It stands to reason that all people who understand what a terrible thing this COVID-19 was, and how terrible the government reaction remains in most cases, would want to hear good news. They would want to report that cases are declining everywhere, even in places that are open for business, like Texas and Georgia. They would want to report that–MIRACLE, HALLALUJAH, LET’S ALL CELEBRATE–deaths have dropped precipitously and there is no sign of a second wave of death, even if improved testing continues to turn up new cases of unknown infectiousness. It seems that you can still test positive a good three weeks after you are no longer contagious, so new cases do not even mean the disease is still traveling much, if at all.
Now look at your local paper, if you can stand to. Do you see, or have you seen, daily plots of deaths? Are they still reporting them? Is there a solid graph showing a decline? Are you seeing one on the nightly news?
Now, I’m a so-so news consumer. I go to perhaps 5 places daily, and perhaps another 5 intermittently. I don’t have cable news at all.
But I don’t think anyone is trying to contextualize all this. It’s hard to gin up fear and panic with numbers which don’t support it.
So most of the media outlets seem to have reverted to Obama era race-baiting and shrieking. They call for justice, but they are not calling for black people to be allowed back to work en masse. They want the race narrative, and want to avoid the ugly questions about whether or not any of this was necessary, much less better in any measurable respect than much less draconian, much less abusive, much less tyrannical solutions.
They want black people thinking about racism, and police violence, and they want them NOT thinking about the fact that their bank accounts–if they had them to begin with (next time you’re in your local ghetto, count how many banks you see, and how many check cashing places)–were emptied in the past couple months because the government told them they were not allowed to work.
Think about this: in the worst periods of the Civil Rights struggle, I don’t think ANY Southern white racist told an entire city worth of black people they were not allowed to work. Not for two months and counting. We would remember that. Movies would have been made about it. The Great Birmingham Labor Lockout of 1965.
But no, nobody cares right now. Obviously, white people are locked out too, but a disproportionate number of us are working from home. Most of the people in black majority neighborhoods are in the service industry. They don’t make much money even in good times. This whole thing has to have been catastrophic for many of them.
And here’s a thought: George Floyd was a long term drug user. He went to prison 2-3 times for cocaine possession and dealing, and seemingly committed an armed home invasion another time for drug money.
But the claim made was that he had straightened out. And maybe he did. Maybe he did.
Then the stress of being fucking broke in a world where there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do to earn honest money caused him to relapse. As I understand it, he tested positive for both Fentanyl and Meth in his autopsy.
It’s not hard to see that lockdown as a contributing factor in his death. After going to jail just about yearly from about 2000-2010–and getting out of a four year term in 2014 if memory serves–he had no arrests for the last six years.
As I said at the outset, this whole thing is going to make a LOT of addicts relapse. It’s going to push a lot of suicidal people over the edge. We may or may not be allowed to see those statistics at some point, but probably not before everything is fully opened back up.
All this, for a disease with a .4% mortality rate among the INFECTED, and when it seems fairly clear now about a third of us have some form of natural immunity at the outset (based on military and cruise ships where everyone was likely exposed).
You take away the lies, then take away Cuomo and Whitmer and others forcing sick people into nursing homes, and you get a bad flu year, nothing more. Perhaps more young people died and were sickened than usual. That’s a bad flu.
But not only did no data exist supporting this whole labor lockout, but none COULD exist because it’s NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE. We literally copied the fucking Chinese, whose data even now is clearly doctored and untrustworthy.
It does seem clear now, though, that home is the worst place to be, if there is someone sick in your home. And that’s precisely where millions of people were locked by State Decree for months. You do that, you take what might be a one-off infection and get the whole damn home sick, and you kill grandpa and grandma, if they live with you, as I think is common in both Italy and China.