There may be areas where activities taken to reduce the threat of the virus will also protect people from the flu. Wisconsin is not one of those areas.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/wisconsin...143650745.html
Title: Wisconsin is battling America's worst coronavirus outbreak, and the state's broken politics are partly to blame
Excerpts:
The gist is, the virus numbers coming out of Wisconsin are bad, and this is not an accident or something random.Look at a map of daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Most of the Northeast and West Coast is yellow, indicating limited spread. The numbers across the Southeast tend to be moderate, or orange. Move into the Upper Midwest and more red hot spots start to appear.
And then there’s one state that’s covered in crimson: Wisconsin.
Right now Wisconsin is battling the worst coronavirus outbreak in America. The question is why. What about Wisconsin is different from, say, the neighboring states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois, where the virus isn’t spreading nearly as fast?
The answer, at least in part, is politics: specifically, the brand of cavalier, it-will-go-away politics propagated by President Trump and parroted by lower-level Republicans who seem hell-bent on resisting efforts to sustain social distancing and mask wearing when the spread is still low enough to contain — and in Wisconsin’s case, who continue to resist even after infections spiral out of control.
They need field hospitals to hold all of patients they have.Next week Wisconsin officials plan to open a 530-bed field hospital at the state fairgrounds to keep COVID-19 patients from flooding heath care facilities, which Democratic Gov. Tony Evers recently characterized as being “on the brink” of collapse.
“We hoped this day wouldn’t come,” Evers lamented. “But unfortunately, Wisconsin is in a much different, more dire place today. ... There’s no other way to put it: We are overwhelmed.”
Basically, Governor Evers, a democrat, put into place attempts to control the pandemic. Republicans turned to the courts to overrule these attempts. Republicans won the court cases.The most disturbing thing about Wisconsin’s outbreak is that it didn’t have to be this bad. NBC described the problem as “political trench warfare between the Democratic governor and the Republicans who control the state Legislature.” That’s technically accurate, but it also makes it sound like both sides are defending equally sensible positions aimed at preventing the spread of COVID-19.
They’re not. On the one hand, Evers has repeatedly tried to do everything in his power to contain the pandemic. On the other, Republicans have repeatedly challenged Evers’s authority and thwarted his efforts, blocking the sort of basic public-health measures other states have enacted while touting themselves as champions of “individual liberty.”
The first and perhaps most consequential of these skirmishes came in the spring, when the Legislature’s Republican leaders filed a lawsuit arguing that Evers’s “safer at home” order would leave the state’s economy “in shambles” — even though it was no stricter than dozens of other shelter-in-place orders in effect across the country. On May 13 the state’s Supreme Court, which was also controlled by conservatives, sided with the GOP and overturned the order. Evers was not pleased, telling CNN that the court’s ruling “puts our state into chaos.”
“Now we have no plan and no protections for the people of Wisconsin,” the governor said. “When you have more people in a small space — I don’t care if it’s bars, restaurants or your home — you’re going to be able to spread the virus. And so now, today, thanks to the Republican legislators who convinced four Supreme Court justices to not look at the law but [to] look at their political careers, I guess, it’s a bad day for Wisconsin.”
“It’s the Wild West,” he added.
And so basically Wisconsin right now is where Georgia was a few months ago. Georgia led efforts to make the virus as strong as possible based on the work of Governor Kemp to block virus protection policies. He has since backed off, and Georgia's numbers are getting much better.This relentless campaign to delegitimize pandemic precautions as partisan overreach comes with a cost. It discourages compliance. It disincentivizes enforcement. And it preemptively restricts the government’s ability to address a worsening crisis.
Now, in Wisconsin, republican legislators and republican courts are continuing Kemp's work blocking anything Evers tries to do try to control the virus. They have been wildly successful in their political victories, and all of Wisconsin is paying the price. Trump's recent antics will no doubt inspire Wisconsin republicans to double down on their destructive political activities.