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.


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