(cartoon courtesy of pixabay)
Open at Easter?
Can’t be done. He will reverse himself at the last minute, as he has done before under intense public pressure. Public health experts say at least eight to twelve weeks of effective quarantine are needed to “flatten the curve.”
If he says “open” on Easter, first, many people won’t follow his advice; second, those who do follow him will spread more infection. It won’t restart the economy if people are still afraid to go out and fly and stay in hotels or go to Disneyland.
There is a company that has been producing thermometers with smartphone apps that report their temperature and location; they have been in business for some eight years.
Their data were shown last night on Rachel Maddow’s show and they indicate that quarantines almost immediately reduce the rates of fevers. Their maps show hot spots in New York and other places that are reporting high rates of COVID-19 positive test results. One surprise is that Florida is an even hotter spot than NYC, even though positive tests haven’t yet spiked there. It seems that spring break has led to increases in fevers.
The data showed school closures and stay at home orders resulted in declines of fever within two or three days. These data probably are the result of lowered infections with much shorter incubation periods than COVID-19: influenza, cold coronaviruses, and the like. The same data, however, will probably show reductions in novel coronavirus transmission with a lag time of five to fourteen days if they are continued effectively.
A nationwide stay at home order still has not been implemented; only eighteen states are under state-wide orders. Thus, more is needed, including a nationwide order that lasts eight to twelve weeks— just as was done in China (if you believe their reports, which is another subject entirely).
The effects on the economy are already baked-in: fear of the virus has shut down the dine-out, stay-out, and travel economy. Prolonging the quarantine won’t make things any worse than they already are.
The right thing to do is to really use the Defense Production Act to mandate that manufacturers produce the equipment we need to treat infected patients without all the healthcare providers becoming ill. The right thing to do is to issue a nationwide stay at home order. Two trillion dollars in economic stimulus may only be the beginning of the federal government support that is needed.
Easter is too soon. Let’s intensify the quarantine and shoot for Independence Day as a target for re-opening. By then, we’ll know just how bad it is.
(This rant was also posted on Quora in answer to the question, “How will [redacted] reopen the country by Easter?”)
(thanks to pixabay and Arcaion for this photo)
You know the commander in chief is suffering from a massive conflict of interest: he is losing half a million dollars a day because his hotels are almost all closed by the current pandemic. So he is pulled by his private business interests to try to open things up again as soon as possible. At the same time, all the public health people are telling him many more will die if we don’t get this thing under control. So the Republicans are trying to hand him control (through Mnuchin) of a half trillion dollar slush fund that he can freely draw from. Who has our best interests at heart? Anthony Fauci, who seems to have disappeared from the daily briefings. “Be wary then; best safety lies in fear.”
(cartoon courtesy of pixabay)
Let’s start with a federal “shelter in place” order– get serious, people. Voluntary, at first. If not working, make it mandatory (by then the scale of the pandemic will have become obvious.)
50,000 ventilators at $50K apiece is $2.5 billion– peanuts to the US government. Surely they would offer a quantity discount for such a large order? Add another $500 million for training. After it’s over, put them in mothballs for the next time. It won’t be long before we need them again.
The states simply cannot do this kind of thing when they are required to balance their budgets every year. The US government is uniquely positioned to get in front of this pandemic and order the equipment. For staff, you add all the doctors and nurses in school right now, plus recruit laid-off baristas to do the grunt work like emptying bedpans.
There are also many retired medical people (like me) who could be coaxed back to work by offering free malpractice insurance and other goodies, like a Good Samaritan clause. A lot of them are older (I’m 65) but some could still be recruited.
What’s wrong with this back-of-the-envelope calculation? Oh, too forward-looking. Never mind.
(Enlarged from a post to the comments line from an article about the ventilator shortage in the Washington Post.)
“Keep your head down until you’re ready to fire.” (I said that) (photo courtesy of 024-657-834)
(photo courtesy of 024-657-834 and pixabay)
photo courtesy of Kevin_Snyman through pixabay
This quote comes from an article in today’s Washington Post. This is something I have feared for years, ever since I started this blog. Other than one or two unpleasant comments, I haven’t been “hated” yet. But I see it could happen to me, just as it happened to everyone who has courted exposure through controversial comments, or even just put themselves out there as a friendly face.
Like Cassandra, I can see the inevitable and I don’t want it to happen (and no-one believes me anyway). Therefore, my posts will continue to be few and far between. I’m sorry I ran out of old photographs to post (I didn’t really run out, but they got harder and harder to find unique images….) So while I may post something now and then, when the urge strikes me, it may not be something that looks controversial to you– just to me.
Apparently the route to having many followers on the net is to be as controversial as possible. That’s not my way. So to the fifty or so people who claim to be following me: Keep your head down until you’re ready to fire.
Why didn’t I post this before? Who, other than us, cares about us? Who even knows we exist? No-one but us and God.
From 12/17/2018: Comment appended to a column in the Times discussing the “tragedy” of human extinction and whether it is undesirable or even avoidable:
Tragedy? In the vast, unknowable stretches of time and space, planets, solar systems, galaxies are created and destroyed regularly without our consideration of the theatrical appeal of this happening. Funny that one would even imagine that the existence of humanity matters in the vastness of the cosmos and the seemingly eternal progression of time.
From our point of view, it’s a disaster. From the point of view of Earth, it’s just another dust-off.
The above comment drew the response below (and many other responses, less notable):
@David All true. However. We are born to care. It is in our wiring that we exist and that we must do everything to continue our existence. And then there is pain and suffering and conflict. It is without meaning that our lives are constructed on this basis. We don’t have anything to do with the fact of our existence and we are doomed to care. If you had asked me, and no one did, I would have done a much better job.
I liked this one best:
[@David] I too consider our survival to be without significance except in our own minds. I am a bit concerned, however , with the future of my dog who has done no wrong.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
This comment comes from the Washington Post and is signed by “Barb against Tyrants”: (the post they commented on was by Jennifer Rubin)
There was something said in the new Parnas audio recording, that is much more significant beyond the discussion of the Ambassador, which meets our legal definition of Treason
“During that discussion, Trump asks a person who appears to be Parnas how long Ukraine would “last in fight against Russia.” Parnas says “without us, not very long,” and another person chimes in, “about 30 minutes.” Months later, Trump would try to cut off military aid to Ukraine.” https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/25/politics/recording-trump-lev-parnas-igor-fruman-ukraine-ambassador/index.html
This quote and Trump’s subsequent actions constitute treason. After that dinner conversation and through the next year Trump CONTINUED conspired with multiple people, both Americans and foreign nationals, in an attempt to aid Russia advance their invasion of Ukraine to diminish Ukraine’s defenses and in doing so directly worked against US National Security. Trump continued with a clear understanding of the consequences of his actions..
Please reopen the Impeachment inquiry in the House NOW and add Treason.
(photo taken by me; I think it’s a buzzard circling over our house.)
We already know that no matter what the Democrats say, the Republicans, to a man, will not vote to convict him for abuse of power, bribery, extortion, violation of the election laws (foreign assistance), and violation of the laws around impoundment of Congressionally mandated appropriations. Not even if he stepped out on Fifth Avenue and shot someone in front of a hundred witnesses.
So why are the Democrats so engaged in reciting their evidence of bribery/extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky? They’d do just as well playing a loop of someone reciting the “transcript” of that notorious July 25, 2019 phone call. The truth is that the Democrats are just as deluded in their way as the Republicans. They think that by going through lawful, reasonable, logical steps of investigation, discovery, subpoena of witnesses and documents, and by reciting their evidence for all to hear, that they are going to accomplish something. The Republicans are deaf to their pleas.
It is clear that the only thing the Democrats can hope to accomplish is to defeat [redacted] at the polls in November. Until then, Don the Con will continue to run wild, doing anything he pleases (as long as it doesn’t break with his base). He’s quite likely to be even worse than he was before the impeachment, based on his mistaken idea that he has been publicly exonerated and that he can now exact revenge on those who opposed him. Don’s base is sure to approve of cruelty towards the disenfranchised, and they won’t notice the moves he takes to consolidate his power and further subvert the power of votes, the ability of people to vote, and the effect of the House’s attempts to control his excesses.
We can hope that there is substantially more evidence that can be uncovered regarding Don’s extortion in Ukraine; already, it seems that there has been a steady drip of relatively minor but damning revelations. The latest is audio of Don saying, “Get her out tomorrow” [Marie Yovanovich, former ambassador to Ukraine, appointed under Reagan] — but a year before she actually left. Why would Don not just fire her way back then?? He surely had the authority. Either he did not know that he had that ability (which is entirely possible, given the depth of his ignorance) or there was some political reason he couldn’t do it.
In the same audio recording (courtesy of Lev Parnas, under indictment for funnelling foreign campaign money to Republican candidates) Don has a number of other disturbing things to say, but they are overshadowed by his reaction to Parnas’ claim that Yovanovitch bad-mouthed him. Parnas is heard saying that Yovanovitch told people Don was surely going to be impeached, and to “just wait for it”. He immediately says “Get her out tomorrow”, but oddly she was not forced out until May 2019. Why did he wait? We don’t know. Perhaps his aides just slow-walked it without realizing the true motives behind the bad-mouthing: they didn’t know that she was threatening to prevent the corrupt moves that Giuliani’s group wanted to make (a money-making scam, probably).
Someone said, “The Republicans will not accept being democratically defeated at the polls. They will abandon democracy instead.” This is my greatest fear: Don the Con will narrowly lose the Electoral College (and lose the popular vote by 3 or 4 millions) and will then attempt a coup.
If he wins in November, look for a steady erosion of democracy through targeted voter suppression. Look for additional chaos in our relations with foreign governments. Look for expansion of the federal government’s support of religious conservative groups, particularly in subsidies for private religiously-oriented schools. Look for further deterioration in public schools as a result.
Look for economic problems: the stock market is way overdue for a “correction” after ten years of relatively steady growth. The Great Recession made things worse for a third of America, and the 1% profited by it handsomely. Another recession will add to the losses sustained by lower-income people in the last one, from which they have not fully recovered. The economy is dangerously imbalanced: wealth inequality is the worst it has been since the Great Depression, and as a result, workers can’t buy more stuff to make the country grow.
Don’t look for relief on prescription drug prices because the pharmacy lobby has Don the Con completely under its spell. Pharmaceutical companies have spent more on lobbying than any other, with the possible exception of military suppliers. As a result, there will be no action to relieve price increases, which have averaged double inflation or more for years.
Look for more military spending. Look for attempts to reduce Social Security spending and no action on taxes other than another phony “tax cut”.
Look for open warfare in the courts between Republican and Democratic viewpoints on every subject imaginable. Eventually, the courts will force Don the Con to reveal his income taxes based on a plain reading of the law– or else they will go completely off the rails, declare the law unconstitutional, and risk being impeached later. Someday the court cases over Don McGahn’s testimony (and many others) will be resolved. If they are forced to talk, another impeachment could be in the offing. If not, there will be further consolidation of the President’s powers and regardless of who is elected thereafter, there will be a distinct risk of fascism ascendant.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
