This is totally hypothetical but what if there were a state like say, Georgia, and the governor, let’s say his name was Brian Kemp, was a thief who stole the election and was also an idiot. And then let’s say that a major city in Georgia, like say Atlanta, happened to have a Black mayor named Keisha Lance Bottoms, who just announced that she had contracted COVID-19. Then let’s say that said governor, who we already established is an idiot, has yet to make masks a mandatory requirement for his constituents mostly because Georgia is a Southern state and Trump has politicized the wearing of masks.
Well, said mayor, Bottoms, is like, fuck this goofy-ass governor and his allegiance to white supremacy and has signed an executive order mandating that all ATL-iens wear fucking masks because fuck Brian Kemp now and forever, hypothetically, of course.
On Wednesday, Mayor Bottoms, whom I love to call Mayor Keisha because it’s bold and empowering to all the Keishas I’ve known throughout my life–Seriously, have you ever met a Keisha that couldn’t fight or jump double-dutch like a goddamn professional?–signed an order making masks mandatory, defying the punk-ass governor.
See, Brian Kemp is a stooge, and despite COVID-19 fucking shit up like a super soaker during spring break, the governor has only strongly suggested that Georgians wear masks.
“We will continue to take active measures to help slow the spread of COVID-19 infections in Atlanta,” Bottoms said in a statement, Time reports. “Public health experts overwhelmingly agree that wearing a face covering helps slow the spread of this sometimes deadly virus.”
Bottoms didn’t just run out here and ignore Kemp—she tried unsuccessfully to appeal to Kemp to change his order but Kemp is and has always been a whole bitch.
“Other cities have taken the approach that they are going to defy the governor’s executive order. Savannah has done it, some other cities have done it, and Atlanta is going to do it today,” Bottoms told MSNBC in a Wednesday interview. “Because the fact of the matter is that COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on our cities, specifically black and brown communities with higher death rates.”
And this is why Bottoms is the mayor that Atlanta needs. She is bold and unapologetic and in a fight between Mayor Bottom and Governor Kemp, bet on Keisha.
“We don’t need a mandate to have Georgians do the right thing, but we do need to build strong, public support,” Kemp told mayors, according to prepared remarks released by his office, Time notes. See, what I’m saying? Kemp is as spineless as they come.
Bottoms isn’t just the mayor of Atlanta; she’s also on the shortlist of names being considered by presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden to be his running mate.
From Time:
The dispute over masks is escalating as the state again recorded new high numbers of daily confirmed cases and people hospitalized with COVID-19. The number of people in hospitals rose to more than 2,200 on Wednesday, while confirmed infections leaped by more than 3,400, bringing the state total to 104,000.
Officials across the state are increasingly voicing worries that hospitals are filling and government-run testing sites are being overrun.
Data released Wednesday showed that 82% of Georgia’s critical care beds are in use, although not every patient in a critical care bed has COVID-19. In three of the state’s 14 hospital regions, fewer than 6% of critical care beds were available, including Athens, Valdosta and Atlanta’s northwest suburbs.
On Monday, Mayor Bottoms announced that she tested positive for coronavirus and she also tested positive for being a stone-cold badass who doesn’t give a shit what goofy governor has to say about masks when COVID-19 is killing Black and Brown people.
DISCUSSION
That’s the whole problem. Critical care beds are expensive to build, staff, and maintain so hospitals study very carefully how many they need at peak times and only build that many. Usually they are used for standard things that are always occurring like heart attacks, strokes, severe infections, poorly controlled diabetes, bad pneumonia, after very major surgeries, etc. Those “peak use” studies don’t take stupid leaders and their inability/unwillingness to enforce safety measures during a pandemic into account because while it was easy to see that a pandemic would happen some day (literally every epidemiologist has predicted this at some point in their careers), nobody really predicted a leader as incompetent, ineffectual, and malignant, but still as influential as Trump. So you still have that baseline need, you just can’t meet it now because the resources are overloaded, and many people will die of things other than COVID that otherwise could have been saved. We will eventually have a good idea of how many people that is, but it will take a while and the current estimate is only “a lot.”