Light at the End of The Tunnel
06/04/20 07:15
I've been watching this Covid-19 graph I bookmarked for the State of New Hampshire over the last few days and it has been pretty consistent from day to day. The daily death counts for New Hampshire were projected to be at X by now and those numbers have simply not materialized. So when I say consistent, I mean consistently low. Projections across the board including projections for ICU beds, total capacity, etc., have not held up either.
The projection that has stuck in my head all along, which I thought was reasonable even in the midst of all this hysteria, was that New Hampshire would have 300 or so deaths in total by August 4th. The number of deaths they are now projecting by August 4th for the State of New Hampshire if a measly 32. Don't get me wrong. One death is one death too many. My name is not Joesph Stalin. What else do we need to reevaluate?
I was reading the Post Star (Upstate NY) newspaper online this morning and I noticed that Governor Cuomo is now allowing golf courses to reopen in the state of New York. With limitations and new guidelines, of course, but they are reopening. I'm not a golf guy but I have to imagine that the golfers are pretty darn excited about this news.
Pun intended, a real stroke of good luck for the golfing community. In New York of all places. The epicenter of the universe when it comes to deaths spiraling, at least as of last Friday, out of control due to Coronavirus.
Governor Cuomo has rolled back his projection for when the peak deaths might occur in New York City. Instead of the peak occurring at the end of the month of April he's now projecting that to come in the next 7 days or so.
I'm beginning to wonder if all of his whining and pissing and moaning for additional resources had more to do with setting up government field hospitals to accommodate the Coronavirus patients so that the public and private hospitals in NYC can get back to business once they clear their hallways of dead and dying Coronavirus patients.
I fully intend to send a tweet to the president later today to tell him not to agree in any way shape or form to Cuomo's request that he turn the USNS Comfort into a Covid-19 vessel. Cuomo would like nothing better than to have the Federal Government take full responsibility for each and every Covid-19 patient within the confines of the greater New York City area.
If Cuomo can't beg, borrow, or steal his away to a balanced budget then he certainly isn't beyond getting on bended knee to Trump to help him solve the problems he created by not preparing the hospitals for this kind of eventuality.
And what the hell is this? Last Friday, in his daily update to the country on the state of affairs relative to his State's battle with the virus and its impact on their hospitals and healthcare workers, Cuomo whined incessantly that he was going to run out of ventilators. Fast forward to today and, voila, he has enough ventilators. WTF?
And what is all this bullshit about this next week or two being akin to Pearl Harbor when it comes to this scourge? You really think this compares to 9/11? These are the Presidents men making these apocalyptic calls. The Surgeon General of the United States no less!
Are we not sufficiently inured at this stage of the game to seeing and hearing about the horror stories coming out of this scourge? Will increases in the counts we're already seeing day-to-day make any difference at all?
You could tell me that we'd be seeing 10,000 deaths per day and I'd likely say that as long as it doesn't happen to anyone I know I can probably live with that. At the same time, President Trump is saying that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
He's referring to the flattening of the curve which means that we'll spike, which explains the Pearl harbor business, and then it will all be downhill from there. In fact , the number of new hospitalizations is falling off the cliff. That is just undeniably as good as it gets when it comes to NYC's scourge.
As long as we continue to be good little boys and girls by practicing good mitigation techniques we can probably get back to business sooner rather than later. That works for me. For those who have been sticking their heads in the sand since this all started they will probably just pick up where they left off. For those of us who have been following things more closely, we'll be watching to see just how it all becomes disentangled at the end of the day.
There will be plenty of finger pointing when it's all over and that is to be expected. I will never stop wondering why in the world we could never come up with a more immediate solution to this problem. I have to believe that our understanding of the science that created this deadly freak of nature is sufficiently up to snuff where we can map its genome inside and out until the cows come home. And then there are those who might prefer that we not find a solution, at least not a quick one, and that would suit their collective political ambitions just fine.
That is a scary thought. But it was Rahm Emanuel, one of Obama's cronies, who once said, "Never let a crisis go to waste." And I have to say, I do take a certain amount of pleasure from seeing Trump at the podium doing pressers night after night where he takes all the naysayers to task for their ridiculous gotcha questions and utterly sinister prognostications on this that and the other thing. Trump is my crony so if he wants to take advantage of this crisis then I support him 100 percent. Just call me Johnny Hypocrite.
That e-mail that Nancy and I had planned to send along to our friend the pathologist no longer seems necessary. It's still sitting on my desktop here as a draft and the more I look at it the more I'm thinking it needs to either be scuttled, or at a minimum, toned down.
I'm even feeling that daily phone calls to friends and family can be reconsidered given the new projections about death counts, ICU bed requirements, etc. It'll be a while before we see the restaurants come back so we'll need to continue to factor that into our daily thought process.
Now that I think about it, should I be feeling even a little guilty about thinking nasty thoughts about out-of-staters while out on my bike ride yesterday. The traffic along Ocean Boulevard was heavy and not what I was expecting to see in the midst of a pandemic.
Are these people out of their fucking minds, I thought to myself? Why aren't the local police taking notice of these out-of-staters and doing what they can to protect the locals from this influx of potential vectors of transmission? I've got to get my head on straight.
It does make one curious though. Who are all of these people dying of this disease? There have been thousands who have died and you and I can't name a damn one of them? No one from Hollywood, you say? I know. I know. Tom Hanks had it but he did just fine. Who else?
Maybe a couple of high profile doctors and nurses on the front lines but I have to wonder why they didn't do a better job protecting themselves. Most have been nameless, maybe disproportionatley from the minority community, and maybe more than a few elderly people whose timely or untimely expirations came as a surprise to no one. From the baby Jesus's point of view, it was nothing more and nothing less than the usual low hanging fruit. Easy pickings as they say in the business.
The last thing I'm wanting to know as I sit here is whether or nor Chris Cuomo, the Governor's brother who has the disease, is taking the drug Hydroxychloroquine as part of his regimen to get through it all. Wouldn't it be rich if after criticizing and even ridiculing Trump for telling everyone and anyone who would listen that this longstanding malaria drug showed promise and that he would take it himself, Cuomo takes the drug that Trump touted and it saves his miserable life. He'd never admit it. He just wouldn't.
The projection that has stuck in my head all along, which I thought was reasonable even in the midst of all this hysteria, was that New Hampshire would have 300 or so deaths in total by August 4th. The number of deaths they are now projecting by August 4th for the State of New Hampshire if a measly 32. Don't get me wrong. One death is one death too many. My name is not Joesph Stalin. What else do we need to reevaluate?
I was reading the Post Star (Upstate NY) newspaper online this morning and I noticed that Governor Cuomo is now allowing golf courses to reopen in the state of New York. With limitations and new guidelines, of course, but they are reopening. I'm not a golf guy but I have to imagine that the golfers are pretty darn excited about this news.
Pun intended, a real stroke of good luck for the golfing community. In New York of all places. The epicenter of the universe when it comes to deaths spiraling, at least as of last Friday, out of control due to Coronavirus.
Governor Cuomo has rolled back his projection for when the peak deaths might occur in New York City. Instead of the peak occurring at the end of the month of April he's now projecting that to come in the next 7 days or so.
I'm beginning to wonder if all of his whining and pissing and moaning for additional resources had more to do with setting up government field hospitals to accommodate the Coronavirus patients so that the public and private hospitals in NYC can get back to business once they clear their hallways of dead and dying Coronavirus patients.
I fully intend to send a tweet to the president later today to tell him not to agree in any way shape or form to Cuomo's request that he turn the USNS Comfort into a Covid-19 vessel. Cuomo would like nothing better than to have the Federal Government take full responsibility for each and every Covid-19 patient within the confines of the greater New York City area.
If Cuomo can't beg, borrow, or steal his away to a balanced budget then he certainly isn't beyond getting on bended knee to Trump to help him solve the problems he created by not preparing the hospitals for this kind of eventuality.
And what the hell is this? Last Friday, in his daily update to the country on the state of affairs relative to his State's battle with the virus and its impact on their hospitals and healthcare workers, Cuomo whined incessantly that he was going to run out of ventilators. Fast forward to today and, voila, he has enough ventilators. WTF?
And what is all this bullshit about this next week or two being akin to Pearl Harbor when it comes to this scourge? You really think this compares to 9/11? These are the Presidents men making these apocalyptic calls. The Surgeon General of the United States no less!
Are we not sufficiently inured at this stage of the game to seeing and hearing about the horror stories coming out of this scourge? Will increases in the counts we're already seeing day-to-day make any difference at all?
You could tell me that we'd be seeing 10,000 deaths per day and I'd likely say that as long as it doesn't happen to anyone I know I can probably live with that. At the same time, President Trump is saying that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
He's referring to the flattening of the curve which means that we'll spike, which explains the Pearl harbor business, and then it will all be downhill from there. In fact , the number of new hospitalizations is falling off the cliff. That is just undeniably as good as it gets when it comes to NYC's scourge.
As long as we continue to be good little boys and girls by practicing good mitigation techniques we can probably get back to business sooner rather than later. That works for me. For those who have been sticking their heads in the sand since this all started they will probably just pick up where they left off. For those of us who have been following things more closely, we'll be watching to see just how it all becomes disentangled at the end of the day.
There will be plenty of finger pointing when it's all over and that is to be expected. I will never stop wondering why in the world we could never come up with a more immediate solution to this problem. I have to believe that our understanding of the science that created this deadly freak of nature is sufficiently up to snuff where we can map its genome inside and out until the cows come home. And then there are those who might prefer that we not find a solution, at least not a quick one, and that would suit their collective political ambitions just fine.
That is a scary thought. But it was Rahm Emanuel, one of Obama's cronies, who once said, "Never let a crisis go to waste." And I have to say, I do take a certain amount of pleasure from seeing Trump at the podium doing pressers night after night where he takes all the naysayers to task for their ridiculous gotcha questions and utterly sinister prognostications on this that and the other thing. Trump is my crony so if he wants to take advantage of this crisis then I support him 100 percent. Just call me Johnny Hypocrite.
That e-mail that Nancy and I had planned to send along to our friend the pathologist no longer seems necessary. It's still sitting on my desktop here as a draft and the more I look at it the more I'm thinking it needs to either be scuttled, or at a minimum, toned down.
I'm even feeling that daily phone calls to friends and family can be reconsidered given the new projections about death counts, ICU bed requirements, etc. It'll be a while before we see the restaurants come back so we'll need to continue to factor that into our daily thought process.
Now that I think about it, should I be feeling even a little guilty about thinking nasty thoughts about out-of-staters while out on my bike ride yesterday. The traffic along Ocean Boulevard was heavy and not what I was expecting to see in the midst of a pandemic.
Are these people out of their fucking minds, I thought to myself? Why aren't the local police taking notice of these out-of-staters and doing what they can to protect the locals from this influx of potential vectors of transmission? I've got to get my head on straight.
It does make one curious though. Who are all of these people dying of this disease? There have been thousands who have died and you and I can't name a damn one of them? No one from Hollywood, you say? I know. I know. Tom Hanks had it but he did just fine. Who else?
Maybe a couple of high profile doctors and nurses on the front lines but I have to wonder why they didn't do a better job protecting themselves. Most have been nameless, maybe disproportionatley from the minority community, and maybe more than a few elderly people whose timely or untimely expirations came as a surprise to no one. From the baby Jesus's point of view, it was nothing more and nothing less than the usual low hanging fruit. Easy pickings as they say in the business.
The last thing I'm wanting to know as I sit here is whether or nor Chris Cuomo, the Governor's brother who has the disease, is taking the drug Hydroxychloroquine as part of his regimen to get through it all. Wouldn't it be rich if after criticizing and even ridiculing Trump for telling everyone and anyone who would listen that this longstanding malaria drug showed promise and that he would take it himself, Cuomo takes the drug that Trump touted and it saves his miserable life. He'd never admit it. He just wouldn't.