Read chapter 61 here
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Yesterday the Wisconsin Department of Human Services announced a record-setting 1,117 confirmed new Covid cases. This tally comes on the heels of seven straight days of 700+ cases. By way of comparison, Germany, a country of 80 million people has averaged 500 daily cases during the past two months. Wisconsin has
a population of 5.8 million. Germany currently has 6,600 active cases while Wisconsin has more than 11,000. Like the rest of the United States, we are moving in the wrong direction.
State health officials attribute the increase to community spread, as the average number of tests per week hasn’t fluctuated all that much during this spike. Too many people aren’t wearing masks and social distancing. Too many people aren’t avoiding large gatherings, which is why this past weekend’s reunion made me experience a combined sense of anxiety and guilt.
What has changed dramatically is the percentage of positive tests. It’s not unusual to see a result higher than 10%. The increase in cases is not limited to the more populated counties in the southeastern part of the state. DHS recently designated 57 of the state’s 72 counties as ‘high risk’ for infection. Three of the most rural counties — Iron, Forest, and Trempealeau — are among the top 20 in the ratio of positive cases per 100,000 people.
As I see it, complacency and a false sense of security took hold in rural, sparsely populated areas. Iron County (population 5600, one of the state’s least populous) went more than two months without reporting any new Covid cases.
At first, the virus was seen as a coastal phenomenon, the first outbreak occurring in Washington State, suburban Seattle. The focus quickly shifted to the devastation experienced by New York City, another coastal Democratic ‘enclave’ as well as the United States’ largest urban area. The virus as an urban and ‘blue’ affliction was reinforced in Wisconsin when the City of Milwaukee, a Democratic stronghold with a large minority population and chronic urban poverty, became the state’s virus epicenter. A month into the pandemic, 8 Wisconsin counties, all rural, had no cases and another 11 reported just 1 or 2, while the number of cases increased significantly in urban counties. Apparently, enough rural residents nonchalantly considered it ‘not our problem’, an attitude no doubt reinforced by the lunatic, wrong-on-all-counts raving of our president and his Fox News enablers. As a result, many of the nation’s current hottest spots are found in rural counties all over the country, places where many voters have been snookered by a sociopath destined to become our worst president ever. Four years ago, it should have been obvious to any rational person that disaster in the face of a major crisis would be the outcome of Donald Trump in the White House. Give him credit, though, Trump certainly knows how to play the white grievance card, which is nothing more than an extension of Nixon’s Silent Majority southern strategy.
The virus has given a comeuppance to a number of southern GOP governors, including Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Georgia’s Brian Kemp. Both men dismissed the seriousness of the outbreak, went through the motions of closing businesses and initiating other safety measures, then reopened their states even though the number of new cases was still spiking. The New York Times map reproduced above illustrates how this foolhardy approach turned out. In April, DeSantis mocked New York’s Governor Cuomo, “crowing how his state had tamed the pandemic”, as the New York Times
reported. So far this month, Florida has reported 14 days of new cases in excess of 10,000, with a peak of 15,300 on July 12th. During New York’s peak in April, the state reported 7 days with 10,000 or more cases, with April 7 setting a record of 11,661. Florida is on pace to exceed New York’s tally sometime next week.
Read chapter 63 here
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