The next to last day of a very bad year.

 This was written yesterday December 30^th . But things are about the same today..

 

 

 

 

Covid-19 patient who has had a stroke is prepared to be flown to another hospital.

 

One word about today's news – bad! Living in California I appear to be if not in the exact epicenter of the global pandemic in its vicinity.  All hell is breaking loose in Southern California. Covid-19 has besieged the entire world for 11 long months and now it is attacking California with a vengeance. The US is fairing worst than any other country in the world both in terms of the shear number of reported cases over 19.5 million (with 183,058 added today) and our number of of fatalities so far with 338,769.  The NY Times' color coded world map denoting the degree of seriousness shows the US with a dark rouge color (the color coding shades out to beige in countries where Covid-19 is under control, with shades of orange in the middle)  Also, interestingly the Times has changed the way they sort countries maybe to lessen our embarrassment. They no longer show them descending from most cases which usually correlates with most deaths where we would be firmly at the top. Instead they now sort them by the fatality rate (deaths per 100,000 in the last 7 days). This leads to obscure small countries with serious outbreaks and limited resources to lead the pack like Liechtenstein and Croatia with 3.8 and 1.6 deaths per 100,000 respectively). But here the USA even by that metric we are still not doing well. We, the richest country in the world of  over 190 countries, are still way up in 18th place in terms of death rate with 0.7. We are tied with a a whole host of well off European countries that have well endowed state-of the-art medical care but serious outbreaks.

So much for Governor Gavin Newsom's great leadership and Californians' feeling of self righteousness and superiority with our low numbers all spring and summer. We are now looking a lot like southern Europe or NY City earlier in the year in crisis mode. Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties are being hammered with hospitals filled beyond capacity, and being driven to battlefield triage measures. Ambulances, unable unload critically ill suffering patients, are forced into a holding patterns. Lobbies, corridors, gifts shops are filled with beds. The staff are working 12 hr plus shifts. They have descended into a ring of hell.

. Yet on other fronts things also suck. 'The Trump' despite being voted out of office continues to cling to outrageous claims of vague unfounded, ill-defined widespread vote counting conspiracies engineered by the (otherwise inept) Democratic Party. Or else he is claiming that huge quantities of ballots should be simply thrown out. The problem is that Trump knows that nearly half of the country (but importantly not more than half) voted for his fat ass even as he lost.  And as we know the hoards of of MAGA hat wearing fools believe anything this world renown liar says. So, despite like 86 court decisions against him and Republican sanctioned counts, he still claims he actually won. To his many acolytes he was cheated by the evil, baby eating, liberal/socialist, corrupt, latte drinking Coastal Elites. He with his minions in tow want to cling to the absurdity that he really won in not only in the three swing states (that he only barely won in 2016) but also Georgia, where Republicans ran the elections. And now, and you can't make this up, Trump is calling for the Republican governor of Georgia to resign. All of this hopefully will help the two senatorial run-off Demo candidates, Ossoff and Warnott, win  Now today(12/30) a proto-fascist aspiring 2024 GOP presidential candidate, from Missouri (with the redneckian name of Josh Hawley) wants to vote against the Congress's procedural proforma certification of the Electoral College vote next week. Apparently he wants to set up some kind of Biden-eliminating Congressional fight. But most legal analysts see this as simply cheap political theater that will go nowhere. 

Trump is not introspective or self critical enough to realize how close he came to actually winning had he not been so anti-science and stubbornly adverse to listening to people who know more than he does. He could have let the experts at CDC and NHC guide our national response to the pandemic from its inception. A rational response would made a world of difference. His criminally negligent handling of the Covid-19 response was not lost on many potentially pro-Trump ordinary voters who vote based on their personal financial well being and pay little attention to the never ending psychodrama of Dems vs Repubs.  Despite the Mueller Investigation, the Impeachment, immigrant children being put in cages, and the daily batch of Tweeted lies and fairy tales, enough apolitical non-ideological voters in the swing states would have put him back in – legally. But his full-a-shit, know-it-all style finally caught up with him. Let's hope as a disgraced one-term President his influence will wain as he confronts his many upcoming legal and financial challenges – that is if he can be physically pried out of the White House come January 20.

It's got to get better once Biden takes over as uninspiring and charisma-challenged as he is. At least he still believes in a democratic transfer of power. If badly needed restructuring and serious reform are not in the cards, at least we don't have some dude as president that aspires to be a Valimir Putin or a Mohammed bin Salman.

* Numbers from NY Times based on Johns Hopkins data base