Mount Everest vs. stack of American COVID-19 dead |
It looks like mandatory face masks are coming to this corner of eastern Nebraska.
At long last, and with the bodies starting to pile up.
The Douglas County Board of Health voted unanimously Monday to authorize the health director, Adi Pour, to require wearing face masks here. As usual, Trumpers and other assorted wingnuts lined up to champion their "freedom" to infect others amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Because 'Murika.
Others expressed concerns that masks prevent their children from developing healthy immune systems. And some said fears about the virus are overblown.
“Why are we making a mountain out of a mole hill?” Seth Paulson of Valley said.
Pour pushed back against those who questioned public health data.
She said she felt comfortable about local case trends around the Fourth of July. But week by week since the holiday, cases have risen, and Pour said the time is right for a mandate.
Douglas County last week saw its highest three-day run of new cases — 476 — since the end of May. Pour noted that the county recorded a total of 940 new cases of COVID-19 during the week that ended Saturday, a 50% increase from the week before and the highest weekly total since May 30.
In addition, the positivity rate for tests increased to 9.6% last week from 7% the week prior.
“This is not an easy decision,” she said. “If the data had been different the last two weeks, I probably would have said it’s not necessary. But the data tells a different story.”
AFTER THE Omaha World-Herald story posted online, former columnist Matthew Hansen highlighted anti-masker Paulson's objection on Twitter and wondered how many bodies would make a mountain. Hansen didn't do the math.
I did.
We now have about 150,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19, and experts say that number surely is an undercount.
Now, let's assume the average depth of these bodies is 1.5 feet -- fat, skinny, adult, child . . . roughly average it out. Now stack the bodies one atop the other like a giant pillar of corpses.
Your stack of American corpses would be 225,000 feet high.
Now divide that by 5,280, the number of feet in a mile. That makes the stack of American COVID corpses 42.6 miles high -- 42.6136363 miles, to be exact. I think that qualifies as mountain high. Mount Everest, after all, is just under 5.5 miles high at 29,020 feet.
No, Seth. You have it backward. You're making a mole hill out of 7.7532736 Mount Everests.
Now shut the hell up.
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