The NEXT ONE

                                     

Are we there yet?

            Why write about the next pandemic when we’re a long way from being through the first one?

            Hundreds of thousands more lives could be lost or saved, depending upon who is in charge. With Trump and the Republicans in charge it’s practically a guarantee that we’ll lose several hundred thousand more.

            Why? Because Trump and his lackey Senators would have to acknowledge that they’ve been lying to everyone and are responsible for losing so many more lives than was necessary. They would have to admit that they killed men, women and children in order to stay in power. POWER is what’s most important to them. Republicans couldn’t agree to give working people enough money to keep a roof over their heads and feed their families but they can move within hours to get a Supreme Court justice in their pocket during a pandemic. That’s their priority.

They have health insurance and regular testing.

            200,000 lives have been lost so far by President Trump. He knows that the virus is deadly, is airborne, a killer and yet he continues to lie to the American people and encourages practices that could result in hundreds of thousands more deaths. It’s crazy that a sentence like that is now possible yet it is. Due to under-reporting of Covid-19 deaths we’re likely almost at 300,000 now. Upwards of 3 million people have lost family or close friends. And we aren’t close to being done. We have yet to reach our destination.

The pandemic spread is getting worse.

When?

            According to the as yet not completely silenced CDC, fully 90% of our population is still at risk and flu season is now upon us. Have you had your flu shot? Well guess what? Trump’s hard core science-denying base doesn’t believe in flu shots any more than they’ll get a vaccine for Covid-19.

            President Obama successfully handled 3 global health issues during his term in office. It isn’t unreasonable to think that another pandemic is waiting in the wings. Not a matter of if one will come. Only when. The one that we’re in could come back if the virus mutates like a flu virus.

            President George Bush warned of a pandemic in 2005 and started making plans. Those plans did not say that lying to the American people about a killer virus was a good approach to saving lives. President Obama tried to follow up with preparedness but Republicans shot down funding. Trump finished off any preparedness early on. And now 205,000 people have died. You might notice that’s a different number than I used a couple of paragraphs back. That’s because that many more people have died since I started writing this a couple of days ago.

Red is now winning!

            Trump and company were okay with Blue states suffering the brunt of the virus but now Red states are taking the lead. Their gamble is that they will kill more Dem voters than cult members. Originally they thought that Dem Governors would be hit hard with handling the virus since there was no federal help. That worked for a while. It’s as if all of these suits didn’t realize that they were dealing with a killer virus that state boundaries don’t stop.

            Like President Trump, Governor Parson of Missouri is doing a dismal job of dealing with the pandemic. He, like Trump, has abdicated his responsibility and left it to local authorities to try and deal with a conservative populace that thinks this pandemic is a hoax. Meanwhile the hospitals are starting to fill up.

            Governor Parson and his wife have tested positive for the virus. He has made it a point of ignoring precautions. (He and his wife tested on a regular basis.) So he caught a hoax, as did his wife. They are quarantining separately.

A joke.

            Unpopular ideas and actions can save lives. Had a nationwide shut down been taken at the very beginning along with masking and physical distancing when it should have we would already be past the middle and on the downside of this pandemic and thousands of lives would have been saved. PERIOD. Procedures would have been in place to deal with oncoming flu season. Instead, by Election Day we could have over a quarter of a million hoax deaths.

The joke is on us.

 

The Ebola pandemic of 2014

      Right off the bat you can tell by the title that I’m messing around. You can go ahead and look at the questions if you want but up front there is one thing that I want you to keep in mind. The mortality rate for Ebola is 50% to 90%. They have been working on a vaccine for years.

Ω  Remember Ebola?

Ω  Remember the great Ebola pandemic of 2014?

Ω  Remember the tens of thousands of Americans that died?

Ω  Remember the crashed economy?

Ω  Remember the millions out of work?

Bear with me.

    What did citizen Trump have to say about how President Obama handled the threat of Ebola. Quite a lot. Below are just a fraction of the tweets. A fraction. I have a couple of favorites in the list below. You can go to the twitter archives if you want to read them all. Trump supporters won’t get it. They won’t get it at all. They’ll be enraged at President Obama for totally screwing up how he handled the great Ebola pandemic that didn’t happen.

    Remember the other pandemics? Did they leave a lasting impression on you for the devastation that they caused?

Ω  All the governors are already backing off of the Ebola quarantines. Bad decision that will lead to more mayhem.  Oct. 28^th, 2014

Ω  There is ZERO margin for error on Ebola. Are we confident in Obama when he can’t even make a website for $5 Billion? Oct 24, 2014

Ω  President Obama has a major meeting on the N.Y.C. Ebola outbreak, with people flying in from all over the country, but decided to play golf! Oct 23, 2014

Ω  If this doctor, who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa, has Ebola, then Obama should apologize to the American people & resign! Oct 23, 2014

Ω  Obama just appointed an Ebola Czar with zero experience in the medical area and zero experience in infectious disease control. A TOTAL JOKE! Oct 17, 2014

Ω  The Ebola nurse should NEVER have been allowed to fly to Cleveland and (amazing) back again. Nothing works in our once great country anymore Oct 16, 2014

Ω  President Obama has a personal responsibility to visit & embrace all people in the US who contract Ebola! Oct 15, 2014

Ω  If Ebola is so non-contagious, how come an NBC cameraman caught it so quickly while over in West Africa? U.S. is behaving very foolishly! Oct 4, 2014

    Judging from these tweets, by his own standards, Trump has been a complete failure at handling the current pandemic. He should take his own advice and resign.

 Think about this. Really. Think about it.

     What would the country be like right now if instead of the SARS-CoV-2 virus the country had been hit with a virus that had a higher mortality rate? Not even Ebola high. Just higher by say ten percent. A virus with a ten percent mortality rate.

 Spanish Flu Pandemic

    One of the reasons that the Spanish Flu pandemic was so bad in the United States is because the government decided to cover it up because they didn’t want to hurt the war effort. (This would be World War ONE not World War TWO as mentioned by the President.)

    President Trump has been covering up about the current pandemic because he wants to get reelected. Republicans have backed him every step of the way. Everything that they have done or NOT done has made the pandemic worse.

Bring out your dead

    There’s a scene in a Monty Python movie where there’s a cart full of bodies going down the street and the guy is yelling “Bring out your dead!”. If this virus had had a higher mortality rate, people would have been piling bodies in the street. Hospitals and morgues have been so overwhelmed that they have had to use refrigerated trucks to hold the overflow.

Taking one for the team

    Early on the Republican Trump Administration figured that the death toll would hit Democrats harder. Fatal mistake for a lot of people. Why they thought the Trump virus would be partisan is beyond me. With that decision they condemned Trump supporters as well. I wonder if those folks knew that they were taking one for the team. The team being Trump and his swamp cronies.

Denial

    Trump and his supporters are in a continual and evolving state of denial. The body count continues to go up so the conspiracy theory is that hospitals are calling non-COVID-19 deaths as being due to the virus. That it’s still an ongoing hoax being manipulated by media to look worse than it is. I watched a video of a Trump supporter after the Tulsa rally saying that he had lost a friend to COVID-19 and the friend’s son was in the hospital but he still didn’t know what to make of it. He wasn’t wearing a mask. The mask is giving people the virus. It never ends.

The Trump Virus

    Trump and the racists supporting him want to blame this pandemic on the Chinese. (Trump is still calling it the “China Virus”.) But what has happened at this stage is squarely their responsibility. They created this ongoing disaster. They own it. Not only have they seen to it that we will lose so many Americans they are setting the stage for possible solutions to fail. They are already cranking up the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theories blaming everyone but themselves. They are the chaos party. They want the Russians to ‘save’ us.

The man who would be King

    President Trump, with the complete support of the Republican Party, White Supremacists and Evangelical Party, are trying mightily to administer the coup de grace to our form of government and create one in their own image.

How many people did the Church kill today?

“They will know we are Christians by our love.” Jesus-inspired lyrics. Wonderful sentiment. If only.

And here we are.
        Before I get into this very far I want to stress up front that there are churches trying their best to do the right thing during this pandemic when it comes to keeping their congregants and community safe. Unfortunately those actions don’t grab the headlines like the churches that are hell bent on bringing harm to others in the name of worshiping Jesus.

First, do no harm! Too easy.
        Wear a mask. Protect other people.
        Something as simple as wearing a mask during a pandemic to protect fellow human beings was and remains beyond too many “Christians”. Wearing a mask to protect others is asking too much of some supposed followers of Jesus Christ, a man that led by example. A man that told his followers to spread the good news and to love one’s neighbors.
        I guess that I missed the part in the bible where Jesus said go forth and spread disease. It must have been in the same section where he said to gather in his name to endanger and kill one another. Followed by the ever popular “and make sure that the little children suffer too”.

It was a commandment not a suggestion.
        Love your neighbor. How complicated is that?
        Wearing a mask, if nothing else, is an act of demonstrating Christian love. But somehow it’s tearing communities and churches apart. They aren’t capable of caring enough for their own church members to wear masks and keep their physical distance let alone members of the community.

Typhoid Khristians.
        Since the very beginning of the current pandemic churches and church groups have been “hot spots” for spreading the plague to the rest of the community. Too many Christians have fought heroically to maintain this status. Let’s call them Khristians with a ‘K’ instead of a “C” in order to differentiate them from followers of Christ.
        Khristians are followers of the Liar. They are working for the Dark Angel. They are of the far-right Evangelical Party. Like the Liar they are perpetual victims. They are the Constitutional Khristians of the Amerika that they would recreate in their image. Their rights to endanger and kill in the name of Jesus come first.
        They are the death squads. They are directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. They work diligently to increase the body count every day—especially on Sunday.
        Like the Liar they accept no responsibility. Like the Liar they are victims. The Liar’s truth is their truth. It is the Liar’s vision that they spread. “We are Amerika!” is their guiding psalm.

The hoax that keeps on killing.

Ω How many people did the church kill, endanger or infect today in the name of Jesus?

Ω How many people in the community did the church spread the plague to today?

Ω How much damage to our Republic did the church do today in support of the Liar?

Ω How much economic damage did the church do today?

Ω What falsehoods did the church support and spread today in the name of Jesus?

        The above are not questions that should have to be asked at any time let alone on a Sunday morning yet here we are. Whether we like it or not these questions and worse are being asked by believers and non-believers alike.

Criminally negligent homicide.
        An ultra-conservative Christian group operates not far from where we live. Kanakuk Kamps has been in operation for decades. I copied the below statement from their web page.

“At Kanakuk, we live I’m Third—God First. Others Second. I’m Third. This foundational principle is integrated into each of our Kamp’s programming, equipping Kampers to be Christ-like examples who lead with responsibility and care.”

        They have been in the news because initially 40 of their “Kampers” and counselors tested positive for COVID-19. The number grew to over 80. In the end, the number of Stone County confirmed cases only went up one since all the rest were not from this area. They took the virus to their homes and communities across 10 states.
        In light of the above would you think that they stopped holding kamps at the outbreak? If you did you thought wrong.

“Others second” my ass.
        Holding a church camp for kids the middle of a pandemic should be considered criminal. (BTW their other camps are ongoing.) The kids and counselors interacted with others in the community. There is no way of knowing what the final toll or impact will be.

Leadership.
        How are pastors handling the mask question? How are they handling providing safe services for their followers? (I’m talking about the ones that aren’t openly flaunting their disdain for protecting others.) Are they going along to get along?
        Some aren’t. They are encouraging doing all the right things. Some are only having online services and holding meetings and studies using technology like Zoom. They’re using phone calls and emails and are wearing masks when necessary.

Others? Not so much.
        I’ve spent some time surfing religious sites and taking in some online services during pandemic time just to see what’s up. Pretty sad really. Some of the services that I watched are in areas where COVID-19 cases are increasing dramatically.
        If you think that I saw a lot of masks and people keeping a physical distance you’d be wrong. If you thought there wouldn’t be any singing you’d also be wrong.
        Why singing? What’s wrong with singing? Well, singing really projects the virus out there. It goes farther than 6 feet. It aerosolizes and hangs in the air longer and gets spread by the ventilation and movement in the air. It’s the churches’ way of really going the distance to spread the virus.

Ripples in the water.
        And get the virus out there they do. Time and time again we can read in local and national news where the virus was spread out into the community from churches. Pastors have died. Their congregants have died. People in the community have died. People also got sick and recovered. Some will have ongoing medical issues for the rest of their now shortened lives.
        One church leader, no name provided, wrote 1588 words about wearing masks. Whoever they were they were pretty worked up about it. Cited all sorts of scripture. Talked about congregants fighting with each other and how un-Christian it all was.
        Never took an actual position. 1588 words and couldn’t say something as easy and simple as “Wear a mask: it’s the Christian thing to do.”

Fear.
        Regardless of what happens we’re going to end up with fewer churches and fewer followers of the real Jesus as this pandemic runs its course. There will be pastors who, whether directly or indirectly, lead their congregations to dissolution. Some smaller congregations will simply lose too many people to COVID-19 to continue financially.
        There are already Christians leaving churches over the mask issue. Their fellow Christians won’t even wear a mask for bible study. Such a small imposition yet it’s dividing churches.
        Like it or not, if a pastor takes a position either way on masks and physical distancing there will be supposed believers alienated. People have already switched churches in order to go to a church that doesn’t treat the pandemic seriously and vice versa. Some just leave.

        WWJD?

Jesus had the courage of his convictions.
        Unlike too many pastors of today Jesus wasn’t afraid to speak out and take a position to save lives. Now Jesus could bob and weave with the best of them when it came to politics but ultimately he took a position there as well, and died for it. Without getting into all of the theology, with that act he put everyone else first. That’s in keeping with the trinity. He put others before his own wellbeing.
        When alive he cured the sick, injured and lame. He didn’t kill people. He didn’t endanger people. He cured lepers. He didn’t spread leprosy. He wasn’t afraid of losing his church.
        Simply put, Jesus would have worn a mask. His followers would have worn masks as well. Jesus would have worn a mask even if it meant a personal sacrifice to his wellbeing. He carried a cross for us. Wearing a mask would have been easy.

Before Square One. [Pandemic]

How is it going?
        When you’ve had 142,000 people die, threw away the plan for handling a pandemic, shut down the country, crashed the economy, recommended treatments that killed people, spend hours a day watching TV, played golf, tweeting constantly, gave a couple of trillion dollars to the rich, shoved millions to your political supporters, lied to people about testing, lied about available equipment, lied about PPE, claimed it wasn’t your responsibility, lied about saving lives, taken credit for doing such a good job and then reopened the country without a plan you might want to think twice about bringing up the previous administration.

Favs.
        The above is just a partial list. I do have a couple of favorites though. It’s priceless that he complains about Obama not leaving him tests for a virus that didn’t exist yet. Then we have his complaints about the shelves being bare because Obama didn’t leave him anything 31/2 years into his Presidency. On top of that the Republicans turned down Obama’s request for funding supplies. Honestly, a classic Republican move. Then we have his son-in-law taking time off from bringing peace to the Middle East to add to the chaos going on in this country. Didn’t you just love it when he claimed ownership of the supplies? I’m sure others have their own favs.

Thanks Obama.
        President Trump’s comments about then Vice President Biden and President Obama and their handling of the Swine Flu pandemic reminded me of a post I saw on someone else’s timeline supposedly from Rush Limbaugh. He may or may not have said it. I hardly ever trace down something attributed to him. It’s pointless. He’s a bought and paid for stooge who has made himself filthy rich off of the rubes that listen to him. The guy is worth like four hundred million dollars or something like that.
        What got me about this meme is that for the most part it was accurate. It was about President Obama’s handling of the Swine Flu pandemic. President Trump keeps bringing it up as well. Cray!
        The estimate provided in the meme was that 60 million people had it, around a quarter of a million were hospitalized and we did lose 12,500 people in the United States. It’s also correct that the country wasn’t shut down as indicated in the meme. I also remember that most of the press, excluding those like Limbaugh and Trump, did not adversely go after President Obama. In addition it should be noted that the Swine Flu pandemic was smaller. It never got a foothold and established as bad as the current pandemic thanks to President Obama.

Looking good!
        So even though it wasn’t intended the meme actually makes President Obama look good if people are paying attention. They aren’t.
        Why? He handled it. The briefings were honest. Medical professionals handled the response and built an action plan to handle the next one. So, no people didn’t have to stay home and President Obama didn’t crash the economy. He built one. He also handled the Ebola crisis. I think that he handled 3 in all.
        Then citizen Trump complained, as in tweeted, over a hundred times about how he thought the crisis should have been handled and how bad a job President Obama did. It’s ludicrous to compare the two. I’m not sure how effective it is to bring up a success story about the black President in comparison to oneself.

Before square one.
         Where do we go from here?
        There never was a national plan used to deal with the virus though one was desperately needed and is still needed. There were 50 different plans. It was and remains chaos.
        The Administration and Republicans in congress need to put working people first and they have proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are simply NOT capable of doing that. They have proved that with the Stimulus Bills that they used to shove millions make that tens of millions to the rich including rich Trump supporters. They are still shoving money to Trump cronies (and most likely to Trump and his family as well).
        Thanks to their ineptitude we aren’t back to square one. The conditions of the pandemic are worse than where we started. So all of the closings were for naught because too many people refused to do something as simple as wear a damn mask. Now we’re even worse off and tens of thousands more people will die that didn’t have to.

Everybody can’t get a test.
        Unlike President Trump’s early promise everybody still can’t get a test. Testing is still inadequate. The virus hasn’t gone away. Practically every metric is worse.
        Shelley and I got COVID-19 tested. It took days to get our results. She got hers 2 days before I got mine. They were negative. Nursing home conditions haven’t changed much. Seniors still comprise 40% of the fatalities but that’s changing to a younger demographic now.
        The only good news is that hospitals are getting better at saving people’s lives as they learn what treatments are working. And giving people Hydroxychloroquine isn’t one that worked.

Send in the children!
        And now the President along with his Evangelical Party supporters and the Republican Party are advocating sending the kids to the front lines with the teachers. It’s what they do. They could have spent all this time developing plans but instead spent the time lying and trying to cover up the effects of the pandemic. They have succeeded in making it even worse. There is still NO national plan.
        As a nation we are now not only worse off than when we started and we’re going downhill. Yet we have a President claiming that he’s saving lives while in the process of seeing to it that the virus claims even more lives.
        Premeditated murder on a national scale backed by conservatives every step of the way. Time for them to start killing kids.