COVID death: it's not just for the elderly and weak anymore

There is increasing evidence that COVID isn't just a respiratory disease but also attacks other organs and symptoms- including even the toes. And it turns out that despite what we've always thought about only the old and the weak being at serious risk of death from the disease, otherwise healthy young COVID victims with mild symptoms are dying of strokes in significant numbers.

This is just one more element in the increasingly confusing set of discoveries about the disease which has left us at a loss as to how to even assess the damage. It seems like a much longer time ago than it actually has been that the CDC reversed ground and began urging everyone to wear masks in public because many and perhaps even most COVID victims are totally asymptomatic, and any of us might be a ¨Typhoid Mary" despite not even knowing that we are sick. This seems to be especially the case with the young and otherwise healthy. We're left to wonder how many outwardly hearty, strong young people have died of COVID-induced cardiovascular problems but were never counted as COVID deaths because there was no apparent reason to suspect that they even had it.

The discovery is only one more nail in the coffin of the well-publicized delusion held by what turns out to be a small minority of the American people that re-opening the economy prematurely is even a cold-blooded option. Yet somehow the notion survives, even as it becomes clearer and clearer that no matter what happens, a mild, "V-shaped" recovery from the economic crisis we're in simply isn't going to happen.

One more rebuke to the COVID denialism which characterized the Trump administration until a couple of weeks ago, and on alternate days seems to do so even now.

One more piece of evidence that the radical right and our first conspiracy-theorist president are riding a tiger in COVID denialism that they cannot now get off, and which sooner rather than later is going to buck them off its back and devour them.

Hopefully, it won't devour the rest of us right along with them, because it's loose in the streets and Mr. Trump is only intermittently inclined to even try to control it. Meanwhile, his supporters both inside and outside the media are becoming increasingly shrill, increasingly irresponsible, and less and less to be taken seriously.