Since Kelly Dodd seems convinced that she can say what she wants without getting fired, she’s ramping up her COVID-19 disinformation campaign.
Now, she is celebrating an absence of masks in reopened restaurants … and claiming that "nobody’s dying" of the virus.
"Yay, we finally get to have a meal out," Kelly Dodd announces in a video posted to her Instagram Stories.
"Yay, no one is wearing a mask," she raves. "I love it. Yay!"
People can understand her cheering enjoying a meal out, even if most of us cringe at the thought.
The fact that she would celebrate an absence of masks is … not good.
"Yeah, no one’s wearing masks here, in Orange County," Kelly says as if it’s a boast.
"Yep," she confirms as she pans around the room.
"Nobody’s dying here, of the virus," Kelly claims. Notably, this is untrue.
"He is," Kelly adds, referring to the server wearing a mask.
In reality, of course, Orange County is unfortunately no more immune to the virus’ transmission than the rest of the country.
The OC’s extreme wealth does mean that more people were able to work from home and shelter in place, so their numbers are relatively low.
But they have lost more than 130 residents in just a few months, and we all know that this pandemic is not yet over.
To hear Kelly pretend that those deaths, and the over 5,300 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Orange County mean nothing is sad … but not surprising.
"It’s not the government’s job to protect my health," Kelly recently insisted. "It’s the government’s job to protect my RIGHTS."
"It’s my job to protect my health," she whined on her Instagram Story. "When you trade liberty for safety you end up losing both."
As we said before, we don’t know how to explain to Kelly that other people have lives and hopes and dreams and hope to live.
One of the primary duties of any government is to protect its citizens. But in Kelly’s eyes, this seems to be all about her.
Obviously, as soon as Kelly posted that clownish video with her malicious caption, people were up in arms.
"I just want to clarify something," Kelly says in a subsequent post, shared in her Stories and on the main page of her Instagram.
She claims: "I was by no means minimizing deaths that have been caused by this virus."
Really? Because it’s not even the first time that Kelly has remarked about the death toll in a flippant, dishonest manner.
"And I feel for their loved ones," Kelly insists.
She has repeatedly mocked the pandemic, spread misinformation about the death toll.
At one point, she referred to this devastating situation as "God’s way of thinning the herd."
If Kelly is even capable of feeling empathy for those who have lost, those who have suffered, and those who have died, she is not showing it.
"However, Orange County has 133 deaths out of 3 million people, much lower than most," Kelly says.
Yes. Extreme wealth makes it easier to shelter in place, and can buy better health care than most can afford.
"I felt encouraged and excited that people were out and about," she recalls, "and there was some semblance of normalcy."
Normalcy is an old mathematic term that occassionally displaces the actual word normality, an error often attributed to Warren G. Harding.
"And by the way, I was wearing a mask," Kelly Dodd adds.
"And no patrons while we were eating were wearing a mask," she continues.
"Servers were," Kelly acknowledges.
"But," she explains, "you can’t eat with a mask on."
Yes, that is why most of us who have been restaurant patrons in these recent months have picked up food to take home.
Even when all states reopen restaurants (fortunately, many states do not allow sit-down dining or bars open yet), most will take precautions.
After all, there are likely many asymptomatic carriers walking around with no idea that they are spreading the virus.
And even of those who will reel from symptoms when infected could spend days or even weeks being contagious before they feel unwell.
Kelly has previously dismissed the death toll out of an apparent disinterest in the value of human lives that are not her own.
At one point, she suggested that 8-9 million people die each day from the flu.
The mathematics of that are patently absurd — it would mean that billions die each year from the flu alone. Humanity could not survive.
But Kelly’s wrongdoing isn’t a failure to understand how the virus spreads or being bad at math.
In fact, Kelly isn’t a dumb person — genuinely, I think that she’s smart.
Yet she seems unable to wrap her head around aspects of the pandemic — the necessary precautions, the scope, and more.
It’s not that her intelligence is lacking, but it may be that she doesn’t want to accept the information for what it is.
In multiple tone deaf, horrifying videos, Kelly has made it pretty clear that if information doesn’t confirm her preexisting biases, she’ll ignore it.
