How is Coronavirus affecting you?

Same here, temperatures gone, negative self test and fatigues on its way at last.....bloody thing

 

I'm scheduled for the first COVID vaccine shot January 26.

 

^^^Great news! Chicago vaccine protocol is stuck in first gear. I expected this, so no surprise.

 

I must admit I can't really see the relevance of comparing COVID deaths with war casualties. It's like comparing cancer deaths with mortal road accidents. Surely it would be more pertinent to compare the death toll from COVID with other viral diseases since 1775, if one wants to go back that far.

 

Gorillas in San Diego zoo tested positive for COVID - 19-20-21-22?
https://zoo.sandiegozoo.org/pressro...-diego-zoo-safari-park-test-positive-covid-19

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2021/01/gorillas-san-diego-zoo-positive-coronavirus/

 

It's not meant to be a literal one-for-one comparison, merely a bit of perspective. We build monuments to war dead, we devote holidays to war dead, and our politicians weep fat crocodile tears over the graves of war dead. And yet, when far more people have died in a crisis that was completely avoidable had the proper precautions been properly enforced, the victims themselves are merely shrugged off, or discounted by "well, they didn't really die of that, they died of something else because this guy on You Tube says blah blah blah delusional conspiracy garbage."

We're in a war, all right, a war against Internet stupidity.

 

Given that so many have capitulated, that particular battle is lost in advance.

 

I do believe, though, wars have never been unavoidable. I guess, we have more difficulties in accepting that we don't really reign over nature as we probably thought we did for far too long now. It takes the glorious majesty from us humans and offends us in our proclaimed rank among all beings on earth when something of such a primitivity as a simple virus can possibly wipe us out. Hopefully we will - after we won this war, to stay in this jargon - not fall back into the cockiness we used to have the time before. But I have my doubt.

 

As long as there's ignorance, and as long as ignorance is profitable for somebody, humanity will find a way to avoid learning from experience.

 

The Wuhan virus caught the world off guard; including the CDC and World Health Organization.
Blame gaming, subsequent error disclaim, duck and cover punditry cannot simply erasure factual
evidence of our all too evident fallible humanity and collective guilt/irresponsibility.

 

Which is not to say, I trust, that no person or group of persons bear any responsibility for the scale of the problem.

“Nobody is perfect.”
— T. Bundy

 

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
-- Cassius, via Bill S.

 

No, of course not. When the story is writ and the tale passes toward time blame and credit can be apportioned
from objective distance, tempered by mercy and understanding.

 

----Edward R Murrow, lateral pass, ran it to paydirt, scored, then a two point conversion (simple screen).

 

^^^Post script to above.
When I was a kid, Murrow, Cronkite, Severeid, Pierpoint, Collingwood, Trout, Smith, and Reynolds,
others; all of whom ranked with Mantle and Maris, Berra, Banks, Williams, Koufax with me. Men were gods.
Brinkley, Huntley, Wallace. Had it not been for fateful circumstance journalism might have beckoned.
But how standard excellence vanished.

 

While in the here and now people are dying. Many of those deaths could have been prevented. Bad decisions were made, for bad reasons. No need to name names.

Mercy and understanding? Tell that to the survivors of the nearly 400,000 who have died to date. While the meter continues running.

 

When I was a little girl, I thought that Eric Severeid was God. Not from a journalistic point of view, I thought, with his big gray head floating on the TV screen, that he was actually The Lord Himself. I tried to explain this to my Sunday School teacher, but I don't think she got it.

It's always a bit jarring to realize that Edward R. "This...Is London" Murrow of the grave gaze and the meaningful pause was also Edward R. "Person To Person" Murrow, who interviewed starlets with a rictus smile. But then, go back further and you find H. V. Kaltenborn, the definitive serious commentator of the radio era, willingly gagging it up as a guest star with Fred Allen. The line between broadcast news and entertainment has always been finer than we want to think it was. If anything, that made me feel a bit better about my own radio career.

 

^^^^^
Journalism *is* show biz, and not just broadcast news. Yes, at its best it informs and enlightens more than amuses and titillates, but even the more sober and serious print publications have more than a little fluff. Comics, crossword puzzles, gardening columns, sports pages. Et cetera.

“There has to be something in this rag for everyone who picks it up,” I said to the millionaire with whom I started up a publication a couple decades ago. “We’re selling an audience to our advertisers,” I told her, “eyes on the page.”

 

And as to those TV news reporters of our salad days ...

I was partial to Sander Vanocur. His coverage of the events of 1968, a year which more than any other shaped my view of the world and my place in it (for better or for worse), will be with me until I either croak or go dingy.

 

In Canada, somewhere around 70% of Covid deaths have occurred in Long Term Care homes..... and the rate of death is still so very high in the homes.....coming up to one year now. It is not, in my view, due to hard heartedness, or even incompetence but I think if nothing else it proves some problems are beyond the capability of government to solve. I know this as the dead bodies keep piling up in the LTC homes.