So there's not a lot I can do with this damn knee. I can't drive, so I'm locked within the distance I can walk. And I can't walk very far, so I'm pretty much under house arrest. And I can't sit up for long without the damn thing swelling up and bitching at me.
So I spend a lot of time sprawled out on the couch or the bed; reading, cruising the 'Net, dozing or sleeping. It's about as fucking mind-bendingly boring as you'd think, so when there is something to do, I'm all about it.
Yesterday (Saturday) evening the Portland Thorns soccer team was scheduled to play the Washington club here at 7:30. I'm still too banjaxed to go in person (and, frankly, even with the club requiring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test, not all that excited about mobbing up with people...) but I was really looking forward to enjoying a couple of hours of soccer and cheering for my club over the screen in my lap...until I went to the club site and was met with this:
It turns out the the visitors had a teensy-weensy little pathogen problem:
"Spirit have 4 positive COVID cases; multiple sources also tell me that the club has “multiple” unvaccinated players. One source said # as high as 8."
So. Here's the thing.
NWSL teams roster between 22 and 24 players. So assuming the high end number is correct, a third of the roster is unprotected against the Plague at a time when vaccination doses are aging out for a lack of willing arms to receive them.
Think about that.
A business that is a part of a public accommodation industry - an entertainment or hospitality business that is centered around hosting the public - has not required it's employees to meet the most fundamental of public health measures; preventing or slowing the spread of disease when preventive measures are easily available and free. And the employees have refused to voluntarily meet that simple and logical standard.
As a result the other party, the business that has been responsible (the Thorns roster and staff are fully vaccinated) has lost a massive chunk of revenue and has been put at a competitive disadvantage by having to reschedule this game. And thousands of people like me are out their ticket costs.
Which is better, mind you, than having these disease-riddled harridans show up and breathe the Plague all over everyone.
But.
Here's the thing.
I'm sure that these players had all the usual bullshit excuses. Muh freedums! Don't know what's in it! God will protect me! Personal choice!
To which I simply reply:
You're running a public business that relies on public health measures. You're a restaurant, and an inspection finds that a third of your kitchen staff refuses to wash their hands after taking a dump?
You get shut down. Period. No explanations needed, no excuses accepted.
No health inspector would buy your bullshit that God protects you from getting shit in the food. Or that it's your choice. Or "freedom!" means you get to decide whether to follow simple basic public health regulations.
Kitchen closed. Boom.
And yet...because a bunch of lunatic QANuts and Three Percenters and Republicans and antivaxxers have decided to make "I will wash my hands after taking a shit" into a political issue, the rest of us are supposed to humor these fucking ninnies and accept losing our time and money and health and, possibly, our lives.
I lived with a lurking sort of low-grade fear, like the point man in an ambush terrain, for over a year until I could get vaccinated. It's hard to explain just how liberating that two-weeks-past-the-second-Pfizer moment felt. Finally! I had my MRAP. I had my mine plow! I could look forward to a normal life again. Yay, medicine!
Boy howdy, was I fucking wrong.
I'm SO fucking done with these people.
There's lots of other reasons to be done with them, too. But this - this idiotic demand that the rest of us go live in the QAnon Bronze Age with them when there's an actual modern world just over there - this just sends me into a flame of utter rage. Like the Emperor Caligula I can only wish that they all had one neck so I could choke the life out of them and move on with all the other, less easily solvable, problems we should be dealing with.
But no. And here we are.
8 comments:
All true, you should be in a white hot rage.
However, spare a bit of flame for the utter failure of our global collective governance.
The latest models show that it is now impossible to achieve herd immunity.
We have failed to contain the virus and now it will be endemic, like the flu and the cold.
Everyone will get Covid. Everyone.
The vaccine greatly reduces the chances of harm, but even if vaccinated, you will get it.
And even if vaccinated, you will spread it on.
They will wind down the public covid testing centres. Who cares how many got it today, when everyone will get it. Only those getting treated (especially those in Hospital / Intensive Care) will become statistics.
You need to make your peace with getting Covid, because you will get it.
And yes, those anti-vax types also need to behave as if they will get the disease, because they will.
"Those anti-vax types" ARE the reason "we will get it".
It's really both that simple and that enraging.
No, the reason we will get it is because the "advanced" gubbermints refused to lock down hard enough at the beginning. It was very containable. China, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand all did it. Hell, even Mongolia did it. You just have to do it harder and faster than the virus moves. But governments *always* reacted too little and too late.
That allowed something like Delta to emerge. And it did. Now it is too late for everyone.
Whaaaaat?
You're joshin' me, right?
Let's take this apart, eh?
China allowed the thing to spread, lied and deflected international concerns until it had slipped over it's borders, and then used the powers available to a dictatorship to lock down the hotspots until enough death and infection brought the R numbers down. We don't actually know what the transmission rate is there because it's hard to tell if they're still lying, or mostly lying, or not.
China didn't "react too late" - it deliberately lied and hid the problem until it became a pandemic.
Taiwan and New Zealand are relatively small islands, and DID act quickly, and suppressed the first wave. It's worth noting that NZ's low vaccination rate has allowed Delta to spike there over the past month. Australia is now seeing a massive spike, as well.
Delta emerged in India, which was always going to be a huge problem with it's insane levels of poverty and overcrowding (and Modi, who didn't help...).
The Trump government did too little and too late, yes. Larely because, like the PRC, it was run by lying mobsters who were more worried about their images than their people.
But my fucking point is that the goddamn solution is no different than polio or smallpox! The vaccines fucking work. Get vaccines in people - a LOT of people, 85-90-95% of people - and you knock the transmission rate down to manageable levels.
So it's not "too late for everyone". It's the same problem I keep coming back to over and over again; it's not that we can't do what we need to do to bring this thing down like we did pertussis and rubella.
It's that it would be expensive and difficult and time-consuming, and we don't do difficult and expensive and time-consuming. And Republicans don't to shit other than wave their metal cocks around and piss and moan about Black people voting.
So are we fucked?
Yes.
But NOT for the reasons you cite.
I will agree with you that there were 1) a lot of "too little too late" governmental failures amid 2) a tiny handful of governmental successes. The problem with making the blanket statement "...the "advanced" gubbermints refused to lock down hard enough at the beginning..." is that to have done that - successfully - required a WHOLE bunch of priors that almost all the "advanced" governments didn't have.
Good example: the ROK.
You had a technologically sophisticated nation with a STRONG tradition of collective responsibility and a government that was willing to use pretty brutal invasions of privacy to do contact tracing and isolation. After an initial spike Korea kept their infection rate relatively low all the way into the autumn.
Then...it began to spike. Right now the ROK is getting hammered, largely because only about 34% of the population is vaccinated. They're still "locking down hard"...but that plague ship has sailed.
This is, like all public health issues, complex and difficult. Early isolations and lockdowns would have helped...but the reality is that there's no human way to maintain that level of control for months and years.
The eventual solution - just like it was for polio, for smallpox, for pertussis, for rubella - was vaccination. IS vaccination.
Will that mean that this stuff won't become endemic? Probably not.
Lockdowns are the past. They were a tool, but that tool is largely done. The effective tool now is vaccination.
So it DOES mean that the more people who actively work AGAINST herd immunity are working to make that endemic level higher, deadlier, and longer and more difficult.
If you're not vaccinated, you're not part of the solution.
Go look at the science. Vaccines do not stop transmission, at most they slow it down, a bit. Check out viral loading of infected vaccinated people.
NONE of the vaccine manufacturers make any claims about reducing transmissibility.
Vaccines by and large, do prevent you from getting really sick and dying.
(and as such, everyone should be vaccinated).
To handle this crisis we really needed a "combined arms" approach.
That failed and we are stuck with only one practical weapon: vaccination.
Jesus wept, man. Is this just you seeing how far up my wick you can get me?
There was never a "combined arms" approach - there was a "delaying action" through things like masking and isolation and contact tracing - until vaccination arrived. That was always the only weapon; everything else simply helped keep the pathogen fire burning low enough to prevent medical treatment in any given locality from being overwhelmed.
The fact the these Covidiots AREN'T VACCINATED is throwing that weapon into the turtle ditch. That's why these hospitals ARE being overrun. Every unvaccinated individual is fuel for the fire and actively working for the pathogen. Every Republican government official that prevents delaying actions like masks and distancing, or who throws away forcing people to either vaccinate or be shut out of society is actively working for the pathogen.
If you're not vaccinated, you're part of the problem.
And I have no more fucks to give for these people who're part of the problem.
It's really just that simple.
Yes, those who can get vaccinated should get vaccinated.
I have a friend who is sensitive to some chemical in the MRNA vaccines and can't.
(Actually, the particular compound is not used in the Janssen vaccine (which is approved in Canada) but nobody is willing to give him that vaccine variant, even though we were sending hundreds of doses of that vaccine to Covax. So he cowers in his house.
And yes, I also know some people who deliberately don't get vaccinated because it is evil (or something or other, I can't quite figure out their reasoning).
I tell them that they are putting their lives at risk and they shrug.
And yes, a significant number of the deliberately un-vaccinated will get very sick and some will die. In the process, they burden the hospital system and prevent many "elective" surgeries. I have another friend who managed to get a hip replacement this summer in the two weeks between the last wave and this current "delta" wave.
A few days either way and she would still be hobbling along.
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