What More Can I Say?

The newest numbers:
U.S. Cases on 6/30 - over 2.6 million confirmed.
U.S. Deaths - over 126,000 confirmed.

I had meant to write again when the numbers were rounder; but time has marched on, and the numbers zoomed past 2.5 million confirmed cases and 125,000 deaths in the U.S. before I could get started. Cases are spiking in the South and the West, generally, and specifically in Florida, California, Texas, and Arizona, where the president held an indoor rally just last week full of thousands of young supporters yelling for hours, supporting the guy who continues to say "it's going away" and call it "kung flu." Today was the day that Anthony Fauci said he wouldn't be surprised if we see 100,000 new cases per day. We had averaged around 20,000 new cases per day through most of April and May, but recently there has been a post-opening bump up to around 40,000 new cases per day, and hit 48,000 today, a new record. People worried that the uprisings of Black Lives Matter protesters would cause spikes, but so far the data has pointed more toward reckless re-openings.

 Things here are basically terrible and will continue to be terrible mostly because our leaders have consistently failed to lead and people have done what they have been allowed to do. You have to love the self-awareness of the guy in the Wrigleyville bar ordering a Vodka Red Bull, who just got back from Dallas, TX, after cutting his stay short due to the worsening pandemic, being quoted saying "(It feels) like I'm the problem." Yes, yes you are, sir. But you can't say you don't have company.

But this feels like, just, why even say anything at this point. There are a certain number of people who have decided that the pandemic is over for them, and they have been and will continue to run around and act like there is no dangerous disease being transmitted around them until and unless they get so sick with it that they cannot continue. They are putting not just themselves but everyone else, particularly hospital workers and those who have no choice but to go do their jobs and interface with the public day in and day out, at risk of death, or a disease that can linger for months. They will not read this. If they did, they would not care. And no one in power seems to feel like making them do the right things. So things will continue more or less as they have. Or get worse.

But enough naval-gazing. There are things happening out in the world as well! Europe won't let us in, now, but at least we're in great company with other autocrat-led countries like Brazil (1.4 million+ cases), Russia (600,000+ cases) and India (nearly 600,000 cases), who all have surging numbers of confirmed cases at the moment.

The world surpassed 10 million confirmed cases and half a million confirmed deaths recently. But that word "confirmed" bugs me a lot. A lot of people have gotten sick and even died of probable COVID-19 infections in our country without officially testing positive or counting in official statistics, and there are other countries in the world that are definitely doing worse than we are.

Take Nicaragua, where I served for two years in the Peace Corps. The president, Daniel Ortega, has a history of violently suppressing reality from being shown in the media. And so now, instead of disappearing protesters, the state-run health system is disappearing corpses with "express burials" at midnight for victims of "atypical pneumonia." Given that victims are being deliberately misclassified, there is little doubt that many more have gotten sick and died than just the 2,519 cases and 83 dead that have been officially reported so far. But it's legitimately hard to know just how many without reliable official statistics being reported.

The CDC recently put out the quote that possibly 10 times the number of people who have officially been recorded as having contracted the virus have actually contracted it based on antibody testing; so 24 million cases, rather than 2.4 million (at the time, in the halcyon days of last week). I would be shocked if in reality there were fewer cases and deaths than 10 times the official counts in Nicaragua.

My heart breaks at the tsunami of death and suffering behind those numbers. My heartbreak curdles into rage to think that political leaders and media undoubtedly clouded some people's minds into thinking that this was never a big deal, or that wearing masks isn't what real Americans do, or that, like literally happened in Nazi Germany, that the old and immunocompromised should sacrifice themselves for the good of the country.

But seeing the numbers go up and up and watching people continue to put themselves at risk, sometimes just because they want to get drunk among a clump of other humans... it's depressing. I find myself drinking (and distracting) away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.

Stay home. Stay safe. Wear masks. Try not to be that guy sitting in the Wrigleyville bar, or in East Lansing at Harper's. We should probably just not go to bars for  a bit. Drinking at home instead is easier (and cheaper!), and like, the bare minimum amount of concern you can show for your own health and the health of everyone else.