Jacqui and Jill: Will Jacqui Rush to Trump’s Rescue?

I was at one of those Emergency Care places a few weeks back having taken someone in there for something minor and easily correctable if done by a skilled medical person. Fortunately, the nurse there had the necessary skills, so the problem was quickly resolved but the person I was with got gabbing with the nurse so it took much longer than it should have..

While waiting I was thumbing through a magazine. Two young women, barely out of girlhood, one with long blond hair and the other the shiniest long black hair I had ever seen, came in. The one with the blond hair went to the counter; the other took a seat close to me but with her back towards me. At some point the one who went to the counter came over and sat with her friend. I had become interested in an article I was reading about Carlo Tresca so I didn’t now this until I heard them talking. I overheard some of their conversation because they were not too discreet apparently oblivious to or not caring about my being there.

One, the one with the black hair, I’ll call Jacqui. She said to the other “why didn’t you find out about this before?”

The other, the blond, I’ll call Jill,  responded: “do you think it is too late?”

Jacqui replied: “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask. I don’t know. Like, I don’t know why you didn’t do one of those tests a couple of months ago”

Jill didn’t say anything but put her head down.

Jacqui then said: “You know, like after it happened, why didn’t you?”

Jill said: “I thought if I didn’t take the test then I wouldn’t be pregnant.”

Jacqui sort of chuckled: “That’s not how it works.”

Jill looked surprised. “Are you sure?”

Jacqui looking amazed answered: “Seriously, like you thought you got pregnant by taking the test?”

Just then the person I brought there came out smiling and walked over to me. I obviously couldn’t say “I want to sit here a bit and eavesdrop.”  Unfortunately,  I’d never head what Jill’s explanation was going to be. As I left I took one last look over at them. Jill was shaking her head sadly.

That all came back to mind during the week. Trump was at a medical supply distributor located in Allentown, PA. (How can you think of Allentown without thinking of Billy Joel. I also thought that was where the guy from Revere who was born to an Irish-American mother, Cecilia Holland, and an Italian-American father, John Cazale had his last movie role. Actually it wasn’t supposed to have taken place there but in Clairton, PA)

At that location in Allentown Trump talked about his achievements saying: “And don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing.

He’s been repeating that claim for weeks. We’ve done more tests than anyone in the world so we have more people with the disease. That’s obvious so why is he repeating it so much? What he hasn’t bragged about is that we have way more deaths than anyone in the world.

Trump went on to explain: “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

There was no mistake. Trump and Jill think alike. He believes there is a connection between doing testing and having cases. Too bad he doesn’t have someone around him like Jacqui who can set him straight.

 

 

 

 

5 Comments

  1. The cartoon is exactly on point. PBS had a great documentary on Clarence Thomas. What an interesting life. Two other American standouts appeared in the film. Ronald Reagan and our cousin Roger. The liberals and the media tried a high tech lynching to destroy him that failed. Just as they did for Bork and Kavanaugh. Bearing false witness against your neighbor is par for the course for the Democrats. See Gen. Flynn’s treatment. 2. What does it say about the character of Clapper, McCabe, Rice and Farkas who on television assert Russian collusion but while testifying under oath in a closed hearing say they have no evidence of it. What horrible people.

  2. I think – I hope anyway – that he was referring to statistics, not people. The numbers we follow every day, like we used to do box scores, do not reflect reality. They are a function of testing which is not done widely or even randomly.

  3. William M. Connolly

    I’ll try to set the record straight. But first I wish everyone an old Irish Blessing: One Hundred Thousand Welcomes. All ideas and all questions are welcomed, and there is no such thing as a bad question, except the one that is not asked, but there are wrongheaded ideas.

    The idea for the day is CONFIRMED CASES. Unless we test, we can’t confirm. The more people we test gives us a better idea of the daily incidence of the disease or state (pregnancy) and the PREVALENCE of the disease or state in the population.

    The girl in your example really did not think the test would cause her to become pregnant, she thought like many people with cancer, if she did not undergo the test, she could continue in a state of DENIAL. One of my lifelong friends had symptoms of colon cancer, bleeding et alia, but would not go to a doctor. When he did the doctor told him if he had come in six months earlier they could have saved his life. We asked him why he did not get checked out earlier, and he replied that if he thought he drank more lemonade the pain and bleeding, et cetera, would go away. He was in a state of DENIAL. IT IS COMMON.

    President Trump is 100% correct, the more testing we do, the more cases we will uncover, and the more we will learn about the PREVALANCE of Covid-19 in the American Population.

    America has so many cases and deaths for two reasons: It is the third largest country in the world in terms of population, behind only China and India, as I recall. Brazil with 200 million people also has a large number of a cases.

    The second reason America has a large number of cases and deaths is that it like Western Europe was one of the two main focal points of the Covid-19 SPREAD in the world. From Wuhan it went West to Lombardy Italy and from Italy a variant went directly to New York City.

    It IS ELEMENTAL EPIDEMIOLOGY.

    • William M. Connolly

      Think of the three foci, loci or HOT SPOTS. Wuhan, Lombardy and New York City.

      Always best to do cases and deaths per million. Best for comparisons.