Coronavirus Diaries 6

With plenty of you out there home and not going out, if you’re interested in watching the progression of the Coronavirus, especially in your country and/or state, check out this interesting link to 91-Divoc:

An interactive visualization of the exponential spread of COVID-19

The information is rather… depressing, I guess, showing that the U.S. is essentially following the same line of infections by time passage that many other nations have shown. While others have managed to get control, however, we’re still on the upswing of things.

Speaking of which, its even more depressing to see comments by right wing pundits -over-eager, it seems, to please Trump- starting to talk about “opening up” businesses, ie ending the self-isolation many have been doing lately, and simply stop doing it and allow people to congregate.

Seems like a great idea… if one wants everyone to catch this virus and for certain overwhelm all hospitals and, as a result, have many more people who will not be able to get access to ventilators die.

Yep, classic pro-business, anti-people thinking.

Here’s a lovely story by Daniel Burke regarding a lovely pastor who defied the governor’s mandate to not have groups of more than 50 people -itself a rather large figure!- and claims to have held mass for 1000 people!

Then there’s Britt Hume of Fox News (who else?) saying it’s “entirely reasonable” for the elderly to risk getting the Coronavirus to aid the economy (the link is to an article by Matthew Rozsa and preented on Salon.com):

Fox News’ Brit Hume: “Entirely reasonable” for elderly to risk getting Coronavirus to aid economy

Sigh.

These are the same people who were outraged at Obamacare because it supposedly (it didn’t) create “death panels” for medical services. Now, some of them are actively urging people to risk their health and/or life for the sake of keeping this economy going.

Speaking of which, here’s another scary article presented on laeater.com and written by Matthew Kang:

Cheesecake Factory Tells Landlords Across Country It Won’t Be Able to Pay Rent on April 1

Most people in the U.S. likely are familiar with the Cheesecake Factory brand. They are a restaurant chain that serves a plethora of foods but their specialty is (c’mon… guess!) cheesecakes. They make many different types and most are quite delicious filled calorie bombs.

Just writing the above makes me want to go to a Cheesecake Factory and pick up a slice of something…

Anyway, this very large, successful chain of restaurants, like I’m sure many, many other restaurants out there, faces harsh economic issues and, as the article makes clear from the headline, they will be unable to pay any of their rents come April 1st, a few days from now.

I suppose this is what gets the right wing riled up and wanting to “force” people outside and not in isolation, the idea that many businesses are on the fringe of collapsing because they no longer have the large client base -and the money provided by the same- to count on to survive.

As I said in one of my first posts regarding the Coronavirus, this is the second very big issue one has to deal with, the first being one’s health: The Economy.

It’s going to be hurting.

Bad.

And for some time. I suspect the “end the isolation” movement is going to fade away as we hear about more and more hospitals that are overwhelmed with patients and more and more deaths reported.

On the somewhat plus side, it was reported that the Coronavirus does not seem to mutate rapidly (you can read an article about that here, fromn washingtonpost.com and written by Joel Achenbach). This is good news because it means that when an effective vaccine against the Corornavirus is developed (early trials are already in effect), people can get the vaccine and, likely, the virus will be done.

However, realistically an effective vaccine will not be available at least until next year some time (it takes that long to go through effective trials), so we’ve still got a while to deal with this.

The end of it can’t come soon enough.