Tag Archives: COVID-19

Two Charts (Signs of the Times)

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This first one is hard to believe. The rate on the government’s 10-year Treasury bond is around 0.70%. That’s the lowest it’s been for more than 150 years. Whoever buys one of these bonds is basically giving the government an interest-free loan, money the government could use to help people who’ve lost their jobs, small businesses that have lost their customers and local governments that are spending more and collecting less in taxes because of the virus.

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This second chart is easy to believe. It shows confirmed Covid-19 cases per million people. Although the president and his cronies claim that America’s response to the virus has been “spectacular”, compared to a country with a competent national government, South Korea, our response has been spectacularly bad. We’re the red line. South Korea is the blue.

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Getting Ahead of Themselves

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As pressure builds to “reopen” America, it should be noted that if you remove the New York metropolitan area (which includes northern New Jersey) from the statistics, the number of Covid-19 cases is increasing. The New York metro area has been hit the hardest and is now showing improvement. But the situation is getting worse elsewhere, including states where Republican politicians are eager to move past all this unpleasantness.

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Here are the trend lines for four states with right-wing governors in thrall to Dear Leader:

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From Andy Slavitt, former administrator of Medicare and Medicaid:

Like many countries, we picked a strategy to beat COVID-19. We just decided not to stick to it. It’s a long and difficult road, and after we climbed halfway we decided it was too hard and chose to roll back down the hill.

There is, however, a plan to slowly and steadily bring the economy back, but only by solving the public health crisis. It was put forward by [the] White House all of three weeks ago. It had gates and stages, and hinged on conditions on the ground. But none of the conditions have been met.

Rather than wait, [the Toddler] grew impatient. He wants life to go back to the way it was before the pandemic. He wants the economy growing. [He wants to be re-elected, not judged a “loser”!]

Our expectations are simple. The truth, no matter how hard. To know that our safety matters. A plan which uses all our tools and best thinking that we stick with. Candor in discussing the tough trade offs.

We’re not getting that.

Instead, in Slavitt’s words, we’ll get:

… a food fight between the hardened realists who can tolerate death to “get our country back”, and the “public health mafia who are willing to kill the economy for the sake of a few people who will die soon anyway.” And if those people say that the death toll is going to be big, they’re just alarmists.

Many in the news media will present this as one more political controversy requiring balance between “both sides”. Dana Milbank of The Washintgon Post sees it as something else:

This is state-sanctioned killing. It is a conscious decision to accept 2,000 preventable deaths every day, because our leaders believe the victims [will be] poor schlubs who work in meat-processing plants… It is deliberately sacrificing the old, factory workers, and black and Hispanic Americans, who are dying at higher rates….

All we can do is pray for a vaccine breakthrough and hope summer weather helps. That’s because our president abandoned the fight. [He] can lie all he likes about the adequacy of testing and supplies, and blame his predecessor, his opponents and the media for his incompetence. It [won’t] matter to the virus.

Finally, some not exactly optimism from Tom Tomorow:

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The Plan Is To Have No Plan

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From Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University:

This is my read on what the government’s guidance and actions amount to…. My purpose in posting it is to challenge the American press to be a lot clearer in its descriptions.

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence.

Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed this will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history, the execution of which will, I think, consume the president’s re-election campaign. So much has already been made public that the standard script for a White House cover up (worse than the crime…) won’t apply. Instead, everything will ride on the manufacture of confusion. The press won’t be able to “expose” the plot because it will all happen in stark daylight. The facts will be known, and simultaneously they will be inconceivable.

“The plan is to have no plan” is not a strategy, really. Nor would I call it a policy. It has a kind of logic to it, but this is different from saying it has a design— or a designer. Meaning: I do not want to be too conspiratorial about this. To wing it without a plan is merely the best this government can do, given who heads the table. The manufacture of confusion is just the ruins of Trump’s personality meeting the powers of the presidency. There is no genius there, only a damaged human being playing havoc with our lives. 

A Terrible List of “Hot Spots”

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The New York Times has a long list of the worst virus outbreaks in the U.S. The list includes facilities with 50 or more cases.

Among facilities with more than 150 cases, jails and meatpacking plants predominate (presumably, the virus can survive longer where there’s meat). The U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt and a few long-term care facilities, such as psychiatric hospitals, also have large numbers of cases.

Most long-term care facilities are relatively small and appear further down on the Times list. However:

Across the country, a pattern has played out with tragic consistency: Someone gets sick in a nursing home. Soon, several residents and employees have the coronavirus. The New York Times has identified more than 6,400 nursing homes and other long-term care facilities across the United States with coronavirus cases. More than 100,000 residents and staff members at those facilities have contracted the virus, and more than 17,000 have died. That means more than a quarter of the deaths in the pandemic have been linked to long-term care facilities.

It’s hard to imagine the suffering that’s going on behind closed doors (including the doors of houses and apartments).

Marion Correctional Institution — Marion, Ohio 2268
Pickaway Correctional Institution — Scioto Township, Ohio 1655
Smithfield Foods pork processing facility — Sioux Falls, S.D. 1095
Trousdale Turner Correctional Center — Hartsville, Tenn. 1037
U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt — Guam 969
Cook County jail — Chicago, Ill. 940
Cummins Unit prison — Grady, Ark. 911
Lakeland Correctional Facility — Coldwater, Mich. 821
Bledsoe County Correctional Complex — Pikeville, Tenn. 585
Harris County jail — Houston, Texas 488
Neuse Correctional Institution — Goldsboro, N.C. 480
JBS USA meatpacking plant — Green Bay, Wis. 348
G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility — Jackson, Mich. 347
Lansing Correctional Facility — Lansing, Kan. 336
Triumph Foods meat processing facility — St. Joseph, Mo. 295
Butner Prison Complex — Butner, N.C. 266
Sterling Correctional Facility — Sterling, Colo. 260
Paramus Veterans Memorial Home — Paramus, N.J. 256
Trenton Psychiatric Hospital — Trenton, N.J. 247
JBS USA meatpacking plant — Greeley, Colo. 245
Parnall Correctional Facility — Jackson, Mich. 243
American Foods Group meat processing facility — Green Bay, Wis. 241
JBS USA meatpacking plant — Grand Island, Neb. 230
Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women — St. Gabriel, La. 216
Shelby County jail — Memphis, Tenn. 205
Westville Correctional Facility — Westville, Ind. 200
Stateville Correctional Center — Crest Hill, Ill. 196
Hackensack Meridian Health Nursing and Rehab Care Center — Hackensack, N.J. 190
Franklin Medical Center prison hospital — Columbus, Ohio 185
Christian Health Care Center — Wyckoff, N.J. 183
The Harborage nursing home — North Bergen, N.J. 181
Tyson Foods meatpacking plant — Waterloo, Iowa 180
Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center II — Andover, N.J. 176
Redwood Springs nursing home — Visalia, Calif. 174
Central Detention Facility — Washington, D.C. 172
Lincoln Park Care Center — Lincoln Park, N.J. 168
PruittHealth Palmyra nursing home — Albany, Ga. 167
Tyson Foods meatpacking plant — Columbus Junction, Iowa 166
Soldiers’ Home — Holyoke, Mass. 163
Gallatin Center for Rehabilitation and Healing — Gallatin, Tenn. 162
JBS Beef Plant — Cactus, Texas 159
Dillwyn Correctional Center — Dillwyn, Va. 158
Northern State Prison — Newark, N.J. 158
California Institution for Men — Chino, Calif. 154
Perdue Farms meat processing facility — Cromwell, Ky. 154
Brookdale Paramus assisted living facility — Paramus, N.J. 153
George Beto Unit prison — Tennessee Colony, Texas 153
JBS USA pork production facility — Worthington, Minn. 151

A president who was reluctant to force the production of protective gear was willing to force meatpacking plants to stay open. Why? On one side are giant corporations who want to continue business as usual and millions of voters who would be affected by a shortage. On the other is a low-paid workforce mostly made up of people — immigrants, Latinos and African Americans — who don’t matter to the president at all. Q.E.D.

A Non-Story That’s Now a Story

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The Guardian (formerly the Manchester Guardian) is a very good newspaper, even for American news. But even they sometimes make a mountain out of nonsense.

This was the top headline on their live Coronavirus blog a few minutes ago:

New York Sees Anti-Lockdown Rally as T—- Supports Michigan Protesters

The story says:

Anti-stay-at-home protesters have gathered in front of New York’s state capitol, where governor Andrew Cuomo just wrapped up his daily briefing on the state’s coronavirus response.

Then you see a picture of the demonstration:

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We had that many people show up for a pro-impeachment rally in our New Jersey town (population 22,000) on a cold, rainy night in January.

Some stories don’t deserve to be stories.