“The U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a raging dumpster fire,” Helen Branswell laments at Stat News as “We’ll Meet Again” plays in my head.
Florida on Sunday chalked up more new COVID-19 cases in a single day — 15,000 — than South Korea has so far in the entire pandemic. The website Covidexitstrategy.org just updated its U.S. map to include a color-coded category for states, adding “bruised red” to indicate states with uncontrolled spread and hospitals nearing capacity. Seventeen states meet the new criteria.
The bulk of Branswell’s “How to fix the Covid-19 dumpster fire in the U.S.” amounts to admitting “that for now the virus has the upper hand” and deciding what to do to mitigate it. There is much the U.S. might do that it is not doing.
“My best read of the data is that a large chunk of the transmission is happening when people gather indoors. So, cut out the indoors. No restaurants, no bars, no nightclubs, obviously no schools right now,” says Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute. The U.S. should ban all indoor activities that cluster groups of people.
And, of course, wear masks and social distance.
The problem is Jha and Branswell and national infectious disease experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci are not calling the shots on a national strategy. There is no national strategy. The only strategy in evidence is not for controlling death and disease but for jump-starting an economy on life support in hopes it will recover enough by November for Acting President Donald J. Trump to win reelection.
Trump dithered for months as he sought a way to either ignore the pandemic, wish it away, or pawn off responsibility for it on state governors. The result is a U.S. leading the world in failing at controlling the pandemic.
States that reopened (under pressure) too soon have seen the virus spread faster than it did in March, Annie Lowry explains at The Atlantic. With no leadership from the top, many consumers remain cautious and at home. Others rushed back to bars and restaurants assuming a state’s reopening meant “All Clear”:
In other ways, the spread of COVID-19 is keeping Americans from going back to work. The perception of public transit as unsafe, for example, makes it expensive and tough for commuters to get to their jobs. Schools and day-care centers are struggling to figure out how to reopen safely, meaning millions of parents are facing a fall juggling work and child care. This is a disaster. “The lingering uncertainty about whether in-person education will resume isn’t the result of malfeasance, but utter nonfeasance,” the former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem has argued in The Atlantic. “Four months of stay-at-home orders have proved that, if schools are unavailable, a city cannot work, a community cannot function, a nation cannot safeguard itself.”
For the economy to recover, parents have to go back to work. Inside. For parents to go back to work inside, children have to go back to school. Inside. Trump demands schools reopen so he can remain in the White House. Inside and unindicted.
So, with 60,000 Americans testing positive for the disease daily, schools must reopen. And restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Keeping them closed in the interest of public health and safety is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Deep State plot Trump has ever had to face. And “Chi-na.”
He’s not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But he is saying 135,000 dead is no big deal compared to the potential millions who might have died. Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, projected on Tuesday that over 208,000 people could be dead by November. In March, Trump considered 200,000 deaths a “a very good job” on his part.
Teachers’ unions are less sanguine about their members being mussed. “Normally, people don’t play with kids’ lives. They’ll play with adults’ lives, but they don’t play with kids’ lives,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said last week. The AFT will spend an additional $1 million on TV and digital ads demanding GOP leaders provide funds to reopen schools safely. Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, believes “3 million teachers, support staff, secretaries, bus drivers,” and any one of her members is more qualified than Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to determine how to reopen schools safely.
Dr. Strangelove‘s Gen. Jack T. Ripper believed fighting wars was too important to be left to politicians. Acting President Donald J. Trump believes leading a national fight against a deadly pandemic is too important to be left to presidents. His ineptitude and madness have already cost many of the 135,000 American lives lost to date. He has left the country without a national strategy for saving lives, and in trying to save his own hide is content to lose 200,00 or more — children included. Uh… depending on the breaks.
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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, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.