There's no escaping it, this is from a Washington Monthly article about why Bernie Sanders has to end his nomination campaign now.
This is what our near-future will look like, and we’re running out of time to mitigate the situation.
“Until three weeks ago, we did everything for every patient. Now we have to choose which patients to put in intensive care. This is catastrophic,” said anesthesiologist and intensive-care specialist Mirco Nacoti.
Dr. Nacoti worked for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti, Chad, Kurdistan and Ivory Coast, and he is one of the few medics in Bergamo who has seen epidemics. Yet, those were diseases with vaccines, such as measles and rubella.
He estimated that around 60% or more of the population of Bergamo has the coronavirus. “There is an enormous number of asymptomatic people, as well as unknown dead who die in their home and are not tested, not counted,” he said. “The ICU is the tip of an iceberg.”
The reports we're getting from Italy have been some of the scarier things I've read. My brother told me that he thinks it wasn't till the Imperial College report came in that Republicans really started to take it seriously when they freaked out. Maybe that's what comes of listening to only those who have English as a mother tongue - something that bil-lingual Canada seems to be less apt to do, judging by the coverage by the CBC that I listen to.
One of the things I find most amazing is how everyone is holding on to the phony predictions game, something which was fake-news before anyone used the term fake-news and which has generally involved a lot of fake science and phony erudition. The fact is that no one knows what this is going to be like in a few months or a year anymore than anyone predicted this was going to happen as recently as last fall. There is no guarantee that this will last or that it will be over, there is no guarantee that, like the influenza of 1918-1919 that it won't come back worse than before.
In looking this up, I have noted one thing that is good, the more responsible sites are downplaying the location of the first cases because people don't seem to be handling that very well, blaming people of Asian heritage and attacking them. That scapegoating has been one of the ugliest and stupidest and most ignorant manifestations of this crisis and there's no surprise that, in the United States and, from what I gather, in Italy the fascists and the fascist media have tried to capitalize on that. People are wondering if this will be the end of Trumpism, they should be hoping that it's the end of Murdochian fascism, the real plague that has made things so much more worse. The ignorance and racism and irresponsible insouciance on display from idiots like the Governor of Oklahoma and Devin Nunes should be crushed out of the media, though don't hold your breath waiting for responsibility and honesty to be reimposed on the mass media - the media that might end up getting you killed.
I'll be curious to know if the Chinese government fixes the disastrous policies that caused this outbreak and the even more disastrous attempt to hush it up in the vitally important weeks and months that it was first noticed there. I would expect that they will act if for no other reason than the economic damage that not regulating the notorious wet-markets and the original bureaucratic cover-up have brought to them. I think they might.
I am far less confident that the United States government, the government of Britain, other alleged democracies will because here the problem is caused or at least made far worse by the media lie machines, the fantasy unreality industry that has replaced reality and the reporting of fact. The endemic corruption matched with fantasy in the United States and Britain is a particularly deadly combination that swamps even that pathetic substitute for morality, "enlightened" self-interest. I'd say that the Chinese government response is the best you can hope for when "enlightenment" replaces morality, in the United States we've jettisoned both.
I'm expecting some of those alive now will die, perhaps survive a viral epidemic that starts in the American meat industry, in the concentration camps for chickens or pigs or other animals kept for slaughter - there is no reason that it would have to come from a wild animal cruelly kept for slaughter. That's something that can be predicted. I doubt our government under the regime of fantasy and lies we live in will do any better than the Chinese dictatorship, I'm expecting it might do far worse. After all, look at what Trump and Boris Johnson have been doing the past two months even as the Chinese government was admitting what was happening, finally. Even as some of the play-lefties - or the Putin troll-boys among them, were pushing the "hoax" lines that Trump was. as FOX was. As I mentioned here, Sam Seder, as recently as the start of this week was wondering how the epidemic might play well for his guy as he was losing. For which he should be retired.
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