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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / COVID-19 Update (Domestic Edition) – Saturday/Sunday, March 7/8

COVID-19 Update (Domestic Edition) – Saturday/Sunday, March 7/8

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104Comments

  1. 1.

    Mnemosyne

    People aren’t being tested because Trump and his gang of idiots think they can bluff their way through like they did with kids in cages by not documenting anything. If they don’t document anything, no one can prove they did anything wrong and the problem magically vanishes — ta da! ?

    Those “Masque of the Red Death” jokes I was making a couple of weeks ago are looking a little more prescient than I’m comfortable with.

  2. 2.

    WereBear

    @Mnemosyne: People aren’t being tested because, we will discover, they used “market solutions” which means “throwing money at you, I get a kickback, neither of us cares if it works.”

  3. 3.

    charon

    The problem is straightforward:  Frontotemporal dementia.

    The frontal and temporal lobes are where judgment, planning, prioritizing occur.

    Sound judgment?  Donald has none, he is, effectively both seriously cognitively impaired and lobotomized.

  4. 4.

    opiejeanne

    @WereBear: With the revelation that Trump owns stock in a company that creates tests, this is not a surprise. This is why he turned down The Who’s test kits, to make money for himself.

    He was supposed to divest himself of these stocks, but it’s very likely that he did not.

  5. 5.

    opiejeanne

    With the two Florida deaths announced Saturday morning and the confirmation of the 16th death in WA, the total last I was able to check was 19 in the US.

  6. 6.

    Sab

    So my office manager, who loves birthdays, has decided we will carry on with the monthly birthday party.

    This time it’s pizza! So we will have pizzas set out in their boxes in the breakroom. Everyone will look them over and take their pieces, maybe cutting them into smaller pieces. Then we will meet for an hour and sit around the comference room table and eat birthday cake together. Afterwards we will return to our separate offices.

    What could possibly go wrong? Half of us are over 60.

  7. 7.

    Martin

    Switzerland has stopped community testing. They’re reserving their test for serious patients. Everyone else is to recover at home. They’ve concluded they can’t contain it.

    The swiss were one of the nations I thought might get on top of this – they are very organized and have an obedient citizenry. They’re also realists and tend to admit the truth a bit faster than their more hopeful neighbors.

    I think most countries in the next two weeks are going to decide that containment isn’t possible, that they need to choose between everyone getting it all at once (more likely as you have people go to clinics for tests) or everyone getting it over a longer period of time – social distancing and soft quarantines.

    This is gonna suck.

  9. 9.

    Mary G

    At least the media is finally using language like failures, fiascos, botched response, and squandered opportunities. Except for Peter Baker, R-FTFNYT, of course. I just wonder what juicy tidbits he and Maggie are saving for their next book.

  10. 10.

    WereBear

    @Mary G: Chris Hayes this morning, on Twitter, called it a sociopathic government.

    Yup, that’s what we got. That’s what we’ve had. And Mr WereBear says it shows just how hamstrung the federal government has become; it cannot operate under Trump. He and his followers won’t let it.

    Though I don’t think any of the cultists will wake up. Even when it is happening to them, and theirs; it will still be the fault of liberals.

  12. 12.

    JWR

    One fitting response to the Econolodge tweet:

    China builds a Super Hospital in 9 days. America buys an Econolodge and paints over the sign. Stay classy!
    — Lucy Buttons (@sharshnibbles) March 7, 2020

    ETA, I am so happy to be on Medicare.

  13. 13.

    Andrew Johnston

    Good news from over yonder: My province is reporting no new cases.

    Not sure that this means too much for the moment, but it’s good to hear some good news after 40 days shut up in this joint.

  14. 14.

    Amir Khalid

    @opiejeanne:

    This is why he turned down The Who’s test kits, to make money for himself.

    There is always this danger when one is mentioning the World Health Organisation, which is a different group from Pete Townshend’s.

  16. 16.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @JWR:China builds a Super Hospital in 9 days.

    And on the 10th day it collapsed, killing everyone in it. Building codes? We don’t need no stinking building codes!

    That hospital is the last place anyone wants to go

  19. 19.

    Raven Onthill

    There is perhaps a fraction within the adminstration that wants to promote the spread of the virus on the theory that it will reduce the surplus population. Certainly the white supremacists are rooting for it.

  21. 21.

    pat

    I am in a quandary.  We are in Austria until April 24, so 7 weeks.  In 7 weeks with the worst of this pandemic be over or will we be in the middle of it?

    Should I change the tickets and go home in the next couple of weeks?  We are reluctant to spend much time in large groups. museums and concerts etc, and the planned trip to northern Italy is out, of course.

    What to do…..

  22. 22.

    Shalimar

    @Mnemosyne: The more direct analogy that Trump is most likely following was Puerto Rico.  More than half the country still thinks not much more than the 16 Trump quoted when he visited died from the hurricane.  The vast majority of Americans still have no idea the death toll was 2995.  The coverup of that catastrophe is one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history.

    What Republicans learned from Katrina is to pretend it didn’t happen, , don’t follow up, don’t comment, don’t investigate. and the media won’t figure out how to report it.

  23. 23.

    prostratedragon

    Have I missed mention of this here? Josh Marshall reports on a community-sourced data collection project for state-by-state CORVID testing. It’s being run by some known data science suspects who would like some volunteers, as explained on the page JMM links to, and where the latest spreadsheet itself can be viewed.

    “Key Source of COVID-19 Testing & Infection Data,” TPM

  24. 24.

    JWR

    @OzarkHillbilly: Hey, waitaminnit! (reads link) Okay, the building that fell wasn’t one of the new Super Hospitals, a notion being peddled on the tweet machines.

  25. 25.

    pat

    @pat:

    I should add that we have a house here and are not living in hotels…  But if things get really bad, I’d like to be home in good old Wisconsin.

  26. 26.

    Shalimar

    1. @pat: Depends on whether cases decline significantly when warm weather comes.  If they do, it will be worse for the next few weeks and then start getting better.  If it keeps getting worse for the next 7 weeks, all airline travel may be shut down at that point.
  27. 27.

    Barbara

    I wouldn’t want to spend a long time in an EconoLodge but renting one out seems like it might be a reasonable measure. A number of big ski lodges in NE originally were built as sanitaria for TB patients. Most probably have been replaced or torn down, but it is a similar concept.

  29. 29.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Michelle Goldberg:

    As I write this, the Grand Princess, a ship carrying thousands of people, is stuck off the coast of San Francisco after a former passenger who had disembarked died of Covid-19, the disease that this coronavirus causes. According to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, 11 passengers and 10 crew members are showing signs of the illness, and Newsom said that number may “significantly understate” the severity of the outbreak onboard. This comes after last month’s disastrous attempt to quarantine people aboard another cruise ship owned by the same company, the Diamond Princess, off the coast of Japan. In the end, 705 people were infected on that boat.

    Researchers concluded that if people had been quickly taken off the Diamond Princess, the infection rate would have been only one-eighth as high. Nevertheless, D.H.S. official Ken Cuccinelli told a Senate committee on Thursday that the ship off California can’t be evacuated because American health care facilities lack the capacity to quarantine its passengers. Therefore, at least for now, the Diamond Princess experiment is being run again.

    Jeremy Konyndyk, a former director of the foreign disaster assistance program at USAID who helped manage the response to Ebola during Barack Obama’s presidency, said a competent administration would have had a contingency plan for a repeat of the Diamond Princess debacle. “It’s one thing to be the first one to make a mistake,” he told me. “It’s pretty different to be the second one to make the same mistake.” He added, “To say we’ve got no way to bring these people off the cruise ship is extraordinary to me.”

    Extraordinary, but perhaps not surprising. “It’s like a Xerox copy of Puerto Rico,” Konyndyk said, comparing the administration’s coronavirus response to its mismanagement of Hurricane Maria’s aftermath. Trump’s presidency has caused manifold catastrophes, but so far, most Americans have not seen them up close. That might be about to change. Trump spent much of Thursday afternoon congratulating himself on Twitter for his coronavirus response. If things get really bad, maybe he’ll toss us a few rolls of paper towels.

  31. 31.

    Shalimar

    @Mary G: I suspect Baker and Haberman practice journalism like the departed Tim Russert: they keep all the juicy tidbits private to cultivate sources and maintain friendships with the people they’re supposed to be covering.

  32. 32.

    Shalimar

    @pat: If traffic drops by 50% or more, governments might not need to.  Airlines will because they’re losing too much money on each flight.

  33. 33.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @JWR: As a union carpenter of 35 years, trust me on this: They didn’t follow codes. The concrete isn’t even fully cured.

  34. 34.

    JPL

    @pat: If  trump thought it would improve his numbers, he’ll stop international flights.   He could do that tomorrow.

  35. 35.

    JWR

    @OzarkHillbilly: Oh I trust you, not even disagreeing with you. But I didn’t read the entire article, and didn’t know that the repurposed building that collapsed was new.

    ETA. Hmm. Now I is confused. No surprise to those who know me. ;)

  36. 36.

    zhena gogolia

    @Martin:

    That’s the analysis I got from my ex-husband’s wife, who’s in the top levels of the German government.

    She was skeptical that a healthy person over 60 was really in a high-risk group, though.

  37. 37.

    New Deal democrat

    @Mnemosyne: “the Masque of the Red Death” is exactly what I have been thinking for the last month, as I hear conversations among older, white neighbors that all but say that coronavirus is a hoax.

    Btw, the one tweet about Brazil is wrong: they have reported 8 cases, only one of community transmission.

     

    in the tropics and global south (where it is summer), so far almost all the reported cases are travelers who returned from Europe or China. Very little evidence of community transmission. I plan on continuing to follow these to see if there is evidence that the virus will abate in warmer weather.

  38. 38.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @JWR:  I haven’t read it at all so…. ;-)

    I am probably over sensitized to complaints about American construction. Everybody hates building to code (houses in WashCO sell for 70% what they do right across the line in FranklinCO, they build to code in FranklinCO), complains about how long things take (want it right? or want it fast?) and about that guy leaning on his shovel (see that great big machine sticking the long arm with a bucket on the end in the hole? it crushes people like bugs)

  41. 41.

    debbie

    @Sab:

    They gave us a pizza lunch last week. Bottles of sanitizers were arrayed among the boxes. Meanwhile, down in the cafeteria, plastic forks, knives, and spoons are in open containers. People reach in and grab whatever they need, which is sure to spread whatever happens by. I’ve complained and complained, even told them it was a violation of the health code, but ended up keeping a box of my own in my desk drawer.

  42. 42.

    sdhays

    Regarding the tweet in the post below about democracies addressing failures – our failure was installing someone clearly unfit to be President in the Oval Office at all. We aren’t just botching the response to a complex crisis; we broke our government because too many Americans hate women.

    I guess my point is that our failure here is a failure of Democracy, not a technical failure as referenced in South Korea’s MERS response. I’m hopeful that we still have enough democracy to start fixing it, although it’s not going to be fixed in just one more election.

  43. 43.

    debbie

    @WereBear:

    The AP is reporting this:

    “According to the Associated Press, Donald Trump, the current President of the United States who is supposed to be managing the Coronavirus epidemic and how the testing is conducted, has listed investments in V.F. Corp (VFC) and Thermo Fisher Scientific Corporation (TMO), both of which moved jobs out of the U.S. in high profile outsourcing deals. There is reason to believe that Donald Trump stands to profit from medical testing of coronavirus that will now take place in the United States.”

  44. 44.

    Nelle

    @OzarkHillbilly: Ah, I didn’t realize you were a union carpenter.  Justified or not, my opinion of you has soared (a union carpenter’s daughter, trained from an early age not to ever cross a picket line).

  45. 45.

    Skepticat

    I was (somewhat) encouraged by the article in the Portland, Maine, paper this morning in which spokespeople from a number of businesses said, literally or in essence, “We’re preparing but not panicking.” Seems like the best approach. Being an introvert and living on a desert island are working pretty well for me so far, but friends in from Florida are having lunch for a half-dozen or so of those here, and it reminds me that I might have to start paying attention too. I’m not looking forward to returning to the States, though that’ll be to a very small island too.

  46. 46.

    Sab

    @debbie: I think I will smuggle in my own pizza pieces.

    I was one of the birthday girls for last months party. Tax season=flu season even in the best years. Both of us birthday girls “blew out” our candles by waving birthday cards instead of blowing. Others were outraged we cheated.

  47. 47.

    debbie

    @Sab:

    Actually, that’s a very clever solution! I’ll have to remember that for the next birthday party.

  48. 48.

    JPL

    Most major companies are postponing business travel for the next month or two.   Maybe they know something we don’t.   hmmm   A friend was suppose to visit mid week for a few days, but has also postponed.

  49. 49.

    Nelle

    @debbie: The link goes to the Political Tribune, not AP.  Weird because in checking Media Bias, Political Tribune has entries as a far left site And a far right site.

  50. 50.

    debbie

    Last night, I got an email from Nordstrom telling me how concerned they were about Covid-19 and reassuring me they clean and sanitize thoroughly every night. They want to reassure me they’re open for business! ?

  51. 51.

    Sab

    @Sab: My brother in law in his early seventies just died last month from collateral issues from an infection.

    I am tired of healthy young idiots and Fauxnews  watchers dictating to the rest of us how we run our health lives.

  52. 52.

    Suzanne

    @OzarkHillbilly: I have a friend who is a building code consultant (he practiced as an architect before that). He works a lot in China. I was asking him about the codes there. He said there essentially aren’t any and that each owner sort of decides what they want to do. They don’t have the same plan review or inspections. So. That’s terrifying.

  53. 53.

    WhatsMyNym

    I’m just so surprised that the medical officer of the Grand Princess says the passenger was infected before the cruise. /s

  54. 54.

    Matt McIrvin

    @pat: They shut down all airline travel for a while after 9/11. I remember the sky absent of contrails–it was interesting to realize how much of everyday high cirrus comes from airplane contrails.

  56. 56.

    Matt McIrvin

    @JPL: The companies know nothing we don’t. This is all on the basis of publicly available information. That the federal administration isn’t paying attention is on them.

  57. 57.

    Suzanne

    @New Deal democrat: I have heard the same educated supposition, too, that warmer weather will slow this down significantly. We’re starting to get highs around 80. Three reported cases in the state, but all in different places. My husband said Costco was as busy as ever yesterday. Though they had no TP.

  60. 60.

    Matt McIrvin

    @New Deal democrat: There was some local transmission in Singapore all the way back in late January, and the temperatures were in the 80s and low 90s there. They’ve escaped the worst of it, but that probably has more to do with relatively smart public policy (and the control advantages of being a small city-state with national borders) than the climate. The epidemiologists I’ve heard talk about this don’t think the heat is going to do much for us–or that at least we can’t plan on it.

  61. 61.

    Tenar Arha

    @pat: I don’t envy you trying to decide. Even if you’re in a house, if you don’t know the neighborhood or neighbors it’d be hard to stay somewhere you’re not super rooted. If you really want to get home to where your support system & family is, & you’re not immune compromised you may want to go now. That’s even with the caveat that you’re definitely going to want to make sure you hand wash, have plenty of hand sanitizer, & stay a meter apart before & after you get on the plane.

    But if you’re immune compromised, or over 60 & you tend to pick up the cold & flu easily you may not want to risk traveling. Then maybe you should consider staying put. 

    And there’s the unfortunate serious question, where would you rather get really sick and where can you afford to get really sick? Because if you’re under 65 you should be maybe be considering what’s covered under your health insurance in the states vs. what’s covered the Austrian healthcare system.

    I know I know, I’m such a ray of sweetness & light. /sarcasm Sorry to be such a downer, I really don’t envy you your decision.

  62. 62.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Suzanne: I once worked for a small contractor doing *ADA* upgrades for a fast food company whose grandfather clauses were running out. The regional manager insisted we do the work without permits. At a restaurant on a major thoroughfare. With a great big dumpster parked in front. Took about 2 hours for an electrical inspector to spot us and put a stop work order on it. Needless to say he was PISSED OFF. He didn’t understand we we were all laughing so hard at being put out of work.

    After a good and proper rogering by the authorities, the RM let my boss get the proper permits after that.

     

    **American Disabilities Act

  63. 63.

    Princess

    @WereBear: I took a shallow dive into right-wing pundit twitter. The cultists won’t  even know about what is going on because they aren’t hearing it reported in their circles. Nothing about trump at the CDC. Nothing about cases or tests of the cruise ships. Nothing. It’s not happening in the US at all.

    Until they and their parents start dying.

  64. 64.

    Skepticat

    @Matt McIrvin: They shut down all airline travel for a while after 9/11. I remember the sky absent of contrails–it was interesting to realize how much of everyday high cirrus comes from airplane contrails.

    I was just thinking about this earlier today. Apparently airlines must fly routes in order to keep them, but I’d think this might be a good time to waive that temporarily. It’s bad enough that they don’t have passengers, but the expenses of flying empty planes must be monumental.

  65. 65.

    New Deal democrat

    @Matt McIrvin: if you check the Johns Hopkins link referenced above by another commenter, you can see that Singapore is the only tropical or southern country with over 100 cases. Maybe it is only underreporting or inability to diagnose, and maybe those numbers will explode, but there is at least some grounds for hope.

    of course, with infections doubling about once a week in the global north, it would make a huge difference if you need late April or June temperatures to slow down transmission.

    And that just buys you time until next November to get better practices (and maybe even a partially effective vaccine) in place.

  66. 66.

    Princess

    @Matt McIrvin: Yes, the supposition that warm weather will kill this off is an uneducated, not an educated supposition. It did not work with H1N1 and usually does not with new viruses. But if we can flatten the curve, it would be a good thing if people got it AFTER flu season is over because hospitals will have more capacity.

  68. 68.

    Geminid

    @pat: A tough decision. Might be “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Hoping you and yours stay safe.

  69. 69.

    Suzanne

    @OzarkHillbilly: Most of my career has been in healthcare architecture. I have done a lot of work for some of the largest healthcare systems in the country. You would be (not) shocked to hear how much they tried to have us either not build to ADA/ANSI 117.1, and work without permits.

    I will note that a small industry of attorneys filing lawsuits under the ADA for violations they found on Google Earth or from basic walk-throughs has really changed that attitude.

  72. 72.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: My comment at #20 notes that I did not know of any building collapse. I was speaking predictively from many years of experience in the trades. The Hard Rock hotel collapse in NOLA? I would bet anything they did not allow time for the concrete to properly cure and/or did not install sufficient rebar. Both things which proper inspections are designed to insure against.

    Either the inspector was overworked (all too likely) or on the take (I have no knowledge of the NOLA construction culture, so can’t even begin to say how likely this is)

  74. 74.

    Princess

    While I was reading this, I got a FB message from a guy who has been travelling through South Asia. In Vietnam there are supposedly only 5 active cases right now, 21 total. All the same, they are checking people’s temperatures, cancelling local cruises, quarantining neighbourhoods. They. Are. Not. Reporting. Cases. But they are obviously still occurring there. Don’t count on warm weather for anything.

  75. 75.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @debbie: That Substack is from Amee Vanderpool. If nothing else, she does connect the dots from the AP reports to Fortune reporting on Trump’s portfolio.

  77. 77.

    Suzanne

    @OzarkHillbilly: Lawyers cost more than architects, too. The number of owners I’ve worked for who want to avoid any involvement with AHJs is really staggering. Oh well.

  78. 78.

    Ksmiami

    @Mnemosyne: god dammit I’ve seen a lot of dystopian sci fi movies and we have Trump instead of Morgan Freeman at the helm. I feel cheated!

  79. 79.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I was speaking predictively from many years of experience in the trades.

    We made the same prediction.

    You’ll appreciate this on the collapsed building:

    The owner began renovating the first floor in January.

    Workers called the owner around 7 p.m. local time on Saturday and told him a pillar had became distorted during construction, according to Xinhua. The building collapsed a few minutes later.

  83. 83.

    WereBear

    @OzarkHillbilly: Everybody hates building to code (houses in WashCO sell for 70% what they do right across the line in FranklinCO, they build to code in FranklinCO

     

    Reminds me of the Sopranos episodes where Carmella and her father cut corners and bribe inspectors and wind up with an unsellable house anyway.

  87. 87.

    WereBear

    @Princess: The cultists won’t  even know about what is going on because they aren’t hearing it reported in their circles. Nothing about trump at the CDC. Nothing about cases or tests of the cruise ships. Nothing. It’s not happening in the US at all.

     

    I believe you, while at the same time it seems impossible to believe. But then, I live in a blue state. I understand red states are really like that.

  88. 88.

    Geminid

    @WereBear: There is a lot of commonality between people of red and blue states. Many “red” and “blue” states vote 55%-45% one way or the other; realitively few vote 60%-40% or more. I know that here in Virginia the reddest congressional district, the 9th in SW Virginia, voted 61%-39% Republican in 2018. So there are plenty of people who think similarly to you in the red states, and plenty of nutty Trumpers in yours, although I’m guessing you don’t hang with them.

  90. 90.

    pat

    @Tenar Arha:

    We have friends and relatives here (the house belongs to my BIL) and have been coming for years, ski a week, then bum around a few weeks.

    We drove through a bit of Germany yesterday on the way home from the week of skiing.  At the border the car ahead of us had Italian license plates and was shunted off to the side, maybe for some temperature check?  Who knows.

    It’s the not knowing how this will develop that bothers me.

    And yes I remember the empty skies after 9/11.

  91. 91.

    joel hanes

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    that guy leaning on his shovel

    People who complain about laborers leaning on their shovel have never done a full workday shoveling, and have erased from their memory what it’s like to shovel a foot of snow off a driveway, or spading a large garden.

    I spent one whole summer digging with a shovel.   One needs to rest about a quarter of the time.   It’s part of the job.

  92. 92.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Mnemosyne: Yes, there is that vibe to it all. I honestly wonder if Trump is in such denial because he is at high risk dying from the Virus and is terrified. Supposedly his grandfather died of the Spanish Flue which might explain the whole germophobia thing with him.

  93. 93.

    joel hanes

    @Matt McIrvin:

    The companies know nothing we don’t.

    The difference is that in large companies, particularly tech companies, decisions are made by people who are used to absorbing complex, incomplete data and making decisions based on that data.

    Humans as individuals rationalize, go with their gut.

  94. 94.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Princess: I thought “warm weather” is people are outdoors more and less crowed together, so  less chance of infection and get more sunlight so they have heather immune systems.

  95. 95.

    joel hanes

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I know a carpenter who bills out at a higher rate than the family-law lawyers in town.   If you want a bespoke curved, solid-cherry staircase with a spindle banister, he’s your guy (He buys entire standing hardwood trees and has a small warehouse to dry and store the rough-cut for a year or so before he uses it).

  96. 96.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @OzarkHillbilly: And on the 10th day it collapsed, killing everyone in it. Building codes? We don’t need no stinking building codes!

    About right, this whole mess is because of the Chine’s government worship of the Invisible Hand of the FreeMarket. The whole wet market thing in China were they sell live animals to be eaten as some kind of new age heath thing. So a lot of species that normally don’t come in contact wallowing in each other filth, so best possible conditions for disease transmission. These wet markets causes SARS, the Chines government shut them down, but they make a lot of money so the Chines government let them reopen. Tens of thousands of people will die, the world will is going to be disturbed because the Chines Communist had to show they are better capitalist than anyone else.

    For as stupid, inept and outright evil our leaders can be, the rest of the world says “hold our beer”.

    Vox on the cause of these viruses

    https://youtu.be/TPpoJGYlW54

  97. 97.

    Suzanne

    @chopper: They can use an admixture to provide high early strength. Though I have seen on my projects that the concrete can set enough to walk on it within twelve hours depending on the mix and the weather conditions that day. Of course the slab shouldn’t get floor finish for weeks…. but in a country where there’s no testing or inspection or enforcement….

  99. 99.

    J R in WV

    @New Deal democrat:

    in the tropics and global south (where it is summer), so far almost all the reported cases are travelers who returned from Europe or China. Very little evidence of community transmission.

    I too want to be optimistic, but in Singapore, which is tropical all year around, community spread of Covid-19 appears to be ongoing. Now, is it doubling every n days where n is a single digit? We don’t know yet…

    The math looks pretty bad for the US though, because nothing has been done to limit community transmission other than canceling a few (not all by any mean, see news out of the America-Israeli conference) group meetings. And the federal government cannot handle 3,500 people from a cruise ship? WASF !!

  100. 100.

    J R in WV

    @Nelle:

    The link goes to the Political Tribune, not AP. Weird because in checking Media Bias, Political Tribune has entries as a far left site And a far right site.

    And the publication Political Tribune (which I have never heard of, but whatever…) has run an article which quotes from an AP story, which is typically how AP stories appear in all news media. They are not a publisher of news, they are a provider of news to publishers of news.

    This doesn’t prove anything, anyone can create a web page that can say anything they want… but also it doesn’t disprove that this is an AP story at all.

  102. 102.

    opiejeanne

    @chopper: Ever watch Extreme Home Makeovers, or whatever it’s called?

    They pour and then build on the slab the same day, as if there’s something wonderful about putting up a house in 24 hours or something.

  104. 104.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Will people at least try to get the basic facts straight before pontificating down the rabbit hole?! The two makeshift hospitals built in two weeks in Wuhan have been and continue to be used to treat severe/critical cases. There was a severe thunderstorm storm in Wuhan before the second hospital was completed, and an unfinished section developed leaks, which were repaired before handover. The collapsed “hospital” was a commandeered motel (a Chinese counterpart to econolodge) used to house suspect cases, or close contacts. It is in Quanzhou, Fujian province, several hundred miles away from Wuhan. Best as I can gather, the structure was built to code (constructed in 2018), but the owner of the auto shop on the ground floor dug into the weight supporting structures during renovation. They either payed off the inspectors, or the inspectors missed it. These kinds of shenanigans are far from rare in China.

    The fact is you will find both world class infrastructure and shoddy “tofu” construction in China, and everything on the spectrum in between. No single anecdote is representative of the situation as a whole. That applies to just about every aspect when discussing China. There is plenty to criticize or condemn concerning the CCP regime as it really is, without descending into tilting at imagined demons.

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