Day 112: You Can't Handle the Truth

A scandal has been simmering for a while now about a New York state directive sending infected patients to nursing homes. The state has promised numbers, someday. The Associated Press got tired of waiting and counted for themselves, concluding that more than 4,300 COVID-19 patients were sent into nursing homes between March 25th and the governor's reversal of the order on May 10th. The governor now claims that nursing homes could have refused patients, although the directive said that they couldn't (at least until April 29th, when they were separately advised by the Health Department to reject new patients under certain circumstances).

The AP documents protests of this remarkably bad idea from the get go, but the governor's overriding concern seems to have been making space in the hospitals for more patients. That of course never precluded his current course of action (sending such patients to the overflow facilities), nor the obvious course of designating some facilities exclusively for infected patients (which other health care institutions have managed to pull off).

PlagueBlog wonders whether denial of the unspeakable truth that coronavirus almost always kills the old and unwell was the overriding factor in the stunning lack of clue necessary to send contagious coronavirus patients to nursing homes (many of which are also rehab facilities) chock full of the old and unwell. Yes, normally you'd send someone to a rehab after the hospital, but not if the direct result of doing so is going to be a vicious cycle of more hospitalizations and an unconscionable increase in deaths.

PlagueBlog also speculates that misinformation about the (virtually non-existent) risks of coronavirus to the young directly inspires conspiracy theories about the disease being a hoax, a side-effect of 5G towers, a globalist conspiracy to take away your rights, etc., etc. When you lie to people, they start wondering what the truth is, and when there's no obvious rational explanation, they seek out the irrational ones.

Massachusetts is up 1% again today. (This repetition in numbers is brought to you by the plateau and by PlagueBlog's rounding service.)