convincing the USA to enact universal healthcare

[mellowtigger]

We've learned more about how long SARS-CoV-2 can stay viable on surfaces, more about how it travels through air, and more about how it infects cells. It's time to change my earlier recommendation against using face masks. I maintain that people should not buy N95 respirators that are desperately needed by medical staff now.

I do wish, though, that I had a good cloth mask to use when I go shopping. I bought a new dish towel on my last shopping trip, but this cloth is too thick to let me breathe normally.  Exhaled air simply jets out from the open spaces near my nostrils then fogs up my glasses. I'm sure that inhaled air is doing the same, bypassing the cloth altogether.  A proper nose-fitting mask would be better. I signed up on the waiting list for this washable copper facemask, but who knows when I can actually get one.

Don't expect the toilet paper shortage to change soon either. Production will eventually shift away from the unused business rolls to the surging home rolls, but that change takes time.

I consider MIT one of the best technical schools in the world. Their Technology Review article titled "We're not going back to normal" is enlightening. Their chart shows how we can expect repeated stay-at-home orders over the course of the next 1.5 years, reducing and increasing their implementation as new COVID-19 cases show up in hospitals. They close, though, with this final sentence:

The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615370/coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing-18-months/

Similarly, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) stated plainly that countries need to make healthcare readily available to all of their citizens in order to combat this pandemic. He offered a too-short summary in a tweet, but the Executive Director's longer explanation at a press briefing is much better.

There are three main areas for countries to focus on.  First, we call on all countries to ensure core public health measures are fully funded, including case-finding, testing, contact tracing, collecting data, and communication and information campaigns.  Second, we also call on countries and partners to strengthen the foundations of health systems. That means health workers must be paid their salaries, and health facilities need a reliable supply of funding to purchase essential medical supplies.  Third, we call on all countries to remove financial barriers to care.  If people delay or forego care because they can’t afford it, they not only harm themselves, they make the pandemic harder to control and put society at risk.
https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19--3-april-2020
https://youtu.be/QjfDPeydUSg?t=206 (YouTube, United Nations channel, WHO update 2020 April 03)

He's basically addressing the USA.  If you doubt my claim, then listen to the previous WHO update where the Executive Director ties himself into a linguistic pretzel while trying for 4 minutes specifically not to name the USA while criticizing exactly our current situation.

The WHO is all but telling the USA to get its act together and implement universal healthcare (perhaps a Bernie Sanders' Medicare-For-All plan).  Knowing that our establishment (including Democrats) is beholden to all major financial interests (including healthcare) and will never do such a very reasonable thing, however, means that Americans can all share in the same reaction:



You'd think I would stop writing these pieces that take over 5 hours to research and hyperlink, but apparently there's still too much to say.

Stay safe out there.  This party is just getting started.