Dusty and Tristan Graham were a couple of Alabama eBay resellers, who made videos of their collecting trips which were interspersed with denunciations of vaccines and pandemic responses and all the usual ridiculous complaints by the gullible victims of rightwing ideology. Can you guess what happened a few weeks after they put out a video insisting that they weren’t never gonna get no vaccine? Of course you can. If it weren’t so deadly, it would be a joke.

According to a GoFundMe page set up by their children, Dusty died Thursday after battling COVID-19 for three weeks. His wife had “passed suddenly in her sleep” weeks earlier due to coronavirus complications on Aug. 25.

“Unfortunately Dusty and Tristan have both passed away,” the couple’s daughter, Windsor Graham, said. “Thank you for all the kind words and helping us during this difficult time. We will be using the money to pay for funeral expenses.” The announcement of their deaths follows an announcement from Dusty weeks earlier that he was in the ICU “battling it [COVID-19] out.”

Look, people. I’ve got two choices for you:

1. Stop declaring to the world how useless the vaccine is and you aren’t going to take it. Pride goeth before the fall and all that. It’s just going to make you a target for derision if you do come down with it, and you’ll have enough anguish to deal with without the libs poking at your corpse.
2. GET THE DAMN SHOT.

The worst part of it is that they’ve left behind a couple of kids (maybe adult children, at least) who have to deal with all of this grief and chaos.

For the love of god, get vaccinated. These stories are terrible and completely unnecessary. You don’t have to tell anyone, just go in and get the shot in secret, and take your loved ones in to get it too.

To the moon, Alice, to the moon!

Look at that. No COVID-19 cases in my county in the summer, and then we all got cocky and slacked off. The Minnesota governor lifted the mask mandate, we had the Stevens County fair (I skipped it), the college students started trickling back, the schools opened, and whooo-eee, look at that spike! 28 cases on Thursday, 48 on Friday, and we’ll have to wait and see the thrilling progression on Monday. Will it continue to rise? Or will the roller coaster start going down? Nobody knows! We don’t even know where the locus of infection is, although rumor has it that in this case it’s due to spread in a local church congregation.

You may recall the conservative church domination of our school board means the public schools here aren’t allowed to insist on masking or vaccinations. How’s that going for you, Stevens County?

I’m pretty sure our local hospital couldn’t cope with 48 serious cases — I hope the majority of the current surge do not require hospitalization — so, to everyone else…do not get sick right now. Be safe. Don’t take any risks. Because if you do, you might find yourself at the bottom of any priorities.

They are all aiding and abetting murder by taking up ICU space with diseases that were easily preventable. Look at this example.

What first struck Nathaniel Osborn when he and his wife took their son, Seth, to the emergency room this summer was how packed the waiting room was for a Wednesday at 1 p.m.

The Florida hospital’s emergency room was so crowded there weren’t enough chairs for the family to all sit as they waited. And waited.

Hours passed and 12-year-old Seth’s condition worsened, his body quivering from the pain shooting across his lower belly. Osborn said his wife asked why it was taking so long to be seen. A nurse rolled her eyes and muttered, “COVID.”

Seth was finally diagnosed with appendicitis more than six hours after arriving at Cleveland Clinic Martin Health North Hospital in late July. Around midnight, he was taken by ambulance to a sister hospital about a half-hour away that was better equipped to perform pediatric emergency surgery, his father said.

But by the time the doctor operated in the early morning hours, Seth’s appendix had burst — a potentially fatal complication.

I take that personally. When I was a child, I almost died of appendicitis — the memory of the agony of that event still burns in my memory. I only had to wait 5 minutes after my dad carried me at a run into the hospital (my projectile vomiting probably motivated the staff), but if that thing had ruptured, if modern medicine hadn’t made appendectomies safe and routine, I wouldn’t be here today. I still remember the pain and drifting in and out of consciousness on that short and probably too fast drive to the hospital, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like to wait 6 hours for treatment.

Fortunately, in this case there was a relatively happy outcome.

Seth Osborn, the 12-year-old whose appendix burst after a long wait, spent five days and four nights in the hospital as doctors pumped his body full of antibiotics to stave off infection from the rupture. The typical hospitalization for a routine appendectomy is about 24 hours.

The initial hospital bill for the stay came to more than $48,000, Nathaniel Osborn said. Although insurance paid for most of it, he said the family still borrowed against its house to cover the more than $5,000 in out-of-pocket costs so far.

You know, there’s this process called triage, in which you rank the needs of the patients. I would not object if hospitals made a patient’s refusal to obtain a cheap, safe, easily obtainable vaccination part of the triage process. When Seth Osborn shows up in the emergency room, they should have looked at the list of people taking up ICU beds with COVID-19 who had not been vaccinated, and bumped one of them out to make room for the kid. It’s a hard decision, but medical personnel sometimes have to make those painful choices.

Imagine if Seth had died because some selfish asshole had neglected to do the minimally responsible thing, all because some Republican had told him not to.

Ouch. This article hits pretty hard. I’d say it’s an accurate summary of how many faculty feel as a result of the pandemic.

A lot of people get into higher ed because they feel like this is a stable profession. So much of the higher ed workforce over the past few decades has changed in ways that don’t normally break through to public perception. I would say less than half of many faculties are tenured. Other people are contingent, hired every year, every semester. And the workload in a lot of student-facing positions is totally overwhelming for people too. These are people who are working really long hours, often on the weekend. The pay isn’t great, and they don’t really see an opportunity for professional advancement. That was an underlying issue before the pandemic, but COVID showed that the lows can be even lower than what people had anticipated.

To me, the theme of these breaking-point moments is when campuses were asking their employees to give up their own personal lives, to put their health in jeopardy during the pandemic without really acknowledging what that took and what the workers were sacrificing.

Seth Stevenson: As these schools reopen, what kind of reactions are you hearing about mask and vaccine mandates, and teaching virtually as opposed to in person?

If you’re at a public institution, the policies your school can adopt have always been in line with what the state allows. But because masks and vaccines have become so politicized, it’s a good chance that, in Republican-leaning states, you’re not going to have mandates, and people might not even be tested regularly. A lot of schools don’t put up the resources for that. If you’re at a private institution, you’re going to have a lot more flexibility. The campus leaders there are far more likely to mandate masks and vaccines and schools in states that voted for President Joe Biden. So there’s a real anger, particularly in red-state public schools, of people not feeling like the health and safety of their family members is being valued.

The people in charge of these schools are kind of a tough spot, right? They’ve got a pretty complicated challenge to deal with.

I think there is an acknowledgment that, especially at state institutions, to some degree their hands are tied. And I think that acknowledgment is far overshadowed by a sense of, Wow, this institution, my employer, there’s a lot of hypocrisy here.

There’s a podcast associated with it, too. There’s been an interesting rupture as a consequence of the pandemic, and most importantly, the fumbling approach of the institution to it. I’ve had a huge loss of faith in the university and the university administration — I don’t trust them at all to operate in the best interests of the faculty or students.

Also, the politicization is here in the blue states, too. I did not care much for our Democratic governor before, since his primary strength in the election was that he’d appeal to outstate Minnesota, the rural, red part of the state, and that’s what he has done. All along he has taken the minimal steps, and he’s folded up the tent as soon as he could (for instance, abandoning the mask mandate prematurely). I trust him even less now.

Boy, it sure feels good to vent on a blog that will have no effect and that the administration would never read and where my concerns can be totally ignored. It’s so nice and reassuring to know I don’t matter.