So far, Red States are doing a Victory Dance that they are immune to Coronavirus and it is only a Blue State problem.
Instead of showing leadership, Trump joins them in pretending.
When it comes, Red States will be hit particularly hard by the virus.
Firstly, they are woefully unprepared. They are doing little to discourage public gatherings.....particularly Churches
Secondly, they have a shaky healthcare infrastructure. In many cases people are 50 miles from the nearest healthcare facility. Those facilities are poorly staffed and when the shit hits the fan, they will have no access to critical safety equipment and ventilators.
While they won’t have the fatalities of urban areas, I fear their death rates will be much higher
I can't help but notice that all of the countries where the virus is raging out of control are headed by right wing conservative governments: Spain, Italy, Iran, and the USA. Conservative governments have moved far too slowly and allowed the virus to get out ahead of them. Their basic mistrust of scientists and experts ("hidden agendas"), and their arrogance of their leaders in thinking that they're smarter than than nerds or the bureaucrats, leads them to do stupid things, like refusing the WHO test, or shut down the pandemnic response office.
Liberals tend to listen to warnings, and experts. They take the lessons of outbreaks past and learn from them. Part of the success of our response in Canada so far, is the lesson learned from SARS in 2003. I lived in Toronto during SARS. This is SARS on steriods, having eaten Alice's "this side makes you grow bigger" mushroom.
I believe this will be like the Great Depression in terms of changing the entire character of America. The Depression woke up the American public for the need for a social safety net. There was none before 1929, and the result was literally famine and starvation in parts of the country. This will dismantle the myth of the "best medical system in the world" that the Medical Industrial Complex has built.
Americans are going to have to take a good hard look at the entire "for profit" health system when this is done. Sick people generate bigger profits. Preventative medicine and early diagnosis are less profitable.
While the Trump Administration is revising its death projections upwards, Prime Minister Trudeau is announcing that he's shipping 2 million masks and 1 million tests to Canadian hospitals this week, and that the government has received its first shipment of face shields from hockey equipment manufacturer, Eddie Bauer. Delivery of a large shipment of ventilators is expect in early April.
Canada was still below 10,000 cases this morning but that milestone will be breached today. As of this morning, there have been 121 deaths, although the rate of infection continues to remain low. We're still testing, testing, testing but our ability to track cases efficiently has been overwhelmed at this point. Every television network is running PSA's from the federal Minister of Health telling Canadians to "Stay at Home", and we're actually doing it.
But then we
