Improvement is ahead. But our slow fits & starts must be accelerated. 1/
1- science will make the virus less deadly & harder to spread
2- one of our missing ingredients— rapid mass testing— will be here soon
3- we frankly have nowhere to go but up. It will be hard to suck at this repeatedly.
4x more seriously at a minimum.
That’s 120,000 preventable deaths. @VincentRK at Mayo thinks that’s accurate, if not higher. 4/
Neither an “it ain’t what it is” nor an “it is what it is” posture will get us there. We just need to act on the challenge. 5/
A sad visceral event that left families shattered and needing a government investigation. 6/
Our losses from COVID are less dramatic but not less sad, most not less unnecessary, and also not how we want to lose our loved ones.7/
No cameras in the hospital.
No funerals.
No flags at half staff.
Seldom names spoken. Part of a counter on a TV chyron, like the national debt counter, spinning rapidly. 50 every hour many days. 8/
Our dependence on a handful of corporate labs will lessen & we should be able to test at scale more rapidly and at low cost.
New treatments like convalescent plasma will reduce deaths.
Mask wearing— state by state if not federally— is being deployed.11
But Arizona, Florida and Texas which failed to learn from the mistakes of NY on the front end must learn from the successes of NY on the backend. 13/
If the governors are opening hot spots too quickly, say “No”. We want to get to the Yellow Line, not drift above it.
Thanks to @JessStrawn for this analysis. 14/
But getting there is do-able. 16/
But we can change. Mississippi has a mask mandate now. Alabama. Arkansas. Texas. Many states have closed their bars. 17/
6 in 10 people support a shut down of 2 weeks. 8 out of 10 say they support a mask mandate. We are waiting for our leaders to stop lagging. 18/
Here again our leaders have an easy job they can’t get right. 20/
Smarturl.it/inthebubble
Every day we don’t carries a big price. 21/
No matter who is in the Oval Office we have no choice but to make whatever progress we can as fast as we can. 22/