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Feds Take All Of County’s 35,000 Mask Order Targeted For Health Care Workers
Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice?
The Americans defying Palm Sunday quarantines: 'Satan's trying to keep us apart'


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Feds Take All Of County’s 35,000 Mask Order Targeted For Health Care Workers
by Bill Bowman
April 3, 2020

http://franklinreporter.com/feds-take-all-of-countys-35000-mask-order-targeted-for-health-care-workers/

Somerset County’s entire 35,000-mask order of N-95 and surgical masks targeted for various health care workers has been “commandeered” by the federal government, the Somerset County Freeholder Director said on April 3.

Freeholder Director Shanel Robinson also said that a joint Somerset-Hunterdon county drive-through testing site could be operational soon and that Raritan Valley Community College in Branchburg is “at the top of the list” of locations.

Robinson said that the county had contracted to purchase 35,000 N-95 respirator masks – used by health care professionals to protect them from being contaminated by the virus if treating victims – and regular surgical face masks.

The masks were to be distributed to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital – Somerset in Somerville and various municipalities’ first responders, as well as staff at the Somerset County Jail in Somerville, Robinson said.

As of early in the afternoon of April 3, Robinson said that the county was told the surgical face masks would be delivered that day, but that the federal government had taken the N-95 masks.

Later in the day, Robinson said, she was told that the government had taken the entire 35,000-mask order.

“The vendor called the county OEM purchaser,” she said.

Robinson said the vendor did not say which federal agency confiscated the order.


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Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice?
By Lili Loofbourow
April 04, 2020

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/coronavirus-deaths-essential-workers.html

On March 16, days before several governors would take drastic stay-at-home actions, a nurse posted an incantatory pep talk called “There is no emergency in a pandemic” to a medical forum. It was posted when things were about to get really bad, and it articulated the parameters around which lifesaving work could and would be done. It’s a “put on your own oxygen mask first” piece of conventional wisdom, but it goes harder. Here’s a bit of it:

...

This country has now deposited its massive, collapsing weight on a small, utterly unsupported group called the “essential workers.” It includes the health care personnel I’ve shyly stalked for all these years. It includes others too: home-care and assisted-living health workers who keep the elderly and infirm alive for minimal pay. Underpaid grocery store workers, some of whom are pressured by management not to wear masks or gloves because customer comfort matters more than employee death. Amazon workers are laboring under conditions that do not prioritize their safety. Farm workers—the very immigrants federal policy has worked to keep out—are laboring in fields with little protection (let alone social distancing) so that the “nonessential” among us can eat fresh strawberries at home.

...

What I’m getting at is the matter-of-factness with which the Republican officials of the administration, senior Republican senators, and many though not all Republican governors have made a disturbingly easy peace with mass death in America. As of this writing, every state still lacking a statewide stay-at-home policy has a Republican governor, and their rhetoric about freedom and the economy positions the latter as the living thing truly under threat. Just before issuing a stay-at-home order effective Saturday, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey had maintained she “would look out for people’s safety while keeping government from choking the life out of business and commerce.”


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The Americans defying Palm Sunday quarantines: 'Satan's trying to keep us apart'
Michelle Conlin, Rich McKay
4 April 2020

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1246552007797858319

(Reuters) - Her house sits on a tidy, peaceful suburban street outside Cincinnati. For the past few weeks, she has been doing everything right: sheltering at home and working out of her makeshift office to help stop the spread of the new coronavirus.

...

The Ohio megachurch down the road, Solid Rock, has charted a different course. Despite warnings from local and state officials, Solid Rock had been holding its 1,000-strong gatherings in person, and plans keep the church open on Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week in Christian churches.

“I think they should obey the laws of the land, like the way the Bible tells us to,” said Sandra, who lives a few miles from the site and asked not be identified by last name. Reuters was able independently to corroborate her address and identity.

The local mayor and health officials have asked the church to close, so far to no avail.

...

But, like Solid Rock, pockets of churches from Florida to Texas and across to California are keeping their doors open and inviting worshipers to attend services this weekend.

“We’re defying the rules because the commandment of God is to spread the Gospel,” Louisiana pastor Tony Spell said in an interview with Reuters.

Spell, 42, who plans to hold three services at his 1,000-member Life Tabernacle megachurch in a Baton Rouge suburb on Palm Sunday, has defied state orders against assembling in large groups and has already been hit with six misdemeanors.

“The church is the last force resisting the Antichrist, let us assemble regardless of what anyone says,” he said.

Date: 2020-04-05 02:33 pm (UTC)
dewline: Text - "On the DEWLine" (Default)
From: [personal profile] dewline
1. The Trumpists have been doing this to Massachusetts as well, I've read elsewhere on my Dreamwidth friendlist.

2. In Canada, we are having - or at worst, trying to have - an open conversation on how to make sure that essential workers are not also expendable. More linkage on this to follow.

3. This is flat out appalling. Other Christian-minded communities are wrestling with this question in a more honourable fashion, by comparison.

Date: 2020-04-06 02:54 am (UTC)
oh6: (Default)
From: [personal profile] oh6
I've been thinking for some time that Christianity (or this expression of it, at least), is a reversion to human sacrifice that the Judaism preceding it had moved away from.

Date: 2020-04-05 02:49 pm (UTC)
gorgeousgary: (Default)
From: [personal profile] gorgeousgary
The churches defying the stay-at-home orders are going to spread a lot more than the Gospel. There have been several documented worldwide cases of community spread traced directly to large religious gatherings.

Date: 2020-04-05 05:12 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] ex_inklessej388
Is it ironic that the churches who are doing this sort of irresponsible behaviour are the very large, mega, "slivers-away-from-corporate-entertainment" churches? My church which barely crosses the 50 mark each Sunday has been closed tight since this all started, but the ones with thousands of parishioners (if I can even call them that) is who we have to worry about.

Date: 2020-04-05 06:20 pm (UTC)
kathmandu: Close-up of pussywillow catkins. (Default)
From: [personal profile] kathmandu
I'd say the irony is that they're dressing commercial motives up in evangelical cover. That South Korean church which was the epicenter of South Korea's early outbreak fitted the profile of a destructive cult; they charge a fine if you don't attend each service, and pack people in to pay tithes in person. That was the reason that first parishioner who caught coronavirus attended even after she got sick.

These American mega-churches haven't been looked into on the same level yet, but I know most of them at the least have very strong social pressure that you must attend every week or be called a bad person. Churches run on a less commercial basis are the ones holding services online now.

Date: 2020-04-05 10:40 pm (UTC)
conuly: (Default)
From: [personal profile] conuly
If only those groups of people who insist on continuing to congregate would only infect each other and not the rest of us.

Date: 2020-04-06 04:07 am (UTC)
calamander: fire salamander (Default)
From: [personal profile] calamander
Thanks for continuing to report on all of this. It's really helpful to have all of these - over time - for reference.

Date: 2020-04-10 06:51 am (UTC)
arethinn: glowing green spiral (Default)
From: [personal profile] arethinn
I saw video of someone in Ohio being interviewed in her car after leaving some kind of church service and asked if she was afraid of coronavirus, and she replied "No, because I'm covered in Jesus's blood". I mean, yikes. Even if I thought "No, because Brighid will protect me" (sure. by inspiring me to use my brain and listen to those with healing knowledge?), I wouldn't put it like THAT.

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