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.
>


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