Tweets: Mostly on Covid

On Covid

We shouldn't be opening the schools this fall unless the children are masked, teachers and staff vaccinated, a covid testing system is in place, and the schools have certified ventilation systems. – https://twitter.com/RavenOnthill/status/1434741830411702273?s=20

We're heading for a health care system crash, soon in red states, in a few months in blue. Don't get sick. I don't see how this ends. Do ICUs start turning away unvaccinated patients as less likely to survive? – https://twitter.com/RavenOnthill/status/1434742656307847170?s=20

What are we going to do when Covid becomes endemic among children? – https://twitter.com/RavenOnthill/status/1434921906931527683?s=20

So many deathbed conversions. I wish we would see the conversions before people were on their deathbeds. – https://twitter.com/RavenOnthill/status/1435035423005298694?s=20

Other Topics

Terrorism works. School boards now need sergeants at arms. Maybe they could enlist school resource officers. – https://twitter.com/RavenOnthill/status/1434927667803918337?s=20

I have come to the conclusion that the Texas Republican leadership should be strangled with coathangers. - https://twitter.com/RavenOnthill/status/1434693176262991874?s=20

The MAGA want to make America great again by throwing away everything that made America great. – https://twitter.com/RavenOnthill/status/1434929344959238146?s=20

Plaguing the Senate, again

A few months back, I did a rough estimate of how many Senators would die if COVID-19 started spreading in the Senate. At that time, the only Senator who had the disease was Rand Paul and, apparently, he wasn't well-liked enough to spread the disease. But the White House, at its nomination ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett, has taken care of that little problem: Republican Senators Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Thom Tillis have been infected. It's time to bring the chart back, so here it is again:

The odds were almost 9 in 10 for at least one Senate death and the chance of one to three Senators dying were roughly 3 in 4.

COVID-19: Sensible Things

If we were at all unified, we could do these things:

1. Make COVID-19 tests widely available.
2. Ramp up production of necessary medical supplies.
3. Regulate the distribution of supplies. Especially, control profiteering.
4. Put everyone in masks.
5. Release as many low-level prisoners as possible and space out the remaining people in the prison population. It is much better to have these people out and social distancing, than having the prisons become centers of infection.
6. Issue temporary visas to as many asylum applicants as possible. Drop ICE enforcement for all but the most egregious offenders. Same reason as for the prisoners.
7. Start a crash program of workplace infection management. Assemble the necessary teams of industrial hygienists and work out rules and practices for the control of infection in workplaces.
8. For working drivers, start a system of infection control and support.
9. etc., etc. etc.

Herd Immunity

I talked to a senior White House official earlier this evening about all of these people, hundreds of people sitting side by side in the audience, not wearing masks, and the senior White House official brushed off these concerns about the lack of social distancing at the president’s speech. And get this, this quote might blow you away, “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.” – Jim Acosta, CNN Chief WH Correspondent, link

I would guess the senior White House official is Stephen Miller, who would be a Nazi if only he were not Jewish. In any event, the Trump administration, probably all the way up to Donald Trump himself, subscribes to the eugenic theory of herd immunity, the idea that if one lets a disease run rampant through a population, it will die out and the surviving population will be a stronger one.

But this is fantasy. If it were so, all of the great plagues would have died out centuries ago and there would be no influenza, no measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio, bubonic plague. Over the centuries, Europeans developed limited resistance to all of these. Over the centuries, the surviving pathogens became less deadly to Europeans. But the diseases never died out. When the diseases arrived in the New World they ripped through a population with no immunity. The things that finally killed smallpox and polio were vaccination, quarantine, tracking, tracing – the public health measures that the Trump administration refuses to take against COVID-19.

Nazi Nazi Nazi.