The Party of Death

Now that the vaccines are giving us a glimpse of what may be the end of the pandemic, some states' governors are not only declaring their states completely open for all types of business, but dropping their mask mandates. Even though under 10% of their populations have been vaccinated. 

The rightly much-maligned marshmallow test seems appropriate in this case: how much more obvious can it be that you just have to wait a few more months? 

Maybe you can reopen some things as long as people are wearing masks, yes. Maybe you can reopen schools if you vaccinate all of the staff and improve the ventilation and require masks, yes. But you can't reopen everything with no masks and no attention to much of anything else, governors of Texas and Mississippi and who knows where else.

MSNBC showed this graph of excess deaths in Texas last night. The gray lines are the five years before 2020; the red lines are 2020 and the beginning of 2021:

As you can see, the years have generally had pretty similar levels of excess death, and 2020 started off the same way, but then it started trending upward, spiked up in July, settled a bit, then rose again in fall, hitting a new peak in January. In February 2021 it actually fell below the usual trend line.

Which you would think would be good news, but I guess Greg Abbott thinks more people need to die or something?

I feel so badly for the people of Texas and Mississippi, who will be hit by the effects of this right after (and still during their recovery from) the failure of their power and water infrastructure. The people of Jackson, Mississippi have been without water for three weeks now! And their governor thinks this lack of leadership is what he should be doing with his time. 

He hasn't called for a federal disaster declaration to get them financial help to repair their water system, though. Too many Black people in Jackson, it must be, and it's a "Democrat-run" city, after all.  

The Republican Party is the party of death.