Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Accountability, motherfuckers.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

When we show up, we win.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

The lights are all blinking red.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Saturday/Sunday, March 28/29

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Saturday/Sunday, March 28/29

by | 43 Comments

This post is in: 

Down at the pointy end:


(The worst of) Jersey gonna Jersey…

Michigan:


(Michigan State University is literally fifteen minutes on a city transit bus away from the state capital. I suspect these protestors are either new ‘libertarian’ student converts, or the sort of middle-aged malcontents who never leave the town where they went to college.)

District of Columbia:

Red states:

*sigh* Florida:

WHO COULD’VE KNOWN?!?


Story: “The Lost Month: How A Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to COVID-19”

… The members of the coronavirus task force typically devoted only five or 10 minutes, often at the end of contentious meetings, to talk about testing, several participants recalled. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, its leaders assured the others, had developed a diagnostic model that would be rolled out quickly as a first step.

But as the deadly virus from China spread with ferocity across the United States between late January and early March, large-scale testing of people who might have been infected did not happen — because of technical flaws, regulatory hurdles, business-as-usual bureaucracies and lack of leadership at multiple levels, according to interviews with more than 50 current and former public health officials, administration officials, senior scientists and company executives.

The result was a lost month, when the world’s richest country — armed with some of the most highly trained scientists and infectious disease specialists — squandered its best chance of containing the virus’s spread. Instead, Americans were left largely blind to the scale of a looming public health catastrophe.

Reader Interactions

43Comments

  2. 2.

    Betty Cracker

    My sister and her spouse are healthcare professionals here in FL (nurse anesthetist and ER doc, respectively), and I’m so worried for them.

  3. 3.

    Chetan Murthy

    In The After Time, DC really needs to get on the stick and get themselves statehood.  FFS, this is insanity.  The same goes for PR, or course, after what they were forced to endure after Maria.  Insanity.

  6. 6.

    Betty Cracker

    Trump super-fan Judge Jeanine was shit-faced during her Fox News program last night:

    I mean, damn!

  7. 7.

    OzarkHillbilly

    FTFNYT, but damn…

    ‘We Take the Dead From Morning Till Night’
    Photographs by Fabio Bucciarelli Written by Jason Horowitz March 27, 2020

    This time, as the ambulance arrived, his daughters, both wearing gloves and masks, packed a bag with two pairs of pajamas, a bottle of water, a cellphone and a charger. His oxygen levels had dipped.

    Red Cross workers hovered over him on a bed, where he lay below a painting of the Virgin Mary. They brought him into the ambulance. His granddaughters, 3 and 6, waved goodbye from the terrace. He looked up at them, at the balconies draped with Italian flags. Then the ambulance left and there was nothing to hear. “Only the police and the sirens,” his daughter said.

    The ambulance crew that took Mr. Travelli away had started early that morning.

    At 7:30 a.m., a crew of three Red Cross volunteers met to make sure the ambulance was certified as cleaned and stocked with oxygen. Like masks and gloves, the tanks had become an increasingly rare resource. They blasted one another in sprays of alcohol disinfectants. They sanitized their cellphones.

    “We can’t be the untori,” said Nadia Vallati, 41, a Red Cross volunteer, whose day job is working in the city’s tax office. She was referring to the infamous “anointers,” suspected in Italian lore of spreading contagion during the 17th century plague. After sanitizing, Ms. Vallati and her colleagues wait for an alarm to sound in their headquarters. It never takes long.

    Indistinguishable from one another in the white medical scrubs pulled over their red uniforms, crew members entered Mr. Travelli’s home on March 15 with tanks of oxygen. “Always with oxygen,” Ms. Vallati said.

  8. 8.

    Mai naem mobile

    Why are Michigan’s numbers so high per capital? NY and Washington I understand. Michigan? We supposedly have the lowest testing rate in the country here in AZ and the emergency management director just quit. She got into a spat with the governor’s aides who want to hand over the response to the state DHS. There was a presser with the governor and the DHS director and honestly she looked nervous. She was rattling off the beds needed and what we have and we basically need twice the number of ICU and regular beds than we have. The only thing we have going for us is overall we’re not a densely populated state except for a few newer gentrified hipster areas downtown Phx and Tempe.

  10. 10.

    WereBear

    On the one hand, I am pleased to see Trump losing support. On the other, I am incensed that it had to come to this. Because they didn’t find any of his other heinous things disturbing. They seemed to have no clue that the cruelty and incompetence would touch them.

    Since a lot of them are rabid Bible thumpers, they should know that verse.

    Hosea 8:7: “they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”

    Sadly, so will all of us.

  11. 11.

    Anne Laurie

    @Mai naem mobile: Not an expert, but there’s a *lot* of auto & other heavy industry in Michigan, and a good chunk of that is owned by or services China / the EU / Japan.   Lots of international travel means lots of chances for transmission.  And once it arrives, much of the state’s epicenter around Detroit is really poor — third-world infrastructure, and people who suffer the health consequences of living in such situations.

    Also, because of all that industry, it’s an airline hub… again, it only takes one coronavirus carrier to sneeze all over a terminal that’s later cleaned by a minimum-wage worker…

    Doesn’t help that the Repubs have had a stranglehold on the state for the last 20 years, and *still* rule too much of the voting population.  The DeVos / Prince families, for instance.

    (I still miss my Michigander friends almost every day, but there were reasons the Spousal Unit & I left his home state 30 years ago!)

  12. 12.

    Geminid

    @WereBear: A new version of Daniel 5:25: a strange chyron starts streaming under the OAN news program Trump is watching. He switches to Fox News, and there it is again. No one will translate for him, Mene Mene Tekel Uparsin. “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

  13. 13.

    raven

    What’s the latest on masks? I’ve got a couple N 95’s. Are people wearing them to the grocery store?

  15. 15.

    New Deal democrat

    Here’s the breakout, updated through yesterday, of the restrictions in place by each State:

    Number of States (+DC and Puerto Rico) in total lockdown, business lockdown, and partial restrictions

    • Total lockdown (personal + business): 26 (AK, CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, ID, IL, IN, KS, LA, MN, NC, NH, NM, MI, MT, NJ, NY, OH, OR, PR, RI, VT, WA, WI, WV)
    • Business lockdown: 7 (DC, KY, MA, MD, ME*, NV, PA*)
    • Partial restrictions on business (restaurants and bars): 14 (AL, FL*, GA*, IA, MO*, MS, ND, SC*, TN*, TX*, UT*, VA, WY)
    • School closure only: 4 (AZ**, AR, OK**, SD)
    • No mandatory restrictions: 1 (NE*)

    *some local areas are under lockdowns
    **some local areas with partial restrictions

    About 2/3’s of the US population is under “stay at home” orders. The holdouts are almost all States in Dixie, plus Arizona, run by GOP governors, and a few of the least populous States in the northern High Plains.

    Time to quarantine those recalcitrant States.

    NY, CA, and IL have been under lockdown for over 2 weeks. Hopefully their numbers will start to show “bending the curve” by now.

  19. 19.

    Mai naem mobile

    @Anne Laurie: okay, that makes sense. The international travel means Atlanta is going to be bad as well. I wonder if this means Arkansas is going to be bad with Walmart being there . I am assuming there’s huge Walmart warehouses in Bentonville. I am sure they have them throughout the country but there’s got to be big ones in Bentonville being that it’s the hq.

  20. 20.

    Geminid

    @New Deal democrat: Virginia’s partial lockdown seems to me to be close in effect to a formal lockdown, but I live and work in relatively rural area and don’t see its effect in the parts where most of the people live. I work alone and outdoors, but it’s not essential work, so I am going to get as much done as I can this week because Governor Northam will probably issue a full lockdown order soon.

  22. 22.

    Shalimar

    I am currently watching DeSantis’s press conference yesterday.  I’m not sure he and Trump realize that by doing this daily they are putting their inadeqaute rolling bullshit crisis response on record forever for people to look back on and also pull horrific clips for future campaign ads.

  23. 23.

    Shalimar

    @Geminid: The outlet mall closest to me in the Florida panhandle has said they will reopen tomorrow.  11 days of lost sales is apparently enough of a sacrifice.  The stores that did stay open seem to be doing booming business, so might as well add another 100 to the mix.

  24. 24.

    Mai naem mobile

    @New Deal democrat: we may not be on mandatory lockdown in AZ but I can tell you the traffic in Phx has decreased substantially. Daily commutes are like major holiday commutes. A lot of businesses have closed on their own accord. The vast majority of churches are closed.

    Anyhow I forgot to mention on my earlier comment was in the presser from AZ governor and the Dept of Health services director that when she started talking about the bed situation the governor kind of quickly  gently pushed her away from the mike . I am guessing he didn’t want people to freak out.

  25. 25.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Want to bet Trump got his quarantine New York idea from watching  “I am Legend”.

  26. 26.

    joel hanes

    No reporter wants to be the story

    … and this is one (of many) reasons why Geraldo, Wolf Blitzer, Chuck Todd, etc. are not reporters.   Or journalists.

  27. 27.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Speaking of disinformation, China;

    The British Government thinks China has 15 to 40 times the cases China claims it has.

    Chines dissidents are pointing out Chines cellphone companies have had 21 million accounts close due to nonpayment in the last months. The assumption is most of these accounts are students and migrant workers returning home, but even then suggests 500,000 to a million more deaths that officially reported.

    Dissidents also report that patents that test positive but are not showing signs of illness are not reported as “confirmed” as the rest of the world is doing.

  28. 28.

    joel hanes

    @New Deal democrat:

    I am saddened to see that California’s fatality curve is still concave upward  i.e. accelerating.

    I do wish they’d do two versions of the chart, with the second one on a log Y-axis.

  29. 29.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Anne Laurie: Not an expert, but there’s a *lot* of auto & other heavy industry in Michigan, and a good chunk of that is owned by or services China / the EU / Japan.   Lots of international travel means lots of chances for transmission.  And once it arrives, much of the state’s epicenter around Detroit is really poor — third-world infrastructure, and people who suffer the health consequences of living in such situations.

    Worth noting Santa Clara, AKA Silicon Valley, with it’s heavy ties to China, is a hot spot.

    Also add in the whole racial undertone in the response to this virus so far “it’s the poor and the others who die, who cares?” until the virus inevitable spreads into the white suburbs like it has in Michigan.

  31. 31.

    New Deal democrat

    @Geminid: Northam is the only blue State governor not to have ordered “stay at home” even for the biggest metropolitan areas. Nor has he acted on Liberty University. Really puzzling and distressing.

    Meanwhile, bad news and less worse news. Bad: Kevin Drum has a graph up this morning showing that at the current rate of increase, the US suffers *1 million* deaths by April 26. Less worse: COVID diagnoses “only” increased by 19% yesterday. For the last 5 days, the average has been 22%. In contrast with the 35% daily rate of increase for the two weeks prior. The curve is being bent, but not nearly enough at this point. And testing keeps falling further behind infections.

  32. 32.

    hedgehog mobile

    I did not think I could hate these evil fucks any more.  I was wrong.  If/when we get out of this I want Dump and the rest of his minions sent to The Hague to stand trial  for genocide.

  33. 33.

    Anne Laurie

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: Worth noting Santa Clara, AKA Silicon Valley, with it’s heavy ties to China, is a hot spot.

    Yeah, first known outbreak here in Boston was close to a hundred people getting infected at a biotech sales conference (Biogen).  The good news is, our Peoples’ Republic has a due respect for science (aka: Sekhmet, Goddess of Consequences), and started rolling out citywide (regional, statewide) mitigation measures (relatively) quickly.

  34. 34.

    ziggy

    @Geminid: Your situation sounds a lot like that of me and my husband. The language around what is “essential” is not totally clear in regards to our work, and I don’t see how we are a risk of virus transmission.  If this shutdown goes on much longer, I’m going to contact the state via a dedicated email address for clarification. We are self-employed, no unemployment insurance, and this will start to really hurt.

  35. 35.

    WaterGirl

    News: America now leads the world in confirmed coronavirus cases.
    Hillary Clinton:  He did promise “America First”.
    Me: She has no more fucks left to give.  Good for her.
  37. 37.

    VOR

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    The British Government thinks China has 15 to 40 times the cases China claims it has.

    The official number of dead from COVID, in every country, probably understates the actual number, sometimes by an order of magnitude. This happens in natural disasters too. For example, Hurricane Maria directly killed <10 (IIRC) in Puerto Rico but the eventual death toll was stated at around 3000. Deaths currently attributed to COVID are most likely only people who had a positive test while alive. I doubt they are testing postmortem, at least not much. So someone running a fever from COVID, who then has a heart attack, is probably going to be scored as a heart attack death rather than COVID.

    Kevin Drum cited an Italian newspaper who looked at the death rate in an Italian region/city. Normal death rate for Jan-March in the past several years was around 35, but this year it is in the 160s. Only 30-odd deaths were attributed to COVID, so they have an extra 100 non-COVID deaths. It’s a huge statistical outlier.

  38. 38.

    New Deal democrat

    @WaterGirl: Thanks. It only seems like it was a decade ago….

    Paradoxically, that is almost better news. It explains why the curve isn’t flattening for the first lockdown States yet.

  39. 39.

    Eolirin

    @VOR: Well, consider too that the strain being placed on the medical system means there’s no room for people suffering from other treatable but potentially fatal illnesses either. More people will die of other things as well if the pandemic is overwhelming the system. So those 100 extra cases are unlikely to be all coronavirus, and we will see increased mortality from all conditions requiring hospitalization and/or intensive treatment.

  40. 40.

    J R in WV

    @raven:

    When I last went to town, last Tuesday, there we’re quite a few with masks and gloves, yet more with just gloves. Saw a young Chinese woman who worked for us at my last job, was wearing a mask, sent by worried family in China!

    Her oldest kid, who I remember  as 4 or 5, is home from Cornell, where she was a junior… time flys!

  41. 41.

    J R in WV

    @J R in WV:

    Oh man, I hate commenting with the tablet! Can’t see well what you are typing, corrections you type don’t take, slow, slow virtual keyboard to type hunt and peck with.

  42. 42.

    Laura Too

    @raven: If you tick any of the boxes (age, high BP, etc.) and have to go out, please wear a mask. If you read these statements they are saying keep them for healthcare workers (because they work!) but save them for them because they have more exposure.  I get it, they are on the front lines. We all can make our own and should ASAP.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/28/masks-all-coronavirus/?fbclid=IwAR0jMkIwV75UOugVvhfoAIsVHxMdouHBWz7ATPfHVlOcff1CLC9yIb4xGns&utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most#comments-wrapper

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