200,000 

& Inconvenient Truths

200,000. Dead. Small by percentages as far as total US population goes, but huge to those who have lost loved ones… in some cases, almost entire families wiped out… only kids left behind… and the ongoing health effects for the “long-haulers” and those with ongoing heart and memory problems. And the incredibly high impact on communities of color makes COVID-19 even more horrifying. Per the CDC, when compared to whites, the case rate for Black communities is 2.6x higher, 2.8x higher for Native American populations and Hispanic/Latino populations. Death rates are, 2.1x higher for Blacks, 1.4x higher for for Native Americans, and 1.1x higher for Lantinx people.

But after the initial push in March for lockdowns and masks, we pass the 200,000 dead mark with a blasé sigh and seemingly collective national “Whatever”… unless you are out protesting masks and lockdowns as against your rights. Nevermind, the concept of personal responsibility and consideration for others, ie duty to society.

I am a former Public Health RN, I worked in a small county health department in Missouri for 7 years, but continued funding cuts and crappy pay finally forced me out of a job that I loved… and we saw people from the community from birth to death almost. From the WIC program to immunizations to injections for community members and so many other services, what we were able to do diminished over time.

I was primarily the Communicable Disease nurse and did the contact tracing for disease reports and outbreaks. When I see how the Coronavirus Pandemic has been screwed up, I feel it deep in my soul. I know the hard work of the invisible battlefront that nobody appreciates… and used to ask where we were when things got bad. But Trump’s absent leadership now calls into question the very function of public health from those who have no clue of its vital role in healthy communities.

If you don’t know where the disease is coming from, who has come into contact with the infected, or where they have been, controlling the spread is nearly impossible. When messaging is muddled or incorrect, it further diminishes the credibility of any advice, even from the most respected institutions like the CDC. And we have lost any sense of civic duty, rather like the Dear Leader.

So, thanks to the lack of national leadership on the Coronavirus Pandemic, 200,000 is not so much a milestone as a speedbump at this point.

One of those inconvenient truths that Cheeto Mussolini likes to obscure with other scandals, like he does.

The Inconvenient Truth is that we have long surpassed the total number who died in every conflict from Vietnam to present (63,418) AND World War 1 (116,541)… total 179,934… and taking out the 5 years of WW2 at 405,399, it took us 98 years to wipe out that many people in war. We lost an estimated 675,000 to the 1918 Flu Pandemic. (https://tinyurl.com/yb9sz5e2) (https://tinyurl.com/y33v84me)

Or another way to look at it: it’s like the population of Salt Lake City has disappeared over the last 6 months. But many of us are lucky, because we are untouched by the heartbreak of this disease… often because we are white. And these lives have been slipping away slowly, outside our sphere of experience

And it’s not because whites live inherently better lives than people of color, it’s because healthcare isn’t a right in this country and accessibility and affordability is unequally distributed. 

Racism is such a part of our entire governmental system, and we have been divided to such a point as to make it impossible for poor people of color to join with poor whites to fight together to make the system more equitable for all of us.

The Dear Orange Leader has an evil cunning for manipulation. As I wrote in 2016, “Trump is a master showman & fraudster ... He builds big shiny skyscrapers, casinos and hawks steaks, wine, his “university”, clothing line, et cetera… All flashy, status-ey things with his name slapped on them… but, truthfully, the core is hollow and the glitter is just spray paint. …Then the spray paint & reality got conflated, and here we are, unsure of objective reality vs. spray paint fumes. …Stuck in the dystopian theme park we can’t leave.” (https://tinyurl.com/y5kbkbar)

His favorite “secret sauce”, if you will, is racism. He knows he can play on the base fears of the rubes, but he doesn’t care about them, unless he can squeeze more money out of them. Per Olivia Troye, who served on the White House Coronavirus Task force, the president said: “Maybe this Covid thing is a good thing. I don’t like shaking hands with people. I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people.” (https://tinyurl.com/y39gpbau)

Additionally, he lives in a demented fantasy world, one in which he believes he can obscure the rising death toll by just talking his way out of it, or ignoring it, or obfuscating by creating other scandals… he has managed to do for most of his life. He said repeatedly that the virus would just go away and after said cases would drop from 15 to zero, he started equating “a good job” to 50,000-60,000 deaths, then 100,000, etc. Now he just says that he has done a great job and prevented “millions of deaths.” He has also said that he takes no responsibility.

This is the same man who ridicules those who wear masks and practice social distancing…. While packing crowds together at venues all over the country… but at a recent appearance in Nevada, he actually told a reporter that he doesn’t worry about catching coronavirus because “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away”. He also told the same reporter, “I’m more concerned about how close you are, to be honest.” (https://tinyurl.com/y5et7wsl) He expressed no concern for his followers packed illegally into the privately own airplane hangar.

Trump is not particularly book-smart, but has a twisted cunning, as mentioned earlier. In addition to his manipulative cunning, he has a strong sense for self-preservation & short-term gain, but no concept of long-term consequences or strategy. For months, controversy raged about whether Trump understood the severity of COVID-19 and was thusly carelessly bumbling along, but the Bob Woodward tape made it obvious that he DID know and made a conscious choice to play the pandemic down, doing essentially nothing, knowing that people would die…. all to preserve his image. Acting again purely in the moment, again looking only at short-term gain. (https://tinyurl.com/yyhm86fb)

His conscious decision to let people die coupled with his absolute disregard for those lives only leads to the conclusion that there is something seriously wrong with him.

Trump does not care about anyone but himself. People are the shit his money grows in (Ukrainian saying, Andrea Chalupa, Gaslit Nation)… or an easy piggybank he can tap with his never-ending cons.

The other part of his culpability in how badly the Federal COVID response has been is how he knowingly disregarded the roadmap left by the Obama/Biden administration, which was built on a sound foundation created post-9/11 by the Bush II administration. But his absolute narcissism, jealousy, and incurable malice against those who don’t kiss his ring run through everything he does as well. So he put Jared Kushner in charge of the response, and didn’t bat an eye blue states were left to fend for themselves, because they refused to bow down to him.

Additionally, he delusionally thinks he knows everything, including epidemiology. So with his “leadership”, real scientists and scientific knowledge has been sidelined, ignored, blocked, or covered up.  And now he has Scott Atlas,  a radiologist, advising him about a vastly different type of medicine. He’d probably be able to read an MRI and tell us about Trump having deterioration in his brain, but he would only have the most general knowledge of epidemiologic principles. Hint: neither herd immunity nor herd mentality are sound plans right now.

Trump has created, in-effect, a slow-moving genocide of the inconvenient, no gas chambers required. Ironically, many of those likely to die are his own supporters.

As of 16 September 2020, per Rachel Maddow, there were about 6.6 million cases and almost 198,000 dead. And Trump’s “herd immunity” (read as: genocide) strategy will see approximately 215 million – 231 million Americans infected (65-70% of total population). Our current fatality rate is 2.97% of those infected and if that follows, we can expect 6,385,500 – 6,860,700 deaths. (https://youtu.be/UVfxjS1DnBc).

Trump and his sycophants have decided that over 6 million of us are expendable.

The Inconvenient truth is that it didn’t have to be this way.