Its all in how we wash our hands

Image: Wickershamsconscience:
"Bill Gates, via Forbes; he still needs to wash his hair more often"


It's all in how we wash our hands
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... wash our hands ... wash our hands ... zzzzzzzzzz

CBS: Ohio GOP lawmaker asks if "the colored population" gets coronavirus because they "do not wash their hands as well as other groups"

Now there's a guy who needs to wash out his mouth.  Here's some more of what he says:

• "My point is, I understand African Americans have a higher incidence of chronic conditions and it makes them more susceptible to death from COVID," Huffman said... Could it just be that African Americans or the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups or wear a mask or do not socially distance themselves? That could be the explanation of the higher incidence?"

Geez,that guy reminds me of my ex. Just before leaving I asked him, out of sheer curiosity, "How do you see me?"  He replied, after a moment of deep, deep thought: "You're colourful". I was married to him for 17 years and that's all he could come up with? And that guy insisted he loved me.

I mean, aren't we all colourful?  I'm recalling a Sunday School song: Jesus loves the little children; All the children of the world; Red, Brown,Yellow, Black and White, they are precious in His sight; Jesus loves the little children of the world.

And it dawned on me that nobody's "white". Pink, maybe, but not white. Certainly nobody's Red unless embarrassed. But I was a kid so what could I possibly know? If Jesus says I'm White and some people are Red, I must be white, and that's embarrassing, so now I'm Red. Don't trust your eyes kid, or for that matter your ears. Do what the big people tell you.

Big people like, you know, Lawmakers!  They must be smart or they wouldn't be in positions of power, right?

Still, couldn't there be another reason entirely why certain of all us "colored" people are susceptible to death by Covid?  Or maybe even reasons with an "s"?

From Forbes:

• “Your health care depends on who you are,” according to a 2014 report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy dedicated to health. “Race and ethnicity continue to influence a patient’s chances of receiving many specific health care interventions and treatments.”
• Latinos and African-Americans experience 30 to 40 percent poorer health outcomes than white Americans. This disparity leads not only to shortened lives and increased illness, but also costs the nation more than $60 billion in lost productivity each year.
• Access to care remains a prevailing problem.

And then there's the Covidly unemployed: because of the Covid uproar, people of all "colours" everywhere are suffering physically and mentally:

Psychologenie: How Unemployment Affects Mental and Physical Health

• The impact of unemployment is not limited to finances. It also affects one's mental and physical health. This post tells you about the effects on unemployment on the physical and mental health of an individual.

Now consider that Black people in America suffer from unemployment under the best of circumstances! Here are the US gov't stats on unemployment

There's a theory that the situation was caused by “white flight”.

So whether Black hands are obsessively washed or not, Black people have more pre-conditions than most (possibly equal or beyond that of old people in nursing homes) that might make them more susceptible to Flu by any name it happens to have been given.

Attention to handwashing certainly can't hurt, and we may even be able to find a happy YouTube video on handwashing.  Let's do a search.

Wow! What does "plethora" mean, kids?

The very first one is a little stuffed Bill Gates (see the hair? just like his).  How cute is that, eh? The caption says, "Super Simple". Get it?

Oops, there's a prob with that video.  No hand-washing!  Bill Gates doesn't wash his hands? No wonder he craves a vaccine! Hmmmm. Let's try again.

Here's one that's way better, especially since the mommy and the little girl have dark-coloured skin. Nevermind that the doctor is "white" and nevermind that when Chiku goes to a fun party it's at the home of "white" people who no longer have to live in fear of being infected with whatever may be lurking on little Chiku's hands.

As well-meaning as the above CBS news video accompanying the story of the ignorant GOP Lawmaker may be, and as fun and happy as the weird hand-washing songs are, the video below strongly suggests something much more sinister.

In fact, it reeks of something similar that happened to our old folks in Ontario nursing homes, only it takes place in a US government-funded Covid hospital in New York -- you know, where kindness to the poor and unemployed abounds.

As the CBS guy said, "black people often don't have access to health care", but, apparently, when they do something really weird happens.  I can't imagine YouTube allowing this video (below) to stay up there much longer.

-- Erin Marie Olszewski is a Nurse-turned-investigative journalist, who has spent the last few months on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic, on the inside in two radically different settings. Two hospitals. One private, the other public. One in Florida, the other in New York.​

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