Virus notes: June 17, 2020 -- Spike in Merced
MERCED (BLJ) – Merced County Public Health Department on June 17 reported 518 cases and eight deaths (and increase of one). Merced no longer reports the number of new cases – just another example of the omnipresent flak or PR or “public informationing” endemic to American government from the lowest to highest levels. It is an increase of 109 cases in four days, possibly as many as 73 between June 16 and June 17. This is a tribute to the stupidity and greed of local commerce and the county supervisors who serve the minority of the public who are owners of businesses, housing, land, livestock, fruits and nuts, real estate development companies and allied services rather than the majority of us, who are losing jobs and facing homelessness. They just can’t care about anything beyond profits and losses.
California reported 157,015 cases (3,455 new) and 5,208 deaths (87 new),
The United States reported 2,211,190 cases (27,080 new) and 119,596 deaths (798 new).
The global tally for the day was 8,367,894 cases (185,563 new).
The point of today is local: the businesscrats in office, including the governor, let the virus get the upper hand again after a promising beginning. It bears repeating that Covid 19 is not some local troublemaker that can be threatened, bought off, jailed or sued. It is a most menacing fact of Nature, our living environment, and nothing is more loathed in an agribusiness dominated region than Nature, which carries with it values not thoroughly in line with Private Property, our God=given right to exploit Nature for our profits. Yet, “opening up the economy” to normal trade in goods (real as well as personal property) creates a banquet for the virus.
Special private interests are certainly going to try to make all levels of government pick up the tab. It is only an indistinct paragraph low in the story below the big picture in the hometown newspaper of free boxes of local produce being delivered to people in town that we learn that the federal government paid local farmers for it. And programs to help business have so far been little more than payoffs to Trump cronies and donors.
A gauge of how well the businesscrats in public offices are doing was a Merced City Council meeting this past week in which several speakers told the council in plain language that they were going to get them out of office. These members of the public may already have driven out one councilman, a close ally of the city manager, but an ill-tempered man with a terrible authority problem, particularly with articulate, brave women.
There was an article in the local outlet of the bankrupt chain that noted the spike in cases, got some comments without attribution from the county health department and noted, for the second time that the county is cutting back on personnel devoted to the virus, but, we are assured by some anonymous source that everything will be OK even though the number of cases is increasing. Evidently, the businesscrats and Trumpsters-in-power want to clamp down on publicity about the virus, number of cases and number of deaths, and try to get the public used to "acceptable losses" to keep the wheels of commerce grinding forward.
Maybe this leadership is contemptible; but maybe Americans are so fed up with our corrupt, incompetent systems of medical care that we just won't follow medical advice when it is given because we have lost so much respect for official Western medicine that now we are endangering our health and the health of those nearby just for spite.. In fact most authority in the United States has been trumped by spite in the last few years.--blj