Are you better off than you were four years ago?
"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2020
Projections by the Centers for Disease Control leaked to the New York Times on Monday suggested that the federal government also expects COVID-19 to begin hitting rural areas harder than urban ones. Citing data from up to May 2, the document said that, over the coming months, cases in “the Great Lakes region, parts of the Southeast, Northeast, and around southern California” were expected to increase. (A White House spokesperson said that the leaked numbers were “not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed.)
Cynthia Cox, Vice President at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Director for the Program on the Affordable Care Act, told TPM that there was a chance the pandemic could worsen an already fragile health care situation in rural communities.
“Those are also the same areas that have fewer health care resources and have older populations, and even the younger population tend to be sicker,” Cox said. “So it’s possible that even if the virus continues to spread, this is a troubling sign because those areas could be harder hit.”
Rural America is uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of COVID-19. A decade-long crisis has led to scores of rural hospitals shutting down, with 126 closing since 2010. Forty-seven percent of rural hospitals in the U.S. were in the red in 2019, according to statistics from the Chartis Center for Rural Health.
The nature of the illness as well could wreak havoc on rural communities. America’s rural population is, on average, older and and has more preexisting conditions that make COVID-19 more dangerous.
Rural counties have far fewer intensive care unit beds per capita as well, limiting the amount of capacity they may have in the event of widespread outbreaks.
Michaud said that data showing how “concentrated outbreaks can be, even in rural counties,” surprised him.
“In rural areas, there’s a problem of meat processing plants and the prisons and institutional areas where we’re seeing such a rise in cases that has to do with the way their work is set up and the way conditions are and the lack of lockdown procedures that have occurred in some of these places,” he said.
Some of the same largely rural states that have had serious outbreaks — like North Dakota and Georgia — are at the forefront of the effort to open up, casting social distancing restrictions aside.
Cox noted an irony in that, saying that “some states are opening up despite the fact that the rural areas in those states have the highest rates of death and infection of coronavirus.”
Michaud cautioned that the data suggested that rural America was likely on the upward bound of a potentially steep infection curve.
“If we are asleep at the wheel a little bit and we don’t recognize that large-scale outbreaks can occur and will occur in rural counties that are especially vulnerable, we could find ourselves very rapidly in a situation where we’re looking at severe epidemics,” Michaud said. “In that case, it would’ve been premature to relax social distancing and expect that the cases would decline.”
I’m afraid that ship is sailing out of the harbor as we speak. I don’t think it’s going to be turned around.
Trump gave an interview with the New York Post. If anyone thought he was somehow chagrined by the bleach-injection debacle, well that was silly:
President Trump said Monday that “everybody” enjoyed his White House coronavirus briefings — including himself — and vowed they will be back, just not daily.
In an Oval Office interview with The Post during which he predicted a strong economic rebound from the coronavirus crisis by the end of the year, and offered his opinions on presumptive Democratic challenger Joe Biden’s best pick for a running mate and the sex-assault allegations facing the former vice president, Trump said the briefings were must-see TV.
And he credited his frequent clashes with reporters for making engaging content.
“We set every record with those press conferences. Six million people all the time. You know we had tremendous numbers, literally, it was in [Fox New host] Bret Baier’s slot, and we did like 30 in a row,” Trump said.
“I heard, is this true? It was the highest rated hour in cable television history. That’s what I heard. I don’t know if that’s true.”
Trump, who ended the daily briefings last week, said there would continue to be one or two a week as he pivots from crisis management to reopening the economy. He said his new White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, would be holding court at some of those sessions.
The president mused about the difference between his coronavirus briefings and his formerly packed rallies, made impossible by spread of the virus, which has sickened more than 1 million Americans, killed nearly 70,000, and left 30 million unemployed.
A lack of re-election rallies before November would be at “a big disadvantage,” he said.
“I hope we’re going to be able to get the rallies back before the election,” Trump said. “I actually think it’s very important. I think that would be a big — a big disadvantage to me if we didn’t, if we couldn’t have the rallies back.
“People are wanting the rallies. They want to have them so badly. They were informative but they were fun.”
Trump asked reporters from The Post whether rallies or his coronavirus briefings at the White House were more important, connecting the two forums as ways to “get around the fake news.”
“So, which is more important, the rally or the press conferences?” Trump inquired.
Asked for his own preference, the president said: “I think they both work. You know, they are very different, though, I suspect.”
Trump said he enjoys sparring with reporters in the White House briefing room and that he believes “everybody” likes watching them, even senior citizens who his advisers began to believe were being turned off by hostile exchanges.
“I was told that some people didn’t like the combative attitude so much. And I can a little bit understand that. But I would say from the standpoint of watching it and wanting to watch, that would be more interesting than having boring questions asked.
“And you know, at the same time, they shouldn’t be asking the same question every press conference just trying to get a rise, you know.”
Trump claimed that if he turned off the cameras facing journalists, they would “take a different attitude. They wouldn’t care, you know. But then it wouldn’t be as good a viewing.
“A lot of people love when the press hits me, you know, when I go at it with the press — they like it,” Trump said. He admitted he liked the arena, too.
“Yeah, I do I, I’m OK with it. I’d rather have a normal, you know, normal — a more normal situation, but I do. And they like it. Some people don’t like it. I have a feeling everybody likes it because, you know, it’s more exciting than sitting there falling asleep.”
He singled out two CBS News journalists as people who particularly irritated him — Weijia Jiang and Paula Reid during the briefings.
“It wasn’t Donna Reed, I can tell you that,” Trump said, referring back to the film and TV star best known for playing Mary Bailey in “It’s A Wonderful Life” and later starring as the mom in an eponymous family TV sitcom of the ’50s and ’60s.
“Paula Reid, she’s sitting there and I say, ‘How angry. I mean, What’s the purpose?’ They’re not even tough questions, but you see the attitude of these people, it’s like incredible.
“So you know, I enjoyed it,” Trump concluded.
“You know, we didn’t stop them. I mean, this is breaking, this, but we didn’t stop them. Because we’ll probably do maybe one a week, sometimes two depending on the news, but Kayleigh’s going to be able to do them,” Trump said.
“We’ll do them. We get a lot of people watching, and it’s the way that you get around fake news. In other words, I have a much bigger audience than anybody’s ever had.”
It’s all a performance to him. And he’s lost himself in the part.
Did I miss it, or did Donald J. Trump swear an oath to uphold the Articles of Confederation leaving every state to fend for itself?
The United States’ executive branch is headless. The acting president is determined to resurrect the economy before the November election, unmoved by the fact that lifting the economic lockdown without adequate testing and contact tracing could cost “233,000 additional deaths from the virus by the end of June.” His economic advisors believe body bags with real bodies are less harm than “body bags of dead businesses.”
Text traffic at a federal mental health hotline is up roughly 1,000 percent, reports the Washington Post. Self-described patriots seemingly “motivated by a kind of neo-Social Darwinist ideology” refuse to wear masks or observe social distancing guidelines. “Let us work! Let us serve! Let us die!” anti-lockdown protesters demand (not in those exact words).
“I don’t want them in Ontario,” Doug Ford, the right-wing populist premier of Ontario, recently said of Americans. “We need to keep our borders closed.” Canada is doing a measurably better job responding to the pandemic. Orders of magnitude better, writes Zack Beauchamp at Vox:
“We have a federal government that is supporting provinces’ responses,” says David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. “You have a chief executive who is directly undermining the public health response.”
The comparison is not a flattering endorsement of American exceptionalism.
The Canadian approach has not been perfect. Its death rate is currently much higher than best-in-class performers like Germany and South Korea; Canadian officials have fallen down, in particular, when it comes to long-term senior care and the indigenous population. But given the interdependence between these two large neighboring economies, Canadians are not only vulnerable as a result of their own government’s choices but also because of their southern neighbors’ failures.
Unlike the U.S., Canada’s federal government has centralized procurement and distribution of PPE supplies based on need. (Having a system of universal health coverage makes that easier in Canada.) But while claiming “total” authority under the U.S. Constitution, Trump refuses to do the same, as though operating under the Articles. He has left state governors to play musical chairs with urgently needed supplies, each trying to ensure her/his state is not left out when supplies run out. Meanwhile, Trump’s government interdicts supply shipments to redirect them to his political favorites.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is currently hiding thousands of coronavirus tests, purchased from South Korea, in an “undisclosed location” protected by the National Guard. Hogan, a Republican Trump critic, is worried that the federal government might seize them. After the federal government seized 500 ventilators requested by Colorado’s Democratic governor, Trump sent 100 back to the state — crediting them to Sen. Cory Gardner, a Republican up for reelection in 2020.
Canada was ahead of the North American curve on testing because its federal government once again made the right choices. In mid-March, Canadian federal authorities launched a large-scale testing procurement program aimed at ensuring the country could test early and often. By contrast, Trump put his unqualified son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of the country’s testing ramp-up. Kushner proceeded to hype a Google testing website that didn’t exist and spearhead a drive-through push that, as of early April, had built a grand total of five testing centers across the entire country.
Unlike polarized state governors to the south, leaders in Canada’s provinces — Liberals and Conservatives — agreed on implementing extreme measures to halt the virus’ advance. The dysfunctional U.S. response is illustrated in the graph above that compares U.S. and Canadian COVID-19 cases per capita since the outbreak began. “The comparison is a case study in how a dysfunctional political system can quite literally cost lives,” Beauchamp explains.
But at this point in the crisis, the worst you can say about the Canadian response is that it has been basically competent — what you would expect from a country with a functioning political and health care system. The United States, by contrast, hasn’t cleared this lowest of bars. Our lack of attention to public health, poorly designed national health care system, and deep political dysfunction have contributed to the greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes.
The cost of that will be counted in lives. And undercounted at that.
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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.
In case no one’s noticed, there’s something seriously wrong with the president of the United States:
Prime ministers, a king, a prince and Madonna all chipped in to an $8 billion pot to fund a coronavirus vaccine.
President Trump skipped the chance to contribute, with officials in his administration noting that the United States is pouring billions of dollars into its own research efforts.
A fund-raising conference on Monday organized by the European Union brought pledges from countries around the world — from Japan to Canada, Australia to Norway — to fund laboratories that have promising leads in developing and producing a vaccine.
For more than three hours, one by one, global leaders said a few words over video link and offered their nations’ contribution, small or large, whatever they could muster. For Romania, it was $200,000. For Canada, $850 million.
It was a rare show of global leadership on the part of the Europeans, and a late-hour attempt at international coordination. Countries the world over have been pursuing divergent — and often competing — approaches to tackling the pandemic.
While the European Union may have led this global fund-raising effort, the bloc has struggled to get its own 27 members on the same page with health, travel and financial measures to respond to the coronavirus crisis. And the details of how the money raised on Monday will be distributed still remain to be sorted out.
The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union that spearheaded the initiative, said the money would be spent over the next two years to support promising initiatives around the globe. The ultimate goal is to deliver universal and affordable access to medication to fight Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
The multilateral effort stood in sharp contrast to the solo road the United States is on as scientists everywhere scramble to develop a vaccine to stop the virus that has ravaged most parts of the globe, leaving 250,000 dead so far.
In early March, German government officials said they believed that Mr. Trump had tried to lure a company based in southwestern Germany that was known to be working on a vaccine to move its research work to the United States.
The company, CureVac, has denied receiving such an offer, but reports of the American invitation were enough of a scare to prompt the European Commission to pledge another $85 million to the firm, which already had support from a European vaccine consortium.
In Washington on Monday, senior Trump administration officials sought to talk up American contributions to coronavirus vaccine efforts worldwide, but did not explain the United States’ absence at the European-organized conference.
Remind me again, why, why, does this chiseler, deadbeat, grifter, liar, and incompetent man have a job?
Note to my dear bloggy friends who will feel a compulsion to explain exactly why international cooperation on something like a vaccine might just happen to be a good pretty good idea:
Don’t take the bait. Everyone already knows this is completely wrong. It’s the political equivalent of suggesting people mainline disinfectant.
International cooperation doesn’t have to be explained. And patiently explaining this oh-so-fucking-obvious point distracts from what we should be doing, which is responding with unalloyed disgust and contempt at Trump’s despicable inactions.
Dr Birx says she finds it “devastatingly worrisome” that unmasked protesters are going around breathing in everyone’s faces because if they infect their grandmother they will feel guilty for the rest of their lives.
No they won’t. They will never accept responsibility for it. They will blame someone else.
Just look at some of these twitter comments :
They are living in another world.
A security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan, was shot and killed after telling a customer to wear a state-mandated face mask, police said.
Calvin Munerlyn, 43, died at a local hospital after he was shot in the head Friday, said Michigan State Police Lt. David Kaiser.
The shooter and a second suspect remain at large, Kaiser told CNN on Monday.Witnesses at the store told police that Munerlyn got into a verbal altercation with a woman because she was not wearing a mask, said Genesee County prosecutor David Leyton. Surveillance video confirms the incident, Leyton said.
Under an executive order from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, all retail employees and customers have to wear a mask.
Footage also shows that immediately after the altercation, the woman left in an SUV.
But about 20 minutes later, the SUV returned.Two men entered the store and one of them yelled at Munerlyn about disrespecting his wife, Leyton said. The other man then shot the security guard.
There’s something about making people wear masks, which are designed to keep other people safe from you since you might be asymptomatic without knowing it, that is the bridge too far for right-wingers.
I am not surprised. They do not care about other people, not even their own families.
Update:
A day after San Diego residents were required to wear face coverings in public, a man went grocery shopping while wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood, according to a report.
The hooded creep was seen roaming the aisles of a Von supermarket in the San Diego County city of Santee on Saturday, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
At least nobody got shot … or lynched.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths over the next several weeks. The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double the current number of about 1,750.
The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.
The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, significant risks remain. And reopening the economy will make matters worse.
“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the Centers for Disease Control warned.
The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways as the health care system was overloaded.
[See the internal report.]
“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Scott Gottlieb, Mr. Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. “We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we’re just not seeing that.”
On Sunday, Mr. Trump said deaths in the United States could reach 100,000, twice as many as he had forecast just two weeks ago. But his new estimate still underestimates what his own administration is now predicting to be the total death toll by the end of May — much less in the months to come. It follows a pattern for Mr. Trump, who has frequently understated the impact of the disease.
Obviously, he still is, even though “his numbers” are increasing.
But as I wrote this morning. I don’t think they really care anymore. Dana Bash on CNN says Chris Christie told her that we need to accept the fact that there are going to be mass casualties because we need to open the economy.
You may have noticed that other countries have not found themselves in this position. The worst hit like Italy have started to improve. But here’s something to note:
Our supposed “lockdown” was erratic and inconsistent. And most importantly, they didn’t use the time to prepare properly for a re-opening by securing medical equipment, testing and contact tracing, so it was basically a waste as far as getting the country ready for the long haul — and creating conditions that could actually bring the economy back. What they are doing will not work.
They are sabotaging their own goals. And apparently, they are just too stupid to realize it.
This Facebook piece by New York ICU nurse Julianne Nicole has been making the rounds. It’s devastating:
I am a Covid ICU nurse in New York City, and yesterday, like many other days lately, I couldn’t fix my patient. Sure, that happens all the time in the ICU. It definitely wasn’t the first time. It certainly won’t be the last. What makes this patient noteworthy? A few things, actually. He was infected with Covid 19, and he will lose his battle with Covid 19. He is only 23 years old.I was destroyed by his clinical course in a way that has only happened a few times in my nursing career. It wasn’t his presentation. I’ve seen that before. It wasn’t his complications. I’ve seen that too. It was the grief. It was his parents. The grief I witnessed yesterday, was grief that I haven’t allowed myself to recognize since this runaway train got rolling here in early March.
I could sense it. It was lingering in the periphery of my mind, but yesterday something in me gave way, and that grief rushed in. I think I was struck by a lot of emotions and realities yesterday. Emotions that have been brewing for weeks, and realities that I have been stifling because I had to in order to do my job effectively.
Please read on by clicking “2” below. It is an amazing, moving, horrifying narrative of the COVID019 horror. I just … wow.
Trump Uncle John really was one. He isn’t:
The famed scientist John G. Trump once explained his theory of how to treat one malady by the “direct injection of electrons” into patients’ skin. To treat another disease, he cited tests that showed it was possible to use electrons to “destroy or inactivate hepatitis virus in blood plasma.”
But, President Trump’s uncle said, “We unfortunately were not able to persuade anybody to try this,” because there had been “some casualties among volunteers.”
The president has long said that he and his uncle, who taught physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and died in 1985, represent a rare breed of “super genius,” benefiting from the same genes.
It is not known whether the president, in his widely condemned recentsuggestion that disinfectant be injected into the body to kill the novel coronavirus, was somehow vaguely channeling his uncle’s theories. What is clear is that Trump has sought repeatedly to present himself as a man of scientific knowledge largely because his uncle was so renowned — and that his efforts in recent weeks have only highlighted the vast gulf between them.
John Trump’s thoughts about killing hepatitis are detailed in the oral history archive at MIT. While he could not proceed with his theory, the idea behind it was based on his rigorous study of science. He had a career celebrated for his achievements in saving the lives of cancer patients, cleaning the environment, helping the U.S. military win World War II through radar technology and receiving the National Medal of Science.
President Trump has for years cited the genes he shares with his uncle to try to demonstrate that he, too, has a scientific intellect, an effort that he has stressed while dealing with the novel coronavirus.
“I really get it,” the president said March 6 about benefiting from his bloodline, as he discussed the coronavirus at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
During his campaign, he told CNN: “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart.” He told the Boston Globe that he and his uncle “have very good genetics.”
A family friend who knew John Trump personally said the scientist would have recoiled at Donald Trump’s claim of scientific knowledge when promoting unproven drugs and other treatments.
“The John Trump I knew would have been horrified,” said John Van de Graaff, whose father, the famed scientist Robert Van de Graaff, was John Trump’s longtime business partner.
Van de Graaff told The Washington Post that he joined his father in many conversations with John Trump, and recalled him as a man dedicated to the rigorous testing of ideas who would not have approved of the way the president has blurted out dangerous supposed remedies for the novel coronavirus.
“He would have been distressed by a great deal of what President Trump has done,” Van de Graaff said. “He would have said, ‘Look at the science!’ ”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
[…]
Trump’s claim that he shares his uncle’s intellect has not been substantiated in terms of academic records or awards. Trump has said that his admission to what was then called the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania is evidence of “super genius stuff” because, he said, it was the “hardest school to get into, the best school in the world.”
In fact, as The Post reported last year, the undergraduate school attended by Trump accepted more than 40 percent of applicants, and Trump was interviewed by an admissions officer who was his older brother’s close friend. That admissions officer, James Nolan, said it was “not very difficult” to get into the school at the time, and he did not believe that Trump was a “genius.”
The story goes on to detail John Trump’s illustrious career and it really was illustrious, in everything from medical advances to serious contributions to the war effort in WWII.
Little nephew Donnie certainly didn’t understand any of it:
John Trump later turned his scientific genius to solving environmental problems, including an effort to clean certain types of waste, which the Associated Press covered in a story headlined “Sewage Sludge Problem Solved.”
The story quoted John Trump as saying he thought the venture was “very important” because it showed that electron beams could be used to destroy viruses that lived in sewage, a comment that tied together the value of environmental policy and public health.
Yet President Trump has cited his uncle in explaining his claim that climate change, which the World Health Organization has tied to a rise in viruses, is a “hoax,” as he has said on Twitter.
Asked in a 2016 interview by the Associated Press about research by scientists who said climate change “is nearing a point where this can’t be reversed,” candidate Trump responded: “No, no. Some say that and some say differently. I mean, you have scientists on both sides of it. My uncle was a great professor at MIT for many years. Dr. John Trump. And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.”
In fact, 97 percent of climate scientists agree that the temperature is warming, which is “extremely likely due to human activities,” according to NASA.
In fact, it’s hard to believe that Trump has anything in common at all with his genius uncle:
A former business partner, Denis Robinson, wrote an obituary for Physics Today that remains one of the most vivid portraits of John Trump. It sharply contrasts with the president’s traits of attacking enemies, airing grievances and extolling unproven ideas.
John Trump “was remarkably even tempered, with kindness and consideration to all, never threatening or arrogant in manner, even when under high stress,” Robinson wrote in 1985. “He was outwardly and in appearance the mildest of men, with a convincing persuasiveness, carefully marshalling his facts.”
Trump proves that eugenics are bullshit. Maybe that’s his contribution to the world.