The states that followed the containment measures have lower number of cases per capita than those that didn’t. Surprise.
Coronavirus cases are rising in almost every U.S. state. But the surge is worst now in places where leaders neglected to keep up forceful virus containment efforts or failed to implement basic measures like mask mandates in the first place, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the University of Oxford.
Using an index that tracks policy responses to the pandemic, these charts show the number of new virus cases and hospitalizations in each state relative to the state’s recent containment measures.
The wave of new restrictions in the United States follows national and regional lockdowns in Europe, where outbreaks surged past their spring peaks but cases per capita remained lower than many Upper Midwest states. A couple weeks into those lockdowns, countries with new restrictions may be seeing results: The rate of new daily cases has begun to level off or drop in France, Spain, Germany and Italy, though it continues to rise in the United Kingdom.
Mr. Hale said the Oxford data makes it clear that acting quickly and forcefully is the best shot governments have to combat the virus. And the more swiftly they can act, the shorter any lockdown-style policies need to be.
Some countries that implemented fast, early restrictions and robust test-and-trace programs have seen the most success. New Zealand recently lifted all restrictions following 10 days with no new cases. New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, called it a validation of the country’s “go hard, go early” strategy, in which the country reacts rapidly to signs of community spread.
“The question is — and I’m sure that’s the conversation now happening in the halls of power — what do we do next? Clearly you don’t want to wait too long because that’s the mistake we made last time, when things spun out of control. So there’s a need to make decisions and be decisive,” Dr. El-Sadr said. “Once you start thinking about acting, it probably is the time to act.”
Here in the US we’ve adopted the “whatever” strategy, which isn’t even as coherent as “herd immunity.” Some states are trying to save their citizens and some aren’t. And the federal government has completely given up on trying to save businesses so people are on their own there too.
We reached 250,000 known deaths from COVID yesterday. And it’s growing exponentially. You’re on your own. Stay safe …
This photo of Carsington Water is courtesy of Tripadvisor
A concern troll in a local Facebook forum fretted yesterday about “those responsible for counting ballots,” about the “temptation for cheating,” and about observers “denied access to vote counting areas.” Do poll officials act “with integrity”? Clearly someone spending too much time listening to the wrong people online who know too little and are easily misled.
Coincidentally, this USA Today story about election integrity popped up from coastal North Carolina:
The integrity of the 2020 election became especially personal for Brunswick County Elections Director Sara Knotts on Nov. 13 when she had to ask her elections board to reject her mother’s ballot.
Knotts felt obligated to do this because her mother had submitted an absentee ballot in September, then died on Oct. 11, several weeks before the Nov. 3 Election Day.
North Carolina election law requires voters to be alive on Election Day. This includes voters who cast their ballots early by mail-in absentee ballot or via in-person early voting.
The Brunswick County Board of Elections voted unanimously to remove the absentee ballot of 62-year-old Anne Ashcraft of Winnabow because she was deceased as of Nov. 3 and therefore not qualified to participate in the election.
Hardest thing I've done as an elections administrator: present a challenge against the absentee ballot cast by my mom. In NC, the qualifications to vote are judged on election day. She passed away from glioblastoma after submitting her ballot but before Nov 3. #electionintegrity
Do dead people vote? In every election! Just as Anne Ashcraft did. In some states those votes still count. Just not here. (I lost an aunt in the Midwest to old age just before the election; her absentee vote did not count either.)
People who run elections here are top-notch. People who work Election Day polls do it to give back to the community. You can’t pry them out of those jobs until they themselves give out. They don’t do it for the money. Their work is a source of pride.
And by the way, vote-counting is done by machine here and backed up by random hand-counted audits overseen by bipartisan teams. Same for full hand-recounts performed after machine recounts. Initial recounts are done by machine to look for discrepancies.
Are mistakes made? In what human endeavor are they not?
When the Brunswick County Board of Elections took up Ashcraft’s ballot on Friday, Knotts stepped aside and had another elections staff person present the case.
Board members on Friday praised Knotts for her honesty just before they took the vote.
This is what integrity looks like. For real. It is far more prevalent than conspiracists suppose.
“The president’s right, we have turned the corner — turned for the worse,” said Terrell Means. Rural Lowndes County, Ala. has the highest rate of coronavirus infections in the state. Means is the county coroner. Masks never caught on there, the Washington Post reports, on the day U.S. deaths from COVID-19 topped 250,000.
The nation has turned another corner too. We have gone from can-do to won’t-do.
The outgoing president won’t concede (or do his job). Many Americans won’t wear masks; they won’t stay home. The Mitch McConnell-led U.S. Senate won’t approve a new Covid-19 relief package for Americans suffering under nearly a year of death and economic ruin.
One week ahead of Thanksgiving 2020 is a pretty schizoid time. The outgoing president and his base are in denial that he lost reelection (by twice the popular vote margin of 2016). Hospitals are overwhelmed as the virus spreads unchecked:
“We have had one million cases documented over the past week, our rate of rise is higher than it even was in the summer, we have hospitalizations going up 25% week over week,” Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, told CNN. “There are so many more cases that we have, that deaths are going up.”
Technology may yet be our savior. News drops daily of effective vaccines in testing. We watched our satellite TVs this week as the latest SpaceX Dragon spacecraft delivered a new team of scientists to the International Space Station.
Yet many of our fellow Americans won’t dance with the one that brought them. They will believe ever wilder conspiracy theories. They will put their families and communities at risk. They won’t believe facts. Or math.
They will “support our troops” with slogans and flag-waving. They won’t make similar sacrifices themselves.
Because freedom. Because freedom is just another empty slogan. Not for what we will do, but for what we won’t do.
Amber Elliott, a county health director in Missouri, expressed her frustrations to the Washington Post:
We hired 10 contact tracers to track the spread, starting in August, but the real problem we keep running into is community cooperation. We call everyone that’s had a positive test and say: “Hey, this is your local health department. We’re trying to interrupt disease transmission, and we’d love your help.” It’s nothing new. We do the same thing for measles, mumps, and tick-borne diseases, and I’d say 99 percent of the time before covid, people were receptive. They wanted to stop an outbreak, but now it’s all politicized. Every time you get on the phone, you’re hoping you don’t get cussed at. Probably half of the people we call are skeptical or combative. They refuse to talk. They deny their own positive test results. They hang up. They say they’re going to hire a lawyer. They give you fake people they’ve spent time with and fake numbers. They lie and tell you they’re quarantining alone at home, but then in the background you can hear the beeping of a scanner at Walmart.
I’ve stayed up a lot of nights trying to understand where this whole disconnect comes from. I love living in this county. I know in my heart these are good people, but it’s like we’re living on different planets. I have people in my own family who believe covid is a conspiracy and our doctors are getting paid off. I’ve done press conferences and dozens of Facebook Live videos to talk about the real science. Even with all the other failures happening, that’s the one thing we should be celebrating: better treatments, nurses and doctors on the front lines, promising news about vaccines. But the more I talk about the facts, the more it seems to put a target on my back.
“We’re tracking your movements.” “Don’t do something you’ll regret.” “We’ll protest at your house.”
It’s as if much of the country has turned “Dirty Dozen.” All these rugged individuals won’t work as a team. Every man for himself doesn’t cut it just now. What will it take? Cutting off everyone’s supply of hot water?
After the scene above, Marvin sees a bright side to the “mutiny.” His crew of misfits and convicts began seeing they were all in it together and started behaving like it.
Major John Reisman : Remember what I was saying last night about 12 rugged individualists? You heard them. It was ‘We ain’t gonna do this’ and ‘We ain’t gonna do that’ When I asked them to step forward, even Posey joined. I’ll bet you he’s been shaving in cold water since he was a kid. Boy, do I love that Franko.
This is pretty stunning, even for Trump. They are going way beyond partisan politics now or even Trump loyalty. They are making national security decisions designed to put Americans in danger so they can blame Joe Biden for it:
President Donald Trump’s order of a further withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq is the latest foreign policy move on a growing list in his final weeks in office that are meant to limit President-elect Joe Biden’s options before he takes office in January.
The White House has directed newly installed acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller to focus his attention in the remaining weeks on cyber and irregular warfare, with a focus on China in particular, an administration official tells CNN.
It is contemplating new terrorist designations in Yemen that could complicate efforts to broker peace. And it has rushed through authorization of a massive arms sale that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East.
The Trump team has prepared legally required transition memos describing policy challenges, but there are no discussions about actions they could take or pause. Instead, the White House is barreling ahead. A second official tells CNN their goal is to set so many fires that it will be hard for the Biden administration to put them all out.
I guess I really shouldn’t be that surprised. Look at how many people they are willing to kill with COVID? Why not destabilize the world to own the libs with some kind of global conflagration?
We will probably hit 250,000 dead, many preventable, in the last eight months. And yet we have nearly half the country insisting that it either is a hoax or is something that happens every year. And why do they think this? Because of lunatic social media bullshit and people like this spewing bullshit on Fox News:
DR. RAMIN OSKOUI (GUEST): Well, you know, the whole idea of lockdowns obviously was to suppress viral spread, but it’s come at a huge social and economic cost, and what we have to understand from that Icon School of Medicine study that you showed, beautifully done, and with very thorough testing is that social distancing doesn’t work, quarantining doesn’t work, masks don’t work.
This is really settled science, and those in the media, and those in the public, who want to cling to those illusions, they’re fooling themselves. And they’re hurting society.
One study — by researchers at the Naval Medical Research Center, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and other institutions — included data on 1,848 recruits who were tested for Covid-19 after completing a two-week quarantine at home and then throughout a supervised quarantine on a college campus.While on campus, recruits wore masks and practiced social distancing.
US Defense Department at war with Covid-19 10:16At the end of that second quarantine, all recruits were required to have a negative Covid-19 test before heading to Parris Island in South Carolina for training. The recruits, who were predominantly male, enrolled in the study from May 12 to July 15.close dialog
The study found that at the time of enrollment, following the recruits’ at-home quarantine, 16 of them — or about 1% — tested positive for coronavirus. Then during the two-week supervised quarantine period, the researchers found that an additional 35 recruits — or about 2% — tested positive. Clusters of outbreaks were identified and “shared rooms and shared platoon membership were risk factors for transmission,” the researchers wrote.Only five of the 51 infected recruits — 10% of them — reported having symptoms in the week before testing positive or on the day testing occurred. All cases were detected through scheduled testing and none were through daily symptom monitoring.
If you think they were wearing masks in their own rooms, you are crazy.
The thrust of the study was that you cannot depend on waiting for symptoms and that testing regularly was the key. They did not conclude that masks, social distancing and quarantining doesn’t work. 1% of these recruits came into quarantine and ended up spreading it to others who were in the quarantine with them. Duh.
But these right wingers are simply intent upon killing people, even their own loved ones and even themselves. I can’t get over it.
The following letter from the Arizona secretary of State made my skin crawl. This country is infected with a terrible disease and it isn’t COVID. It’s right wing disinformation and reckless Republican leadership.
Trump is still flogging the lie that Michigan can’t certify the election.
The Great State of Michigan, with votes being far greater than the number of people who voted, cannot certify the election. The Democrats cheated big time, and got caught. A Republican WIN!
The Georgia recount is a joke and is being done UNDER PROTEST. Even though thousands of fraudulent votes have been found, the real number is in matching signatures. Governor must open up the unconstitutional Consent Decree and call in the Legislature!
If you’re not on twitter, you’ve have blessedly missed the cascade of lies like that hour after hour. It’s even more disturbing than usual.
The strategy, to the extent there is one, appears to be to file lawsuits and demand recounts as they simultaneously pressure local Republicans in various states to buy into their tactic of crying voter fraud without evidence and refuse to certify the results. I suspect Trump is still counting on his handpicked Supreme Court to throw the election to him if it gets that far.
And all of it is Trump’s patented method of handling his failures — throw up a bunch of smoke, harass everyone involved and try to make it not worth their while to hold him accountable. He’s not living in the real world this time, of course. It’s not going to happen. But his fallback is to keep his cult excited and engaged even if he leaves office by perpetuating the lie that he actually won and was denied the office by the Deep State and the Swamp. I’m sure there’s money in it.
“There is now aggressive, unrelenting, expanding broad community spread across the country, reaching most counties, without evidence of improvement but rather, further deterioration.”
Trump fatigue is real. So real that Americans this month threw an incumbent president out of office by four percentage points and nearly six million votes. We all want a return to “normal.” Normal is not cooperating.
Like it or not, that is the environment into which the incoming Biden administration finds itself as well as the dangerously changing global one. Unless you are prepared to fold, you play with the cards you are dealt.
The Joe Biden administration is signaling it has learned nothing from the last Democratic administration’s desire “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Barack Obama’s Department of Justice would not investigate George W. Bush’s C.I.A. interrogation program and other potentially illegal actions. Biden’s team signaled Tuesday it would treat Trump malfeasance similarly, or at least at arm’s length:
President-elect Joe Biden has privately told advisers that he doesn’t want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor, according to five people familiar with the discussions, despite pressure from some Democrats who want inquiries into President Donald Trump, his policies and members of his administration.
Biden has raised concerns that investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite and risk making every day of his presidency about Trump, said the sources, who spoke on background to offer details of private conversations.
They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump or of challenging any orders Trump may issue granting immunity to members of his staff before he leaves office. One adviser said Biden has made it clear that he “just wants to move on.”
An unnamed adviser told NBC News Biden’s DOJ would be independent of the Oval Office again. “[A]ny Trump-related investigations, the expectation is ‘it’s going to be very situational’ and ‘depending on the merits’.” So, some wiggle room.
But beginning with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon for the Watergate break-in and coverup, the history on looking forward not backwards suggest doing so means the next cycle of ethical decay will be worse than the last. *
At the time of the Nixon pardon, Ford wrote, “the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” Normal. We want to get back to normal.
And so, only Nixon underlings would face prosecution. What followed?
Iran-contra followed Watergate (under Reagan)
Torture, prisoner killings, and international kidnappings followed Iran-contra (under G.W. Bush)
Obstruction of justice, human rights violations, and likely financial crimes and public corruption followed the torture (under Trump)
On approximately 15-year intervals, David Waldman (KagroX) added.
Yet, holding prior administrations accountable for law-breaking has been dismissed since the George H.W. Bush Iran-contra pardons as “the criminalization of policy differences.”
Jonathan Mahler in the New York Times Magazine catalogs some of Trump’s likely crimes: financial, election-law violations, obstruction of justice, and public corruption. He left out alleged crimesagainsthumanity.
The nation may desire healing. But there is also the matter of justice, and there is no guarantee that what feels right now will look right through the longer lens of history. Ford was widely assailed for pardoning Nixon. But one of his most outspoken critics at the time, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, later honored Ford with a Profile in Courage award, explaining that he’d been moved to rethink his views after witnessing the sprawling and protracted investigation into President Clinton by the independent counsel Ken Starr. It may be time to rethink Ford’s decision once more; it’s hard not to wonder if a Trump presidency would have been possible if Nixon had been criminally prosecuted rather than pardoned.
In that sense, the problem that Trump poses for Biden may also present an opportunity, a chance to repair more than just the damage of the last four years. To begin with, this may require recognizing that when a president brazenly flouts the law, electoral defeat might not be enough of a punishment. “There’s a mind-set that we need to reset,” Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, told me. “Breaking the law is not a political difference.” It might also require recognizing that to really move on from Trump, “healing” may have to mean something fundamentally different from what it has in the past — and that without accountability, it may in fact be impossible.
Not looking back means a future with more of the same, only worse. Biden’s need to heal the country will only kick the can of accountability down the road. We have already seen the escalation in criminality correlating with (if not caused by) doing that over the last 50 years. In the name of moving on, we sacrifice principles of equal justice and the country decays from within.
Demanding accountability now with neo-fascists in the streets and a country bitterly divided risks ripping the country apart irreparably. Not addressing it now may only delay that eventuality. By that end, the country will be unrecognizable. At least fighting to demand justice and accepting the risks, the U.S.A. if it fails could fade into history with some of its dignity intact.
These are the cards Joe Biden must play if he has the guts for it.
*We did not know at the time of Nixon’s “treason” in sabotaging the Vietnam war peace talks in 1968. LBJ did and covered it up, as did Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey who believed it would be “too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason.” Fifty years later, here we are.
