News of the Day III

[dannybolt]

For what it's worth, per the Times, something like 85% of Pinellas's cases have been in the 65+ cohort, with the Lion's share driven by Nursing homes. DeSantos made a smart call by focusing on them early on, I'm friends with a Health care reporter for USA Today who also confirmed that Florida's numbers have been better than expected due to the strategic concentration in high risk areas, rather than blanket shut downs. Nursing homes got prioritization for PPE and testing and quarantines and moving people to hospitals early which has helped blunt the impact. I believe Pinellas has benefitted from that approach.

That said, I'm still not wild about how many people at Home Depot aren't wearing masks, but I did notice that downtown St Pete is pretty mask heavy when I've gotten take out recently.

[Flycoon]

For what it's worth, per the Times, something like 85% of Pinellas's cases have been in the 65+ cohort, with the Lion's share driven by Nursing homes. DeSantos made a smart call by focusing on them early on, I'm friends with a Health care reporter for USA Today who also confirmed that Florida's numbers have been better than expected due to the strategic concentration in high risk areas, rather than blanket shut downs. Nursing homes got prioritization for PPE and testing and quarantines and moving people to hospitals early which has helped blunt the impact. I believe Pinellas has benefitted from that approach.

That said, I'm still not wild about how many people at Home Depot aren't wearing masks, but I did notice that downtown St Pete is pretty mask heavy when I've gotten take out recently.

Costco is no mask, no service. Sam’s (walmart) not so much. I’d bet most of the no mask demo are trump loyalists

[Donnie D]

Not all his fault. Look around, people are acting like idiots. Practice a few measures like wearing a mask (to protect YOU), wear a glove when pumping gas and dispose of it THERE, Social distance properly and we can get to herd immunity but keep up the parties, shoulder to shoulder contact and....well, cases increase.
As I recall, he shut down flights from China pretty quickly. Is it his fault that supplies were not there when it was our turn?
Come on.
Don't make this political. That comes after.

Bullshit. He is responsible for the vast majority of the deaths in this country. He is the guy who discounted the problem. It was a democrat hoax, it was going to disappear, it was under control. He sent our strategic reserve of supplies to China. (What happened to America First?). Wearing masks would have saved 95% according to 2 studies. He has discounted their effectiveness and has refused to wear them. The China flight shut down is similar bullshit. More than 40,000 individuals traveled from China to the US after the ban. None of those 40,000 were screened or tested. They just entered the country. He hasn’t provided the needed tests and now he is pressuring states to reopen despite the fact that they don’t meet the criteria for reopening. His response to the meat packing plant infections? Give the plant operators legal liability for not following protocol. He was given a pandemic plan and didn’t even know it existed. Then HE made it political by trying to blame Obama for his Own ineptness. He peddled an unsafe drug to the masses.

I could go on and on. A mask doesn’t protect the wearer, it protects the people that the wearer comes in contact with. That’s why requiring masks should have been the first thing done.

[pete]

Trump's timeline about his China ban and an understanding about where the bulk of the infections came from undercuts his narrative about how magical his response was and how many lives the ban saved.

On November 17 the first case of coronavirus infection was reported in Wuhan, China.

The first case of coronavirus got to Europe (France) from Wuhan sometime between December 14 and December 22.

The first case of coronavirus got to the US from Wuhan on January 21 on the west coast.

China locked down the city of Wuhan on January 23.

Joe Biden put out his USA Today Op-Ed on January 27 criticizing Trump for not sending people to China to oversee pandemic response and containment the way the Obama Administration did sending folks to Africa to contain ebola.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/27/coronavirus-donald-trump-made-us-less-prepared-joe-biden-column/4581710002/

The travel ban from China was instituted on February 2. It was a very, very porous travel ban, however, because in the month after the ban was put in place over 40,000 were allowed direct entry from China.

https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-trump-china-travel-ban-45a2da12-8063-4ad9-ba28-61cdeb1ce0b3.html

On February 23 Secretary Navarro issued a memo to Trump warning about the increasing risk there was going to be a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in the US.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/us/politics/navarro-warning-trump-coronavirus.html

On March 1, the first confirmed COVID-19 case in New York was reported. It did not come from China, though, it came from Europe, which was still wide open for travel.

The travel ban for Europe was not issued until March 12, and like the China travel ban it was extremely leaky, in that it originally did not originally include Ireland and the UK (which were later included on March 16) and had tons of exceptions. It was also a day late and a dollar short, because in the month of February alone 1.74 million airline passengers arrived to the U.S. from the European Union, excluding the UK and Ireland.

https://skift.com/2020/05/03/a-european-travel-ban-to-the-u-s-came-at-least-5-weeks-too-late-heres-a-timeline-of-the-fallout/

Was Trump solely to blame? No. Bill de Blasio screwed the pooch pretty hard for his hesitancy to lock down New York City for a week when it was becoming obvious time was of the essence. And, between the two of them, showing more spine just a week earlier could've cut the death toll by a third.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/21/860077940/u-s-could-have-saved-36-000-lives-if-social-distancing-started-1-week-earlier-st

Both the George W Bush Administration and the Obama Administration took pandemic preparedness very seriously.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-2005-wait-pandemic-late-prepare/story?id=69979013

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/04/10/barack-obama-2014-pandemic-comments-sot-ctn-vpx.cnn

So there was bipartisan agreement that this was an important thing for the federal government to stay on top of. In 2018 Trump fired the pandemic team in the White House as a cost cutting measure and on March 22, he said he basically refuses to consult with past presidents about matters like these: Democratic or Republican.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-obama-coronavirus-pandemic-response

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/22/trump-coronavirus-past-presidents-143131

And that's where the whole thing about politicizing this just rings hollow. Putting aside the fact that Trump politicizes every little damned thing he does, all he and his administration had to do was reach out to veterans of either of the past two administrations and they would've had a better response than what happened listening to Jared f'ing Kushner and the rest of the team of rejects and grifters currently in the West Wing. And we've all absolutely got a right to be upset about that. These clowns are so far beneath the baseline standard we expect of any government, Democratic OR Republican, it should make us all outraged regardless of affiliation.

[pete]

Bullshit. He is responsible for the vast majority of the deaths in this country. He is the guy who discounted the problem. It was a democrat hoax, it was going to disappear, it was under control. He sent our strategic reserve of supplies to China. (What happened to America First?). Wearing masks would have saved 95% according to 2 studies. He has discounted their effectiveness and has refused to wear them. The China flight shut down is similar bullshit. More than 40,000 individuals traveled from China to the US after the ban. None of those 40,000 were screened or tested. They just entered the country. He hasn’t provided the needed tests and now he is pressuring states to reopen despite the fact that they don’t meet the criteria for reopening. His response to the meat packing plant infections? Give the plant operators legal liability for not following protocol. He was given a pandemic plan and didn’t even know it existed. Then HE made it political by trying to blame Obama for his Own ineptness. He peddled an unsafe drug to the masses.

I could go on and on, but just to help you. A mask doesn’t protect the wearer, it protects the people that the wearer comes in contact with. That’s why requiring masks should have been the first thing done.

Let's all be clear about this, too: more people in the US died from coronavirus that came in from Europe through New York City than came in from China, and the Europe travel ban came a month and a half after the China travel ban and only after 1.74 million travelers shuffled back and forth from the European Union.

So when you hear propaganda about how heroic and life saving the China travel ban was, it's a diversion from where the bulk of the deaths actually came from.

[pete]

Erik Erlendsson reTweeted this earlier, and I think it's wonderfully instructive regarding masks:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2

https://twitter.com/kevin_mcgran/status/1264763551295700999?s=20

[Hoek]

It doesn't really matter if a governor is willing to have the RNC if none of the major cities capable of having it are interested.

Also, if a disorganized party full of "you can't tell me what to do" types like the Libertarians can manage to accept and successfully pull off a virtual convention, surely the big parties can. I fail to see what is so important to have 50,000 Republican blowhards show up in person nominate a preordained candidate and ratify a platform everyone knows a mile away.

Hong Kong did a study that basically showed mask wearing helps a healthy person to not get it just enough to be worth recommending it to everyone. They might as well tell people it helps just to get more of the selfish people to do it.

[Donnie D]

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/26/2020-election-democrats-281470

Of course they are assuming that there won’t be a spike in cases from reopening too soon.

[Donnie D]

It doesn't really matter if a governor is willing to have the RNC if none of the major cities capable of having it are interested.

Also, if a disorganized party full of "you can't tell me what to do" types like the Libertarians can manage to accept and successfully pull off a virtual convention, surely the big parties can. I fail to see what is so important to have 50,000 Republican blowhards show up in person nominate a preordained candidate and ratify a platform everyone knows a mile away.

Hong Kong did a study that basically showed mask wearing helps a healthy person to not get it just enough to be worth recommending it to everyone. They might as well tell people it helps just to get more of the selfish people to do it.

My theory is that we have to convince the deplorables that wearing a mask re-elects Trump. They made Trump / Pence masks and they need to be widely distributed.

[Hoek]

Furman is an economist, but he had some strategic advice for the Biden campaign. “Don’t make predictions that could be falsified. There are enough terrible things to say you don’t need to make exaggerated predictions,” he said. “The argument that we are in another Great Depression will look like it was overstated. Trump can say, ‘Two million deaths didn’t happen, Great Depression didn’t happen, we are making a lot of progress.’”

I'll agree with this part. Part of the reason the re-openers are so emboldened is because people kept trumpeting absolutely horrific worst case scenarios.

[pete]

That’s a catch 22 because you had to show the models to get people to act, and acting is the only thing that has prevented us from hitting the number of deaths shown in the model. The right is going to strut around saying, “See it wasn’t that serious,” because deaths avoided are speculative and abstract, politically. But the truth of the matter is without shutting down for 2+ months we’d be pushing catastrophic numbers right now. As it is, we’re approaching a WWI amount of deaths pretty soon here.

[pete]

If 52% of the workforce lost is re-hired in Q3, but the other 48% become long term unemployed, as that Stanford economist predicted, is that really something for Trump to crow about. It seems to me we’re headed for a very lumpy, very uneven recovery and Trump bragging about rebound numbers will look stupid if the bulk of the recovery happens in places like California and New York rather than the swing states.

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1265287092780912645?s=21

Nate Silver’s take is that even a recovery to 9% unemployment isn’t great electorally.

[RSchmitz]

It's going to be a tough sell to the American public to blame Trump for the unemployment when he's been front and center telling state governments to open up. I mean, it is Trumps fault, but it may be too complicated and nuanced for your average joe to piece together time lines as to why.

[Maverick9911]

Trump threatens NC to pull the Republican National Convention if they do not lessen the social distancing restrictions. Not sure what other state/city would agree to host it and ignore the guidelines, but that's Donny the Bully for you. Maybe Bumphuck Alabama would consider it an honor to host it to show them damn libtards what's what around here.

He wants to have it down here at Mar-a-Lago for the grifter benefits.

It's going to be a tough sell to the American public to blame Trump for the unemployment when he's been front and center telling state governments to open up. I mean, it is Trumps fault, but it may be too complicated and nuanced for your average joe to piece together time lines as to why.

Agreed. People are stupid enough to listen when he inevitably says "The Democrats torpedoed my amazing economy with this virus hoax" and they'll buy it.

[Puckhead]

He wants to have it down here at Mar-a-Lago for the grifter benefits.



Agreed. People are stupid enough to listen when he inevitably says "The Democrats torpedoed my amazing economy with this virus hoax" and they'll buy it.

Fortunately, those buying it are around 35%. They’d be buyers if he said it was Joe Scarborough that was guilty of murder AND In charge of fraudulent voting.

Make no mistake, even when he gets rolled in Mi and PA, he’s not going quietly. I don’t know the law—do the US Marshalls drag his ass out of the WH if necessary?