Tag Archives: coronavirus

State news

Gov. Abbott hands out blame, fails to own this crisis

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I have some advice for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

You need to stop dishing out blame to others and start taking ownership of the role you have played in the spike in COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and death in the state you were elected to govern.

Abbott decided this week to blame 20-something Texans for refusing to practice social distancing, for failing to wear face masks in public and for being too cavalier about the threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic that has swept around the globe.

Here’s a thought for the governor to ponder, although he likely won’t: Greg Abbott has the authority to issue a mandate that requires Texans to wear masks. Yet he doesn’t do that. He chooses to follow the lead of others — namely Donald Trump — who decline to accept fully the gravity of the health crisis at hand.

Having said that I’ll accept that we all deserve to be slapped across the face about this COVID-19. We need to ensure we all take it seriously. I get it. However, I found the tone of Gov. Abbott’s remarks to be disconcerting because they fail to address the role he and other political leaders can play in reducing the threat of this killer virus to Texans.

Isn’t there a saying making the rounds that declares that “We’re all in this together”? If were “in it together,” then we need to share the responsibility in looking for ways to get through this crisis. Assessing blame to just some of us won’t do the job.

medical news

Flabbergasted at POTUS’s declaration of ‘victory’ against COVID-19

I cannot wrap my arms — let alone my noggin — around the notion that Donald Trump keeps harping on that declares some form of “victory” against the COVID-19 killer virus.

How in the name of medical expertise does this clown get away with making such idiotic declarations we have whipped the virus, that it’s all but gone?

Texas is among more than a dozen states that is seeing a dramatic spike, an increase, in the number of infections. Yet our governor, Republican Greg Abbott, says he sees no compelling need to put the brakes on the state reopening. Oh, no. Now he’s throwing out blame at 20-somethings for refusing to use proper social distancing methods and declining to wear masks in public for the increase.

Yumpin’ yiminy, man! We aren’t winning anything as it regards this virus. Medical gurus tell us there might be a second “wave” of infection that will make the first wave look like a Scout outing. Our beaches have been declared open and tourists are flocking to the coast with little or zero regard to social distancing “recommendations.” Is it any surprise that we’d see a spike in infection and hospitalization in Texas?

Still, Donald Trump tells us we’re whipping that Bad Boy. His loyal followers believe him! The basis for his victory declaration? He doesn’t have any. He points to his own vacuous skull and says he just knows these things.

No. Donald Trump doesn’t know whether to sh** or shine his shoes.

I think we’re just going to keep doing what we’ve been doing all along. We’re not going to mingle among crowds. No thanks, Mr. POTUS. You can declare victory to your heartless soul’s content. We cannot believe the words of a pathological liar.

crime news, medical news, national news

If we stop testing? What?

Donald Trump shot off his pie hole again today about the coronavirus pandemic, once more seeking to downplay the misery and mayhem it has caused in the United States of America.

“If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” Trump said during a White House event highlighting administration actions to help senior citizens.

Good grief! That idiocy remains me of an earlier moronic statement from the late Marion Barry, once the mayor of Washington, D.C. Barry was asked to comment on the hideous crime rate in our nation’s capital city. He responded, and this is paraphrasing what he said:

If you take away the murder rate, we don’t have such a bad crime problem.

national news

Smartest man in history fluffs it again

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Donald J. Trump professes to be the smartest man in human history, who studied at the best schools, who knows the best words, who surrounds himself with the best people.

Still, the dude cannot schedule a political rally without tripping all over himself. He had planned to resume his campaigning for re-election in Tulsa, Okla., this coming Friday. It’s Juneteenth, the day African-Americans learned in 1865 that they had been freed from slavery. Oh, and then he would stage the rally in the city that is the scene in May 1921 of the nation’s worst race riot, killing dozens of African-Americans.

As has been said: Oops! Trump now has moved the rally to Saturday. He says he is moving it “out of respect” for Juneteenth and the significance it holds for African-Americans.

Let’s get real here.

Donald Trump doesn’t “respect” anyone or anything other than himself. He moved the date because someone on his team told him he’d better do it or else he would inflict a potentially mortal wound to his re-election effort.

Still, that Trump would schedule a return to live campaigning in Tulsa, on Juneteenth without understanding the hideous juxtaposition of the location and the historical significance of the date is mind-boggling in the extreme.

There’s all of that, plus the notion of Trump bringing his devotees into a 19,000-seat arena, packing ’em in there like sardines. Not to worry, as the Trump team is demanding attendees sign an agreement that they won’t sue the Trump 2020 campaign if they are stricken by COVID-19.

This is the product of the smartest man on Earth? Hardly.

It’s the result of a man obsessed only with one thing … his political future. To think that Donald Trump began his presidential quest by declaring to the world that he is “not a politician.”

My a**!

medical news, national news

Texas ought to follow Oregon’s lead

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I have intimate knowledge and familiarity with two of our nation’s 50 states. I was born, came of age and grew up in Oregon; I have lived in Texas for most of my life, 36 out of 70 years on Earth.

Oregon is experiencing a spike in COVID-19 infections and is slamming a halt to its plan to reopen the state’s business community. Texas also is experiencing a spike, setting infection and death records daily, but it is moving ahead with its phased reopening.

Hmm. I believe Oregon has it correct and that Texas is reacting badly. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he sees no real need to scale back, let alone shut down, the state’s reopening. Why? Because the state has no shortage of intensive care unit beds in hospitals, according to Abbott.

Oregon has adopted a go-slow approach to this pandemic. Accordingly, Oregon has experienced a much lower per capita infection and death rate than many states. Texas cannot make that claim.

According to the Texas Tribune: The number of available beds is seen as a key gauge for the state’s ability to handle a potential surge in coronavirus cases, and Abbott has said the hospitalization rate — the proportion of infected Texans who are requiring hospitalization — is a benchmark he’s closely monitoring. That number has trended slowly downward since April and was just over 8% on Friday.

I continue to believe the state is moving too quickly to return to what some Texans hope is “normal” business and recreational activity.

Hey, I want this to end as much as the next guy. I want to return to regular activity. I am tired of wearing a mask when I mingle with others at the grocery store. I am sick of slathering sanitizer on my hands whenever I touch door handles, fuel pumps and shopping carts.

I also do not want my family members exposed to a virus that could do them serious harm. I want the state to take greater care than it is already doing to help ensure that they remain safe.

national news

Are we really ready to repeat this fluke?

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I have written of Donald Trump’s election as president as being the greatest political fluke in U.S. history.

Hardly no one saw it coming in 2016. The pundit class, all the political “experts” believed to their core that Hillary Clinton would be elected. She wasn’t. Instead we got a guy who had never sought public office, let alone ever held one. Many of us predicted he would be a disaster as president of the United States.

I hate saying this — yes, I really do hate it — but he’s proven to be far worse than we thought. The Nitwit in Chief has shredded the presidency. He has destroyed relations between the legislative and executive branches of government. Trump has decimated our international alliances. POTUS has turned us into a worldwide laughingstock.

We have a chance in November to rescue what Trump has damaged. The destruction he has brought to intergovernmental relations can be restored by electing someone who understands how the executive and legislative branches can cooperate and seek common ground. Yes, that would be Joe Biden, the former longtime senator and two-term vice president.

However, the wreckage that Trump has brought will be difficult to clear from the landscape.

Time and time and time again, this president refuses to speak to issues that compel his attention. The issue of race relations has returned to the top of our minds. The death of a black man by a white police officer who choked the life out of him for nearly nine minutes has galvanized a movement. Trump doesn’t speak to that tragedy specifically. Instead he quotes racist cops from more than 50 years ago and drives wedges between Americans, relishing the division he is creating and widening.

Yes, we also have the pandemic. Trump’s initial response was pathetic and rotten to the core. Tens of thousands of Americans have died from COVID-19; there will be tens of thousands more who will die. Trump claims success. For what?

Are we really ready to commit the Greatest Political Fluke 2.0 come November? The polling tells us “no!” Then again, it said the same thing four years ago … and look at what we got.

national news

Trump to accept nomination … in Jacksonville

I guess the Republican National Committee is going to stage its convention in Charlotte, N.C. after all. Donald Trump couldn’t find a suitable venue to switch at the last minute.

You know the story. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, was too concerned about the health of convention attendees to allow them to pack themselves into an arena and be exposed to a killer virus.

But wait! Trump is going to make his nominating acceptance speech in Jacksonville, Fla., more than 300 miles south. I understand he’ll get to speak to a packed arena full of Trumpsters — who will have to sign a waiver absolving the Trump campaign of liability in case they get sick from COVID-19.

Good gracious. Trump is hellbent on staging an event with lots of folks hollering, whoopin’ and cheering his every incoherent rant. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who rushed to get his state reopened after the pandemic shut everything down, is all in on that one.

Even though the Trump team is requiring arena attendees to sign the waiver that says they can’t sue the campaign if they get sick, they’ll still have to live with their conscience if anyone falls ill from the killer viral infection.

That’s presuming, of course, that they have a conscience to bother them about such matters. I have my serious doubts.

medical news

This isn’t ‘success’ in COVID fight

Donald Trump keeps yapping about the “fantastic” job he and his administration have done and are doing to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Hmm. I looked at some numbers compiled by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of this very day:

  • The world has logged 7.3 million confirmed cases of COVID-19. The United States reports 2.04 cases. The United States comprises about 5 percent of the world population, but we have reported nearly 30 percent of the world total of infection.
  • Earth reports 413,854 deaths from the killer virus. The U.S. total is 114,452. That’s 27 percent of the world total, again in a country that comprises about 5 percent of the world population.

That’s success? That is a “fantastic” job?

No. Neither is true. What is true is that Donald Trump’s pledge to protect Americans against all our adversaries, even those we cannot see, has gone unfulfilled.

Yet the Imbecile in Chief keeps insisting he is doing so well that we simply must send him back to the presidency for another four years.

Aye, caramba! Perish the thought.

Those numbers all by themselves tell me he is failing the fundamental test of presidential leadership. I will concede there might be a discrepancy in the reporting of illness in some of places on Earth. Indeed, I am willing to argue that even in the United States — the most advanced nation on the planet — infection and death rates likely are underreported, too.

We are failing — not succeeding — in the fight against COVID-19.

medical news

Goodbye to a social custom

This damn global pandemic is claiming many social customs along with the human beings it is sickening and, tragically, killing.

I refer to one of them: shaking of hands when you greet friends.

Doctors and assorted other medical experts tell us that handshakes are being put aside while the world fights against the global viral infection that has killed 110,000-plus Americans.

This disturbs me. I am a hand-shaker. I enjoy greeting old friends and making new friends with a hearty handshake. I consider my handshake to be firm, but not crushing. I expect the same from those I meet for the first time or those with whom I reconnect.

We’re left now with “fist bumps” and “elbow bumps” and waving at each other from across the room. My wife and I ventured to Amarillo recently over the Memorial Day weekend. I had hoped to see old friends while we were there. I got cold feet. The instances of viral infections in Randall and Potter counties made me jittery. Thus, I was unwilling to see old friends, offer a handshake or an embrace.

This fist- and elbow-bumping ain’t my style, man.

The latest edition of the AARP Bulletin arrived this week and it tells us that the custom of shaking hands, which dates back to ancient Greece, is a goner … at least for well past the foreseeable future. AARP quotes Harvard University epidemiologist William Hanage, who recommends we greet each other with a “sanitary Star Trek salute and a hearty ‘Live long and prosper.'”

The pandemic, says Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, has created the “single greatest disruption of our lifetime.”

So, you thought it was only a handshake, right? Hardly. Get ready for the “new normal.”

medical news

Restrictions fall away, infections keep climbing

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The trend is troublesome … in my humble view, but that isn’t stopping Texas Gov. Greg Abbott from proceeding quickly to reopen the state, which has been crippled by the coronavirus pandemic.

Abbott has announced the next phase of the state’s reopening, all the while Texas is recording an increase in infections from the killer virus. The Texas Tribune reports some troubling numbers, all of which tell my wife and me to keep doing what we’re doing, which is to stay home and venture out only when we absolutely must.

As the Tribune reports: Throughout the state, the number of new cases reported each day has grown from an average of about 1,081 during the week ending May 24 to about 1,527 in the past week. (Public health data varies day to day, so officials use a seven-day rolling average to better capture trends over time.)

The 14-day trend line shows new infections in Texas have risen about 71% in the past two weeks. Although confirmed infections have increased across the state, hot spots like state prisons and meatpacking plants, which have recently been the sites of mass or targeted testing, are responsible for a portion of the increase, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Yikes, man!

I want to stipulate that I am among those who wants the state to reopen, but only as soon as it is prudent and healthy. I do not want to become a casualty in this fight; of course, that’s no flash as no one wants to become sick from COVID-19. I am just troubled by the steepening infection rate in our state, indeed in Collin County.

Meanwhile, we keep getting pressure from on high — namely the White House — to speed up the resumption of “normal” business and recreational activity. Donald Trump is shopping around for a site to stage the Republican Party’s presidential nominating convention. He wants that big crowd to cheer his nomination, exposing every one of the participants in whatever arena opens up to being infected by the virus. Baloney!

This kind of foolishness is playing out in our public parks, in our eating establishments as Texans are increasingly tossing caution aside just because the governor says it’s OK to do so.

It’s ridiculous. And frightening.