All things Covid and Politics, Part2

Let’s get the stark reality of some Covid Pandemic statistics out of the way, and to be clear let us remember that these statistics are people’s lives!

From March of last year to the present –

We are quickly approaching 5,000,000 (5 million) dead around the world!

We are quickly approaching 750,000 (that’s ¾ of a million) fellow Americans dead!

We are quickly approaching 60,000 fellow New Yorkers dead! (2nd only to California which is almost double our population)

Just in NYS we have dozens of children and teens dead, 100’s of young adults dead, 1000’s of middle aged adults dead, and of course tragically 1000’s of our most vulnerable older population time cut short!

We now have 206 of our fellow Chautauqua county citizens dead! (Where most of the deaths in NYS state have been from the greater NYC area, we have more deaths in our county than approx. 39 other counties)

We also have a vaccination rate that is lagging behind many other counties and well below the state average. (Oh yes, and we are lower than the national average as well)

We still only have 56% of the presently eligible population vaccinated!

We continue to have too many people in the hospital, active cases, those quarantined, and a high transmission rate, and at this stage it is preposterous that just in recent weeks there have been 100’s and 100’s of new cases (the substantial majority of which are unvaccinated) as well as about ¼ of the overall county deaths occurring.

Just as preposterous is the following:

New York State

Chautauqua County

Now what did we just illustrate? Two things:

The NYS chart shows the initial impact of this pandemic hitting us that was concentrated in the NYC area, not here and you know or can now see that we had weeks and months before we starting getting severely hit and people dying, all that time to learn and study and make good choices both as a local government as well as a local population, so would you say we did that good a job. No, if we had it would have still happened but not as severely.
The Chaut chart above shows quite clearly it’s worse than that. Given what we have learned, or should have learned from the beginning, and then from our own spike now months ago, why are we now having another spike?

It’s obvious unless your deft. Masking and all the mitigation efforts were necessary and worked, albeit of course not perfectly as in the case of a pandemic like this there is no such thing, never the less without them there would be exponentially more illnesses and deaths. The more we have loosened up, the worse the problem has become again. As of late the answer is the vaccines work (not to mention as combined still with mitigation efforts, necessary in large part because so many are still not vaccinated), and where you see recent state stats being better than our county stats, well of course the overall state vaccination rate is higher than ours.

Forget local and state and consider our nation for a moment, from a piece we reviewed Sept 21st:

Last week, 1,150,284 Americans were newly diagnosed with COVID-19, more than 100,000 people were hospitalized and 10,386 people died from it. By the time you read this, at least another 10,000 people will have died from it — and probably more, since COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths are growing exponentially as the fourth wave of the pandemic surges. So it will continue each week through September, with COVID-19 potentially becoming again the leading cause of death in the U.S., as it was in January 2021.

How many of you have friends or family deceased from Covid (our deepest condolences to those that do), how many of you can even imagine 10,000 dead people, how about 60,000, how about 750,000!!! And, while you are pondering that, all you folks that want to continue to resist masks and vaccines please go read all their stories and the sentiments of their families, and make sure to include all the young ones (you know the ones who cant get it, cant get really ill from it, cant die from it!)

Now consider some scientific data that was released in August. Unvaccinated adults are 11 times more likely to die than fully vaccinated adults. Unvaccinated adults are 6 times more likely to get Covid. They are also far more likely to suffer a severe case of it as opposed to a mild case.

There has been so much that has been done right, but still so much that has been wrong and we now want to step back to some months ago and share some observations about why things didn’t have to be so bad.

At the height of this mess when things are limited, gathering numbers are restricted, essential services are in effect, all mitigation efforts are ramped up, and masks are required for everyone everywhere:

At a local gas station convenience store, at a highway exit no less where travelers may be coming through bringing the virus with them, or taking it home with them, there is an idiot, yes idiot, employee behind the counter, with signs up everywhere about rules and how concerned this business is for you, and he has his mask down around his neck, while serving people, and is handling money back and forth and not using hand sanitizer, and is then handling food without gloves and again without using hand sanitizer, and he is allowing others to be in the store not wearing masks (how could he even attempt to correct them, the idiot isn’t wearing his own). There was a complaint made to the store manager. Days later the observation was a repeat of the same employee doing the same things.
Walmart. We’re calling them out by name because they have been horrible. Not only have many of their own employees violated over and over what the store says their own rules are, in conjunction with what the state rules have been, but the management has been absolutely feckless about it. The store itself even at times while announcements are playing over their store broadcast, have violations occurring in front of their faces at that very time, in various regards, and nothing to correct it, nothing, again completely feckless in handling themselves and in handling droves of customers violating policies as well.
We could name several, many, local businesses where the same is true. We have considered from the very beginning a very basic premise, a simple truth, and that which makes things actually simpler than it seems: It has been a long standing accepted basic health rule for ages, “no shirt, no shoes, no service” and an entity has every right to eject you for failing to abide. They can ask you to leave, refuse to serve you, and if you are unruly or threatening they can simply have the authorities come deal with it. A mask is for damn sure way more important than the shirt or the shoes, and the same rule applies and such should be enforced even more stringently for masks under these dire circumstances.
We have witnessed at the hospital and other medical facilities, several instances of several different healthcare workers violating safety protocols. This just burns us, and if that’s not bad enough to begin with, this has occurred at times in the presence of other staff and even superiors who did and said nothing about it.
Just as infuriating is government facilities who have allowed this. One particular town hall for example has a big sign right on the front door, no mask no entry. Low and behold a man walks in, no mask, isn’t questioned, isn’t corrected, isn’t asked to leave, and instead is waited on no problem!
How about the small post office who both has a sign that reads masks are required, but then another that they are recommended, and guess it doesn’t really matter because in the small room where you drop off a package or buy some stamps there’s the postmaster not wearing a mask.
There’s also the case of municipalities who rent out a community building to the public and in this instance there is about 30 people in an approx. 20-30 room, its cold out and no windows are open, not a one of them are wearing a mask, and there are several children present to make matters worse. Shame on the dumb municipality and shame on the dumb participants, not only for taking such a risk, but also for violating more than one ordinance in effect at that time.
Then we take a look at schools and a bus driver not only wearing a bandana which science has studied and can tell you aren’t worth a darn instead of an effective mask, but he’s not even wearing it responsibly up around both his mouth and nose, while the bus is filled with kids. The school districts haven’t been that bright either by not taking the advice (which districts in other areas have done) to operate the buses with all the windows down.
Of course that brings us to all these school functions and sports events, in many cases that were advised against, only to have them stopped shortly thereafter because of cases, but what really stands out is how here’s one event and only a couple kids are wearing masks, and here’s another event the same sport the same week and all those kids are wearing masks. What the hell is the matter with these coaches and administrators in the first example.
Oh yeh and remember that bar here in the county that got taken down and made an example of, that’s the problem that’s what they do, they flex their muscles and do something, and make themselves look good in that example, but overall the authorities haven’t uniformly, fairly, or comprehensively enforced anything. It’s terribly problematic, there are several bars that could have been caught being unsafe just the same, and there are hundreds of instances as aforementioned of people violating mask rules putting others at risk that something should have been done about, but wasn’t.

We could go on, but the point is that things did not have to be as bad as they were, and as they still are, which brings us back to at present the vaccine.

If you are not getting vaccinated to help end this the best we can, to heal and get back to a semblance of normalcy, without a legitimate medical reason (which there are few and which is rare), then you are a fool and you are contributing to the problem and instead of helping to end it, you are helping to prolong it.

If you aren’t getting it because of some uncertainty or some myth then you ought to read this

Wrong for US: COVID Vaccine Myths and all those still holding out without cause

If you aren’t getting it because of some supposed religious argument or presumed exemption, well we will be posting another part with a very contrarian view addressing that issue.