This is pathetic

Our country is sick in many ways, and not just from the Covid virus.

In the past 10 days, our rate of new Covid-19 infections has increased by 150%, measured by a rolling 14-day average. The worldwide average of new infections in that time increased by 18.8%.

In other words, the United States — home to the world’s most prosperous economy, and the most advanced science — has recorded eight times more Covid infections per capita in the past 10 days than the world at large.

Let me mention here that nearly half (46%) of our planet’s 7.7 billion people subsist on less than $5.50 a day, according to 2018 figures from the World Bank, the most recent statistics I could find.

Average per capita income in the United States in 2019 was $34,103 — $93.43 a day (based on a seven-day workweek; based on a five-day workweek it would be $103.81.)

So tell me, please, if you can, why the richest nation in the world, whose average per capita income is 17 times higher than that of the world’s poor, has a Covid infection rate eight times higher than the world at large.

(Play the “Jeopardy” theme music here. Take a guess.)

Here are some more interesting statistics: real statistics, from reliable sources.

Alabama has the lowest rate of fully vaccinated people in the country (34%) and its rate of Covid infections from late June to late July rose by 1,800% — from less than three cases per 100,000 people to more than 54 per 100,000, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Bunch of damn liberal doctors, I guess.

Nationwide, the number of coronavirus cases reported in July increased from about 13,000 cases per day at the start of the month to more than 56,000 toward the end of the month — a 431% increase, according to The Washington Post.

Even with a sharp decline in testing and 60% of the adult population vaccinated, the United States recorded more new Covid cases on July 29 this year (83,000), than it did on that date in 2020 (61,000) — an increase of 36%.

Meanwhile in Florida — competing with Texas to become Ground Zero of idiocy, outside the halls of Congress — the state recorded 21,683 new Covid cases on July 30, the state’s highest one-day total since Jan. 7, at the start of the pandemic, when it recorded 19,334 infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Florida, with 9.6% of the U.S. population, now accounts for 20% of new Covid infections — nearly 16,000 new infections a day — 11 new infections a minute — one every 5½ seconds.

More than 10,000 Floridians are hospitalized today, 10 times the number in New York, which has as six times as many residents. An average of 58 Florida residents are dying each day, compared with six in New York.

And what does Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the hair apparent (sic), have to say about this? This week, he blamed it on air-conditioning. But he devoted more of his time, and public money, to raising campaign funds by pushing “Don’t Fauci my Florida” souvenirs. Other pathetic governors, in Texas, Arkansas and elsewhere, are backing him up, and hiring people to make up their own slogans.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton joins DeSantis on our Top 10 Hit List today (elected officials who don’t mind if their constituents die), with his deathless statement: “Nobody elected Tony Fauci to make these decisions. … If you just turn these decisions over to a bunch of public health bureaucrats, of course the only thing they’re gonna consider is what they think is in the best interest of public health.”

Wow. You can’t make that stuff up.

But let me ask you: Remember polio?

Remember the Salk and Sabin vaccines, that all but eradicated polio from the world — except from a few Taliban-ruled enclaves in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they kill medical workers?

Let me quote our much-maligned Dr. Anthony Fauci: “If we had the pushback for vaccines [then] the way we’re seeing on certain media, I don’t think it would’ve been possible at all to not only eradicate smallpox. We’d probably still have smallpox, and we’d probably still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now. If we had that back decades ago, I’d be certain we’d still have polio in this country.”

Virtually across the board, Republican officeholders nationwide have abdicated their responsibility to protect public health. But for supreme idiocy, it’s hard to top Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who on Tuesday blithely compared Covid-19 with the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918: “It was a two-year phenomenon and then it was over. That’s what happens with pandemics; they don’t last for decades unless you drag these things out. And that’s one of the problems I always thought with the, you know, flattening the curve, is you just draw the pandemic and the economic devastation out.”

Spanish flu killed 50 million people worldwide, including 300,000 in the United States in just three months.

Covid-19 has killed 4.25 million worldwide, including 614,000 in the United States. According to Johnson, let’s just let it kill another 45 million people and be done with it. No reason to drag these things out.

Talk about sick.

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