today's rant: coronavirus

I feel like I have been living in a young-adult novel for the past twelve months.  What the fuck?!

I think the argument of "if we just closed down a week earlier" is a bullshit argument, because absolutely nobody, democrat or republican, wanted to shut down.  I didn't want to shut down at the time either.  Baseball preseason had just started.  Let's go, Mets.  We were forced to due to the exponential rise of COVID cases.  So republicans blaming NY Governor Cuomo for not shutting down a week earlier is just as stupid of a comment to make democrats blaming the White House for not doing the same thing.  However, everything that happened after the 3rd week of March is entirely Trump's fault.  Everything bad was exacerbated by federal inaction.  Argue that with me.  Just try.

I've heard arguments that Trump took "decisive" action to stop travel to the US to curtail the spread of coronavirus.  Those same arguments ignore the fact that travel from Asia was restricted.  Travel from Europe was not restricted so quickly.  That's why NY and the east coast got hit so hard.

If the former President of the United States gets to call it "the China virus", I get to call him "the ginger whispy pubes president" and his wife "the European First Lady", because they are simply accurate factual descriptions of where they came from.

Living in South Carolina during the first part of the outbreak in the states made me feel really smart.  The key demographics that I noticed at a store wearing masks were old people and black people.  Middle-aged white people, I observed, had only about a 10% mask wearing rate out in public.  Fuck, I live in a dumb demographic.  It got to the point where I was making angry Facebook posts about the record-setting death rates in the state, ending in "Wear your fucking mask!" with every post.  I offended a family friend who knew my parents.  I told him to block me.  He complied.  Hey Dick?  Fuck you!

I knew right away that we were fucked and we were not going to get a decent response from the federal government.  The messages they sent were:

- Wear a mask, but you don't have to.

- It's worse than the flu, but it's not worse than the flu.

- WARP SPEED!

- "Very powerful light."

- Disinfectants will work by injection.

That last one really bugged the shit out of me.  At first, I thought "No way Orange Julius actually said that."  Then I watched the replay.  And holy shit, he actually said that.  To his "credit", a lot of the repetitions by comedians and news outlets said he wanted people to inject themselves with bleach.  While the sentiment was there, he never specified which "disinfectant", so it was inaccurate.

I read a story about an married couple who heard about hydroxychloroquine from Trump, found out it was in their fish food, ate it themselves, got sent to the hospital, and the husband died.  GOOD!  Fucking idiots.