Donald Trump is starting to sound like Eliza Doolittle — “Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!”
Trump Rips ‘Fake News’ For Focusing On COVID-19 ‘CASES, CASES, CASES’ As Nation Breaks Record
He said without evidence that the coverage was a plot to “create fear” ahead of Election Day. Trump told a campaign rally later in North Carolina that “you won’t hear about it anymore” after the election.
Unfortunately for the country, there’s no Henry Higgins who can teach him to say things correctly. Meanwhile, outside the world of Soho Square, people — not h’s — are dropping everywhere:
Resurgent Virus Rages Across the American Heartland
The latest coronavirus surge is raging across the American heartland, most acutely in the Midwest and Mountain West.
This harrowing third surge, which led to a U.S. single-day record of more than 85,000 new cases Friday, is happening less than two weeks from Election Day, which will mark the end of a campaign dominated by the pandemic and President Trump’s much-criticized response to it.
And: ‘At Capacity’: Covid-19 Patients Push U.S. Hospitals to Brink
Here’s a map of current hospitalizations. Also check out the chart at the top of this diary. That spike on the right is not a blip of a pen: A record 15,000 plus patients were admitted to hospitals yesterday (Oct 23).
Both campaigns tend to focus on cases and deaths; Biden playing them up, Trump playing them down. Biden has the right of it, but he needs to take more about hospitalizations, because this is also a consequence of Trump’s incompetence and venality.
Hospitals are running out of space. This means they have no room not just for Covid patients, but for all the regular reasons people need a hosptial: accidents, injuries, surgeries, cancer, stroke, heart attack. These lives also indirectly at risk because of Covid.
Medical providers are running out of energy. Treating anyone with a highly infectious, sometimes fatal, and often debilitating disease is frightening and exhausting. We are losing essential personnel not only to the disease itself, but to the work required to care for those sick with it. Nurses feel an extra strain because they often are the only ones allowed near patients as they die; families can only say goodbye remotely.
Patients are losing quality of life. Survivors of Covid severe enough for hospitalization often face lifelong disabilities ranging from reduced lung function to neurological damage to, on occasion, loss of a limb. (We won’t even get into the pre-existing condition complications.) All this means a reduced work force, less income, less productive lives, a greater burden on the patients, their friends and family, and the country.
Trump is deliberately and maliciously adding to these burdens with his superspreader rallies and his insistence that we need “herd immunity.” The Biden campaign, the Lincoln Project, the media, everyone needs to make this point: The 400,000 deaths predicted by the end of the year are a holocaust. The 15,000 new admissions to hospitals just in one day are a catastrophe for civilization.