Susan B. Glasser, writing in The New Yorker :
Consider the news this week that now one in five hundred Americans has died in the pandemic; total deaths in the country approach seven hundred thousand. What’s worse, covid deaths — the vast majority of them preventable, avoidable deaths, now that science and the federal government have provided us with free vaccines—are continuing to rise across large swaths of vaccine-resistant Trump country. This is not a tragic mistake but a calculated choice by many Republicans who have made vaccine resistance synonymous with resistance to Biden and the Democrats. The current average of more than nineteen hundred dead a day means that a 9/11’s worth of Americans are perishing from covid roughly every thirty-eight hours. To my mind, this is the biggest news of the Biden Presidency so far, and it has nothing to do with Afghanistan, or the fate of the budget-reconciliation bill, or Bob Woodward’s new book.Six more deaths from COVID-19 were reported yesterday in my deep-red Illinois county.
comments: 7
Somehow writing the number of deaths differently really brings home the reality that so many have died needlessly. And now we have a medical system overwhelmed by patients who shouldn't be there. They weren't hit by an inattentive driver or slipped while going up stairs but rather from their own ignorance or lack of reasoning or knowledge.
Our area is up to 6.28% positive and the campus is at 8%.
By the way, did you see the calculator in the Smithsonian article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-calculator-estimates-your-risk-of-getting-covid-19-180978670/
It's rather fun to play with by changing the variables. I put in a scenario that ended up with extremely dangerous risk!
Kirsten
Kirsten, thanks for the link. I had not seen that. I tried playing “store” and ended up with a low-risk scenario. We get in and out as fast as we can, every couple of weeks, always monitoring the space. (Moving across Wal-Mart through a clothing aisle is a good way to avoid the larger numbers of people on the “boulevard.”)
One way they could make the calculator more useful: allow the user to look by county rather than state. (Downstate Illinois ≠ Cook County.) I’m going to suggest that, even though making a change would require considerable work.
The calculator page does have a drop-down box for the county or borough of a state. Firefox is my browser of choice and counties in Illinois showed up in the box. The difficult part may be that the box is in light gray which may not make it obvious.
Going to Walmart here isn't too bad and I rarely spend an hour there! I'll have to try the clothing aisles.
Kirsten
Thanks, Kirsten — I’ll look again.
Yep, it’s right there. I must have scrolled too fast.
I’m getting my third Pfizer Thursday.
Don’t miss your shot. (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)
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