“Two weeks to flatten curve.”
Remember that? It was several months ago now.
The deal elected officials struck with the American people was to trade lockdowns for hospital capacity. The fear in the early days of the COVID pandemic was that hospital capacity would be overwhelmed if we didn’t lock down, curb activity, and so forth. So we got “two weeks to flatten the curve.”
New York City built a hospital into its Javits Convention Center. President Trump sent a Navy hospital ship to handle the expected caseload.
None of that capacity was needed. Way back in June, CNN declared that New York had “flattened the curve.” The Javits no longer has a hospital, and the Navy ship went away. We flattened the curve. To hear the media discuss it, despite New York (city and state) being the site of thousands of COVID deaths, they’re the example the rest of the nation should follow.
Well, Mayor Bill de Blasio has altered the deal.
We've made great progress on COVID-19, but we're not done until we hit zero. Here’s a look at the numbers:
•332 new reported cases
•61 patients admitted to hospitals
•Citywide positive tests are at 1.93%Practice social distancing, wear face coverings and avoid large crowds.
— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) September 28, 2020
The likelihood that we ever get to zero cases is, well, zero. Coronavirus is a virus. Once virii hit human populations, they tend to come and go seasonally. Despite all the promising news we’ve heard about vaccines lately, vaccines don’t mean the virus cases zero out anytime soon, if ever.
The flu infects hundreds of thousands every year and kills somewhere between 24,000 and over 60,000 Americans annually. We have a flu vaccine. We’ll never have zero flu cases. It took decades to get to zero U.S. polio cases.
The COVID numbers de Blasio reports in his tweet are tiny. Plus, “cases” can mean a lot things, from positive tests all the way up to hospitalizations. The city’s test positive rate is low.
But he wants to keep New York under his COVID-unist bootheel “until we hit zero.”
He’ll kill the city’s economy, and then the city itself, if he’s allowed to do this.
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