That’s what Trump said yesterday. This look at the past and current situation by the New York Times shows just how under control it is:
That looks like it’s exploding pretty much everywhere.
"what digby sez..."
Month: July 2020
The Trump administration is forcing the Secret Service to get COVID-19 so they can pretend the virus is under control:
Vice President Pence’s trip to Arizona this week had to be postponed by a day after several Secret Service agents who helped organize the visit either tested positive for the coronavirus or were showing symptoms of being infected.
Pence was scheduled to go to Phoenix on Tuesday but went on Wednesday instead so that healthy agents could be deployed for his visit, according to two senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private details of the trip.
Arizona has seen a spike in cases in recent weeks, and Pence scaled back the trip before the delay because of the growing amount of infections in the state.
Pence’s staff was concerned last weekend about their ability to hold planned public events in Tucson and Yuma due to the outbreak, one administration official said, and decided on Saturday to visit only Phoenix for a much smaller meeting — a public health briefing with Gov. Doug Ducey (R) and local health care leaders.AD
On Monday night, the Secret Service urged Pence’s staff to delay the Tuesday trip until Wednesday because at least one agent on the ground had a confirmed case of covid-19 and other agents and federal officers preparing for the Arizona visit were showing signs of illness, according to two administration officials.
The Secret Service needed time to bring in healthy agents and other personnel to replace the ones who were either sick or most likely sick, one of the officials said. The official said the Secret Service estimated that a total of eight to 10 agents and other officers from sister agencies — all of whom were helping prepare for Pence’s visit to Arizona — had fallen ill.
This is the second time in recent weeks that Secret Service agents preparing for a White House or Trump campaign event outside Washington have contracted the virus. At least three Secret Service personnel working on the advance team for President Trump’s Tulsa rally on June 20 tested positive for the coronavirus. Two agents tested positive hours before the indoor stadium event was held, and dozens of agents who were on site for the rally were ordered to self-quarantine when they arrived home.
The VP has no need to go to hot spots in the middle of all this. It’s ridiculous pandemic theatre that’s putting people in danger. Those people are willing to take a bullet for their charges but there’s no reason they should have to expose themselves to a deadly virus because the administration is in denial.
Just over two weeks ago The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Vice President Mike Pence titled “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave.’” The article was supposed to reassure the nation.
What it provided, instead, was a clear illustration of the delusions and magical thinking that have marked every step of the Trump administration’s response to Covid-19, producing an epic policy disaster.
Put it this way: By now, according to Trump officials and sycophants, we were supposed to be seeing a fading pandemic and a roaring recovery. Instead, we have a fading recovery and a roaring pandemic.
About the pandemic: The Pence article cheerily declared that “cases have stabilized,” with the daily average number of new cases only 20,000. Even that figure, as it happens, was five times the number in the European Union, which has a third more people than America does. Since then, however, new cases have soared, hitting more than 50,000 by some counts on Wednesday.
Indeed, at this point Arizona, with seven million people, is reporting around as many new cases each day as the whole E.U., with 446 million people.
Some Trump supporters are still trying to dismiss the upswing in cases as an illusion created by more testing. But it isn’t. Cases have grown far more than testing has. Hospitalizations have shot up in Arizona and Texas, which are at the leading edge of the new surge; in both states, hospitals are in crisis mode. (Florida, which is probably in the same situation, hasn’t been releasing hospitalization data.)
[…]
The thing is, Covid-19’s resurgence was utterly predictable — and predicted. When Donald Trump declared that we would “transition to greatness” — which is to say, rush to reopen the economy despite a still-rampant pandemic — epidemiologists warned that this could set off a new wave of infections. They were right.
And economists warned that while relaxing social distancing would lead to a brief period of job growth, these gains would be short-lived, that premature reopening would be self-defeating even in economic terms. They were also right.
Don’t be fooled by the big jobs number in Thursday’s employment report — a number that still left us down almost 15 million jobs from February. The report was a snapshot of the economy during the “reference period,” basically the second week of June. So it’s telling us what was happening before the Covid-19 surge became apparent.
We don’t have official data for what has happened since then, but a variety of real-time indicators suggest that the recovery has stalled or even gone backward. Indeed, things started falling apart even before states began reversing some of their previous moves to reopen. Fear of infection will do that: Many people will avoid going out whatever their governors may say.
As a result, unemployment, still in double digits, probably won’t get much better for a long time.
Now, there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between jobs and the spread of the pandemic. If we had all worn masks and avoided stupid policies like reopening bars and resuming large indoor gatherings, we probably could have had substantial job gains without surging infections. But we didn’t, largely because Trump and Republican governors refused to take sensible actions (and in many cases prevented mayors and other local officials from acting sensibly on their own).
Nor can we simply hit the reset button. Activities we could have safely resumed two months ago, when infection rates were low, aren’t safe to continue given today’s much higher Covid-19 prevalence. That is, we’re in worse shape, even economically, than we would have been if Trump and his allies had taken the pandemic seriously early on.
The really frightening aspect about where we are is that Trump and his people don’t seem to have learned anything from their coronavirus debacle. On Wednesday — Wednesday! — Trump insisted, as he has at every stage of the pandemic, that the coronavirus will “sort of just disappear.”
It’s stunning. He’s making it clear that he’s just given up. I guess if you get all your news from Fox and Breitbart you might not know that the virus is a wildfire that spread out of control.
And the Trumpists are crowing about the June employment number, with no apparent awareness that it’s out of date and the situation has probably worsened in recent weeks.
The sad, even terrifying thing is that Trumpian delusions of success will impose a heavy price on the rest of us.
Right now we should be going all-out to bring the Covid-19 surge under control and making sure that Americans keep getting the economic aid they need. In reality, neither of those things is likely to happen. Infections and hospitalizations will soar further, and millions of Americans will lose crucial economic lifelines in a few weeks.
The next four months are going to be very, very ugly.
Actually it’s going to be very ugly for the next 6 months at least, probably longer. He’s fucked everything up so royally that it’s going to take a very long time to dig out of it.
And Krugman doesn’t mention it, but I have to. The fatuousness of crowing about an 11% unemployment rate as being the result of the biggest jump in history without noting that it follows the biggest drop in employment in history cannot be overstated.
And this ridiculous thing he said yesterday. Oh my God:
This is not just luck, what’s happening; this is a lot of talent.
He wasn’t being sarcastic.
Yesterday:
The Washington Post editorial board:
IN A week in which the United States exceeded 50,000 new coronavirus cases on multiple days, more than double the rate of just a few weeks ago, there are important messages that President Trump could have sent from the White House podium on Thursday. He could have insisted that all Americans wear face masks in public, or urged them to steer clear of crowded July 4 celebrations. He could have pledged a renewed federal effort to expand the still-troubled program of diagnostic testing, a prerequisite for a return to normalcy. He could have given governors support for the need to impose new restrictions to contain the virus.
He did none of these things.
Instead, Mr. Trump remains in blissful denial as crisis ripples through the Sun Belt, threatening to create chaos and distress nationwide for months to come. On Wednesday, he said of the pandemic, “I think at some point that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.” On Thursday, in a brief appearance before reporters, without wearing a face mask and refusing to take questions, he said, “We have some areas where we are putting out the flames, or the fires, and that’s working out well.” He went on to assert that the United States, like Europe and China, is “getting it under control.” Some areas are suffering a “flare up,” he acknowledged, “and we are putting out the fires” with a strategy to “vanquish and kill the virus.”
The reality is that the virus is not under control; it is in control. Record-shattering numbers of new cases were reported Wednesday in six states: California, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona and Alaska. New daily cases are increasing in 41 states compared to two weeks ago. Outbreaks and superspreader events are erupting, such as clusters from Myrtle Beach, S.C. In five months, the pandemic has killed nearly 19 times as many Americans as have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Trump — whose early reaction to the pandemic was to wish it away, who failed to muster the logistical support to confront it and who then decided to walk away by leaving the response largely to the states — this week continued to engage in magical thinking, referring to the raging pandemic as “certain hot spots.” In fact, states that opened up prematurely in May are paying the price now, and Mr. Trump bears responsibility for encouraging governors to loosen the restrictions too early. It was a bad miscalculation.AD
Now, governors are rapidly trying to backpedal, abruptly closing bars and restaurants, but it is exceedingly difficult to shift from reopening to closure again. Mr. Trump on Thursday elided this difficulty, saying the reopening decision is “largely up to them.” He was characteristically only concerned with praising himself. “We’ve done a historic thing,” he said, adding that he saved “millions of lives” and now is opening up the country “far faster than anybody thought even possible and more successfully.”
This is historic delusion, and it has consequences in human lives.
It’s demented.
After months of dismissing mask-wearing for halting the spread of the coronavirus, after refusing to lead a national effort to stop it, after 130,000 Americans died, after setting a single-day record number of new COVID-19 cases (over 50,000) twice this week, after months of daily reprising Kevin Bacon’s “All is well” scene from “Animal House,” Donald Trump, acting president of the United States, has had a “come to Tony” (Fauci) moment.
Well, all right, I guess masks aren’t all that bad, Trump said, looking at the floor and shuffling his feet. “I’m all for masks,” he says now. Hey, they make me look like the Lone Ranger(?), he said, brightening. But he still thinks wearing them around others should be voluntary.
People listen to this guy. 130,000 Americans never will again.
But “there’s only so much reality-warping this administration can get away with,” Molly Roberts writes at the Washington Post in explaining how Trump lost the culture war he himself started:
Of course, the anti-mask army never really had an argument for its obstinance except that the president said so — and the president said so, it seems, to try to downplay the epidemic out of existence, even though he has ended up downplaying the worst of it back into existence instead.
The naked-cheeked were trying to project toughness, but the point of personal protective equipment was never really personal protection so much as the protection of other people. This contempt reached its peak of embarrassing absurdity at the reelection rally in Tulsa, where a man arrived clad in an adult diaper that read, “I COVID my ass to stop the spread!”
Is he still above ground, I wonder?
Americans do not understand how the virus spreads any more than Trump does, finds a study released Monday:
Researchers at the Social Cognition Center Cologne and the University of Bremen conducted three experiments, each involving more than 500 adults from the United States. A sizable number of them did not see the point of social distancing or mask wearing because they made a simple mistake about statistics. People tend to think coronavirus spreads linearly when it really spreads exponentially.
[…]
The study authors referred to the difficulty people have understanding this as the ‘exponential growth bias.’ “In general, people have difficulty understanding exponential growth and erroneously interpret it in linear terms instead,” explains first author Joris Lammers in a press release. When people don’t understand, they massively underestimate how fast coronavirus spreads. Likewise, they also underestimate how big a difference social distancing makes on stopping the spread.
Alison Escalante of Forbes takes a couple of stabs at visually illustrating the difference. But what came to my mind was the old mousetrap and ping-pong balls example of how chain reactions work. Those of a certain age may remember first seeing it in Disney’s Our Friend the Atom (1957). Scroll to timestamp 5:30.
Someone at the Ohio Department of Health thought of that example three months ago. They released a video to illustrate both how viral spread works and how social distancing slows it. Is our Trumpers learning?
An unopened box of still-serviceable N95 masks left over from the swine flu pandemic (2009) has gone into service here. Since this crisis hit, I wear one to shop for groceries every two weeks — as soon as the doors open in the morning when there are only a handful of others in the store.
A redheaded woman monitors the self-check registers. She is working her shift every time. Wearing a cloth mask, every day, month after month. Still healthy, she was there again on Monday.
Maybe there is a lesson there. Not that the acting president would ever learn it. Not in time, anyway. Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout is running the White House.
Take the garbage out November 3rd.
(h/t SR)
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
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.
He had other priorities. His own:
The White House is not planning an immediate response to intelligence reports of Russian bounties given to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan because President Trump does not believe the reports are true or “actionable,” according to two senior administration officials.
Trump is not convinced he should do anything about the bounty issue, which he decried in a Wednesday morning tweet as “just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party.” One administration official said there is an internal White House dispute about how much information to declassify to support the president’s skepticism of the intelligence.
Some of Trump’s own senior intelligence officials viewed the information as credible enough to warn the Pentagon and allies so they could ensure they had measures in place to protect their forces in Afghanistan, and to begin developing options for responding to the Russian operation, national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien said Wednesday.
And though the administration has sought to downplay the veracity of the intelligence, O’Brien said the CIA has asked the Justice Department to open a leak investigation on the matter.
The officials cautioned that Trump’s posture could change as pressure mounts from Congress to respond to the reports of Russian bounties, as intelligence analysts suspect the deaths of three Marines in Afghanistan in 2019 may have resulted from the Russian operation. Like others interviewed, the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
White House communications director Alyssa Farah declined to comment on the intelligence reports except to say they were “uncorroborated,” and to criticize “selectively leaked intelligence.” The president, she said, “always puts the safety and security of U.S. service members above all else.”
O’Brien told reporters Wednesday that CIA Director Gina Haspel distributed the intelligence to coalition forces “to make sure they could have force protection.” He said as soon as the Pentagon received the information, “we made sure we had tactics in place . . . to look after our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in Afghanistan.”
Officials from several NATO allies in Afghanistan, however, said they were not officially informed until last week.
O’Brien said Haspel circulated the “raw intelligence — even though it wasn’t verified.” Former intelligence officials say, however, that officials would not have circulated the intelligence or taken precautionary measures had they not believed the reports were credible.
In a news conference Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared to confirm the reported information — if not the intelligence community assessment of it — saying that “the intelligence community handled this incredibly well.”
The administration receives multiple threat reports from throughout the world every day, Pompeo said, “so I can assure you that whatever reporting it is that you’re referring to, that we responded in precisely the correct way, with respect to making sure that our forces are postured appropriately, that they were aware of the level of the threat, the credibility of the threat, and that we were there.”
Responding to lawmakers of both parties who are “suggesting that they are shocked and appalled by this,” Pompeo said, “They saw the same intelligence that we saw, so it would be interesting to ask them what they did when they saw whatever intelligence it is that they are referring to.” He said the information was shared “more broadly” than with just the intelligence committees.
Russian involvement against U.S. interests in Afghanistan is “nothing new,” Pompeo said. Russia has been “selling small arms that have put Americans at risk for 10 years.” Without referring specifically to the bounty report, Pompeo said he brings up Afghanistan “with great frequency” in talks with his Russian counterparts.
His message to them, he said, is “Stop this.”
O’Brien reiterated Wednesday that though officials decided not to present Trump with “uncorroborated” intelligence, they took the situation seriously enough to prepare options for the president. “If this eventually becomes something that’s proven, or something that we believe, we need to have options for the president to deal with the Russians,” O’Brien said during an appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
But former officials who have taken part in options development say national security officials would not have begun the process had they not felt the information had to be taken seriously. Options including sanctions and diplomatic censure were debated in late March. The administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was said to prefer confronting the Russians directly about the matter.
“They obviously thought it exceeded the threshold for action, which implies that it was more than a stray, uncorroborated report,” said Katrina Mulligan, a former director on the National Security Council staff in Barack Obama’s administration.
They blamed the briefer, of course …
McEnany said it was the decision of the intelligence officer in charge of orally briefing the president not to tell him about the bounty reports, a decision that “O’Brien agreed with.” Intelligence, McEnany said, is normally not “transmitted up to the president” until there is “a strategic decision for the president to make” on what to do about it. “That’s the way intelligence works.”
I don’t know if they told him and he blew it off so the rest of the government just went ahead and warned people anyway or if they didn’t tell him because he blows up when anyone talks about Russia —- so they went ahead and warned people anyway. Either way, this is not how it’s supposed to work.
The point is that while they were warning the allies and the troops about this issue, Trump was out there inviting Putin to the US and insisting that he be allowed t rejoin the G7 because Russia is such an important country. This is the problem. Trump is always working on behalf of himself whether it’s for his bank account or his re-election, not the interest of the country. (He believes that what’s good for Trump is good for the US — Alan Dershowitz even argued that point at this impeachment trial!) In fact, in this case, he was arguing explicitly against the interest of the United States.
I don’t know if we will ever know exactly why he’s so loyal to Putin. It could just be that he always wanted his help in getting re-elected in 2020. Or, it may be something else. Whatever it is, this is an instance in which his bizarre obsession may have cost American lives.
Just add that to Trump’s body count from COVID-19, I guess. It’s quite a pile.
Trump is having a sad. A big one:
With Donald Trump’s approval sinking to Jimmy Carter levels and coronavirus cases spiking across the country, Trump is reluctantly waking up to the grim reality that, if the current situation holds, his reelection is gone. Republicans that have spoken with Trump in recent days describe him as depressed and “down in the dumps.” “People around him think his heart’s not in it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Torn between the imperative to win suburban voters and his instincts to play to his base, Trump has complained to people that he’s in a political box with no obvious way out. According to the Republican, Trump called Tucker Carlson late last week and said, “what do I do? What do I do?”
To console himself, Trump still has moments of magical thinking. “He says the polls are all fake,” a Republican in touch with Trump told me. But the bad news keeps coming. This week, Jacksonville, Florida—where Trump moved the Republican National Convention so he could hold a 15,000-person rally next month—mandated that people wear masks indoors to slow the explosion of COVID-19 cases. According to a Republican working on the convention, the campaign is now preparing to cancel the event so that Trump doesn’t suffer another Tulsa–like humiliation. “They probably won’t have it,” the source said. “It’s not going to be the soft landing Trump wanted.”
Neither the Trump campaign nor the White House responded to requests for comment.
Trump remains furious at his son-in-law Jared Kushner, whom he blames for the campaign’s dismal poll numbers. Axios reported this week that Trump complained privately that Kushner’s advice on criminal-justice reform damaged Trump politically. But because Kushner is family, sources say it’s unlikely that Trump will formally strip him of authority.
Kushner’s vast sway over West Wing decisions has become a flashpoint between him and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, sources say. The two have been engaged in a cold war over control of the campaign. Meadows pushed Trump to replace campaign manager Brad Parscale, a Kushner ally, the Republican close to the White House said. Kushner wasn’t happy that Meadows is close with Kushner’s adversaries Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie. “Meadows is in real shit. He went to war with Jared and tried to get Brad out,” the Republican, briefed on the internal debate, told me. A couple weeks ago, Meadows unloaded about Kushner over dinner with his predecessor, Mick Mulvaney, at Sette Osteria near the White House. “All Mark did was complain how much operational control Jared has and how it leaves very little space for the chief of staff,” said a Republican briefed on the conversation. “Mark whined to Mick, ‘why didn’t you warn me before I accepted the job? There’s nothing for me to do.’”
Nervous Republicans worried about losing the Senate are now debating when to break from Trump. Trump campaign internal polls show Trump’s level of “strong support” dropping from 21 to 17 points since last week, a person briefed on the numbers said. A source close to Iowa Republican Joni Ernst’s campaign said Ernst advisers are upset that a solid seat is now in play. “Joni’s campaign is pissed. They should not be in a competitive race,” the source said. (Ernst did not respond to a request for comment.) A Republican strategist close to Mitch McConnell told me that Republicans have Labor Day penciled in as the deadline for Trump to have turned things around. After that, he’s on his own.
Hilarious that Ernst is “pissed” that Trump is losing popularity apparently unaware that the fact her tongue has been glued to his boots for the past three years may have something to do with her own loss of popularity.
Sorry, Joni, if you’re so dumb (and irresponsible) that you think enabling an unfit ignoramus for three years was a winning political strategy maybe you too are an unfit ignoramus who shouldn’t be in such an important position.
Same thing for poor Mark Meadows, a D-list wingnut so steeped in Fox news and Brietbart that he apparently hadn’t heard that Jared Kushner has a knife out for anyone who threatens the Javanka power center. Maybe if he read a real newspaper once in a while he might have known what to expect.
And, by the way, Lewandowski is an amateur dipshit and Bossie is the Joe Pesci in Goodfellas of political character assassins. Neither of them have what it takes to save this sinking ship.
All these Republicans could have spared this country the total loss of confidence by the rest of the world and prevented many thousands of American deaths, not to mention the economic disaster that followed. They chose not to. Every last one of them bears equal responsibility, perhaps even more since they knew what an odious incompetent he was and they supported him every step of the way. He’s a fool. They are cynical opportunists. They are worse.
Former 2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is receiving treatment for coronavirus at an Atlanta-area hospital, according to a statement posted to his Twitter account.Cain, a contributor for conservative media outlet Newsmax, was hospitalized Wednesday “after he had development symptoms serious enough that he required hospitalization” and was informed Monday that he tested positive for the virus.
“Mr. Cain did not require a respirator, and he is awake and alert,” according to the statement released Thursday.
Cain, as a co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, was one of the surrogates at President Donald Trump’s June 20 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”We honestly have no idea where he contracted it. I realize people will speculate about the Tulsa rally, but Herman did a lot of traveling the past week, including to Arizona where cases are spiking. I don’t think there’s any way to trace this to the one specific contact that caused him to be infected. We’ll never know,” Dan Calabrese, who has been editor of HermanCain.com since 2012, said Thursday in a post on Cain’s website.
Yeah, ok. But it’s also possible that he gave it to people there since he wasn’t wearing a mask. But these people don’t care about that.
By the way, the Trump campaign was a vector:
At least eight Trump advance team staffers who attended the Tulsa rally tested positive for coronavirus.After interacting with several colleagues who later tested positive, all of Trump’s campaign staffers who attended his Tulsa rally quarantined the following week, CNN previously reported.
I wonder if Cain signed that responsibility waiver…
It’s tempting to think that people ignoring the CDC guidelines and refusing to wear masks is solely a matter of partisan politics. But it isn’t. When governments open up a lot of people assume that means it’s safe to go back to normal. I saw it right here in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica. It wasn’t Trump voters I saw crowding in bars and restaurants without masks or social distancing last week.
t may seem weird considering all the mistrust of government in our culture, but I think we may underestimate how much people who don’t pay attention to politics trust that when the government says the state is open for business again that this means they are safe and that’s the end of it.
This is a failure of communication. I think the businesses have to be enlisted some way and it has to be made clear that big parties are out. Walking around my neighborhood a couple of weeks ago it was clear that people were gathering in large crowds at home, drinking and hanging out. I’m sure they weren’t wearing masks indoors, which is the most important place to wear them if you’re in close quarters.
Sharing his regret on Facebook, Thomas Macias was focused on his loved ones.
“Because of my stupidity I put my mom and sisters and my family’s health in jeopardy,” the California truck driver wrote in a post his family shared with The Washington Post. He’d gone out to a party where no one wore masks, his niece Danielle Lopez said, only to learn afterward that someone knowingly attended with the novel coronavirus, apparently reasoning — erroneously — that without symptoms, it couldn’t do anyone harm.
But 51-year-old Macias was also at risk, made extra vulnerable by his diabetes and weight, Lopez said. The morning after that June 20 Facebook post, he called his mother saying he couldn’t breathe. She told him to rush to the hospital.
By 9 p.m., family say, he had died.
Perhaps, Lopez said, her uncle would not have gone out if their Southern California county had not been reopening and if people hadn’t thought the virus’s threat was easing.AD
“It was absolutely preventable,” Lopez told The Post.
Family say Macias was diligent for months about minimizing his trips outside the home, knowing his health conditions made him vulnerable. But Macias was also a social creature, they said, calling his mom every day and eager to see his loved ones.
He “made friends wherever he went,” just like his father, his uncle Ricardo Macias told The Post over Facebook messenger.
California was also starting to emerge from shutdown when Macias would have been weighing attendance at the party. Macias said he went out a couple of weeks before his June 20 Facebook post.
Riverside County, where he lived in Lake Elsinore, was approved late in May to enter Phase 2 of California’s reopening process, which meant people could head back to malls and dine at restaurants. Gyms, nail salons and more followed in June.
The coronavirus situation in Riverside, however, was worsening that month. On June 17, the Desert Sun reported, the county went on a state watch list after cases increased and hospitalizations rose 19 percent in three days. Riverside is among the 19 counties, covering more than 70 percent of California’s population, that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced this week would have to shut a large swath of businesses back down, as the state shatters its records for new known coronavirus cases reported each day.
Even before Macias’s death, Lopez said, “we thought that it was a mistake opening so soon. … There’s still no vaccine, there’s still nothing to fight against this.”
“We should not have opened to begin with,” she said.
It’s not clear how many people were at the party Macias attended in Lake Elsinore, where he lived about an hour’s drive southeast of Los Angeles. Lopez said her family heard from Macias that a friend who also attended later reached out to say everyone should get tested — because that person went despite having a coronavirus diagnosis.
I doubt that person was trying to kill anyone. But the result speaks for itself. I just don’t think people understand how bad this is, even now. And it’s terrifying.
We will be spending our holiday at home. We’ll have a nice cookout. It will be fine. I hope you all do the same. I know people are yearning to socialize. It’s human nature. But we can’t right now. We just can’t.
This piece in the New Yorker is just depressing:
On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci sat in a Senate hearing room that had been reconfigured for social distancing and listened, mask at hand, as Patty Murray, of Washington, described the consequences of America’s failure to manage its pandemic. The tally of cases was soaring in a majority of states, particularly in the South and West; Murray, speaking by video, quoted a C.D.C. official who had warned that there was “too much virus to control in the U.S.” Murray stated the obvious: “Our strategy hasn’t worked.” What, she asked, did the federal and state governments need to do to turn the numbers around?
“I am also quite concerned,” Fauci replied. He reeled off some of the statistics that Murray had alluded to—“surges” in Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas alone, he said, accounted for half of the new confirmed cases, which now amount to more than forty thousand a day. Later in his testimony, in answer to a question from Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, Fauci said that he would not be surprised if the number of new cases reached a hundred thousand a day. (He declined to make a guess as to how many deaths that would amount to.) Perhaps, Fauci added, some states had reopened “too quickly”; even in ones where the governors and mayors had acted properly, he had seen “in clips and in photographs . . . individuals in the community doing an ‘all or none’ phenomenon”—by which he meant “either be locked down or open up in a way where you see people at bars, not wearing masks, not avoiding crowds, not paying attention to physical distancing.” To halt the pandemic, Fauci said, “I think we need to emphasize the responsibility that we have both as individuals and as part of a societal effort.”
Fauci is, of course, right about personal responsibility; everyone has a role to play in stopping the coronavirus. But he was less clear about how that rallying cry fits into any federal or even state-government public-health strategy. The great cause of confusion is that we have, at the moment, an all-or-none President, whose exercise of personal or political responsibility in dealing with this crisis is around the level of zero.
At times, it sounded as though Fauci had pretty much given up on Donald Trump, and had no option left but to appeal directly to the American people. He could only hope that they would pay attention to his warnings rather than to Trump’s tweets mocking people who wear masks, or the clips and photographs of the people in the crowd, very few of them wearing masks, at the President’s indoor events. (At a rally in Tulsa, campaign workers reportedly removed labels encouraging social distancing from seats.)
[…]
Many Americans, in assessing their own behavior, are asking how the government is using the time that sheltering at home has bought; without a better answer from someone, there is a risk that a sort of public-health nihilism will take hold. Such a development would bring the pandemic to a new level of catastrophe, and that prospect makes Fauci’s plea at the hearing, lonesome as it is, all the more urgent and worth heeding. “We’ve got to get that message out, that we are all in this together, and, if we are going to contain this, we’ve got to contain it together,” Fauci said. Trump or no Trump, people should do what they can.
The pandemic remains a national problem. As Fauci noted, surges in any region put “the entire country at risk,” and not all of the problems brought up at the hearing could even notionally be solved by Americans simply rearranging their personal lives. For example, a number of senators pressed Fauci and other witnesses—Robert Redfield, the head of the C.D.C.; Stephen Hahn, of the Food and Drug Administration; and Admiral Brett Giroir, the Health and Human Services official tasked with coördinating testing—on whether a real strategy exists for distributing a vaccine, if one becomes available. The answer, in short, was no. As Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, pointed out, the obstacles include building trust in communities that may be resistant to any vaccine. When Bernie Sanders asked whether a vaccine should be available to everyone in the country, regardless of income, the witnesses answered, “Yes.” But that, too, remains nothing more than an aspiration. There were also unanswered questions about who would bear the cost if low-income workers need to be tested repeatedly as a condition of returning to their jobs.
At one point, Rand Paul, of Kentucky, launched into a diatribe about how people who listened to “experts” are acting like “sheep.” And yet, as Paul offered charts that he said showed that the reopening of schools in countries like Germany and Denmark had not been followed by major new waves of cases, and quoted the findings of contact-tracing studies there, the irony was almost unbearable. These are countries that actually have functioning contact-tracing programs, organized by the experts that Paul, and his President, seem to despise. (They also have cultures of mask wearing.) Schools in those countries opened, often in limited ways, after a concerted and sophisticated national effort that is absent here. When the European Union announced, on Tuesday, that it would reopen its borders for nonessential travel to residents of countries where the virus was under control, the United States was not on the list. (Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Rwanda made it.) Later in the hearing, Maggie Hassan, of New Hampshire, pointed to charts that compared the falling case levels in Europe and elsewhere to make a very different point than Paul. “The disparity is eye-popping,” she said. It is a measure of America’s tragedy and of its loss.
Sadly, we have nihilists like Paul, cynical incompetents like Ron DeSantis and narcissistic imbeciles like Trump running things. They are going to kill us.
I wish I felt more optimistic about this.