Palm Beach warning - pay attention to public health advice

Two echo opinion letters published in The Palm Beach Post call for citizens to pay attention to public health advice, wash hands and practice social distancing, especially in public places. Meanwhile, the number of mobidity and mortality continues to increase and, unfortunately, will not be accurately counted because the numbers are under reported, as disclosed in The New York Times.

This photo was published in The Intercept

Amy Harmon in The New York Times reported "Coroners in some parts of the country are overwhelmed. Funeral homes in coronavirus hot spots can barely keep up. Newspaper obituary pages in hard-hit areas go on and on. Covid-19 is on track to kill far more people in the United States this year than the seasonal flu."

United States will be responsible for one out or three world deaths caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Moreover, the United states population is 4.3 percent of the world's total number of people but the incidence of coronavirus is 28 percent of the pandemic victims.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronavirus-death-toll-total.html
Total deaths in seven states that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic are nearly 50 percent higher than normal for the five weeks from March 8 through April 11, according to new death statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is 9,000 more deaths than were reported as of April 11 in official counts of deaths from the coronavirus.

Dr. Frank Lansville, medical director of the emergency department, sits in the E.R. of the Medical Center of Aurora, Colorado, on Wednesday, April 22, 2020. Extra precautions and measures are being taken by healthcare professionals to protect against the spread of coronavirus within the hospital. (Published in The Denver Post.)

The new data is partial and most likely undercounts the recent death toll significantly. But it still illustrates how the coronavirus is causing a surge in deaths in the places it has struck... 

In The Palm Beach Post, the Florida newspaper published these two opinion letters:

(Wrong minded....) younger people talk about how they aren’t afraid to get the novel coronavirus; that more people should be brave like they are so we can get the economy back up and running. Your odds of dying are way lower than in a war, someone told me, so have the courage to face the enemy and we’ll get back to normal again much faster.

These people have it all wrong. They think they’re acting like brave warriors when they go out in public without a mask, or downplay social distancing in some other way, but instead they should see themselves as rats during the plague.

When the “brave soldiers” get infected, before they even know they have the virus they become a carrier, a vector for spreading disease and endanger everyone they come into contact with — maybe even people they’ve never met — by leaving the virus on some surface they later touch.

If they want to show their courage: Brave social distancing, brave having to wear a mask, brave the depression economy we will have to live through. That way someone’s grandparents will live to see another day.  From Chris Ely, in West Palm Beach

And this....

Jupiter (Florida) restaurant goers need to practice social distancing

When picking up takeout food at a popular Harbourside restaurant in Jupiter late last week, I was surprised and saddened to see dozens of young men and women standing in the small outdoor portion of the restaurant drinking face-to-face. They were not abiding by the suggested social-distancing or wearing masks. Many were young mothers with their young children.

Not only were they endangering each other, they displayed little or no concerns for the restaurant employees and customers picking up takeout orders.

These people obviously do not believe what they hear or see about the COVID19 pandemic.  From Steve Leber, in Jupiter Florida.