Military Cases Triple

Posted on by Thor

COVID-19 cases in the United States have surged almost three-fold in the military since just before Christmas of 2021 according to defense department statistics. The Defense Department reported just under 5,300 cases among service members December 22, 2021. By January 5, 2022 that number reached more than 13,900.

As of September 1, 2021 there were 40 military member deaths due to COVID-19. By January 5, 2022 the total was 86. In response, the military is increasing health protection protocols on many bases and at the pentagon.

Wright Patterson Air Force Base has moved to the highest level of health protection measures which includes now allowing only 15% of the workforce in the office at a time.

One base that has seen a post holiday surge is Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which currently has an estimated 50% positivity rate among those being tested. The base hospital, Womack Army Medical Center, was at 100% capacity at the end of last week, a military official there told CNN.

The jump reflects, to some extent, what is happening in civilian society as the Omicron variant has taken hold and case rates have risen in many communities across the country, defense officials say. The Defense Department does not test specifically for the Omicron variant but officials say there is every reason to believe the highly contagious variant has hit the military force.

Trump’s Rally Plans Toppled

Posted on by Thor

The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse are pestilence, war, famine, and death. The fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse is astounding incompetence. After dismissing prescient advice on pandemic preparedness from the outgoing Obama administration, the Trump administration went on to weaken the nation’s pandemic response capabilities. Trump eliminated the White House global health security office that was established following the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic to foster cross-agency pandemic preparedness, and in late 2019, he ended a global early warning program, PREDICT, that identified viruses with pandemic potential. Quite simply Trump ignores science and reason. Rather than “Making America Great Again”  incompetence and failure of leadership have ushered in an unprecedented public health crisis that continues to threaten the lives and livelihoods of countless Americans.

On top of the pandemic the country has become galvanized behind the protests after the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer kneeling on his neck. The tide it slowly tuning as protests have been going on for weeks. NASCAR has decided that displays of the Confederate flag at races are no longer tolerated. The US military is considering re-naming bases that are named after confederate traitors like Fort Bragg names after Braxton Bragg, Confederate army officer who served as a general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. The confederacy tried to split the union and lost.

Protestors are toppling Confederate statues around the country. The statues were put up long after the south lost the war a symbols of slavery. A neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to the death of one protester resulted in calls to tear down statues of Confederate leaders, but conservative local politicians largely managed to keep the statues in place. Those tides are finally turning. There are now also calls to remove confederate statues from inside the US Capitol building. Racism is a painful sickness this country has dealt with for a very long time.

Trump is adamantly opposed to changing the names, tweeting Wednesday that he would “not even consider” doing so. Just hours after Trumps announcement, the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee approved an amendment to the annual defense policy bill that would require the Pentagon to rename bases and other military assets bearing the names of Confederate leaders. Senator Dick Durbin, from Illinois said, that Trump’s resistance is so out of touch as to be almost irrelevant, it’s part of the reckoning that’s long overdue.

Some things need to be toppled.