From CDC:
There's a noticeable spike starting on 6/5: 14 days after George Floyd's murder. I don't blame protesters; I blame mayors and governors who decided stopping COVID was less important than protests and rioting. The IHME graphs are not easily exported or snipped in whole so I have clipped the most recent parts of the daily deaths for the U.S.
and Italy:
and France:
The data for the U.S. is more current, so the rise in U.S. deaths may be a sign of serious problems (like unmasked protests and riots) or that we are all having similar responses.
Here in Arizona, the rise started before the riots... err... protests. However, it may have accelerated as a result of those.
ReplyDeleteThe cause was simple - observed by me and on videos: when the rather soft "stay at home" order was lifted, too many people took it as a sign that "the virus is defeated, time to party, time to get drunk in crowded bars and on crowded water venues."
I feared this would happen. There were two reasons: weak messaging by the federal and especially state government at the time of lockdown; and, misplaced civil liberties arguments augmented by way too much unscientific BS spread, sadly to say, by some conservative outlets. I was amazed, reading commment threads on, for example, Instapundit, to find an almost unanimous view that the whole COVID19 thing was a lefty plot, that masks don't work, that stay-at-home orders were a plot, etc, and an attitude to just ignore the virus. Some even had the attitude that old folks should just be left to die - too bad. Disgusting ignorance and in the latter case, sociopathy.
The irresponsible attitudes were, of course, mostly among the young - one reason for a dramatic shift in demographics of cases - from old folks to a lot more in the 20-45 year old group.
Our hospitals now have more COVID19 patients than at any time in the past, more in the ICU, more on ventilators. They have a lot more seriously ill young people.
They have activated "surge protocols" already, and gotten additional medical personnel from out of state. A hospital that went out of business last year is being re-opened, and field hospitals are available, but have not been requested yet.
Hospitals requested and got liability coverage for "crisis care" - which is a euphemism for war-level triage - deciding which patients die for lack of treatment capacity. Naturally, us old folks will be chosen.
The governor, who has been weak on this, finally allowed counties and cities to enact mask mandates, which many did. Those mandates are sensible, not silly - you don't need a mask outdoors unless you are getting too close to people, etc. Then, when businesses were acting irresponsibly - bars allowing crowding, etc - he mandated at a state level requirements for them to meet. Violators are losing their licenses and being shut down.
This is getting serious and I am not happy to be in the middle of this.
If one tracks how other countries are doing, the US looks, frankly stupid and incompetent. Japan, for example, is doing well, and they never had a lockdowns - but people there have been wearing masks since this appeared - they remember SARS. South Korea is doing well, again, without lockdowns. Taiwan has done extremely well from the start. Thailand, of all places, has contained the virus quite well.
And, of course, mainland China is doing pretty well - they aren't lying about that - but then dictatorships can take really drastic actions, and they have. Anyone wonder how the Uigurs are doing? Good luck finding out, but I'd bet they just led COVID19 kill them.
The US needs to wake up and see how bad we look, because frankly, we are going to be the world's laughing stock.