caulfield12

Bernie Sanders would have been the nominee “if not for special interests” in 2016. Not 100% sure our country would be significantly less polarized had that happened than under either Trump or Clinton, but historians of the future will certainly play the “what if” game. It’s also difficult to imagine any one Democrat holding so much power over their party as Trump with the GOP today...you’d probably have to go back to FDR.

Counting traditional UNE as well as pandemic programs expiring in 2020, we’re currently at 30.5 million total.

Tigers, Red Sox and Mariners with cases.

Not sure. Just thought it was interesting. Along with Germany, those would be the majority of largest populations/economies in the EU. Of course, the US death rate will continue to climb while almost the entire EU except for Sweden is swinging in the opposite direction. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ Slovakia and Greece did a really good job. Croatia and Czech Republic. Not sure if we can trust Ukraine numbers. Poland 1,396 37.98 36.76 Qatar 104 2.78 37.39 Serbia 263 6.98 37.67 Belarus 362 9.49 38.16 South Africa 2,205 57.78 38.16 Saudi Arabia 1,387 33.7 41.16 Honduras 417 9.59 43.49 Bahrain 69 1.57 43.96 Puerto Rico 149 3.2 46.63 Norway 249 5.31 46.85 Colombia 2,524 49.65 50.84 Bosnia and Herzegovina 173 3.32 52.05 Estonia 69 1.32 52.24 Slovenia 109 2.07 52.72 Russia 8,503 144.48 58.85 Hungary 577 9.77 59.07 Finland 327 5.52 59.26 Turkey 5,025 82.32 61.04 Dominican Republic 691 10.63 65.02 Bolivia 876 11.35 77.16 Austria 693 8.85 78.33 Romania 1,555 19.47 79.85 Kuwait 337 4.14 81.45 Denmark 603 5.8 104.01 Germany 8,928 82.93 107.66 North Macedonia 259 2.08 124.34 Armenia 386 2.95 130.77 Panama 547 4.18 130.96 Portugal 1,543 10.28 150.07

COVID-19 deaths per million population. Belgium - 840.37 UK - 645.63 Spain - 606.22 Italy - 573.79 Sweden - 506.82 France - 442.86 Average of top 6 - 602.62 US - 370.44 If the US had performed at the same level as the average of those 6 EU countries an additional 80,000 Americans would be dead. OTOH... In Texas, if the current case trajectory continues, Houston could be the hardest-hit city in the US with numbers rivaling those in Brazil. Infection numbers are also rising in Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine. "The big metro areas seem to be rising very quickly and some of the models are on the verge of being apocalyptic," Hotez told CNN's Anderson Cooper. Models show that Houston could have a four-fold increase in the number of daily cases by July 4, he said, adding that states need to act to stop community transmission. "That is really worrisome and as those numbers rise, we're seeing commensurate increases in the number of hospitalizations and ICU admissions," he said. "You get to the point where you overwhelm ICUs and that's when the mortality goes up." Hotez is also a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology, and is working on a potential Covid-19 vaccine. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html

https://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2020/5/27/21271286/marquee-sports-network-comcast-xfinity-cubs-tv

Basically, the opposite of Ebola and MERs, but much more resilient. That’s not the case, however, in places such as Florida, Texas and Arizona, where governors have resisted calls to make masks mandatory and have insisted that lockdown is over for good. According to a recent study reported in Health Affairs, mask mandates in 15 states may have prevented as many as 450,000 COVID-19 cases in the U.S., and new modeling from U.K.-based researchers suggests that effective public health efforts to track new infections and trace and isolate the contacts of those infected can also lower the risk of infection in a population by more than half. Yet in the U.S., views about mask wearing and social distancing have become incredibly polarized. A new Gallup poll shows that only about 30 percent of Republicans would now advise others to stay home as much as possible (down from more than 80 percent in March), and fewer than half of Republicans say they’ve practiced social distancing in the last 24 hours (down from about 90 percent in March). Among Democrats, both numbers are still hovering around 90 percent. Given how little mitigation and containment some state governments are doing, and how lax certain segments of the population have become, especially young people, it’s no wonder that cases are rising. Few other countries have followed a similar curve, but the ones that have — such as Iran — also report widespread skepticism about science, distrust in government, premature rollbacks of lockdown and low levels of compliance with public-health guidelines. The point here is not that lockdown should have continued forever. After all, it ended in Europe, and so far, cases haven’t spiked there. The point is that lockdown should have lasted as long as necessary to limit the amount of virus circulating in the population; reopening should have been tailored to conditions on the ground; and personal precautions should have been encouraged, not politicized. ..... A report Tuesday in the New York Times revealed that the EU is considering two potential lists of acceptable travelers based on how foreign nations are faring in their fight against COVID-19 — and neither list includes the U.S. This slight — “a stinging blow to American prestige in the world and a repudiation of President Trump’s handling of the virus in the United States,” as the Times put it — not only underscores how much worse the U.S. outbreak has gotten in recent days. It also highlights how much better the EU is currently doing than the U.S. And that raises the question of why. “American exceptionalism was not supposed to mean this,” Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently tweeted. https://www.yahoo.com/news/as-covid-cases-fall-in-europe-calls-to-ban-travel-from-america-what-the-eu-got-right-about-controlling-coronavirus-164627926.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/06/america-image-power-trump/613228/ The Decline of the American World Other countries are used to loathing America, admiring America, and fearing America (sometimes all at once). But pitying America? That one is new. 18 minute read, but well worth it.

Rockies and Phillies being hit by cases already...

You mean the Walt Disney Company is pretty powerful...

Well, they did that not to create a panic in the days before roughly five million people were going to leave the city for Chinese New Year’s. In reality, covering it up and then the WHO not pushing any harder were terrible mistakes that have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. That said, by the week of January 19th, the full severity was becoming readily apparent and they took decisive action by locking down 70 million people (the equivalent of California) with less than ten hours’ notice the night of January 22nd/morning of the 23rd. The other fatal mistake was allowing a Spring Festival Gala banquet to go on, with over 12,000 dishes shared with roughly 40,000 people. That was the equivalent of (attempting to hold) an indoors rally without masks for 19-20,000 people Saturday night, or 3,000 teenagers and twenty-somethings in an enclosed church on Tuesday night. To top it off, both Tulsa and Phoenix were experiencing explosive Covid case growth at that time. –I do solemly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/generalprofessionalissues/87229 This article probably gets a bit closer to the “profiting off Covid cases” argument. At any rate, “half truths” is a pretty accurate picture of the reality in this case. Nevertheless, the lack of consistent guidelines (or their being obscured by bureaucracy or political infighting) and the overall trustworthiness of Federal agencies being called into question has led to this quagmire. If you were the Governor of NY, faced with that same exact situation, even today in late June it’s not easy to decide what clearly should have been done (that was realistic or even remotely feasible in that exact moment in time.) Whereas the Federal Government knew what was coming since January 8th, and the national intelligence/defense community, since late November. If that information was made readily accessible to governors before early March, they would have been able to formulate a much more proactive, forward-facing approach.

How does one even clinically define “mildly symptomatic”? One thing we are seeing here in China is the definite likelihood that an asymptomatic positive means, at best, 2-3 months of immunity before being susceptible to contracting it a second time. Which means coming up with any type of “permanent” or even long/er lasting vaccine is increasingly a daunting task for epidemiologists around the world.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/new-yorks-nursing-homes-ship-empty/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/13/andrew-cuomo/new-yorks-nursing-home-policy-was-not-line-cdc/ https://www.factcheck.org/person/andrew-cuomo/ https://apnews.com/12d83565f65f998c5bfdb32daed08ba2

https://www.breitbart.com/health/2020/04/27/andrew-cuomo-blames-nursing-homes-greed-for-not-rejecting-coronavirus-patients-directive/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/21/nursing-homes-residents-account-for-81-of-covid-19-deaths-in-minnesota-but-state-still-allows-facilities-to-admit-covid-19-positive-patients/ https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/nursing-home-deaths-coronavirus https://www.foxnews.com/us/ap-count-over-4300-virus-patients-sent-to-ny-nursing-homes

Okay, let’s try this one. 33-34,000 additional Americans will lose their lives between now and October 1st according to IHME. With 95% masking, we would be at 146,000 deaths. As it stands, we’re heading for over 180,000. As far as retractions go, I’m not sure why I’m being held to a higher standard than the President of the United States. But I would love to get some clarification on why a “highly-offensive” weeks ago is now suddenly acceptable again. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway reacted to President Donald Trump’s use of “kung flu” first by explaining that Trump used the phrase to highlight the origins of the coronavirus in China — and then by suggesting she disagreed with him. Weeks ago, Conway blasted the phrase as "highly offensive." But on Wednesday, she initially reacted to a reporter's question about the president's repeated use of "kung flu" by criticizing the Chinese government. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/24/kellyanne-conway-trump-kung-flu-coronavirus-337682

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ Sweden, by the way, not exactly bending the curve by any measure. In the very beginning here in Wuhan, the health care system was totally overrun, much like in NYC. You can blame Cuomo and De Blasio, but the storyline from the White House is that everything was contained because of the supposed shutdown/“sort of ban” of travel from China and lack of breakouts across the West Coast other than Seattle area nursing homes. The reality is there wasn’t the same warning bell coming from any Federal agency about European travel, the CDC, or even the WHO. In the initial phases, there was also no Javits Center, no USS Comfort, no requisitioning or commandeering of hotels and sports arenas/community centers and unfinished housing projects, as well as the ability to construct two completely brand new facilities in under two weeks. Once the true severity of the crisis was identified, NY as a state did a very good job...De Blasio at best would be a C-. What other options were there available besides skilled nursing facilities for demand outstripping supply of hospital beds? Piling people up in the hallways or turning them away to go back out into the public and eventually home to infect their families/neighborhoods/communities? It’s the job of the Federal government to analyze and interdict international threats before they reach the shores of the US, as well as international multilateral organizations like the WHO. To blame NY and NJ for what happened there...well, that’s why they dumped the Articles of Confederation and went back in the direction of Alexander Hamilton’s vision for the new nation. Cue Bobby Boucher’s mom Kathy Bates in The Waterboy, Btw, IHME predicted deaths now over 180,000 without nationwide masking, 3X the revised predictions after 8-10 weeks of shutdowns across most of the country.

This is not at all what South Korea, Thailand, Germany, Australia or New Zealand did. Even Vietnam, HK and Taiwan provided far more freedoms than here in mainland China. This is almost like jerksticks’ “well, we don’t or can’t be 100% sure about anything so let’s just throw our hands up and trudge right through the unknown” line of thinking. It doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other...except for the fact that the lack of a coordinated, consensus-driven Federal response has put us in this position. Even the UK was able to course correct and largely overcome initial missteps. Why would it be surprising that the US and Brazil have the two most similar political leaders as well as approaches to science (or lack thereof) and coronavirus debacles on their hands? Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro has been ordered by a federal judge in Brasilia to wear a face mask in public or face a fine. Federal Judge Renato Borelli issued a decision Monday, saying Bolsonaro must wear a mask when circulating in public in Brasilia. The judge's order said failure to do so could potentially lead to a fine of up around $386 per day. The decision extends to all government employees in the Federal District, where the capital Brasilia is located. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/23/americas/brazil-bolsonaro-coronavirus-mask-intl/index.html

But public health experts who supported the original shutdowns now worry that governments will not be able to constrain the resurgent coronavirus with a blizzard of shifting restrictions that can change the moment a person crosses a city limit or state line. Hundreds of city, county and state governments have created their own reopening plans, each with different “phases” of economic reopening and each with their rules for how many people can gather at a party, what portion of a restaurant’s tables can be full and when people must wear masks. The results can be a baffling patchwork, and one that residents are left to navigate on their own. nytimes.com Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is imploring residents to stay home as the state grapples with a surge in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations stemming from the disease. In an interview Tuesday with local CBS affiliate KBTX-TV, Abbott said Texas would report more than 5,000 cases of COVID-19 from the previous 24-hour period, marking a new high in the state. He added that hospitalizations were also at an all-time high, stressing that the outbreak is "serious." "First, we want to make sure that everyone reinforces the best safe practices of wearing a mask, hand sanitization, maintaining safe distance, but importantly, because the spread is so rampant right now, there’s never a reason for you to have to leave your home," Abbott said. “Unless you do need to go out, the safest place for you is at your home." https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/504203-texas-governor-urges-residents-to-stay-home-as-state-reports-new-high-in It’s perfectly understandable why some would now prefer to discuss the determined protection of statues compared to the suddenly “re-relevant“ health care crisis. Of course, if we had defended real, living American people in February and early March, we wouldn’t be in such a sheer and utter mess right now.

Florida and California on Wednesday reported record high one-day tallies for new confirmed coronavirus cases at 5,508 and 7,149, respectively. Arizona on Wednesday saw another 1,795 positive cases after adding a record 3,591 on Tuesday. In Texas, Houston Mayor Sylvestor Turner said that the city’s intensive care units were at 97% of capacity, according to a Twitter post from a Houston city councilwoman. Meanwhile, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that travelers to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut coming from Covid-19 hot spots would be subject to a 14-day quarantine. “The latest coronavirus news is not positive for the stock market which was betting the worst of the pandemic recession was behind us,” Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist for MUFG Union Bank, said in an email. “All the hopes of investors looking for a better economy to improve the bottom lines of companies shut down in the recession have been dashed. Forget about the fears of the virus coming back in the fall, the number of new cases and hospitalizations in states like Arizona, Texas, and Florida says the threat is happening right now.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during an appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Tuesday that the “next couple of weeks are going to be critical” in containing the virus in states in the South and West where surges have appeared. Still, state and local officials have so far largely tabled the idea of shutting down their state economies again, with Texas Gov. Greg Abott saying that a new lockdown would be the last option. Fauci also added during his testimony that states might not require going back into “an absolute lockdown” to contend with the latest rise in cases. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stock-market-news-live-june-24-2020-221938970.html

I do fault teachers 50-70 (and I’m on the very bottom end of that spectrum) for just sticking their head in the sand and refusing to adapt to or at least be open to the benefits of modern technology applications (which will be critical to future career success for both students and teachers.) Having taught four years in the Kansas City, MO, public school district, this might be an issue with a significant number. It’s up to to every veteran teacher to utilize their experience to help younger teachers with classroom management, and not just mail it in when retirement age is nearing. The tenure situation provides too much protection in the US, but if that is eroded or negotiated away, there also needs to be some significant “carrots” or in incentives provided as well. Otherwise, we’ll end up like Russia or a banana republic in the not too distant future, with grade bribes for teachers to supplement low salaries and diminishing pension security. Of course, the education of wealthy/elites will be continuing pretty much as normal. I would also argue the downstream learning impact on pre-K, K-6 is even more dramatic. My son hasn’t been in school since January, and won’t return until late August. Thankfully, he started full-time KG at age 3, so the effects should be mitigated somewhat.

If the trend doesn’t jump back up to 500-750, probably even 1,000/day in the next 2-4 weeks, it would be shocking. A better handle on how to treat critical patients, more protections for vulnerable populations, underreporting and playing games with state numbers and the fact that many of those at the highest risk have already died are all part of this. Cases in countries that had suboptimal initial reactions are trending way down, across the EU, even the UK and Sweden.

And HRC in 2016, and a “non-conspiracy” led by the DNC and this time establishment politicians like Clyburn in SC to prevent the likes of a progressive Sanders or Warren from winning. To me, it all comes back to the Birther movement, then Tea Party “revolution” over ObamaCare, McConnell’s comments about openly trying to prevent Obama from accomplishing anything and finally denying Merrick Garland, which has led to an imbalance in the SC that seems like is self-correcting in opposition to it being as political as the other two branches of government. But everything to do with oversight or accountability, Inspector Generals, the Southern District of NY/NJ, violations of the emoluments clause, countless allegations coming out in the Bolton book on transactional/rudderless foreign policy, the complete politicization of military/police/Defense Department and National Intelligence, totally unprecedented. Nixon doesn’t come close. We have gotten nowhere or ceded leadership to China on global trade, transportation modernization, climate change/environment, Belt and Road, foreign aid/lending, AI, mobile and 5G technology, science in general, the WHO, the UN, etc. Oh, and our health care system is still the most expensive in the world but ranks 30-35th for effectiveness, just like our K-12 public education system. And the state of public infrastructure around the country is in shambles. Our main advantages remaining are the university system, military, creativity/risk-taking/entrepreneurship, rights and freedoms, natural resources, isolation from rest of the world, global finance/reserve currency (HK, Dubai and London taking hits) and Silicon Valley. But $7 trillion in new spending to fight coronavirus isn’t going to help matters, as income inequality/wealth disparity continues to widen.

Kates, of the Kaiser Family Foundation, concluded, “You would not look to the United States as a case study of how to do this well. The U.S. has in the past, and could in the future, show/n tremendous leadership in health crises. ... The fact that we couldn't do it in this case — it is depressing, as a global health person.” Harvard’s Jha, who said he’s long championed some flexibilities in the U.S. health system compared to nations with socialized health care, said he’s come to his own grim conclusion about America’s often scattershot response to coronavirus. “We may end up being the worst of any country in the world in terms of our response,” Jha said. “Italy… they're going to do way better than us.” ..... A scorecard issued by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Healthy Security in October 2019 ranked the United States the most-prepared nation to face a pandemic, citing ample investments in infectious disease detection and response, led by organizations like the Centers for Disease Control. Meanwhile, Italy ranked 31st in preparedness, falling behind nations like Estonia and Indonesia. But the all-encompassing faith in the U.S. infrastructure turned out to be misplaced, exemplified by the CDC’s early failure on testing, which contributed to coronavirus’ silent spread. Trump’s own vows in February and March that the virus would simply “disappear” put the United States out of step with other developed nations. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/22/united-states-italy-traded-places-coronavirus-333122

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said more than 7,000 nursing homes across the United States have a Covid-19 patient in them. “Over half of the nursing homes in this nation right now, over 7,000 nursing homes in this nation, have a Covid patient in them,” Redfield said as he testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday. Nursing homes have been hit hard in the pandemic. “Recent data show that approximately 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States are residents or workers at nursing homes and other longterm care facilities.” www.cnn.com