Virus notes: August 16, 2020 -- Signs of the times

We are no longer recording the tallies for number of cases. The American politico-medical system is, to repeat a tiresome but still accurate cliché; a seamless web of incompetence and corruption overlaid with layers of evasion of responsibility – the American system du jour of government in a nutshell. It’s been building up for years and it needs to be reformed before it completely collapses into the chaos so fervently desired by the anarchic plutocracy, whose ideology consists of: “If I don’t own it or control it, I seek to destroy it.” At this rate we’re going straight back to the 14th century complete with the plague. --blj

 

 

MERCED (BLJ) –On August 15, 2020 Merced County Public Health Department reported 89 deaths from Covid-19, an increase of 19 in five days.

The United States recorded 11,224 deaths, an increase of 77 in a day.

The global death count 171,426, an increase of 794 in a day.

 SIGNS OF THE TIMES

 It was over 100 degrees yesterday. In the mid-afternoon, members of the editorial board returning from a bicycle ride noticed neighbors in their car with the engine running – two parents in the front seat and seven small children in the back seat. When they asked the father if they were going somewhere, he replied that they weren’t; they were just cooling off with the car’s air-conditioning.

The father hasn’t had steady work for more than half a year but the mother is pregnant with an eighth child.

Two weeks ago: Homeless men with one shirt among three of them and not many more shoes, sat in the Mercy Medical Center emergency ward, cooling off for several hours, enclosed in private hells.