Figures for government or corporate revenue and spending are rattled off every day in billions or hundreds of millions. So when we learn that 250,000 people are dead now in the USA from coronavirus, how to get our heads around a number like that?
Living in such a rural area, even trying to envision the idea of 250,000 people gathered together feels almost preposterous... my county has about 33 residents per square mile in a 1400 square mile area.
So it struck me to add up the 2019 population estimates of all four mostly rural counties served by my local newspaper, and the figure came to not quite 182,000. The four counties cover a total area of not quite four thousand square miles, so an average population per square mile of around 45.
So if the coronavirus had somehow limited itself to such a localized piece of terrain, everyone in those four counties would be dead, plus another 70,000 people from several more adjoining and also rural counties.
To imagine such a sprawling landscape that would be completely devoid of human life seems just mind boggling, even for those of us used to living in very sparsely populated areas.
And yet that would not faze Donald Trump, apparently. He's not fazed by the idea of 250k dead nor apparently by any individual's death from the covid-19 virus yet, because he has not died from it, so whoever else has passed on from it was just... faking it? Or weak? Oh, and then he has a theory that a lot of the deaths were not "really" covid because the people had underlying illness so that's what killed them, not covid.
Every day Trump stalls and puts off cooperation w/ Biden and the transition team getting with the administration to deal better with covid is just another day Trump allows to pass with mixed messages and politicization of a public health crisis like we've never seen before: just ask country public health officials in state after state, where it has become common for county clerks paid less than $70k per year to deal with threats to their lives and that of their families just for trying to do their jobs of managing contact tracing and public health data reporting.
I was talking to my brother earlier this evening, and - among other sobering subjects - we discussed the numbers of those killed by the Corona virus in the US.
(And yes, we discussed Mr Trump's breathtaking and profoundly disturbing lack of empathy - my brother reminded me of how Trump's niece had written of his complete lack of empathy and how unhinged and dangerous he is, and how she wrote that these days between the election and the next inauguration will be very dangerous - a quarter of a million dead, and he doesn't give a proverbial flying fuck unless it affects him, or inconveniences him, or harms him in some way......words fail me).
In the Other Place, Other Country, in some of the earlier lunatic threads, around the time the deaths numbered 70,000 (itself a mind-boggling number), I had done some historical addition, such as checking or looking up, supposed numbers of US dead from all of the 20th century wars, by way of comparing and contrasting these numbers, with the numbers of those who have died (in a far shorter period of time) from Covid-19. And, even then, more had - have - died from Covid-19 in a few months than in all of the wars the US had been engaged in, during the entire 20th century (and what we have experienced of the 21st century, so far). Shocking.
However, I did recall that the numbers killed during the Civil War were stratospheric (and for different reasons, political reasons, I have been looking at some of this stuff these past few days, plus the fact that it was a major interest of mine when I was a kid - something my father and I had bonded over, as Lincoln was a childhood hero of mine), and tonight, while chatting, we checked them, yes, approximately 600,000-700,000. Actually, some sources suggest 750,000 from war (military) related deaths,
But, that was in over four years of combat; in eight months, deaths from Covid are already in excess of a third of that in the US.
That the leadership of the Republican Party do not see this as shocking and shaming leaves me gobsmacked.
And that they have no shame about merrily and busily - and quite deliberately - undermining the democratic foundations of one of the world's oldest democracies - flawed, yes, but once upon an increasingly distant time, a place that served as an ideal, a model, an aspiration, the possibility of something better and fairer - for almost everyone else on the planet - appals me.
Actually, - this belongs in another thread - but we both think that he (Mr Trump) will try to do something completely deranged, spectacularly insane, utterly lunatic - such as drop a nuclear bomb on Iran a day or so before he leaves office, - if only to spite Mr Biden.
Should he attempt to do such a thing, I can only hope that there are individuals who will decline to carry out such orders.