Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself. We’re allowed to grow past that.

The lights are all blinking red.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Bark louder, little dog.

Fuck that bum, let’s go Joe!

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

This blog will pay for itself.

I really should read my own blog.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

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

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

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / Concerning the Pandemic : Some Longer Reads

Concerning the Pandemic : Some Longer Reads

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An epidemiologist warns:

 


Remember, it was a group of Saudi ‘guerilla warriors’ who decided that the best way to bring down America was to demonstrate its weakness by destroying its most sacred edifice. As it turned out, the World Trade Center was not that, but …

Saudi authorities are racing to contain an outbreak of coronavirus in the Islamic holy city of Mecca, where crowded slums and labor camps have accelerated the spread even with much of the country under a 24-hour curfew.

The total number of coronavirus cases reported in Mecca, home to 2 million people, reached 1,050 on Monday compared to 1,422 in the capital of Riyadh, a city more than three times the size. Mecca’s large number of undocumented immigrants and cramped housing for migrant workers have made it more difficult to slow the infection rate.

In late March, after five Mecca-based employees of Saudi Binladin Group, one of the kingdom’s biggest construction companies tested positive, authorities locked down housing for 8,000 laborers and suspended work on the expansion of the grand mosque, Islam’s holiest site, according to a document seen by Bloomberg. Some workers were placed in hotel quarantine, the document showed. The company did not respond to a request for comment. It was unclear if the camp remained in lockdown.

Shielding Mecca from a pandemic that’s overwhelmed countries like Italy and the United States is crucial for Saudi Arabia. That’s partly because of the city’s significance to the world’s Muslims, but also because the royal family grounds its rule in guardianship of the birthplace of Islam. Millions of Muslim pilgrims visit Mecca each year; King Salman’s official title is “custodian of the two holy mosques.”

The government is conscious that the virus sweeping Mecca would “call into question its responsibility in the protection of those spaces, which is part of the legitimacy of the country itself,” said Yasmine Farouk, a visiting fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is sensitive.”…

The outbreak underlines a nationwide issue of soaring cases among foreign residents. Foreigners make up about a third of the Saudi population but account for 70% to 80% of new cases recently, according to the health ministry — a rate that’s sparked debate about their role in society.

Some Saudis have attacked foreigners, accusing them of price-gouging, fear-mongering and deliberately spreading infection. Others say that the solution lies in better living conditions for the blue collar foreigners who underpin daily life, driving garbage trucks and cleaning streets. Saudi novelist Mohammed Alwan recently wrote on Twitter that he hopes authorities will create “humane requirements for workers’ housing” after the pandemic…

 


On the third Friday of January a silent and stealthy killer was creeping across the world. Passing from person to person and borne on ships and planes, the coronavirus was already leaving a trail of bodies.

The virus had spread from China to six countries and was almost certainly in many others. Sensing the coming danger, the British government briefly went into wartime mode that day, holding a meeting of Cobra, its national crisis committee.

But it took just an hour that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the coronavirus threat. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out of Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.

This was despite the publication that day of an alarming study by Chinese doctors in the medical journal, The Lancet. It assessed the lethal potential of the virus, for the first time suggesting it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people.

Unusually, Boris Johnson had been absent from Cobra. The committee — which includes ministers, intelligence chiefs and military generals — gathers at moments of great peril such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other threats to the nation and is normally chaired by the prime minister…

It was a big day for Johnson and there was a triumphal mood in Downing Street because the withdrawal treaty from the European Union was being signed in the late afternoon. It could have been the defining moment of his premiership — but that was before the world changed…

It would not be until March 2 — another five weeks — that Johnson would attend a Cobra meeting about the coronavirus. But by then it was almost certainly too late. The virus had sneaked into our airports, our trains, our workplaces and our homes. Britain was on course for one of the worst infections of the most deadly virus to have hit the world in more than a century.
Last week, a senior adviser to Downing Street broke ranks and blamed the weeks of complacency on a failure of leadership in cabinet. In particular, the prime minister was singled out.

“There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there,” the adviser said. “And what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.”

One day there will inevitably be an inquiry into the lack of preparations during those “lost” five weeks from January 24. There will be questions about when politicians understood the severity of the threat, what the scientists told them and why so little was done to equip the National Health Service for the coming crisis. It will be the politicians who will face the most intense scrutiny.

Among the key points likely to be explored will be why it took so long to recognise an urgent need for a massive boost in supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers; ventilators to treat acute respiratory symptoms; and tests to detect the infection.

Any inquiry may also ask whether the government’s failure to get to grips with the scale of the crisis in those early days had the knock-on effect of the national lockdown being introduced days or even weeks too late, causing many thousands more unnecessary deaths.

An investigation has talked to scientists, academics, doctors, emergency planners, public officials and politicians about the root of the crisis and whether the government should have known sooner and acted more swiftly to kick-start the Whitehall machine and put the NHS onto a war footing.

They told us that, contrary to the official line, Britain was in a poor state of readiness for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and gone out of date after becoming a low priority in the years of austerity cuts. The training to prepare key workers for a pandemic had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit…

By February 26, there were 13 known cases in the UK. That day — almost four weeks before a full lockdown would be announced — ministers were warned through another advisory committee that the country was facing a catastrophic loss of life unless drastic action was taken. Having been thwarted from sounding the alarm, Edmunds and his team presented their latest “worst scenario” predictions to the scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling (SPI-M) which directly advises the country’s scientific decision-makers on Sage.

It warned that 27 million people could be infected and 220,000 intensive care beds would be needed if no action were taken to reduce infection rates. The predicted death toll was 380,000. Edmunds’s colleague Nick Davies, who led the research, says the report emphasised the urgent need for a lockdown almost four weeks before it was imposed.

The team modelled the effects of a 12-week lockdown involving school and work closures, shielding the elderly, social distancing and self-isolation. It estimated this would delay the impact of the pandemic but there still might be 280,000 deaths over the year…

Reader Interactions

27Comments

  1. 1.

    WaterGirl

    Anne Laurie, should I pull BG’s culture post that’s scheduled for 5pm?  Maybe for half an hour

    edit: They are also very different from each other, so maybe it doesn’t matter?  Your call.

  2. 2.

    Brachiator

    Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears

    The Times UK is usually a reliable supporter of the Tory government, and of Boris Johnson. It will be interesting to see if the other conservative propaganda organs, uh, I mean, newspapers start to criticize Johnson.  The Sun UK has a headline story about people in the park flouting lock down orders, a link to a column titled “Don’t Blame Boris,” and a larger headline about the disappearance of virus whistleblowers in China.

    Meanwhile, the last I read, the UK is still not counting nursing home deaths as Corona Virus fatalities, and NHS staff still don’t have enough protective gear.

    The situation in Saudi Arabia is challenging:

    The outbreak underlines a nationwide issue of soaring cases among foreign residents. Foreigners make up about a third of the Saudi population but account for 70% to 80% of new cases recently, according to the health ministry — a rate that’s sparked debate about their role in society.

    Will the Saudis spend a significant amount of their wealth to protect foreigners?

  3. 3.

    Anne Laurie

    @WaterGirl: Nah, they are very different posts… I knew BGinCH’s post was due soon, but I wanted this available while people have the spare time to read more than a tweet.

  5. 5.

    Anne Laurie

    @Brachiator: Will the Saudis spend a significant amount of their wealth to protect foreigners?

    My cynical guess, based on what little I’ve seen so far, is that they’ll ship foreigners back where they came from, posthaste.  There were some tweets, early in the outbreak, about Pakistani / Filipino workers being dumped at their ‘home’ airports, sometimes without their passports much less other possessions, and left to cope as best they or their distant governments could manage.

    They’d probably be a little more subtle for cases involving ‘important’ countries — Americans & Europeans — but I still wouldn’t have wanted to be a non-Saudi in the Kingdom by mid-March.

  7. 7.

    Hoodie

    @Brachiator: There is going to be a furious effort by conservatives to rewrite history.   The one remaining pillar of the conservative myth is that they are the only ones who can protect us from dark forces, and this is an existential threat to that.  Bush was able to get away with his pre 9/11 failures, but it’s much more clear that these guys new what was coming but did nothing because they’re (1) lazy; (2) incompetent and (3) cheap and greedy.  They didn’t want to have to kick in for the big-government socialism this thing requires.  Even now, their responses entail a lot of graft directed towards their cronies, while they nickel and dime state governments because they are loath to set up a situation in which people can see what a competent federal government can deliver.

    Was corresponding today with a colleague about one of these “open up” groups today, as we both happen to know a lawyer that represents one of these alleged “grass roots” groups.  He’s from a firm that is run by Reince Priebus and tied to big midwestern money like the Kochs and really has no local prominence.  You can guess who is paying for that astroturf.  I think the whole thing is to create an excuse for Trump where he will claim “the economy would have been great except for all these Dem governors who shut everything down!”  They really don’t want to open anything, they’re just posturing and they can easily find a bunch of dimwit cosplayers to participate in rallies and marches.

  8. 8.

    Anne Laurie

    I should add (missed the comment window) that it would be much more difficult for the Saudi government to dump / disown Muslim pilgrims… which I suspect has much to do with the commendably proactive attitude towards discouraging pious visitors the kingdom has demonstrated, especially since Iran got hit so hard after (allegedly) those Chinese businessmen introduced the pandemic to their sacred sites!

  9. 9.

    Brachiator

    @Hoodie:

    There is going to be a furious effort by conservatives to rewrite history. The one remaining pillar of the conservative myth is that they are the only ones who can protect us from dark forces, and this is an existential threat to that.

    I think that something else is at play here. Conservatives are not even pretending to care about conservative myths. They simply declare that Trump has made America great again by revving up the economy, lowering unemployment and sticking it to our Muslim enemies.

    Conservatives are indeed re-writing recent history, but they are doing this by returning to the early false claims that the pandemic was a hoax or was deliberately built up to cause panic. Liberty and the Second Amendment are more important than life.  And if a few more people die along the way, well, that’s just a part of life.

    I’ve recently read some conservative pundits who give Trump a solid B for handling the pandemic. They are uncomfortable with and downplay his rhetorical excess, but otherwise give him credit for doing … something. They are always weak on this, but insist on supporting him.

    Trump has no morals, no values, and cannot be said to have really done much to save anyone or to preserve anything. Trump’s main concern is that he look good and continue to be loved and admired as president. He was bored with the pandemic and desperate to see the stock markets rise again. So he threw his supporters a bone. And his supporters and conservatives have signed on to this.

    These are strange times. Trump doesn’t care about conservative philosophy.  He doesn’t even know what philosophy is. But his appeal is to smug, angry, ignorant white men and women who truly believe that the myth of America is that they deserve everything they want, and no one else deserves anything.

  10. 10.

    rikyrah

    @Hoodie:

    Folks are bringing receipts.

    Who could have known?

    The Obama Administration knew.

     

    The 60 Minutes slapdown of Navarro showed that not only did 44 know, but even Shrub knew ?

     

    That they had the LITERAL PLAYBOOK FOR WHAT TO DO IN A POSSIBLE PANDEMIC

     

    And, they didn’t use it, cause the Black man put it together.??

     

    No. Not with 30+thousand Americans dead…no, they will not get to rewrite this.

  11. 11.

    Dave

    @Hoodie: Conservatives despite being so completely fear driven prove time and time again they are terrible at actually assessing risk.

    Climate change, rampant wealth inequality, COVID-19, etc etc dismiss out of hand but Hispanic people coming to pick our vegetables and fruits and non-existent WMD’s well those are civilizational threats for some damned reason.

    They are terrible as a group at assessing and responding to risk and yet they are the serious national security party.

    We live in the dumb future.

  12. 12.

    cmorenc

    We need to be concerned about how many shut-down small-business owners across the land are feeling intense practical pressure to bend toward the view that the cost to society of the continuing the restrictions much longer outweighs the benefits, coupled with buying the notions that the high % of folks who are asymptomatic + the actual impact of COV isn’t worse than the flu, + that we can identify and segregate those most at lethal risk.  I talked with a neighbor today who owns a retail business which is getting crushed and has found the supposed financial “help” to such businesses was forbiddingly difficult to get in practice.  He was skeptically hostile a couple of years ago to the Trump Administration over how the wealthy and big businesses overwhelmingly got the benefit of the big tax legislation, and from other things he has said, near-certainly was a Clinton voter in 2016.  But now, I could tell that the economic / situational pressure was starting to sharply bend him toward wanting the economy re-opened ASAP and buying the sorts of notions the GOP is trying to peddle about cure worse than the disease, etc.

  13. 13.

    Brachiator

    @Dave:

    Conservatives despite being so completely fear driven prove time and time again they are terrible at actually assessing risk.

    Conservatives, especially libertarians, only understand risk as a philosophical concept. They talk about being tough enough to accept risk, but what they really mean is that they believe that they are magically immune to harm and can perfectly figure out how to protect themselves from harm.

    So, they believe that polluted water will never endanger their families. Presumably, they will always be rich enough to live where they can get pure, clean water. And they don’t need seat belt laws because they never get involved in accidents.

    Of course, many of the people who most vehemently believe this have died from poisoned water or in car crashes. So they are not around to admit how wrong they were.

  14. 14.

    lgerard

    Pointed question

     

    #FloridaMorons

    If you could end Covid-19 by sacrificing a part of the United States, which state would you choose and why Florida?

  15. 15.

    Ohio Mom

    I check the NYT Corona map and graphs for Ohio every day. For most of April, our new cases were holding steady at just under 500 per day; then, four days ago, they started shooting up. Yesterday, we broke 1,000.

    DeWine says we’re going to start opening things up in twelve days, May 1st.

    He can open up whatever he wants but I’m not going. I’m pissed at us abandoning the science.

  16. 16.

    Sloane Ranger

    Here in the UK I think at least some people are beginning to see the light. I was talking to some friends of mine, who I believe, from things they’ve let drop, voted Tory at the last election a couple of weeks ago and they were telling me that they thought Boris and gang were handling the crisis well. I said I thought that the lockdown was the right thing to do but we had wasted 4-6 weeks.

    They phoned me today and, during the conversation, they complained about the broken promises on delivery of testing and PPE and said there needed to be an enquiry once this is over.

    There is more joy in heaven…

  17. 17.

    Another Scott

    @cmorenc:

    Reuters:

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. lawmakers are near agreement on approving extra money to help small businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic and could seal a deal as early as Sunday, congressional and Trump administration officials said.

    [ image ]

    “I think we’re very close to a deal today and I’m hopeful we can get that done,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNN.

    Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer also said he hoped an agreement with Republicans could be reached as early as Sunday evening. Schumer cautioned, however, that both sides had a few more issues to deal with.

    An agreement would end a stalemate over Republican President Donald Trump’s request to add $250 billion to a small-business loan program. Congress established the program last month as part of a $2.3 trillion coronavirus economic relief plan, but it has already run out of money.

    Senate Republicans and Mnuchin had a conference call on Sunday afternoon, said a senior Republican aide, who said Trump also joined the call.

    Democratic leaders want more money for small businesses but with additional safeguards to ensure that credit is reaching businesses in underserved communities. They also sought more funds for state and local governments and hospitals, as well as food aid for the poor.

    Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Mnuchin told senators on the call that additional funding that Democrats had sought for state and local governments or food stamps would not be in the package

    “The president has heard from governors and he’s prepared to discuss that in the next bill,” Mnuchin told CNN. Congress plans to take up another major coronavirus relief measure after the small-business fund is replenished.

    Separately, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and Republican Bill Cassidy said on Sunday they would formally introduce legislation when the Senate reconvenes to create a $500 billion fund to help state and local governments respond to the crisis.

    […]

    (Emphasis added.)

    Moscow Mitch is determined to drag the funding that the states, etc., need out as long as possible, while continuing to dump money in the business funds. I wonder why??!!?

    Grrr…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  18. 18.

    Tenar Arha

    @cmorenc: I don’t know what to tell people who are wavering like that. I understand why they’d grasp at straws, but I also don’t think they’re rational enough to imagine being sued into bankruptcy by the first customer or employee who dies from their choices.

    The unfortunate truth is they’ll not only have problems keeping their employees safe, but they won’t be able to protect their customers,  and/or won’t actually have enough business to stay in business. They’ll die a death by a thousand cuts, instead of a sudden stop.

    Their best hope is they might be able to suspend their business wo [their business] dying, & recover from that by the grace of House Democrats convincing the GOP to act in their own best interests. (We can only dream).

     

    ETA Anyway they’d be better off calling all their Reps to demand rent & mortgage freezes, as well as state $$ & testing testing testing & PPE for everyone working hospitals or cleaning anything.

  21. 21.

    BR

    @cmorenc:

    Someone needs to remind folks like that about how restaurants and movie theaters (which we have data for) had dropped something like 90% in a lot of places *before* stay at home orders were issued.  So this is people voting with their feet.  They will not be rushing to stores unless they feel it’s safe, and so we need to do what will *actually* make it safe, not just declare mission accomplished and “reopen the economy”, whatever that means.  The economy is made up of people and their individual economic decisions as much as it is made of governmental actions — something free market capitalists have long praised about free markets.  People will vote with their feet.

  22. 22.

    J R in WV

    @Ian R:

    BoJo really is just a better-educated Trump, isn’t he?

    Perhaps, but I would rather say, more well-spoken, as opposed to better educated. If BoJo is better educated, he is reluctant to show that, and would rather just beat a drum, politely…

  23. 23.

    Duane

    @BR: If employees are forced back to work without proper testing and PPEs then boycott those businesses. It would be a good counter-protest to ending the stay at home orders too soon.

  24. 24.

    Jinchi

    @Ohio Mom: For most of April, our new cases were holding steady at just under 500 per day; then, four days ago, they started shooting up.

    I noticed that too. Did something happen about 2 weeks ago? Or have they changed their testing regime?

  25. 25.

    ziggy

    @Jinchi: I notice the same thing is happening in WA state unfortunately. We’ve been plateaued for quite a while, now we are trending upwards! At least the percentage of positive results in the testing is not going up, but still plateaued at about 9%.

    It feels to me like there is a lot of “coronavirus fatigue” here. The stores are starting to get a lot busier, with long lines. Traffic is heavier. Some people that used to wear a mask have given it up. It doesn’t seem like we are making progress towards getting the levels down to a point we can safely open though.

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