Month: April 2020

CNN reports:

Sunday’s edition of The Boston Globe contained a shocking visualization of the coronavirus pandemic: page after page after page of death notices.

The obituary section in Sunday’s print edition spanned 16 pages. This time last year, there were seven. The increase is a stark illustration of the devastating toll the pandemic is having on Massachusetts and New England.”It’s literally showing it in black and white how deadly this virus can be,” said Jaclyn Reiss, the Globe’s digital editor, in an interview with CNN.

And while Reiss noted there was no immediate way to determine how many of the death notices that filled pages A-13 to A-28 came from coronavirus victims — death notices don’t always say how the person died — several of them mentioned a battle with the virus.

The section has “been growing every Sunday since the coronavirus pandemic has been surging here in Massachusetts,” Reiss said, adding that the previous Sunday, the paper ran 11 pages of death notices.

Reiss explained that besides the increased death toll — 1,706 people have died as of Monday afternoon — the uptick in death notices could be because families aren’t able to hold wakes and funerals now. With no time constraint to publish a death notice before a scheduled memorial service, families could be submitting their death notices to be published on Sunday when the paper gets higher readership.

The Globe, of course, isn’t the only paper to mark an increase. Newspapers in other hot spots around the country are seeing a drastic rise in the number of obituaries and death notices they are publishing.

In today's @NOLAnews, we had just over 8 pages of death notices. It's been like this the last few Sundays, which is the biggest day of readership. We used to consider 4 pages a lot. All of these beloved family members and friends for so many. And no funerals. pic.twitter.com/xtMypiaNb4

— Jennifer Brown (@brownjen) April 19, 2020

“On the same weekend last year, there were about four pages devoted to obituaries,” according to an article in the Advocate. There were approximately 25,000 cases and 1,328 deaths in the state as of Monday afternoon.

The Hartford Courant has 12 pages of obituaries today.

The index on the left usually runs 1/4 or 1/2 way down the page. pic.twitter.com/g4sEJ6ZQKT

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) April 19, 2020

The Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey, published 109 obituaries across nine pages of its April 12 edition, A year earlier, there were 17 obituaries on one and a half pages, according to nj.com.

The Hartford Courant has 12 pages of obituaries today.

The index on the left usually runs 1/4 or 1/2 way down the page. pic.twitter.com/g4sEJ6ZQKT

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) April 19, 2020

Connecticut’s Hartford Courant published 12 pages of obituaries on Sunday. The state has about 18,000 cases and 1,127 deaths.”It’s more than I’ve ever seen. On a Sunday, you’d see at the most three, maybe four pages, so it was about triple what we normally do,” said Rick Green, the Courant’s assistant managing editor.

And then there’s this. Good lord:

Do look at this if you have any doubts about how deadly coronavirus is. The video shows a man showing the death notices in a Bergamo newspaper on Feb 9 and the death notices today. It is very sobering https://t.co/GYffwPFemu

— Crispian Balmer (@crispiandjb) March 14, 2020

By coincidence, I watched a bunch of documentaries about the 1918 flu pandemic about six months ago. I knew we would inevitably have one like this although I had no idea it would be so soon. And in one of them (I don’t remember which one it was) it talked about the death notices. I wondered how people lived through such a thing and carried on with life. Now I know.

Baker has a good point. They’re opening up tattoo parlors and restaurants in Georgia and he’s banning non-existent immigrants from entering the US when the whole world is on lockdown. It’s hard to think of a policy more ineffectual in the crisis that is as nakedly xenophobic and political.

I am increasingly convinced that Stephen Miller is really running Trump these days. His coronavirus rallies every day feature a long, tedious speech in the beginning which I’m sure most people tune out because it’s delivered in Trump’s halting, grade-school level reading style that puts you to sleep. But if you do listen to what he’s saying it’s almost all lies (of course) but is also full of crass, “American carnage” style rhetoric, even when he’s just reading off long lists of non-existent accomplishments.

Trump may have seen something on TV that made him decide in the middle of the night to ban all immigrants. But you can bet that Miller’s been pounding that drum for a long time. This is his chance to “purify” America and he wants to grab it.

Jonathan Chait outlines the Trump play today:

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday afternoon that Trump has “asked White House aides for economic response plans that would allow him to take credit for successes while offering enough flexibility to assign fault for any failures to others.” Trump’s seemingly paradoxical stance is an attempt to hoard credit and shirk risk, straddling the demands of his business allies with the pleas of his public-health advisers. On the surface, he is deferring responsibility and blame to the governors. Just below the surface, he is coercing them to resume economic activity as fast as possible, regardless of what public-health officials say.

Trump’s plan to coerce the states into reopening has at least three discernible elements. The first is, or was, the formation of a task force to reopen the country. The purpose of the council was to give Trump cover. The council would prod governors to reopen businesses, and because it would be seen as coming from the business community, Trump himself would not bear the blame for future outbreaks that might result.

As the Washington Post reported last week, “Trump’s advisers are trying to shield the president from political accountability should his move to reopen the economy prove premature and result in lost lives, and so they are trying to mobilize business executives, economists and other prominent figures to buy into the eventual White House plan, so that if it does not work, the blame can be shared broadly, according to two former administration officials familiar with the efforts.” (In part because its purpose was so naked, the task force seems to have collapsed.)

The second element is the mobilization of protests. The appearance of flag-waving and sometimes gun-toting demonstrators in a handful of state capitols this weekend seems to have come as a shock to the news media, but Trump’s allies signaled this was coming. Last Monday, Stephen Moore, a right-wing pseudo-economist and close Trump ally who has spent weeks pushing back on public-health guidelines, was quoted in the press saying, “In the next two weeks, you’ll see protests in the streets of conservatives; you’ll see a big pushback against the lockdown in some states.”

This was not just an eerily prescient forecast of the direction of right-wing opinion. Moore is not Nostradomus. The protests were always an integral element to Trump’s strategy. The protests apply pressure to state governments, mobilizing conservatives to oppose lockdowns and raising using the threat of either passive resistance (by flouting social-distancing rules) or open violence (which Trump teased by linking the cause with the Second Amendment).

Trump’s comments about the protesters have been unusually subtle. (“These are people expressing their views. I see where they are and I see the way they’re working. They seem to be very responsible people to me, but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”) Anybody listening to Trump would understand that he is encouraging the protests and sees them as his allies, but he is also leaving himself room to deny direct responsibility for their actions if things get out of hand.

The final element of the plan is using fiscal starvation to bring the states to heel. Republicans have refused to allow any additional funding for state and local governments in the latest economic relief package. “The thinking among some Trump administration officials is that many states should be reopening their governments soon and that additional funding could deter them from doing so,” reports Axios. Likewise, Politico reports the administration opposes aid for states because it believes “if Congress keeps cutting checks for state and local governments, they will be disincentivized to open up their economies.”

From the standpoint of either public health or economic growth, this is a wildly irresponsible course of action. Public-health officials and business leaders agree that it will be impossible to restore normal business activity without testing and other measures to ensure public safety. Testing has been a debacle, and the number of tests has been flat for two weeks. Rather than sort out the mess, Trump is essentially giving up on the whole job and leaving it to governors.

And yet, while he is purposeful about avoiding blame, Trump refuses to cede authority to other officials. He wants to reopen the economy fast, and fiscal pressure is a way to force their hand.

Faced with the desperation of a disintegrating revenue base and spiraling needs for social spending, governors may be forced to risk the health of their citizens and try to gamble that they can restart the economy. The certainty of an unsolvable fiscal crisis, requiring massive cuts to education and health care, may outweigh the risk of a new outbreak. If the economy blossoms, Trump gets the credit. If the recovery sputters because people remain afraid to leave their homes, or if they do leave their homes and thousands of them die, then the governors who made the decisions get the blame.

I wrote about this yesterday for Salon. Trump and his cronies are on a separate path from the public health leaders and we’re now in a race to see if Trump can beat the virus. It couldn’t be riskier but I guess he’s just hoping he gets lucky.

I don’t know that the governors will be held responsible for this by the death cult but you can bet that Trump won’t hold back in lying and condemning them for anything negative that results.

This is as cynical as it gets. But Trump is increasingly desperate about his re-election prospects and he doesn’t have limits. So, this could get really ugly. The immigration order in the middle of the night signals that he’s going to go out of his way to gin up his armed and dangerous base.

Stay safe.

If you were wondering why Fox News hosts have suddenly stopped pimping Trump’s fabulous miracle cure I would guess it’s because the lawyers told them the network was already facing massive lawsuits over their irresponsible promotion of the drug:

A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating the new coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers reported.

The nationwide study was not a rigorous experiment. But with 368 patients, it’s the largest look so far of hydroxychloroquine with or without the antibiotic azithromycin for COVID-19, which has killed more than 171,000 people as of Tuesday.

The study was posted on an online site for researchers and has has not been reviewed by other scientists. Grants from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia paid for the work.

Researchers analyzed medical records of 368 male veterans hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus infection at Veterans Health Administration medical centers who died or were discharged by April 11.

About 28% who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died, versus 11% of those getting routine care alone. About 22% of those getting the drug plus azithromycin died too, but the difference between that group and usual care was not considered large enough to rule out other factors that could have affected survival.

Hydroxychloroquine made no difference in the need for a breathing machine, either.

Researchers did not track side effects, but noted a hint that hydroxychloroquine might have damaged other organs. The drug has long been known to have potentially serious side effects, including altering the heartbeat in a way that could lead to sudden death.

There were similar results in recent small Brazilian, French and Swedish studies.

Honestly, the fact that this drug may actually be killing more people, if proven, should make President Trump personally liable. He’s the one who went out there and insisted the government buy massive quantities of this drug for trials when it was no more likely than any of the other drugs to work — and then said “what have you got to lose?” It’s among the most irresponsible things he’s done and that’s saying something.

I know we knew that already. But since the Trump cult persists on screaming “Carter Page, Carter Page!” at the top of their lungs and the president continues to publicly call the FBI “human scum” for doing their jobs, it’s worth noting that the bipartisan investigation into the Russian sabotage of the 2016 election was specifically designed to help Trump.

Newly declassified Senate Intelligence Cmte study affirms the intelligence community assessment that Russia's 2016 election manipulation operation was specifically geared at helping Trump win, and finds the Steele dossier played no role in that analysis. https://t.co/XWrK6H3uVv pic.twitter.com/jn2oRRjAg9

— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) April 21, 2020

Trump was told this before he was inaugurated. Whether he knew at the time is unknown. But it doesn’t matter. He was grateful and has rewarded and encouraged Vladimir Putin ever since then, clearly inviting him to do it again. Can anyone doubt it at this point?

This guy apparently has an insatiable need for money. We know he’s been selling his access to the president for years now. And recently he was hawking hydroxychloroquine to Trump’s cult.

Now this:

Rudy Giuliani is hosting his own coronavirus-themed talk radio show and, for a fee, he’ll tell listeners that your business is providing a crucial good or service amid the panic and uncertainty.

The former New York mayor and personal attorney to President Donald Trump is offering paid sponsorship packages for his new show on WABC in New York, billed as part of the station’s three-hour daily block of coronavirus coverage. A sponsorship solicitation sent out by a WABC advertising representative last week and obtained by The Daily Beast indicates that Giuliani’s on-air endorsements of those sponsors will couch them as crucial coronavirus-era businesses.

“I’m confident that I can help you achieve your goals and highlight your brand right now as a much-needed product or service during this unprecedented time,” Giuliani says in a 60-second promotional audio clip that accompanied the sponsorship solicitation.

I don’t know if it’s just untrammeled greed, massive debt or a severe personality disorder that’s manifested itself more acutely in the Trump era, but this man has lost every shred of dignity and credibility he once had and he just keeps making it worse.

Sometimes I think we’ve been visited by some alien species that has taken over the brains of half of our country. So many of these people who were always right-wingers but still had a grip on reality and some sense of propriety have completely gone over the edge.

Raw Story:

Appearing remotely on CNN’s “New Day” New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman claimed that senior officials in Donald Trump’s administration are deeply concerned about the possibility of a coronavirus outbreak afflicting supporters who have flocked to the streets to protest the pandemic shutdown at the president’s urging.

Speaking with hosts John Berman and Alisyn Camerota, Haberman, said those same aides are also worried about violence at the protests as some attendees have been showing up armed with weapons.

Over the weekend, following the president’s tweets to “liberate” various states overseen by Democratic governors, flocks of Trump supporters took to the streets waving signs and, in some instances, blocking traffic around hospitals.

According to Haberman, televised scenes of the protesters have set off alarms in the White House.

“This is not 2016,” she began. “What he is doing is encouraging people to violate statewide orders and these are not by choice issues from these governors — these are mandatory. So you have a president who is doing something that some of his advisers acknowledge is probably not smart public health policy, but they think is probably effective politics for him because it helps him with a certain group of supporters and downplays his own responsibility.”

“Public health policy can mean a lot of things,” Berman offered. “In this case, Maggie, it might mean that it costs lives”

“Right, look, it’s very risky” the journalist replied. “One adviser I spoke to made the point if someone gets hurt in one of those protests, and we should be clear these protests been pretty small and scattershot organized as opposed to authentic so far, so we’ll see how durable they are. If they remain, if someone gets hurt or sick at one of the protests where a lot of people are not wearing masks, that raises the potential stakes for the president and some of his folks are aware of that.”

Hmmmm. I wonder if there might be someone in this country who could speak sense to these people? Someone they trust — worship, in fact — who could persuade them to stay home until the guidelines are lifted ?

There is, of course. But he is one of them and likes the idea of protesting the governors he feels haven’t properly licked his boots. Nothing else matters to him. And frankly if half these people drop dead and they spread it to everyone they know, he won’t care and I’m really afraid that they won’t either. They are a death cult.

“It becomes increasingly evident … that our president suffers from a severe form of mental illness,” insists Slate’s David Masciotra. The refusal of public figures from the press to Democrats to pundits to say so plainly makes them the “silent partners” of an abuser. “[T]heir refusal to state the obvious forces the American public to feel as if we are the ones confined to a mental institution.” Then again, it was clear from the outset of his campaign that Trump is mentally imbalanced and unfit to be president. Yet, we as a country — our system — put him where he is. What does that say about us?

Donald Trump’s election and misrule, from his incoherent tweets to his windsock policy gyrations to his daily, whine-and-boast sessions (ostensibly public health briefings), say as much about our breakdown as a county as about the man we’ve watched unravel on live TV.

Decades of movement conservatism have shrunk the government. Trump arrived like an earthly Surtur to finish the job of drowning it the bathtub. Trump would bring about Ragnarök, not to fulfill conservatives’ ends but for his own revenge and aggrandizement.

The pre-Trump United States government was already “crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding,” writes George Packer at The Atlantic. Faith in government had been systematically undermined. Sarah Palin was Trump’s John the Baptist, heralding that expertise and competence had been cast aside to make way for celebrity.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Great Recession came the plague, the third major crisis of the 21st century:

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

The virus might have united Americans against a common threat, Packer writes. Instead, it lays bare how much an economy that gives lip service to “hard work” rewards instead making money from money. “We now have two categories of work: essential and non­essential.” The plague makes clear many people we reward most highly are essentially nonessential:

We now have two categories of work: essential and non­essential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact.

[…]

The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of non­essential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay.

In the film, Thor realizes his destiny is not to prevent Asgard’s prophesied destruction but to bring it about. But not without hope of rebirth. “Asgard is not a place … Asgard is where our people stand,” Odin tells him. America is not a place either, but an idea. One of renewal built upon renewal, improvement built upon improvement. Even if interspersed with destruction.

Packer concludes:

We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

[h/t NA]

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV 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.

Naturally Trump put a Trump-like egomaniac failure in charge of ramping up the vitally needed testing regime in America:

Brett Giroir, the federal official overseeing coronavirus testing efforts, says that his experience working on vaccine development projects at Texas A&M University helped prepare him for this historic moment. He once said that his vaccine effort was so vital that “the fate of 50 million people will rely on us getting this done.”

But after eight years of work on several vaccine projects, Giroir was told in 2015 he had 30 minutes to resign or he would be fired. His annual performance evaluation at Texas A&M, the local newspaper reported, said he was “more interested in promoting yourself” than the health science center where he worked. He got low marks on being a “team player.”

Now President Trump has given Giroir the crucial task of ending the massive shortfall of tests for the novel coronavirus. Some governors have blasted the lack of federal help on testing, which they say is necessary to enact Trump’s plan for reopening the economy.

That criticism has focused attention on Giroir and whether he can deliver results under pressure. His years as director of the Texas vaccine project illustrate his operating style, which includes sweeping statements about the impact of his work, not all of which turned out as some had hoped.

He is exactly the type of person Trump would put in charge of testing.

Meanwhile:

The U.S. will need to administer 20 million tests for the novel coronavirus each day by mid-summer in order to fully remobilize the economy in a safe fashion, according to new report from a Harvard panel of more than 45 experts in health, science and economics.

The figure far exceeds testing recommendations from other health experts. Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has said that the country will need to initially conduct up to 3 million tests per week to reopen. A separate estimate from Harvard University researchers says the U.S. must conduct between 500,000 and 700,00 tests per day by mid-May to begin reopening.

The new report, released by Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics on Monday, emphasized the need for a massive scaling up of testing coupled with a robust contact-tracing program in order to reopen the U.S. in a way that avoids future shutdowns. Its top recommendations include a call for the nation to deliver 5 million tests per day by early June in order to ensure a safe reopening of portions of the economy.

“This number will need to increase over time (ideally by late July) to 20 million a day to fully remobilize the economy,” the authors wrote, cautioning that even that figure may not be high enough to “protect public health.”

The value in dramatically increasing testing is it will “prevent cycles of opening up and shutting down,” the authors argued, adding that the testing output will allow the virus to be adequately managed until a vaccine is developed.

“This Roadmap is the only approach to BOTH contain the virus and ramp back up to vibrant economic life. And, in the long term, it allows us to build an infrastructure of pandemic resilience that will serve us well when the next health crisis or disaster hits, while improving community health,” Danielle Allen, director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, said in a statement.

Tha’s not going ove well with the Trump Death Cult which wants to throw the economy open and play Russian Roulette with their lives and everyone else’s.

https://twitter.com/shootmupintx/status/1252333536935383042

*sigh*

Strictly speaking, it’s The Conservative Death Cult, but seeing how he likes his name on everything and this is his policy:

A senior scientist at a government biomedical research laboratory has been thwarted in his efforts to conduct experiments on possible treatments for the new coronavirus because of the Trump administration’s restrictions on research with human fetal tissue.

The scientist, Kim Hasenkrug, an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, has been appealing for nearly a month to top NIH officials, arguing that the pandemic warrants an exemption to a ban imposed last year prohibiting government researchers from using tissue from abortions in their work.

According to several researchers familiar with the situation, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive internal dispute, such experiments could be particularly fruitful. Just months ago, before the new coronavirus began to infect people around the world, other U.S. scientists made two highly relevant discoveries. They found that specialized mice could be transplanted with human fetal tissue that develops into lungs — the part of the body the new coronavirus invades. These “humanized mice,” they also found, could then be infected with coronaviruses — to which ordinary mice are not susceptible — closely related to the one that causes the new disease, covid-19.

Outside researchers said the scientists who created those mice have offered to give them to the Rocky Mountain Lab, which has access to the new virus that causes covid-19, so the mice could be infected with the source of the pandemic and experiments could be run on potential treatments. Candidates include an existing drug known to boost patients’ immune systems in other circumstances, as well as blood serum from patients recovering from covid-19.

“Kim Hasenkrug is one of the world experts in immune responses to persistent viral infection, including HIV and a whole bunch of other viruses,” said Irving Weissman, a leading stem cell researcher at Stanford University. In addition, the Montana NIH site has a biosafety lab equipped with high-level protections for experiments with dangerous microbes.

“It isn’t clear if this added layer of urgent investigations will find more effective” treatments for people infected in the pandemic than other approaches being tried, Weissman said, “but it’s stupid not to try.”

No therapies or vaccines for the new coronavirus exist yet.

The inability of the Montana lab, part of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to pursue these experiments on the coronavirus is the latest example of disruptions to scientists’ work caused by the administration’s restrictions on research involving fetal tissue.

“When I hear the vice president saying [they’re] doing everything they can to find vaccines [and treatments], I know that is not true,” said one scientist familiar with the situation, referring to Vice President Pence’s daily news briefings of the White House’s coronavirus task force. “Anything we do at this point could save hundreds of thousands of lives. If you wait, it’s too late.”