Where Are We?

 This thread is interesting in terms of where we are with Covid. When you look at the county rates of positive tests it looks exactly like I thought it would back in May. Large swaths of rural America are getting hit. The 19th century "Greater New England" that stretched along the Erie Canal into the Great Lakes is looking better. A lot of that is simply better governance in those states, some of which is a byproduct of getting crushed back in the spring. But it's pretty clear we suffer from two handicaps when dealing with Covid:

1) There is no national strategy
and
2) Morons walk amongst us

The good news is that steroids are proving very effective in treating either the cytokine or bradykinin storms that are causing many of the health problems. Additionally, we should have a vaccine sooner rather than later, unless Trump fucks that up, too. 

From March to July, we had 215,000 additional deaths in the US. Some were Covid, some were health conditions complicated by Covid, but that's more Americans that died from combat wounds in the Civil War (disease was the big killed back then), and we haven't added August to the list. We still have people insisting that Covid's not that big a deal, but I guarantee you they will be falling all over themselves with "Never Forget" on 9/11.

Anyway, the partial shut down of the country in spring was designed to give us time to work on how to contain this disease. Good news!  We now have much better treatments, a vaccine seems months away and we know how to mitigate the disease: everyone wears masks and washes their hands. Bad news! See the two points above. Without Trump and his administration making some sort of national mask mandate an essential part of their messaging, we will continue to have his cultists refuse to wear mask. And it's critical that EVERYONE mask, because it's most important for the asymptomatic infected to be masked. 

I'm down in Georgia helping my mom transition from this life, and I was worried, frankly about coming to a "hotspot" state. But masking seems really good here. People are masking out of doors, which to me signals a real commitment to masking. If you're masking on the sidewalk, you're masking in the store. But when I look at Georgia's test positivity rate, it's pretty clearly the exurbs that are getting hit hardest.  In the thread linked above, Friedan thinks simply masking from the beginning could have cut the death rate in half, easily. That's bad, but you know, half as bad.

We start school in about ten days. It's a bit anxiety producing, but there are real policies we can do to make it safer. If everyone did this, we'd be in such a better place. This is a failure of leadership not medicine.