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As my wife and I are currently in the process of recovering from Covid my thoughts drift to wondering what the next pandemic in the United States will be like. What have we learned? What have we unlearned? Will we do a better job or worse of handling things?
I dealt with this same topic back in Sept of 2020.[1]
Recovery
Before getting into that I do want to spend a few words on how Covid affected me personally. First off, I am over the worst part and on the mend. I am fortunate in that regard, being in my 70s with a compromised immune system due to the cancer medication that I am currently taking. My wife and I are mainly dealing with the after effect of being tired. Food still doesn’t taste right to me.
Others have posted that Covid was no worse than a summer cold for them. That was not the case with me. I started off with chills and a 102.7 fever along with a host of other symptoms. Headache. Profuse sweating. Muscles aching. Diarrhea. Nausea. Sore throat. Cough. Fatigue. Short winded. NO vomiting! I’m really glad of that. Honestly, I haven’t been this sick in decades. (Not counting the cancer.)
We sought medical attention. We also got prescriptions for Paxlovid. Paxlovid does not provide symptom relief. It is to help with preventing Covid from getting worse. BUT there is a 5-day window from the time that a person becomes symptomatic that it has to be taken. BTW that stuff leaves a nasty taste in your mouth and affects how food tastes.
We had let our guard down and were not being as cautious as we were at the beginning of the pandemic. We weren’t masking or being as mindful as we had been in regard to hand sanitizing. We were also in public a lot more than we were previously.
In short, we changed our habits.
To mask or not to mask?
A new variant of Covid is on the upswing. We had vaccinated but were not up to date on our booster. We were waiting for the new vaccine due to come out at the end of September. The new vaccine is supposed to offer protection against the variant. Vaccines and masking aren’t any kind of guarantee that a person won’t get Covid. They just offer a level of protection.
As Covid resurges the no-one-tells-me-what-to-do MAGA Republicans as coming out yet again against preventive measures like masking and vaccinations.[2] They are anti-science and health care. They want to tell everyone else what to do. MAGA Republicans and the Beluga Trump are why we have an extra few hundred thousand dead people from Covid.
There is strength in ignorance.
Death rattle
As best I can determine the current death rate for Covid is slightly above one percent.[3] We’ve lost over one million people in the United States to Covid so far.[4] Vaccines made a huge difference in tamping down the number of deaths. It is now going to be with us like the flu and RSV.[5] MAGA heads will naturally reject the vaccines. I saw a post on Facebook about the new vaccines being available. There were a lot laughing emojis. A LOT. I wondered about what people were finding humorous so I started checking out the people that were posting the laugh emojis. I lost count of how many I checked. It was a bunch. I only had to spend a few seconds on each person. ALL of them were MAGA heads. Because Covid and science, especially medical science is a joke to them. A million people dead is a real knee-slapping hoax to them.
The problem is that in red states MAGA Republicans have crippled any reasonable response to halting the next pandemic and we’re overdue one.[6] They want to take us back to the golden times of the 1300s to 1700s when an estimated 40% of the European population died.[7] Truly a hoax of biblical proportions. Trump talked about locking down the borders but there were an estimated 40,000 citizens that returned from overseas. Entire cruise ships disembarked. Count on these same things happening again.
So what will the red state MAGA response be to the next plague?
- Reject what’s happening.
- Spread disinformation.
- Reject mandatory masking.[8]
- Reject vaccines.
- Reject quarantining.
- Do no contact tracing.
- Turn on health care providers.
- Encourage gatherings in public.
- Don’t socially distance.
- Take horse dewormer.
Die.
https://yadayadayadablahblah.blogspot.com/
[1] https://yadayadayadablahblah.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-next-one.html
[2] https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1697397823875018936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1697397823875018936%7Ctwgr%5E33e7ca73d241a6001bf2d870737ef363653a0f2f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Frepublicans-declare-war-mask-mandates-1824750
[3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/
[4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
[5] https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/news/20230609/what-adults-need-to-know-about-the-new-rsv-vaccines
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemics
[7] https://hosted.lib.uiowa.edu/histmed/plague/
[8] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/republicans-declare-war-on-mask-mandates/ar-AA1ghPD9?rc=1&ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=a8b07ce0e4ae4d69b7844e8ca5a70504&ei=25
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