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In a recent interview with CNN’s Erin Burnette, Dr. Amy Rapkiewicz who heads the Department of Pathology at NYU Langone Medical Center said she and her colleagues had made some surprising discoveries in the autopsies they performed on people who died of COVID-19.

In the early stages of the pandemic, she said, bedside clinicians noticed a lot of blood clotting “in lines and various large vessels. What we saw at autopsy was sort of an extension of that. The clotting was not only in the large vessels but also in the smaller vessels.”

She continued, “And this was dramatic, because though we might have expected it in the lungs, we found it in almost every organ that we looked at.” She also said they didn’t find myocarditis, or inflammation in the heart muscles, as much a surprise as were the clots in all the organs.

But those who survive the virus are hardly done with it once they have seemingly “recovered.” Journalist Claudia Turner reported that doctors are discovering people who contracted the virus and survived, even those with mild or no symptoms, have been experiencing “crushing fatigue, breathlessness and brain fog longer than expected – in some cases leaving them bed-bound or unable to work full time more than two months after infection.” 

She also wrote that “experts at King’s College London…are finding that people with mild cases of the disease are more likely to have a variety of symptoms that come and go over a more extended period.”

That comports with another finding I read that said many young adults who had the virus but were asymptomatic are now suffering from permanent lung damage because of the kind of blood clots Dr. Rapkiewicz discovered in her autopsies.

According to Dr. Richard Becker, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at UC’s (University of California) medical school, “We and others have seen young and otherwise healthy individuals with COVID-19, and some of them have been asymptomatic, who have experienced strokes, deep vein thrombosis — that is a blood clot in the legs — and pulmonary embolism.”

All of this is troubling news about the immediate and long-term effects of the virus, but a news story here in Minnesota yesterday broke our collective hearts. A 9-month old infant who had no underlying health conditions died from COVIS-19. the youngest peron in the nation to date to have died.

Truly, no one is fully safe in this pandemic.

But in addition to the critical information these reports provide us, the more we learn the more obvious it becomes that Donald Trump has become the primary menace to our public health.

On July 4^th he said in a Fix News interview, “Now we have tested over 40 million people. But by so doing, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, yet more than a few Americans believe what he says. A couple of times our doctor son who treats COVID-19 patients has had people in his circle of relationships tell him they believe the threat the virus poses is being “overblown” by the news media.

I would like to meet these people and ask them if they would be willing to tell the parents of that 9-month old infant who died yesterday from the virus that the threat is being exaggerated.

Or perhaps they would like to tell all the families of 143,032 who have died it’s all overblown. How about those among the 3,895,803 Americans who have contracted the virus who are now experiencing the side effects we have been discussing? Tell them this whole thing is “fake news.”

Or, as our son told them, “Come and meet some of the patients I am treating and see if you feel the same way.”

I don’t know any of these people personally, but I know very well what kind of people they are. They are either callous, rigidly ideological, or just plain stupid.

They are the kind who reject what health experts are telling them and, instead, believe a man who has not only told more than 20,000 lies since becoming President, but is probably the dumbest man ever to occupy the office?

Frankly, I am as tired of them as I am of Trump. The only way to shut them up is to shut him up by throwing him out of office in November

It’s the least we can do for the millions of people the virus has infected, the thousands it has killed, and the grieving families for whom COVID-19 has been anything but overblown.