This will be very short.
Folks, while the election drama plays out (and drama it surely is; never since the Civil War has this degree of deliberate sabotage of basic governance been so public, and so blatant), while this passion play goes through its gyrations… we have to some degree or another lost sight of the truly existential danger wandering unchecked among us.
Everything I am going to say next is based on direct quotes, factual news reports, government statistics, and global data aggregators:
Our nation is now recording >120 thousand coronavirus cases per day.
Our nation now has a higher number of hospitalized people than at any other time in this crisis.
Our nations nurses, nurses’ aides, and doctors are now depleted by death, sickness, and exhaustion, and their numbers are running shorter than the number of available hospital beds.
The death toll is starting its climb, three to four weeks after the caseload increase, as usual, and is now accelerating through 1000 deaths per day on a 7 day average. That number will increase dramatically and continue to rise.
Places that were hit hard in the spring and summer, that were the basis for the ridiculous and irresponsibly stupid “Herd Immunity” arguments or the “Community Resistance” mumbo jumbo… are being hit hard again. Spikes are spreading rapidly into rural and exurban enclaves, and hospitals there are small and underfunded.
Winter is coming, and with it the need for people to be indoors, cooler temperatures, lower humidity, and less sunlight. The virus will thrive, and it has many, many carriers and hosts. Community spread is out of control in an enormous swath of the nation. The holidays are upon us, and peoples’ need for family, for comfort, for visits, for celebration and food are immense and intense. People are lonely, people are frustrated, people are scared, and they want their folks around them. This instinct, so often a comfort… will be a vector.
The passions of the electoral outcome and all the incredible stupidity and anger, protests and celebrations, discussions, close-quarters for counting, close-quarters for strategizing… are an absolute boon for the virus.
We are in for an extremely dark and dangerous time. Death, disease, and panic are going to start to set in, and set in hard.
Be prepared, be mindful, be aware.
