The Trump administration is pushing to reopen much of the country next month, raising concerns among health experts and economists of a possible covid-19 resurgence if Americans return to their normal lives before the virus is truly stamped out.
Behind closed doors, President Trump — concerned with the sagging economy — has sought a strategy for resuming business activity by May 1, according to people familiar with the discussions.
I know this isn’t going to happen, because this dude, who has infinitely more credibility than Trump and his clown taskforce, says it isn’t:
The worst of the Rochester-area COVID-19 outbreak is at least several weeks away, [Monroe County Commissioner of Health] Dr. Michael Mendoza [pictured above] said Thursday, and the return to normal life will not occur for a considerable time after that.
Re-opening of businesses and a resumption of social and recreational activities would not occur before mid-summer, by Mendoza’s estimate. School is almost certainly out until September.
But before any of that can even be contemplated, people in the Rochester region must weather the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.
We just made a massive investment in keeping people alive. Business as usual in three weeks would be pissing that investment away. This is obvious to anyone paying attention, and believe me, COVID-19 has our full attention in New York.
What’s more interesting to me is that some local and state governments in red states are ignoring Trump. Even in my red state home town, the city council voted to shut everything down over two weeks ago, in a state where a full lock down has not yet been ordered. That’s because their hospital is 100 miles from any other, and probably has a couple of ventilators (counting a spare anesthesia machine) and maybe 25 (50?) beds if they stretch. My mother-in-law (I married a woman from my home town) is sewing masks as I write this — her sewing circle is sending them all to the hospital. My dad declared that he and my high-risk mom were going on lockdown almost three weeks ago. This is in a county with zero confirmed cases, as of today. Even this very Republican small town knows which way the wind is blowing.
Trump is being ignored for the a number of reasons, but at the core of it all, the most salient one is that he has very little to offer. He has no tests on the scale we need, no meaningful number of ventilators (in the short term), maybe some PPE (who knows) and a daily clown show. That’s it. He is the titular head of the most powerful government in the world, but he’s like a child sitting in the cockpit of a 747 without any idea of which knob does what.
dr. bloor
Yep. As someone noted on Twitter, Trump didn’t close the economy, and he certainly can’t open it again on a whim.
Duane
Given the disastrous response to the pandemic I’m done referring to the US as the most powerful country in the world. Like you said, a 747 is useless if you don’t know how to fly it.
Jeffro
Go ahead and open up those cruise ships and airlines, trumpov. BOOM! goes the economy, amirite? What are we waiting for?
What a moron.
Nora
He’s more like a child sitting in the cockpit of a 747 hitting buttons at random and looking around in expectation of being praised for his wonderful piloting.
Jeffro
@Duane: Great point.
I guess by metrics that actually matter, Germany, New Zealand, and South Korea are world powers now.
WereBear
I would normally worry about a coup; but he’s also alienated the military.
Roger Moore
What I am hoping, and I realize that it may be a forlorn hope, is that by going against the mood of the country so badly Trump will hurt his reelection chances. Going all in on reopening everything when people are still afraid and don’t want to reopen until they feel good and safe is a really bad look. It shows how callous and out of touch he is. Backing off might help, but even that will make him look weak.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Brother, this is some prose:
I bow to you.
JoyceH
I do wish the news would stop discussing ‘Trump wants to reopen economy’ as if Trump even has the power to order people back to work. We’ve seen over the past month that it’s up to the governors. The article in the post about this had two brief mentions about that fact and the rest was what Trump wants to do and whether or not it’s wise and who he’s listening to, blah blah blah. Anyone not doing a very careful reading would conclude that it’s up to Trump whether businesses and schools reopen.
Let him issue all the orders he wants. Maybe his base will rush out to like-minded bars and churches and die.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
Some people at lower levels of government who are responsible for the decisions whether to reopen may be inclined to listen to Trump, however.
The chance to see the laboratories of democracy in action would be edifying if not for all the dead bodies any failed experiments would produce.
Ohio Mom
We are still the world’s greatest military power, which means a lot, and we still have a huge economy and are still the reserve currency.
But domestically, on a national level, we are a failed state. A good number of states and localities are still functioning but even so, the failed national state makes them less effective.
Can we repair our failed state, that is the question.
joel hanes
he’s like a child sitting in the cockpit of a 747 without any idea of which knob does what.
He’s like a child trying to use that 747 to run over the babysitter who tells him that it’s past his bedtime.
JoyceH
@Roger Moore: “What I am hoping, and I realize that it may be a forlorn hope, is that by going against the mood of the country so badly Trump will hurt his reelection chances. Going all in on reopening everything when people are still afraid and don’t want to reopen until they feel good and safe is a really bad look. It shows how callous and out of touch he is. Backing off might help, but even that will make him look weak.”
How about Barr, referring to those of us who are responsibly staying at home as ‘hiding under the bed’?
And I think later this month things are going to become clearer. They like to call the 50 states ‘the laboratories of democracy’ – well, pretty soon those red states with Trumpy governors who have done nothing are going to be hit and hit hard and then we can do a compare and contrast.
dr. bloor
@Krope, the Formerly Dope: Oh, absolutely. I would expect the confederacy, lesser-hit midwestern states, etc., will enthusiastically follow Trump’s marching orders. And, to be blunt, they won’t pay the price in human lives that the coastal urban areas are paying. But if NY, CA, and the rest of the world don’t want to go along, they’re going to get a lesson in just how intertwined their fates are with those dirty coastal elitists.
schrodingers_cat
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Rick Wilson?
senyordave
It is this sort of attempted action that makes me certain that, no matter what state the country is come fall, this election has to be largely about Trump’s response to the pandemic. From pissing away two months by ignoring it to not having adequate testing in mid-April (US is still way behind most developed countries in testing rate) to Jared Fucking Kushner being one of the people in charge of the supply chain. Failure at every level and more people died because of it. I want ads with Harry Truman and the buck stops here contrasting Trump and “I take no responsibility at all”, maybe throw in statistics of dead and infected.
ThresherK
Anyone else thinking of The Old Man in the Cave Twilight Zone?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@JoyceH: I see DeSantis is musing about reopening schools on the grounds that the virus doesn’t his children. How is it possible to be that stupid and not risk putting your pants on back-to-front?
Kent
The really scary thing is that while this is all true, Trump seems to be stealing the ventilators and PPE and other materials that states are procuring for themselves and then portioning it back out through some sort of corrupt patronage system. Josh Marshall has been on that beat for several days now. Very scary and horrifying that the powers of the Federal government can be used that way in a completely opaque fashion. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/goodfellas
MisterForkbeard
I’m seeing a number of different efforts to ‘discredit’ the pandemic coming together on the right, and it’s kind of scary watching people be this nuts. From acquaintances on facebook, mostly:
Honestly disturbing to see people in the cult. The first time I saw someone put quotes around “pandemic” I wanted to smack them. But alas, social distancing prevents that option.
debbie
At long last, toilet paper! (And Lysol, Kleenex, and Bounty!)
Trump has also demonstrated to everyone that he has no regard for others’ lives or welfare. Even his most ardent supporters realize this, but they still cling to their enjoyment of others’ suffering. Once they see they are joining the ranks of the suffering, they will finally admit they were wrong.
Ohio Mom
Today’s Cincinnati paper had two articles on a Tea party-like movement that is protesting Governor DeWine’s closures and quarantine.
In the photo of the demonstration in Columbus, there are about 75 of them, many wearing Guy Fawkes masks and holding signs that DeWine has violated the Consitution and taken away our right to be free. The funny part is that they are all standing at least six feet apart!
Who is behind this?
Meanwhile, I am still waiting for the Enquirer article on Trump’s shenanigans with the ventilators and PPE. That story is nowhere to be seen. I often think that paper does more harm than good.
debbie
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
That photo of him tooting the horn of that big truck early in his administration needs to be plastered over the pro-life billboards everywhere in this country.
Kent
That would be an EPIC CLUSTER FUCK as tens of thousands of elderly teachers would refuse to show up and hundreds of thousands (or more) of parents would refuse to send their kids.
HIPAA protects medical privacy. If I’m a teacher and I call in and say that I’m Covid-19 positive, what are they going to do? Tell me to come to work anyway? They can’t legally see my medical records.
MattF
So, Trump puffs up and says “I hereby order everything to go back to normal” and nothing happens. Someone’s got to notice that won’t be a good look.
Martin
@Ohio Mom: Observe Gavin Newsom’s new proclamation that California is a nation-state. We’ve always acted somewhat in that manner, with what are effectively treaties with Canada and China, though we can’t call them that. But it’s a declaration that we’ll chart our own course here.
Gavin is now trying to build an interstate compact that will supercede FEMA. Our 200M mask deal is effectively the first action of that arrangement since we will provide masks to other states. He’s working a soft version of the Defense Production Act in state. We will be a state that will put a ballot in every voters mailbox this November.
We’re gearing up for a fight.
debbie
@Ohio Mom:
I hope the Enquirer also enquires about his investment in hydroxychloroquine producers.
Those clowns were all over the news here. I love the clips of them chanting through their masks. “Glubb, mluff, bffft!”
Zelma
A friend just lost her grandfather to COVID-19. Here in somewhat remote Cape May County the number of cases rises significantly every day, even though there is very limited testing. The authorities are trying to get FEMA to open a testing center in South Jersey, but so far, no luck. The federal government has nothing to offer us. I guess our renegade Congressman has discovered how valueless his support for Trump is once his usefulness ended.
The small local hospital is holding its own but lacks PPE. (My cousin had a 95mask for some reason. She gave it to her neighbor who is a nurse and lacks proper gear.). We are probably two weeks behind north Jersey. We have too many second home owners who have come here despite the governor’s order to stay away. Beaches and boardwalks are closed and towns are banning short term rentals.
debbie
@WereBear:
He’ll regret that when he runs for protection behind the fat corporate pigs who haven’t exercised more than their mouths for years.
Kent
@Martin: Honestly, without CA the rest of us would be truly and utterly fucked. The House would still be in GOP hands and us smaller blue state folks like up here in WA would be truly at the mercy of TX and the rest of the GOP.
debbie
@Martin:
He needs to stop sending tax payments to D.C. That’s the only thing that will wake up Trump.
Baud
@debbie:
States don’t pay federal taxes, directly or indirectly.
debbie
@Kent:
I still can’t get over Wisconsin refusing to postpone or restage the primary. Even Georgia is postponing their primary!
Brachiator
Trump is being ignored, a very good thing, but conservatives are still bending over backwards to give Trump credit for offering hope and leadership during this crisis.
Just this morning I heard a talk radio host dismiss any criticism of the administration efforts as politics. Even while acknowledging state and local efforts that are clearly helpful.
It’s crazy.
debbie
@Baud:
Inventive bookkeeping would fix that.
Zelma
@Zelma:
Local authorities will hold the line. Trump has become what he always feared: irrelevant.
satby
@MisterForkbeard: I hear the really cultist ones are yapping about 5G and Fauci needing to be fired for lying to the country.
Omnes Omnibus
@WereBear: Why would you normally worry about a coup?
Baud
@satby:
What’s the story behind 5G?
Kent
@debbie: I can’t figure out what happened to WI in the past two decades. Back when I was in college in the 80s it was a cool and liberal place. And not just Madison. Now it is worse than much of the fucking confederacy. And yes, I know it is under minority rule. But still. They vote for GOP Senators and governors and refuse to recall them so it isn’t entirely just gerrymandering.
Kristine
@Martin:
Which other states are involved? Hoping Illinois is one of them.
That said, what about this: “An interstate compact is an agreement between two or more states of the United States of America. Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution provides that “no state shall enter into an agreement or compact with another state” without the consent of Congress.”
Is that definition applicable? If yes, could Congress block California? I know Trump would try.
satby
@Baud: guess that one of the conspiracy theories is that it somehow spreads the covid virus? Or makes people more susceptible. Who the fuck knows, conspiracy theories are nuts.
Jim Parish
@Kent: I think that strain was always there. Remember that Joe McCarthy was from Wisconsin.
Ryan
Trump wanted the states in charge. “The states should have been preparing.”
Trump, you had your chance to lead.
JoyceH
@Kent: “The really scary thing is that while this is all true, Trump seems to be stealing the ventilators and PPE and other materials that states are procuring for themselves and then portioning it back out through some sort of corrupt patronage system. Josh Marshall has been on that beat for several days now. ”
And FEMA claims they’ve got nothing to do with it. I immediately jump to the suspicion that that weird quasi-official group that Jared put together is doing this.
sdhays
He’s like a child sitting in the pilot’s chair of a nuclear submarine demanding that it fly.
Brachiator
@Baud:
Woody Harrelson is one of the more notable idiots who believe that the Chinese deliberately used the deployment of 5G to create or spread the virus.
sdhays
@JoyceH: I hope people eventually go to prison over that. And if the House gets smoking gun proof that he’s doing that, I just may re-evaluate my opposition to impeaching him again.
trollhattan
@Jeffro:
Hey now, remember those National Review lecture cruises? Right now would be a bang up time to hold a series of those.
Republicans love a bargain.
Baud
@Brachiator: He’s going to be the next Rosanne, isn’t he?
sdhays
@Kristine: I wonder if Congress has to affirmatively assent or if it needs to actively block it. If it needs to actively block it, the House isn’t going to stop them.
sdhays
@trollhattan: Heck, I’d be ok allocating funding for that endeavor in the next “stimulus” bill.
Patricia Kayden
Governors who enacted stay-at-home orders aren’t going to let Trump force them to lift those orders. I assume that red states will lift their orders to please Trump. Thank goodness for sensible governors who actually care about their citizens’ health.
Barbara
@Kent: What happened is that it stopped growing. Like many areas of Pennsylvania, it is a place that people leave.
Martin
@debbie: It’s not really about tax revenue. It’s more about how the economy serves as a constraint on governance, and how the federal government wields that. The biggest impediment to implementing single payer is that you have to tear down this economic engine to pull it off, and that kind of economic damage is politically too much. But if the economy is in shambles, in part because the feds refused to act, that creates opportunities for the state.
CA has never been one for stimulus to employers. That’s entirely too socialist for us. We’re much more interested in regulatory and tax structures that bends the economy in the direction we want. Rather than bail out the insurers, maybe we nationalize them and go single payer that way. The risk of job loss, which was always one of the bigger problems is kind of moot with unemployment heading where it is.
There’s no requirement that if government is needed to reassemble the economy that we do it in the way it was structured before. We can make any number of changes to create or bolster in-state industries, and the governor can push those initiatives now rather than waiting for Congress or the WH.
Subsole
@Baud:
They are saying the signal causes
windmill cancercovid.Kristine
@sdhays: This from the explanation: Consent can be obtained in one of three ways. First, there can be a model compact and Congress can grant automatic approval for any state wishing to join it, such as the Driver License Compact. Second, states can submit a compact to congress prior to entering into the compact. Third, states can agree to a compact then submit it to Congress for approval, which, if it does so, causes it to come into effect. Frequently, these agreements create a new governmental agency which is responsible for administering or improving some shared resource such as a seaport or public transportation infrastructure. In some cases, a compact serves simply as a coordination mechanism between independent authorities in the member states. Such compacts are distinct from Uniform Acts, which are model statutes produced by non-governmental bodies of legal experts to be passed by state legislatures independently.
Looks like approval is needed to move ahead according to my IANAL interpretation. That said, Newsom may try to push it.
Barbara
@Kristine: First, who is going to stop them? Second, there are ways around this, especially when it comes to group purchasing of items. I am not going into chapter and verse, but this is the last thing the states should be worried about.
Barbara
@Kristine: You are almost certainly wrong. This is a purchasing arrangement, not an “interstate compact.” There are ways to do this. Among other things, one state can take the lead and enter into “prior approval” agreements with other states. This happens ALL THE TIME with Medicaid rebate agreements.
dr. bloor
@Baud: Randy Quaid demands his due.
SandyZ
What Trump is doing by this is putting alot of pressure on Republican governors to open up their states. They want to get past this too. Let’s hope they can hold the line. If not, it will be a disaster.
debbie
@Martin:
I know and I understand; I just want to hit Trump where it will hurt him the most.
trollhattan
Compelling Rolling Stone article on David Bowie’s final years. Dearly missed still, he lived well and fully until the end. Poignant for me, since I’m still processing the loss of John Prine.
Wonder if they ever met? Although vastly different artists I bet they admired one anothers work.
mrmoshpotato
And selling off parts of the plane because he’s a Soviet shitpile mobster conman.
Kristine
@Barbara:
I used @Martin’s term for the agreement, and when I looked it up, found the related info. If that’s not the official term for it and they can move ahead, great.
trollhattan
@sdhays:
Nancy, on phone to Mitch: “Mitch, have I got a deal for you….”
Subsole
@Baud:
Also that Chinese agents were spreading it, somehow? Like, the Chinese sent Chinese techs from China to install London’s 5g antennae?
I dunno. The brainworms feasting on the brainworms currently infesting these peoples’ brainworms have brainworms.
Subsole
@sdhays: I hope people eventually go to a firing squad over that
Martin
@Kristine: It does apply, but my understanding is he’s looking to build on top of the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, so it’s already approved by congress. What’s lacking is a logistics role on top of that compact, which Gavin is looking to build.
I know that Inslee and Brown are involved, and I would think Illinois and NY would be good fits as well. I mean, the consortium of states that support CARB is likely to be included and Illinois is one of those.
JMG
It was supermarket day, and on the way back in my car sports talk radio was asking fans if they’d go to games if the leagues reopened. Almost all the callers said “no” ranging from “hell no” to “maybe after they played games for awhile and nobody got sick.” These are people whose attitudes about sports are not usually rational. If they’re afraid to go back, nothing is gonna reopen anytime soon. Trump can say “open sesame” all he wants. Consumers and workers will vote with their feet.
Kristine
@trollhattan: I saw him at the Rosemont Theater that January. They scheduled one show, and had to add another. He looked amazing, and it was a great show. Before that, I saw him in 1990–his was one of the first shows at Tinley Park. I didn’t enjoy that show nearly as much–we were up on the grass and I needed binocs to see him.
I’d been a fan since my early teens. 1971. I remember those first videos.
Kent
I’m guessing that it is also sort of stuck between the larger Chicago and Minneapolis metro areas and so doesn’t have the geography to generate a major liberal metro area on its own. Milwaukee doesn’t really count as a major metro area anymore. So the best and the brightest who really want to get ahead drift away west to Minneapolis or south to Chicago.
Oregon would be the same way if Portland shrank to the size of Milwaukee. Shrink Portland down further to the size of Boise and politics in Oregon would look like Idaho.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Here in Ohio, there was actually a protest at the statehouse in Columbus during the Governor’s Daily Press Briefing yesterday.
Reports estimated 100 people. Almost none of them were wearing masks, except for Guy Fawkes masks, if those count ?.
Homemade signs read:
These fucking idiots just don’t get it, do they? I wonder if dumb shit like this was done during the 1918 Flu pandemic? I have no idea where these people are getting these conspiracy theories from
Kristine
@Martin: Thanks for that info. I really hope Illinois is involved. Pritzker has been pretty critical of Trump, so I am thinking that he would try to work with Newsom on something like this.
mrmoshpotato
@JoyceH: Exactly. Dump isn’t doing shit except for being a mobster seizing vital medical equipment that the states are ordering themselves because, again, he’s a mobster sack of shit.
The fucking Democratic governors and mayors are the ones working like hell to minimize the death toll.
(I can believe I just wrote that last sentence.)
trollhattan
@Kristine:
I can well guess how much you treasure those shows. Never saw him, a major void in my music experiences.
Bowie was one of those rare artists with an enormous career arc and yet who never stopped creating, and about whom I never heard anything negative.
scav
Let’s hope it’s a 747 and not a 737-max in case random button pushing, bruum-bruum noises and a discrete push get this puppy lifted off the tarmac.
ETA: Not that my environs are going to poke their noses out until they personally are good and ready. Which is not to say there aren’t a few local partisans piping up with his platitudes verbally. Their actions reveal otherwise.
Kent
This.
Interstate compacts are things like the Colorado River Compact of 1922 that portioned up use of the Colorado River in a legally binding agreement between the seven states within it’s drainage basin. They are permanent legal agreements between states to address these sorts of cross-border issues and are rightly ratified by Congress to prevent one state or a group of states from disadvantaging others. California and Arizona can’t gang up to squeeze Nevada out of its water, for example.
This sort of temporary purchasing agreement is a completely different sort of thing. If the big states were doing it to squeeze out little states then perhaps Congress would be justifiably involved. But that’s not what is happening.
Barbara
@JoyceH: He can order people to stop being careful all he wants but he can’t stop them from being careful if they think it is in their best interests. I know that many people are not deep thinkers, but you can look at now probably half a dozen countries, not to mention a few states, to see that early shut down plus aggressive testing is the way forward. The economy really will take care of itself if he takes care of the testing and emergency response. There is simply no hope of that anymore. People would be foolish to look to him for leadership.
patroclus
Well, the federal government does have some things – the Army Corps has built and is maintaining dozens of field hospitals, Congress’s bills are providing funding for a wide variety of things, like unemployment insurance, FEMA is active in distributing supplies, the Fed is actively implementing lower rates and QE, the Navy deployed the Mercy and the Comfort. And we will have to open the economy at some point and we need to be thinking about how to do it in as safe a manner as possible. Trump doesn’t have to be irrelevant – he could clearly do a better job and make the Feds more relevant than they are.
Barbara
@Kristine: I didn’t mean to be snippy. Even if there were no prior congressional permission, there are ways for states to essentially engage in joint purchasing, but it might not be as efficient or effective as a full-on compact.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: How big do you think Milwaukee is?
jl
IMHO, always remember there is the ‘ignorant fool’ school of open up as quickly as possible, and the ‘infectious disease expert with practical experience’ school of open up as quickly as possible. Doubt Trump can tell the difference.
Need to have testing, contact tracing and quarantine, bake in implicit control methods with changes to health and safety laws and inspections, early sentinel surveillance systems in place. Otherwise, we wait forever, and same kind of epidemic will re-occur. So, that is IMHO. Read Scott Gottlieb, Farzad Mostashari, Tom Frieden (my references….)
trollhattan
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Stating that “time is of the essence,” Dr. Anthony Fauci is imploring the nation’s pharmaceutical companies to fast-track the development of a drug to treat narcissism.
Acknowledging that narcissistic-personality disorder has historically been resistant to medication, the esteemed virologist said that a breakthrough drug was “urgently needed.”
“I have seen the toll that narcissism takes, day in, day out,” Fauci said. “The human cost is incalculable.”
Kent
Metro area of about 1.5 million according to Wiki. Which ranks it 39th in the country, down between Providence RI and Jacksonville FL.
Portland metro area is 2.5 million
Minneapolis metro area is about 3.5 million
mrmoshpotato
@JMG:
By shoving their boots up Dump’s fat orange fascist ass?
chopper
trump has always been a cargo cult politician. he thinks if he just does the motions then things work out just like they did for previous presidents.
mrmoshpotato
@chopper: The motions?
Like wave his short-fingered hands around like he’s playing an invisible playskool accordion?
Ruckus
Not only does he not know what the knobs do he keeps turning them, sees what happens, still hasn’t got a fucking clue, and blames everyone else for his stupidity.
He’s the devil of death. Probably why some voted for him.
chopper
@mrmoshpotato:
for the most part, yeah. and just saying crap in front of the camera as if he’s in charge of things.
Major Major Major Major
We can’t (or shouldn’t at least) reopen things until we have a contact-tracing system in place, so we can identify people who had run-ins with recent positive cases and quarantine them. New York already has decent testing infrastructure, though it will need to be expanded. We also already have devices in our pockets that track us everywhere we go and give the data to private companies. If we’re able to stomach being honest with ourselves about this fact, we can have a contact-tracing system set up very quickly, without any government intrusion. Apple and Google are willing to be honest about it:
Subsole
@mrmoshpotato:
I think it’s more of a jerking motion, actually…
debbie
@JMG:
There was a poll here yesterday that said the majority would not return to public or sporting events until there was a vaccine. Eat that, Donald Trump!
Major Major Major Major
@debbie: Shit, depending on how I look with a buzz cut (clippers arrive next week), I might not even sit for a haircut for a few months.
mrmoshpotato
@Subsole:
Ok, badly playing an invisible playskool accordion!
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Ugh, crazy! Did they misspell ‘quarantine’ or ‘constitution’?
Ruckus
@chopper:
He’s sure they will work out far better, because he’s trump. Problem is that he is always wrong. About everything, every time. He’s wrong when he says or doesn’t say anything, he’s wrong when he does or doesn’t do anything.
He’s the rational for damned if you do, damned if you don’t,
Martin
@Kent: So, the mask is temporary purchasing agreement, but Gavin is trying to build a permanent structure here. One where states would agree to bulk purchasing and local stockpiling, and participating states would then get resources in an emergency. It sounds like a NATO style arrangement – commit to $x per capita or something like that, we’ll set up a permanent supply agreement, and use EMAC as the the mechanism to keep everything square.
EMAC lacks a non-federal FEMA-like coordinating group, and it’s only used for responsive relief, not precautionary – those are the things they’re looking to address. What’s not clear to me is could the do that with a subset of states under EMAC. I think so. I don’t think EMAC mandates that states provide relief, it merely encourages them to.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
The big problem with moving to single payer is Prop 98, since it would divert a large fraction of any new taxes needed to pay for single pay to schools. If we can figure out a way to get around that, or if we can convince voters to approve a constitutional amendment to exempt single payer from Prop 98 requirements, I think we could make it work.
JaneE
Los Angeles is supposed to start random testing of 1,000 people today with new antibody test. Another county north of there is already doing it, as is Stanford University. With any luck we will get better information about asymptomatic spread and what level of immunity there is in the community at large. How long that will take, I don’t know, but we are still talking low thousands of tests total, in a population of 35 million. At least it is a start. So far as I can tell, the federal government had absolutely nothing to do with this.
I just hope they get a vaccine soon.
rp
There’s no way in hell we’ll end the lockdown by May 1 (or even June 1), but this isn’t sustainable long term. I don’t want to sound like I’m defending Trump in any way, shape, or form, but (a) people are not going to tolerate a lockdown for 6+ months, and (b) if we did have that, we’d have a situation worse than the great depression and potentially major problems with food and other supplies. The cure at that point would be worse than the (literal) disease.
At some point (maybe mid-summer), we’ll need to start sending people back to work gradually with a heavy emphasis on masks and gloves, and maybe reinstate short term lockdowns from time to time .
Soprano2
This morning I was arguing with an idiot on Facebook who said this is just like a bad cold, so we never should have closed the economy because all that is going to happen is a bunch of people are going to get bad colds and then it’ll be over. Of course, he has no answer for why hundreds of thousands of people are dying from this supposed “bad cold”. I asked him how many people die from a “bad cold” every year, no answer. Oh, and he also said that Newsom actually got those masks because of Trump, and he should thank Trump for that! Also, all these governors suck, Trump has gotten all their asses out of the fire because they’re so bad. I swear, these cultists are beyond reaching because they’re listening to news sources that are just straight-up lying to them about what’s happening.
Here in Missouri I’m really worried that Parsons will say to end the lockdown way too soon since he’s one of the dumb Republican governors. If they say things can open up, we’ll have to open the bar. There will be too much pressure to resist doing it. What a clusterfuck.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Well, the state has rarely been compliant with Prop 98, but I take the point. Yes, that would need to be addressed.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
The May Revise will be a bloodbath. IDK how much revenues to Sac have plunged but combined with all the new expenses stemming from COVID-19, California Fiscal Year 2021 will be the tightest budget in a decade. Or three.
trollhattan
@Soprano2:
It’s just like a bad cold. In those situations where every two or three people who get a cold, die. A-choo.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
‘Constitution’ lol
trnc
@dr. bloor:
True, but what he and the rest of the flying monkeys can do is blame everyone else for keeping the economy shut down and claim that it’s not his fault that unemployment is still high. After all, every fox “news” personality is already claiming the experts don’t know anything because the death toll may not be as high as the forecasts.
Whether anyone outside of the fever swamp actually believes it is the big question.
Raoul Paste
So Barr says that us folks staying at home are “hiding under the bed”, eh?
Karma, where are you?
trollhattan
@rp:
My assumption is once accurate, widespread, fast testing in place–for both infections and antibodies–we can begin phased returns to work, school, etc. I’m not returning to the office until I and everybody else is screened beforehand.
And I guess incremental screening should continue until the epidemic either dies out on its own or a vaccine ships.
trnc
@joel hanes:
Liked.
Major Major Major Major
@JaneE: The problem with widespread antibody tests is false positives. Consider a test that’s 95% accurate: if you test a random individual, and they show a positive result, given the underlying low likelihood of having been infected, that person is actually most likely negative. We need a more sophisticated scheme than “test everybody.”
trollhattan
@Raoul Paste:
Who can guess what’s hiding under Barr’s bed at this very moment.
C Stars
I haven’t had a chance to read all the comments so pardon me if this is a repeat, but my understanding from a critical mass of interviews with and articles by economists and doctors is that the distancing/shelter orders can ease up once certain conditions are met. There will still be a wave of infections at that point, but it will be manageable. The conditions to be met involve diagnostic metrics like 14 days without an increase in infections etc. but they also involve robust testing of the general population for both infections and antibodies. The current administration isn’t only disinclined to take such measures, I don’t actually believe there’s the collective brainpower around Trump right now to implement such a program at a federal level. So how do we move forward? I think it’s likely that states form alliances to set in place policies to meet those conditions. Obviously not all states, but some. And then the easing out of distancing/shelter will be implemented across regional swaths of the country, maybe in a staggered or coordinated manner. I truly do not see any role for the Trump administration in this process. If the executive branch were a functional governing body, it could take on this project and do an immense amount of good for the country as a whole, but…lol.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
The pandemic is already having a huge impact on the California state budget. Governor Newsom is already having to rethink the proposals to expand healthcare coverage to more people.
Covered California, the state version of Obamacare, is supposed to cover more people, provide increased subsidies and also impose the individual mandate that the federal version abandoned.
The date for signing up for California health coverage had been extended, and there are still large numbers of people who still don’t know that having health insurance is supposed to be mandatory.
Right now, I bet that the California individual mandate will be repealed, and this will add to budget woes.
We are a long way from getting single payer.
JoyceH
Here it is about 1:40 and the 1 pm task force briefing hasn’t yet begun. (Not that I plan to watch it; the news is on and I’ll switch it off when that idiot starts talking.) Incredible. One completely easy thing that can be done to give at least the appearance of competence is just to start a briefing at the announced time, and these morons can’t even do that! Have they EVER started the briefing on time, even once?
sdhays
At a COVID-19 Party with a special invitation for Bill Barr.
Martin
Ok, here’s the best news I’ve heard in a while.
iOS and Android combined are one of the planet’s most important infrastructure layers, so if they can build this as an OS layer service, it’ll be a game changer. It’ll be harder for Android to do that since they don’t really have that kind of control, but it’ll still be a big help. Apple has damn near 100% compliance for OS updates. They can even include this as part of a security update for devices that can’t run the most recent OS.
This would take a lot of the scaling issues out of mass contact tracing.
The idea is very similar to an information escrow. The devices collect the information and put them into an independent escrow space. The escrow owner can then give permission to share that information with anyone that came in contact with them, without either party knowing the identity of the other.
Universities are doing some of this with regard to sexual assault reporting as it allows for contemporaneous reporting of an assault, but doesn’t require the victim to commit to a course of action until they’re ready.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: It’ll need to be opt-out, not the opt-in they currently say.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: Okay, what parts of Wisconsin were cool and liberal when you were in college but aren’t now?
WereBear
@ThresherK: No, I’m more of A Quality of Mercy type.
catatonia
Some very red states are going to be facing an ugly Easter Sunday, with a severe weather outbreak targeting LA, MS, AL and maybe TN and GA. It’s shaping up to be the worst outbreak in that part of the country since the infamous and deadly April 2011 event. Some of the atmospheric parameters for Sunday approximate those before that outbreak, although the instability in the atmosphere–one of the key ingredients for supercell thunderstorms, and therefore strong and long-tracked tornadoes–is progged to be a bit less than April 2011. So chances are it won’t be as devastating but still could be quite bad especially if whatever strong tornadoes that do form (if any) hitting populated areas. Lots of people who live in mobile homes or other fragile housing may have to take cover in community shelters in close quarters. That may accelerate transmission of COVID. OTOH, this threat may staunch the inflow of the Jeebus citizenry into the for-profit megachurches
Brachiator
@C Stars:
This makes a lot of sense. States may be moving in this direction out of necessity.
The crazy thing is that the right wing is looking for ways to lionize Trump for his strong “leadership” in dealing with the pandemic while also salivating over some crazy idea that the failure of the federal government to do much is a vindication of small government and free markets.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Ha! Of course.
debbie
@Major Major Major Major:
Not me, bub. I prepaid the chick who cuts my hair for three visits just so I could move to the front of the line!
But I’ll definitely pass on the crowd scenes.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
I was promised there would be no math! =:-P
C Stars
@trollhattan: Perfect!
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: Never mind. I obviously don’t have the patience to deal with people here today.
debbie
@Major Major Major Major:
JESUS, THERE’S ALGEBRA HERE???
Major Major Major Major
@debbie: I just don’t want to sit there trapped in a building full of strangers, blow-dryers, the barber breathing on me for fifteen minutes… but I’ll probably look terrible, so we will see.
trollhattan
@catatonia:
Sounds possibly very nasty.
While I’m happy as a clam fire season is months off yet here, it’s never not earthquake season.
Fire season and hurricane season match up pretty well. Our ability to respond to either/both is stretched even in normal times. And while we can never know if or how many hurricanes, wildfires are assured.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: @debbie: You wanna talk disease testing policy, you’re gonna have to reckon with Bayes’s Theorem!
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: I think the collection may be opt-out, with the disclosure opt-in. My guess is that there’s another layer to this mandating access to CDC or state health agencies that will take longer to work out.
The hard reality is that the US has no infrastructure to open. No way to certify that a person is safe to travel, no way to do contact tracing on the necessary scale, not even a reliable way to test and notify people of results. There’s no time to build that nationally. They’re going to have to push this as close to a mandatory program as they can.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
I’m more curious about what’s hiding in Republican closets than under their beds.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: What’s wild is that if a handful of companies wanted to, they could set this up themselves totally legally, as long as they notify people through ‘anonymous’ online advertising.
C Stars
@Brachiator:
Well, exactly. I mean, this is what I find a bit confusing. Do the current administration and its cheerleaders really believe that easing up on distancing now will guarantee them some kind of financial or demographic victory? People will die, and feel scared and misled by the government, rural hospitals and healthcare systems will collapse, and the distancing will continue to happen in a patchwork/ haphazard way even in the red/trump states…I just don’t see them pulling a win out of this situation…
debbie
@Major Major Major Major:
Yeah, that would be nervous-making in NYC. My stylist (and I use that term loosely) is in an annex behind the main building which she shares with three other stylists.
trollhattan
Hope everybody’s seated before reading this shockeroo.
Sister Golden Bear
@Ohio Mom: We’re living through a reminder why the Founders ditched the Articles of Confederation after only a few years.
Martin
@debbie: I was smart enough to hire someone with a cosmetology license a number of years ago. She doesn’t work for me any more, but she’s happy to come to the house with her gear.
ET
Sadly I can see the DC metro area having a really sever second peak because I assume this opening things up includes the federal government. What the other local governments and private employers do is a different thing, but federal workers account for a lot of the people out and about during the average work day.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Sort of. The back end, yeah, easily, but I don’t think iOS allows an app to hit Bluetooth that way – or at least not without a user approval. They could get damn close, though.
Major Major Major Major
Duane
The world’s most powerful government is now receiving supplies to fight the coronavirus from charitable groups like Direct Relief and Doctors Without Borders, according an AP report. Those supplies would normally go to impoverished and war-torn countries. Some people might say that Trumpov’s inability to provide basic needs, to fulfill his constitutional duties, has turned our country into a shithole.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
We need a test with a false positive rate well below the actual infection rate.
debbie
@Martin:
My stylist has been thinking about starting up house calls too. I may have to resort to it if this goes on as long as some people fear it will.
Keith P
Is Trump’s mind sophisticated enough to where this is all his plan to get his own May Day parade, since the mean ol’ Deep State won’t let him be a guest of honor at Russia’s?
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: They do snoop on the wifi networks you pass, though. (Not sure about iOS but this is a common data-collection practice and iPhones do use it for GPS resolution). You can get, as you say, pretty darn close with that–close enough to at least ask people “did you see this (wo)man?”
p.s. Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth when you go out unless you’re using them!
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
And for an antibody test, few as possible false negatives. Healthcare is starting to use antibody testing to assign people to treat active cases.
Ben Cisco
@Subsole:
Bravo!
Major Major Major Major
While true, there’s a decent chance we won’t have that luxury come mid-May/June. ETA: We don’t even have rapid flu tests that work very well. Even blanket HIV testing, while helpful, requires higher-resolution followups.
@trollhattan: Testing high-risk groups is totally different, and current ~95% tests are appropriate, especially in an emergency like that.
realbtl
Up here in Montana ~40 people picketed outside the city council building while the council was discussing and passing a state of emergency proclamation.
The council was meeting by video conferencing.
debbie
@Major Major Major Major:
I love these bits. Did you see the ones with schoolroom musical instruments or with office supplies?
Brachiator
@C Stars:
The administration and its surrogates are pushing the following argument:
“hey, people die all the time. And if the deaths from the pandemic are close to the number that die from the flu every year, then hey, we are really ‘back to normal.’ And it is not the federal government’s responsibility to save people. And anyway, if we don’t get everyone back to work, more people will die because of the economic shutdown. Life is good. Hail Trump!”
Trump is focusing on his supporters. They want to be misled, and will forgive Trump anything.
They are also delusional. They believe that they can lie their way around another outbreak.
And if they can manage to win the election an another outbreak doesn’t happen until after November, they won’t care what the public thinks.
MomSense
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Arrogance. It’s a helluva drug.
terry chay
@MisterForkbeard: Do you know any of them who weren’t Trump voters or non voters before COVID-19 hit?
No? Then they don’t matter.
Elections change not by people swapping sides (John Cole is a rare case), but by one side activating voters while the other side adds non voters.
In the past, this has been happening to the Democrats with Bernie or bust, Jill Stein, disenfranchising and the Republicans with gun nuts, forced birth, and tea parties.
It was already trending heavily in the reverse in 2017 (Virginia, Pennsylvania, Alabama), 2018 (blue wave), and 2019 (Virginia again). My reading is COVID-19 is putting that trend into overdrive.
What you are reading is a lot of Trump supporters gearing to talk themselves into being “apolitical.” Makes sense as their life depends on being so (they were never going to vote for a D).
Dorothy A. Winsor
This made me laugh. It’s a You Tube set to “The Zoom Where It Happens.” It’s from Saturday Night on Broadway.
SFBayAreaGal
@Ben Cisco: How is my favorite captain doing?
EthylEster
@JaneE: I just hope they get a vaccine soon.
At this point I would be very happy for accurate and fast tests that:
(1) detect the virus; and
(2) detect virus antibodies.
Until those two things happen I don’t see how to make data driven decisions. And it is very hard to speed up vax development process.
I read an interesting article this morning in WaPo by doc stating that docs need to go back to historical protocols for putting patients on ventilators. He says sedating folks on vents is bad; “prolonged immobilization is extremely dangerous for the human body”. New info (to me).
Chyron HR
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I’m pretty sure they get them from the GRU, just like every other stupid meme on Twitter meant to program westerners to destroy their own countries.
Major Major Major Major
@debbie: I did not! Some great art coming out of this, at the very least.
MoCA Ace
If he tries and gets enough red-state governors to go along with him the “grand opening” is going to be a big F’n dud… followed by white hot rage when COVID19 comes roaring back (or roaring in) with a vengeance.
Here in the great red north our small town closed the city boat landings and banned fishing on city property because so many out-of-town anglers flooded the area for the much anticipated walleye run. Drove by the only motel in town the other day and it was packed with trucks/boat trailers with out of state plates! Idiots. It’m sure its perfectly safe for a dad and his kid out on the river but they are packed in ass hole-to-elbow at the landing and fishing shoulder-to-shoulder at other public access sites.
C Stars
Anecdotally, I am hearing about a lot of Republicans in my extended family who have changed their tune pretty dramatically about Trump/Covid in the last couple of weeks. Going from “it’s a Democrat hoax!” to “I’m not leaving my house for six months!” With, one assumes, some attendant realization that Trump is not the greatest example to follow in this crisis. But yeah, critical thinking skills not a dominant trait in the GOP base.
catclub
according to people familiar with the delusions
dww44
@Kent: as a lifelong citizen of one of way more southernly red states, I have to agree. At least our state government’s voter suppression efforts are a bit more sophisticated and not so blatant. But then, we’ve had more than a century’s worth of practice to that end.
catclub
Have you called Digital Electronics Corp?
I’ll be here all week, try the veal.
terry chay
@Roger Moore: I imagine the false positives come from the way the samples are taken, not from the test itself.
Keith P
@catclub: They’re gone, but Dave Cutler is still at Microsoft.
Ben Cisco
@SFBayAreaGal: Getting over bronchitis and working from home. Plus, we have an idiot squatting in the Oval, but other than that I’m fine.
Major Major Major Major
@terry chay: it’s a blood test. https://www.fda.gov/media/136625/download
HeartlandLiberal
Just wanted to say that as much as it hurts me to praise a Republican, our Indiana governor Holcomb has ignored Trump, and issued strict shelter in place rules for the entire state, including specific instructions to churches ignoring the religious liberty hogwash. Quoting from one Indiana news web site:
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
Check his stock trading history.
Brachiator
@C Stars:
On Fox News you have people like Sean Hannity switching from “It’s a hoax!” to “I never said it was a hoax,” and their viewers still tune in. I don’t get it.
MoCA Ace
My wife has a “friend” in the GOP who holds a state elected office. She reported that he was saying in his town (very rural) there was no problem with in-person voting and the local election officials weren’t having any problems keeping people safe. She asked how it went in Milwaukee and he said its their problem if they didn’t prepare well enough.
The Wisconsin republican legislature sees no problem trading lives for another state supreme court seat. They are fucking monsters and I wish COVID19 on all of them.
Myself, I cannot talk to him for fear of what I would certainly say and god help me if I hear him opening his fetid pie hole in my presence.
patroclus
Biden 2020: Vote Joe if You Want to Live
Trump 2020: Making American Graves Again
Biden 2020: He Can Read
Trump 2020: It’s Mourning in America
Jeffro
@trollhattan:
that would indeed be awesome!
CPAC 2020 very nearly took care of this for us. Ah, well…
Major Major Major Major
@patroclus: Bernie Or Bust 2020: Only a Morally Bankrupt Neoliberal Whore Would Vote For a Decent Man Who Wants to Help People
Kent
Shrug. I’m no expert on WI. I grew up in OR and for family reasons went to a religious college in Northern IN (Goshen College) for 1.5 years. My freshman roommate was from…..Whitefish Bay WI? Somewhere up there so I’d go home with him on holidays and we would go to Chicago and Madison for concerts and such. WI seemed like a total breath of fresh air compared to Northern Indiana which was a combination of broken down industrial cities (South Bend, Gary) and more rural areas populated by fundamentalist Christians (my people).
I don’t really know how progressive WI was in the early 80s. There was a Dem governor and at least one Dem Senator. But it was nothing like today in terms of right wing crazy.
MoCA Ace
Probably not the first to mention this but the phrasing in this case offers up so many possibilities! I can think of a multitude of ways and endorse them all.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Navarro isn’t smart enough to make money in the market even when he’s the one gaming the market. Trust me on this one – he was my neighbor for a while.
Jeffro
@Major Major Major Major: how about “test everybody…twice”?
;)
Major Major Major Major
@Jeffro: Depends on what the point of failure is. If the same sample always gets the same result…
patrick II
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s interesting mathematics Mr. Major, but if we test everyone and that test is 95% accurate, we can send 95% of the people back to work with a reduced (but not eliminated) fear of infection. The other 5% can remain at home — and hopefully in self-quarantine for two weeks, taking temperatures daily and then back to work. Even if 90% of those people test negative after that time and we didn’t need them to stay home, it is still better than having everyone stay home, or most everyone go back to work untested. We wil still have screened out many who were ill and allowed 95% of the workforce to go back to work with some semblence of safety and reduced the second wave of disease.
cliosfanboy
@Duane: we’re a 747, big, powerful,but we peaked a couple decades ago.
Sebastian
@Kristine:
Have them try.
Jay
cliosfanboy
@Kent: or the Delmarva agreements about the Chesapeake?
laura
@trollhattan: I dont know if I am emotionally capable of negotiating yet another round of public sector layoffs and contract concessions. Twenty years of tech bust, rising healthcare costs (effectively pay cuts) attacks on pensions, the great bankster getaway of ’08, actual pay cuts, layoffs, employer costs shifted to workers (more pay cuts), pension reform, a decade of wage stagnation, a decade of income inequality on steroids, 2nd and 3rd jobs to cover basic household costs, deaths of despair, workers broken but unable to afford to leave jobs.
Now covid and the devastation of job losses in the near future. Today the weight of speculation is anguishing.
Major Major Major Major
@patrick II: it’s an antibody test to show immunity, not a ‘live’ virus test to show existing infection. It’s irresponsible to use a test with a 17.7% population-wide signal to tell people it’s safe to go outside again. And it’s not so much “interesting math” as “the way we analyze all diagnostic testing.”
catclub
My guess is that there would be a mandate to turn on your phone, and carry it with you at all times. haha Isn’t that what Batman’s Butler did?
Subsole
@Brachiator: Spite. It is literally all spite and sunk cost at this point.
They’re not chasing the high, they are trying to outrun the crash.
Subsole
@Ben Cisco: <bows>
Love the ‘nym, by the way.
chopper
@patrick II:
is it really a smart move to send a bunch of people back to work when over 80% of them are in fact not immune?
Subsole
In my more cynical moments I wonder if they aren’t trying to time the double-dip economic crash/outbreak to cause enough chaos at just the right time to steal the election.
But no, they’re likely just short-sighted assholes who cannot think past the tip of their plumbing, trying to scramble out of the hole they built.
Martin
@chopper: So, this is again a question of whether we are after containment or mitigation. Under mitigation, everyone gets it, but at a slow enough pace to not overwhelm the hospitals. You still get 1% of the public dying, but not 5% when hospitals are overrun. Basically, you try and find that sweet spot between open/closed where you have an R0 of 1, which opens the country as much as the health infrastructure can afford.
The containment strategy avoids that, but you need a strategy to contain, which we haven’t seen yet. This is massive testing, contact tracing, quarantine, along with travel restrictions and the like.
By all accounts, we’re on the mitigation plan, with no real effort to stabilize R0, instead just cycling endlessly between lockdown and open.
Robert Sneddon
That’s not how it works (unless you’re being sarcastic, I don’t do people stuff very well…)
A 95% accurate test doesn’t mean that you can tell WHICH 95 out of a hundred people have acquired immunity to coronavirus, it just means you think someone who passes the test is immune, to a confidence level of 95%. It means one in twenty tests will be wrong and some poor schmuck might get sent off thinking they’re immune when they’re not. It’s also entirely possible a test might be, say, 10% false positive (i.e. it reports antibodies when none are present) and 5% false negative (fails to detect antibodies when they are present). Both error rates have to be taken into account.
The bad news is that it’s unlikely any of the cheap mass-produced tests being promoted in Wired magazine and online, social media etc. work to that high a level of reliability. For anything as high as 95% requires labwork which takes time, personnel, lab bench space, equipment etc. and a lot of that resource is being taken up by testing for virus infections right now.
Obvious Russian Troll
@Kent: I’m in Toronto now, but I moved to Madison in 1989. Republican Tommy Thompson was already governor by then, and Republican Scott Klug won District 2’s seat in the House in 1990 and held it for most of the nineties. That’s the district which includes Madison and which Tammy Baldwin won before she went into the Senate.
Upthread someone pointed out that Joseph McCarthy was from Wisconsin–whichhas really been a purple state for a long, long time.
jl
@chopper: Problem with waiting until we have herd immunity is that, with a shut down, we wait forever, or for at least year to 19 months, hoping we get a vaccine by then. Can economy and human psychology bear that burden?
I think several countries (South Korea, Taiwan, maybe Japan) show that getting society running again, even if only maybe 70 percent, going to work, small gatherings, outdoor activities, can be done without herd immunity.
Going to take testing and strong contact tracing and quarantine programs, changes in health and safety regs and laws, several strong early warning surveillance systems. And probably some kind of mask wearing program.
As other commenters have noted, a big problems is that US public infrastructure of various kinds has been so gutted, hard to imagine how it can happen in time for a reopening to work well within a couple of months. From Newsom’s press conferences, I think CA has a shot in a few weeks to start a gradual but steady reopening. I don’t know where else.
But, I think it can be done. Check out Scott Gottlieb, Tom Frieden, Farzad Mostashari on twitter and their references.
I think a lot of discussion on social media overinterprets preliminary research results. I’ve seen a mathematical research paper saying that contract tracking can’t work with covid-19. But the problem is that what they mean by ‘contract tracing’ is not defined in English and what the really mean is buried in the equations, and it is not what has been done, certainly not what California did in the first stages of the outbreak. You don’t want to make the economist’s mistake of favoring a mathematical model over what you see in reality, ‘Maybe it works in reality, but it will never work in theory.’
We have several models of what works in five or six different countries. You can sit there and whine that they can’t keep up (well, they have so far, compare them to us or Italy), you can whine that the US is essentially different. Or, you can look over how other places have done it, and figure out how to adapt their collective success to the US.
IMHO, and experts with lots of practical experience are my references. Or you can search youtubes for old newsreels of that the US used to be able to do in terms of TB, meningitis outbreaks, etc, and see what the US used to be able to do for big outbreaks of disease, some of which have some control problems that have a lot in common with covid-19, like lots of asymptomatic transmission, high transmission rates, and quick very bad health consequences.
Uncle Cosmo
@Major Major Major Major: Lucky you. Not an option for me. Over the long years I’ve whanged my head on so many hard-edged & unyielding surfaces while driving, standing up, or falling down a flight of stairs that if I lost all my hair I’d look like a “Newcomer” extra on the set of Alien Nation.
jl
@Robert Sneddon: I think you are correct that the test characteristics of some of the new tests are being oversold. Whether that is problem depends on how they are used. What you and other commenter talk about are big problems mainly I think for real time testing needed for screening (say, getting into office building) contact tracing, so a real obstacle for opening up from shut down if it just relies on testing. Edit: Problem is that in low prevalence setting, which is needed to keep potential outbreak small enough to handle, false positives can swamp everything else).
Not so much for clinical work (since you can combine test info with other patient info) or surveillance (since for estimating prevalence, can correct for imperfect tests)
But, yeah, I agree, shouldn’t think ‘test’ is that magic word for everything. There will be some real problems to overcome. Edit: but you are right, no reason to give up hope or be defeatist either.
Major Major Major Major
@Uncle Cosmo: I’m curious to learn what dings and dents I didn’t know about!
jl
@jl: In my comment, ‘you’ means ‘people’ not particular commenter. Sorry, I get lazy at typing and like three letters better than more.
jl
Lucky thing in SF Bay, the combination of California’s contact tracking and self-quarantine, with very early shut down, meant that the whole region didn’t get caught up in the same general exponential explosive growth stage of the epidemic. Was able to keep things more like a few separate outbreaks with varying degrees of severity that could be addressed to some extent separately, with slightly different methods.
If you look at the epidemic curve and deaths over time, looks more like a bad outbreak that a epidemic swinging up in explosive expansion that looks the same everywhere and that is impossible to stop until over the peak, all you can do is squish it down somewhat by everyone hiding at home. I hope that pays big dividends in future in gradually lifting shut down sooner, with fewer and smaller risks. But, with this kind of thing, we’ll just have to see how things develop in real time, and adjust, sadly.
J R in WV
@catclub:
As if the whole US has continuous cell network coverage. It does not, will not ever. Even in some urban environments the topography creates severe limitations on cell network coverage.
Driving on highways in high relief topography even with cell towers intended to provide uniform coverage to those highways, your connectivity varies from OK to good, to non-existent as you drive along the interstate.
We do not have cell network coverage at our home, no one in the neighborhood does. Some folks use their wi-fi linked to a Sat-based internet connection to access the internet with their cell phones, but it’s like talking to someone on the Moon, or on the other side of the planet, even if they’re actually next door.
Using it to allow people out of quarantine is not going to work in the mountains.
I don’t even know where my cell phone it right now. But it still has a battery charge, because it is turned off… I turn it on when I have connectivity and need to call someone, otherwise it’s turned off.
Also, there is no voice mail box set up. I don’t want your messages.
Uncle Cosmo
@Major Major Major Major: Well fuck, they broke it off just before my all-time favorite verse:
Uncle Cosmo
@realbtl: How long did they lay in wait for their councilcritters before they figgered out warn’t no one comin’ out? Hours? Days?
Uncle Cosmo
@catclub: I thought it went Tip the veal & try your waitress….
Major Major Major Major
@J R in WV:
Oh, you folks have Internet? Well then good news! You and the rest of the neighborhood still have their whereabouts tracked constantly by advertisers. No contact-tracing limitations there.
Uncle Cosmo
@Major Major Major Major: Initially I took umbrage at your comment – well, penumbrage anyway – until it dawned on me you were referring to the dings & dents on your own head.
There’s one I remember in rather lurid detail, from 50 years ago: I was a junior at Johns Hopkins waiting in the student union for a Moratorium (!) meeting to start. Went into the men’s room & after washing up tossed the paper towel at the wastebasket under the dispenser, & missed. Bent over to pick up the towel, stuffed it into the basket, stood up – & slammed the crown of my head against an edge of the steel dispenser.
When I touched the area my fingers came back bloody. So I walked – not to the student health services, who I didn’t trust to put on a bandaid properly, but to the ER at the USPHS hospital across Wyman Park Drive.
The doctor looked at it & said, What do you want me to do?
I replied, Does it need stitches?
Do you want stitches? I’ll have to shave your head.
Um… Not particularly.
Then no, it doesn’t.
We left it at that. But I am amorally certain that there is a Papiertuchspendertal**, a canyon the size (& possibly the color) of Valles Marineris, lurking up there, just waiting to see the light of day from under the thinning shards of whitened hair….
**Someone page Amir Khalid, he’ll have fun with that one.
/tmi
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
Actually not. We are amused every day to see where Google thinks we are.
Today the Google thinks I am in Mesa, WA, which is a very long way from our location in SW W Va. We get western NY state, Mississippi, Texas, all over the country. Very seldom do they place us in WV, maybe once in the past year…
Not sure exactly why, I have lots of things choked off, there’s a local network involved, a VPN (I think) etc. But if they place us 2,500 miles, 3/4 of a continent, away from our current location, that’s good by me!!
Amir Khalid
@Uncle Cosmo:
That is indeed delightful.
Brantl
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Then the dick would be in the back of the pants, and with ReThugs, it’s always in the FRONT.
Misterpuff
@MattF: When Trump discovers that the Donald has no clothes, sad.
ballerat
@Kent: What happened is lots of older white people, latent racism, Fox News and hate radio; resulting in the ascendancy of the politics of resentment and entitlement. White people reaction after 9/11 seemed to be a catalyst to the tipping point.
ballerat
@Kent: When Walker and the Wisconsin R’s nixed the federal money for a high-speed train from Chicago to Minneapolis via Madison, I had thought it was entirely due to the usual conservative bigoted terror of mass transit that enables (in their minds anyways) the migration of Those People to places where they don’t want them.
But I can see now Walker et al. had more powerful reasons to turn away a billion bucks. It would have given Madison an enormous boost to be that major midpoint liberal metropolis.
Well not Walker. He was too fucking stupid to see that far ahead. But the Kochs, yes.