Record Numbers

by wjw on November 13, 2020

So New Mexico today posted another record number of Covid cases.  Most days we post a new record number.

Our lowest numbers were in early September.  Since then, daily reported cases have risen by a factor of 45.  That’s 45 TIMES THE NUMBER WE HAD JUST TWO MONTHS AGO.

The hospitals are at full capacity.  Any more cases, we just toss ’em in tents or something.  There’s some talk of opening up a recently-closed hospital.  There’s enough equipment there, but we’ve run out of medical personnel.  There’s talk of using National Guard doctors, but since National Guard doctors are civilian doctors outside their Guard duty, that means shifting them from one medical job to another, with a possible net effect of zero.

After her vigorous response to the pandemic earlier in the year, our governor’s current inertia is astounding.  Her stance seems to be something along the lines of, “If you keep disregarding my guidelines, I’ll just have to issue more guidelines.”

I had thought that maybe she was holding off until after the election, for fear the Republicans would call her a Mask Nazi or something.  But no.

Not that the rest of the country is doing much better, since the USA is now generating 160,000 cases per day.  (How’s that herd immunity workin’ for ya?)

If Trump hadn’t been such a coward, the pandemic could have been largely contained by May.  But he was terrified of giving bad news, and he didn’t want the stock market to go down for fear of losing the election, so he lied, and 260,000 died.  He left the bad news to the governors, but some governors refused to give the bad news, and the rest were inconsistent in their policies.  If Trump had told everyone to isolate and mask back in February, he’d be a hero now.

As it is, some states have given up contact and trace, because the virus is simply everywhere, and there are too many places any given victim might have found it.

2020.  The year that keeps on giving.

UPDATE: The governor finally moved, and the state is basically ordered to shut down for two weeks except for essential businesses.  Fingers crossed.

John Appel November 15, 2020 at 1:31 pm

Maryland has been creeping up too, but our rates finally started to join the national curve this week. Our Republican governor doesn’t possess the moral fortitude to reinstate any meaningful restrictions as he hopes to run for President in 2024, and is trying to keep the disconnected-from-reality GOP voters pacified. Fortunately he’s allowing the counties to set restrictions. Unfortunately, some of our counties are run by the “None of this is real” crowd.

We’re hunkering down here and getting ready for what promises to be a brutal winter.

Jeremy Smith November 15, 2020 at 4:36 pm

Thank you for finishing Quillifer 3. Is it true that the book will be out in 2022 and not 2021?

pixlaw November 15, 2020 at 6:54 pm

Walter –

As much as I hate to disagree with you, I’m not sure that Trump actually acting would have made that much of a difference, at least not yet. It’s my impression that almost all of the EU countries are suffering a second/third wave of pretty extreme proportions. On the other hand, it looks as though many of the East Asian countries are weathering this way better than we are.

On the third hand, before anyone (I’m looking at you, Etaion) brings up Sweden, it’s clear that their bullshit ‘herd immunity’ tactic didn’t work out at all well: https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-herd-immunity-second-wave-coronavirus-cases-hospitalisations-surge-2020-11.

So I guess the take-away is that I have no clue. Dang.

Stay healthy, OK?

wjw November 16, 2020 at 1:35 am

Jeremy, the last I heard for Q3 was spring or summer of 2022, but they hadn’t made up the schedule yet and things were not final.

There’s a second wave going through Western Europe, and it seems mainly to be the result of young people ignoring guidelines and being stupid. Everyone’s bored with being safe, so they might as well disco!

And of course the guidelines aren’t being enforced in any case.

What it shows is that we haven’t learned a goddam thing since 1918. October was the worst month of the last pandemic, and for us it came a month later.

So basically I think the only way to turn this around is to assume that every human being is stupid and malevolent and contagious. If I were in charge, I’d say “If you’re in a group and not masked, and not keeping proper distance, you are committing a deadly assault on your fellow human beings, so we’re going to shoot you in the fucking head and leave the body lying in the street as an object lesson to others.”

Save lives in the long run, I betcha.

grs1961 November 16, 2020 at 5:48 am

We’ve recently come out of lock-down here in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and have had 17 days of 0 deaths and 0 new infections, but the way the idiots are behaving – a party with 100+ on the beach, frex – I’m not sanguine that we will make it to Christmas without a third wave.
But I’m so very, very glad I’m not in a country that seems to despise it’s own inhabitants. The USA is just the poster boy for getting pandemic management wrong, there are others just as incompetent.

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