Grisly milestones, one after the other. On Tuesday, the U.S. hit 40 million COVID cases since the start of the pandemic, with four million in the last four Delta-inundated weeks, over a quarter of them
kids. This Labor Day
weekend, the number of hospitalized COVID patients was nearly 300%
higher than the same time last year, and the number of deaths was over 86% higher. Today, some 100,000 Americans are
hospitalized, almost as many as during January's COVID peak; we are at over
1,500 deaths per day - almost a 9/11 a day - and climbing. Surges are still spreading across GOP states, many of them southern, where vaccination rates are about 40% lower than in the Northeast and malignant
"stooge hack dickdrip" idiots like Gym Jordan are still
saying things like, "Vaccine mandates are un-American," never mind George Washington ordering smallpox vaccines for the Continental Army. With Delta now spreading into western and Midwestern states, COVID-swamped Idaho officials on Tuesday
announced they'll start rationing health care - aka GOP death camps - by activating protocols for "crisis standards of care." Meanwhile, the usual GOP suspects continue to infect and kill their constituents at unfathomable rates.
Texas, despite being so busy
suppressing voting, banning abortion and magically "
eliminating" rape, has seen over 3.7 million COVID cases and this weekend hit an all-time high in
pediatric hospitalizations.
Florida, thanks to its death-dealing, anti-mask-and-vaccine-mandate
governor, now
represents almost 25% of U.S. deaths; in Miami-Dade County alone, 15 teachers
died in the last 10 days, including a longtime, much-loved
mentor who "leaves behind a wife, son and countless men he inspired," after which
The Miami Heraldeviscerated DeSantis as an inept "portrait in selfishness." In Mississippi, there were 900 deaths in August that
included multiple pregnant women; doctors in the ICU were performing emergency C-sections on women hooked up to ventilators to "get the baby out before the mom dies." "This never happens," said one doctor. "Never." Given all these horrors are both unprecedented and largely preventable - virtually all COVID hospitalizations and deaths are people who inconceivably declined to take a free, safe, readily available vaccine because goddamn the stupid is killing us - PTSD is
soaring among doctors and nurses, and many are leaving the field. Mississippi now has at least 2,000 fewer nurses than at the beginning of the pandemic, a growing trend that only adds more strain to already maxed-out health care systems. "It looks heroic, (but) it's sweaty and hard and chaotic and bloody,"
said one Mississippi ICU nurse who recently resigned. "And it's hard to live in this every day and then go home and live a normal life." Asked if the system is reaching a breaking point, one nursing manager said, "I think we already broke."
It's a common, woeful, searing refrain among those
doing the unimaginable "heavy lifting." From one anonymous doctor: