The Pro-Choice Republicans
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The Trump family refused to wear masks at Tuesday’s debate, and now a bunch of staffers are sick with COVID:
At least 11 positive coronavirus tests can be traced to members of the media or organizers of this week’s presidential debate in Cleveland, city and clinic officials said Friday.
The city’s announcement came after President Donald Trump, who debated Democratic rival Joe Biden on Tuesday in Cleveland, revealed he and his wife have both tested positive for Covid-19 and are in isolation. Trump was transported to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday. . .
A prominent Ohio lawmaker who attended the debate went into self-isolation on Friday after learning about Trump’s positive test.
Ohio House Minority Leader Emilia Strong Sykes said she personally witnessed members of the president’s entourage declining masks from health care providers — from the Cleveland Clinic — inside the hall at Case Western Reserve University.
“I am frustrated today as I worry now about my own health and the health of so many others who were present that evening like journalists, support staff, Cleveland Clinic professionals, and many others who could have potentially been exposed,” Sykes said in a statement on Friday.
“This didn’t have to happen,” Sykes said. “If more would follow the guidelines, this wouldn’t continue to happen.”
Of course we don’t know if the staffers were infected directly by somebody in Trump’s entourage, just as we don’t know who Patient Zero was at Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination announcement.
It could have been Barrett herself, who had COVID very recently, although exactly how recently is remaining conveniently unspecified. Did Barrett tell anybody at her little superspreader event that she and her multifarious family (I wouldn’t be surprised if one of her kids was an asymptomatic carrier) had all be exposed to COVID, before people jammed themselves maskless into that tightly packed space? Seems like a line of questioning worth pursuing.
Still, it’s highly unlikely that any of the GOP bigwigs who have just come down with COVID will actually die from it.
They won’t die from it because they’re upper class people with easy access to excellent medical care.
The people who are dying from COVID are, with occasional exceptions, either very old and sick already, or poor and working class, often with no health insurance at all (Despite the ACA — which of course the GOP is actively trying to destroy by putting Judge Superspreader on the SCOTUS — there are still 30 million people in this country with no health coverage of any kind).
This is why the mortality rate from COVID is double among Blacks relative to Whites — because Black people are far less likely to have access to decent medical care, because they’re far more likely to be poor or otherwise sufficiently economically or socially marginal, and therefore not have access to the great medical care that is going to guarantee that nobody at Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination announcement is going to die of COVID.
Of course if you’re a Republican this is all an illustration of why we shouldn’t, unlike every other developed country in the world, have universal access to health care. Because the right people are getting hurt: the poor, who are poor because they’re lazy, and the blacks, who are especially likely to be poor, because of their bad work habits, drug use, etc.
This is America.