[FRIAM] Pandemic Over!

[Steve Smith]

Just after I posted my own rant about my mother's context in an assisted
living, I got a cryptic txt from my sister who lives in Tucson where my
mom is.   She got a call from the Assisted Living that a (the first)
COVID19 case was reported there and they were increasing the
restrictions/care and planning a facility-wide testing starting
today.    They couldn't tell us (or her) if the case was among staff or
residents or if it was in the assisted living (~50) who interact more
with staff but don't come and go much, or the fully independent (~500)
who come and go freely.   

My MAGA hat wearing sister/family are speaking on issues as if they
somehow became democrats...  I highly doubt it...  but I think maybe
they are trying to eat their MAGA crow in  small doses so they don't get
the double-stuffed footlong MAGA hoagie handed to them all at once in
November.   AZ is key and I *hope* they are somewhat typical of their
demographic (upper-middle/professional/boomer/white).

∄ uǝlƃ wrote:

> Yep. I forget when it happened, April I think. But soon after my mom's facility locked down, she told me she saw 9 bodies in the lobby on gurneys. I have no way of knowing if she actually saw that, imagined it, saw it on the news, or what. My sister's the executor with PoA and such. So I haven't tried to find out if it was true or not.
>
> And, really, it's irrelevant. All this focus on number of deaths and even infections is myopic. The *real* costs should be understood as functions of our infrastructure, including the psychological well-being of  those proximal to the victims. We've demonstrated to ourselves and the world that our idiotic fetishization of individualism, including the galling and horrific experiment of "diverse responses" amongst the different states and counties, increases suffering. Any utilitarian or consequentialist would laugh at our fetish if it weren't so horrifying.
>
> It's fine when our feds are run by someone competent like Obama (or even the barely competent like Bush) and we have small cliques of moronic anti-government types [ptouie] running around spouting nonsense. But when given an inch, those morons will take a whole mile and kill people [†] willy-nilly just to "thin the herd".
>
> Nursing homes or whole states pulling-Chinas and hiding deaths feeds into such rhetoric. It normalizes them and sets precedent for policies and procedures (i.e. infrastructure) to keep such things quiet. So you're on the nose to point that out. (I hope we're all on board with FAIR: https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/.)
>
> I realize Dave's argument is that people simply won't care if my mom dies alone with a broken hip and rib, shouting into the air that she's shit herself as some distraught nurse tries to help. But what those people don't understand is that such events *ripple* out, to me, beyond me, into the zeitgeist we see in the streets. Speaking of which, I WANT THIS so bad: https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/
>
>
> [†] Is there a difference between killing and letting die? I'm not confident.
>
> On 6/23/20 8:02 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
>> In our recent all-hands meeting at work, we talked quite
>> a bit about COVID-19 data and in particular the statistics
>> related to nursing homes in the US.
>>
>> ‘Playing Russian Roulette’: Nursing Homes Told to Take the Infected
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/us/nursing-homes-coronavirus.html
>>
>> From the data we discussed, a surprising amount of COVID deaths in many
>> states are in nursing homes. 80% of the deaths in Rhode Island, for
>> instance.
>>
>> Many states do not declare the mortality rates for their nursing homes
>> and Arizona, perhaps pulling-a-China, declares a number far less than
>> others.
>