Thursday, August 12, 2021

Political Calculus

 


That is a graph of projected Covid cases through 2021 in Florida. 

That is the graph DeSantis is actually counting on to win re-election, because Covid will recede and by 2022 it will be last year’s news. All the trauma, pain, death: forgotten, as if it never happened.

You know, the way everybody forgot 9/11, and already nobody mourns the dead of Seaside condominium.

This is what DeSantis is building his political future on: that he suffered the children to suffer and die for “parental rights” because, after all, the fourth wave of Covid didn’t last that long.

And then there’s long Covid:

Children are reporting a host of lingering ailments – even if their initial symptoms were mild – including headache, muscle aches, fatigue, heart palpitations, gastrointestinal problems, nausea, dizziness, seizures, memory loss, hallucinations and other sensory symptoms like the loss of sense of taste and smell, and even numbness that leaves children unable to walk.

....

Until now the pandemic has largely focused on preventing severe illness and deaths in older people, many of whom have now been vaccinated. But many advocates, like Mcfarland, and medical experts want to see more attention paid to the young.

Last week paediatric Covid-19 cases accounted for the largest percentage of new infections since the start of the pandemic, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, with 94,000 new cases registered (15 percent of all cases, up from 14.3 percent on average) in the week ending August 5.

"Simply stated, the Delta variant has created a new and pressing risk to children and adolescents across the country," the academy said in a letter to the US Food and Drug Administration, urging vaccine approvals be expedited for those under 12.

....

"I believe in public health interventions and vaccinations is one way we can squash this disease," said Kasturirangan. "And whenever I can, I'm going to talk about my experience because I don't want anyone going through what we did last year. It's taken a toll on us as a family, and what's frightening is we don't know how long we'll have to live with this."

Well, as long as it doesn't affect elections in Florida in 2022, or Presidential elections in 2024, who cares, right?  But the calculus is, there won’t be that many, so who cares? Which may not show up until weeks, or months later. 

DR. CHRISTINA PROPST: Absolutely. That is one of the greatest concerns, I would say, for pediatricians, and, frankly, should be one of the greatest concerns for parents across the country right now. There is a condition, as many people have heard, called long COVID. It was originally identified in adults, mostly because adults were getting tested. From day one, children have been undertested in this country. So, long COVID, now also known as post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, is a condition that can arise weeks to months later and generally involves a constellation of symptoms, including the brain fog many people have heard of, aches, low-grade fevers, a malaise that just won't go away, a lack of energy.

And unfortunately, we are seeing more and more long COVID, which can be truly debilitating, in young children. We are seeing that as the incidence among the pediatric population increases, we are starting to see those long COVID cases, so the malaise and fatigue that just does not go away, six, eight, 10 weeks after an acute COVID infection, which might even have been a mild infection. The vast majority of children do not require hospitalization for COVID-19. However, that does not mean they are safe or somehow immune from long COVID or from multisystem inflammatory conditions that can occur post-COVID infection.

You know, the frightening thing about polio wasn't the death rate; it was the number of people it left crippled, or affected for life.  I knew those people as adults.  I remember well the relief palpable around me as the polio vaccine became available.

Now? It’s an eminence front. People forget.  Or so the politicians hope.


Fuck 'em. Depressed people don’t vote anyway. Besides, fuck it, we're all gonna die anyway, right? Why do we even need hospitals? You know, there's a difference between elected officials calling on people to "make the ultimate sacrifice," and elected officials saying "Fuck it, they were gonna die anyway."
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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal5:14 AM

    Archibald MacLeish wrote a poem slamming the existentialists, a couple of the lines were said something like "we all die in the end, so we give up the enterprise? Or something like that. I've never found it when I wanted to use it. I recall hearing him read it in a radio lecture or something.

    MTG is dead from the neck up, now.

    The Republican-fascist use of this pandemic, the epic callousness and indifference to, as you note, even the lives and futures of young children is something even I never thought they'd reach or dare to openly exhibit. They are counting on a large number of people gulled by the media into the kind of depravity that the Trump dead-enders demonstrate, and the media is a huge part of it. I see the cynicism of dozens of cheap movies in this, not only Hollywood ones, Brit's too. It was Robert Hammer who said "I want to make films about people in dark rooms doing beastly things to each other," So, he had pretty much the same attitude to life as Hitler or most of the Republicans holding office, today.

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