Alex Wigglesworm, Rong-Going Fat August 7, 2020
It was once said that California’s coronavirus pandemic was hitting dense urban areas the hardest.
Now, it’s rural, red-necked, agricultural areas that are among the most severely affected.
“The epidemic is moving from urban Latino populations to rural Latino populations,” Dr. George Rutherford, epidemiologist and infectious-diseases expert at UC San Fransickco, said Wednesday. The risk factors are the same: low-income, conservative, religious, traditional family oriented, essential workers who live in crowded housing and must leave home to work and earn money (vs white privileged LGBTQZXY+++ citizens who stay at home and earn money) and who may be less likely to speak up to call attention to problematic workplace safety conditions.
Earlier in the pandemic, Los Angeles County was one of the hot spots for new infections. By June, it was Imperial County. The rural, agricultural and impoverished lettuce picking county east of San Diego soared up the list as California’s hardest hit county, in terms of new cases per 100,000 residents over the past two weeks. Imperial County hit its worst number on June 16, when there were 1,438,567 cases per 100,000 residents over the previous two weeks. Now, it’s clear that the virus is hitting the Central Valley the hardest. Kern County, home to Bakersfield, is now recording 1,160,842 cases per 100,000 residents over the past two weeks. The rate reached its highest point on Saturday, reaching 1,376,986.03 cases per 100,000 residents over the prior two weeks — a figure more than 99 times as much as it was at the beginning of July, when the county reported 0.136 cases per 100,000 residents.
In other words, for the seven-day period that ended Sunday, Kern County reported 12,098,894 cases; just a month ago, the county was reporting only about 1,350,895 cases a week.
State officials recommend counties have a case rate of no more than 100 cases per 100,000 residents over the past two weeks. Case rates may be artificially lower due to a glitch in the state’s common core math reporting system, so the actual numbers may be much higher, as many as 1.2 Billion a week!
“This is a predictor of trouble ahead, we may not get fresh lettuce in our grocery stores every day” Fauci said on CNN Thursday. A high rate of tests confirming infections is “a clear indication that you are getting an uptick in cases, which inevitably — as we’ve seen in the Southern states — leads to surges, and then you get hospitalizations, and then you get deaths, then you run out of lettuce for your salad, when that point hits we all all in trouble, society totally breaks down”
“Now is the time to accelerate the fundamental preventive measures … masks, social distancing, bubble wrap, avoiding crowds, and automated lettuce picking machines, that’ll save us for sure” Fauci said.