TSA: Transmission-Spiking Agency.

In this our new world, Fantasy and Horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water. Horror is the more dangerous place ... you can walk around Fantasy on your own, in thrall to a Throne of Games as you stumble through a vale of Mysts, whence you depart unscathed. Then you learn that the road between the two cities is Corona St, a long street that runs from the  outskirts of one city into the other. One that began with a minor thoroughfare, but has now morphed into a six-lane freeway, its roadmarkers changing each time you traverse it.

Thus has man, through his own machinations become an anachronism. With an odious Musk still clinging to his shroud, he fantasizes moving to other realms, soaring through space to conquer other worlds, having turned his back on the only planet in the universe that nurtured him. Burning his bridges before learning how to keep even the air he breathes from destroying life on earth thanks to his intransigence, his inability to differentiate between deeply shared desires and shallow wishes springing from mere Vanity ...

After reporting that a TSA worker had succumbed to the COVID-19 virus, ABC News reported that,

"A total of 329 Transportation Security Administration employees have tested positive for COVID-19 and two have died ... "

This is now our "Aspirational" April 12, yet only now has, according to this same report,

"The agency ... begun to allow its workers to wear N95 masks, goggles and surgical masks. 

These workers, despite the fact that there are, according to our Administration, plenty of PPE, and of course, "millions of tests, and the tests, They're Beautiful" (but just try getting one) are all untested.

"The agency screened 94,931 passengers at U.S. airports Wednesday compared to 2,229,276 on the same day last year."

So, even as the administration and the press were exchanging barbs, no one in the press thought to ask the Nasty question of why, with more than 2,000,000 people it was exposing to a known deadly pathogen, the wearing of masks which were to protect those who didn't have it from those who did, were these untested TSA employees not only then, but now, not being REQUIRED to wear masks at least while at work?

This results in us being in the situation now where a federal employee can come from home dutifully wearing a mask on the subway (There's footage online in which a man was shown being physically removed from a train for not wearing a mask) on the way to work at their Federal position scanning passengers by the thousands, yet can, once they reach their place of employment, then remove their mask as they begin to interface with the public. Oh wait, until the second agent died, so for most of the two weeks counting down to April 12, they were FORBIDDEN to wear them ... so now that a Federal employee, who, by the way, is paid from the taxes levied on the rest of the population that have real jobs, is now being paid with those tax dollars to infect the public with COVID-19, which anything that I've read about this virus, means that's exactly what's happening: to "protect" us from an imaginary threat, they are intentionally exposing us to a killer predator.

But no plane will go down in a fiery blaze taking entire buildings with it. The deaths will be spread silently, infect secretly, and be blamed on the country to which the travelers vacated to, no one being able to trace the origins back to the deceased TSA agent, so, "Carry on", and not just your luggage. Wave your tragic wands over your unsuspecting victims: You don't care, you don't have to, you're a Federal employee.

Remember, the TSA is a part of the Homeland Security, an organisation now culpable of spreading a deadly virus to every airline customer in the country.

Even as our President was spewing his "Asspirational" date for "Getting America to Work", because, as this virus has eloquently demonstrated, America simply doesn't work in its present configuration, hence, any aspirational date would of necessity be preceded by taking steps to ensure amelioration. Aspiration isn't simply desire, passively making a wish. Aspirational includes desire plus ambition, it means not only that you wish for something, but that you actively outline the steps necessary to ensure the desired outcome can be achieved. But aside from social distancing, what steps have we taken to arrive at the state where we can say it's time to go to work, and this is how we're going to do it?

Instead Easter has come and gone yet TSA workers are only now being ALLOWED, not required, to wear masks (that they must procure on their own) while interfacing with the public, exposing it to a deadly disease that's very real - in order to "protect" us from a threat that is apparently hidden in our shampoo, sequestered in weaponized (somehow) fingernail clippers, or lurking in an unopened bottle of body lotion.

But the most curious fact about our having gone by our asspirational (sic) date, is that despite said date having come and gone, there is still no plan as to how we would have gone about opening the economy again. If Easter was the date we planned on celebrating the economy's rise from the dead, where are the plans to do so? How can the 12'th have come and gone without the Sole Super Power, the Exceptional Nation, the Full Spectrum Dominatrix of the Globe,  having the briefest outline or sketchiest puff piece in which to set forth the means of doing so?

Or is the plan to simply continue to do the same thing we did at the beginning of this pandemic's outbreak? Namely make absolutely no plan and then simply follow step-by-step what the Chinese are doing, and them scream how it's all China's fault because the plan they used, thereby demonstrating that it doesn't work, we then copied anyway. Since, being America, and the Exceptional Nation it is, surely it'll work here; it'll be like  a miracle.

Right now in California, the State developing various shoulder ailments from patting itself on the back for shutting down in a timely fashion, in the City that called a Health Emergency before the month of February had ended, an RN with whom I lately had a conversation told me of yet another hospital worker at their facility coming down with the COVID-19 flu (none of their patients have tested positive for it).

This worker had come straight to work from a job at another hospital, despite not feeling well, and got his temperature taken only when another staff member insisted he do so. It was 104 degrees.

This is the second employee in as many weeks, the first having done pretty much the same thing (except that she was an RN!).

Yet, only patients in the rooms for whose health the RN was responsible were tested for the virus. NONE OF THE OTHER STAFF MEMBERS OR PATIENTS WERE ALLOWED TO BE TESTED. (This is hardly the action one would expect from a country that has "plenty of tests available").

(If I'm permitted to make a statement that may seem overly bold, methinks there's something we're not being told).

So now, Surprise! Surprise!, this other staff member has tested positive, and that staff member worked not only at the facility that finally told him to go home, but at another hospital as well. Because workers who work for a living caring for others instead of waving a wand between their legs while alleviating them of their toiletries and bringing them home, can't afford to maintain a household in the San Francisco Bay area without holding two jobs, as their pay isn't even close to what Federal workers makes. This particular person holds two full-time jobs at two different health facilities, and goes from one job directly to the other. 

That's the reason I picked up on the TSA's statement that, "The agency has begun to allow its workers to wear N95 masks". Like the testing for those at-risk hospital workers, that "allow" is quite literal: they wanted to be tested, but because they were showing no symptoms (those personnel included the one that is now ill with the virus) they couldn't get tested. So workers wearing PPE have the same blindness that TSA has with "Security": "Protection" as to meaning "security/protection" from what?" ... and for whom? Sure the RN got tested, but then returned to work (why is that even an option?!) for the three days it took for the test results to come back, and although she infected none of her patients  she may well have infected her fellow employees who she interfaced sans PPE. And yes you read that correctly, suspecting she had the virus so much she got tested, she went to work in a healthcare facility regardless. I guess if you're told you are an essential worker, isn't it essential that you go to work? As the TSA spokesperson remarked:

"Frank (the deceased) screened hundreds of thousands of passengers, keeping them and the transportation network safe."

SAFE!? Which he said with a straight face, completely unaware of the irony of what he was saying.

That's how blind he is to the fact that what it actually means is that Frank unknowingly (we hope) exposed hundreds of thousands of passengers, making them and the transportation network he was "making safe", a nexus of contagion, efficiently infecting airline passengers with the same virus that was silently killing him. And he was but one essential personnel.

Of the total of the 329 TSA employees testing positive for COVID-19, 162 were reported in just the past week. So for this whole "Aspirational" window of opportunity, a major Federal agency, one claiming it was "keeping us and the transportation network safe", was covertly putting everybody's life in danger who came in contact with them, and, like the San Francisco hospitals, continues to do so. All while we assert our desire for everyone to go back to work.

 But if lightening was desire, this White House would've burnt down a long time ago. 

One more point before I get back to the hospital workers as vectors, is that, despite this Trumpette being convinced that it is still all about Her (Sorry, I just can't help it. I'm an old sod, and this effeminate ritual of daily daubing one's face with such a heavy multi-layered regime of make-up, while talking to constituencies about how, the ozone be damned, you can't abide by those spritz sprayers, which deliver their hairspray in glops, necessitating your just having to avail yourself of the full gas-propelled effect to care for your carefully-coiffed, carotene-colored canopy, was simply not done by real MEN. This queenly primper, whose daily toilette resembles Ru Paul's more than Rand Paul's, is voted for by the very people who slapped their own sons in the face and called them sissies for any amount of self-pampering and womanly obsession with their physical appearance ... even weight lifting was frowned on as being too suspiciously homo. Yet they flock to vote for this preening peacock because they find Gay Marriage so insulting it means this is not America, so if Trump will destroy America, all the better. "How do they reconcile this?", I can't help but wonder. It is truly beyond the beyonds for someone who was born in the Military-addled, ultra-conformist fifties that was dominated by Corporate Males, not this she-man who's as self-pampering as any kept mistress. From "I like Ike" to "Divine is Fine". How'd that happen?) But the lack of a national response isn't just one going back to January, February or March ... we are suffering from the lack of a concerted federal response right now.

As a federal agency that interfaced with "94,931 passengers at U.S. airports (last) Wednesday", will only "allow" its employees to wear masks, despite knowing many of them are already infected (Remember, "a total of 329 Transportation Security Administration employees have tested positive for COVID-19 ... therefore there are untested hundreds more who are still spreading it right now). Similarly, the Postal Service, even as twelve states remained open for Business, (which means open for the business of spreading COVID-19), was tasked with the responsibility of delivering to every household a card from the federal government that contained social distancing guidelines, the first of which should have read, "Wash this card upon receipt, as your State doesn't take this virus as a serious threat".

So because isolation isn't a national policy, but the dispersion of this printed material is, a substrate known to be capable of transmitting the corona virus for several days after coming in contact with a contagious individual, is brought door-to-door to inform you on how not to get the virus, even while delivering the pathogen it's warning you about right into your hands.

What just these two or three scenarios suggest is that although the shelter in place has helped stop spreading the virus from those who have symptoms to the rest of the population, those who are asymptomatic, even when they work with a very sick population (The particular LTAC referenced has many  patients already on ventilators) among whom there is not one infected individual, has no guidelines as to whether you can have another job where they do have COVID patients, even though two of their employees came to work several days in a row despite feeling ill. Simple epistemological probability means that the odds of there being others who are untested yet infectious approaches certainty.

The overriding reason for those workers going to work when they suspected they were ill was monetary. Non-essential personnel may get that promised $1200 check, but essential personnel don't. And because the "essential" label is exactly that, a label, their "essentiality" being conferred from above, not by their "Industry", their usual level of benefits/pay in no way reflects their enhanced status. The CEO still receives his lifeblood-sucking level of compensation, but the so-called "essential" workers get the same old pay that they got when they were sneered at just for asking for a raise, since they are considered to be totally and easily replaceable (After agitating for higher compensation recently, the CNA's at this LTAC were snidely awarded a raise of .20/hr. That's $1.60/day; not even enough to pay 3/4's of what it costs to just get to work on Muni). Since you just clean shit, we'll just pay you shit, how's that? Now off to work you go.

Unlike TSA, which is part of a Federal Employees Union, CNA's get scant few benefits, and extra sick days are not among them. There is no check in the mail for them. They get to work.

In other words, calling the Easter date "Aspirational" is a far cry from what any child would know it  actually is, which is nothing more than wishful thinking.

And mere wishful thinking in the middle of a pandemic mean that that six-lane Freeway between Fantasy and Horror gets increasingly mined with IED's. While the road back to reality remains unpaved.

United States 

Cases: 555,371;

 Deaths: 22,056

After a mere month, the corona virus has caused an equivalent number of fatalities as the the regular flu causes during the entire flu season.