Axios is reiterating what I said last week. We wasted a season:
America spent the spring building a bridge to August, spending trillions and shutting down major parts of society. The expanse was to be a bent coronavirus curve, and the other side some semblance of normal, where kids would go to school and their parents to work.
The bottom line: We blew it, building a pier instead.
There will be books written about America’s lost five months of 2020, but here’s what we know:
We blew testing…
We blew schools…
We blew economics…
We blew public health…
We blew goodwill….
The objective of sheltering in place for the spring was two fold. First, give the hospitals a chance to not get slammed in the first wave. That mostly worked everywhere except Metro-New York City. We also bought time for learning and development to happen. We know a whole lot more about how to clinically approach severe COVID with better tools now than in March.
The second objective was to buy time to moblize other resources that could successfully suppress and minimize viral spread with tools that are more precise and less costly than what we had to do in the spring. We failed at that.
Harris County + #Houston together can contact trace 600 COVID patients a day.
But the daily average is 1,500+.
This means tracers often miss a critical window to warn potentially pre-symptomatic COVID carriers to isolate away from family and coworkers. ➡️https://t.co/CDjTSrHSwc— Zach Despart?️ (@zachdespart) July 19, 2020
If there are 900+ people a day who are not being contact traced, that invites either massive community spread or necessitates wide spread shut-downs again until the number of new cases per day are back within the capacity to aggressively, quickly and comprehensively contact trace and isolate anyone who was likely to have been exposed to an individual. Contact tracing is a combination of public resources which, if they are state or locally funded, extremely scarce and social behavior. It is far easier to contact trace someone who walked to a mail box, drove to the store for a once a week 30 minute in and out and then stayed home then someone who ha a full and active social life. Precise tools get overwhelmed with high prevalence and increasing social mobility so the only tools left are either riding things out with massive death and suffering OR blunt tools.
My wife and I spent most of the weekend talking about the schools. Our school system had planned initially on a hybrid model and then switched to a full remote model for at least the first quarter. Duke University is still planning on having students on campus in under a month. The NFL is meandering towards an attempt to start training camps. All of this is happening in the context of significant community spread and a haphazard policy response.
The question being asked right now is “When can we do X?”
The question that we should be asking and solving for is: “What are the conditions needed to do X, and what do we need to do now to make those conditions happen?”
If we want kids in school, if we want students on campus, if we want live sports, then we need to clamp down on community spread. That means massive increases in testing. That means massive expansion of PPE distribution. That means aggressive and prompt contact tracing. That means making isolation a non-ruinous proposition for working families. That means a ton of hard work. But the choice is either doing the hard work to get what we want, or not doing the hard work, seeing massive suffering and not getting what we want.
JPL
This is just depressing and I can be personally responsible and follow the guidelines, but we need leadership at the top for real change to occur.
Chief Oshkosh
By and large, Americans did their job in March and April. The Trump administration didn’t do its job. It utterly failed us, literally on every level. It continues to fail us and it will not get better, only worse.
Sobering thoughts run through my mind…
bbleh
Worth noting that “quickly” is a major qualification for testing and tracing. Right now in my experience and from what I’ve read, testing is taking on the order of a WEEK to return results. That’s not nearly fast enough for successful suppression, unless we decide that tests are superfluous and merely TAKING a test is enough for contacts to isolate and get tested themselves (which in turn sharply drives up the number of tests required).
Not developing or supporting a national testing infrastructure capable of rapid turnaround is one of the key ways the Trump administration has bungled the US response.
Zinsky
What so many Americans don’t realize is that it didn’t have to be this way. An intelligent President would have understood the potential of the nascent novel coronavirus identified in Wuhan China in December of 2019 in his PDBs and acted accordingly – ensuring adequate stockpiles of PPE; ordering huge quantities of test kits; establishing quarantine protocols for travelers; developing contact tracing protocols and hiring tracers. Trump did none of these things. Even his “China travel ban” he constantly touts, was full of holes. COVID 19 could have been contained to a small outbreak like SARS I was in the early 2000s. Instead, due to the stupidity and foolishness of Trump and his minions, we have widespread and uncontrolled community infections which will take years to resolve.
Ryan
@bbleh: I agree. However, if one gets a test, shouldn’t the procedure be to isolate until results come back, unlike what a Rand Paul would do?
The Thin Black Duke
And the cherry on this shit sundae is that nothing resembling a rational plan of action will happen until Joe Biden is sworn in as president, so things are only going to get worse the next four months.
David Anderson
@bbleh: Yep, this Lancet paper makes that point very clearly.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30157-2/fulltext
Speed matters
David Anderson
@Ryan: Ideally people who think that they should be tested should be isolated at the moment they realize they should be tested until they get a clean result back.
Right now, that is probably a seven to ten day window for most people who are not showing up to the ER in shitty shape. Not many people can afford to take time off for what is still likely to be a negative test.
Spanky
@The Thin Black Duke: Six months. And the last 2 with lame duck Trump are gonna be “beautiful”.
Cheryl Rofer
Echoing what others have said, I have a lot of trouble with the “we blew it” formulation.
Trump blew it. The anti-maskers blew it. The “open the bars” crowd blew it. And they blew it for all of us.
It may be my age and the memory of being lined up, no questions asked, in school for immunizations. The idea that the public health office was where you went for mandatory syphilis testing before you could get married. The idea that public health benefits all of us.
Even now, very few are saying “It’s your civic duty to wear a mask and stay the hell out of groups.” Rather, the public health community is slithering around trying to figure out if camo-styled masks will encourage men to wear them. Meanwhile, the anti-maskers are hawking “masks” made of open fabrics that will stop maybe 1% of the bad stuff. Public healthers should just say those people are going to prolong the bad times and cause more deaths.
Edited for clarity
Gin & Tonic
@bbleh: I mentioned before, that last month my son and his wife felt ill and were concerned. Went out, got tested (swabbed), had results in under 8 hours sent to them by e-mail.
They live in Ukraine. If Ukraine can do that and the USofA can’t, I don’t have much to add…
Richard Guhl
This means, first and foremost, getting everyone to wear the damn mask. But we’re surrounded by willful toddlers who refuse.
SiubhanDuinne
@The Thin Black Duke:
He will take the Oath of Office in six months, two hours, and 40 minutes.
SiubhanDuinne
@Gin & Tonic:
I hope they are both better now.
Brachiator
@Chief Oshkosh:
Sadly true. State governors are forced to work around Trump’s attempts to undermine their efforts. This is not good, not good at all.
Mathguy
@Cheryl Rofer:
The whole notion of civic duty has gone out the window with the IGMFY culture of the GOP. I’m astounded by the complacency and sheer stupidity of it all. If you’ve been baking in an oven of RW propaganda for the last 30-40 years, it’s inevitable.
Amir Khalid
@Ryan:
That is indeed the proper procedure.
p.a.
@SiubhanDuinne: Joe & his people will find the place physically trashed. What they lied abt the Clinton & Obama people doing is what they will actually do.
The US gvt is already figuratively trashed by the reign of nincompoops or actual unfilled positions. And once the orange shitstain is gone there are the 4 years of appointments of sappers and idiots that will still be in place unless/until the admin can get them out.
Just One More Canuck
@The Thin Black Duke: especially so since Trump is actively trying to cut funding for testing
Ohio Mom
I think we all expect Biden to hit the ground running but even so, it will take a while for things to fully ramp up.
For one completely made-up example, let’s say Biden announces a program to send every resident a set of masks every two weeks (which is something some other countries do). The masks have to be procured (which means Congress has to approve this expenditure), the mailing list developed, the packages delivered. Rinse and repeat. That won’t happen overnight.
I’ve been saying this will be a lost year. Maybe longer, when you add in the economic devastation that people are going to have to dig themselves out of. This will reverberate for a long, long time for most of us.
Patricia Kayden
David C
@Cheryl Rofer: Agree. For mask wearing, there’s a difference between “blowing it” (no clear message from leaders about wearing masks now) and making a mistake because you don’t have enough data to draw a conclusion. We modeled SARS-CoV-2 on SARS and MERS, and what little data we had at the time.
The issue with masks back then was how well they would protects the wearer, but it ended up that asymptomatic and presymptomatic spread was happening with SARS-CoV-2 and that masking could help prevent droplet dispersal from an infected individual. We knew that we were operating in a bit of an infectious disease fog and that we would need to change course in light of more data. At the time there was also a cost to a run on supplies.
For the rise in cases in May and June, there’s no excuse. There were enough data in the rest of the world to conclude that COVID-19 would not be a seasonal disease.
Marcopolo
This entire timeline sucks. The only thing that gives me the slightest bit of joy (and it is of the schadenfreude kind) is seeing Trump whine & moan about not being able to hold rallies & not being able to hold his RNC and knowing he is totally responsible for it. As for my household, with an octogenarian mom, we plan to be following strict quarantine protocols for the rest of the year and maybe through, what, Valentines Day, St. Patrick’s Day. Guess it depends on how quickly they finish with developing and ramping up production of the vaccine.
bbleh
@Ryan: @David Anderson: @Amir Khalid: Anyone who GETS TESTED, or even SUSPECTS they’re positive, definitely SHOULD self-quarantine until and unless their results are negative. But what I was talking specifically about was “contacts” of people who get tested. Without rapid testing, ALL contacts of a POTENTIALLY infected person SHOULD self-quarantine and get tested, which greatly increases both the testing burden and the general economic burden, but with rapid testing, only contacts of an ACTUALLY infected person need do so. And the unfortunate fact is, given the ambiguities under current conditions, many people are waiting until they get their test results to inform their contacts, and/or contacts are waiting until they hear the results before isolating themselves or getting tested, both of which lead to more disease spread. So we’re left with the worst of all worlds: more disease spread, greater testing burden, and worse economic impact.
Nicole
@Cheryl Rofer:
I’m so tired of living in a society built around coddling the feelings of white men.
WaPo has an article today about the behavior of customers at a small N.Ca shop over masks:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/18/covid-pandemic-store-clerk-north-carolina/?arc404=true&utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most
There is something deeply wrong in a sizable portion of the nation.
A Ghost to Most
This doesn’t end even if t* does leave office in January. His followers will just pick another fascist leader and carry on. Can you say Tom Cotton?
Bobby Thomson
@The Thin Black Duke:
the next six months. Why does everyone forget that regardless of the election results, Trump is still president until January 20, 2021?
Jeffro
@Cheryl Rofer:
Thank you. It really can’t be said often enough (especially since 75% or more of the country is on board with doing the right things) – it is trumpov and his ignorant base holding the country back here.
This half-assed sorta testing, sorta tracing, sorta masking thing is a waste of time. Let’s have a national ramp-up on PPE production, hire every out-of-work waiter/waitress/etc as a contact tracer, put in a national mask mandate, and get going here.
schrodingers_cat
We didn’t screw up the man in WH and his Republican cronies did.
Booger
@Ohio Mom: Don’t need a mailing list. Mail them ECRLOT…carrier get a big box of them, one pack to each mailing address on the route, no addressing.
Amir Khalid
@Ohio Mom:
Biden’s transition team is almost certainly not going to get the benefit of a proper handover, no thanks to the Trump side’s incompetence, malice, and need to hide incriminating evidence — of which there will shirley be plenty. I think the Trump White House has already missed some transition prep deadlines. So that’s another thing that will slow them down.
Danielx
@JPL:
What is this “leadership” of which you speak?
Kattails
@Cheryl Rofer: Thank you for this. (Thanks, also, to David of course!) It was easy to see this shitstorm coming back in February and in mid-March we closed down the store I was working in. I wear a mask everywhere, stay at home, keep my hands clean, wear gloves and change them out going from store to store. Mask wearing up here is pretty good but not universal. I know one friend’s son-in-law who believes this is a hoax, they have two young children. I know him, he’s the poster boy for entitled white male. Yes, please drop that “we” business. So many of us have made the sacrifice and the arrogant children have kicked over the sand castle. I am getting really hostile.
Circumstances have made it possible for me to stay at home, so far, without losing everything I’ve worked for, and the extra funds voted by Congress have been enormously helpful with that. Once those funds are gone things are going to get dicey; even though the state has appropriated funds to extend unemployment into December, between that and my small SS check it won’t be enough. I’m working on figuring out what I might be able to do from home that could bring in enough money to take over from the job if need be.
Kay noted, and it’s certainly true for me, that those Congressional funds have been going right back into the economy, & I need to write to my Senators and let them know that. I’ve kept the car repaired, bought a few things online, trying to support small businesses. I just come online every day and see what’s going on and want to punch people. Can’t help but feel the cops are pepper-spraying the wrong people, it should be the non-mask assholes.
Whoops, first cup of coffee hitting…
UncleEbeneezer
The irony of course is that the same people who refuse to wear masks but want schools and bars to open immediately are the same people who will tell you “you only get what you’re willing to work for” and “there’s no free lunch.” But those don’t apply to collective action or to themselves, individually.
The Thin Black Duke
@Bobby Thomson: I said “four months” because I believe that once Trump loses the election, he’s going to get the hell out of Dodge. The presidency was the only thing keeping his bloated orange carcass from going to jail and the GOP will begin constructing the narrative (with help from Fox News) that Trump was an “aberration”. The United States won’t be a safe place for him anymore.
StringOnAStick
@p.a.: The media fell for Dubya’s employees claiming a bunch of juvenile sabotage. Supposedly all the W keys missing from keyboards was the worst I heard of, but I don’t recall any actual photo evidence. I want the mess these criminals will leave behind investigated like a crime scene and most of all, published everywhere. Make the bastards own it and look like the trash that they are.
geg6
@bbleh:
It’s even worse than that. My friend is a perfect example.
She is a Florida snowbird. She and her husband co-own a house with a friend who lives permanently in FL. Tracey, my friend, lives here in PA but goes to FL every year after the winter holidays and stays until around Easter and she did so this past winter as always. The shut-down kept her there past Easter and, since PA wasn’t looking good at the time, through May. By the time she thought she could safely drive home, FL’s numbers shot through the roof. So she stayed, holed up in her house, only going out for groceries and prescriptions now and again. Her housemate had to go to work, but was masking and social distancing properly, even though she is a Trumper. Finally, Tracey decided that FL was just too dangerous and she had to get out. So, she made arrangements to leave and set the day and time. The day before she left, her housemate’s mother, aunt and sister stopped by the house. Tracey was not happy about visitors but didn’t feel she could say anything. While they were there, Tracey stayed masked and insisted they make their visit outside on the patio, where they would be outside and could easily distance socially. After the visitors left, her housemate told her that while Tracey had been inside using the bathroom, her sister had admitted to testing positive, but since she felt okay, she wasn’t staying home and just wore a mask when visiting others. The woman fucking knew she had it and still went around paying visits to friends and family.
Tracey is home and quarantining herself for the recommended 14 days. She is living in her basement while her husband, with several medical issues, is upstairs. They haven’t seen each other, other than a few minutes when she got home, in six months. They have another week before they can actually give each other a hug. All because of this idiot in FL. She took every precaution she could think of and still may have been exposed. Thankfully, she feels fine, but this shit infuriates me.
Redshift
Echoing what others have said, “we” didn’t do this, our government did. If you want to compare to other countries and say America screwed this up, it would rankle but still be correct, but saying “we” is just wrong.
The disastrous public health response is all on Trump and his malignant and incompetent cronies. And while there are a lot of assholes in this country, masks being a partisan issue wasn’t inevitable, he made it one because he wanted people to blame Democratic officials instead of him, for his own completely selfish reasons. There are parts of this that would have been bad anyway because of inadequate preparation or not having a strong culture of public health, but he made every one of them worse.
I knew back in March that we were not going to have a competent response to this until January at best. And I knew why.
Redshift
@StringOnAStick:
There wasn’t any photo evidence because none of it ever happened. And the media didn’t really fall for it as I recall, it got lots of outrage on wingnut media, the mentions elsewhere were skeptical.
piratedan
@schrodingers_cat: and I completely agree with that statement and yet, I also have to understand that it is WE… I know that the majority of us voted for HRC but I also have to recognize that a shitload of us voted for this current abomination. We have to not only fix what they’re wrought we have to try and deprogram the constant propaganda onslaught that is turning people into abhorrent shitstains. I almost believe that we need to have an understanding of what is a cultural good because this entire “greed is good”,” I got mine, fuck you” mindset when coupled with issues around skin pigmentation and gender really make it open season for folks like Putin to cause us to collectively chase our tails.
Nicole
@geg6: Holy cow. I’d be spitting nails in your friend’s shoes. I’m glad it looks like she dodged infection.
rikyrah
@Zinsky:
Look at the rest of the world who got it together
PsiFighter37
@Marcopolo: It’s going to be even longer. There is no way there will be a vaccine that is mass-produced and available by spring next year. It’s already fucking July 20th…it’s just not happening.
I am thinking ahead of what my wife and I should be planning to do with regards to where we live next year. We have (by NYC standards) a relatively large 2-bedroom apartment, but if the current status quo holds up, we will need more space. Whether that means moving to a larger apartment that has meaningfully more room or taking the plunge and buying a house in the burbs…who knows. This whole thing fucking sucks and has completely screwed up our plans for the near-term future.
JPL
Mitch is at the White House with the president thinking of ways they can give tax cuts to their wealthy donors.
Gin & Tonic
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks, they’re fine. Tests were negative, it was just an abundance of caution.
zhena gogolia
What do you mean “we”? I’ve barely left my house since March 13.
I voted for Hillary Clinton.
PsiFighter37
@JPL: Hoping Pelosi stands firm. Messaging has to be that the focus needs to be on families and not on corporations. Mnuchin messaging that he wants to forgive all PPP loans is a cover for letting who knows how many companies that don’t need the funds get away with outright theft.
Gin & Tonic
@PsiFighter37:
My son will have to leave Ukraine next month. He has to come back to the US, but his wife can’t, because this administration has essentially put a hold on all consular work and the green card she applied for last August(!) isn’t coming any time soon. So she has to go back to Mexico. And now, because this administration has screwed the pooch, my son won’t be able to go to Mexico because he’s a US passport holder, which means persona no grata in an increasing number of countries.
If you want screwed up plans.
TS (the original)
@PsiFighter37:
From the government that won’t forgive any student loans when by law they are supposed to do just that.
Biden would need 16 years in office to recover from what this administration has done in a mere 3.5 years.
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne:
But, who’s counting? :-)
trollhattan
@TS (the original):
You’re not wrong. “It takes weeks to build a barn, minutes to burn it down.”
Mai naem mobile
@The Thin Black Duke: not 4 months but 6 months and if you don’t think the Trumpers and GOPrs will intentionally make crap even worse in the two months between the election and inauguration you have way more faith in them then I do. The only hope is that the Trumpers are so busy trying to cover their crimes that they don’t have the time or energy to make things worse for Biden. Ofcourse you know Donny is a vindictive little man who will do crappy stuff just because so you have to hope the Trumpers don’t follow any of his Mafia orders because they’re too busy saving their own asses.
Amir Khalid
I haven’t had The Young Turks, that really annoying pack of Bernistas, on my YouTube rec page in a while, thanks to hitting “don’t recommend this channel”. I’m a little curious, though: what have they been up to lately?
rikyrah
We got kicked out the Bahamas. Don’t blame them. Don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want us to come. They are a TOURISM ECONOMY and they’re saying’ that’s ok’ to American $$$ They would rather live.
rikyrah
SO angry, when I look at the rest of the world.
THEY took care of business.
We had Dolt45 and his merry band of idiots.
All those GOP Governors who talked mad shyt about New York and Cuomo, and look at their states.
We are in the same position.
NOT ENOUGH PPE
NOT ENOUGH TESTS
HOSPITAL CAPACITY
But, before, when it was Democratic Governors, they spoke up.
All this shyt is happening to GOP Governors, and they aren’t saying shyt!
Elizabelle
Send a postcard to Dr. Fauci. Cheer him and support the post office.
Yeah, it’s from FB, but putting this up. Although: cards from all over the country? Vectors! I wonder if they will UV light them at his office, or the mail gets quarantined for a spell.
gene108
David, the United States of America has essentially given up trying to deal with COVID19. We have taken your latter suggestion of death and suffering, rather than doing hard work.
The only reason we have wasted five months is because six months has not passed yet. Next month we will have wasted six months, in September it will be seven months wasted, in October eight months, and so on stretched out to infinity.
Maybe this will start to change, if Biden becomes President on January 20, 2021.
But under our current leadership there’s no hope, but for everyone to look out for themselves as best they can, because there’s going to be no collective action for the foreseeable future.
taumaturgo
Here is a tremendously successful country that managed to flatten the curve, how come we don’t hear this story as an example to follow? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-cuba-recovery-idUSKCN24K0JL
gene108
@Mai naem mobile:
Trump has hollowed out the government enough that an orderly normal transition will be next to impossible.
Second, the real sand in the gears comes from McConnell and his co-conspirator Republican Senate colleagues, which has already started by refusing to even give the HEROS Act a hearing in the Senate.
The $600 extra per week in unemployment benefits will expire next Friday, which will hurt the millions of unemployed peoples’ ability to spend, and be a further drag on the economy.
And this obstruction will continue unabated, even if Biden is President and Democrats hold the House and retake the Senate.
McConnell is already setting Biden up to fail.
Pittsburgh Mike
@The Thin Black Duke: 1/20/21 is 6 months from now, to the day, not 4 months.
Realistically, there’s no way that we’re not screwed. The only way out of this is to:
1 — build a fast testing infrastructure, preferably with tests that can be collected, if not processed, at home.
2 — cut out as much indoor public stuff as possible until. there’s a vaccine or good anti-body treatment.
3 — if you want to reopen schools, you might be able to do it if the # of cases is low (because you did a new shutdown) and you solved #1, and you restructured the schools to use more space.
This will all cost $$$, at the level that you’ll only get from the Feds. Certainly the states, soon to be suffering under huge tax shortfalls, aren’t going to provide it.
I see none of this planning happening as of now. No great improvement in testing. No school restructuring. No funding for school improvements. FFS, many places still have *bars* open, and restaurants with indoor seating! This stuff takes time, and planning, and none of it is happening, if for no other reason than that there’s no funding for it.
Makes me sick and pissed off.
Elizabelle
The NY Times reports the coronavirus has reached The Villages in Florida. 2/3 Republicans. A lot are still out on the golf course, and in the bars, restaurants, and hair salons. Thoughts and prayers.
‘If It’s Here, It’s Here’: America’s Retirees [!!] Confront the Virus in Florida
As cases spike across Florida, the virus appears to have caught up with the residents of the Villages.
Elizabelle
From the NY Times article (link above) on The Villages: did DeSantis actually do a good job preventing early spread in nursing homes? Maybe so. Florida had the examples of Washington and New York states.
Elizabelle
@geg6:
Ugh! I would recommend your friend write a letter to the editor in both Florida and PA, and tell them that little story. I think it would get published.
And Tracey has the time. How dreadfully obtuse and selfish that houseguest was.
Kattails
@Gin & Tonic: Oh my God, that is heartbreaking. It’s not even the rampant theft that gets me as much as this, the individual pains multiplied by the hundreds of thousands. Hope some path can be found for them.
joel hanes
Ima just leave this here
low-tech cyclist
Losing a season? If only. There’s a not-very-good song by Third Eye Blind titled “Losing a Whole Year,” and that could be the theme song for 2020. The Administration could have started dealing with this back in January, and it won’t do anything meaningful until next January, and that assumes Biden wins in November.
@Elizabelle:
My one anecdatum: Community Care in Plant City, FL, where my wife’s grandmother had been living for the past half-dozen years or so. Something like 87 out of 120 residents got Covid, including Grandma who is now no longer with us. So I’m less than impressed by DuhSantis’ handling of nursing homes.
rikyrah
@PsiFighter37:
Nothing but PHUCKING THEFT.
Elizabelle
@low-tech cyclist: I’m sorry about your grandmother.
I thought the reporting on DeSantis’s efforts was a bit chipper.
And, you can see that a man whose death was hastened by COVID has been listed as a heart attack death.
Kelly
The Republican Party succeeded in capturing the word “patriot” with empty symbolism, relentless PR and relentless cheating. Throughout my youth I thought we had two political parties with honest differences over policy. My eyes opened when GWB started his own war in Iraq. Patriots take care of their fellow citizens. Republican IGMFY has metastasized and seems no more aware that it is killing it’s host than a cancer cell.
Cheryl Rofer
Joke seen on Twitter:
Time traveler returns to the US from 2050.
TT: What year is it?
Random citizen: 2020
TT: Oh, the first year of quarantine, then
joel hanes
@Marcopolo:
The only thing that gives me the slightest bit of joy
is watching Trump destroy the national Republican Party
joel hanes
@StringOnAStick:
all the W keys missing from keyboards
This story was a lie.
rikyrah
@Elizabelle:
I am going to write him. Thanks for the idea.
different-church-lady
“We” didn’t waste anything. The GODDAMNED RED AREAS OF THE COUNTRY THREW AWAY EVERYTHING THE BLUE AREAS SACRIFICED, LED BY THE SOCIOPATH IN THE WHITE HOUSE.
MattF
Lying with statistics. Rather clever.
different-church-lady
@StringOnAStick: Ought to be rather easy to photograph headstones.
sdhays
“They’re going to go home and get over it.”
Apparently, Missouri’s governor has decided to be upfront that spreading COVID-19 via the schools is part of the plan. I have to say, I appreciate the honesty, as horrible as it is.
Elizabelle
@MattF: Link does not work.
MattF
@Elizabelle: Hmmph. Does this work?
Calouste
@Zinsky: If the pandemic taskforce that was started under Obama had still been in place, a lot of that stuff would have happened without it even making it to the President’s desk. That was what the taskforce was for.
Gvg
I am angry at the selfish denialist and want to scream at them they are arsonist and drunk drivers combined and should be arrested for behavior that endangers others (and themselves). I do think those analogies will help some confused people see what is wrong with indulging conspiracy idiots pet theories.
DaveInCO
Another bone-head issue: Here in El Paso County, CO about 70% of those contacted for tracing refuse to cooperate, citing privacy issues. It’s one of the reddest counties in CO.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
(Gordon Ramsay voice) Finally, some good fucking journalism. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer: The Mike DeWine from the beginning of the pandemic is nowhere to be found: Analysis
Fucking finally. Ever since he reversed himself in late April about a mask mandate, I lost what little respect I had for DeWimp. I’m just glad others are noticing how much of a mediocrity he is now. Without a universal mask mandate, reopening was always doomed to fail. How I wish Cordray had won instead. Only in a red state could someone like DeWimp get elected
Elizabelle
@MattF: Can only see the first slide, but it’s viewable, at least.
How are they obscuring the 50% increase?
Elizabelle
@MattF: Can you find another source for that? Would be interested to see.
MattF
@Elizabelle: Look at and compare the definitions of the data intervals in the two graphs.
MattF
@Elizabelle: It’s already third or fourth hand, but it looks like some official Georgia source. And since we’ve spoiled their little game, the original source may vanish.
RoonieRoo
Honestly I don’t see how we “ramp up testing” when the labs cannot handle the current level of testing. The lab bottleneck and accuracy issues have to be addressed first. This is coming from the Texas experience where it’s difficult to get a test in places and the accuracy of the results is an increasing problem as the labs start to give under the volume of testing.
Matt
IMO we need to nip this narrative in the bud immediately – “we” did not fail, some of us either didn’t even try or were actively sabotaging the effort for profit and/or politics.
If you wanna put a failure on the collective “we”, it’s that “we” haven’t got streets lined with Republican officeholders hanging from lampposts.
Elizabelle
@Matt: Well said. Agree with you.
The “we” shit bothers me immensely. Happily, lots of jackals got there before I did.
Do not spread and share the blame for this. It is not a societal failure. It is a failure of Trump, the Republican party, rightwing media (I hope Fox News gets sued out of existence), and all the morons who defy wearing masks as a political or cultural exercise.
And, although “we” [they] blew it, “we” [us] share in the death and destruction and economic pain following their blowing it. Lost businesses, no school, locked out of Europe and wiser nations, no or reduced contact with loved ones.
“We” all suffer for their stupidity, malfeasance, and cruelty.
Archon
America has too many people down the rabbit hole to properly navigate the issues of the 21st century.
Were in deep, deep trouble.
polyorchnid octopunch
I’m reading the comments and the one that’s killing me more than anything else is the people saying “we didn’t blow it, they did.” I’ve got news for you guys, that’s not how this works.
@[email protected]: “I’m so tired of living in a society built around coddling the feelings of white men.” is pointing the way to what you guys need to do, which is to stop coddling those asshole’s feelings. Problem is that means you’re gonna have to start way down the food chain by doing things like putting the fear of the American people into your police forces; it’s no longer enough to demonstrate you need them to become personally physically afraid of you, because they’re part of the group of white men who’re so accustomed to having their feelings coddled that they are losing it at the idea that they might be subject to some gentle criticism when they beat, disappear, and kill people. I skimmed the WaPo article about the sixty-something store clerk; they need to quit their job because It Ain’t Worth It.
You guys are all in this collectively; you can’t really separate your responsibility for the situation you’re in from the people who are so clearly pathologically egocentric fucksticks, because when they started becoming this way back in the Nixon/Reagan era all of you normal folks went along to get along and that is the root of the mistake that has left you and your country in this terrible situation.
I’m your next door neighbour; your border is just 11 miles away from where I’m sitting right now and I can see America from my window. I don’t think you folks realise how badly you’ve fucked this up and how badly you’ve fucked your national reputation and yes power. We are your best friends In The World and we think you’ve become a nation of soft-headed greedsticks who can’t see anything beyond the tips of your own noses, and our greatest fear is having some of you show up to visit because you guys have aptly demonstrated that any six year old from a civilised nation has a better handle on how to behave in public than you do.
Last thing; you guys are gonna need a plan for November wrt transition; I’m reading about how you expect to find they’ve physically trashed the joint on Jan 20th when Biden moves in and all this leaves me thinking is that you’re still coddling the feelings of sociopathic white men and that you’re all sweet sweet summer children with the naivete of a babe in arms. Come the following Wednesday it’s gonna get a LOT darker than that and you need to be ready to, among other things, put the fear of God and the American People into your police forces, and really you need to start doing that now.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Oh bullshit, yes it does
America-bashing is so tiresome. Like no other nation has gone off the fucking rails recently. It’s a global phenomenon. Need I remind you of Harper? Your Conservatives are pretty fucking looney tunes too and Canadian police have plenty of their own issues. First Nation peoples have been killed by white Canadian police
jonas
Not to mention letting hundreds of rich, virus-y flights from Europe continue unabated for weeks after his “ban” on China.
Ksmiami
@UncleEbeneezer: no -democrats need to get on air everyday with the clear message that the GOP is murdering the country and its citizens with do nothingness and corruption. Bury them
@gene108:
LuciaMia
In an attempt to rehabilitate Trumps hideous poll numbers on the Corona virus, they say aides have convinced him to bring back the ‘task-force’ daily briefings. Starting tomorrow.
Sweet Jesus, why? How do they think this will help them? Trump will simply spout the usual nonsense, make up new ones and find any way to pat himself on the back.
jonas
Maybe it’s my age — I’m obviously too young to have known about this — but from a public health standpoint, unless your town is well known for rampant adultery — wouldn’t you want to test the *unmarried* people for syphilis instead? They’re the ones who spread it.
Jinchi
Right. Set aside Harper’s government, which was famous for shutting down several world reknowned national libraries and tossing their books into landfills ( all to destroy climate science research). In recent years we’ve seen very Trump-like governments elected in Israel, India, the United Kingdom, Poland, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Turkey, Australia, Italy, and Greece, just to name a few. Even France came close to electing Le Pen.
This is a world wide problem. One that a lot of countries haven’t been able to shake off.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So I found out part of the reason for the surge in California is a lot places are making their work at home employees come because behinds must be in seats and promptly get everyone sick. Apparently it’s harder for office employees to understand the need for masks unlike jobs like manufacturing were there were requirements like eye protection to begin with.
jonas
Dear. God. It’s going to be one spluttering whirlwind of bullshit after another, day in, day out, trying to explain 1. how the numbers are all fake news and 2. it’s not his fault anyway and shut up, that’s why.
My bet: he does this like three times, implodes spectacularly, storms off and never does another one. Biden rises 2 more points in the polls.
Jinchi
Seems like in that scenario, Biden could seize the money Trump seized to build his wall.
Brachiator
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
From the Los Angeles County health officials, a good deal of the community spread is also coming from factories and manufacturing facilities.
Sometimes mask and social distancing guidelines are ignored. Sometimes they do not appear to be sufficient.
It is more difficult to re-open safely than many thought. But we are stuck in some ways, because a return to a long lockdown would be very painful and not economically sustainable for many people or businesses.
Bill Arnold
@David C:
This is counterfactual gaslighting. There was existing weak science on masks for source control for general respiratory viruses, there were early observations (Hong Kong, etc) suggesting that masks worked, there were early superspreader events impossible to plausibly explain without invoking mid-range (>6 meters) airborne spread, there were existing mechanical arguments and experiments showing droplet dispersal would be disrupted by masks worn for source control would generalize to SARS-CoV-2, and there was the general precautionary principle that should always be considered (re low-cost interventions) during a pandemic with limited time for science. (If A. Fauci were in front of me I’d give him a similar earful.)
Then on April 4(?) the CDC acknowledged that the evidence for presymptomatic/asymptomatic spread was strong enough (good for them to publicly shift, to be clear) and started recommending general mask wearing by the public, at which point we should have gone all in on masks. A couple of weeks later (April 17 in NYS) a few US states went to mandatory face coverings (with a high level of discipline), though there were entire countries that preceded them.
It’s now 3 months later, July 20, and the US allowed propagandists (what the fuck are their motives, and who are they?) to build a mask-refusenik pro-mass-death movement that includes a large subset of the US population (and that movement has has also been internationalized; UK is undergoing similar arguments, using the exact same disinformation points; common language makes it work, sort of.).
Kent
Don’t forget the granddaddy of them all. Russia.
Jackmac
“We” did not blow it. Trump, Republicans and various COVID -19 deniers did.
different-church-lady
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Oh? Well how does it work then?
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
In Sacramento county it’s been social gatherings, and our largest infection ten-year group is 20-29.
satby
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): you may not like it, but every word @polyorchnid octopunch said is accurate. Noting that other countries have struggled with similar right wing movements doesn’t at all deflect from the fact that the institutions of this country have failed so profoundly as to put the tangerine traitor in office.
When a nation fails so spectacularly, “we” are all tarred with the brush whether we opposed it or not. Other countries have ground to a halt over conditions as bad as this, we turn the channel.
Kent
Honestly, the Orcs were at the door in 2016 and WAY WAY too many progressives and left of center Americans were utterly complacent. The Butthurt Bernie-stans and Jill Stein types. The millions of complacent non-voters who thought a little shake-up by Trump wouldn’t be a bad thing and wouldn’t affect them.
Yes, I know, Comey and the Russians and the FNYT and the racist electoral college and all of that. But we, on the left and left/center of the country didn’t play 2016 with the urgency that was needed either.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid:
…and don’t call me Shirley.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Brachiator: Yes, I read that from the LA Heath Department and I noticed the type of manufacturing described was the low end stuff like food processing were the employees are treated as disposable. Makes one wonder wonder about food safety.
My point is in manufacturing you do things like eye protection to protect yourself because you know the situation has dangers so additional safety equipment isn’t a big mental leap. An office worker is normally not at risk of a work place accident.
different-church-lady
@satby: OK, fine then: WE wound up with this illegitimate motherfucker of a president even though WE cast more votes for someone else. Then WE tried to remove his sorry ass from office, but WE couldn’t because WE protected him due to the fact each one of WE got to cast a vote on all 100 members of the Senate. Happy now?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@trollhattan: My friends who were talking about this are from Sacramento; one is a state employee.
ProfDamatu
@jonas: I think it was because of the assumption that people getting married would soon be having children; syphilis can be transmitted from mother to fetus, with some pretty unpleasant consequences. Unmarried people can for sure spread it, but I think the goal was to prevent that vertical transmission in couples who might not know they were infected, as the disease can have a long latency period before secondary or tertiary symptoms emerge.
The Moar You Know
@Nicole: We just had a local restaurant here close their inside dining permanently because the owner was sick and tired of her employees getting assaulted, yelled at, spat on, etc for demanding that they comply with an already in place statewide order mandating mask wearing inside.
Americans have lost their fucking minds. I’m not sure, even with a vaccine, that we’re going to ever be able to get this disease under control here.
Martin
Been saying this for a while. There’s no magic bullet. Even if we had a vaccine today, you wouldn’t get it until next year, and you need to keep doing these efforts until vaccine distribution is in the 80% range.
Logistics of the population is really fucking hard, and nearly impossible if you choose to politicize it. Contact tracing doesn’t matter if it’s spreading communally. That’s sort of the point – it’s spreading everywhere. The only message you can give is ‘don’t go anywhere’. You need to get cases down low enough that communal spread isn’t happening and locking down is the only way to do that. NY is knocking on that door right now. And that’s going to be fucking hard when anyone from a communal spread state can travel to NY and spread it around. With no registration of people entering the state, you have no control.
This is going to continue either until the Feds actually start to do something or the governors find a unified set of policies such that it can resemble federalism. This is going to continue through January.
satby
@different-church-lady: well, we as a nation somehow let them get away with corrupting everything to the point where Moscow Mitch and his minions vote against the expressed desires of this country’s people routinely.
That this country didn’t grind to a halt after the slaughter of first graders even though vast majorities of us want much more rigorous gun control is an example. “We” don’t put the fear of retribution into the elected leaders who flout our wishes, and they ignore us with impunity, because we haven’t, so far anyway, pulled enough people out to vote with any consistent success. I have voted against these fuckers for 47 years, but the failure of this country is mine too, because none of us (born here anyway) could have imagined that it would all fall apart so quickly while we were still debating science and justice with people who don’t give a shit about either.
Martin
@bbleh: Regarding delays on testing. One of the studies I did years ago was on how 4 year universities turn into effectively 5-6 year universities. We were growing very rapidly at the time and had a mean time to degree of less than 4 years for freshmen (still do). What I determined was that you need to keep capacity at least 5%-10% ahead of steady state demand to remain there. As soon as you start to fall behind, you have two choices:
A testing lab has a given capacity on a given day. That capacity can vary significantly at a time like this as your lab techs can get covid, and if one gets its, probably a lot will get it. Assuming you are administering tests with knowledge of that capacity (clearly we aren’t, which is dumb) then any given day’s tests should be processed within 24 hours. If it takes more than 24 hours, then your entire system will fail and that must be fixed immediately.
The whole way this has been administered has been a catastrophic failure. Testing must be prioritized – first tests go to the testers. If they don’t say healthy and working, this whole exercise fails. The next tests go to the lab workers. Same argument. The next tests to hospital staff, etc. The ordinance should be that you can only go to work if you have been tested in the preceding week. The definition of ‘essential’ then becomes where the testing goes, and the overall capacity of that testing. You want your meatpacking plant open – you must have testers sanctioned by the county/state in the plant testing workers weekly when they arrive. If that capability isn’t available, you aren’t open. If the county doesn’t have enough lab capacity, you aren’t open.
And all tests must have results back to the person in 24 hours. Destroy any tests you can’t process in that time, and close down the source of those tests until capacity returns.
You have a given throughput, and everything is tied to that throughput. You can increase it by adding lab capacity or efficiency. Or you lower demand.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
Yep. This has been a problem in Southern California as well.
I think that the UK early on suggested that people have social bubbles, first an individual or household, then a very small group of people who you might associate with. I don’t know if they talked about that here to the same degree. But we saw community spread quickly happen when families and friends got together for parties and picnics. All it took was a medium sized group of people mixing together.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin: That what the porn industry does, to work you have to have a clean STD test. The age of the test varies a bit by studio, but the oldest is one month.
Ross
I mean, ‘we’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence if you ask me. That a bunch of sociopathic red state governors actively did everything they could to spread the virus, and a normally competent Blue state governor decided to bow to pressure from astroturfing liars and reopen too soon like a fucking idiot isn’t ‘our’ fault.
Otherwise yes what a goddamned shit show.