World War Z

As we pause to contemplate the wreckage the GOP has created of the Constitutional framework set in place a couple of centuries ago, it's also worth noting that among other things the Fraudulency Adminstration has gifted We the People is a severely compromised ability to respond to epidemic disease.

"Public health advocates have been ringing alarm bells to no avail. Klain has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”

One of the most appalling parts of the GOP cult is it's insistence that, as Saint Ronald of Fantasyland said, "government is the problem".

But for a global pandemic there is no "market solution". Government IS the solution, to the extent that there can be a solution.

The current incipient panic and scaremongering - and, yes, I'm looking at you, Wilbur Ross and Mike Pompeo, you fucking idiots - about the Wuhan coronavirus is not warranted. So far the infection has proved relatively highly morbid (compared to, say, SARS) but with a mortality lower than even a typical influenza. There is really no need for any sort of massive mobilization in the United States.

Which is good, since the Trumpkins have been deconstructing the ability to massively mobilize to deal with a pandemic.

But.

Let's recall that the last pandemic started as a fairly minor flu season.

The initial wave of the 1918 "Spanish" flu passed through the United States in the spring of 1918. It was as bad as influenza got in those early-modern-medical days, but no worse.

Then in the autumn it returned to the U.S., and something in the virus had changed.

Flu typically kills the "vulnerable"; old people, very young people, people with compromised health or immune systems. The autumn flu of 1918, on the other hand, killed apparently healthy young adults. Millions of them. It ran around the globe doing the same. A third, less-lethal-but-still-pretty-lethal wave ran from the winter of 1918 to the spring of 1919 before finally petering out.

Could this sort of mutation occur to the Wuhan coronavirus?

Of course it could. We won't know until it happens, just like we had no idea that the 1918 flu season would turn lethal until it did.

I know it's easy to be fixated on the viciousness and racism and general Know-Nothingism of these idiots.

But it's important to recall that they ARE idiots, and as any good soldier knows, nothing can get you killed quicker than being stupid.