caulfield12

It will be interesting to see how often this happens to states with Dem governors, and how often the supplies end up in GOP or battleground election states. Battle of Asymptomatic Transmission is a Thing Gov. Brian Kemp vs Tybee Island (beach community) As the Pentagon ordered 100,000 body bags to store the corpses of Americans killed by the Coronavirus, Governor Brian Kemp dictated that Georgia beaches must reopen, and declared any decision-makers who refused to follow these orders would face prison and/or fines," Sessions' statement read. "Tybee City Council and I are devastated by the sudden directives and do not support his decisions. The health of our residents, staff and visitors are being put at risk and we will pursue legal avenues to overturn his reckless mandate." https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/04/us/tybee-island-georgia-beaches-open/index.html

8377/16486 recovered https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

https://theathletic.com/1723090/2020/04/03/rosenthal-mlb-pondering-games-in-empty-spring-parks-but-many-obstacles-remain/?source=weeklyemail KBO starting sometime in May. https://sports.yahoo.com/report-president-trump-wants-sports-194343096.html NFL, as we noted many times, will be even more difficult because of the physical contact and numbers of players/coaches/staff. NCAA FB season will clearly be jeopardized if classes don’t return on time in August. Could be decisions about a partial season that need to be made, but hope it doesn’t come to that. Of course, the subtext beyond all of this is whether mass political rallies can return in September and October

Warren Buffett (who’s essentially leveraging his wealth with Gates) and Ted Turner...George Soros, but only if you agree with his Open Society reforms. Zuckerberg, but his donations are usually more self-serving and we’re just learning the full extent of negative externalities created by FB. His wife’s health care initiatives, though, have been more impressive and less controversial.

Another analogy on the states not issuing stay at home orders. Would you get onto a plane where there was a smoking section in the back where 4% (let’s say 12-15 passengers) were putting that smoke into the ecosystem and having it recirculate around the plane...? And still almost writing hydrochloroquine prescriptions when we don’t yet know the side effects when taking it with a cocktail of other drugs...based on purely anecdotal evidence? WTH? Especially with those patients with underlying conditions, which could exacerbate them or even lead to death in extreme examples...this is the polar opposite of evidence-based science. People are now being COVID tested when they get on and off planes? No evidence that anything close to that is happening. Mutters a response. “I don’t know. Check it out!” That’s the best we can do here in the US?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/04/politics/republican-governors-stay-at-home-orders-coronavirus/index.html And those holdout governors are still taking their cues straight from the White House and their own often less-experienced public health officials over Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx... https://www.yahoo.com/news/tensions-persist-between-trump-medical-141306900.html

S-hole Chinese..... Joe Tsai, the billionaire co-founder of Chinese technology and e-commerce company Alibaba, and his wife Clara Wu Tsai have donated 2.6 million masks (both surgical and KN95), 170,000 goggles and 2,000 ventilators to New York. The donations came in two separate shipments: The first arrived at Newark International Airport on April 2 and has already been distributed. The second shipment, which New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo referenced at his most recent press conference, arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Saturday. The Tsais have considerable ties to the New York City-metropolitan community. Joe Tsai owns the Brooklyn Nets basketball team and Barclays Center Arena in Brooklyn. “We kept hearing cries for PPE from our community and wanted to help,” said Clara, who said New York state authorities will allocate the second shipment, but “it’s our intention to help the most under-served institutions.” Clara cited Jacobi Medical Center and Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx and Elmhurst Hospital in Queens as the institutions she and her husband thought might need the supplies the most. The 2,000 ventilators that were donated are noninvasive, so they are not the type that can be used on patients who are unconscious. www.cnn.com

Chelsea Clinton ✔@ChelseaClinton (Keep thinking: I’ve a Masters in Public Health; wrote my doctoral dissertation on global efforts to tackle AIDS pandemic; co-authored a book on global health governance; teach MPH courses on health systems & global health & I’m not qualified to lead a national #covid19 effort.) For Greg, it was amusing for a moment to imagine an alternative universe where HRC put Bill Clinton in charge of this...what the reaction would be. Or Chelsea in Jared Kushner’s current “fixer” role. “This will be probably the toughest week between this week and next week, and there will be a lot of death, unfortunately, but a lot less death than if this wasn't done but there will be death,” Trump said. Easter Palm? Please tell me he’s not serious about having gatherings outside now for Easter Sunday...Lord help us all.

Let’s face it, some don’t want any immigrants from poor countries, or from Islamic countries (even though Iranian-American incomes are in the top 25% on average.) It’s the Trump vision here. Beauty queens from Eastern Europe, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. They’re okay (after all, he’s anchor immigrated two families, after all.) This is how we get the current administration attempting to rewrite the Statue of Liberty quote about “give me your poor huddled masses.” It’s kind of shocking that the New Testament hasn’t been modified to focus primarily on the prosperity Gospels. One more thing, Moan...you certainly would have blocked one of the most important Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, based on his upbringing as a poverty-stricken bastard on Nevis and St. Croix. Without Immigrants, the Fortune 500 Would Be the Fortune 284 More than 40 percent (43 percent) of today’s Fortune 500 had a first- or second-generation immigrant among their founders, even though just 14 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born. Nearly a fifth (18.4 percent) of these companies were founded by first-generation immigrants, and another quarter (24.8 percent) were founded by their children. All told, these 216 immigrant-founded companies accounted for $5.3 trillion in global revenue in 2016 and employ more than 12 million workers worldwide. Immigrant-founded companies make up more than half of the Fortune 25 (52 percent) and Fortune 35 (57 percent). Rather than preventing people from getting jobs and costing the government money, these immigrants have created an amount of wealth greater than the GDP of Japan, the world’s third-largest economy. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/12/without-immigrants-the-fortune-500-would-be-the-fortune-284/547421/

Justin Amash twitter, totally shocking with Mnuchin after what we witnessed from 2008-10, right? It seems to have gone largely unnoticed that Mnuchin has unilaterally altered the Paycheck Protection Program to substantially reduce loan forgiveness. Law says a business can spend ~50% of the loan on nonpayroll and still receive full forgiveness; Mnuchin says not more than 25%. To be clear, Mnuchin’s change doesn’t help employees. Law says total pay can’t be reduced by more than 25% of an employee’s full quarter salary or wages. He doesn’t touch this. Regardless, Mnuchin has no authority to change laws. Congress legislates; executive officials execute. The math is a bit tricky, so I think that’s why many people are not immediately seeing what’s going on here. A covered loan is 2.5x average monthly payroll. The covered period is 8 weeks. Compare the law to Mnuchin.

11. Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who is helping to lead the effort to replenish supplies of personal protective equipment, admitted that the administration is delivering products it acquires to medical supply companies – rather than delivering them directly to the hospitals in need, per NBC’s Geoff Bennett. (Bottom line: The federal government is not taking over the supply chain.) 14. And as NBC News has reported, it wasn't until Thursday night that banks received their 31 pages of guidance from the Treasury Department on how to lend the money in the $350 billion small-business relief program — and some banks haven't even decided whether they can participate on the opening day. Many of these failures — see the Top 4 on this list — can be traced directly to the president, but the rest have so many other fingerprints on them. How many of those failures were due to poor leadership at the very top? How many were systemic? A combination of the two? Americans 40 years and older have seen this country’s government do big things — go to the moon, expand civil rights, end the Cold War, help build the internet, combat AIDS. But if you’re in your 20s or 30s, you’ve mostly seen the government fail again and again. And the government’s response to the coronavirus – just two months into the crisis — is the biggest failure of all. https://www.yahoo.com/news/governments-biggest-failures-coronavirus-response-130750197.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-wants-coronavirus-over-world-103022425.html I’m skeptical of this doomsday scenario for a number of reasons. One is the overall quality of exports (see all the PPE and test issues in Europe), and the fact that this diplomacy almost always has a price tag, loan amount or concession behind it (surrendering a port here, doing transactions in RMB instead of dollars there)...the Chinese manufacturing capacity might be ramping up, but there is still limited worldwide demand and a ton of overcapacity as well as growing skepticism over Belt & Road. Obviously, a lot of these trends depend on what happens in November, just like a lot of diplomatic trends reversed in January, 2009. That said, there has to be a serious and strategic thinking of the new world order...with Europe once again threatening to come apart at the seams over immigration and now economic/pandemic factors. A return to neoliberalism/globalism would simply be the status quo from a decade ago, and a new reimagining needs to take place. With Biden more a caretaker than a visionary, some serious thinkers need to emerge from both sides of the political spectrum (but especially the center left) to articulate a way for the country to move forward that balances the interests of the middle class and rich/corporations without resorting to class warfare and populism that further divides the country. Right now, though, most are just looking for leadership wherever they can find it.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3078427/coronavirus-chinas-new-export-restrictions-medical-supplies Some are going to look at this as “bad China.” Others, at securing the quality of their supply chains/vendors with a couple high profile equipment failures in Europe this past week. Perhaps the third point is a market opportunity for competitors, as demand is spiking world-wide. That said, the respirators they are working in now are going to be too late for NYC, same with the GM and Ford conversions. Also noteworthy is the Elon Musk equipment failure, at least to meet specs required.

Not even Obama wanted that. He was a pragmatist, and realized there was a lot more sympathy for those kids under 18 brought up in the US, or at least raised with no language or culture than English/American. The DACA kids. How quickly it has been forgotten thst he sent back more immigrants by far, compared to Trump. Yet there’s roughly the same percentage of Americans in favor of protecting them (DACA) as there are women who think that abortion should always be legal, or that there should be limits on assault weapons. The Group of 8 was clearly working on a compromise, until it became politically untenable to be a Republican and look for a reasonable solution or you would get primaried by someone even more extreme, like a Sheriff Joe or Judge Roy Moore. Certainly the left has its extremists as well, but they’re not pushing for anything so extreme as open borders or fully amnesty except as an opening position. In fact, the GOP side has only gotten more entrenched, about E-Verify for example. You have to give something to get something. The difference is that there is not one iota of give on the other side. When Trump was willing to compromise, he quickly caved under pressure and reneged on his commitments. And there’s an issue of fairness when illegal immigrants have tax ID numbers and are paying a lot more in taxes than many Americans who are receiving checks from the government but slickly manage to avoid any tax liability through loopholes carved out for the rich. Any UI or UBI study will demonstrate that the working poor always plug that money right back into the economy.

This reminds me of the press conference the other day. Classic bait and switch about drug interdiction and the border wall when the American people want facts and guidance about what to do. As long as the administration is successful at distracting attention away from the most important issues, refusing to take any responsibility and taking credit for a constantly moving goalpost (100-240,000 lives lost now considered a victory like no other in the history of pandemics), we’ll continue to get the government we deserve. If it takes blaming others for the situation in order to feel better about ourselves, well then there will always be people like that...just as there always have been. All I know from living through this firsthand is it takes a monumental amount of shared sacrifice and a common goal to defeat this virus, and the US isn’t there, not yet. Wuhan declared victory by clapping for medical workers, honking horns, sirens going off for 3 minutes at 10:00 a.m., but, even now, it doesn’t feel close to being over.

"I blame the corrupt business owners that are employing these ILLEGAL immigrants, not the U.S. government." 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will be a very lonely place if you do that. But just ignoring or wishing these people away in the face of the biggest healh care crisis in a century isn't going to solve the problem, because it's about science and flattening the curve, not politics. We are only as strong as the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Yes, they’re bringing massive amounts of Muslims here to Wuhan to bury them in mass graves but only after removing all the organs first...just like we don’t have any contingency plans to help any illegal immigrants who have been doing the work Americans refuse to do at below minimum wage. That’s the way things have been for at least forty years in this country...because the corporations and politicians benefit, as they work as nannies, or do most of the shitty work at casinos, hotels and golf courses. The politicians act like when these immigrants who often pay taxes at a higher rate than the 1% get sick, when the homeless get sick, when refugees at the border get sick, that it will all just miraculously go away. The irony here is that the Trump administration and China have pretty similar policies on Muslims and immigrants. That’s why there is almost no daylight between the two. When has he ever criticized Xi Jinping OR Vladimir Putin? I’ll hang up and listen to the answer. And if the United States doesn’t start acting like a world leader sometime soon, it will be a scary world we’re leaving for our children and grandchildren. A world where everyone is left on their own, a world without empathy/care or compassion...where what we’re essentially left with is simply survival of the fittest. Two months from now, we’ll look closer to a Purge movie than a shining city on a hill. We’ll look at the way we’ve been treating the least among us, and understand where it all went wrong. And the people who held their nose to vote because they thought it would benefit their stock portfolios will also have nobody to blame but themselves.

If we had a respirator for every female that Trump has referred to as "nasty" in the last 3+ years, there would be a net surplus of 30,000 now. At any rate, we can battle back and forth for the rest of the year about who was more unprepared... states vs. Federal government. We know what Harry S. Truman would say about that. But arguing we had the biggest economy in the history of the world and getting credit for having his signature on every check that goes out? They really should just have a camera and no press at these briefings. Just present information from non-politicians.

Well, nobody has held a single funeral in the city of eleven million since January 23rd. Undoubtedly, those dying the first 2~3 weeks weren't being caught or were being logged as pneumonia. Of course, that's the same exact case all around the world. But every body was taken away for 10~11 weeks and cremated almost instantly. What's the natural attrition rate of a city of 11 million over that time period? This weekend is the first time since January anyone could go out... and it's also Qingming or tomb sweeping festival. Which means every family in the city that lost a loved one finally has the opportunity to take the ashes and place them in the cemeteries, and there are only eight of these places in the city. It's a cultural thing. So you'd have to provide convincing or compelling evidence that NYC, Chicago or LA wouldn't have similar numbers with ZERO citywide funerals from January 23rd through April 4/5/6. Is it likely that the numbers are underreported, sure? By a factor of 10~12, no way. Think of all the people who died because the hospitals were overwhelmed the first month just like what you're going to see in NYC. Heart attacks and strokes that couldn't access an ambulance or taxi because they weren't available. Normally, people die here while stuck in traffic jams with no medevac helicopters. In this case, many couldn't even get out of the house or successfully enlist an ambulance or taxi because all public transportation was shut down. In 2015 there were 153,623 deaths in NYC. That comes to 420.88 a day with heart disease and cancer as leading causes. So we can divide that 153K by 1/5 (10 weeks) and the number would be around 30,000ish. Wouldn't be surprised by 8000~12000 deaths that were not counted. But similar problems with numbers in Italy and Spain. Some reports those countries are over reporting deaths for a number of reasons. But 3x the reported numbers absolutely make sense and wouldn't be a surprise, because that would align with the 10% mortality rates in southern Europe.

Probably too busy coming up with some more prescriptive abortion guidelines. I feel embarrassed to be an Iowan sometimes. Compared to Reynolds and Steve King, Terry Branstad is almost benign.

Of course there's a Maryland nursing home right now with 77/95 infected because they took all their 27 allocated Covid tests away... those places are no better in these situations than the cruise ships. My mom's main factor for survival in her assisted living center is pretty much Iowa's relatively remote location. And Trump, evidently, can't withhold the impulse to point out that there are fewer automobile accidents this last month...or bringing up the flu again. And he never clarified yesterday that the US was PAYING was Russia for the supplies, not a humanitarian donation.

It's because they DO have kids. They don't want to see a health care system so decimated (think of all the doctors and nurses dying in Italy from performing so many intubations) that there's not just a threadbare framework left to save their kids or elderly parents when this is all over.

Sure, but it's a lot easier for leaders to change their tone. When I read what you'd written, Charlottesville came to mind almost immediately. But this isn't about states' rights vs. Federalism. It's bout clarity. About everyone being on the same side... pulling in the same direction. We also have to waste time educating governors about asymptomatic transmission or the dangers to the elderly of attending church services in Florida. Everyone should act like they have it Covid and behave accordingly... and thank God they don't. At a certain point, there has to be a strategic plan for getting through the next four months, and especially beyond instead of reacting. Governors are going to have to work together to share equipment after peaks are over... and avoid too many peaks occurring simultaneously to prevent the entire health care system from collapsing. Decide on a mask policy and stick with it. Stop bidding up the prices of ventilators to $50,000 but agree to a framework for the order in which critical areas will need them. Unfortunately, we're still going to be dealing with states on the back end of this who waited too long because they didn't have surveillance testing to warn of a tsunami coming (see Albany,GA) before it was too late.

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/01/philadelphia-hahnemann-hospital-joel-freedman/ Then there are the profiteers, like Joel Freedman, who bought and closed a Philadelphia hospital and now wants the city to rent it from him—for $1 million a month.

The states should have been building their stockpile. We have almost 10,000 in our stockpile and we've been building it," Trump said at the White House. "We've been supplying it. But the states should be building. We're a backup. We're not an ordering clerk." Trump also appeared to question the financial wisdom of investing in mass production of the critical breathing machines, saying that in a few months they would only be worth $5 apiece ..... The building controversy over ventilators came as it emerged that 20% of a federal reserve of ventilators were out of commission because their maintenance contract lapsed. Hospitals in California and New York received machines from the stockpile but found them to need repair, according to the story first reported by The New York Times and CNN reporting. Federal officials have said they have sent 4,400 ventilators to New York -- by far the worst-hit US state -- from the national stockpile. Even the new ventilators will not be available to states that are in the heat of the coronavirus battle right now. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/02/politics/donald-trump-ventilators-leadership-coronavirus/index.html

Friday setting up as a battle between Dr. Fauci, GOP governors and Trump over why there’s still no national/Federal stay at home declaration yet. States without Statewide Stay at Home Orders (info is a few days behind, cnn.com) Alabama Arkansas Georgia (Thursday) Florida (just instituted Thursday) Iowa Maine (announced) Mississippi (just announced) Missouri Nebraska Nevada (just announced) North Dakota Oklahoma (announced) Pennsylvania (just announced) South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee (“safer at home”)??? Texas (not stay at home, but some restrictions recently announced) Utah Wyoming https://www.foxnews.com/politics/coronavirus-deaths-top-5000-in-us-as-more-states-issue-stay-at-home-orders https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/02/opinion/if-clueless-governors-wont-act-trump-needs-issue-national-stay-at-home-order/ https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/what-are-you-waiting-for-11-states-that-havent-asked-residents-to-stay-home/