The influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed at least 25 million people globally. Here in the United States 675,000 people are known to have died from that massive outbreak of flu.
As of this last week (middle of September 2021), more people have died of Covid-19 in this pandemic. 682,000 as of today, with another 2,000 Americans dying every single day.
While 675,000 is the population of a city and thus hard for people to grasp, 2,000 is the number of people you can see on a busy city street. It’s an understandable number.
What I still can’t understand is why anyone with the power to stop this pandemic doesn’t seem to care about all these deaths. For the anti-vaxxers and people taking worming medicines, I can write them off as the stupid half of humanity. But for those who have been elected to lead in government, whether school board or city council member, mayor, governor, Congressperson, Senator, or President, I don’t understand how the preventing the death of constituents isn’t the highest priority.
I don’t understand how nineteen months into a global pandemic it is not obvious to them, and thus repeated so that it becomes obvious to everyone, that if you congregate in groups, don’t wear a mask, and don’t get vaccinated, more people die. Many more people.
That, and the math was already obvious to me back in March 2020. Pandemics spread exponentially. If you fail to stop the spread today, the problem doesn’t get a little worse tomorrow, the problem doubles every week or two.
At this point, given nineteen months of experience with this specific disease, if I had the power to fight this pandemic I’d take drastic action. Close everything but the hospitals for two weeks. Tell everyone to stay home for two weeks. Stop spreading the virus to new hosts. Spend two weeks going door to door providing vaccinations to anyone who wants one.
Two weeks, and this pandemic would be set back to a level we’ve not seen since early 2020. We literally saved millions of lives with the shutdowns in 2020, and if we want knock this pandemic down enough to get back to normal life, we need to knock back the active infection rate by 99%. We can do that by vaccinating 99% of everyone on the planet or we can stop advocating to open back up while the pandemic is near an all time high.
