If you’ve ever wondered how you would fare in a disaster movie, you are in luck if you can call it that. Assuming you survive.
“For every indication of improvement in controlling the virus, new outbreaks have emerged elsewhere,” reports the New York Times (in the voice of Don Lafontaine), “leaving the nation stuck in a steady, unrelenting march of deaths and infections.”
One man won’t save the day. That one man is: Donald Trump.
An inept and corrupt president is listening to the Wormtongues of his court. He’s floundering, making all the wrong, self-interested moves. He is ignoring the people dedicated to averting disaster. One filed a whistleblower complaint Tuesday:
Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, alleges he was reassigned to a lesser role because he resisted political pressure to allow widespread use of hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug pushed by President Donald Trump. He said the Trump administration wanted to “flood” hot spots in New York and New Jersey with the drug.
“I witnessed government leadership rushing blindly into a potentially dangerous situation by bringing in a non-FDA approved chloroquine from Pakistan and India, from facilities that had never been approved by the FDA,” Bright said Tuesday on a call with reporters. “Their eagerness to push blindly forward without sufficient data to put this drug into the hands of Americans was alarming to me and my fellow scientists.”
Yes, you’ve seen this movie before. An epidemioloist at the University of Washington issued a warning Sunday:
Dr. Malmgren was responding to the acting president’s pressuring governors into lifting stay-at-home restrictions. Trump has spent four years bragging about the economy. He’s still bragging about his supposed miracle-working months after the COVID-19 pandemic put the American economy in lockdown and vaporized any gains made since January 2017. His reelection chances depend on defibrilating an economy essentially without a pulse.
Trump is desperate and doesn’t care who gets hurt. He means to survive November.
It wouldn’t be a blockbuster if things didn’t go from bad to worse.
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have identified a more contagious mutated form of the original virus. The mutation affects the “spikes” on the exterior of the virus, reports the Los Angeles Times. It appeared in February in Europe and has become dominant across the planet since mid-March. Those who survive it may be more vulnerable to a second infection. This might be old news because the strain killing people now is likely the mutated strain.
Scientists at major organizations working on a vaccine or drugs have told The Times that they are pinning their hopes on initial evidence that the virus is stable and not likely to mutate the way influenza virus does, requiring a new vaccine every year. The Los Alamos report could upend that assumption.
If the pandemic fails to wane seasonally as the weather warms, the study warns, the virus could undergo further mutations even as research organizations prepare the first medical treatments and vaccines. Without getting on top of the risk now, the effectiveness of vaccines could be limited. Some of the compounds in development are supposed to latch onto the spike or interrupt its action. If they were designed based on the original version of the spike, they might not be effective against the new coronavirus strain, the study’s authors warned.
In New York City, for now the epicenter of the disease, children once thought to be relatively safe from COVID-19 are turning up ill:
In the past two days alone, the hospital, Cohen Children’s Medical Center, has admitted five critically ill patients — ages 4 to 12 — with an unusual sickness that appears to be somehow linked to Covid-19, the disease caused by coronavirus. In total, about 25 similarly ill children have been admitted there in recent weeks with symptoms ranging from reddened tongues to enlarged coronary arteries.
Doctors are calling the new, less lung-specific disease “pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome.” It presents as similar to “a rare childhood illness called Kawasaki disease.” That condition can cause inflammation of the blood vessels and especially the coronary arteries.
Well, it’s sort of a disaster movie:
Private Hudson : [after the drop ship crash] Well, that’s great. That’s just fuckin’ great, man! Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We’re in some real pretty shit now, man!
And no, that’s not all. On top of a global pandemic of disaster-movie proportions and a president not just out of his depth but lacking any, the U.S. is in the grip of a mass hysteria.
From the Arizona Republic:
The Arizona Department of Health Services told a team of university experts working on COVID-19 modeling to “pause” its work, an email from a department leader shows.
The modeling team of about two dozen professors at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona was compiling the most robust public model in Arizona of COVID-19.
The email, from DHS bureau chief of public health statistics S. Robert Bailey, came on Monday evening, after Gov. Doug Ducey announced plans to begin easing social distancing in the coming days.
A rule proposed last year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) would modify the amount of time an infection preventionist must devote to a facility from at least part-time to “sufficient time,” an undefined term that lets the facility decide how much time should be spent. The regulation has not been finalized, but CMS last week defended its proposal, saying it aims to reduce regulatory burden and strengthen infection control.
Opponents of the change said the rule could leave nursing home residents more vulnerable to infection. They expressed concern, especially given the devastation COVID-19 has caused within long-term care facilities.
“It makes no sense at all,” says Lindsay Heckler, a supervising attorney at Buffalo, New York’s Center for Elder Law & Justice. That’s Donald Trump.
Not to mention the lunatics with no masks or social distancing demanding they be eaten by the contagion because Freedom. Even Trump adviser Dr. Deborah Birx (she of many scarves) thinks they’re nuts:
“It’s devastatingly worrisome to me personally, because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a comorbid condition and they have a serious or an unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives,” Birx said. “So we need to protect each other at the same time we’re voicing our discontent.”
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live through a mass hysteria, here is your chance. COVID-19 is a twofer.
As bad as all this sounds (and it is), just remember the one rule about surviving disaster movies: Never give up.
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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.