It’s day 32 of the Covid-19 social distancing extravaganza. I’m spending way too much time on the internet and potentially developing vitamin-D deficiency. I could just go outside I guess, but that would require leaving my room, so I’ll just deal with the loss of bone density and headaches for now.
Word on the street is the quarantine could end up lasting through the end of April, though I’m already hearing whispers of an extension through May. The first week or two were alright. It felt like being in school again, and having a long break because of a bad snow storm. Now it’s just starting to feel like being on house arrest, but without the ankle monitor and cool story to tell all my friends.
Amazon’s infrastructure obviously wasn’t designed to handle this many people stuck at home, ordering crap online. It used to take about two days to get a delivery in my area, and now it’s taking a week to 10 days on average to get my orders. I don’t think I can go on waiting 10 days every time I want to eat a box of Cookie Crisp™ cereal. This is truly a dystopian nightmare. It’s like I’m living in one of those Blade Runner movies or something.
The virus allegedly originated from someone eating a bat from an animal market in Wuhan. This is like the 19th pandemic that has originated from a bat and/or rat being eaten, so maybe those animals should be crossed off the “Animals to Eat” list for the sake of humanity. Or perhaps some kind of meal preparation regulation should be put in place to prevent pandemics from springing up every 5-10 years without fail. China is the world’s second largest economy. Surely they could form some equivalent of the FDA and institute a standard or two.
Trump initially downplayed the severity of the virus stating that he had things under control:
Currently, the Orange Man Bad brigade are using these tweets to dunk on Trumpy, but they’re somewhat predictably ignoring the fact that these sentiments were quite common among major media outlets and other government officials at the time as well:
Here’s Vox initially downplaying the severity of the virus, before doing damage control and deleting all the offending tweets as Vox often does:
Next up is the Washington Post. Here they are, first downplaying the virus, then pivoting to calling people who downplay the virus “hoaxers”. The journalistic integrity is astounding. *chef’s kiss hand motion*
Here’s the New York Times employing the “it’s racist to enact a travel ban from a Country with a deadly pandemic” approach. Brilliant.
Plenty of credible sources were saying it wasn’t safe to have open travel with China at the time, the CDC and State Department included. This didn’t stop members of our esteemed journalist community from continuously denying this fact. In hindsight, they were more than likely just parroting the World Health Organization’s completely incorrect appraisal.
Here they are early on, spreading false information because they somehow didn’t get the memo that China’s government is corrupt and generally shouldn’t be trusted:
It seems like only a few months ago that China came under fire for both their human rights violations against citizens of Hong Kong, and for that whole rounding up Uyghurs and throwing them in concentration camps thing. But yes, let’s take their government’s word without question.
As of this writing, New York is closing in on almost 200k confirmed Covid19 cases and 9000 deaths. Let’s have a look as to why that might be the case:
Oh, wow. That’s NYC’s health commissioner and the chair of the health committee brazenly suggesting that people mingle about in large crowds during a pandemic. That doesn’t seem very responsible. It was still early February however, so it’s not nearly as bad as these two:
Wait a minute. That’s New York’s gosh darn mayor and his habitually problematic school chancellor. Both of these goofballs were putting people in harm’s way a month ago. New York really needs to do a better job of who it’s electing into office.
It wasn’t only US elected officials who failed their constituents. Here’s London’s mayor pulling a whoopsie:
Whoopsie! And here we have the mayor of Florence attempting to tackle a dangerous statistical reality with hopes, dreams and unicorn farts:
As of this writing, Italy has over 15,000 confirmed deaths. Bravissimo! Maybe next time don’t advocated for hugging strangers during a pandemic there, Mayor meatballs.
Perhaps the greatest irony here, is that while all these officials were seemingly outright denying the reality of China being ground zero in this pandemic, China was a mere month away from doing this:
China’s government has done nothing but lie and divert responsibility over the last 3 months. Now they’re pushing the narrative that the virus came from outside of China, and blaming foreigners. Meanwhile, the U.S. media can’t seem to bootlick enough, even going so far as to write screeds chastizing people calling Covid19 the “Wuhan Virus”. That’s literally where it originated. You’re doing P.R. for China’s corrupt government, and helping them divert responsibility. Congrats on being mediocre.
We’re still lacking in masks and medical equipment, but hey, maybe we should continue to rely on China for quality goods:
Who could have seen that coming? Apparently, while China was lying about the severity of the virus and the numbers affected, they were also busy buying up supplies from other countries. Now those countries desperately need supplies and China is showing that it only looks out for number one.
Who knows how many countries this was taking place in, or just how many plane-fulls of supplies were shipped into China. I’m sure we’ll find out in the coming weeks. Keep in mind, China is still only claiming 3000 deaths from this virus. I’m sure we’ll find out how many zeroes they omitted from that number in the coming weeks as well.
Before I head out, here’s Trump seemingly celebrating the fact that we’re making history with how bad this pandemic is, but still winning, whatever that entails. So uh… sleep tight I guess?
