Federal officials are hiding hospital data needed to better understand pandemic impact

(image courtesy of pixabay.com and Gerd Altmann)

This paragraph from a New York Times article stuck out at me:

Public health experts say detailed local data on where people are hospitalized — a real-time measure that does not depend on levels of testing — is crucial to understanding the epidemic, but federal officials have not made this data public. The New York Times gathered data for nearly 50 metropolitan areas, including 15 of the 20 largest cities in the country, from state and local health departments to provide the first detailed national look at where people are falling seriously ill.

According to the article, the data “show a far-reaching crisis” extending into Tulsa, OK, Las Vegas, NV, and Nashville, TN.  Places like the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio, both in Texas, have seen big jumps in cases in the last week.  But hospitalizations in Galveston, Corpus Christi, and Galveston TX have also increased dramatically even though cases are not rising so much.  St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida hospital cases are also going up fast, whereas other cities in Florida like Orlando and Jacksonville are not so bad.  There are details in the article for fifty large cities across the US.

Information like this could be very useful for the general public, especially those who are not convinced that there is a problem out there.  Why is this not being made public?  This is just another example of the fragmented federal response which has no overall coordination and no sense of urgency.  It’s not all due to a desire for secrecy.  Some of it is incompetence, some is lack of direction from the top, and some of it is political.  All of it is making us as a country look like fools to the rest of the civilized world.

Contrast this with the crackdown on “anarchy” that is going on in Portland and soon coming to other large cities.  The president, desperate to find an issue that will build political support for his re-election has seized upon “law and order” (meaning suppression of demonstrations) as a wedge issue.  There is no more polarizing position than one that claims that everyone who protests against police brutality is a traitor.

The president is a racist, authoritarian, sociopathic, narcissistic man who has no concern for the poor and downtrodden people of this country and is only interested in concentrating power in his own hands.  The book by his niece reveals that he was brought up this way by a racist, authoritarian, sociopathic, mean old man who destroyed the president’s older brother because he wouldn’t go along.

I can only hope that enough people will be aware of his true nature to get out and vote against him and provoke a landslide defeat in November.  Anything less will tempt him to fight dirty in an attempt to overturn the majority and retain power.  We are going to be in very bad trouble if there is not an overwhelming majority vote against him.