Death Comes for the March Bitch-up.

     

Just take a little off the ides.

The Covid death March.

As let-them-shiver-to-death Texas drop its mask mandate, and Florida hosts a grand re-opening for bikers, letting Hells' Angels run rampant and thereby earn their sobriquet, lawlessness being the adopted New strategy of a failed Grandpa's Old Party, they are spreading death among the unvaccinated. Thus does the refrain of late last year, that 2020 was the year from hell, and 2021's arrival was a sign of springtime for Hitler, there's a sobering, yet ignored, statistic that in the short two and a half months of 2021, the USA has lost more than  half as many of its citizens to Covid-19 than it did in all of the ten months it swept across the country in 2020. With more than 200,000 deaths in 2021 as of today, the falling rate they point at is indeed something to cheer about, the re-opening while a variant spreads all over the world however, is somewhat less Cheerio and more Post Toasties, as at this rate we will double 2020's number of deaths to more than a million in 2021 (100,000 per month x's 12 = 1,200,000.

It doesn't bode well.

Millions more are already climbing onto planes, and Mexico has already suffered the ignominy of having the USA accuse its citizens of "bringing it across the border", when in fact, Like Hell's Angels on planes, it is the stale upper crust of the well-bred who are actuating its continued spread, a fact that can be gleaned from where the new variant has spread, and the rapidity with which it has leaped the boundaries of the OECD nations, each of which prefers to open its borders to wayfarers, having structured their economies in such a manner that, without a constant flow of currencies from other countries not their own, they suffer economic collapse. Despite the supposed adoption of Adam Smith's  economic rostrums  in the eighties, each of the richest nations in the world generates sparse income in their own economies, preferring to vacuum the Wealth of Other Nations into their coffers than dirty their hands, befoul their air, and poison their water with the wastes from the modern technologies that make their lives comfy, by exporting their industrial polluting processes to "developing" (as though they were Fotomat kiosks) nations, than expose their own citizens to the environmental consequences of their lives of leisure, and then, as a final slap in the face, accusing those nations of achieving economic growth by burning dirty fossil fuels, while they bask in their Green and Clean glory.  

All of which is to say, in my usually long-winded way, that, as wonderful as the vaccines are, the overall picture is far from sanguine. On the contrary, to watch as the world pretends that dropping a mandate in Texas has no effect on their own citizens, it is like watching yet another sequel in the Back to the Future franchise. As the virus was wending its way through the US  population, its failed president was assuring its citizens that "it would be like a miracle", assuring them the virus would disappear over the horizon. Now that the oxymoronic "Miracle of Science" has been achieved, and countries are vaccinating their citizens, they turn their back on the very science that promises to deliver them out the other side of this nightmare by dropping mask mandates and social-distancing recommendations, opening bars, massage parlors, gyms, big-crowd events, and, most ominously, their borders. Thus does the worst-performing, such as Brazil, quickly infect even the countries most rigidly adhering to anti-contagion protocols, with a vicious new variant.

Our European allies, those nations that a year ago were the source of infection for the eastern seaboard of the US, have one by one, closed their borders as the speed of contagion from one variant or another overwhelms the rollout of their vaccine programs.  Yet the US ignores the "lessons learned" (lol) in 2020 and pretends that Italy, Germany, the UK, Belgium, have their problems, but exactly as one year ago, we continue to insist that we are the Exceptional Nation, and can go on willy-nilly opening ourselves up to disaster, simply because this just isn't fun any more.

I saw a visual the other day, well, weeks ago now, as it turns out, but it has stuck with me, so I wonder what you think about it:

Although they were wearing masks when I witnessed this, they soon enough won't be, and so it made me ponder. Even though the fomite transmission of the Covid virus has now proven to have been somewhat exaggerated, it would probably behoove us not to go back to shaking hands anytime soon. However, I saw two people greeting each other using the "elbow-bump". By pure happenstance, a handshake, the average length of an adult's arm being close to a meter, keeps the parties the recommended two meters apart, while the elbow bump assures that that distance is more than halved, which thus brings their faces, and the focal point of transmission, closer together, not farther apart, arguably making the elbow bump far more likely to transmit the virus that a handshake. So although we didn't know last year that the virus was aerosolized (although there was evidence printed as early as late January 2020 in both China's SCMP and the India Times, suggesting exactly that, but, well, you know, we being exceptional and all, we ignored every single lesson learned in Asia) we spent both countless hours and millions of dollars "deep-cleaning" everything under the sun, despite the inefficacy of it. The two people who I mentioned above were in awkward positions vis-à-vis each other, so in order to bump elbows, they had to bring their faces ridiculously close in order to greet each other "safely". To assure that what we know now does the good that it should, the elbow bump, instigated because of the panic over fomite contagion, should be abandoned. 

Likewise with mask mandates. If a State, such as Texas, abandons the mask, then in that State, and all others that drop the mask mandate, wouldn't it be wiser to inoculate everyone with at least the first shot before anyone in that State receives the second? Adhering to the science is all well and good, but since that's not being done in the one instance, by dropping the mask mandate, thus purposely giving the  virus a shot in the arm, shouldn't twice the number of citizens in those arrogant States of America be given one as well? Our Aryan failed former president was the ultimate germ-man, he presided over the largest loss of his own county's citizens' lives in one year since Hitler's holocaust cost that German leader a similar annual death toll. And at the rate we are going, averaging more than 100,000 deaths/month in this "New" year, worse than the old year, maybe it's time we stopped champing at the bit to "get back to normal" and instead started addressing just exactly what that "normal" has delivered up to us.