This is out of control
John Hopkins University announced that more than 675,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. It’s now believed that more Americans have died from COVID than died from influenza in the 1918 pandemic (approximately 675,000).
Despite over a century of scientific and technical advancements this country has made many of the same mistakes that it did in 1918. At least back there wasn’t the level of misinformation there is now thanks to the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. (Of course, I once found a early 20th century newspaper story from a local paper here in Iowa about how a guy came across a “hideous monster” made up of several different animal parts eating a horse near Bernard, so misinformation was still a thing then. Just not as bad as it is now). They didn’t have the former guy and his GQP drones like Reynolds, DeSantis, Abbott, Noem, and so on actively sabotaging the response to a crisis to score political points with right wing fanatics.
Last March the Brookings Institute estimated that had the US had an actual, unified response to the pandemic we might have avoided over 400,000 deaths. That’s about 16,000 more than the equivalent of the population Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa (about 384,000 people) dead because of the disgraceful response of the GQP to this crisis, and their continued resistance to putting this crisis behind us. Iowa’s Branch Trumpvidian government, for example, continues to push bullshit that’s been thoroughly debunked as the reason why we cannot take any measures to stop Delta and put us on the path to getting out of this pandemic.
This whole thing makes me f—–g sick. Instead of working together to solve this crisis, Republicans had to politicize it, and it’s now caused more Americans to die than the 1918 pandemic.
