New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) reflected on the past 100 days of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in his state, which had become the epicenter of the outbreak, during an interview on “Good Morning America” Wednesday morning.
Washington State has fallen out of the spotlight for Covid issues. But that doesn’t mean all is well.
From a Seattle Times story, about the PROBLEM with the Red half of our state:
Leola Reeves is acutely aware of the absurdity.
“It’s bizarre — that’s the right word for it,” the mom of three says. “I’m trying to raise awareness about a pandemic, in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t know why this needs to be done. It’s baffling to me.”
Reeves, 37, lives in Yakima, which right now is one of the hottest zones for America’s patchwork coronavirus pandemic. How hot? At the current rate of disease spread, within about a week Yakima County is due to pass New York City for the percentage of its people known to have contracted COVID-19.
You’d think that’d be alarming enough, considering what happened to New York in the spring. Add to it that Yakima’s main hospital, Virginia Mason Memorial, has been sounding sirens that its intensive-care beds are overflowing from patients sick with COVID-19.
And yet.
“It’s like Yakima refuses to believe there’s an actual issue,” Reeves says.
She’s concluded from personal experience that all the numbers, about rising infections and hospitalization rates, aren’t punching through.
It started when her 70-year-old stepfather, “who also did not think this virus is serious at all,” contracted COVID-19, she says. He was hospitalized for a time and has lung damage, to the point he’s expected to need an oxygen machine for the rest of his life.
The rest of the article describes her fight with her conservative town.
Our nation has thrown their hands up and given up on fighting it. It was just too inconvenient.
Should have just left everything open and let it burn through everything and gotten it over with.
Half measures (or in this case, tenth measures) are sometimes worse than doing nothing.
As a resident of upstate NY, I haven’t always cared much for Cuomo. He came to town once and scolded us to ‘fix our own pipes,’ and his downstate demeanor can rub the wrong way. I even voted for Zephyr Teachout in the primary a few years back just as a protest against Cuomo. But since March, I have watched my governor juxtaposed with our would-be president, and I have never been more thankful that I live in a state like NY----that is, a blue state where our leadership listens to medical experts, scientists, and others in order to confront a crisis of this magnitude and reverse the horrible course we were on. Cuomo gets a lot of grief from the left, and sometimes it is deserved, but I have a whole new outlook when it comes to him. He walks on water for me right now.
Now Bill DiBlasio, on the other hand…
I don’t like Cuomo much at all, but from here in AZ he looks like Jonas Salk, Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa all rolled into one.
Our governor received a letter from almost 700 doctors here in AZ to please mandate mask wearing in public and …crickets.
We fail the marshmallow test…
Yes, but in this case, every minute we went without grabbing the marshmallow cost us a million jobs.
This is true, and it is why I try to reserve judgment on DeSantis in Florida. I mean I think he is a total tool in a general sense, but he is in a tough spot when it comes to the pandemic since the state’s whole economy is essentially tourism. On the other hand, there won’t be any tourism if steps aren’t taken to reverse current trends. Someone just posted how FInland and Iceland are doing well, largely because of tracing and distancing. Might that, combined with hygiene, allow us to resume many activities without having to hole up in the house?
Tracing? So the gumming knows which secret societies of Real Patriots I associate with? I’ll happily let your grandma die to prevent that!
I’m guessing the cost of such programs, tracing and distancing, make implementing at the State level near impossible, but I’d love a State or two to put it in place and see what happens next.
The trouble with facts is, they can’t really be denied. If the numbers for those States dropped precipitously, it would call out the morons who insist nothing is necessary.
I am just waiting for the first mofo to pull a Trump on doctors and nurses and say, “Well they knew what they were getting into when then signed up.” The mental and physical toll on healthcare works is the unwritten story here.
I agree with you. Some people are at their best in crises and that is the case with Cuomo. And best of all, he makes it about the people not about him. “New Yorkers did it”, not “I did it”. Such a contrast with someone else.
As for contact tracing it works great when the numbers of infected are reasonably small, but less well when there is raging community transmission.
Speaking of contact tracing, how will you contact trace from the Trump rally in Tulsa? “Was there anyone you were close to for more than 15 minutes in an indoor space?”
“Well there were 72 guys in MAGA hats”…
“… we had a higher infection rate than countries.”
There’s nothing at all surprising about that. In fact, I would be surprised if this were not true.