Has the president ever said anything like this? “If you socially distanced and you wore a mask and you were smart, none of this would be a problem. It’s allllll self-imposed. It’s all self-imposed. If you didn’t eat the cheesecake, you wouldn’t have a weight problem.”
Trump looooooves to spread blame for his mistakes but offhand I can’t remember him blaming the victims of COVID for their own illness and resulting government-imposed hardships. He’ll blame China, he’ll blame experts like Fauci who were slow to embrace masks, but even POTUS had the basic good sense not to tell suffering people that if they’re struggling with the rules set for them, well, they should have thought of that before they let their guard down on social distancing.
Which, I hasten to add, doesn’t mean Cuomo’s entirely wrong. But he’s partially wrong. And he’s unbelievably tone deaf on a day when an egregious hardship is being imposed — again — on New Yorkers with little justification. Watch here until 13:15, as he spends a few minutes sneering at midwestern states like South Dakota for thinking back in March that coronavirus was a “New York problem.”
You know, New Yorkers might have done a better job avoiding the cheesecake if they didn’t have a mental defective in charge of the state back in March, force-feeding it to them via his incompetence. From his fateful (and fatal) delay in locking down to his infamous nursing-home policy, Cuomo built his own — if you’ll pardon the pun — cheesecake factory. And ever since he’s been pointing the finger at de Blasio, then Trump, and now at New Yorkers instead of at himself.
Is getting COVID “self-imposed” if you’re forced to work a front-line job because the scumbags who populate Congress don’t care enough about the people they represent to give them the means to stay home?
Update: The Senate is expected to recess tonight until after Thanksgiving. That means they will come back the week of Nov. 30 ahead of a Dec. 11 govt funding deadline.
There has been no progress on a Covid relief deal.
Very unlikely one will come together at this point
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) November 18, 2020
Is it self-imposed if you’re a doctor or nurse doing your best to keep patients alive, only to find yourself and all of your colleagues suddenly sick? If you’re one of those nursing-home residents who had the virus brought into their facility by an infected person under Cuomo’s genius guidance of keeping those people where they are, is that self-imposed?
Even scientists don’t know how people are getting infected:
In Germany, authorities say they don’t know where 75% of people who currently test positive for the coronavirus got it. In Austria, the figure stands at 77%. In Spain, the health ministry said that it was able to identify the origin of only 7% of infections registered in the last week of October. In France and Italy, only some 20% of new cases have been linked to people who previously tested positive.
Jay Varma, senior adviser for public health in the New York City mayor’s office, said 10% of the city’s infections are due to travel, 5% from gatherings, and another 5% from institutional settings such as nursing homes.
“The vast majority of the remainder—somewhere probably around 50% or more—we don’t have a way to directly attribute their source of infection,” Mr. Varma said. “And that’s a concern.”
Best guess is that infections are happening mainly in homes, as one member of the family who picked up the virus somewhere outside ends up bringing it in and spreading it to everyone else. But as a friend in Ohio said to me yesterday, everyone seems to be wearing a mask in public now; everyone seems to have gotten religion about keeping six feet away; and still, cases are skyrocketing. Precautions aren’t always effective, unless you’re Cuomo and looking to pass the buck for your own terrible policies to the people affected by them.
But again, he’s not entirely wrong. If you’re throwing a big Thanksgiving with extended family this year because it’s the only proper way to own the libs like Gavin Newsom then you are, in fact, serving up cheesecake to everyone there. And to a lot of people who aren’t there and are doing their best not to get infected.
Exit question: Does Cuomo’s administration do anything right? If they can’t even count votes, how exactly does this state function?
