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| Connecticut's Coronavirus hot zones |
We have been living in the dark forest of Coronavirus long enough now – about eight months – so that we should be able at this point to shed a few primitive conceptions and misconceptions concerning the virus.
The novel virus is not the Black Death which, from 1347 to
1351, decimated Eurasia, North Africa and Europe. The Black Death carried off 75–200
million people in Eurasia and North Africa, peaking in Europe; nearly 50 percent of the population
of Europe died of – not with -- the plague. Businesses were lost because lives
were lost. Consumers died, employees died, businesses died.
This is not the case
with Coronavirus. Businesses are disappearing in Connecticut, for instance, not
because employees have been carried off by a deadly pandemic. In fact, many of the
Coronavirus deaths in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey occurred in nursing
homes ill prepared to confront the virus.
The governors of
these three states knew from the get-go that elderly people in nursing homes
were more likely than, say, school children under 14 years of age to die with not of the virus. Jobs in
Connecticut are disappearing because politicians have executed lockdowns, partial
lockdowns and recently more robust lockdowns during the course of the viral
spread. The deaths in nursing homes are properly attributed to political
decisions made and not made by governors.
We have been treated
daily to death totals during the course of the infestation. Coronavirus is called
a “novel” virus because it is a startling new virus manufactured and exported,
it is now generally accepted, from a lab in Wuhan China.
Because the virus is
new, any “science” concerning the virus must necessarily be primitive. Instead
of a “science” of Coronavirus, we have before us many scientists, a contentious
lot, openly disputing the best way to kill Coronavirus. In a few years,
scientists will be able to tell us what we’ve done right and wrong in
combatting the virus.
As early as May
2020, we knew that the combined deaths in Connecticut nursing homes and assisted
living facilities were “ roughly 70 percent of the 3,125 COVID-19-related
fatalities reported,” according to a piece in CTPost.
These dry bones may properly be laid at the doorsteps of state governors.
The good news is
that scientists are daily promoting new treatments, and a vaccine, owing to the
efforts of the Trump administration, is beginning to hatch from its egg.
This is good news
because we know that the wearing of masks, maintaining a six foot distance from
others, and self-sequestration, while helpful in flattening the Coronavirus
curve, are not curative. Flattening the Coronavirus curve should not be
confused with ending Coronavirus. When you flatten Coronavirus, you extend it
into the future; flattening the curve extends, it does not end, Coronavirus.
It is the human body
that ends viral infections by producing antibodies
that kill pathogens. A vaccine hastens the process.
Recent state
elections painted Connecticut blue from head to toe, but the state just now is
a Coronavirus red. “Eighty percent of Connecticut residents,” CTMirror tells us, “now live in COVID hot zones,
places where the per-capita caseload exceeds 15 per 100,000 people.” The Hartford
Courant tells us that “Gov. Ned
Lamont and several top state officials began self-quarantining Friday night
after his chief spokesperson, Max Reiss, tested positive for COVID-19.”
The reports do not
tell us whether a citizen of Connecticut traveling between the state’s hotzones
and its increasingly disappearing cool zones must self-quarantine for fourteen
days before he or she is able to resume his or her sub-normal Coronavirus
routine. Now that Democrats control with vast majorities both chambers of the
General Assembly, all the Constitutional offices in Connecticut, all the seats
in Connecticut’s US Congressional Delegation, the Governor’s office and the
State Supreme Court, whose justices have been appointed by Democrat left of
center governors, a recalibration of Coronavirus may be possible.
The red-spread has
“subdued” Lamont, whose approval rating zoomed from 24.1 a little more than a
year ago to a present high of 53.21. “He more than doubled his approval rating
in 13 months,” Colin McEnroe wrote in the Hearst papers. “You don’t see that a
lot. The fishhook that pulled him up from underwater was COVID-19. The same
poll said 71.2 percent of residents like the way he has communicated during the
pandemic … When you look at Lamont now, after guiding our state roughly half of
the way through a treacherous pandemic crisis, he looks ... I don’t know how to
say this ... he looks ... I don’t know if I can say this ... he looks ... kind
of hot.”
Joining Lamont at a
dour news conference, former head of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb, Lamont’s Dr. Fauci, said “I
think this is the final stage of the acute phase of this pandemic that we need
to get through. Unfortunately, it’s going to be the hardest phase right now.
We’re in for a very difficult two to three months.”
But in the end, all
things end, even pandemics. “Gottlieb said,” according to CTMirror, “the
disease might finally be tamed in 2021. At the current rate of spread, at least
30% of the U.S. will have had the disease, slowing transmission. And mass
vaccinations might be available next summer.”
The disease is being
slowed by non-quarantined people “who have had the disease,” not politicians
who have flattened the curve. And, thanks to soon to be ex-President Trump, vaccines might be made available early during the presumed presidency of Joe
Biden.
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