Wednesday, September 15, 2021

A Second Pandemic Coming?

It's been a while since I've covered a COVID-19 related topic (almost a week!).  This is odd, considering that the pandemic is THE news story of the decade, if not the early 21st century.  I figured I'd post about the pandemic today because one in every five-hundred Americans has died of COVID-19.

On a more alarming note, I have a feeling that things are going to get worse in the short-term.  With the death of an anti-vaxxer and QAnon celebrity in a Chicago hospital which refused to pump her full of ivermectin, anti-vaccine fanatics, led by grifters like Lin Wood, are discussing storming hospitals, doxxing healthcare workers, tying up the reception desks, and calling in bomb threats:

Meanwhile, Wood is exhorting his followers to 'go to war', then making insincere attempts to walk the rhetoric back: The majority of these discussions are occurring on off-brand social media platforms, such as Telegram, where moderation is not really implemented. More mainstream social media sites aren't much better: Truth to tell, I'd rather see anti-vaccine whackaloons steer clear of hospitals, rather than being admitted, then becoming martyrs for an increasingly-unhinged mob of fanatics with violent ideation. Still, my greatest concern is that there will be a bomb attack or mass-shooting at a medical facility. With one-in-five-hundred Americans having died of the disease, and hundreds of thousands more deaths likely, it's the secondary pandemic of violence which is freaking me out.

2 comments:

Richard said...

I was talking with Cassandra from Troy and she gave me an earful. The gist of it was we still have to be careful and the city has already fallen but we could still survive.

They don't call her Cassandra for no reason. It was not an optimistic conversation but she implied that we might talk again in happier times.
A lot of this will have to depend on us.

Ten Bears said...

That's why g'ma didn't answer the phone ...

Mea culpa, back when all this started I was as guilty of making bad beer-jokes (bad-beer jokes?) as the next guy, and I was a bit snarky in my assessment it was as likely to have thawed out of the thawing tundra a viri that hasn't seen a human since before we were human as leap from raw bat to undercooked dog to immunocompromised human (or "escape a bio-weapons research facility in St Petersburg, Tel Aviv, or Cincinnati) but then I got really sick. I can't quite find where, doesn't appear to have been at my house so in comments somewhere in May or so of last year I made the observation that this wasn't the one that's gonna' kill us all. Maybe the next one but not this one. As with most of Cassandra's Grandson's intuitions, I can't quite put my finger on why. Maybe because early on it didn't seem so bad. That it was something we could handle. It just didn't strike me as the Andromeda Strain.

I mostly don't mind that people don't listen, I've been wrong a time or two ...