Pandemic: Life on the ground

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Canpakes, I don’t believe Nolte’s listeners would heed him. I think he’s clever enough to try a conspiracy theory to provoke them into contrarianism, but he’d need the ‘demonrats have reversed uno’d you into acting against your own best interests’ to become a meme. Also, here’s another example of their gargantuan hubris:



This is just ingrained into their dna - an overestimation of their abilities and smarts where a few Facebook posts and Google searches is enough to become an autodidactic genius on pathology and immunology.

- Doc

[canpakes]

Journalists that make themselves the news have zero credibility.

Like this Nolte guy.

Let’s go direct to the source - his column at Breitbart -

The organized left is deliberately putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.

In other words, I sincerely believe the organized left is doing everything in its power to convince Trump supporters NOT to get the life-saving Trump vaccine.

This is a fantastic demonstration of overthinking while not thinking.

Nolte almost got it right. If his readers believe him, then the ‘organized left’ has managed to make “cucks” out of unvaccinated Trump supporters whether they get vaccinated, or not, seeing as how easily the ‘organized left’ wins this game either way. Except that Nolte is the fellow working hardest to make them “cucks” by feeding them this snowflake BS.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I don’t get the cog dis.

- Doc

[Cultellus]

Gorilla

[Lem]

Canpakes, I don’t believe Nolte’s listeners would heed him. I think he’s clever enough to try a conspiracy theory to provoke them into contrarianism, but he’d need the ‘demonrats have reversed uno’d you into acting against your own best interests’ to become a meme. Also, here’s another example of their gargantuan hubris:



This is just ingrained into their dna - an overestimation of their abilities and smarts where a few Facebook posts and Google searches is enough to become an autodidactic genius on pathology and immunology.

- Doc

Charpentier’s response in the above exchange is perfect.

[Gunnar]

Idaho COVID Insanity Shows How Much Worse the GOP Can Get

As the morgues and ICUs in Idaho overflow with COVID patients, Republican Governor Brad Little said he would fine businesses with over 100 employees if they enacted a mask mandate.

It’s an insane stance rooted in his desire not to give his challenger, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, any cause to attack him as she guns for his job.

The Idaho governor has reason to be on guard. McGeachin pulled a power play when he was out of the state briefly in May, using her temporary status as acting governor to enact a mandate against mask mandates. Little overturned it as soon as he got back—not that he’s a big fan of mask mandates, but he was leaving it up to individual localities and that didn’t go far enough for the Trump base, so now he’ll be punishing companies for trying to keep their employees safe in a pandemic.

“She does seem to be channeling Trump here and angling for Trump’s endorsement,” says Jessica Taylor, who follows governors’ races for The Cook Political Report.

That dynamic is hardly confined to Idaho. In another red state, Alabama, where COVID cases have overwhelmed the health system, Governor Kay Ivey blamed the unvaccinated for the surge, a rare moment of truth-telling that has gotten her three primary challengers, with two more mulling the race.

Even in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott isn’t facing a super-serious challenge, says Taylor, he’s not taking any chances, ordering a recount at Trump’s request of four vote-rich counties that Trump won in 2020, adding to the craziness. At his rally in Georgia on Saturday, Trump bizarrely claimed that the months-long audit of the Arizona election found that he had won even though Cyber Ninjas, the company selected by the GOP that conducted the audit, found Biden had won—and by more votes than the original count.

The Republican primaries are shaping up like the Hunger Games, dystopian battles among the Trumpian faithful. “What you’re seeing are incredible races to the bottom as they one up each other to be the craziest and the Trumpiest in whatever context presents itself,” says Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic group. The fights and the lies can be over mask mandates, or vaccines, or how we teach children about slavery, with all of them tying into the Big Lie that Trump somehow won the election and was cheated out of his supposedly rightful victory.

[Jersey Girl]

Just noticed this on my phone. I was vaxxed in a large chain grocery store. They just sent out notification for booster appointments.

So...let us know if the system you were vaxxed in does that for you, please. It may help others who would like to receive the booster.

Going to cross post this to the V&T thread as well.

[Gunnar]

We've reached the 'Red Covid' phase of the pandemic
It is becoming increasingly difficult for the GOP and the Trump administration to credibly escape justifiable blame for making the pandemic far worse than it should have been.

In his victory speech after the 2020 election, Joe Biden said this: "I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn't see red and blue states, but a United States."

Roughly nine months into his presidency, however, red states and blue states have widely diverged on what should be the least political of issues: Vaccination rates for Covid-19.

Dubbing it "Red Covid," The New York Times' David Leonhardt writes:
"The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state. ... Because the vaccines are so effective at preventing serious illness, Covid deaths are also showing a partisan pattern. Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America."

New data from Gallup provides stark numbers to back up Leonhardt's claim.

More than 9 in 10 self-identified Democrats (92%) report that they have had at least one dose of one of the three vaccines for Covid-19. That number among Republicans? Just 56%.

That's a stunning data point that tells a very clear story: there are Republicans who are getting seriously ill -- and even dying -- as some sort of distorted political stance.

How did we get here? There's no single person to blame, but in my mind it's quite clear that former President Donald Trump and Fox News bear the lion's share of the responsibility.

Trump spent the first 16 months of the pandemic doing everything he could to downplay it. He insisted that the virus was "going to disappear." He was openly dismissive of mask-wearing; on the day he announced CDC guidance that people should wear masks indoors, Trump said that he had no plans to do so. "I just don't want to be doing -- I don't know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk," Trump explained. "I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens -- I don't know, somehow I don't see it for myself. I just, I just don't."

Trump also worked to make the debate about masking -- and steps to mitigate Covid-19 more generally -- about attempts by Democratic leaders to limit your freedoms. Lockdown orders were an abrogation of your rights -- as opposed to short-term attempts to slow community spread of the virus. Masks were nanny government trying to tell you what to do. Respected experts -- most notably Dr. Anthony Fauci -- were shills for the Democratic Party. Everything, in short, that people other than Donald Trump was telling you about the virus was bunk.

(That Trump was booed when he told a crowd earlier this year to get vaccinated tells you everything you need to know about the danger of fomenting distrust and feeding people lies.)

Meanwhile, Fox News served as a sort of force multiplier for the politicization of the virus. That charge was led by prime-time hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, both of whom sought to cast the vaccine debate in terms of freedom abridged rather than a public health good. "We're not saying there is no benefit to the vaccine -- there may well be profound benefits to the vaccine," Carlson said over the summer, ignoring the scads of evidence that all three vaccines available for Covid-19 are not only safe but hugely effective in preventing serious illness and death from the virus. Carlson also regularly features anecdotal evidence of a person -- or persons -- with an adverse reaction to the Covid-19 vaccine, absent the context that the vaccine is, in the main, perfectly safe.

Here are the most damning takeaways from this analysis:

The result of all of this misinformation and politicization of Covid-19 is stark. The 12 states with the highest case rate for every 100,000 people are all run by Republican governors. The 13 states with the highest hospitalization rate per 100,000 residents are all run by Republican governors. The 15 states with the highest percentage of deaths per 100,000 are all run by Republican governors.

This isn't complicated. We are not just divided along political lines now. Our political divisions have created two entirely different Americas: One in which the vast majority of people are vaccinated and hospitalizations and deaths are low, and the other where the coronavirus continues to ravage the population.

In contrast, California, arguably the bluest of the states, and which Republicans relentlessly try to mock and disparage, now has the lowest daily new cases of covid-19 per 100k and the lowest testing positivity rates of any of the states. Yet, because California's population is so huge compared to any other state, it still manages to have more Trump supporters than any other single state, and my county, which happens to be one of California's red counties, has a higher per capita case rate, a higher positivity rate, a lower fully vaccinated percentage and a higher percentage of people hospitalized with covid-19 than the state's average, which all fits in with what I said above.

[Doctor Steuss]

Two more positive cases at work; but, for now they seem to be thankfully very mild. Work had us early birds come in a bit later so a company could come through and disinfect. I pulled up as they were finishing. There was either a bit of “safety theater” involved, or it was the chems they used -- they were all rocking disposable hooded laminate coveralls (gave me Breaking Bad flashbacks). The one coworker who has been hospitalized for a long while was able to finally go home with supplemental oxygen -- very excited and happy that they might finally have the worst behind them.

My little dude had a slight fever, and some sniffles last Tuesday. We did an OTC rapid test the following day, and negative for COVID funk. It took us until Thursday for an appointment to get a test that his school would accept (results received yesterday… another negative). Wouldn’t you know it, the second we get the all-clear, poor little dude managed to get some allergen-based conjunctivitis (*sigh*). Everything should be back to normal tomorrow.

In my neck of the woods, we are still experiencing shortages of appliances (currently refrigerators, dishwashers and cooktops). Car stereo receivers also seem to be a pretty hot commodity. I went in to have my amps re-tuned a bit, and they had even sold off 90% of their floor models.

[Cultellus]

Gorilla