Read on Twitter
I think people want to attribute this to one specific thing—a holiday or a celebration or even Trump’s rallies—and we are seeing consistent exponential growth with a rate of spread greater than most other countries right now. https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1327601074367131648
This is the 7 day rolling average of new covid infections. You can see that we were kind of keeping things in semi control until mid September, when we just hit the exponential growth curve. Look at us compared to just about every other country (excepting Brazil).
This is the same data on a log scale, which I’m showing you because you can see when the US tips from a relatively flat line (little growth) into a line with positive slope (exponential growth). It happens sometime around the beginning of October.
By the way, here’s the source of the data, if you want to play with it yourself. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?yScale=log&zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-08-21..latest&country=USA~IND~GBR~DEU~BRA~MEX®ion=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&hideControls=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=total_cases&pickerSort=desc
What happened around the beginning of October? That’s when Trump had COVID and announced to the entire US that it wasn’t that bad and almost nobody died from it and medicine would take care of all of us and he felt better than he’d felt in ten years.
I think the thing we are looking at is widespread flouting of basic public health because our fucking President said it was okay.
It’s not *just* Halloween. It’s not just rallies. It’s not just going to be the upcoming holiday season. It’s going to be all of those things, plus the fact that 40% of our population doesn’t believe in facts, and that fucking dude told them not to care.
Trump surviving COVID was probably the worst thing that could have happened from a public health standpoint.
What I really want right now is for the Dems to go on attack on this issue. NOW. Not later. NOW.
Try and get bills passed in the Senate. Look, we know you’re going to fail. But TRY.
Show the American people what a Democratic Senate would do.
Try and get bills passed in the Senate. Look, we know you’re going to fail. But TRY.
Show the American people what a Democratic Senate would do.
Because we have the benefit of prescience here. We know what all the numbers are. We know what those numbers mean. Infections now mean hospitalizations in a few weeks mean deaths a few weeks after, and if you outrun medical capacity, it will mean a LOT of deaths after that.
This is just math. We know what hospitalizations look like now. We know that we’re at the edge of medical capacity in most states. We know that with numbers like this, we’ll tip over that edge in a week.
We can predict the future, so do it. Loudly. Now. Make the GOP respond with their fairy tales. And then nail them to the wall with their responses when the cards all come up death.
