In general I think of my blog as a place to talk about conservation and dark skies and to showcase my astrophotography. But I want to keep jotting down a few notes for posterity on my thoughts about the pandemic.
A burial in New Jersey last week. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Trump and the GOP are pushing re-opening. The case and death curves are now flat to slightly down. With reopening they are not likely to go much lower. A vaccine is a year or more away. There is negligible immunity built up. The disease is out there now more than ever. We are run my a mafia crime family and there have been no preparations for a national plan to test, trace and contain. Yesterday I predicted 250,000 deaths by Election Day on Facebook. I am probably low. That would be at 1,000 deaths per day for the next 180 days added to the current 70,000 dead. We are still seeing nearly twice that daily death rate.
Weirdly, yesterday is reporting at only 105 deaths in the U.S. at the WaPo. What is that about? It is way below what would be expected by the weekend lag in counting. Also cases plummeted. Last week makes it look like the numbers are diving to zero. No news about it. Numbers being repressed? Probably a fluke. Fog of war.
Indeed, the NYT’s #s look more likely (scroll down to see deaths per day bar chart). 7 day moving average is sloping down to around 1,800 deaths per day. Probably will start sloping back up in a week because Trump. Markets and employees will not be impressed and the economy will further slump.
Trump’s conspiracy theory is that Democrats are exaggerating the effects of the disease to hurt his chance of election. So he is pushing R governors to open their states, and they are, including Utah. If we Ds are right, the disease will ramp back up, the economy will be on its ass, and there will be over 300,000 dead by Election Day. Could be the end of the GOP. I could almost root for that if the dead would be only the idiot Trumpers who bring it on themselves. Sure, give them their liberty and give them their death. But it is not that way. So we Ds are in the box of working to get the country to do the right thing which would actually make Trump look better. He is determined to shoot himself in the foot and we are trying to take away his gun.
In states where the meatpacking plants are getting hit with the disease, the captured regulatory agencies are in the pocket of the meat packing monopolies and refusing to release the numbers. The Rs there are owned by the corporations and will sacrifice the workers for the sake of the donor corporations. No coincidence that the workers are brown immigrants. The GOP would rather they be dead and gone. They may get their wish.
We did flatten the curve. The Rs, of course, are saying that proves the disease was never that bad, not that social distancing worked. So they now open back up. The flat curve will start to move back up but only slowly because the Rs enjoy minority rule from rural states where spacing helps naturally control the disease–in spite of the idiots there. But it will be enough to keep the curve from going down, over 1500 a day likely will die, amounting to 300,000 dead if not more. Moving back up slightly to 2,000 deaths/day would be 430,000 deaths by Election Day.
Then what?