On Friday, Dr. Fauci said we are headed toward an exponential growth curve where cases could double in one day, then double again the next. The CDC is saying there is no way to safely celebrate Thanksgiving except within your immediate bubble. Please…
Before we discuss a very serious subject, Thanksgiving and Covid, I want to update folks on our 2021 Legislative Advocacy Network meeting yesterday. Twenty five advocates from around the state refined plans for legislative advocacy focused on the NM State Senate, where bills have died year after year.
We have a plan. Now we need you.
While Retake will continue to operate its statewide alert system during the session, we are also organizing constituents of Democratic State Senators to organize a zoom conversation with their Senator in December. While bills will not have been formally introduced, we will have bill language and speaking points, we have goood contact info for all Senators, and we have a growing number District Coordinators who will organize Zoom calls with their Senators, inviting all advocates to be part of the zoom.
Retake is asking everyone interested in being part of a Zoom conversation with their State Senator to write to RetakeResponse@gmail.com and provide us your name and Senate District. If you don’t know your Senate district, you can get it by clicking here. All you need to do is provide your address and in a second you will see a picture of your State Senator smiling at you with his/her name and District Number.
We will publish our refined strategy next week after it is vetted with others.
Let’s do this.
- To review our list of bills we support, click here.
- To review our 2021 Legislative strategy, click here.
COVID Surging Out of Control; CDC Recommends Strongly
Stay Home
I am actually a tad uncomfortable about making such a strongly worded recommendation. All of us are adults and I am guessing most all of you read/watch the news and understand the situation. But, Friday afternoon’s NY Times Covid update was the bleakest report yet, with Dr. Fauci predicting that we are headed toward the worst phase of the pandemic and I just wanted to send this along, in case some of you are on the fence about what to do next week.
Update from Monday, Nov. 23:
As I finalizes Monday’s post, I have read of how the airlines are jammed with reservations and parts of the country are heedlessly celebrating masklessly. It occurred to me, that this post was likely preaching to the converted. I suspect most of you are trusting science and sadly planning Thanksgiving at home. But from one of our readers I was told of an email she received from a good friend, whose comment was, “I just came from a social at a friends and am planning to host Thanksgiving, too. The vaccine is coming; we’ve got this.” As this report makes very, very clear, we have not got this. It has got us and the only way we can avoid a an almost inconceivably disastrous winter, is to stay home this week.
You may understand this, but perhaps you have cousins, friends, or colleagues in other states who are going full steam ahead. Please share this link with them and ask them to cancel their plans.
The map above is our country today and from multiple reports from the CDC to other experts, what we do on Thanksgiving could make this map look, much, much, much worse. Exponentially worse. Consider this: positivity test rates in Wyoming are now at 90% and Mississippi is close to that rate at 87%.
From The NY Times Covid Report:
“Epidemiologists dread exponential growth because cases can quickly double, then double again. As the country edges closer to recording 200,000 newly detected infections a day, the numbers could become staggering.”
NY Times Covid Update, November 20
The curves below are current, but consider what exponential growth means: 400,000 cases tomorrow. The projections are mind numbing.
In these conditions and with so much at stake, experts say that there is no way to celebrate Thanksgiving safely except with those within the household that lives within your personal bubble. That does not include friends or family who have been trying to stay safe, as most of us have. The trend lines above are clear. Hospitals are full to capacity and doctors are facing the horrific necessity to decide who will get treatment and who will simply die.
Fauci offered hope for which we can be thankful, the immanent release of what appears to be two very effective vaccines. But he also offered this dire comment.
From Dr. Fauci:
““this [the vaccine] should be a motivation to double down even more to get us through this until the vaccine comes to the rescue.”
Don’t take the vaccines as an invitation to throw caution to the wind, he said. “It’s kind of like the last soldier to get killed in a war when the war is going to be over soon. You don’t want to be that person.”
NY Times: Dr. Anthony Fauci
Commenting upon Thanksgiving gatherings, Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island, put it this way: “I hate to be apocalyptic, but it’ll be the day that will determine our trajectory for the rest of the year.”
The NY Times Covid report yesterday had quotes from numerous pandemic experts, emergency docs, and the CDC. All said the same thing: there is no safe way to celebrate Thanksgiving with anyone except those how have been living in your home in your bubble.
Retake has become a kind of community over the years and we have grown to care for all of you. Let’s stay safe next week. If you have plans that involve guests, please consider cancelling those plans. We have a responsibility as a nation to pull together.
In solidarity and hope….. we can get through this…..
Paul & Roxanne
Categories: COVID
What, specifically, should we be doing now to influence the Georgia Senate race? (If you have already a ddressed this request-it bears repeating….) Happy solitary Thanksgiving! Harriet
truth in our house – let’s make turkey sandwiches & the side dishes…, everyone looks forward to the trimmings more than the bird!!
Hi Paul and Roxanne. Thanks for the SCOTUS eye opener. A carbon copy of the religion playbook set into the Constitution, now unfolding its final chapter.
But on to threat inside – the sinistre’ plot to infect a majority of the ‘murkan population to the point where society breaks down and its government cannot hold the nation together. This is the boilerplate for Extinction No. 6.
I have written, often here and in WaPo, of the need to consider NOT the deaths or hospitalizations (as tragic and debilitating as they are), but rather the long and arduous recoveries of the vast majority of C19 positive cases. This phenomenon is the crushing blow I speak of, where both prolonged and chronic side effects leave otherwise healthy and productive folks incapable of returning to an energetic state, and the systems needed to support them fragmented and failing.
Yes, stay home for the holiday. But it goes far deeper. C19 began its contagion like any other microbe or parasite – randomly (stochastically) moving about looking for hosts to occupy, infect and breed within. It is 100 percent a math and probability issue. Given its ecological limitations, C19 needed NUMBERS of hosts to get rolling, and for the first few months, those numbers were small enough to at first suppress its expansion.
But due to the psychological addiction to winning, ‘murka’s population thought one win was enough. But the virus simply kept on reproducing and moving from host to host, asymptomatic or not, and six moths later, it has reached deep into every corner of the geographic distribution of humans, and where once there were only 1 or 2 infected hosts per square mile, now the population here are 40 to 75 infections per sq. mi. The ‘murkan average is 90 persons/sq.mi., so magnify that by the density of cities (at least one factor of 10) and we arrive at total (deterministic), or exponential infection rates.
Then add the terrifying acute testing/sickening/hospitalizing/dying episodes WITH the chronic, debilitating aftermaths of those already long sickened, and you have chaos.
We know other nations have avoided this catastrophe. We see the numbers.
The ‘murkan genocide now in play was PLANNED, from the get go, by the religious-zealot conservative, extinct R party cabal, to seriously thin the population of minorities, homosexuals, urban liberals, unruly feminists, scientific professionals, educators and the poor, regardless of ethnicity or political affiliation.
Poor, misinformed and undereducated rednecks are just as loathe some to the sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, sadists and perverts as are the many minority groups that represent democratic peoples.
As an ecologist, I have studied, worked within and observed the interplay between biodiversity and extinction for 50 years, using the templates of science and philosophy generated across millennia.
Just as disease and imbalances have always occurred with all of biota, they have rarely, if ever, been found to be the sole driver of any extinction event. But now, one species has developed serious predatory behaviors, wholly parasitic, within its own group, now exhibiting cannibalistic strategies that use a different ‘species’ of microbe, a virus, to kill and digest its own kind.
We think altruistically about family, tribe, city, state or nation, in hopes of improving it via participation. But there is a psychotic force, a perilous enemy within that is in full-blown suicide/genocide mode as I write this tome.
We need every healthy mind and body on board in the next two months, to do ‘whatever is necessary’ to beat down this virulent cabal, or the next legislative session will only drive more nails into our coffins.
Who among us will receive the first 20-50m doses of vaccine? What government will show up to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? What government here has EVER demonstrated its loyalty to the proposition that all ‘peoples’ are created equal?
Follow the rhetoric and compare it to the actual actions. It will be ‘pay to play’ and the viral tool of C19 will kill and maim the many for unknown months to come.
Revolution or Extinction.
Mick Nickel
I sent the following to Lujan Grisham, Egolf, and Wirth to give them talking points:
First and foremost, congratulations on your reelection and on securing the Democratic majority in the House. I know you are already at work strategizing for the important 2021 legislative session and have set priorities. I urge you to make one of your top priorities the abolition of the anti-abortion law on the books. We are all aware that even with a Democrat as president, the Supreme Court will probably overturn Roe v Wade sooner rather than later and New Mexico must be prepared to defend its women.
Let me tell you why I think dismissal of the anti-abortion law is so central to the Democratic Party’s mission. Basically, it is a privacy issue rather than a right-to-life issue. If women do not have the right to privacy of their bodies, then no citizen does – men, women, gays, transgender, etc. And just as privacy on the internet or in our homes is central to our democratic principles, so should pro-choice be.
Let me give you another reason for prioritizing pro-choice in this session. As you know, I conducted anthropological research on Mongolians’ views of democracy soon after its citizens rejected Soviet socialism and ratified a Western-style democratic constitution (1992). What I learned from people who had suffered under socialism for 70 years is that they believe democracy gives them the opportunity for gaining what they want most: dignity—personal and national. How do people gain dignity? Through self-determination and rule of law (everyone is equal before the law—I don’t have to tell YOU that). In short, before Covid-19, people all over the world were agitating for dignity (e.g., the Arab Spring).
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Based on this research and on what I have observed in the USA over the past decades, I am convinced that what Americans want is dignity, too. Often, Americans equate dignity with having a job and being able to provide for their families. But they also equate it with having the ability to make their own decisions. And that is why getting the anti-abortion law off the books is so important now: we must grant ALL New Mexico citizens the dignity that can only come with the right to make their own decisions. That is why I urge you to prioritize this action in the upcoming legislative session.
Somewhat hypocritical – you are touting the right to make our own decisions except for COVID-related matters? The SCIENCE tells us that those mostly at risk are elderly and those with comorbidities, yet we restrict EVERYBODY from so many everyday activities, including activities that keep us healthy. Imagine all the elective surgeries and other health matters that were not addressed early on and even still because we took a BLANKET approach and have been opening and closing, opening and closing. We are individuals and have unique life circumstances; we CAN make good decisions without restricting ALL life activities and businesses. I might add that the “scientists” have been inconsistent and even wrong at times, and guidelines/restrictions contradictory at times. Based on the science, it appears we can mask up, socially distance, and keep a lot more open than we are.
These graphs are so disheartening yet I just wished a friend in Naples, Florida a “Happy Birthday”. She proceeded to tell me that their 100,000 population will swell to 300,000 in the next week as the Snow Birds head south–already up 50,000 just this past week. That “story” is truly disheartening. I still say that IF those 250,000 deaths were children/adolescents we would not be where we are but SINCE those deaths are the elderly, those with underlying medical conditions and (largely) minorities Americans will continue to ignore the pandemic. My friend also told me, “It is almost over now with the vaccine” and she had just returned from a “social” event with a dozen people. I truly think that the exponential growth from Thanksgiving – we must get together – large gatherings will fulfill those premonitions.