The system is simply overrun

The current COVID hotspot is India and it is hot. In a tweet from five days ago Lina Srivastava wrote:

It's a massacre in India. The country is collapsing. The Indian government has utterly failed Indians. And the Global North, by refusing to lift bans on export materials or provide material assistance, has abandoned India. Infuriating and heartbreaking.

The tweet includes a link to an article in Forbes with the headline India Logs Almost 1 Million New Covid Cases in Three Days Amid Deadly Surge. I didn’t read the article. In the five days since that tweet, India has reported above 350,000 cases a day. That’s a million cases every three days or three million cases in the last week and a half. Aruni Kashyap tweeted:

Indians across the globe are perhaps on the brink of a mental collapse at this point. We are stuck around the world and we can’t do anything for our loved ones except praying and wishing well. Anxiety. Sadness. Rage. Guilt. The thought that an inept government brought this on ...

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos summarized the state of the virus in America, then provided more details of what is going on in India.

On Tuesday, India reported over 360,000 new cases of COVID-19. That’s a new record for any day in any nation. It was just last week that India first surged past the worst days of the United States’ big fall wave, but now even those numbers are starting to recede into the “not so bad” territory. Worse still, it’s painfully obvious that the numbers coming from India, in terms of both cases and deaths, are massively undercounting what’s really happening. At every stage—testing, hospitalization, and handling deaths—the system is simply overrun. As The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, patients in India are now on their own. Families are conducting a mad search for a hospital bed in a system that’s overwhelmed on every level, and where effective communication has been crushed under the burden of simple need. That means ferrying sick relatives from one location to the next, seeking assistance that doesn’t exist. Or desperately trying to find oxygen. It means watching people who could easily survive COVID-19 if they could get basic treatment die in their homes. Then it means hauling them to parks or parking lots to be burned in mass cremations that are burning 24/7.

Sumner then shared other reasons why the collapse of India is a world problem: * The world’s largest democracy is no more safe from disruption than any other. * India is a major source of pharmaceuticals, the “Pharmacy of the World.” It can’t supply enough vaccine for its own population and companies without workers could be unable to supply other necessary drugs to the rest of the world. * India is a nuclear power between two other nuclear powers and has border disputes with both. Might they attack an unstable India? Might India believe they are ready to strike and strike first? * India is so populous the virus will have plenty of opportunity to create new variants. Some of these might laugh at our vaccines. * India’s economy is big enough that a downturn there will be felt around the world. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported on a poll by NBC News. Basic finding: When talking about voting Democrats want to make sure all eligible people can vote. Republicans want to make sure that all ineligible people can’t vote. Hint to the GOP: ineligible voters already can’t. Cases where they try are quite rare. Yeah, I’m very aware the GOP definition of “ineligible” is black people, brown people, and anyone who doesn’t vote Republican. Hunter of Kos discussed a long article by Andrew Prokop of Vox about Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The article (in Hunter’s words) show Manchin’s

ability to survive in a state now dominated by hard-right Republicanism, and his (ahem) peculiarly optimistic belief in compromise as antidote to all that ails us. Interspersed through the piece are quite a few quotes from Manchin that paint him as someone who ... hmm. How to put it? For a master of getting reelected in a Republican state, the man's observations about the current state of the Senate and of the nation in general feel more aspirational than sensical. ... As one example: Manchin categorically dismisses concerns that Republicans will systemically obstruct Biden and Democratic priorities, even as he appears to acknowledge that that is precisely what Republicans did during the last Democratic administration—the same Republicans, in fact, with Sen. Mitch McConnell leading the way. “I don’t think that can be repeated, or that people would stand for it, or even that the Republican caucus would adhere to that again,” says Manchin. Really? Based on what? No, seriously, what moves have Republicans made, since looking to contest the election and prevent the Biden administration from even coming to existence, since shouting conspiracy theories that stoked violent insurrection, that give Manchin this optimism?

Dr. Reece Jones, Professor of Geography and Environment at University of Hawai’i, tweeted:

Your daily reminder that Border Patrol agents are arrested for crimes at a rate five times higher than regular police.

He then linked to two articles, one on Imtoline about a BP officer who assaulted his wife, and another on QZ about that arrest rate. In my understanding the BP job attracts supremacists, willing to harm those desperate enough to attempt to cross the border. And supremacists want to be supreme in all areas of their lives. When Michael Harriot was young his cousin showed him a jar that could catch sunlight. Harriott couldn’t get his jar to do the same thing. Spoiler alert: glow in the dark paint was involved. He concluded:

Now, my cousin is Black, but that’s when I first understood white privilege. A lot of white people really believe that anyone who is doesn’t succeed in America MUST’VE been doing it wrong. They really believe white people don’t get shot by cops because wypipo don’t resist. They really believe the disparities in criminal justice is because white people aren’t committing crimes. They really think it’s a “poverty problem not a racism problem” that could easily be solved with a little more white education & negro elbow grease. But I get it... That’s how white privilege works. They really think they know how to catch the sun. Even worse, they truly believe we could do it too if we just used the right jar. ...Like the one that was handed to them.