Senator Murphy reframes the debate over Trump’s pandemic response (detwitterized);
Hear me out: If you’re criticizing Trump’s Coronavirus response as ineffective, you’re doing it wrong. The problem is – for all practical purposes – there has been NO RESPONSE. The Administration has effectively declared surrender. And 200,000 might die because of this.
All the school, business, and beach closures have been carried out by states and cities, not Trump. At the very least, Trump could incentivize non-compliant or complacent states to enact emergency measures. But he does nothing, except provide weak, intermittent guidance.
The only way to solve mask, test, and ventilator shortages is for the feds to organize production. Trump has this power, but he chooses not to use it. His minimalist actions have barely made a dent. And day after day, the shortages continue, and Trump does nothing.
The supply chain for these same supplies has completely broken down into chaos. States and hospitals bid against each other, driving prices up. Supplies don’t get to areas of greatest need. Trump could solve this by federalizing the supply chain, but he does nothing.
Every legislative action to fund the public health response and save the economy from total ruin has been driven by Congress. Trump has no legislative agenda. He asks for no new authorities or new funding. In fact, his negotiators mostly argue for less money.
Trump has no actual plan to contain the virus. The virus will grow unless there is a national plan to TEST, ISOLATE, TRACK, AND QUARANTINE. But this takes a massive public health infrastructure that doesn’t exist now. Trump has no plan, and no interest, in building it.
You cannot beat Coronavirus with a state-by-state, city-by-city response, with thousands of conflicting strategies. Only a national plan will work. And the problem isn’t that Trump’s doing the wrong things. The problem is he’s effectively doing nothing.
Murphy is correct. On most issues, Trump’s lack of interest or action would be welcome, but the current situation requires a massive, coordinated response that only the federal government can provide. Christ, Florida Governor DeSantis and who knows how many other red state mouth-breathers are still playing “Mother May I” with the White House as the virus spreads. It’s ridiculous.
I don’t know who can shame the dumb fuck into doing his job (more accurately, appointing someone else to do it). It won’t be any of the unqualified dolts Trump appointed to the agencies, cabinet or adviser corps. Drs. Fauci or Birx maybe? They seem to have awakened Trump to the reality of the situation from the science side of the ledger, but schooling Trump on the complicated logistics of the response isn’t their job. Maybe they’ll take it on anyway since they are at least capable of abstract thought?
Somewhat related: Biden was interviewed by Lawrence O’Donnell last night. Here’s what he (Biden) said about handling the virus (via The Post):
Biden also continued to criticize President Trump for his handling of the global pandemic, saying that he should have done more and sooner. Biden said that if he were in charge, he would appoint one person to lead the administration’s response.
“I would find someone in the administration who was a former general or used to organizing massive efforts,” he said, adding he would also consider his former chief of staff, Ron Klain, who also headed the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak.
Later he said: “This is a war. You need a general. Put somebody in charge.”
Well, Trump DID put somebody in charge, but unfortunately, it was Mike Pence, an idiot whose only qualification for the role is that he’s a reliable toady. No change in “tone” will address this. Like Murphy said, the problem isn’t that the response is ineffective. It’s that so far, it’s a goddamned postcard.
laura
OT, but please be sure and complete the Census online today. Everybody counts. EVERYBODY COUNTS!
germy
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/boosting-your-immune-system-during-a-pandemic/
Major Major Major Major
I am skeptical that we will get away with only 100-200k deaths. My husband is skeptical that it will even reach six digits, but I think that’s sticker shock. The next week (and the week after of course) will be very informative.
MomSense
I want that orange motherfucker to end up like Mussolini did.
trollhattan
Hat tip to Senator Murphy, stitching together the cloak of shame donned by Donny and his clownshow. It’s all fun and games until people start dying. And dying and dying and dying. They should have began responding in December.
laura
There’s no way in hell that trump will take charge because he is physically and emotionally incapable of doing so. He’ll keep doing what he does – spinning and spewing bullshit, casting blame and demanding adulation. Thanks Republicans who could have done something and refused.
dmsilev
The really sad thing is that a Vice President who used to be a Governor is, in theory, the sort of person that would be appropriate to lead such an effort. In theory.
schrodingers_cat
Meanwhile the NYT politics desk is busy giving the Mango Mussolini political cover.
Betty Cracker
Right now Pence is babbling on CNN from a Walmart distribution center, talking about how they’re on the job to get food on people’s tables. Fucking hell.
Wolf Blitzer is doing a pretty good job of holding the sanctimonious prick’s feet to the fire about Trump’s inexcusable decision to downplay the virus in past weeks.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
That’s how you know things are serious.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: Their coverage has been predictably terrible.
germy
?BillinGlendaleCA
@schrodingers_cat: The New York Times is garbage.
germy
@Betty Cracker:
I wonder if some beltway media members are aroused from their slumber because this current crisis may actually affect… them and/or their loved ones.
Crashman06
@schrodingers_cat: They’re going to get a way with very few consequences because of coverage like this.
germy
taumaturgo
@schrodingers_cat: Seriously what is to be expected from a member of the ruling class? For the ruling class, profits are sacred and everything and anything could be sacrificed at the altar of the pursuit of perpetual gains. The MSM has a twisted symbiotic relationship with Trump and as long as the clicks and advertising keep coming in, the country be dammed
trollhattan
@germy:
“Bin Laden determined to strike in US.”
Disbanding the pandemic group = closing the Bin Laden desk. It’s just the virus will kill more Americans than 9/11 plus all the subsequent wars.
Mike in NC
@MomSense: Amen. That entire crime family needs to be strung up from lampposts.
skerry
I think we’d see different content in the MSM if there were medical journalists instead of the same old political reports covering COVID19.
MattF
Trump is incompetent and lazy. His laziness is perhaps not as obvious as his multiple other malignant traits, but it’s there and it’s doing immense damage. And it goes beyond ‘bad work habits’. He just won’t do it. Not anything, not ever.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
@Major Major Major Major:
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I tend to ignore them nowadays. I actually didn’t realize their normal crappy coverage of domestic politics was being extended to covid coverage.
Geoboy
“Well, Trump DID put somebody in charge, but unfortunately, it was Mike Pence, an idiot whose only qualification for the role is that he’s a reliable toady.” You give Mike Pence too much credit. When he was governor of Indiana he was responsible for the worst HIV epidemic in the state’s history.
eric
The Trump defense will be: China lied and democratic governors did not shut down their states in time, so that it spread to the rest of the country. With an extra focus on New York and its “foreign” populations.
trollhattan
California superintendent of education is advising districts to formally cancel in-class instruction for the rest of the school year. Not a mandate–maybe the governor has the authority?–but a relatively easy call to make. Kids are bummed about this. Complaining about school is easy; complaining about no school truly comes from the heart.
Scout211
From downstairs, here is the link to the site that I used for the masks that I made. She recently updated her site with lots of different pattern options and sizes. I used the pattern for the mask that has two layers and a pocket in between the layers to slide a filter into. The filters I made were from a vacuum cleaner bag. (No Dyson in this household). Luckily, I had several boxes of bags in my closet.
https://www.craftpassion.com/face-mask-sewing-pattern/
trollhattan
@eric:
Correct, only missing “democrat governors.”
Barbara
Pence isn’t really in charge. The idea that decisions about who gets what has to go through the White House at all is a sign that the so-called response is highly politicized. The White House needs to ensure that it agrees with the criteria that are being used to distribute supplies or to untangle disputes or unanticipated issues, but it should not be in charge of coordinating something as complex as supply chain distribution. Indeed, they could marshal existing logistics providers, who would do a much better job of carrying out criteria than FEMA.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Scout211: I noticed on my trip to the market(needed produce), that folk who are wearing masks think that social distancing doesn’t apply to them.
opiejeanne
@Major Major Major Major: I think 240,000 is far too low. In early March I calculated the probable lowest number of dead to be 1.7 million, and I have been seeing that same number popping up in projections since, although last night on Rachel’s show it was 1.4 million as the low number.
Right now it’s very difficult to see what’s going on in Washington State because for the past 5 days our DoH reporting system hasn’t been able to handle the overwhelming numbers of test results. The only way we’ve been able to see any numbers is because the media has resorted to adding up the numbers county by county, and those numbers are probably hard to pry out. We don’t know if we really have started to level out or not, and all of those “wonderful news out of Washington” stories may be based on information that is 5 days old.
It wasn’t gastritis that broke it, oh no.
COVID-19 broke my (state’s) calculator.
BobS
I work in a large university affiliated hospital that is part of a corporation with a number of other hospitals in the immediate vicinity. Our emergency room is bigger than many other hospitals in the state, we have multiple ICUs, ORs, etc. Our response has been coordinated internally, with other hospitals in the corporation, and increasingly with every other hospital in county, state, etc.
It occurred to me this morning that were we to ape management of the federal government, our ER would be functioning distinctly from the ORs and ICUs, none of which would be coordinating with each other or the pharmacy, etc.
piratedan
having “someone in charge” is one thing, technically Trump is in charge, so you can see how that works, I would suggest the qualifier, having “someone competent in charge” is what is needed.
Start with the basics, we still do not have any kind of coordinated testing going on, people at risk, people on the “front lines” providing health care and people presenting symptoms and the great number of us who are simply scared and want to know are out there. There’s not been any decision (as far as I can tell) on who’s testing to use, so facilities are using what they have access to. Right now, we have the sub-standard CDC version, the WHO version, a number of home-grown’s that kind of straddle the differences between the CDC version and the WHO version. Plus, you’re also now hearing about the POC Abbott testing becoming available. We also have to take into consideration that once you test out Negative, it simply means that you don’t have it NOW. Can’t emphasize that enough and rarely do I see that particular point emphasized. There still needs to be an education angle to this, because for many of our fellow citizens, it will be easy for them to equate a negative result finding with immunity.
As to coordinating the testing and the results, its as described, 50 states, and in some cases, metro areas all doing their own thing and making it up as they go along because no one is directing anything regarding a response at the national level. data is out there, no one is aggregating and formulating a national response because no one at the Federal Level is stepping up and doing what is needed. With who is “in charge” I can see the reluctance to do so.
This is going to continue for some time, maybe even until it starts taking its toll on senior legislators…
Also, I wouldn’t rely on the POC testing as being any kind of savior, our facility is rejecting the idea of using them because their methodology is “crap” based on our own lab directors and medical directors and pathologists review of the instrumentation and media.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I think that’s the main concern of people who are opposed to universal masking.
trollhattan
Burning Man never seemed more 2005.
opiejeanne
@germy: A sports agent for several football players in Seattle, Buddy Baker, announced that both of his parents died of COVID-19 on Sunday. They had been married 51 years, and they died within 6 minutes of each other. This makes me incredibly sad. I hope neither of them was alone.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
No, Pence was just given enough authority to undermine Dr Fuaci in the usual Trump stunt of setting his subordinates up to fight each other.
skerry
@saradannerdukic
Complimenting tone is like complimenting an abuser for not abusing while people are watching. I’m not interested in tone. I’m interested in action, specifically: what’s being done to address the shortages in PPE, equipment, testing, and medicine.
hells littlest angel
Of course Trump has a plan, the same plan he’s used for every scheme of his life: hope for a miracle. And if that fails, keep your go bag handy.
Elizabelle
It’s Cuomo O’Clock.
Elizabelle
20% chance patients ever come off a ventilator.
egorelick
Ok. 240,000 is more than 1 in 1500 people. That is likely not to happen and I am worried that Trump will claim victory and people will believe him. Why do I say that. Look at Italy. They are currently facing a death toll of 1 in 5000 people so the death toll would have to triple to match the equivalent of the 240k. But the curve is definitely bending in Italy. Another 24,000 deaths in Italy at the current rate of about 800 per day would be another whole month. New cases are going down in Italy so unless you can explain why new cases are decreasing in Italy but the death rate will stay high or increase then you cannot justify over 35,000 dead in Italy. And we are better off than Italy. The US is younger, richer, and, better prepared. Yes, the federal response is f*’d up by that walking pustule that couldn’t lead a zombie army to a brain buffet, but we do have leadership at the state level. Newsom, Cuomo, and (surprisingly) DeWine have done good things to protect their citizens. Others will follow suit. So this is a disaster, but 1499 out of 1500 will survive. Don’t let Trump get away with proclaiming “success” if less than 200k die.
Mandalay
From their corporate web site, this seems like a sensible step from WalMart:
Of course the devil is in the details. I suspect “will be paid for reporting to work” actually means “will not be paid until they return to work“.
Elizabelle
Cuomo drawing such a good line between those who follow facts and those who interpret or spin based on their own agenda.
“Sgt. Joe Friday: Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts. No opinion.”
Elizabelle
@Mandalay: True, you can read that “reporting to work” two ways.
But: WalMart paying sick employees with their regular paycheck will buy them goodwill that they cannot otherwise obtain.
And who knows how they come up with a regular paycheck amount for their poor workforce that is scheduled and mistreated by computer — the least workforce possible for the projected sales.
Aleta
There are people who don’t care about deaths and injury if their cause or desire (their end goal, they hope) is furthered. Trump is one, and the people guiding and funding him are the same. Collateral damage, is how they frame it to themselves. Killer instinct in business. 2A, stand your ground. Survival of the fittest. They have been expecting deaths.
piratedan
@opiejeanne: depending upon where you are in WA state helps. The hospital system I work for in the Tacoma area is showing more positive results but fewer than expected patients presenting at the hospital(s). Hoping that the trend will continue, our anticipated gauntlet of “expected surge of patients window” has supposedly moved past the median date, so while people are still getting sick, the numbers are “manageable” in that there are not as many feared hospitalizations showing up in our system (as of yet)…
So based on that purely anecdotal data element, perhaps the lockdown and distancing effects are “working” as far as the hospitals in our network are concerned.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@opiejeanne: And how do you see this happening by May 1st? So far New York is the only state were the death rate is showing anywhere near the kind of growth needed to do that. According to Lancet the Virus takes 19 days to kill. Not to mention the virus is only just spreading into the Red States which are quite rural and low population density slows the spread by itself. That projections read like all quarantine measure will fail, the population will go out a do group hugs Italian style and the virus will take off threw the entire population of the United States in two weeks.
Nora
Just to be clear, you can’t get a test in New York unless you are either showing symptoms or have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive. The numbers of people infected in New York are unknowable in the current circumstances. I’m looking at the numbers of people hospitalized, and the numbers of deaths.
Jager
I drove my Jeep to the gas station yesterday, I hadn’t been there for 2 weeks, the only reason I went was to put some air in my RR tire, it has a slow leak. I wore gloves, parked by the air pump, went in to ask the guy to turn on the pump. I see Julio, standing behind the counter, big smile, no protection. I know Julio, he’s older and a hell of a nice guy. He’s 3 feet from hundreds of customers all day, handling filthy cash. I asked him why he wasn’t wearing gloves…
Julio said, “the boss doesn’t think we need them.” I had an extra pair in the Jeep, I gave them to him. I hope he wears them and makes the customers stand back from the damn counter.
Heywood J.
It would be a mistake to chalk up the “response” to ineffectiveness and incompetence. The response has gone exactly as they intended for it to go.
Really, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if by next week, he’s forcing blue-state governors to eat bugs and wrestle each other for the “right” to purchase overpriced past-date PPE. The media will assure each other that his tone is very statesman-like, the Republicons will trade stock tips, and the Democrats will tell us that we need to show up in November.
Brachiator
Trump is afraid.
Trump is afraid of doing anything that might make him look bad. He is afraid of being accused of not doing enough, or of not doing something right.
He is afraid that he will not be applauded for his courageous efforts in defeating the virus.
And so he deflects, blusters, lies, calls any question that he doesn’t like “nasty.”
He is the Wuss-in-Chief
We are in deep trouble if one of his pretend solutions impedes governors and local officials who are doing the real work.
Jeffro
“Do-Nothing Donnie” will have a nice ring to it for the next seven months. Let’s get RELENTLESS about it, Dems!!
Heywood J.
@Jeffro: There ya go. I like that one a lot.
“Kim Don Un” also seems appropriate at this point.
Uncle Cosmo
@Major Major Major Major: If any capacity for shame remained at the Herrenvölkische Beobachter**, Pinche Sulzberger and Dean Baquet would long ago have retreated into one of their offices with a pistol and a New York State quarter to flip for which one gets to kill the other & then blow his own brains out. Maybe taking out MAGAt Habs on the walk there for a bonus.
** My preferred name-of-derision for the Old Gray Slattern/ Vichy Times/ FTFNYT; YMMV.
ziggy
Excellent analysis of the situation. If control of the coronavirus continues to remain only in the hands of the states, there are going to have to be state border checkpoints installed, along with mandatory quarantines. Or perhaps some areas can band together (like CA, OR, WA–the Pacific Federation) to have a cohesive plan to keep the virus in check. This could get very ugly without some kind of competent federal oversight. I sincerely hope that someone can wrest control of the CV response out of the dirty hands of the white house. We’ve got a very long, hard road ahead of us.
Mandalay
Trump repeatedly claims that China is lying about the deaths due to coronavirus, but that seems less likely if you read about some of measures China has taken to prevent the spread. I wonder if any of the measures detailed below are being followed here?…
These are presumably the same Chinese who are regularly portrayed on right wing radio as “filthy” and “disgusting”.
Elizabelle
Tying in floods and hurricanes. Speaking of the importance of professional and prepared government.
“This will happen again.” He repeated that about 3 times.
Cuomo uses his time so well to educate and inform. Why DON’T we have the capabilities we need? What can we do better?
Speaks of importance of getting ahead of it. Why didn’t we have telehealth and tele-education already in place.
Also spoke at length about the isolation and pain of social distancing. Strikes me that Andrew Cuomo could have been a priest, if not for the (ridiculous) celibacy requirement.
Anyway, he’s been great at setting out issues we need to think about “soon.”
Think about not including the malevolent Trump, I would bet. But the better governors and leaders can do so.
Uncle Cosmo
@germy: They should model it on the Truman Committee of WW2 – specifically including a chairman/spokesperson with zero tolerance for bullshit & no compunction about exposing it publicly.
eric
This pandemic will be here for tornado and hurricane seasons.
Ohio Mom
Biden’s campaign has been completely usurped by the pandemic. There is nothing he can do but say the same two things over and over from the safety of his house: Trump is a complete screwup and I would do a better job.
Obviously behind the scenes, candidates for VP and other appointments are being vetted and courted, as well as all sorts of other planning.
Heywood J.
@Mandalay: I like how the pols and radio turds who make racist snipes about the animals that are consumed as food in China, are the same people who chortle about eating roadkill, squirrels, possums, raccoons, etc.
Mike Huckabee would fry up a weasel taint and smother it in squirrel gravy, and crow about it as a class signifier for the cousin-fucking peckerwoods in his audience, and then turn around and talk trash about people in other countries eating bats.
joel hanes
Drs. Fauci or Birx maybe?
Definitely not Birx, who has completely knuckled under to Trump, and who was, IIRC, implicated in Pence’s mishandling of HIV in Indiana, which resulted in a local epidemic. She’s a fundagelical; all such should be disqualified because science.
I would put Rear Admiral Ziemer at the top of the list. Understands mobilization, logistics, and epidemic diseases. He should have been in charge of this from the start, and would have been had Sec. Clinton been President.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Timothy_Ziemer
It would be nice if Ron Klain were one of his chief deputies.
EthylEster
Here’s the gist of my last interaction with a non-Trump Florida relative…
We were talking on the phone, discussing various aspects of the virus crises, wondering why any planes were flying, etc. Then out of the blue she says “Why isn’t everyone being given those anti-malarials?” I pause, wondering WTF?
Me: Why? There is no current proof of efficacy. And studies are being run now so we should know soon if Chloroquine works.
Her: Are you looking at world wide stats?
Me: Daily
Her: Have you noticed that there are basically no cases in Africa? Or a tiny number. And everybody in Africa is on malarial drugs. I had to take anti-malarial drugs when I went to Africa.
My brain is churning at that point. My first response is: everybody in Africa is NOT on anti-malarial drugs. Sub-saharan Africa is very poor.
Her: I’m sure WHO is getting anti-malarial drugs to people who need them.
Me: So you think that the low numbers in Africa are due virus immunity conveyed by Chloroquine.
Her: Yes.
=========================================================
This woman is NOT stupid. But she lives with a Trumper and decided long ago the her beautiful mind does not want to pay attention to details. So she is really ignorant about the “world”.
Fun exercise: find the many factual errors and logic errors in my relative’s POV.
Heywood J.
@Ohio Mom: To be fair, he also continues to insist that we can’t afford health care for all, even though we managed to find two trillion in the couch cushions last week, on a moment’s notice, because a few billionaires got a haircut in the stock market.
It’ll be interesting to hear what the big plan is when the unemployment rate hits 20% at the end of this month.
Betty Cracker
@Mandalay: I have no idea about the data coming out of China, but after A/B testing the “impeachment ate my C19 homework” and “China lied, people died” PR strategies over the first part of the week, the White House seems to have settled on scapegoating China.
JPL
@Major Major Major Major: I think he mentioned a number higher than anticipated so he can say he won. The only way it reaches totals in the hundreds of thousands is if the hospitals can no longer treat patients.
Look at me, I’m a hero since I only killed 75,000…
ziggy
@ziggy: missed edit window, dang.
And this doesn’t even get into the problems with messaging. The messaging from Trump has done nothing but make the situation much worse than it could have been, undermining compliance, making people suspicious of authority, spreading falsehoods, setting states against each other, raising xenophobia. I think our general level of anxiety would be MUCH lower with a competent leader and good comunicator. We are craving a leader, thus we look to state leaders like Cuomo to fill the void, even if they have little to do with our own situation.
Major Major Major Major
@taumaturgo:
Basic journalistic competence, as exhibited by many other
members of the ruling classmedia organizations? What does “ruling class” have to do with anythingKent
Exactly. We are down here in Clark County WA (Vancouver), population about 500,000 but for all intents and purposes should really be considered part of the Portland metro area for this outbreak. Thing haven’t really hit here yet, there’s only been about 120 confirmed cases and 6 deaths (all very elderly). The entire Portland metro health care system has been entirely mobilized and re-deployed to accommodate COVID but the wave hasn’t hit yet.
I expect that the car-centric suburban sprawl of our built-environment may help compared to say Seattle. Everything is more spread out, even the parking lots and store aisles. So distancing is so much easier.
Major Major Major Major
@JPL:
So New York City as of tomorrow, coming soon to a red state near you?
Elizabelle
Q on NYS question on posthumous COVID testing.
Cuomo “I have no idea.”
Med expert: they do some testing (if there’s an autopsy).
Reporters did not follow up, but I wonder if NYS will take a blood and tissue sample from every death, and test it after the fact.
joel hanes
@MattF:
Trump’s malfunction is far deeper than just laziness. He does not have any idea what it means to govern, because he has no conception of “good” except “that which advantages Donald J. Trump”. He cannot take action on situations that do not directly impinge on his conception of himself, because such things do not even exist in his mental universe.
Echidne Of The Snakes, a golden-age blogger who’s still working and just as insightful as ever, has been good on this:
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2020/03/on-trumps-assertion-that-masks-are.html
Marcopolo
@Major Major Major Major: The model that those figures are base on had a prediction of something like 780 deaths yesterday. Instead, there were at least 830. So it is already off to the low side.
Betty Cracker
@Ohio Mom: Biden had this to say about the VP pick in the article linked in the post:
He also discussed the possibility that the convention may have to be postponed and the need to stand up absentee voting options.
Litlebritdifrnt
Why doesn’t the shitgibbon have a sign language interpreter at these so called “briefings” are deaf people just supposed to die?
Mandalay
If there is a silver lining to this massive clusterfuck, technology advances will make things better next time around. Here’s a doozy: China to Roll Out Temperature-Taking Infrared Cameras.
This is how it might pan out: in five years time, while you are standing in line to go through airport security during the flu season, your temperature will be taken by an infrared camera. If it is above a certain threshold you will be checked, and if appropriate you won’t be allowed to get on the plane.
Nobody argues that drunk people should be allowed to drive. I think in the future nobody will argue that someone with a temperature of 104 should be allowed to mix with the general public.
Cheryl from Maryland
@EthylEster: which explains why tonic water is sold out in my local grocery store in MoCo MD.
jc
It’s the perfect storm, Trump is an attention hog who’s also incompetent, he can’t get out of his own way.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
I think it goes beyond laziness and into actively dodging responsibility. His “leadership” style is to intimate and suggest but never to actually order anything. The whole point is to dodge final responsibility by being able to say he never ordered anyone to do what they did. I don’t know if this is his natural style or something he learned by leading a criminal enterprise, but it doesn’t work when decisive action is needed and he’s the only person with the legal power to order it.
Ksmiami
@MomSense: that’s been my prediction since 2016- scaffolding or orange jumpsuits
JPL
@EthylEster: Although the virus is spreading in warmer climates, it is not spreading as fast.
I wore a scarf while out today, and looked like an older version of Claire Danes on Homeland. I haven’t researched yet, but I wonder if muslim females have a lower rate of the virus, because of their apparel.
CaseyL
I am very glad to see Rep. Murphy doing his best to broadcast the facts of the situation, and glad that the House is at least starting to think about a 9-11 type investigation.
Yesterday I saw reports that a Mike Gula, GOP fundraiser, had abruptly quit the fundraising business to start a medical supply company selling ventilators and masks.
He claims to have millions of them in stock.
How did he get them? Trump told individual states to buy their own masks and ventilators, it’s not the Federal govt’s job. Individual states trying to do that say they keep getting outbid by other buyers – often, in fact, the Federal govt.
Where did he get them? Millions of masks purchased by the Federal Government are said to be unaccounted for.
What is his price point going to be?
Trump is not only abandoning the states, he’s sabotaging their efforts by letting GOP cronies get dibs on the supplies. And anyone who thinks he isn’t somehow personally profiting by this is an idiot.
joel hanes
@egorelick:
And we are better off than Italy
No. Italy had national lockdown, more strict than anything currently in the US except maybe Silicon Valley and parts of Washington.
The data curves from New York City are worse than the Lombardy region of Italy, and what’s going to happen in Florida during April …
Sab
OT: I am 66 years old. In my city a lot of the small businesses are owned by people slightly older than me. These busineses won’ t survive a shutdown. They have retirement savings and social security. Why would they continue fighting with laandlords over rent with no income.
Hairderesser, barber, paint store, dog groomer, dry cleaner
. So many of these guys won’t be here. Who the phuck restarts a business at age 68?
Marcopolo
@Elizabelle: So in Italy, without post-mortem testing what a couple of statisticians who look at this stuff did was look at the average number of deaths in a locality over the past decade for the same time frame. Then they looked at the current number of deaths & the number attributed to C-19. What they found was a massive uptick in deaths of which the identified C-19 deaths only accounted for about a third of the increase. So something else is going on: 1) in IDed C-19 deaths, or 2) deaths as a result of the strain C-19 is putting on their healthcare infrastructure. Mostly likely both.
Scout211
@Baud:
I wondered if the CDC and the WHO have been opposed to universal mask wearing (even as places like South Korea have done so with positive results) because there are simply not enough for everyone. And if people are hoarding toilet paper, why would they not hoard face masks, leaving none for the health care providers and immune compromised.
JMG
@Cheryl from Maryland: Have gin sales increased proportionally?
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
He loves to take credit while dodging responsibility.
MattF
@joel hanes: I agree completely that narcissism is the core of Trump’s dysfunction. That’s a proven fact. I’d only amend that to add additional dysfunctions, i.e., incompetence and laziness. These may be consequences of his fundamental dysfunction, but I’m not (thankfully) his therapist.
trollhattan
@Heywood J.:
“Kim Dong Schroom” :-)
Kent
Hospitals are still closing throughout the rural South. RIGHT NOW. This week in the news one in Alabama and one in Kansas (two non-expansion states for Medicaid). The COVID mobilization is making it worse for them because their only profitable activities were elective surgeries, which have all been shut down. It will be WORSE than NYC. We could see 100k in Florida, alone.
p.a.
@Betty Cracker: must be the highest ranking in focus group tests.
joel hanes
@JPL:
The only way it reaches totals in the hundreds of thousands is if the hospitals can no longer treat patients.
Which is exactly where New York City is today, where Michigan will be in a week, where Florida will be sometime in April, and where Mississippi will be eventually.
Kent
That would be my guess. Plus there is evidence that most people don’t actually wear them properly. I expect the advice to shift if we ever get to a point of mask surplus.
JPL
@Major Major Major Major: Okay I’m a cynic and have trouble believing anything he says.
trollhattan
@joel hanes:
Florida will be our Strategic Coronavirus Reserve, in case the rest of the country runs out then there will be a steady supply at the ready.
Not sure what Texas is up to, but with Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber in charge it’s probably no good.
Mandalay
Fark!!!! …..15,318 new cases of coronavirus reported in the USA today, with 429 new deaths!
The total number of cases here is currently 203,848.
Here are the awful details, broken down by state.
Unless you really, really have to go somewhere, don’t. Stay home, and stay away from the rest of humanity.
MattF
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Assholes everywhere. As a contrast to that, I think wearing a facemask should be seen as a signal that one is obeying a social norm. And that’s a worthwhile bit of information.
piratedan
@Kent: and this will affect the numbers because there will be bupkis to handle anything resembling accurate medical reporting out in the hinterlands. People that are rural and old are going to die in their houses and for all we know, in these days of social distancing, no one may be aware of this for days/weeks/months. If the big cities are ill equipped to handle the crisis, you can only imagine the effect on locally supported and staffed EMS out in areas where the profitability of medical care has stripped land bare of emergency services and everything is now volunteer driven. All we can do is hope that it hasn’t spread out there and that seems to be a forlorn hope…
Major Major Major Major
@Mandalay: A bunch of airports already use those.
Sab
@Litlebritdifrnt: Because he is a shitgibbon. This is who he is. All norms to make him appear human are off the table because they offend him.
Boris Johnson is an ass. Donald Trump is a freak of nature.
But I do not want that to excuse the Republican party in Congress. They know what he is. They apparently just don’t care.
MisterForkbeard
@Major Major Major Major: I’m with you on this one – absent some major change, I think we’re going to see over 500k. 100-200k is reliant on things going well after this point and lots of social distancing which just isn’t happening.
I have to remind myself that even that many deaths is still a relative drop in the bucket.
Duane
@Jeffro: Trumpov wouldn’t even meet with the Speaker of the House Pelosi during a national emergency. FDR worked with Stalin, but this pathetic coward crybaby loser is more concerned about himself than the country. 100-250k dead on your watch, you should resign for the good of us all, Typhoid Trump.
Scout211
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/01/asia/coronavirus-mask-messaging-intl-hnk/index.html
“In the coming weeks, if they have not already, your government is likely to begin advising you to wear a face mask to protect against coronavirus.”
Mandalay
@Sab:
IANAL, but won’t some/all of those businesses be leasing their premises? If so, won’t they may have to keep paying the rent regardless of whether the business folds? A brutal double whammy.
Kent
They are doing their best to amplify the spread through their churches, some of which have STILL not shut down, and are especially well-attended by the elderly.
Mandalay
@Major Major Major Major: And do they stop people getting on planes?
Brachiator
@laura:
Yep. Did it online. Fairly easy.
An accurate census is another way to defeat Trump.
Ohio Mom
Betty Cracker @74: Thanks, Betty. What you said fits with what I was thinking, there is planning and strategizing going on. When the time comes, the campaign will be ready. It will stand in contrast to Trump’s constant floundering.
Right now though, if Biden started talking in depth about the sorts of issues that were big debate topics — climate change, health coverage, college loan forgiveness, whatever — I think most people would do a double-take and wonder why Biden was being so off-topic, because at the moment, there is only one topic.
That’s what I meant when I said, the pandemic has usurped his campaign. He has to time things like his VP announcement carefully. Imagine if the next day, the pandemic crisis deepened. The excitement of a woman VP would get lost, might even look irrelevant.
Betty Cracker
Nancy Pelosi is on CNN right now, and I’m worried about her because she looks sweaty. Maybe it’s just bad lighting because of the distancing thing. It doesn’t make sense to have all these older lawmakers congregating in the Capitol.
gkoutnik
Already done. States and cities are competing in the open market with FEMA for ventilators, driving up the price and restricting the ability of large municipalities to get what they need.
Betty Cracker
DeSantis finally caved and says a “stay at home” order goes into effect at midnight in Florida.
egorelick
@joel hanes: Show me the data. Are you talking about cases or deaths?
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker: Listening to his presser now. He is hitting a lot of the same talking points as Trump.
Blaming New Yorkers for spreading the virus. What about the goddamned snow birds heading home?
Definitely conspiracy-mongering about why there’s an insufficient supply of masks etc.
Major Major Major Major
@Mandalay:
I’d say it seems fairly likely if you know much about how the CCP operates (for example, covering up the disease for a month and applying pressure on the WHO to prevent Taiwan from helping the international community during China’s denial phase).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: if your goal is to evade responsibility, even at the cost of human life, you can’t outlast trump
Major Major Major Major
@opiejeanne: The senate was allegedly briefed to expect 1.5-2.5 million.
Major Major Major Major
@Mandalay: Having not been to every airport in the world, and having never been flagged, I can’t say. Can you? I do know they use them to prevent people from entering the country.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: If you normalize numbers for population, right now the US is on a track very, very similar to Italy’s, only with maybe 3/4 the CFR. Italy seems to be turning the corner and is at or near peak right now. If you take their numbers as of today and scale in that way to the US, you get about 45,000 deaths at peak, which would be a couple of weeks from now. The total for the whole pandemic ought to be more than twice that (because deaths are delayed relative to cases). So I’d say six figures is extremely probable, and much better is extremely unlikely.
At least it’s probably not going to be seven figures unless we just give up.
TheTruffle
@Betty Cracker: At this point, how many Floridans are infected?
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
So is it the New York Virus now?
This guy is a dope. But I hope he at least does the right thing.
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
Five minutes. Easy-peasy. Only tricky part was “Urr yew leegle?” question. _yes, _not sure, _white were the only choices.
Chris Johnson
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Why.
We have fucking cars. And red-staters have these things called ‘megachurches’. And go to spring break.
Rurality will make NO DIFFERENCE. I’m calling it now. The only thing that will help is discipline in self-quarantining, me and my friends up here in New England are doing that already. Not all of them well, but everyone is attempting SOME form of quarantine, and the ones who are fucking around and listening to bad or enemy information are the ones at higher risk. (enemy as in, kind of shit Trump has been telling you)
Elizabelle
Today’s Google Doodle is on point.
Observer:Google Doodle Spotlights Jean Macnamara, a Doctor Who Fought Sexism to Help Cure Polio
Betty Cracker
@TheTruffle: No one knows due to the lack of testing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Brachiator:
he and trump have been flogging that for a good week now (or two weeks, or 48 hours). De Santis said he was going to (and maybe he did) set up road blocks on the north border of FL to stop cars with NY (and I think NJ) license plates. Trump heavily implied this was the NYC virus when he was talking about his quarantine of NY, NJ and CT
Mandalay
@Elizabelle:
Indeed. And what about this humdinger from March 15?.…
If I had to nominate the single biggest bungle in handling the coronavirus outbreak in the USA, DeSantis wins it for that.
Roger Moore
@Ksmiami:
I’ve been predicting exile in a country without an extradition treaty, probably Russia.
trollhattan
@Chris Johnson:
100% guaranteed that rural Californians will blame “bad elements from the city” on all their infections. They do the same everytime a meth lab blows up or somebody gets their chainsaw stolen from the garage.
Matt McIrvin
…the other thing to remember is that deaths due to the coronavirus are probably being undercounted by a factor of several in every country where the pandemic hit big. You don’t even need lying with malice aforethought for that, just a shortage of tests. And total excess deaths, including ones not from covid that were in some way caused by the epidemic (e.g. lack of medical services, loss of other services, etc.), are going to be an even bigger number. That might well exceed a million for the US, though we won’t know for a long time.
Origuy
@Litlebritdifrnt: An ASL interpreter would have a nervous breakdown trying to turn Trump’s fractured syntax into ASL’s.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Roger Moore: you’re more optimistic than I. I think trump dies in his own bed, the most justice I hope for is a loss in November and the humiliation of exposure, and humiliation might just hasten that demise
Elizabelle
@Mandalay: But now he is grandstanding with Holland America’s Vaandam, with four dead aboard.
NOTE: Holland America transferred the healthy passengers to a sister ship which arrived bearing fresh supplies and crew (including medical) before the ships transited the Panama canal.
The airports and cruise terminals were utterly negligent, but that is a fish that rots at the top. Does Homeland Security even have a permanent leader? I think it’s yet another “acting” …
Who can forget that photo of O’Hare a day or two after Trump unilaterally shut down air travel from Europe? Crowds packed in together, hundreds of people in the frame.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan:
NANCY PELOSI CONGRESS-CREATED
DROUGHTRECESSIONPANDEMICBURMA SHAVE
Dan B
@opiejeanne: The Seattle Times had a chart of weeklyweekly hospital admissions. This smooths out the daily static and reporting variations. Admissions decreased for the last recorded week. It’s a single snapshot but good news – better than the reverse.
The week ending:
2/29: 61
3/7: 126
3/14: 226
3/21: 251
3/28: 193
*this represents 84% of ER rooms reporting statewide.
joel hanes
@egorelick:
Deaths. IMHO, confirmed case testing data for the US is pretty much worthless.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
See chart “Confirmed COVID-19 deaths by country”
It’s a shame the chart is linear; I could not re-find the log-scale one that showed NYC and Michigan rising faster than Lombardia.
We’re still on the exponential-increase path, and will be for a while because of our inadequate and piecemeal response. New York City is going into overwhelm right now; Michigan will soon follow. Florida’s turn will come later. We have more people in prisons than any other reporting nation.
Mandalay
The clueless and dangerous fuckwit finally does the right thing. It only took him a month of dithering…
That fucker really does have blood on his hands. He had all the necessary information and resisted for weeks because he said he didn’t want to be a dictator. DeSantis is a dangerous idiot.
Mandalay
@joel hanes:
Forget “reporting“. We simply have more people in prisons than any other nation.
JPL
@Mandalay: Brian Kemp also, not just because he fixed the election. I imagine he will do the same by the end of the day. Fulton Cty has now imposed fines up to !000 for violations to their stay at home order.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Scout211: It’s culturally common in South Korea(and Japan) for folk who are sick to wear masks, it’s not so common here. You are also correct that one of the reasons for not recommending masks is the shortage of masks so that health care workers are having to reuse masks.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
Heh :-)
The Nancy SMASH gavel is mighty and reaches far.
joel hanes
@egorelick:
Found the graph I was looking for.
Same page
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Heading
Are deaths increasing at different rates in different countries?
Log scale, with lines for values of doubling times.
US fatality doubling is closer to every two days than every five days, and shows no downturn.
Major Major Major Major
@?BillinGlendaleCA: It does appear that the full-court press of “Masks don’t work and we need them for healthcare workers and sick people, for whom they become magically effective” was due to wanting the masks reserved for healthcare workers and sick people.
I think it’s bad when public health leaders lie because it erodes institutional trust. The impending flip-flop on universal mask wearing will be fun. Asymptomatic people spreading it by breathing and talking might be one of the primary vectors, so it was a big mistake especially combined with not having enough masks in the first place.
Putting surgical masks on everybody reduces the need for respirators because it means fewer people in the hospital…
joel hanes
@Mandalay:
I suspect that perhaps Russia …
and that we’ll never know about Russia
Cheryl from Maryland
@JMG: No. Stores also stocked full of margarita mix, bloody mary mix, tomato juice, vermouth, ginger ale, olives, etc.
low-tech cyclist
Sen. Murphy is absolutely right. Trump isn’t doing anything. And by occupying the Oval Office and doing nothing with it, he is the main obstacle to any sort of coordinated national plan to fight the virus.
Accordingly, Trump needs to be removed from office. Where are the calls for his resignation? Where are the calls for his cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment? Because if he doesn’t resign, the Cabinet needs to invoke the 25th. And if the Cabinet doesn’t invoke the 25th, then the House needs to impeach, and give the Senate one last chance to remove him before things really go out of control.
And if the Republicans in the Senate prove unwilling to remove Trump even in this developing catastrophe, then we hang it around their necks in November.
But I’d really rather they remove him and give Pence a chance. (All we are saying is…) Pence ain’t no great shakes either, but without Trump to toady to, he might actually do the basics. And if he won’t, impeach him too.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: And there’s the whole confusion between simple masks protecting YOU (many probably don’t, to any significant extent) vs. protecting OTHER PEOPLE (even the simplest masks probably do, just by blocking some of the droplets that fly out of your mouth when you talk).
It makes it a collective-action problem, too: the masks don’t do much unless most people are wearing them.
Elliottg
@joel hanes: wow. You dont have a feel for data. The us and italy are on totally different parts of the curve. In fact that was my point. Italy is not growing exponentially any longer and has not and will not get to the level of death associated with 200,000 deaths here.
Martin
@Mandalay: None of those are being applied here.
Soprano2
I think someone, maybe Ron DeSantis, finally got Trump to understand that this is going to kill his voters too, not just those bad liberals in the cities in the blue states. Plus he has to know that “100,000 Americans died of a virus while Trump was president” isn’t going to be good for his re-election campaign (although I too think the death toll is going to be higher than they think). I think as long as Trump thought it was confined to the cities in the blue states he didn’t think he had to take it that seriously, since those people didn’t vote for him anyway. I keep telling people that Florida is going to be a nightmare when this thing really hits big. The combination of lots of people over 65 and not closing things down until tomorrow, plus encouraging people to come for spring break, is going to cause them to have a massive outbreak that might even dwarf New York’s. Here in MO there is still no statewide order as far as I know.
joel hanes
@egorelick:
240,000 is more than 1 in 1500 people
Kevin Drum, who takes pains to be the “not alarmist” voice in the room, is carefully using “deaths per million people” in his charts, instead of “total deaths by nation”
I think he’s making an analytical mistake in choosing “day of first death” for the X-axis, because the US is so large and our population in the rural states so dispersed; I think that “days since 100th death” charts are more appropriate.
And I have no idea where he’s getting the number for the growth of herd immunity, which should underlie the logistic-curve considerations that would allow prediction of the date of the peak.
Nevertheless, here’s his stuff :
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/04/coronavirus-growth-in-western-countries-march-31-update/
The Moar You Know
@Major Major Major Major: Ex-girlfriend of mine worked for Sandia’s bioterror unit. Retired last year (medical issue, she won’t be coming back and that’s a loss). I think you could comfortably bet on over two million.
More scary, in their pandemic modeling one of the things that they kept running across, as a thing of great concern, is a localized breakdown of civil order followed by the usual looting, rioting and burning. I hope very much that the Pacific Coast governors are planning out roadblocks using the National Guard and any law enforcement assets they can find. We are likely to need them by June.
Betty Cracker
I wore a bandana on my face during a recent supply run. I felt silly, tbh, but better safe than sorry? One good thing: it reminded me not to touch my face.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: Surgical masks actually do a decent job of blocking incoming droplets. A series of JAMA investigations found they were just as effective as N95’s at preventing flu & respiratory infections in healthcare workers. Obviously there are a lot of unknowns here (how many virions necessary for infection?) but it does appear that initial viral load affects how sick you get, so something is better than nothing.
But yes, the main public health benefit is blocking the outgoing droplets.
@Betty Cracker: Bandana better than no bandana. Recent lab experiments showed they block 50(?)% of incoming droplets… and of course you may already have it.
Matt McIrvin
@Elliottg: I tried that exercise myself: to me it looks like, if the US follows the Italy curve, we’re looking at around 100,000 deaths easy, and maybe well over 200,000 if we put in a multiplier for undercounted deaths, associated but not direct excess death, etc.
joel hanes
@Elliottg:
The US will not have the kind of uniform hard lock-down that Italy imposed for some time now, if ever.
CA and WA are turning the corner in the curves.
NYC is not. FL will not turn for a month. Spring breakers will have seeded the entire eastern half of the US. Again, prisons.
Dan B
@JMG: Gin and lime sales up, Vermouth plummets.
And noon at home is the new 5PM!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@low-tech cyclist: Unless the President can’t object the 25th Amendment is useless. Lets say Pence and the Cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment, Trump can just say “I’m OK” and relieve the Acting President.
joel hanes
@Betty Cracker:
I wore a bandana on my face during a recent supply run.
Good. You’re not a health-care worker in an environment saturated with aerosols, working face-to-face with symptomatic people — a bandana will have helped protect, quite possibly to a significant degree. Erring on the side of caution is a good thing.
Fold the top and bottom corners up and down so that you’re breathing through four layers or more.
Also, when I last went to the store (eight days ago), my bandana mask seemed to me to cause unmasked people to give me a wider berth. I saw lots of gloves but few masks. IMHO, that’s backward — if I could only wear one, mask or gloves, I’d definitely choose the mask. Primary mode of infection seems to be aerosol droplets, and if you wear gloves, you must still wash your hands anyway after taking them off and disposing of them.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
This. Avoiding responsibility for their problems is the core of contemporary conservatism. It’s always the liberals’ fault. Even when the conservatives do something, it’s the liberals’ fault for not stopping them.
superdestroyer
Isn’t the real probably is that for a government with several million employees, thousands of political appointees, and over 100k pages of regulations that too much power is vested directly with the President. The Sec. of HHS and his staff along with the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) should be the ones coordinating the logistics instead of having to get POTUS sign-off. Shouldn’t the SecDef or maybe even UnderSecretaries of Defense should be able to use the Defense Production Act without sign-off at the White House. There are way too many decisions to be made to have the President make them all no matter who is the president. Having an incompetent president just magnifies the problem.
The problem with vesting too much power with the President is that it gives too much power to the few staffers around him instead of letting the bureaucracy do its job and leaving the White House to over site, ranking priorities, and working with Congress.
The National Incident Management Systems stresses that a leader should not be leading more than 7 other people, yet at the White House, the President has over 300 direct reports and a ton of informal direct reports. It will always lead to confusion.
Major Major Major Major
@joel hanes: This is an interesting new (to me) metric: rolling 7-day windows. By that, NY (state) is beginning to show signs of bending (the second derivative at least).
joel hanes
@Roger Moore:
Avoiding responsibility for their problems is the core of contemporary conservatism.
“I don’t take responsibility at all.” — Donald J. Trump
Perhaps the only completely truthful sentence he’s spoken in years.
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: Without federal intervention on travel restrictions, checkpoints, tests – like Mandalay lists above, the US will just go through periods of constant reinfection from states like Florida to states like California, and then the reverse.
So far there is mostly just soft measures, but hard measures are needed. We have millions of truck drivers moving goods around the country. We still have airlines operating with no change in procedures. You have grocery stores open with no hard, enforceable health rules. Those things need to be done. The new bay area lockdown rules have a bit of that, but not enough.
Yes, we have a shortage of PPE for these workers and the public. but before that you need a plan, and we have no plan.
Major Major Major Major
Another thing worth noting is that the various 100-200k projections seem to rely on social distancing measures through the end of May, which may be a teensy bit unrealistic.
Roger Moore
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
This is not quite true. If the VP counter-objects and claims the President is still unfit, the issue gets thrown to Congress. I think we’d have a very hard time getting 2/3 of each house to back Pence over Trump, though.
Duane
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: True, the point being that if the President can object it’s a higher bar than impeachment.
EthylEster
@Elizabelle: My fact challenged FL relative spent a lot of time complaining about NYers fleeing to FL, mentioning several times that the Palm Beach airport was overwhelmed by private planes from the north.
It’s amazing how people can always find a goat to scape.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: I’m seeing that too in NY, but it looks less like a bending and more of a settling to a more traditional curve. Seattle didn’t bend after everyone from the nursing home died, it just took some time for the trend data to overtake the outlier.
I suspect the same is true of NY right now. I think a bending in new hospitalizations is at least a week off, and fatalities closer to 2 weeks off.
chopper
and yet the press is pushing really hard this “wow he’s really becoming presidential” shtick merely because, while still spending half the time pissing up and down about how nasty and unfair it is when reporters ask simple, non fawning questions, he’s spending at least part of the rest of the time pretending to take it a little bit seriously.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@chopper:
In fairness, Trump hasn’t been golfing in a few days.
EthylEster
@Mandalay: Desantis is an idiot. But failure to ask Americans returning from Europe where they had been (not to mention testing them) has been documented at many international airports so it’s not just him. Many others in positions of responsibility have failed us.
Bottom line: nobody has been in charge up to this point and nobody is in charge now. We are just stumbling around.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: They also seem to assume that we will bend the curve as aggressively as China did. That’s our only data point to work off of, so we’re stuck with it for now, but I have a strange feeling that we’ll stall out at the peak as Italy has so far done. At that point your 1% CFR has jumped to 5%, and it’s not going to drop back down to 1% until your infected numbers drop by a lot, which is hard when you are overwhelmed and struggling to follow protocols. If the US hits 5K-10K fatalities per day, and sits there for 2 weeks, that’s another 100K or more fatalities on top of that number.
Italy threw down new restrictions when they hit that point. That suggests to me the data on hospitalizations and cases wasn’t showing the necessary improvement to turn downward, and they needed to do more. We should be implementing everything Italy does when they do it, as they’re our sherpa right now.
Other MJS
Trump dismantled Obama’s preparedness programs out of spite.
How America built the best pandemic response system in history – and threw it away
chopper
@Mandalay:
“paid for reporting to work” means just for that day.
EthylEster
@Dan B: Hi. I am disturbed by the lack of numbers published for WA state in the last few days. An article in the ST today suggests that the public health system cannot keep up with the numbers so the reports are being delayed. From the article:
The Department of Health hasn’t reported the number of new COVID-19 cases and deaths in several days. The department blames a flood of data swamping the state’s disease-reporting system. The problems are partially blinding health officials and the public to the latest information about the disease’s spread. As of 11:59 p.m. March 28, Washington had 4,896 cases and 195 deaths.
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Another reason I skip the president’s briefings.
And besides for folks here in California, the state and local briefings are much more informative and to-the-point.
ETA: And yet, we really need credible and coherent federal oversight.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: Also assumes China has reported 100% accurate numbers.
SiubhanDuinne
@Litlebritdifrnt: Very good point. All the governors do as a matter of routine, at least the ones I’ve seen. That’s a real oversight, and I’m ashamed it has never occurred to me to wonder about it. Thank you for sensitising me to the issue.
opiejeanne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: That date is now 30 days away. Just keep an eye on the midwest and the southern states that are behaving as if this is some phenomenon limited to blue coastal states; and don’t you think for a moment that there won’t be a second wave the moment we relax the restrictions. It will be worse than this first one. New York is already offering $6/hour to Rikers inmates to dig mass graves.
The biggest problems are the inability to test and the lack of necessary equipment, including PPE and beds and staff. We are seeing the doctors and nurses die, and not all of them are old.
Florida is about to have a big meltdown and so is every state all of those spring break partiers returned home to, if their parents didn’t lock them out of the house.
Martin
@EthylEster: So, WA is looking pretty good. They’re still peaking, which is why they’re struggling with reporting, and that may last 2-3 more weeks, but if people keep doing what they should, pressure on the hospitals will start to really fade in the next week or so.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: I think they’re fairly accurate. They’re consistent with other data we’ve collected since (like Italy) and consistent with social media accounts.
It’s really hard to game your numbers when you don’t know what the final result is supposed to look like.
Major Major Major Major
@opiejeanne: Why do you think the second wave will be worse? I know that happened with Spanish Flu but I’ve also read that was maybe due to a mutation.
Mandalay
@SiubhanDuinne: Completely O/T, some happy news for you:
Fair Economist
@Major Major Major Major: Madrid has a very strict lockdown and might have turned the corner faster than Lombardy.
Washington’s low growth is relatively good but it doesn’t seem to be turning.
Fair Economist
@Martin: Wuhan probably had a massive under reporting. It used about 45,000 cremation urns in two months, which is about three times its normal death rate for that period. So 20,000 to 30,000 exceds deaths, about 10 times reported. In Lombardy the analogous ratio is about 5 times.
cain
@trollhattan: It won’t work, because there won’t be enough space either – and they can’t scale to all the other red states. Eventually, the blue states will simply come up with their own solution based on the industries local. Build their own supply chain and they will just ignore FEMA.
That won’t stop Trump from taking credit for what the blue states do. But he would have completely failed the red states.
joel hanes
I know I’m being an alarmist in this thread.
There are two reasons:
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: The CFR varies meaningfully across time and space. China covered up human-to-human transmission for at least a month and I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt on death statistics. Wuhan’s official mortality figures aren’t even due until June–plenty of time to juke/unjuke the stats if they want to.
opiejeanne
@piratedan: I’ve been watching the WA data since Feb 21, recording daily deaths and total deaths and comparing that to daily confirmed cases and total cases. We are not seeing a huge jump in daily deaths, the most since I began is 15 on one day.We had 14 yesterday, 225 deaths out of a total of 5482 confirmed cases statewide, (510 recovered). That is if my current numbers are correct. I got them from KOMO since KIRO and the Seattle Times both still have old numbers from March 28, or did when I checked earlier today.
That is a death rate of .04, or 4%. My earlier calculations were based on a much lower death rate, 1.7% of those who contract it based on what we were seeing in the rest of the world back then.
I thought we were doing so well here, 4% is terrible, and I hope you are correct about this coming in manageable numbers.
D Gardner
@dmsilev: Look at Pence’s response to the HIV outbreak in his state when he was Governor; his delay in approving a safe needle program for intravenous drug users exacerbated a serious problem.
joel hanes
@Other MJS:
Trump dismantled Obama’s preparedness programs out of spite.
Yes. Anything Obama did, Trump has been determined to undo, with maximum in-your-face dominance displays.
But to be scrupulously fair, he had help — the entire national GOP has long been committed to the idea that a functioning federal government should be opposed, disabled, and disestablished whenever the opportunity presents itself — right down to such innocuous institutions as the Post Office.
Bolton was willing to give the order to fire the pandemic response team. Sen. Collins was responsible for stripping pandemic response funding from the 2009 stimulus bill. Etc.
Eolirin
@cain: I think he meant that Florida will be a reserve of the actual virus, which, when the other states lock down enough to burn out their infection rates, can be used to reinfect the rest of us.
Doc Sardonic
Just got back from a brief medical appointment. A normally busy practice had 5 chairs in the waiting room where there used to be ~25. Got screened for fever(that took a few minutes, don’t drink coffee before you get out of the truck dumbass), and asked the usual questions plus 2 bonus ones. Had I been on a cruise ship in the last 14 days and had I flown in the last 14days. Living where in Florida one has to be concerned about The Villages and Sun City. Where The Villages are located there are 5 hospitals, they will be overrun in 24 hours or less. Hell during snowbird season one can 24-36 hour on a gurney in the ED before you can be admitted to a room. Shit is going to get very real, very fast and our Ivy League educated Fuckwit Governor is probably going to be found naked, smeared in shit in the fetal position sucking his thumb and humming show tunes and alternately screaming Daddy Donnie may I.
opiejeanne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: And who says all of the deaths will occur by May 1? There will be many MANY deaths beyond that date.
EthylEster
@Martin: So, WA is looking pretty good.
Correction: WAS looking pretty good when the last data were published. No data since 28 March…a long time ago in a pandemic.
Dan B
@EthylEster: It’s disturbing that public health systems are overwhelmed in WA. Since we and the SF Bay area seem to be the darlings of “how to stop a pandemic”. There are many other tidbits I’d like to know:
#1. How does the Seattle metro area compare to other areas?
#2. Are there counties where rates of infection per capita are on a dangerous trend?
#3. Are there counties where hospitals are likely to be overwhelmed soon?
#4. Are PPE supplies inadequate for specific counties?
We may look good in the aggregate but hotspots and stress points in a pandemic are not good.
WhatsMyNym
@EthylEster: @Martin:
From the ST article…
Betty Cracker
@Doc Sardonic: Speaking of the governor, this is petty, but is there a file photo of the man that DOESN’T show him with his mouth hanging open like a slack-jawed yokel? He’s as big a disgrace to Harvard as Jared Kushner.
My mother-in-law and hubby’s auntie live (in separate houses) in a large 55-plus community a bit south of The Villages, and I’m worried about the hospital situation in Central FL too. There’s already one person in their development who has tested positive; dog only knows how many there really are.
MIL, who is in excellent health for an old bird, is being a good girl since hubby read her the riot act about her rampant socializing a couple of weeks back. But auntie, who is at extremely high risk since she already needs an oxygen tank, is still needlessly going out in public even though we’ve repeatedly offered to do any shopping or running around she needs done.
It’s maddening, but what can you do?
fmbjo
@Doc Sardonic: Our ** governor Has Finally given the state wide Stay at Home order.
J R in WV
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Some of us require tonic water to mix drinks in the late afternoon. Wife prefers Rum and tonic, I prefer Gin and tonic!
I also make a mean margarita with tequila, orange liquor, lime juice, fill the rest of the tall glass with tonic water.
We are now completely out of tonic water in our quarantine lock down — so sad !!! What to do?
EthylEster
@opiejeanne:
I went to the KOMO website and found conflicting numbers. They don’t agree with worldometer numbers.
KOMO says: As of Monday mid-afternoon, individual counties in Washington have reported 5,161 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Worldometer got to 5,482 over the weekend. And Worldometer lists 225 deaths. So something is out of whack.
If I look at yesterday’s WA Worldometer data, it showed 232 new cases but the listed total was 5,482 then and is still the same today. Why not 232 higher?
So ambiguities cloud the picture. But 232 new cases is a number I like. I just want to see more data like that coming out of WA.
WhatsMyNym
@WhatsMyNym: My local county seems to be very much up to date on the number of cases. The county info is probably pretty accurate except for the large counties. The WA DoH is probably trying to keep the total numbers as accurate as possible before releasing to the press, that includes the tests that came back negative.
L85NJGT
Today’s poll dump at RCP.
Biden has a couple of good ones from Wisconsin, and the wrong track numbers are yikes.
opiejeanne
@Major Major Major Major: Bingo. The 100,000 to 240,000 number of deaths is pie in the sky.
Martin
@EthylEster: So, the nice thing with viruses is that they are predictable. Unless the public behavior in WA has changed, the data isn’t going to take some sudden turn.
I don’t think this is necessarily anything to worry too much about. The very end of a wave is going to be marked by a lot of people in ICU, pushing that area to their limit or beyond, something that takes a lot of staff time and resources. That starves the rest of the process – regular hospitalizations, testing, intake, etc. So, even when new cases are diving toward zero, the hospitals are still surging because that ICU load is so heavy. That’s when your fatalities are spiking, you have morgue challenges, and reporting gets really hairy.
So again, the intake and ICU peaks are a good two weeks apart. I don’t think this a bad sign for the trajectory of things there. I almost expect this, so I would wait for data to point to a turn for the worse.
Everyone is going to struggle with process near the peak.
EthylEster
From the last line in the ST article excerpted by WhatsMyNym: “We’re hopeful that by tomorrow, we’ll be able to report numbers that we can be comfortable with in terms of accuracy of the data,” McNamara said Tuesday.
So maybe by the end of the day here in WA we will know more.
Martin wrote: so I would wait for data to point to a turn for the worse
I’m pointing out that 4 day old data does not tell today’s story.
Doc Sardonic
@Betty Cracker: I was basing infection and hospital overrun on a cocktail napkin algorithm based on the rate of STD spread in The Villages which makes my time at UF look like life in a monastery, but it is of concern.
egorelick
@Matt McIrvin: How do you get “easy” for 100k deaths. I allow for possible, but I just don’t see it in the curves right now. In fact, Drum’s curves would almost certainly rule that level of deaths out. I’m not that optimistic. Undercounting deaths in China is a given, but we are talking tens of thousands or maybe low six figures. In Italy, excess deaths are more likely due to chaos than maliciousness. Finally, undercounting in the US seems to me unlikely except for Florida (and maybe Texas) where there is considerable political will to lie.
WhatsMyNym
@EthylEster: The state DoH is saying they are releasing data today (later this afternoon).
Calouste
@opiejeanne: In South Korea, which seems to have done a fairly good job so far, the fatality rate has gone from 0.5% at the beginning of March, to 1.6% at the end of March. More than 40% of their cases are still not recovered, and some of them have been ill for 4 weeks or more. It looks like there is going to be a long tail, and then we’re not even talking about people who have recovered from Covid-19 but have permanent effects of it.
Major Major Major Major
@egorelick: This widely-shared & recommended projection tool currently says we are on track for 94,000 deaths by August, and that’s assuming social distancing in place through the end of may, which seems unrealistic.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
trollhattan
@joel hanes:
It’s too damn bad Obama wasn’t loudly touting the hotel and golf industries on his way out of office.
opiejeanne
@Major Major Major Major: heh. Those signs are very familiar to us because of that long drive up and down I-5, and Pelosi’s name is always prominent in the “Washington-created drought” signs.
In WA the red counties always blame Olympia, even as their candidates beg to be sent there, and then they become part of the group being blamed.
trollhattan
Our first inklings of enforcement.
Good.
trollhattan
@opiejeanne:
Could they locate Olympia on a blank Pompeo map of Washington? :-)
James E Powell
@joel hanes:
Maybe ask General (ret) Ann Dunwoody. She’s got the resume for it: Logistics, Commanding General, US Army Materiel Command.
James E Powell
@opiejeanne:
Same thing on the 99. Apparently, Professional Lefties are not the only people who believe Nancy Pelosi has super powers.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Betty Cracker:
Make sure you have copies of her will, poa, and final directives, and say a prayer for those she comes in contact with.
trollhattan
@James E Powell:
Way back in the day on I-5 in southern Washington, some farmer had a whimsical Uncle Sam on a billboard sloganeering this or that. When I was a little kid he was all in for impeaching Earl Warren. I can’t recall what replaced Earl when the time came, but it was something bad that Democrats were up to, believe you me.
opiejeanne
@Dan B: Thanks. I hadn’t seen the list of hospital admissions before. May have missed them because I wasn’t looking for them.
The Seattle Times has a map with stats assigned to various counties, but at least 6 areas (counties?) are blank. Maybe those are not individual counties but an arm of the adjacent one? But no data is reported from those areas but they seem to be at the edges of the state. Maybe they’re state parks or some other area lacking a population?
Slim from MA
I’ve seen two political ads today. The one that just aired a minute ago on CNN – not effective. It consisted of a bunch of media sound bites. Use the mofos own words. as the earlier ad did. That one was devastating. I didn’t catch who was behind either of them.
opiejeanne
@egorelick: Washington State alone has identified 5482 confirmed cases, and 225 have died. That is 4% of the confirmed cases, a little fewer than 72 deaths per 1500 but still higher than the 1 per 1500 that someone was pushing as a tolerable number. We have many more who died in January and February that are suspected of being due to COVID-19 because of statistics and the description of the progression of their illness and death to pneumonia.
And WA has been self-isolating voluntarily for 3-4 weeks now but new cases are still being identified every day. It has dropped from 610 on the 28th, 586on the 29th, down to 303 on the 30th, and 232 yesterday. But WA’s Department of Health’s reporting system has been overwhelmed for the past 5 days and the state is still stuck on the numbers reported on the 28th.
We suspect that the actual number of cases in the wild since late January in WA to total more than 20,000 but due to lack of testing we can’t know how many.
WhatsMyNym
@opiejeanne: I checked Pacific County’s (pop. 21,000) website and they have 55 negative tests and no positives. They are starting drive thru testing. They also say that 5 counties still have no confirmed cases in WA.
Martin
@trollhattan: The same Earl Warren that won both the Dem and GOP primaries in CA in the same year?
Yeah, quite the radical leftist.
nasruddin
“Hear me out: If you’re criticizing Trump’s Coronavirus response as ineffective, you’re doing it wrong. The problem is – for all practical purposes – there has been NO RESPONSE. ”
Is this the way we run businesses in America? Or anything?
We need a new, more flexible executive system in this country, one that can be quickly flushed out when it doesn’t function properly. This current arrangement is suicidal.
nasruddin
@MattF: And stupid, and doesn’t care about what happens to others. The whole set makes the royal flush.
nasruddin
@Chris Johnson: “Rurality will make NO DIFFERENCE. I’m calling it now.” I fear you are right. The combination of high church attendance (a known source of many super outbreaks) and high elderly pop could prove deadly.
Another Scott
A quick report from NoVA:
I had to go into work for an hour or so today. Things are fairly quiet on the commute, but like last Saturday there seems to be a lot of traffic on the road (maybe 20% of a normal day – more than I would expect). There were no signs of VA, DC, or MD having increased police patrols to try to encourage people to stay home during the “lockdown”.
Stopped at TJs and Balducci’s in Alexandria on the way home for ~ 10 days of groceries. TJs had people standing ~ 8+ feet apart in line in the garage to get in. Someone was cleaning the cart handles, and another staffer was regulating when a new person could go in. The wait was maybe 10 minutes.
Hand sanitizer was on a cart by the shopping carts. They had a big sign saying that they were using paper bags for items to help their checkout staff, but not forcing people to use them (if they brought their own). TJs was well stocked and even had a good selection of yogurt (though not our favorite low-fat vanilla), so I got a bunch of staples, fruit, and various kinds of nuts and trail mix.
Balducci’s had markings on the floor and signs for people to stay 6′ apart, the store was a little busier than usual and had several Instacart shoppers (never seen before a couple of weeks ago). There was a long line to the checkout (almost never happens), but it was mainly because of the 6′ spacing. No yogurt (except the kids kinds) here. I stocked up on salads and a couple of dessert slices.
At both places there were several shoppers with masks and gloves, including me (an old unused sanding mask). Gloves were universal with the checkout people, but masks were uncommon.
J tried a pickup order at our Target and she said it worked amazingly well. Their app can track you (when it’s running, if you let it), and her order was basically at the car when she pulled up. They scanned her phone (or tried to – it didn’t work for some reason), then put the order in the trunk. We might be doing that more (not so good for refrigerated items, of course, and maybe those items aren’t eligible) in the future for non-perishable items.
The supply chain seems to be recovering around here. Fingers crossed that cleaning products and TP recover soon as well.
Cheers,
Scott.
Betty
@eric: Yep. Just saw that defense on Facebook.
Kent
Still there. Somewhere around Centralia. It’s pretty much a MAGA billboard now
For me it marks the 1/2 way point in the drive between SEA and PDX
opiejeanne
@EthylEster: Yes, I had to divide up a couple of days into morning reports and afternoon reports because the numbers coming in early in the day made no sense; they were way too low compared to the previous week’s numbers. I was getting really weird results until I added cases up, and checked their math, and now it makes some sense.
On 3/30 I have 354 new out of 5250 cases, 9 new deaths out of 211.
On 3/31 I have 232 new cases out of 5482, 14 new deaths out of 225.
I do not yet have any numbers for today.
ETA: I’ve been using the website started by a HS student on Bainbridge Island whose numbers have been very reliable even through the breakdown of the reporting system, but sometimes his numbers don’t show up for Washington until very late at night now, or the next morning.
https://ncov2019.live/data
nasruddin
@Chris Johnson: “Rurality will make NO DIFFERENCE. I’m calling it now.” I fear you are right. The combination of high church attendance (a known source of many super outbreaks) and high elderly pop could prove deadly.
@hells littlest angel: Trump’s plan, to revise what you said, is to wait for some sucker to come along & rescue him, which is what he’s always done. He has no concept of how to act otherwise.
opiejeanne
@trollhattan: No. LOL!
It’s right next to Tumwater, which used to be “famous” for a brand of beer.
opiejeanne
@trollhattan: That sign is still there. The guy who started it died and his idiot grandson uses it for hateful messages now. It’s in… Centralia?
egorelick
@Major Major Major Major: So the estimate of this model says less than 100k. Are you contradicting my take or confirming it? The models don’t take into account the serological testing that will soon be available to identify those who have had it and recovered, the quick testing the disease, and treatments including immune nursing units to reduce spread (bcuz of serological testing), blood donations from those who have recovered, and more stringently tested treatment protocols.
Martin
@egorelick: That’s a lot of assumptions for good things happening when the people who need to implement that stuff are hair on fire overrun with ICU patients. Those things may come into play after things calm down a bit, but that’ll be after we hit that fatality/day peak.
Martin
Ms Martin now on mask V4. This is for the L&D nurses and allows for a replaceable filter. Built to spec for a few in our neighborhood. She’s planning for a V5 – a personal washable mask designed for comfort for long periods of wearing.
opiejeanne
@Martin: Good on her. I have made one mask so far. It fits me but not my husband, and I’m not making the pocket for a filter yet, because I don’t have any vacuum cleaner bags of any sort, let alone HEPA filters. I’ll have to order them, but he wore mine yesterday when he went out to pick up Chinese, which is all Major Major Major Major’s fault for showing me a picture of his favorite Chinese place complete with Lucky Cat wearing PPE.
EthylEster
@opiejeanne: I just saw updated numbers at worldometers. +345 new cases and +53 deaths. And WA is down to 9th in total cases now behind LA.
Daddio7
@Sab: Song lyric, “Yesterday’s glory won’t help us today
You wanna retire?
Get out of the way “
Another Scott
@joel hanes: Thanks for the pointer. That’s a good site.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major:
Also too, if they’re doing modeling like https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections then they’re assuming this thing is over everywhere by August.
There’s still far too much not known, or with no reason to expect that the breaks will go our way, to put any money on death totals yet.
Donnie and the Congress should be doing everything they can to ramp up PPE, ramp up training and recertification to take the load off over-worked medical people, ramp up production of test kits and testing equipment, ramp up production of antibody tests, work on effective treatments and vaccines, etc., etc. The idea that if we make it to April 16 then things will get better afterwards is whistling past the graveyard…
We have to make things better, not just bail out the leaky boat.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Martin: No doubt Donnie (and BoJo) is going to try though.
Hurricane Maria death toll:
The BBC reported that (the UK, IIRC?) didn’t count COVID-19 deaths that didn’t take place in hospitals.
We all know, he’s going to try to game the numbers. I hope that reporters and other government officials keep on top of the best numbers they can get (which will, of course, be undercounts) – it’s important.
Cheers,
Scott.
rikyrah
@trollhattan:
Senator Murphy has been on it from the beginning