Yes, bedbugs are annoying little fuckers. They give you little bites, and make you wash all your clothes and maybe throw out your old couch. If they force a temporary shutdown of Hollister, that's fine. But they're god's creatures too.

The WSJ reports that Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn shut down a triage room for fumigation after discovering a single bedbug on a patient. It wasn't the only triage room, and they didn't shut down the whole hospital, but...triage rooms are kind of important, no? Is it now the settled judgment of the medical establishment that the risk of a bite from a single bedbug outweighs the risk of not having a room to triage somebody for...whatever people get triaged for?

I don't know, I'm not a god damn doctor. But it does seem worth asking ourselves how scared we must really be, of these bedbugs. Did you know bedbugs do not spread disease? It's true! They are just annoying. I come from Florida, which, during many months of the year, is completely infested with clouds of mosquitoes that, 1) Descend upon you as soon as you step outdoors, biting you repeatedly; 2) Cannot be eradicated, and; 3) Do spread disease. Still, people survive in Florida, contracting only a modest number of tropical diseases annually. Yet here in New York, spot infestations of bedbugs, which do not even attack you unless you are asleep (try convincing a mosquito to do that) and do not spread disease, have rendered the entire city indescribably nervous, to the point that people will discard every last bit of furniture they own, spend tens of thousands of dollars on fancy exterminators, and shut down even hospital rooms upon the sight of a single bedbug, which is not even that big.

New Yorkers never have learned to appreciate nature.

[Pic via]