Matt York/AP Photo
At a COVID-19 testing site at Steele Indian School Park, in Phoenix. Arizona is among the states reporting growing numbers of infections.
Coronavirus cases are now on the rise in 22 states, mostly red states where Republican governors followed Trump’s advice to open early.
You might say there is poetic justice in this, except people’s lives are at stake. Severe illness or death is too harsh a punishment for political gullibility. It’s the cynical politicians who deserve retribution.
When you average the states where cases are increasing with more prudent states where cases are falling, we’re almost back at a plateau. And it gets worse. The New England Journal of Medicine has just published an item about a research study showing that 58 percent of people in a sample who tested positive for the virus were asymptomatic.
That means that as states open prematurely, millions of people who think they don’t have the virus and are taking no precautions will infect millions of others. The study was based on testing passengers from the cruise ship Diamond Princess, which finally was permitted to dock and let off passengers after becoming a floating petri dish with 712 people infected.
So the real rates of infection in places that are being impatient and careless are likely to keep spiking.
Speaking of the pandemic, nursing home owners have been complaining that they are severely understaffed because nurse aides (CNAs) do better staying home and taking the $600 supplemental unemployment benefit rather than coming to work and exposing themselves to sickness and death, for dismal pay.
Republicans want to solve the problem by killing the supplemental benefit, which expires at the end of July. Uh, there’s a better solution. Raise the pay of CNAs to at least $25 an hour, plus another $15 for hardship pay as long as the pandemic lasts.
