As I said somewhere, it's end stage capitalism running head on into Stage II of the pandemic.

Our nurses have been underpaid in Knoxville for years. That's pretty much standard for most professional/working jobs in Knoxville. What has always been this towns savior is the community and area we live in. When combined with a comparatively friendly, appreciative local population, and temperate weather, the reduced wages seemed a decent tradeoff. Those conditions no longer exist.

This summer was, and is, hot. Enjoying the outdoors in this weather is a far less satisfying experience that it has been in the past. This summer has been full of warnings to stay inside. My point being simply the inducement of wonderful weather is quickly moving on and out of Knoxville. Knoxville is becoming a good place to winter. As we begin to see how global warming will effect us locally, heat domes and violent storms, and high winds fanning fires, Knoxville's traditionally great weather, isn't looking as great.

The real issue is staffing. It's always been tough at emergency rooms and ICUs. More so as pay rates separated by wider and wider margins. Like most businesses, the local medical industry plans to likely scenarios when staffing and making expansion plans. Simply put, covid has changed this dynamic.

Across the nation, political leaders that have weaponized covid for political gain are now beginning to reap what they sow. Glenn Jacobs has been among the best in the nation at weaponizing covid and we are starting to see the results of that style of governance. Everything from introducing deadly viral loads into our schools, where multiple exposures to high viral loads of covid are common, to the increased numbers of long haul cases stripping our workforce of necessary workers, to threats of violence and death against local medical workers, to advocating for the acceleration, expansion and saturation of covid, rather than its containment, to three times the death rate of comparably sized communities, our response in no way deals with the realities, nor long term effects of covid.

We see this now in our construction industry and in the Mayor's latest power grab.We built 3810 houses last year and have well over 4000 new building permits issued. Our local infrastructure is literally years behind our development and we can't keep construction crews operating because of absenteeism due to covid. If you force one sick worker to work today, you'll have five next week. The way most communities, indeed the nation, have dealt with this is to advocate for vaccination. Vaccinations have been shown to lower the number of total infections, the severity of those infections the length of those infections, hospitalizations from those infections and deaths from those infections. Compared to the rest of America, our regions number are extremely high and poised to get worse. Long term covid response is becoming a community lifestyle issue.

(The Mayor deflected this issue for a long term power grab by eliminating the BZA. What this allows developers to do is just outspend opposition on intimidation, PR and lawyers, and obfuscate the intent of developments whose start will be years down the road. These sorts of policies can undo decades of hard work in a matter of months, if one's ducks are in a row.)

In Knoxville, that means overloading the emergency rooms to the point of shutdown, slowing down our construction industry, gutting the restaurant industry and creating workplace environments that are forced to operate short staffed at least four times a year while covid surges move through.
It also means worsening working conditions for everyone in the Medical Industry. There is no total protection from initial heavy viral loads. Best you're going to get is only being down a shorter time than the unvaccinated. And not going to the hospital, or dying. Glenn Jacobs has managed covid to provide the worst public outcome from covid possible, and that's what we have. And that's why we can't fill our staffing positions locally in the Medical Industry. Who wants to work in an industry that is being undercut and sabotaged by local government? These folks can make 120,000 a year pretty much anywhere else. Why would you stick around in these conditions for 65,000 per year? The long term effect of this wage structure shift is that the whole local medical industry is affected. You can't increase a wage structure of primary employees by 50-100% in the short term without crippling the industry in question, at least in the short term. When your response is the worst in the nation, the ancillary effects of that response will go through the whole community. In Knoxville, that means capitalists must prepare for reduced profit or a shutdown. While not pretty, it was completely predictable.

(Workers are not capitalists. They might be wannabe capitalists. They might be loyal to their capitalist masters, but they are not capitalists. Thanks to this covid response, they won't ever be capitalists, but I digress.)

All of which brings us to the ballgame Thursday. The 500 pound gorilla. Since a Thursday NIght Game before Labor Day has no real dynamic to compare to, we are left to best guess scenarios. The over riding question is this, "Will the stadium itself, the game day experience, continue to be a low exposure experience?" Up until now, games have all been in periods of waning viral transmission during the downside of surges. This one, we are running smack into a full fledged local viral saturation. There's no way of knowing what's going to happen. Should this turn out to be the surge where outdoor transmission comes into play, this game could shut down the town. But the dangers we face are much more mundane.

In addition, will tailgating and celebrating and a night out waiting in an understaffed restaurant that's full to capacity have any effect on the transmission of covid? I guess we'll see.

What if a batch of Listeria lettuce makes it to one of the local restaurant chains? Do we have the space in the hospitals to treat these people? Do we even have the staff to triage a situation where covid and food poisoning are hitting at the same time. What about a staff outbreak in the schools? RSV, like last year? God forbid, what if this is the week monkeypox makes it into our schools? What happens if a bad batch of fentanyl hit's town sending dozens to the emergency rooms? What are we going to do about the eventual inevitable nurses strike? What if there's a bad wreck involving a bus? We don't have the capacity to handle emergencies in our emergency rooms anymore simply because of our covid response. Now cut covid numbers by two-thirds and plug those figures into our emergency preparedness. That's where we should be. That's where folks with a competent covid response are.

I hope everything goes well tomorrow, but I'm sitting this one out. I don't see anything to indicate this is going to turn out great, I see lots that gives me pause for concern. This is just our new normal, I guess.