Why? Here's Why

 

 

 

There's a great article in The Atlantic about why The Empire is so comfy wumfy with nearly 1,000,000 dead Americans from COVID.  Here is an especially compelling excerpt from the article:   America is accepting not only a threshold of death but also a gradient of death. Elderly people over the age of 75 are 140 times more likely to die than people in their 20s. Among vaccinated people, those who are immunocompromised account for a disproportionate share of severe illness and death. Unvaccinated people are 53 times more likely to die of COVID than vaccinated and boosted people; they’re also more likely to be uninsured, have lower incomes and less education, and face eviction risk and food insecurity. Working-class people were five times more likely to die from COVID than college graduates in 2020, and in California, essential workers continued dying at disproportionately high rates even after vaccines became widely available. Within every social class and educational tier, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people died at higher rates than white people. If all adults had died at the same rates as college-educated white people, 71 percent fewer people of color would have perished. People of color also died at younger ages: In its first year, COVID erased 14 years of progress in narrowing the life-expectancy gap between Black and white Americans. Because death fell inequitably, so did grief: Black children were twice as likely to have lost a parent to COVID than white ones, and Indigenous children, five times as likely. Older, sicker, poorer, Blacker or browner, the people killed by COVID were treated as marginally in death as they were in life. Accepting their losses comes easily to “a society that places a hierarchy on the value of human life, which is absolutely what America is built on,” Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist at the Michigan State University, told me.   So - for The Empire - it's pretty OK for the elderly, the poor, People of Color, to die more often than - you know - slim white Instagram-influencing younglings..  I would add fatties to the list that the In Crowd finds acceptably dead.. (ugh.. fatties right? The worst of all.. Sweaty, lumbering, bags of flesh. It's amazing that you all can tolerate us as well as you do. We really do appreciate it.)   Here's the killer (no pun intended) part of that excerpt above:      Accepting their losses comes easily to “a society that places a hierarchy on the value of human life, which is absolutely what America is built on.   Let's get back to normal!   Let's go to brunch!  What's new on Netflix?

 

 

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