Politics and Money

[lesgetrich]

Deaths from Covid have now exceeded the number of deaths from the 1918 flu pandemic and this is now considered the worst pandemic in US history. Think how different things might have been if Trump and the GOP hadn't first called it a hoax, immediately invoked the Defense Production Act to produce PPE and hadn't fought against mask and vaccination mandates as an infringement on rights. This is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated, most of whom have been encouraged and swayed by propaganda from GOP politicians.

'Soul-crushing': US COVID-19 deaths are topping 1,900 a day

The nation was stunned back in December when it was witnessing 3,000 deaths a day. But that was when almost no one was vaccinated.

Now, nearly 64% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. And yet, average deaths per day have climbed 40% over the past two weeks, from 1,387 to 1,947, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Health experts say the vast majority of the hospitalized and dead have been unvaccinated. While some vaccinated people have suffered breakthrough infections, those tend to be mild.

The number of vaccine-eligible Americans who have yet to get a shot has been put at more than 70 million.

“There is a very real risk you’ll end up in the hospital or even in the obituary pages,” Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, chief medical officer for the Ohio Department of Health, said to the unvaccinated. “Don’t become a statistic when there is a simple, safe and effective alternative to go out today and get vaccinated.”

Many low-vaccination communities also have high rates of conditions like obesity and diabetes, said Dr. William Moss of Johns Hopkins. And that combination — along with the more contagious delta variant — has proved lethal.

“I think this is a real failure of society and our most egregious sin to be at this stage where we have hospitals overwhelmed, ICUs overwhelmed and hitting this mark in terms of deaths per day,” Moss lamented.

New cases of the coronavirus per day in the U.S. have dropped since the start of September and are now running at about 139,000. But deaths typically take longer to fall because victims often linger for weeks before succumbing.

In Kansas, 65-year-old cattleman Mike Limon thought he had beaten COVID-19 and went back to work for a few days. But the virus had “fried” his lungs and he died last week, said his grandson, Cadin Limon, 22, of Wichita.

He said his grandfather didn’t get vaccinated for fear of a bad reaction, and he hasn’t gotten the shot either for the same reason, though serious side effects have proved extremely rare.