Month: March 2020

Everybody needs to relax about this poll:

Former Vice President Joe Biden has emerged as Democrats’ top choice for the presidential nomination in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, but with only bare majority support within his party and a massive enthusiasm gap in a November matchup against President Donald Trump.

Indeed, strong enthusiasm for Biden among his supporters – at just 24% – is the lowest on record for a Democratic presidential candidate in 20 years of ABC/Post polls. More than twice as many of Trump’s supporters are highly enthusiastic about supporting him, 53%.

This isn’t good, of course. It’s also irrelevant. Do we think that people will refuse to vote in seven months because they aren’t “enthusiastic” about Biden in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown in which he’s personally forced to shelter in place while the president hogs the attention of everyone? As if this will be a normal election and all the usual signifiers mean anything?

Honestly, everyone needs to just tune this stuff out right now.

The shrieking online about these numbers and the instant response that we must drop Biden as the presumptive nominee and coax a bunch of people back into the race or simply remove him by fiat and appoint Sanders — so that the Democrats can appear to be completely unhinged and panicked in the midst of a global crisis — seems just a tad unwise. If people are unenthusiastic now just wait until the Democratic Party proves itself to be a bunch of lunatics screaming that the sky is falling based upon one poll. Let’s just say it’s not a good look.

And anyway, as Steve M at NMMNB points out, this reflexive propensity to come completely unglued over a bad news poll while ignoring a good one is a truly self-destructive impulse by Democratic pundits, online and otherwise:

I told you on Friday about that other poll — a Fox News poll with Biden up 49%-40% among registered voters. In that poll, there’s no enthusiasm gap:

The race remains a nine-point advantage for Biden over Trump when looking only at those voters extremely interested in the election (52-43 percent)….

Right, because the Fox question wasn’t about whether respondents are enthusiastic about their candidate, it’s about whether they’re eager to vote in November. (The question is “How interested are you in the presidential election?,” with choices ranging from “Extremely” to “Not at all.”)

Oh, and:

… the former vice president has an eight-point edge in battleground states (48-40 percent).

However, Biden’s advantage grows to 25 points, 57-32 percent, in close counties (where Hillary Clinton and Trump were within 10 points in 2016).

Being “very enthusiastic “about Biden is not the same as being “beyond desperate and will vote for a potted plant” to get Trump out of office. I suspect if anyone asked the question that way we’d have a very different result.

I understand feeling panicked at the idea that Trump might win. I feel that too, maybe even more than most because I have lived in this online political swamp for 20 years and I know how far the Republicans will go, legally, ethically and morally to keep this monster in the White House. It is terrifying. But to make assumptions in this moment, and start agitating for some kind of reckless, panicked response would be about as self-destructive as it gets. I know Democrats are more than willing to do that in the best of times. But we are in the worst of times and they simply must behave like sensible people.

Update: I am reminded of the panic back in 2012. Recall that everyone was freaking out that Obama as going to lose re-election against Romney at this point in the 2012 race as well:

Here’s how that turned out in case you forgot:

I realize times have changed in many ways. But the polls in April are not more predictive now than they were then. And we have an infit miscreant in the White House today who is screwing the pooch in an epic crisis and literally threatening to allow people to die if their governers don’t properly kiss his feet. Let’s just say “enthusiasm” among normal people for anyone or anything but staying alive until we can get him out is probably beside the point right now.

This look back at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis in the New York Times is a terrible indictment of our federal government. I don’t see how Trump can possibly escape the repercussions. He’s the head of the government and he and his administration dropped the ball:

Early on, the dozen federal officials charged with defending America against the coronavirus gathered day after day in the White House Situation Room, consumed by crises. They grappled with how to evacuate the United States consulate in Wuhan, China, ban Chinese travelers and extract Americans from the Diamond Princess and other cruise ships.

The members of the coronavirus task force typically devoted only five or 10 minutes, often at the end of contentious meetings, to talk about testing, several participants recalled. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, its leaders assured the others, had developed a diagnostic model that would be rolled out quickly as a first step.

But as the deadly virus from China spread with ferocity across the United States between late January and early March, large-scale testing of people who might have been infected did not happen — because of technical flaws, regulatory hurdles, business-as-usual bureaucracies and lack of leadership at multiple levels, according to interviews with more than 50 current and former public health officials, administration officials, senior scientists and companyexecutives.

The result was a lost month, when the world’s richest country — armed with some of the most highly trained scientists and infectious disease specialists — squandered its best chance of containing the virus’s spread. Instead, Americans were left largely blind to the scale of a looming public health catastrophe.

The absence of robust screening until it was “far too late” revealed failures across the government, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, the former C.D.C. director. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said the Trump administration had “incredibly limited” views of the pathogen’s potential impact. Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said the lapse enabled “exponential growth of cases.”

And Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a top government scientist involved in the fight against the virus, told members of Congress that the early inability to test was “a failing” of the administration’s response to a deadly, global pandemic. “Why,” he asked later in a magazine interview, “were we not able to mobilize on a broader scale?”

Across the government, they said, three agencies responsible for detecting and combating threats like the coronavirus failed toprepare quickly enough. Even as scientists looked at China and sounded alarms, none of the agencies’ directors conveyed the urgency required to spur a no-holds-barred defense.

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, 68, a former military doctor and prominent AIDS researcher who directs the C.D.C., trusted his veteran scientists to create the world’s most precise test for the coronavirus and share it with state laboratories. When flaws in the test became apparent in February, he promised a quick fix, though it took weeks to settle on a solution.

The C.D.C. also tightly restricted who could get tested and was slow to conduct “community-based surveillance,” a standard screening practice to detect the virus’s reach. Had the United States been able to track its earliest movements and identify hidden hot spots, local quarantines might have confined the disease.

Dr. Stephen Hahn, 60, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, enforced regulations that paradoxically made it tougher for hospitals, private clinics and companies to deploy diagnostic tests in an emergency.Other countries that had mobilized businesses were performing tens of thousands of tests daily, compared with fewer than 100 on averagein the United States, frustrating local health officials, lawmakers and desperate Americans.

Alex M. Azar II, who led the Department of Health and Human Services, oversaw the two other agencies and coordinated the government’s public health response to the pandemic. While he grew frustrated as public criticism over the testing issues intensified, he was unable to push either agency to speed up or change course.

Mr. Azar, 52, who chaired the coronavirus task force until late February, when Vice President Mike Pence took charge, had been at odds for months with the White House over other issues. The task force’s chief liaison to the president was Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, who was being forced out by Mr. Trump. Without high-level interest — or demands for action — the testing issue festered.

At the start of that crucial lost month, when his government could have rallied, the president was distracted by impeachment and dismissive of the threat to the public’s health or the nation’s economy. By the end of the month, Mr. Trump claimed the virus was about to dissipate in the United States, saying: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Read the whole thing. It’s important to bear witness.

If you think this is all overblown, look at this. It’s just shocking:

Good lord this video. Like a thoroughbred making a late break in a horse race pic.twitter.com/EHdbTCviiU

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 29, 2020

Some smart people on where we were, are and where we’re going. This is a PBS interview with Dr. Tom Frieden, former head of the FDA:

The following piece in the Washington Post notes the President’s evident desperation to end social distancing so his beloved “numbers” will rebound:

The latest proposal is a 19-page plan with a step-by-step timeline, with clear benchmarks states and regions would need to meet to safely move forward to the next step. The plan was published Sunday by the American Enterprise Institute. Its lead author — Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner in the Trump administration — has been acting as an informal adviser to the White House. His collaborators include Mark McClellan, a former FDA commissioner from the George W. Bush Administration; Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security; and other leading policy experts and epidemiologists.

“People feel anxious about the future and you need to have milestones to show people how their lives are going to improve,” Gottlieb said in an interview late Saturday. “The goal is to outline a plan that will allow a gradual return to a more normal way of life without increasing the risk” that the epidemic will resurge.

Most economists and health experts say there is no way to restart the economy without addressing the underlying problem of the coronavirus. As long as the pandemic continues to spread, the markets will be in turmoil and any businesses will struggle to stay open, they say.

“The question is once you take your foot off the pedal, what happens then?” said Michael Osterholm, director of University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

Like other experts, Osterholm has argued in a series of op-eds and interviews that instead of giving false reassurances and deadlines, the White House should tell people the hard truth about the current situation and a coherent strategy they can work toward. “The social distancing, being stuck at home, the deaths we’re going to be seeing. People want to know what it’s for. That there’s a plan.”

Similarly, the road map Gottlieb’s group outlined stresses the need to move away from the current decentralized system and “toward more coordinated execution of response.”

The report was co-authored by Lauren Silvis, an attorney who was Gottlieb’s chief of staff at the FDA, and was reviewed by prominent experts including Thomas Inglesby of the Hopkins Center for Health Security and Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The plan divides coming months into four phases and sets “triggers” for states to move from one phase to the next. Given the uneven spread and stages of outbreak, not all states would move through the phases at the same time. While overall the peak of the epidemic may occur in late April or early May, the timing may be different in different states. And New York, which is the current epicenter, may see a decline in infection rates as other states have an increase.

With most of the nation now in phase one of the epidemic, the goal should be a sharp increase in hospital critical care beds and an increase of testing to 750,000 people a week to track the epidemic — a number Gottlieb said could be achieved in the next week or two. For a state to move to phase two, it should see a sustained reduction in new cases for at least 14 days, and its hospitals need to be able to provide care without being overwhelmed.

“The reason we set it at 14 days is that’s the incubation period of the virus,” said Rivers of Johns Hopkins. “That way you know the downward trend is certain and not because of a holiday or blip or some other delay in reported cases.”

States that have moved into phase two would begin gradually lifting social distancing measures and opening schools and businesses, while increasing surveillance. The key goals thereafter would be accelerating the development of new treatments and deploying tests to determine who has recovered from infection with some immunity and could rejoin the workforce.

Phase 3 occurs when the nation has a vaccine or drugs to treat covid-19 in place and the government launches mass vaccinations. Phase 4 involves rebuilding the nation’s capacity to deal with the next pandemic by building up its scientific and public health infrastructure.

Trump has repeatedly returned to strategies of bans and movement restriction. On Saturday, Trump indicated he might announce a federally mandated quarantine on the New York metro region, forbidding people to leave the New York tri-state area.

His comments quickly prompted questions about whether it was feasible or legal. New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) called a possible quarantine “preposterous,” while New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said he wasn’t “sure what the president means.”

It was unclear whether Trump was seriously considering the New York quarantine or whether it was an off-the-cuff pronouncement. Two White House officials said the idea was spurred by a conversation Saturday morning with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who complained about people from New York pouring into his state. Aides spent the day warning the president against it, explaining that it would be impossible to enforce and could create more complications, the officials said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

For weeks, World Health Organization officials have stressed such lockdowns are only helpful for slowing down the virus and buying time to deploy more targeted and comprehensive measures, which the U.S. has not yet done.

Mike Ryan, WHO head of emergency programs, recently urged countries to focus on finding and isolating infected people and their contacts. “It’s not just about physical distancing, it’s not just about locking down,” he said.

Many experts’ recent proposals for a U.S. strategy have similar stressed the importance of large-scale contact tracing — because it was a cornerstone for successful efforts like South Korea and Singapore.

Some epidemiologists in the past considered contact tracing on large-scale impractical and unhelpful once an outbreak has become widespread in a community. But as countries have shown success with it against this coronavirus, that thinking has changed.

In a recent paper, Marc Lipsitch, a leading epidemiologist at Harvard University suggested that while such contact tracing is “impractical now in many places but more practical once case numbers have been reduced and testing scaled up” and “could alleviate the need for stringent social distancing to maintain control of the epidemic.”

South Korea had already honed this ability during an 2015 outbreak of the deadly MERS coronavirus. Singapore deployed its police force to do the work, drawing on digital footprints with security camera footage and credit card records.

In the U.S., that task has fallen to county health departments — weakened by decades of budget cuts and lacking the staffing and ability to mount such a response. Rapidly building up that capacity — either with community volunteers or short-term hires — will be crucial in coming months, said Rivers of Johns Hopkins. “If you build capacity up and bring cases down, it starts looking a lot more possible.”

Many proposals tackle the problem of the tanking economy. The Gottlieb-Johns Hopkins plan, for example, calls for widespread use of blood tests to identify people who have had the infection and now are immune — called serology testing. People who are immune could return to work, or take on high-risk roles in the health care system and help people, especially the elderly, who are still quarantined at home.

Such serology tests have not been deployed before like this on such a large scale. But during Ebola outbreaks in Africa, survivors were often the ones who provided care, watched over the children of sick patients and buried the dead.

There is more at the link.

I wish I didn’t feel so skeptical about this administration’s desire or ability to do this right. It has shown absolutely no ability to do that up until now.

Maybe everyone but the president has figured out what’s going on and have figured out how to get around him to do the right thing. I don’t know. I do know that he’s giving out misinformation every day and most of his henchmen have been more than willing to back up his delusions and magical thinking.

But we live in hope that they are now listening to the experts. What else can we do?

In case you were wondering…

https://twitter.com/leonardocarella/status/1243648800872443904?s=20

It’s big for him because he’s never gotten more than a two or three point improvement and it’s always been incremental. But it ain’t much.

Faced with a sprawling global crisis, world leaders have begun setting policies into motion that will have vast economic and health implications, and will almost certainly play an outsized role in defining their legacies. The coronavirus outbreak has already shifted the political terrain in a number of countries, swiftly impacting how heads of state are viewed by their constituents, as new Morning Consult Political Intelligence data illustrates. 

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has had the most dramatic shift in fortune: his net approval rating has risen by nearly 30 points in a matter of days. French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison have all had their net approval rating increase by double digits since March 11, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus to be a global pandemic. 

Why does the political right engage in denialism time after time? After all, multiple studies suggest the conservative brain is wired for a higher sensitivity to threatening stimuli. That should make them sentinels who serve to alert the tribe to potential threats instead of denying them. Perhaps it is the nature of the “threat,” how it is presented and by whom, and who counts as their tribe. But it’s hard to keep (or put) a good zombie lie down. COVID-19 denialism is no different, says Paul Krugman.

The rich relentlessly promote the notion that tax cuts boost the economy and pay for themselves. In paper after lecture after failure to produce promised results, the lie won’t die because those with financial interest in perpetuating it keep feeding it brains. Climate denial? Same mechanisms, only funded by fossil fuel interests.

But who benefits from COVID-19 denialism? Krugman suspects it is related to other denialism by patterns of thought:

First, when you have a political movement almost entirely built around assertions than [sic] any expert can tell you are false, you have to cultivate an attitude of disdain toward expertise, one that spills over into everything. Once you dismiss people who look at evidence on the effects of tax cuts and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, you’re already primed to dismiss people who look at evidence on disease transmission.

This also helps explain the centrality of science-hating religious conservatives to modern conservatism, which has played an important role in Trump’s failure to respond.

Second, conservatives do hold one true belief: namely, that there is a kind of halo effect around successful government policies. If public intervention can be effective in one area, they fear — probably rightly — that voters might look more favorably on government intervention in other areas. In principle, public health measures to limit the spread of coronavirus needn’t have much implication for the future of social programs like Medicaid. In practice, the first tends to increase support for the second.

And we can’t have government giving “free stuff” like medical treatment to undeserving Irresponsibles, the lowest caste in the conservative firmament. It’s something I wrote about long before the T-party uprising:

… fellow citizens who need help succeeding in the private sector deserve only pity, if that. It’s the law of the meritocratic jungle. Social Darwinism. If they aren’t smart enough, talented enough, disciplined enough, educated enough or well-born enough it’s because they are Irresponsibles. Helping them enables their dependency and unjustly burdens the more virtuous and successful.

Disdain not just for experts but for those judged unworthy — Guess who gets to do the judging? — fueled the dismantling of public systems built to mitigate the capricious nature of … well, nature, not to mention the short-term unpredictability of market economies. No one could have predicted the consequences of that, yes?

“This… waves at everything… is what happens when you put people who hate government in charge of running it,” Josh Holland tweeted Saturday in response to a tweet Meghan McCain has since deleted — this one:

McCain is shocked, shocked to find Ronald Reagan’s shining city shrunken and drowning in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. She’s spent decades as a member of a movement dedicated to doing just that.

“You wouldn’t trust a mechanic who hates cars to fix your carburetor,” Holland said. Or a failed businessman to run the government even if you think it ought to be run like a private-sector business. Yet, here we are.

For more on why Jerry Falwell Jr. ordered the reopening of Liberty University in the middle of a plague, and on the “nationalist, white-identity, Neo-Confederate” apocalyptic cult that worships “power, white supremacy, and hypercapitalism” (in Jesus’ name, of course), see Jared Yates Sexton’s “The Cult of the Shining City Embraces the Plague” at the New Republic.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Seriously, I can’t believe the wingnuts have the nerve to criticize anyone for gaffes while they’re defending this gibbering moron:

There is no escaping this thing:

To hear year-round Sun Valley, Idaho, residents like Justin Malloy tell it, town right now is as crowded as you’d expect to see it in the peak Fourth of July or Christmas seasons. The small airport is packed with private jets. And then there’s the parking lot at the Atkinsons’ Supermarket, one of only two in town where bread and essential cleaning items are particularly hard to come by.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of Washington plates, a lot of California plates, their cars just full of all of their stuff that they’ve brought from out of state,” Malloy says.

This has fueled outrage on social media, and on unusually crowded hiking and ski trails, where locals are wondering aloud whether rich people are fleeing cities to seek refuge in rural Idaho, and unknowingly making the public health crisis here even worse.

“It’s a little frustrating to see people that are basically coming here to take a vacation,” Malloy says.

Some regions in the rural West are still reporting very low numbers of COVID-19 cases. But there are pockets with high infection rates: wealthy resort towns like Sun Valley and adjoining Ketchum, Idaho, that have a lot of visitor traffic from around the country and world.

“I just hope that some of these people aren’t bringing this disease with them,” Malloy says.

Most of this for now is anecdotal. There’s no way to know how many people have driven into the Wood River Valley. In recent days, flight data at the local Hailey-Sun Valley Airport did show private and commercial flights from places such as Salt Lake City, Seattle and Southern California continuing.

But local hospital officials say they are seeing one of the highest rates of known cases in the entire U.S.

“It seems likely that people were fleeing other places and not recognizing that they were then bringing the disease with them from Seattle, or other areas where they might live part time,” says Dr. Josh Kern, vice president of medical affairs for St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center in Ketchum.

While resort towns like this can typically house a lot of tourists or second- and third-home owners, that doesn’t extend to St. Luke’s, which has only 25 beds. The hospital has had dozens of COVID-related admissions and officials warn there are likely many more cases in the community than what’s been diagnosed.

That’s leading to some impassioned pleas to take the recent, strict self-isolation orders seriously.

“No one should come here,” says Dr. Brent Russell, a local emergency room physician.

Russell should know. He has COVID-19. He’s been very sick, so can’t work at this critical time.

“We have a really high percent of COVID spreading among the population here,” Russell says. “If you come here, that is putting your life at risk and it’s putting other lives at risk.”

Trump said today that he might quarantine New York, New Jersey and Connecticut because too many people are going to Florida (where he happens to have a bunch of properties and needs the electoral votes next November.) He reflexively lied, saying that he’s already talked to Cuomo, but Cuomo said he knew nothing about it and didn’t see how such a thing was workable.

Other states are talking about shutting their borders. Deborah Birx made some ill-advised comments about shutting down counties which is clearly daft unless we start putting up roadblocks and arresting people for crossing county lines. I won’t even mention the impossibility of maintaining our already tenuous supply lines.

If everyone who isn’t absolutely essential voluntarily stays inside their own homes this won’t be necessary. I can certainly see why someone would want to leave New York right now and I don’t blame anyone for making that decision. But Californians really have no excuse and neither does anyone else. We just have to hunker down.

Of course. Seriously, did you really think Trump would keep his tiny filthy hands off of 500 billion bucks in free money?

When President Trump signed the $2 trillion economic stabilization package on Friday to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, he undercut a crucial safeguard that Democrats insisted upon as a condition of agreeing to include a $500 billion corporate bailout fund.

In a signing statement released hours after Mr. Trump signed the bill in a televised ceremony in the Oval Office, the president suggested he had the power to decide what information a newly created inspector general intended to monitor the fund could share with Congress.

Under the law, the inspector general, when auditing loans and investments made through the fund, has the power to demand information from the Treasury Department and other executive branch agencies. The law requires reporting to Congress “without delay” if any agency balks and its refusal is unreasonable “in the judgment of the special inspector general.”

Democrats blocked a final agreement on the package this week as they insisted on stronger oversight provisions to ensure that the president and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin could not abuse the bailout fund. They feared that Mr. Trump, who has previously stonewalled congressional oversight, would do the same when it came to the corporate aid program.

But in his statement, which the White House made public about two hours after the president signed the bill, Mr. Trump suggested that under his own understanding of his constitutional powers as president, he can gag the special inspector general for pandemic recovery, known by the acronym S.I.G.P.R., and keep information from Congress.

The only question is whether he and his pals will limit themselves to half. Or get greedy.

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.

But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

– “The Masque of the Red Death,” by Edgar Allen Poe.

“Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?”

“No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

– Donald Trump responding to a reporter on 1/22/20, the first of many times he minimized the risk of the coronavirus.

Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.

– Donald Trump ridiculing concerns about the coronavirus to his supporters at a South Carolina rally, 2/28/20.

“Dr. Fauci said earlier this week that the lag in testing was in fact a failing. Do you take responsibility for that, and when can you guarantee that every single American who needs a test will be able to have a test? What’s the date of that?”

“No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”

– Donald Trump responding to a reporter, 3/13/20.

WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!

– A Donald Trump tweet on 3/22/20, one of several statements he’s made in opposition to health experts and stay-at-home measures.

(I’m hardly the first or only person to make the Poe connection – it’s been on several people’s minds, and Driftglass has been citing the story for years.)

Trump cares much, much more about public adulation than human lives. We saw it with his inept response to devastation in Puerto Rico and lashing out at those who contradicted him, we saw it with his misstatements and then lies about Hurricane Dorian, and we’ve seen it throughout his entire handling of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump administration is doing to the United States what the Bush administration did to Iraq.

In 2018, Trump closed the U.S. “pandemic office,” despite its value for precisely this type of crisis. Trump has repeatedly tried to cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other health agencies, although Congress has blocked his efforts. Job vacancies and inexperience throughout the Trump administration haven’t helped, either. Trump’s team was briefed about pandemic threats before he took office. The Trump administration received multiple warnings about a major pandemic threat since January. Yet Trump has consistently downplayed the coronavirus threat, ignoring health experts even in his own administration.

Trump has styled himself as a “wartime president” for his pandemic response, but the concocted mantle is just characteristic self-adulation with little to show for it. Trump pawned off the coronavirus task force to Vice President Mike Pence, then apparently became jealous of the attention Pence was getting. Trump invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) but long refused to actually use it, even though the law lets the government tell private companies to produce critical supplies that are sorely in need, such as masks and respirators. Trump’s opposition to using the law despite pleas to do so seemed partially based on conservative dogma but also the usual corporate influence. As of this writing, after significant criticism, Trump has finally used the DPA to order ventilator manufacturing from General Motors, which is a start, and we’ll see if this trend continues. (In the meantime, Trump and his surrogates have gone after the governors for insufficient public praise; Trump has insisted, “I want them to be appreciative. We’ve done a great job.”)

Trump has also insisted on calling the disease “the China virus” and protested the term is not racist, even as hate crimes against Asian-Americans increase. Other members of his administration have used the terms “Kung-flu” or “the Wuhan virus,” and even scuttled a G-7 statement by insisting on their terminology.

Predictably, Trump has continued his staggering record of lying and bullshitting with harmful lies to the public about the coronavirus, many due to his habit of making up the reality he wants at the moment. His sycophants at Fox News and other conservative outlets have cheered him on despite his bad information. If that weren’t enough, conservatives have also attacked Dr. Fauci, an actual expert giving good advice. Trump has even bragged about “tremendous testing” in the U.S., even though anyone with the slightest grasp of reality knows that American COVID-19 testing is still dangerously scarce, far, far below the demand, and woefully behind that of many nations. In fact, as of this writing, a Seattle NPR station “will not be airing the [Trump] briefings live due to a pattern of false or misleading information provided that cannot be fact checked in real time.” Trump cannot get through a single unscripted press conference without being petty and narcissistic, even about softball questions, and recently said governors “have to treat us well.” It’s one of his trademark threats; anyone who doesn’t suck up to him should suffer. (Update: Trump has admitted he’s told Mike Pence not to call governors who aren’t sufficiently “appreciative.” Suck up, or your constituents, the American citizens Trump is supposed to serve, will die.)

Besides masks and other protective gear, what hospitals need most are ventilators to help the most critical COVID-19 patients breathe. The U.S. has about 160,000 ventilators, far short of what experts think the nation will need – estimates differ, but one projection estimates America might need 960,000. The U.S. also lacks trained personnel to use the machines. Anyone’s who’s followed the pandemic news from credible sources knows that the lack of ventilators is a huge problem that could significantly increase the death toll in the U.S. and around the world. But despite his conceits that he is leading the pandemic response and doing a great job, Donald Trump apparently is not “anyone.” His administration balked at paying for ventilators (before a partial reversal), but Trump also questioned their necessity:

In an interview Thursday night, [3/26/20], with Sean Hannity, the president played down the need for ventilators.

“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” he said, a reference to New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo has appealed for federal help in obtaining them. “You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’ “

Of all the astounding Trump statements, this one may be the most shocking and infuriating. Was Trump in a coma the past three months? Has he been sleeping through every briefing or staring at himself in the mirror when medical experts have explained the situation? Is he an imbecile? Does he have dementia? He honestly thinks a hospital in a major city can treat the COVID-19 pandemic with just two ventilators, despite the statistics on COVID-19 cases and deaths? He rejects out of hand the advice of experts based on a fleeting whim – or to spite a perceived political rival – or due to the extensive medical knowledge he’s obtained by pulling it out of his ass? This is deadly narcissism.

Trump simply will not acknowledge any reality he doesn’t like, and he expects others to play along. On 3/17/20, Trump lied and even tried to gaslight the public, claiming, “I’ve always known this is a real, this is a pandemic. I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Likewise, his allies at Fox News pivoted 180 degrees and went from downplaying the virus like Trump to acknowledging its seriousness, as chronicled by The Washington Post:

More recently, Trump has been pushing to end stay-at-home measures, claiming the nation would suffer dire economic harm otherwise. Trump has said he’d like to end the safety measures by Easter (4/12/20), in opposition to all sound expert medical advice, apparently due to pressure from family members and doctrinaire conservatives.

So far, the stages of coronavirus response from Trump and his allies have been:

1. It’s not a threat.

2. I said it was a threat all along.

3. It’s only a threat to the little people. Who cares if your grandmother dies? I need to boost my slumping stock portfolio.

The COVID-19 pandemic poses severe challenges for months to come and could remain a problem for years, with a vaccine likely 12 to 18 months away and no actual cure for the contagious and sometimes deadly disease. That alone should keep us all mindful and spur those with power to try to help by all available means, and to invent new methods of aid. But the delusional incompetence of the Trump team and the ‘expendable grandmother’ mindset could make everything nightmarishly worse.

Texas’ Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick claimed that “lots of grandparents” would be willing to die to preserve America, by which he meant the stock market. Brit Hume defended Patrick’s remarks, calling them “entirely reasonable.” Glenn Beck urged older Americans to go back to work and claimed, “I’d rather die than kill the country.” Several billionaires have expressed similar sentiments, including Tom Golisano:

The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people. I have a very large concern that if businesses keep going along the way they’re going then so many of them will have to fold. . . . You’re picking the better of two evils. You have to weigh the pros and cons.

(“Real” talk, from people unlikely to suffer the consequences of their callous idiocy.)

Likewise, some investment banks are pressuring medical companies to raise prices to increase their profits during this crisis. (The notion that they are killing their potential customers does not seem to have occurred to them.) Pharmaceutical companies have largely gotten their way in Congress to put profits first, mostly due to Republicans. At least one drug company has been publicly shamed into rejecting a ridiculous and potentially dangerous sweetheart deal, and perhaps public pressure can continue to spur corporations to renounce evil.

Speaking of which, congressional Republicans have continued their tradition of being cartoonishly evil, proposing a 500 million dollar slush fund to be controlled by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who could also hide the names of the companies he gave to for up to six months. (Perhaps some Trump companies or Trump allies would be included?) To add to the farce, Trump declared that “I’ll be the oversight.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, ever shameless, attacked Democrats for opposing the bill while fighting against the public interest. Oh, and some members of the Republican Party (which sadly has been the party-before-country-party for decades) were likewise shameless enough to argue that some unemployment measures were too generous and could make workers too uppity. (This mindset is likely also why the Trump administration is cutting food stamps.) The Democrats did fight for and won some good measures in the two trillion dollar stimulus package under consideration, but David Dayen has described it as “robbery in progress” (and has some more details here; Digby highlights another provision open for abuse).

Rulers often use a crisis as an excuse to grab power and make corrupt deals – the Trump EPA is suspending environmental laws at the behest of the American Petroleum Institute and the Trump Justice Department has asked for emergency powers that could include suspending habeas corpus. These are classic shock doctrine moves; the Republican track record does not inspire confidence and U.S. conservatives are significantly more evil than many of their international counterparts (although they almost always seem to get a pass for it).

Like Prince Prospero in Poe’s story, Trump the Orange One and other conservatives in power believe that they will survive the pandemic unscathed. They’ve become more cavalier about expressing their true views: that other people simply matter less, and that they’re happy to let other people suffer and die for their own benefit. They are too dumb, selfish, greedy and short-sighted to realize that the same fate could befall them, or that killing off their customers and fellow citizens might not be a good long-term plan. The U.S. conservative reaction to this pandemic is basically the same as their reaction to climate change – ineffective, full of denial, and focused on profit and personal gain at the expense of all the people of the world – but for COVID-19, the deadliest consequences have been accelerated, and will be hitting hard in days, weeks, and months instead of years and decades from now.

The dominant form of U.S. conservatism is essentially neo-feudalism: those born to privilege are inherently better, and can rule over the masses. If you choose the right parents or suck up to the right lord or corporation or institution, you might live pretty well or even extravagantly, but the vast majority of the populace will have far less opportunities and likely a markedly lower quality of life. The U.S. is the wealthiest nation in the world, and the richest could still remain obscenely wealthy without seeking to increase the inequities of wealth and power as conservatives and the Republican Party consistently do. Our current, messed-up system is a choice. Although decent people exist who self-identify as conservatives, it should be blatantly clear by now that the dominant strain of American conservatism is destructive and sometimes literally lethal, and these crappy citizens and corrupt governors should be voted out of office and kept far away from power. Republican voters saw Trump was unfit for office and voted for him anyway. Congressional Republicans saw he was unfit for office, corrupt and incompetent, yet refused to convict him and remove him from office when he was impeached. The Conservative policies are simply awful, and Trump is not an aberration of conservatism; he’s emblematic.

If there’s anything positive about the pandemic, besides heroic medical workers and acts of kindness and creativity and community, it’s that more people seem to be realizing how many “rules” in the U.S. system are bullshit, “with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest.” For instance, it should be clearer than ever that the U.S. needs good, universal health care, a much stronger social safety net, and a much kinder, compassionate and supportive society. Jared Bernstein has characterized conservatism as YOYO, “You’re on your own,” whereas liberalism is WITT, “We’re in this together.” The present crisis has produced some clear insights and articulations of moral principle in that vein.

Steven Klein captures the real fear of plutocrats:

the fear is not that coronavirus will destroy the “economy.” it’s that the political measures necessary to keep people alive will now require and enable large-scale redistribution of wealth and resources.

— Steven Klein (@stevenmklein) March 23, 2020

Alex Cole points out a telling contrast:

I remember when Republicans like Dan Patrick were screaming about Death Panels and now the very same people are saying sacrifice the elderly for the sake of our economy.

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) March 24, 2020

(Why, it’s almost as if they always argue to benefit themselves at the moment rather than from some deeper principle.)

Alexandra Petri offers the satirical “I regret that I have but one grandparent to give for my country.”

Ken Tremendous considers the flaws of the conservative “let people die” proposal in terms of the trolley problem.

Scott Lynch explains “Disaster 101”:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo explains some basic humanity:

I want to make a point on the president’s point about the economy and public health. I understand what the president is saying, this is unsustainable that we close down the economy and we continue to spend money. There is no doubt about that, no one is going to argue about that. But if you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest. No American is going to say, ‘accelerate the economy at the cost of human life.’ Because no American is going to say how much a life is worth. Job one has to be save lives. That has to be the priority. . . . My mother is not expendable. And your mother is not expandable. We’re not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable. We’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life. . . . We are going to fight every way we can to save every life that we can. Because that’s what I think it means to be an American.

Cuomo is overly optimistic or diplomatic when he says “no American” believes such monstrous things, because sadly, we’ve seen that some of them do, and many of those people have power and influence. But may we hold them to account, follow higher principles, and try to help one another stay safe in these trying times from the Orange Death as well as COVID-19.

From the Washington Post:

Day after day, news organizations track the death toll for the novel coronavirus, often relying on tallies maintained by universities or researchers. The figure for the United States crossed 1,000 deaths on March 25 — a sharp increase from the 100 or so reported just nine days earlier.

Still, President Trump has taken comfort in often citing death tolls for the 2009 swine flu pandemic and the seasonal flu, appearing to suggest the death toll for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is much smaller. But the numbers he cites are not comparable to the covid-19 statistics.AD

The daily tracking number for covid-19 is substantially below the real figure of deaths that can be attributed to the coronavirus. It represents only the bare minimum — confirmed deaths reported by hospitals, medical providers and state health authorities as caused by covid-19. The actual number is substantially higher, but that will only become apparent after statistical modeling on excess mortality during this period.

Here’s an explanation.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that from April 12, 2009, to April 10, 2010, there were 12,469 deaths in the United States because of the H1N1 (swine flu) virus. That was the midpoint of an estimate that ranged from a low of 8,868 to a high of 18,306.

But that was an after-the-fact report. What was the CDC reporting as the swine flu pandemic unfolded? Here’s a comparison of the first 65 days of the 2009 swine flu in the United States and first 65 days of the 2020 covid-19 outbreak.AD

Swine flu

• April 15, 2009 — first infection detected
• June 19, 2009 — 21,449 cases, 87 deaths

Covid-19

• Jan. 20, 2020 — first infection detected
• March 25, 2020 — 69,344 cases, 1,050 deaths

The 2009-2010 swine flu pandemic is considered to have been relatively mild — and in the United States, it hit harder in a second wave in the fall. Clearly, covid-19 is striking with more force — and faster.

“We know that if you just look at laboratory-confirmed deaths, it is an undercount, especially in the case of flu,” said Cécile Viboud, senior research scientist in the Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health, where she is part of the Multinational Influenza Seasonal Mortality Study (MISMS).

Viboud said that many deaths are triggered by the flu but occur later, via secondary bacterial infection or exacerbation of underlying chronic diseases, even as flu symptoms may have disappeared. So a death might be recorded as a heart attack, not as having been caused by the flu, even though the flu led to the cardiac arrest. The CDC, which tracks weekly flu deaths, also closely tracks pneumonia deaths because pneumonia is so often a consequence of the flu.

“Only counting deaths where influenza was recorded on a death certificate would be a gross underestimation of influenza’s true impact,” says the CDC in a website explanation of how it estimates deaths caused by seasonal influenza.

Researchers such as Viboud use a time series analysis to estimate how many excess deaths in a given period can be attributed to a viral disease such as the flu but are not counted in the official death statistics.

For instance, in the 2009 swine flu pandemic, 2,096 laboratory‐confirmed deaths were reported in the United States from Aug. 30, 2009, to April 6, 2010, the second wave. But a 2013 study that Viboud participated in concluded that the excess deaths that could be attributed to the pandemic in that period amounted to about 14,800. In other words, the official lab count in the United States missed 6 in 7 deaths.AD

Another 2013 study, examining data across the globe, concluded that the World Health Organization laboratory-confirmed count missed 9 in 10 deaths that could be attributed to the swine flu pandemic.

There is debate within infectious-disease circles about how to structure such statistical models, including accounting for seasonal mortality patterns and determining what types of deaths to include. That’s one reason that there can be such wide ranges in the estimates.

But there already is anecdotal evidence that many deaths that stem from covid-19 are not being recorded as such. Doctors and nurses have told BuzzFeed News that deaths in the United States are not being correctly reported, in part because overwhelmed hospitals and a shortage of tests meant people died before it was determined whether they had contracted the virus.

And in Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s leading newspapers, the mayor of the northern Italian town of Nembro reported that even though 31 people are recorded as having died of covid-19 from January to March, 158 people are listed as dead in the town — 123 more than the average. “The difference is enormous and cannot be a simple statistical deviation,” wrote Claudio Cancelli, suggesting that the actual death toll was four times higher.

Viboud said that the Nembro figures were “not entirely surprising” but that they would need to be studied more closely, given that they were a relatively small data set in a limited period. She said the death reporting system in Europe is quite fast, in contrast with that in the United States, so the actual covid-19 death toll might be more quickly estimated there. In the United States, she said, the collecting of death certificates can take two or more years, so a time series analysis of the current pandemic probably could not be completed until at least 2022.

“In the case of a new cause of death (like covid-19), there are additional issues about incomplete capture of deaths due to the new cause, including a lack of an ICD-10 code,” said Keri N. Althoff, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, referring to a WHO medical classification list. She noted the medical classification code for covid-19 was only released in recent days. “There will likely be a lot of work on the ground and with statistical methods to estimating the number of deaths from covid-19 prior to the release of the ICD-10 code.”AD

Trump is comparing apples and oranges. The figures he cites for the swine flu and seasonal influenza are after-the-fact estimates that try to account for all excess deaths that could be, in some way, attributed to a flu infection. Studies indicate that the official lab counts may be missing as many as 9 in 10 deaths.

The numbers so far for covid-19 are only laboratory-confirmed deaths. So, depending on how the United States handles this public-health emergency, the future estimates of the impact of covid-19 may be grim reading indeed.

I am certain that Fauci and other experts have told him that. But he is incapable of understanding anything this complicated. And even if he did, he would lie about it to make himself look better.

I obviously have no idea where these numbers will end up. But it’s pretty clear that because the testing has been so delayed we will never know for sure how many people have died from this thing. But we do know that it’s virulent and dangerous.

And we are led by a pathologically dishonest imbecile so anything he says must be ignored anyway.