Louisiana FUCK YOU
Turning now to the Asshole of America, Florida. I just read a piece in The Guardian. As the president pointedly pointed out in his nationwide address Tuesday, two states, Florida and Texas, both of course slave states, account for one-third of all new COVID-19 cases nationwide. Well, you expected South Dakota? Florida and Texas are the third and second-largest states in the Union of which they should never have been a part but rather sawed off from the mainland and allowed to drift in the Caribbean until it ran into Cuba in the former instance and had a wall built across its northern, eastern, and western borders in the case of the latter with invitation to Mexico to reclaim its lost territory if it pleased them.
Anyway, this is Florida’s cases graph.
It’s just a coupla dozen steps from the summit of Peak DeSantis, named for its governor, on January 8. Dire.
Hospitalizations:
Approaching its peak in mid-July 2020. Of which DeSantis man nonchalantly says “Florida’s hospitals are open for business” like hospitals are restaurants. “I would recommend the baked Delta tonight.” DeSantis man doubled down that “We are not locking down.”
But I read something interesting on DeSantis man's thinking that made some sense.
“The one driving force that most affects the governor’s decisions in the state’s policies is deaths. As long as deaths remain stable or under control, the rates of hospitalization and infectiousness are likely not going to elicit mandating masks or vaccines or doing anything else that would jeopardize the economic policies.”—Dr. Jay Wolfson, professor of public health medicine, University of South Florida.
Term of art there, "under control." And how exactly would mask mandates or vaccine mandates "jeopardize" the Florida economy which is based on drug trafficking, money laundering, and sex tourism?
Florida’s deaths:
Deaths are rising in the Where the Sun Don’t Shine State but, as nationally, the rise is not nearly as precipitous as with cases and hospitalizations. Florida deaths are rising at a more prolonged and steeper angle than in the whole Union but are still a modest-sized peak in the DeSantis Death Mountain range. A reasonable moron could conclude that deaths remain "under control" and DeSantis man is becalmed by this. He oughtn’t be to the full Monty, deaths are just now being “processed” from the huge rise in cases and hospitalizations, and that Florida peak is going to become more impressive. DeSantis man does not connect those dots either.
But the main point here is that it is not irrational to fixate on death as the first-among-equals metric. Death is different, in the criminal law biz and the public health biz, and the death graphs are different for Florida and the U.S.
From the mouth of DeSantis man his own self, the numbers across all of the metrics are “seasonal.” Wrong, but. This is Hurricane Delta, a Cat-5 speedster that made landfall on the subcontinent and plowed through huge swaths of the population, killing and sickening horrific numbers. And then, within about a month, sped away for parts unknown, maybe jumped on a cruise ship to Florida.
As with the nation as a whole we do not know how high Peak Delta will be in Florida but, learning from India, this will be a needle peak, not a flat-top like Florida’s others, and will retreat quickly. So it is not Summer-seasonal as DeSantis man has it in his malformed brain, but we have reason to expect that it is seasonal, hurricane-seasonal. The Atlantic hurricane season peaks typically in September with August a close second and lasts technically until December 1. Hurricane Delta is not going to peak in Florida in December but both the current data and the lesson from India are consistent with a September-October peak.
