I am in the process of reading a book called "Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal Of Appalachia" by Steven Stoll which has been widely lauded as a book about the problems of Appalachia which it happens has been written by a professor at Fordham University which is about as far from Appalachia as you can get. This has been a common problem with books supposedly written about Appalachia in that they have often been best accepted when written by people who have little or no personal experience in Appalachia. But Stoll is an excellent researcher who focuses the book on a long history of socio-economic issues examined from a historical perspective and I am nearly a hundred pages into the book without any clear understanding of what he seems to think went, or is going, wrong with Appalachia. I have to admit that this a pretty long introduction by anyone's standards. But in all that tangential socio-economic writing, I did find a real jewel from Stoll's extensive research on a vast number of topics which is highly relevant to today's world and the Covid 19 pandemic. Here is the section of the book to which I am referring which can be found on page 51:
"Twelve galleys heavy with trade from Jaffa sailed into the port of Messina. The Genoese crew groaned in the hold, suffering in sickness. At least one staggered onto the wharf. The first Sicilian he greeted received a bacterial infection from a sneeze, a cough, or maybe a flea bite. Three days later the sailor was dead along with every Sicilian who had stood close enough to smell his breath. The afflicted buckled with fever and hard, bleeding ulcers--the first European victims of the Black Death. Over the next four years, as many as 50 million people perished from the plague--representing between 30 and 50 percent of the inhabitants of Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, Syria, and Palestine, as well as parts of Egypt, the German Empire, and Azerbaijan. So many Italians died so quickly that rotting corpses lay for days and weeks until neighbors noticed the smell. Entire families needed to be dragged to doorsteps so that undertakers could carry them away. "No tears, or candles, or mourners" ushered off the dead wrote Giovanni Boccacio; "in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown to dead goats." Bodies were dumped in shallow trenches, "stowed tier upon tier, like ship's cargo."
The dead left entire town empty, fields unharvested. The social order came apart. People became scarce. One region in southern France did not regain its pre-plague population until the nineteenth century. Marginal places like mountainsides and wetlands, some settled as early as the eleventh century, lost their human presence altogether." (Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal Of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, page 51)
There could not be a more horrifying snapshot of death and destruction written than the one above from Stoll's book. Yet, there are very basic parallels between what he has described in Europe in the middle 14th century and what is happening in America and the world with Covid 19 today. The Black Plague was estimated to have caused somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million deaths across the world. It lasted roughly from 1347 to 1351. According to Reuters, there have been, as of today, October 12, 2021, 38million cases and more than 5million deaths from Covid 19 worldwide. There have been at least 700,000 deaths in the USA, more deaths than from the 1918 influenza epidemic, more deaths than from World War II, more deaths than any short term cause in the history of America. And the great majority of those deaths could have been eliminated, if any appropriate action had been taken by the White House in January through March of 2020 after the intelligence community and the health care community both informed the White House that the pandemic was spreading from China and could destroy the world. In what at the time was still being called "The President's Daily Briefing", despite the fact that TRAITOR Trump was simply the beneficiary of a Russian theft of an American election, a senior CIA official was telling the illegitimate occupant of the White House that an existential threat was facing the country and absolutely nothing was being done about it by the recipient of that erroneously named briefing. On both January 23, 2020, and January 28, 2020, TRAITOR Trump was told, if he even listened, that Covid 19 was spreading worldwide and could destroy the world. Nothing was done in response to those briefings.
In the quote above from Steven Stoll's book, there is this somewhat lenghty description of the multitude of deaths due to the Black Plague in Europe: "So many Italians died so quickly that rotting corpses lay for days and weeks until neighbors noticed the smell. Entire families needed to be dragged to doorsteps so that undertakers could carry them away. "No tears, or candles, or mourners" ushered off the dead wrote Giovanni Boccacio; "in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown to dead goats." Bodies were dumped in shallow trenches, "stowed tier upon tier, like ship's cargo." There have also been striking parallels to the events in that description in America. In New York City and Miami, refrigerator trucks had to be brought into hospital parking lots to hold the dead because funeral homes were so busy that they could not even store the dead. Television news showed workers in a large city cemetery on Long Island burying dozens of dead in cheap wood coffins in long trenches which had been dug with backhoes. Recently, in the heart of Appalachia in Hazard, Kentucky, the Appalachian Regional Healthcare system, the largest operator of hospitals in the Eastern Kentucky area, reported that their morgue was "at capacity" and a local funeral home was loaning their morgue to the hospital for temporary storage of the bodies of Covid 19 victims. In a recent week in my home county of Morgan County Kentucky which has a population of slightly more than 13,000 people, one local funeral home had 4 dead bodies waiting to be buried and had buried more than 10 in the preceding month. Historically, over the 28 years I have lived in this county, each of the two local funeral homes would rarely have two dead bodies awaiting burial at any given time. During the recent week I am discussing, one of those funeral homes held a joint funeral for two elderly sisters who had both died from Covid. And those numbers are not an anomaly in today's world in any place in America. Thirty-five hospitals in Kentucky have been forced to call for assistance from the National Guard. The life expectancy in America in 2020 dropped by nearly two years overall and both African Americans and Hispanics saw even greater shrinking of their life expectancy.
Never forget that this could have been greatly mitigated in America if the TRAITOR Trump had been competent in his illegal occupancy of the White House. He was unconcerned in early 2020 and has been ever since. He has laughingly suggested that Americans could treat Covid 19 by injecting cleaning chemicals into their bodies and promoted several untested and unapproved drugs as cures for Covid 19 as his followers have begun to use horse wormer in the hope they might live over the disease. All 700,000 deaths from Covid 19 in America are on his hands.
