James.galbraith

If you haven’t seen the Tiger King documentary on Netflix, you should, because it isn’t just crazy, it’s also a window into what Donald Trump might be like if he hadn’t been born to a rich daddy. It’s about a white-trash network of big cat “private zoos,” a rivalry with an animal-rights-themed rescue operation in Florida, a sordid cast of characters (not kidding with the Donald Trump analogy), polygamists, a murder for hire (maybe), another murder (maybe), and more plot twists than we’d ever tolerate from a scripted show. You know, like real life in the era of Trump. 

The documentary is a national sensation, as it should be. It’s amazing TV. But, its popularity is driving crowds to Oklahoma, and rather than shut them down given the global pandemic ravaging our country, Oklahoma’s governor is totally okay with keeping them open for business. There are some show spoilers below, but worth it, given the importance of this information.

The show’s main stage is the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, population 2,212. And despite the whirlwind of drama surrounding it, it remains open for business today. And I mean, TODAY. From the park’s Facebook page (which I won’t link to, because they are horrible and f’ them), posted Sunday, March 29, in the evening: 

After two of the busiest days this park has ever seen, we are going to step back tomorrow and confirm with the Governor that we are operating within the guidelines of the Covid19 requirements. We will not open at 9:00 tomorrow morning.

We are a licensed agricultural entity, but the crowds have been huge since the Netflix show and we have difficulty in controlling that much traffic at one time. At one point today we had cars lined up 1/2 mile down the road. We want to accommodate everyone, it just might not be possible to do safely.

We are conferencing with Gov Stitt tomorrow to seek advice on remaining open yet somehow controlling crowds.

Please check in with us before you travel all this way. We have been assured of our exemptions, now we just need to figure out the logistics of managing crowd sizes. We will post tomorrows hours after our State Capital conference call.

Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt is the same governor that, as the pandemic exploded around the country two weeks ago, posted (and then deleted) this tweet: 

He really likes things that are “packed” in Oklahoma, and clearly, he’s happy as can be to ride off the Netflix documentary’s fame for his state, no matter how backward and disgusting it makes them look. (For example, a big source of revenue is playing with tiger cubs, $50 for two people, for six minutes. However, they grow up in 12 weeks. So they have to keep churning out cubs for this scheme. What happens to them when they grow up? The documentary suggests that they may be killed.)

It wasn’t until last Wednesday that the governor instituted some restrictions around the state (in 19 of the state’s 77 counties, because the coronavirus respects county lines), but there is still no “shelter in place” outside certain cities, where mayors have taken that initiative. Instead, there’s a “safer at home” order for seniors and the immunocompromised, but that’s not slowing the spread of the disease. 

However, the governor’s emergency order does close “non-essential” businesses in counties that have confirmed COVID-19 cases (because, again, the virus respects county lines), and Garvin County, home of the tiger park, has four confirmed cases. It doesn’t matter, however, because somehow, the park can keep operating under an “agricultural” exception—clearly designed for working farms, not private zoos drawing record crowds. Apparently, nothing is more essential, in the governor’s eyes, than a tourist attraction. (We already know the park owners don’t care, because they are the worst people.)

Of course, the order does do the following: “Prohibits gatherings of 10 or more individuals.” So … is the state going to limit attendance at the park to 10 people? In fact, why haven’t they already been enforcing this restriction? Those four cases in the country are likely just the tip of the iceberg, and now you have crowds of tourists arriving and leaving from what may very well be a new hotspot? 

According to the CovidActNow.org model, Oklahoma could see around 80,000 dead if it doesn’t get its shit together literally in the next couple of days. 

Yet, instead of moving in that direction, the governor is working with a tourist attraction to figure out how to keep it in business. No matter how morally bankrupt the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park might be, allowing it to become a new vector for the spread of the disease just takes it to another whole level of disgusting.

[You'd think that would have been clear by now to prosecutors and judges.]

From Commonwealth v. Mueller, decided Wednesday by a Pennsylvania Superior Court appellate panel:

On June 8, 2018, police conducted a traffic stop in Brookhaven Borough. During the course of the stop, Appellant, who was a bystander and not involved with the traffic stop, approached the scene. Appellant stood over the vehicle's occupants, and Officer Hughes asked her to step back. Appellant refused to comply. Officer Hughes asked Appellant to step away from the immediate area, and he told her that she could observe from across the street. Officer Barth arrived, spoke with Appellant, and asked her to move.

Appellant began to videotape the scene with her cell phone and refused to move. Officer Barth threatened to arrest Appellant if she did not move, and Appellant moved into the intersection and obstructed traffic. Officer Barth asked Appellant to move again.

Appellant said: "This is fucking ridiculous." Appellant subsequently walked away and went to work. The police issued a citation, charging Appellant with disorderly conduct at Section 5503(a)(3) (uses obscene language or makes obscene gesture) [for which Appellant was convicted and (a)(4) (creates hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose) [for which she was acquitted]

A person is guilty of disorderly conduct under Section 5503(a)(3) if, "with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof, [she]…uses obscene language, or makes an obscene gesture." Where a person uses profane language or other "angry words" that are not used to describe an act of sex or to appeal to anyone's prurient interest, this Court has found insufficient evidence to sustain a conviction under Section 5503(a)(3). See, e.g., Pennix, supra (reversing conviction under subsection (a)(3) where appellant became agitated during search of her book bag in courthouse and screamed: "Fuck you I ain't got time for this," "Fuck you police" and "I don't got time for you fucking police"; while appellant's words were disrespectful, insulting and offensive, they were not "obscene" within meaning of Section 5503(a)(3)); Commonwealth v. McCoy, 69 A.3d 658 (Pa.Super. 2013), appeal denied, 623 Pa. 761, 83 A.3d 414 (2014) (reversing conviction under subsection (a)(3) where appellant shouted "fuck the police" multiple times during funeral procession for police officer; record showed no evidence that appellant's chant was intended to appeal to anyone's prurient interest or to describe sexual conduct in patently offensive way).

Instantly, the record shows Appellant uttered "this is fucking ridiculous," after police had repeatedly asked her to back away from the scene of a traffic stop. Nothing in the record indicates that Appellant intended to describe an act of sex or appeal to anyone's prurient interest.

The Commonwealth agrees the evidence was insufficient to sustain the conviction under Section 5503(a)(3). Accordingly, we reverse Appellant's conviction and vacate the judgment of sentence. {Due to our disposition, we do not have to consider Appellant's challenge under the First Amendment.}

Texas expanded its quarantine requirement for out-of-state travelers on Sunday, adding to a growing patchwork of domestic travel rules aimed at stemming the spread of the coronavirus.

Gov. Greg Abbott targeted some of the pandemic's hot spots, ordering that air travelers from California, Washington state and several other places must self-quarantine for two weeks after arriving in Texas. His executive order, which previously focused on New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and New Orleans, was also expanded Sunday to all of Louisiana and Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit and Miami. The new rules take effect Monday.

Abbott directed state troopers to enforce the quarantine order for Louisiana motorists driving into Texas, with authorities slated to collect information from drivers on where they would isolate themselves for 14 days, with the possibility of unannounced visits to verify compliance and levy punishment of a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.

Texas has emerged as a new center of the coronavirus, with the Department of State Health Services reporting more than 2,500 cases and 34 deaths as of Saturday night.

The Republican governor‘s action follows a similar move by Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, who first required quarantine for New York motorists but expanded her order Sunday to all states. Her initial targeting of New Yorkers drew the ire of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who denounced the policy and threatened to sue.

Florida has also gone after neighboring Louisiana and the faraway New York tri-state region, with Gov. Ron DeSantis setting up checkpoints along the Panhandle border. The Republican governor, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, said he would support Trump if he quarantined New York City's metropolitan area, as he floated Saturday.

The president, after floating the idea earlier Saturday, backed down a few hours later and instead asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “issue a strong Travel Advisory“ for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. “A quarantine will not be necessary,” he said.

And we've come full circle

As Daily Kos covered last week, while colleges closed across the nation, one private, Christian college in Virginia went a decidedly different route. Liberty University, which has had both Mike Pence and Donald Trump speak over the years, welcomed students not only back to campus, but back to campus after spring break.

Now, as The New York Times first reported, some students at the evangelical university have gotten “sick with symptoms that suggest COVID-19”—and that’s concerning for both the university and the local community.

How did we get here? At one point, Liberty president Jerry Falwell Jr., a major Trump supporter, went the route of many higher education institutions, claiming that only students (including international ones) without another place to go could stay on campus. That evolved into him welcoming about 1,900 students (of which 800 have reportedly already left) back to campus. That number, by the way, reportedly doesn’t include students who returned to the area to live off-campus.

As The Times reports, there are attempts at social distancing happening on campus. As The News & Advance originally reported, classes went mostly online whether you returned to campus or not, with labs limited to ten people or less. Dining halls went to-go only. Still, in a campus setting, students can only reasonably be so far apart. Limiting a small group of residents is one thing, especially for schools who went the route of, say, Amherst College, which allowed students in need to stay on campus only if they did not go elsewhere for spring break and then return. 

Now, as Falwell told The New York Times in an interview on Sunday, students returning to campus will need to self-quarantine for two weeks. Dr. Thomas Eppes, the physician who runs the school’s health service, told the outlet that of the Liberty students who are already “sick with symptoms that suggest” COVID-19 as a possibility, three were reportedly told to go to local hospitals for testing. Eight more were instructed to self-isolate, Dr. Eppes added.

Obviously, there’s a lot happening here. While it’s easy to make jokes and knock undergrads who would return to campus in spite of all other advice and precedent from schools around the nation, blaming the students misses the point. Especially given that, as the Richmond-Times Dispatch reports, Falwell told students who did not come back to campus for the semester that the biggest refund they might receive is a whopping $1,000 credit for the next academic year. 

In the bigger picture, the campus is not a bubble. Even if one isn’t terribly concerned about the fate of students, faculty, and staff remaining on the campus, these people are still out and about in the general region. And even if the students are very, very conscientious, there’s still a possibility they’ll use already limited resources if they need medical care down the road. 

Falwell, who is fairly active on Twitter and recently appeared on Rush Limbaugh’s show, shared this tweet about a week ago.

Sigh.

If Falwell, and other influential leaders like him, didn’t have so much power and sway, this perspective would be a lot less dangerous. As Daily Kos has covered, more than one religious leader has insisted on holding service in spite of the pandemic. What should people of influence be doing? Advising people to follow medical advice—including, but not limited to, washing their hands and staying home as much as possible.

Donald Trump's daily pandemic campaign rallies have been the sources of countless lies and bizarre asides, but today's effort, moved to the Rose Garden in belated effort to more closely adhere to social distancing guidelines, is unhinged.

In stream of consciousness ramblings, Trump publicly suggested the continued shortage of masks in the nation's hospitals might be because healthcare workers are making off with them "out the back door"; accused, without evidence, hospitals of "hoarding" ventilators; repeated the lie that the U.S. military was out of ammunition, before he arrived; etc. He is lying about all of it, straight-up.

The man remains unfit, incompetent, and a direct danger to the public.

In actual news, Trump also announced that the federal government would continue to advise social distancing through at least April 30, as recommended by top federal experts. after repeated earlier musings of re-opening businesses "by Easter.”

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Really, the optimal wish is to be perfectly satisfied with your remaining wishes.

Today's News:

On March 16 six San Francisco Bay Area counties announced a “shelter in place” order—Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo. They were the first in the nation to take that drastic step, and can you believe that that was less than two weeks ago.

Three days later, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested that his city needed to follow suit, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the same guy getting so much praise today, thought it was the dumbest f’n idea possible. “Look at your words, ‘shelter in place,’ you know where that came from? That came from nuclear war,” Cuomo told reporters on March 19. “What it said is people should go into an interior room of their home with no windows, stay there until they get the all-clear sign. Now, that’s not what people really mean, but that’s what it sounds like. Misinformation, emotion, fear, panic,“ he added, are “truly more dangerous than the virus.”

He added, “I would have to authorize those actions,. It’s not going to happen.” Two days later, Cuomo ordered a shelter in place for his state, calling it a “pause” so de Blasio wouldn’t win. But even that delay cost the city dearly. 

Now look at the growth of cases in New York City and the Bay Area:

Using a log scale, one that increases exponentially rather than linearly, and adjusting the times so that the chart begins at a time when both regions had the same number of cases, and you can clearly see how a single week of shelter-in-place made such a massive difference: 

In the time that NYC went from around 800 cases to over 3,000, the Bay Area’s case numbers increased only around 300-400. And even now, things are relatively calm here. Keep in mind, the divergence in responses at the time was controversial. 

Ten days later, not really much to discuss, is there? 

Here’s the thing, at least New York shut down. And New Yorkers are the longest-lived people in the country—they are healthiest, from walking everywhere, to a lack of elevators and escalators in old apartment buildings, to low rates of obesity, to a world-class healthcare system. 

The city is slammed with cases right now, and the worst is yet to come, but there are ongoing efforts to “flatten the curve”—the slow and extend the transmission of the diseases, so that hospitals aren’t slammed with patients all at once. What happens as the disease spreads to less healthy areas of the country (which is almost everywhere else)?

Here’s a map of states that still aren’t doing shit: 

The green states have shut down. Those orange and red states? They aren’t taking this pandemic seriously. And if you want to be terrified, go to that site and click through state by state. What they have done is run a model that predicts how many people will die in each state with various measures enacted. 

For example, California, thanks to its early shut down, is projected to “only” lose 21,000. New York, by waiting a week later, is projected to see 64,000 dead. 

Horrifying, yes. But it gets so much worse for states that still haven’t shut down:

California, by far the largest state, is over 12% of the population of the United States. Any state that loses more people to COVID-19 than California—despite the state being an early foothold for the disease—has so mismanaged its response that its leadership deserves to be tar and feathered. That the states above still haven’t taken this disease seriously enough to issue shelter-in-place orders is downright criminal. Hundreds of thousands of people might die as a result. 

Now, those numbers aren’t set in stone. The ActCovidNow.org models provide the dates upon which these states will hit their point of no return. For example, Tennessee still has three weeks before its hospitals are overloaded. Texas about two and a half weeks. Florida a little over two weeks. We can still avoid the worst of this disease if the leadership in those states acts. 

The problem, of course, is that those states are all run by Republicans, and Trump-loving Republicans. And if Trump is talking about opening up the country by Easter, which is Sunday, April 12, then they won’t want to do anything to undermine Trump’s “leadership” of the crisis. (Mississippi’s useless Republican governor even invalidated local stay-in-place orders from mayors!) The rot starts at the very top, with a president who only cares about the immediate message and PR, as opposed to listening to the experts on the long-term (very painful) solution. So it leads to ridiculous moments like this one: 

Of course, a lot of people didn’t agree with him, and the experts certainly did not. You know who did, and led him to say what he did? Donald Trump. And Trump rules their worlds. That’s why we have shit like this RIGHT NOW:

What the hell is Florida still doing having open beaches? Well, Trumpian governor Ron DeSantis refuses to do anything to undermine Trump’s message that “everything is getting better.” And you know what? Florida isn’t as young and healthy as New York. So when you see 320,000 potential deaths in Florida if they don’t move to restrict people, it’s all too believable. Every day matters. Every second delayed matters, with real lives at stake. 

Here, let’s look at this chart to terrify the hell out of everyone. This was made by community member sufeitzy yesterday: 

What that chart shows so well is that the growth of the pandemic is logarithmic—it’s exponential, with current rates of infection doubling every 2-3 days. That means that if we did nothing, just let the disease run its course, we’d have over 2 million dead in just three weeks.

Let me say that again: left unchecked, the disease would kill 2 million Americans IN THREE WEEKS. 

That’s why every single day that any state delays in shutting things down means people will die. 

Now, of course, we won’t see that many deaths. Half the country is in lockdown. The curve is already being flattened in California and other large states. Even New York will see the worst of it ebb in a couple of weeks. That will eventually flatten that exponential growth in deaths. 

But states that don’t take action will get hit. 

One final chart, using yesterday’s numbers (because the real-time numbers become obsolete the second I hit “publish”):

I’ve sorted the chart by new cases. The New York area is currently getting slammed. New Jersey is fast becoming a New York. Washington has its caseload under control, finally. Look how far down California is, despite having twice the population of New York and being an early nexus of the pandemic, along with Washington State. 

We know that Mardi Gras fueled the pandemic in Louisiana, and things are getting rough there. Detroit and Chicago are rising too quickly, fueled by equipment shortages that shouldn’t exist. But, you know, Trump: 

But what’s terrifying in that chart is that two large, Republican-led states, Florida and Texas, are rising way too quickly up that chart. Go ahead and refer back to those worst-case scenario numbers further above—and we see how they’re moving too quickly toward that “hundreds of thousands of dead” scenario if they don’t take action. Indiana is up there! Tennessee! (Next-door Kentucky, with a Democratic governor who was quick to shut the state down, is seeing a fraction of the cases.)

So the moral of the story? Stay in place orders work, and if we don’t see them implemented at the national level, we’re going to see some horrific death rates in just a few short weeks. Every day matters. Every day counts. 

Outside of war, politics is so rarely life-and-death as it is today. 

Update: Florida is going to be rough. 

Police on Saturday broke up a 47-person “corona party” in a 550 square foot apartment drinking to a DJ in defiance of New Jersey’s social distancing order. The party took place in Ewing Township, outside of Trenton, according to police.

Governor Phil Murphy shamed the participants: “We are not going to be shy about naming and shaming those who can’t get this message into their heads. Last night right here in Mercer County, Ewing Township police broke up a party with 47 people, including a DJ, crammed into a 550 square foot apartment. The organizer was charged, as they should have been and deserved to be.”

Last night, Ewing Township Police broke up a party with 47 people – including a DJ – crammed into a 550-square foot apartment. The organizer was charged, as they should have been and deserved to be.

This is not a game. Stay home. Be smart.

— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) March 28, 2020

Last week, a similar party was held in Kentucky. At least one of the attendees now has coronavirus.

The post Police Break Up 47-Person ‘Corona Party’ Held in Defiance of NJ Social Distancing Order: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Workers in New York City make and package face shields for health care workers. | Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

Florida has received all the supplies it has asked for. But most states haven’t.

As Covid-19 continues its spread across the United States, health care providers across the country face a staggering lack of necessary equipment, with shortages in a federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment contributing to unequal distribution among affected communities, according to new reporting by the Washington Post.

While it is still not clear which communities are receiving more or less federal support — or how distribution decisions are made — the Post article suggests, anecdotally, that federal allocation of medical resources do not seem to target density of need, but rather the political makeup of affected communities.

According to the Post, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requested $2 billion for emergency medical equipment in early February, but received just $500 million weeks later. Now, under strain, that federal stockpile — comprised of ventilators, masks, drugs, and other medical equipment — is insufficient to meet the needs of hospitals who feel underresourced due to the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Communities have been begging, sometimes literally, for increased access to medical equipment, including ventilators and respirators, and basic personal protective equipment (PPE), like masks, gloves, and gowns, for weeks.

But distribution from the federal government has appeared to be uneven. In Massachusetts, where there are major outbreaks around Boston and in the state’s western Berkshire County, only 17 percent of requested resources have been shipped out. Maine has received about 5 percent of what it has requested, and Colorado has received about a day’s worth of supplies, according to the Post.

On Sunday, Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared on Meet the Press to say that her state received 112,000 masks from the national stockpile Saturday, but that even with that number, “We’re going to be in dire straits again in a matter of days.”

President Donald Trump has been critical of Whitmer’s requests for aid, and her criticism of his administration’s response, referring to her as “the woman in Michigan.” By contrast, he has praised Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, where Trump resides, and that state has received multiple shipments of everything it has requested, and is awaiting another, according to FEMA data.

It is not clear why this disparity exists, or what protocol FEMA, which recently took over control of the stockpile, uses to administer resources.

The federal stockpile exists to ensure that states can easily access emergency necessities without relying on a fickle open market. But that reserve, established in the 1990s, was never intended to span a nationwide emergency, a former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Richard Besser, told the Post.

“The response contains enough for multiple emergencies,” said Besser. “Multiple does not mean 50 states plus territories and, within every state, every locality.”

Trump wants states to take the lead on responding to Covid-19, despite the fact the federal government is better equipped to do so

At a press briefing on March 19, Trump expressed resentment about being asked for medical supplies, saying that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk.” He also suggested that governors needed to take care of their own states, acquiring necessary medical materials themselves on the open market.

Governors “are supposed to be doing a lot of this work” of obtaining supplies, Trump said at the time.

But many governors and health officials have said this approach is difficult, needlessly expensive, and that it pits localities both against one another — and the federal government.

“Allowing the free market to determine availability and pricing is not the way we should be dealing with this national crisis at this time,” Virginia’s Gov. Ralph Northam said.

“It is a challenge,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said. “The federal government says ‘States, you need to go find your supply chain,’ and then the federal government ends up buying from that supply chain.”

Equipment is hard to find on the open market, health officials say, because individuals and communities across the globe are buying out what exists. And prices are rising in the private market for the same reason: a number of actors — individuals, hospitals, states, the federal government, and other countries — are competing for the same limited resources.

This paradigm favors wealthier states, those most willing to divert financial resources toward the pandemic (regardless of potential political fallout), or those able to leverage existing relationships with a president who often uses personal preference to determine national policy. As the crisis deepens, all states — regardless of whether they have these advantages — are finding needed equipment in dangerously short supply.

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo has told reporters her state is trying “to scour the world to find all the supplies we need in order to do the testing,” with mixed success.

And Oklahoma’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Jerome Loughridge told reporters his state will run out of personal protective equipment within the next week.

There is a mechanism by which the federal government could help states overcome these difficulties — essentially, by working, despite what Trump has said, as a shipping clerk. As Vox’s Alex Ward explained, the Defense Production Act (DPA) allows the government to procure badly needed resources and to direct production to resolve supply shortages:

The federal government could get involved and place an order for masks, which would get fulfilled first because a DPA order takes priority over all others. Then, because the government knows which areas have the most need for those masks, it can distribute them appropriately.

... [To fill those orders, companies are] going to need additional materials and may be hampered in their efforts if they can’t get those materials.

Again, this is where the DPA comes in: The federal government can find other sources of those materials and then put in an order to have the company sell the materials to the federal government instead of using them to make their own products.

... Finally, there may be a company that wants to help build something — say, respirators — but doesn’t have the machinery or capital to do so. If the federal government thinks that company could be useful, it might give a loan or offer equipment under DPA so production can begin right away. That accelerates that company’s ability to help right now.

Trump has begun using the DPA in an extremely limited fashion. Its broader use could go a long way toward helping state officials access the materials they need, however. But with no guarantee that federal assistance is at the ready, states may have to continue their efforts to figure out how to protect their own — even if that’s to the detriment of the collective United States.

Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health at a White House briefing on March 26, 2020. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

“We’re going to have millions of cases.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, went on CNN Sunday morning and, though clearly reluctant to offer a numerical estimate, said in his opinion the United States would likely see 100,000 to 200,000 coronavirus deaths before all is said and done.

As of Sunday afternoon, the United States has about 135,000 cases and more than 2,000 people have died.

Fauci cautioned, “I don’t think that we really need to make a projection,” because of the uncertainty inherent in the forecasting enterprise. But he did concede that “looking at what we’re seeing now, I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 cases — excuse me, deaths — we’re going to have millions of cases.”

Fauci’s comments follow a warning from White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx on NBC’s Meet The Press Sunday morning that “no metro area will be spared” the toll of Covid-19 and that nobody should be complacent and assume this is just a problem for the New York region. Instead, she said we should see the situation in New York as a preview of conditions that are likely to prevail elsewhere in the country in a week or two, just as the crisis in the Lombardy region of Italy previewed the outbreak in New York.

The contrast with messages from President Trump, who started talking about relaxing social distancing measures a few days ago while setting a goal of reopening the country by Easter, is striking.

Trump’s view that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the disease” and emphasis on the need to strike a balance between public health and the economy is very different from Joe Biden’s message on Covid-19 this weekend, which stresses the need to listen to public health experts and tell the public the truth.

It’s worth emphasizing that even among economists, there is very little support for Trump’s view. The University of Chicago’s Booth School routinely polls a panel of distinguished economists for their views on policy issues, and found near-universal assent to the notion that prematurely ending lockdown measures would ultimately be more economically costly than allowing them to proceed.

Economists’ main critique of the policy status quo isn’t that we are doing too much to prioritize public health, it’s that economic policy is not investing enough material resources in expanding the health care system’s capacity.

That economic wisdom seems entirely in line with the priorities of America’s top public health officials.

But the question of how those officials will navigate tensions between the shared priorities of economists and public health experts and the views of the president of the United States and his economic policy brain-trust (which is largely composed of non-economist businessmen) remains open.

Most recently, when confronted on the disconnect between her words and the president’s, Birx just pretended to believe that Trump is “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data,” underscoring the inherent tension between maintaining credibility as a public communicator and being attentive to the president’s taste for flattery.

The facts as conveyed today by Birx and Fauci are, however, extremely sobering and suggest that we’re not even close to putting the darkest phase of the current crisis behind us.

This new ad from Joe Biden speaks for itself.

And the numbers—and the breadth of Trump’s failure—only continues to grow.

[This is an advisory list, but I expect will have some influence on some local governments.]

See here, which lists "[w]orkers supporting the operation of firearm or ammunition product manufacturers, retailers, importers, distributors, and shooting ranges," but prefaces all the categories (not just the gun-related ones) with:

This list is advisory in nature. It is not, nor should it be considered, a federal directive or standard. Additionally, this advisory list is not intended to be the exclusive list of critical infrastructure sectors, workers, and functions that should continue during the COVID-19 response across all jurisdictions. Individual jurisdictions should add or subtract essential workforce categories based on their own requirements and discretion.

The Free Beacon (Stephen Gutowski) notes that, several days ago, N.J. Attorney General Gurbir Grewal defended including gun stores in the N.J. lockdown by saying,

[T]he Governor's executive order tracks every other executive order that has a stay at home provision and none of those—none of those—contain an exemption for firearm stores, nor does the federal guidance from Homeland Security contain that type of exemption when it comes to essential facilities and nonessential facilities. So, we're consistent with every other executive order that calls for stay at home. We're consistent with federal guidelines and we'll defend the Governor's executive order in court.

FOX News host Laura Ingraham had a toxic conversation with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Friday night in which she asserted that the media enjoys the coronavirus crisis and is upset when there is good news.

Said Ingraham: “You get the sense that the media, they don’t almost — some of them don’t want things to go back to normal in the United States. They like this crisis point and they really don’t want things to go back to normal, and that a lot of them seem — as the news comes in that might be slightly better than we thought, they’re angrier and grumpier than they should be. It’s odd.”

Ingraham’s comments came after an exchange with Giuliani in which the former NYC mayor said governors and mayors should be showing fealty to Trump in order to get the ventilators and COVID-19 supplies they need: “A little advice for the governors and the mayors, having been in that position in three extraordinarily difficult situations, I’d say one equal to this. Take the blame when you have to. You know, if you play with your boss, sometimes it’s better if you don’t win the golf game. He’s the boss, he’s got all the resources. I don’t say that he’s gonna be affected in giving out resources one way or another, but it’s just human nature that if you act like a responsible guy, and he’s got real confidence that you’re doing what you’re doing, he’s gonna give you everything you want.”

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All non-essential workplaces in Spain will close for two weeks to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Saturday after the country’s death toll climbed to nearly 5,700.

Speaking at a press conference, Sánchez said the measure will come into force Monday and last until April 9. Workers will receive their usual wages but will have to make up lost hours at a later date, he said. The goal is to reduce travel to levels registered during the weekends, he added.

Sánchez had faced pressure to tighten the country's lockdown from regional leaders, including from his own Socialist party, anxious to slow the spread of the virus across the country from Madrid, officials said.

Sánchez announced the move on the day that Spain’s death toll climbed to 5,690 as of 11.30 a.m., up by 832 since Friday morning. A total of 72,248 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed, with 4,575 people receiving treatment in intensive care units, and 12,285 recovering.

“These are very tough, sad, bitter days. But they are decisive because they are the ones in which we have to measure ourselves. And then we will have an entire life to remember that in the difficult times, resisting, united, Spain made the grade,” he said.

NEW YORK — New York City’s top health officials were tracking warning signs of the flu, and didn’t like what they were seeing: A massive, late-season spike in influenza-like-illnesses that revealed a troubling aberration.

So on March 10, Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot went to City Hall to share the findings with Mayor Bill de Blasio and urge him to begin taking more drastic action to control the spread of the coronavirus, which has since claimed 450 lives across New York City. De Blasio resisted, believing that closing schools, restaurants and cultural centers would cripple the city’s economy and disproportionately hurt the marginalized residents he aims to prioritize.

What followed was a week of mixed messages, delayed decisions and feuds that escalated to what one person described as “warfare” amongst city officials, all while the federal government withheld critical aid to New York and Gov. Andrew Cuomo grappled with whether to impose draconian mandates.

A week later, the mayor began following most of Barbot’s advice, after plodding through a decision-making process that was described by people involved as tense, laborious and rife with conflict. As he huddled in City Hall with top aides, contending with how to handle the biggest crisis of his tenure, residents of one of the most densely-populated cities in the country continued to cram into subway cars, dine in restaurants and pop into their local watering holes — something de Blasio encouraged only hours before he ordered them shut on March 15.

New York City is now ground zero of a global catastrophe few saw coming — one that has thrust de Blasio into the national spotlight, laying bare his managerial vulnerabilities and threatening to undermine the legacy he has been building over the past six years. What’s more, the virus shows no signs of abating anytime soon.

“I think in retrospect we deliberated too long on the various shutdown steps,” City Council Member Mark Levine, who chairs the health committee, said in an interview. “We’re racing against the clock in slowing the spread of this, and even a day or two can change the trajectory.”

The virus was first reported in New York City on March 1, when a health care worker who had been infected in Iran began displaying symptoms after returning home. By then, the alarm bells had already begun ringing and would grow deafening in the subsequent weeks.

“You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus,” warned the headline of a Feb. 24 story in The Atlantic, which quoted a Harvard epidemiology professor predicting up to 70 percent of the world’s population would be infected within the year.

City Council Member Steve Levin read the article in horror, and began cautioning “anybody that would listen, including members of the administration,” he said in an interview. “I mean, I was telling it to the cops outside [City Hall] at the metal detectors.”

Levin said he reached out to de Blasio’s chief of staff, Emma Wolfe, who was promoted to deputy mayor last week as she helps lead the city’s response. “She was adamant that, ‘We get it. We know what’s happening,’” Levin said. In fact she was so consumed with responding to the virus that when he broached her about another subject during the first week of March, she brushed him off, saying she could focus on nothing else, he added.

De Blasio showed less urgency.

“I caught him in passing and he listened,” Levin said. Asked how the mayor reacted, he paused to carefully choose his words. “You know, he was, I think — along the lines of, ‘I hear you,’” he said, and declined to go into further detail.

Meanwhile, city health officials were watching emergency room visits from possible coronavirus cases explode — 1,156 patients complaining of flu-like symptoms on March 12, compared to no more than 422 on any given day in March last year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

But de Blasio was determined that life in the city continue apace.

He and top health officials fought during lengthy planning meetings in City Hall, according to multiple accounts from sources with knowledge of the interactions and published reports. The discord had been years in the making — several current and former city officials said he has long distrusted the top brass of the health department, feeling they do not understand politics and public relations and mishandled an outbreak of Legionnaires disease in 2016.

“He certainly has no trust in his field of expert commissioners and high ranking agency officials,” one former City Hall official said this week. “If an expert at an agency says to him, ‘Mayor this is what’s happening,’ instead of granting that some truth and acting on it, he will laboriously poke and prod at that opinion for hours.”

Another former aide said de Blasio has misgivings about government bureaucrats, subject experts and those he perceives to be in the “chattering class,” particularly when the chatter amounts to criticism of his leadership.

To that end, de Blasio kept schools open for days after parents, teachers and members of his own administration urged him to close them, touching off a feud with the teachers union, which chastised the health department this week after a 36-year-old principal died from the coronavirus.

Three city officials familiar with his decision-making process said he was relying on advice from Mitchell Katz, head of the city’s public hospital system, who worried school closures would compromise staffing levels at hospitals during an emergency. De Blasio was also concerned about the lopsided impact it would have on low-income students and single-parent households.

He insisted schools would remain open during TV interviews on the morning of March 15, even as he was preparing to announce a system-wide closure later that day.

“You know I hated closing the schools. I thought it was going to cause all sorts of other problems and of course it has,” de Blasio said during a radio interview Friday morning. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has been granted public hero status during this crisis, similarly reversed his stance on closing schools within a matter of hours that Sunday.

He and de Blasio were also at odds over whether to require New Yorkers to “shelter in place,” an argument of semantics that went on for days as residents were left without clear guidance. De Blasio was calling for the policy earlier than Cuomo, while also signaling confusion about its implementation.

“What is going to happen with folks who have no money? How are they going to get food? How are they going to get medicines?” he asked during a news conference on March 17. “There's a lot of unanswered questions.”

In another example of his mixed messaging, he has said he will make a “first attempt” to reopen schools by April 20, while also calling President Donald Trump’s push to bring businesses back by Easter, which falls on April 12, “false hope.”

Yet on Friday de Blasio tweeted that April 5 is “the day the strains we’re seeing right now on medical supplies and personnel could overwhelm us if we don’t get the help we need. This is a race against time.”

De Blasio spent days deliberating over whether to cancel the St. Patrick’s Day parade, even after other cities canceled theirs, did not provide clear guidance over a municipal work-from-home policy, according to multiple agency leaders, and argued with library officials who wanted to close their branches before he was ready.

And in arguably his most ridiculed move, he hit the gym the morning after he closed schools, just as “social distancing” guidelines were starting to take effect and fitness centers were preparing to shutter that evening.

Perhaps more importantly, his administration’s guidance on testing for the virus was inconsistent, as was his tone about its severity.

Shortly after the World Health Organization deemed the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, the mayor was asked to respond to expected recommendations about a possible quarantine.

“I think we can say at this point in time we’re looking at all the guidance, but with a bit of a trust-but-verify worldview,” he said.

He also said the city’s hospitals were ready for an influx of patients. “We have 1,200 beds that we can activate readily,” he said on March 8. “Just the fact that you’ll turn off a lot of non-essential things and turn all that talent and capacity to a crisis, should give New Yorkers a lot of confidence that, you know, even with hundreds of cases, we’d be able to handle it.”

This week The New York Times chronicled the nightmarish scenes from one of the city’s public hospitals, where 13 people died in a single day.

Privately, people across City Hall have begun to wonder whether de Blasio’s week of delayed action put people in danger.

One Council member expressed those concerns publicly: “By failing to disclose virus cases in schools, they kept families in the dark and left more lives at risk,” Mark Treyger, who chairs the education committee, said in response to the principal’s death.

Mayoral spokesperson Freddi Goldstein said city hospitals and the health department have stockpiles of protective gear, but she declined to provide information about the amount of supplies on hand when the first case was confirmed on March 1. De Blasio has been asking the federal government to provide 15,000 ventilators, 3 million masks, 45 million gloves, gowns and face shields, 500,000 goggles and another 50 million surgical masks.

“It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and have an opinion,” she said. “The mayor carries the responsibility of 8.6 million New Yorkers. He must think about their safety, their livelihood, their education. Every decision he has made has been deliberate and thoughtful. That’s what you need in a crisis.”

One public health official who has long advised de Blasio and is part of high-level briefings on the administration’s plans defended his governing style.

“It was hours and hours of detailed questions,” Irwin Redlener, a medical doctor and the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said in a recent interview. “If anybody gave him sort of general information, he was forceful and aggressive saying, ‘I don’t want that; I want the details, I want the numbers.’”

“I was pretty impressed,” he added. “I was slightly intimidated because he was very demanding, in a way that was appropriate.”

Redlener said he would have preferred faster action on closures of public spaces, but said the mayor was trying to account for a mountain of consequences — backsliding students, job losses, economic devastation — all while confronting a “distressing” lack of clarity from the federal government.

Yet even this week, de Blasio, who’s fond of offering “blunt truths,” was voicing uncertainty about whether to close public playgrounds. “If we think people are abiding by the rules, we'll leave them open. If we think different, we’ll shut them down,” he said Friday. Meanwhile, city officials have begun posting “play at your own risk” signs.

While de Blasio works out of City Hall, his top aides overseeing the response were hunkered down for weeks at the Office of Emergency Management in Brooklyn, where staffers from city agencies are rotating shifts in a 40-person room serving as a command center. The arrangement ensures de Blasio is physically separated from his first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, who would take over the city if de Blasio could not serve and has recently begun working from his apartment.

The team is relying on a pandemic response plan previously established by the emergency management department, though a workshop the city’s hospital agency hosted in late 2018 exploring the impact of a worldwide avian flu outbreak drew troubling conclusions: “The workshop highlighted how quickly such an outbreak might overwhelm the city’s health care delivery system,” the Greater New York Hospital Association wrote in a release to its members.

Former OEM commissioner Joe Esposito, who de Blasio fired more than a year ago, defended his former boss, saying in an interview this week, “I'm not sure I would've done anything differently.”

As the days have tumbled along and New Yorkers have begun to settle into new routines for an indeterminate amount of time, de Blasio’s messages have become clearer and much more dire.

He has been spending up to three hours a day preparing for his daily news conference, often facing the public around 5 p.m., well after Cuomo has already addressed New Yorkers in briefings that kick off the day’s news cycle and attract a loyal following.

“[De Blasio] keeps using this wartime analogy. He does not seem like a general. He seems like he’s writing a book about the general. Cuomo seems like a general,” a former City Hall official said.

On Friday, the mayor vented his frustration at the ordeal.

“This whole godforsaken experience has been a learning curve,” he said on his weekly radio interview on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.“ “None of us have been through anything like this.”

Dan Goldberg contributed to this report.

This country has had some truly bad people as president over its history. Andrew Johnson was a racist. Warren G. Harding was plagued by scandal. Richard Nixon was a criminal, a racist and an anti-Semite.

But there has never been a president in American history who based his re-election strategy on a cynical gamble involving the lives of the entire American population. We have never before experienced a president who deliberately, voluntarily chose to assume the role of a threat, rather than an ally and protector, to the American public. Not just a threat to those who might oppose him, but an existential  threat to all. Tragically, that is exactly Donald Trump’s strategy to preserve his political power in the face of this pandemic. He has chosen to gamble the lives of ordinary Americans facing potentially the most dire public health crisis in the nation’s history, in hopes of securing his own re-election. 

We are already seeing the strategy play out. Charlie Warzel, writing for The New York Times, shows us the outlines as it begins to take shape.

First, it’s important to understand the two choices that were available to Trump when this crisis began.

Donald Trump’s re-election strategy had two potential paths this week. The first path would save millions of jobs, turn Trump into a populist hero for many and perhaps prevent another depression. The second path would court chaos, playing up the partisan divide, deflecting all blame for the coronavirus pandemic onto the media, China and the Obama White House, and praying that it ends up being enough to obscure his administration’s disastrous lack of preparation.

(emphasis supplied)

Trump chose the second path because that is the path that has been successful for him during his entire tenure as president. A leader who was actually concerned about the fate of Americans would not have waited two months to treat the coronavirus pandemic with the deadly seriousness it warrants. Nor would such a leader, in light of the infections now sweeping exponentially throughout the country, be encouraging American workers that an immediate return to work was in their best interests. As Warzel notes, “Knowingly putting workers into harm’s way to move the market is both unthinkably cruel and wildly misguided, even from an economic perspective.”

But not from a political perspective. Trump’s actions up to this point bespeak a cold, political calculation, one that Trump clearly believes is viable in these polarized times. The calculation is not particularly complex. It is that the number of Americans who die as a result of his policy will be outweighed by the polarized sentiments of the electorate, come Election Day.

That is why, when the seriousness of the pandemic became impossible to ignore, the first thing the administration chose to do was create a focus for his supporters to place blame. The racist “Chinese virus” tactic was deliberate with a view towards generating controversy in the media, and thus to distract from the very real fact of Trump’s own negligence.  

News cycles about the administration’s trollish language compete for airtime with reporting around the administration’s slow and costly response to the coronavirus — one that’s left millions of citizens and health care workers vulnerable. In pro-Trump circles, the conversation focuses on a deranged media that’s more obsessed with political correctness than a pandemic.

Trump’s continued attacks on governors from Democratic states and the protective measures they are implementing—actually threatening to withhold aid from certain states whose governors weren’t “nice” enough to him—follows the same pattern: to set up a ready scapegoat for his base.

Mr. Trump’s desire to end social distancing follows a similar pattern. The president’s short attention span, thin skin and obsession with the Dow Jones industrial average all lead him to push for a reopened economy. Only the president doesn’t have that power — states do. And most states are likely to continue urging their residents to stay home. So he’ll blame the media and Democratic governors for the economic fallout. Here’s where the faulty American bailout helps the president in the most sinister way: Workers left without adequate protections could suffer more under a mass quarantine and might be more likely to resent medical experts and a mass media urging for social distancing. Mr. Trump can rail against the states’ decision to extend the quarantine and pretend, insincerely, to side with workers over the elites. After all, many of them can comfortably work from home and keep their jobs, he might argue.

As Warzel notes, this provides Trump with a potential win-win situation: If states’ efforts are successful and the pandemic is thwarted or diminished, Trump can claim victory for his “national strategy.” If the pandemic does not spread to more rural areas, Trump can also claim that Democrats overreacted and cost the country economic harm that could have been avoided.

We see the stark disparity between the actions of several “red” state governors and those of “blue” states already playing to this strategy. For the moment, red state governors in solidly Trump-voting states like Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Tennessee are following the Trump playbook. Meanwhile, Trump continues to rally his base with his thinly-disguised propaganda “briefings,” in which he surrounds himself with health professionals and continues his attacks on those governors who criticize or ignore his pronouncements. In this way he can stay in a perpetual campaign mode.

The fact that this strategy ignores the potential toll of human lives and suffering in those states that have chosen to follow Trump’s lead is of absolutely zero significance to the administration. The fact that people in those states, convinced by Trump that the pandemic is overblown, are nonetheless likely to infect others who do take such precautions is also of zero significance. And the fact that this strategy flies in the face of all the scientific research promoted by the public health authorities, including Trump’s own CDC, is also of no moment. That is what makes Trump’s actions here so striking and unique— American lives are simply removed from the equation, in favor of political expediency, that is, Trump’s re-election prospects. Trump has intentionally chosen to make us all his pawns, to the extent that he has the power—and the bully pulpit—to do so.

Trump is simply counting on the profoundly hyper-partisan divide in this country to be more significant and powerful than the actual body count caused by his strategy. He is counting on Fox News, and Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and the billionaire set who have all come out in favor of Americans “getting back to work” as soon as possible. He is expecting that the stimulus just passed by the Congress, which he signed, will not do enough, and he is attempting to channel the anger and rage that he believes will follow, towards those who counseled caution. And more than anything, he’s counting on his base to remain loyal and credulous throughout.

Never before has any American president exhibited such wanton, callous disregard for the lives of American citizens. But Warzel isn’t sure that treating Americans as “collateral damage” in such a strategy is going to play out the way Trump hopes.

Under normal circumstances, this tactic seems to work for the president. But these are not normal times. Though public opinion around the virus is still starkly divided by party, there’s evidence to suggest that gap is narrowing and could shrink substantially as the spread of infection peaks across the country. Faced with an exponentially multiplying threat, the president has chosen to flirt with disaster rather than avoid it. It’s a strategy with a high risk of collateral damage — namely, us.

One thing is certain—Trump is constitutionally incapable of admitting mistakes. As he was mentored by the despicable and infamous red-baiter, Roy Cohn, he can always be counted on to double-down, even in the face of egregious missteps. He will continue on this path no matter who dies as a result. So we are all going to see Trump’s strategy playing out in real time, day by day, as the death toll increases. 

Google won't be participating in April Fools' Day this year due to the serious threat of the coronavirus that continues to impact the entire world. The Verge reports: According to an internal email obtained by Business Insider, Google will "take the year off from that tradition out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Our highest goal right now is to be helpful to people, so let's save the jokes for next April, which will undoubtedly be a whole lot brighter than this one." "We've already stopped any centralized April Fool's efforts but realize there may be smaller projects within teams that we don't know about," the email from Google's head of marketing Lorraine Twohill continues. "Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned -- internally or externally." Hopefully other companies will take note of Google's lead here and adjust their own April Fools' plans accordingly. There's a time and a place for a good joke -- but this probably isn't it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NPR is reporting that some Wuhan residents in China who had tested positive earlier and then recovered from the disease are testing positive for the virus a second time. It's raising concerns of a possible second wave of cases, as China prepares to lift quarantine measures to allow residents to leave the epicenter of its outbreak next month. From the report: Based on data from several quarantine facilities in the city, which house patients for further observation after their discharge from hospitals, about 5%-10% of patients pronounced "recovered" have tested positive again. Some of those who retested positive appear to be asymptomatic carriers -- those who carry the virus and are possibly infectious but do not exhibit any of the illness's associated symptoms -- suggesting that the outbreak in Wuhan is not close to being over. NPR has spoken by phone or exchanged text messages with four individuals in Wuhan who are part of this group of individuals testing positive a second time in March. All four said they had been sickened with the virus and tested positive, then were released from medical care in recent weeks after their condition improved and they tested negative. One of the Wuhan residents who spoke to NPR exhibited severe symptoms during their first round of illness and was eventually hospitalized. The second resident displayed only mild symptoms at first and was quarantined in one of more than a dozen makeshift treatment centers erected in Wuhan during the peak of the outbreak. But when both were tested a second time for the coronavirus on Sunday, March 22, as a precondition for seeking medical care for unrelated health issues, they tested positive for the coronavirus even though they exhibited none of the typical symptoms, such as a fever or dry cough. The time from their recovery and release to the retest ranged from a few days to a few weeks. One theory is that they were first given a false negative test result. Another theory is that, because the test amplifies tiny bits of DNA, residual virus from the initial infection could have falsely resulted in that second positive reading.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump had a bizarre response Friday when asked whether everyone who needs a ventilator will be able to get one during the coronavirus crisis.

During a briefing at the White House, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Trump, “Are you able to guarantee, to assure these states, these hospitals, that everybody who needs a ventilator will get a ventilator?”

“Here’s what I’ll tell you: I think we’re in really good shape,” Trump responded. “This is a pandemic the likes of which nobody’s seen before. It think we’re in great shape. .. Ventilators are a big deal. We’ve distributed vast numbers of ventilators, and we’re prepared to do vast numbers. I think we’re in great shape. I hope that’s the case. I hope we’re going to have leftovers so we can help other people, other countries.”

Karl then repeated his question: “Will everyone who needs one be able to get a ventilator?”

“Look, don’t be a cutie pie, OK?” Trump responded. “Nobody’s every done what we’ve done. Nobody’s done anything like we’ve been able to do. And everything I took over was a mess. It was a broken country in so many ways, in so many ways other than this. We had a bad testing system, we had a bad stockpile system, we had nothing in the stockpile system. So I wouldn’t tell me what you’re — you know, like, being a wise guy.”

Watch it below.

JON KARL: So everybody who needs a ventilator will be able to get one?

TRUMP: “Look, don’t be a cutie pie. ‘Everyone who needs one’- nobody’s ever done what we’ve done. Nobody’s done anything like we’ve been able to do. Everything I took over was a mess. It was a broken country” pic.twitter.com/5eN8Q3pzrA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2020

Watch it below.

The post Asked if Everyone Who Needs a Ventilator Will Get One, Trump Tells Reporter, ‘Don’t Be a Cutie Pie’: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The U.S. mortgage finance system could collapse if the Federal Reserve doesn’t step in with emergency loans to offset a coming wave of missed payments from borrowers crippled by the coronavirus pandemic.

Congress did not include relief for the mortgage industry in its $2 trillion rescue package — even as lawmakers required mortgage companies to allow homeowners up to a year's delay in making payments on federally backed loans.

When individuals stop making payments on their home mortgages, the companies that handle the loans and process those payments, so-called mortgage servicers, are still on the hook: They're legally obligated to keep sending money to insurers and investors in mortgage-backed securities, the giant bundles of home loans that are packaged and sold on the securities markets.

Now industry executives and regulators are worried that Congress's generosity toward homeowners could wipe out those companies, causing investors not to get paid and potentially bankrupting the entire mortgage finance system — a domino effect that would make it much harder for borrowers to access credit to buy homes.

Housing lobbyists sounded the alarm to Senate staff about the potential danger, but the sheer scale of the rescue bill and the focus on communicating the industry’s other big concerns — such as the details of how long mortgages would be suspended — meant their warnings were unheeded in the rush to finish the massive legislation.

Yet while the final bill allocates $454 billion for the Treasury Department to support the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending programs, including for large corporations, there is no overt requirement for lending to mortgage companies, despite a weeklong lobbying push by the industry.

“There was a strong desire on the part of housing lobbyists to have the bill explicitly direct the Fed and Treasury to use some of that money to finance servicing advances,” said Michael Bright, CEO of the Structured Finance Association, which represents 370 financial institutions in the bond market.

Now industry lobbyists are turning their efforts to Trump administration officials.

“We have been in constant contact with many parts of the administration to ensure that they understand the urgency of this liquidity facility being set up,” said Bob Broeksmit, president and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group.

On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Financial Stability Oversight Council — a powerful interagency body that consists of the top financial regulators — is “particularly focused on the liquidity issues that market may have." Mnuchin said he was establishing a task force to report back to the council on the matter on Monday.

Concerns about liquidity in the mortgage finance system have been building for years, as the companies that service mortgage loans are increasingly nonbanks — which don’t have banks’ access to Fed loans or their strict capital requirements and deposits to fall back on. Banks, which once dominated the business, have steadily pulled back since the 2008 housing market meltdown.

Usually, a mortgage company can withstand a few borrowers failing to make payments, but the breadth of the coronavirus pandemic has sparked industry estimates of between 25 and 50 percent of borrowers being unable to pay.

That “could threaten the ability of a mortgage servicer, particularly nonbank servicers, to remain a going concern,” the Conference of State Bank Supervisors warned Fed Chair Jerome Powell and Mnuchin in a March 25 letter.

State regulators wanted to weigh in because “our members are the primary regulators of the nonbank servicers,” said Margaret Liu, CSBS senior vice president and deputy general counsel.

If 25 percent of borrowers fail to make their mortgage payments, the industry would need $40 billion to cover three months of payments, according to Jay Bray, CEO of the servicing company Mr. Cooper. Depending on how long the situation lasts, Broeksmit said demands on servicers “could exceed $75 billion and could climb well above $100 billion.”

And if mortgage companies fail across the board, “the system breaks down,” said Andrew Jakabovics, vice president for policy development at Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing nonprofit.

“The kinds of relief we did during the foreclosure crisis — all of that had to do with the fact that we wanted to ensure that investors from across the world would continue to treat U.S. mortgage-backed securities as an incredibly safe investment,” Jakabovics said. “That would have very serious ramifications for the availability and price of mortgage credit.”

Bright, who formerly managed the $2 trillion portfolio of government-run mortgage financier Ginnie Mae, said he believes the Fed will come through with an emergency lending program for the industry.

“Even though that language wasn’t included [in the Senate bill], I do think it’s likely that this could be part of [the Fed’s Term Asset-Backed Loan Facility Program] in the end,” he said.

Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mark Calabria — who regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored mortgage giants that prop up about half of the nation’s $11 trillion market — said this week in a Bloomberg TV interview that he was confident that large banks would continue to extend credit to mortgage servicers for the time being.

Still, he said, “if we get to a situation where this goes longer than two months, absolutely there’s going to need to be a bigger solution.”

Broeksmit said some mortgage companies won’t make it that long, depending on the share of loans in their portfolios located in areas of the country where the virus has hit particularly hard.

“Some servicers will need the liquidity sooner than others, so we’re hoping that the facility will be set up immediately,” Broeksmit said.

Liu also said the credit lines from banks wouldn’t be enough to keep the system afloat.

“The mortgage market is one of the many multiple complexly interconnected pieces of our financial system, so those assurances are really important, but I think the role of the government in being a reliable and available source of credit for the mortgage market and mortgage servicers during a crisis is even more important,” she said.

In the meantime, the industry is crossing its fingers that the individual cash relief in the Senate bill will lead to fewer people needing to request forbearance on their payments.

“We’re hoping that the take-up rate won’t be too high and that the duration is not extended, but we have to prepare for both,” Broeksmit said.

President Donald Trump today invoked the Defense Production Act, directing General Motors to produce ventilators needed for the coronavirus outbreak, hours after lashing out at the automaker on Twitter and following weeks of increasingly loud pleas from governors and mayors to put the powerful statute into use.

Trump also appointed trade advisor Peter Navarro to coordinate the government’s efforts to purchase and distribute emergency medical supplies, including ventilators and protective equipment for health care workers.

“We will not hesitate to use the full authority of the federal government to combat this crisis,” Trump said at a White House briefing. “We thought we had a deal with, as an example General Motors, and I guess they thought otherwise. They didn’t agree, and now they do.”

The move to activate the Korean War-era emergency law came the same day that Trump slammed GM on Twitter after reports emerged that his administration had called off a deal to buy tens of thousands of ventilators that GM agreed to produce in partnership with a ventilator manufacturer. It marks a pivotal turn in Trump's previous reluctance to put the DPA into use.

“As usual with ‘this’ General Motors, things just never seem to work out,” Trump tweeted. “They said they were going to give us 40,000 much needed Ventilators, ‘very quickly’. Now they are saying it will only be 6000, in late April, and they want top dollar. Always a mess with Mary B. Invoke ‘P’.”

The tweet came the morning after The New York Times reported that a deal between GM and medical device supplier Ventec to provide up to 80,000 ventilators was called off after FEMA said it needed more time to assess how much the ventilators would cost.

Minutes after the first tweet, Trump called on GM to reopen its recently shuttered auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, to begin producing ventilators.

“General Motors MUST immediately open their stupidly abandoned Lordstown plant in Ohio, or some other plant, and START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!!!!!!,” he tweeted. “FORD, GET GOING ON VENTILATORS, FAST!!!!!! @GeneralMotors @Ford”

In a statement, GM said it, Ventec and its suppliers have been "working around the clock for over a week to meet this urgent need. Our commitment to build Ventec’s high-quality critical care ventilator, VOCSN, has never wavered."

Trump’s move comes amid rising criticism from Congressional Democrats and governors from states hard-hit by the virus outbreak, who have blamed Trump for not invoking the DPA sooner. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, whose state has more than 3,000 coronavirus cases, praised Trump's decision but said that more federal support will be needed.

"That’s terrific, but we need more," Pritzker said. "We need thousands more ventilators, as many as we can in short order. As you hear time and time again, you’re competing against everybody all the time.”

Trump’s decision to invoke the DPA caps more than a week of false starts with the emergency law, which allows the president to direct private industry to produce needed goods in a crisis. Trump first activated the DPA with an executive order March 18, but said he would use it only if necessary.

As recently as Thursday night, Trump was downplaying the need for more ventilators in an appearance on Fox News. “I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” he told Sean Hannity. “I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

At a press conference Friday evening, Trump repeated his claim that GM lowered its ventilator offer in negotiations with the White House and implied that he invoked the DPA in response.

“We thought we had a deal for 40,000 ventilators, and all of a sudden, it became six [thousand] and price became a big object,” Trump said. “But Peter Navarro is going to handle that … Maybe they'll change their tune. But we didn't want to play games with them.”

The president also said his previous opposition to GM’s decision to shutter an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, made negotiations with the automaker difficult.

“I was extremely unhappy with Lordstown, Ohio, when they left Lordstown, Ohio, in the middle of an auto boom,” Trump said, adding later “and frankly, I think that would be a good place to build the ventilators.”

Appearing on CNN Friday, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said she knows GM will "rise to the challenge," but that it "won't happen overnight. Switching over from building cars to building something as complicated as a ventilator is going to take a while, and we don't have a lot of time to waste."

"That's why I'm glad to see this action. I would love to see more of this, more of the strategic powers of the president to be used nationally. We need a national strategy. This patchwork of laws based on who the governors are really isn't the best strategy going forward," she said.

Both GM and Ford have partnered with medical device suppliers to produce ventilators for the coronavirus outbreak, but they told POLITICO this week their plans are still in the early stages. After Trump’s tweets, GM issued a statement saying it and Ventec will produce ventilators at its Kokomo, Ind., plant, but the first systems will not be available until sometime in April.

“Depending on the needs of the federal government, Ventec and GM are poised to deliver the first ventilators next month and ramp up to a manufacturing capacity of more than 10,000 critical care ventilators per month with the infrastructure and capability to scale further,” the statement read.

Ford said in a statement Friday that it is “in active conversations with the Administration” and would provide updates on timing and ventilator production figures soon. But a spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday that its ventilator partnership with GE Healthcare has only been in the works since last week — and was initiated by the companies themselves, not in response to a White House directive.

“We started thinking about this internally before the White House came out to ask companies to act,” said Ford spokesperson Rachel McCleery. “Once we realized we wanted help, contact was made with the White House.”

More ventilator announcements may be coming. Minutes after ribbing GM and Ford, the president tweeted: “We have just purchased many Ventilators from some wonderful companies. Names and numbers will be announced later today!”

Some medical device companies have expressed concern that using automakers to scale up ventilator production through the DPA could deprive more experienced device manufacturers of critical, hard-to-source parts. In a press call Friday, the leader of the largest device lobby said it would be most helpful if automakers can boost manufacturing of component parts instead.

"We've made the case and I think they have agreed that they don't want to get in the way of the supply chain and they don't want to impose any unnecessary burden," AdvaMed CEO Scott Whitaker told reporters Friday. "Moving forward without DPA continues to be the best course of action, but we're prepared to adjust as we need to."

David Lim and Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.

He’s described the illness as a “little flu,” a trifling “cold.” He’s accused the media of manufacturing “hysteria”—even as confirmed cases of the coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, soar to well over half a million and deaths to roughly 25,000 worldwide. The coronavirus-denial movement officially has a leader, and it’s Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Nicknamed the “Trump of the Tropics,” Bolsonaro has sought to emulate the American president’s right-wing populist-nationalism since launching his bid for the presidency in 2018. But compared with Bolsonaro’s position on the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump’s approach looks sober and scientifically grounded.

[Read: All the president’s lies about the coronavirus]

If there’s one lesson from the global responses to COVID-19, it’s this: The countries that have had the most success “flattening the curve” acted quickly and aggressively to contain the virus, rather than downplaying the threat it posed. Bolsonaro has had months to absorb this lesson, yet has chosen to take the opposite tack.

Bolsonaro, who leads one of the world’s most populous and economically dynamic countries, has described COVID-19 as a symptom-free nuisance for “90 percent” of infected Brazilians. He’s argued that while he may be 65, he wouldn’t be at serious risk even if he were to become infected, because of his “history as an athlete.” (The athletes who have contracted COVID-19 might be surprised to learn that their talents grant them special powers against the virus.) He has proposed isolating only the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. As recently as yesterday, Bolsonaro asserted that Brazilians “never catch anything,” even when they dive into “sewage,” and that they may have already developed the “antibodies” to stop the virus’s spread.

He has, moreover, railed against lockdowns; closures of businesses, schools, and public transport; anything that strays far from normalcy. He has lashed out at governors and mayors who have implemented these policies, alleging that they’re committing crimes and “destroying Brazil,” and actively sought to block some of these measures.

Bolsonaro’s stance has emboldened some of his advisers and prominent supporters to engage in the same denialism, but it has also left him isolated and besieged. Local officials, along with many pot-and-pan-banging, self-quarantining protesters, have condemned him for not supporting emergency actions. One former supporter, the governor of Rio de Janeiro, just won a court battle against Bolsonaro that will allow him to proceed with shutting airports and interstate roads. The governor of São Paulo, another ex-ally, has threatened to sue the federal government if it obstructs his efforts to contain the virus.

Bolsonaro has done all this even as top officials around him, including cabinet ministers, have fallen ill with COVID-19. On the evening of March 7, in a scene that now seems from a bygone era, Trump met Bolsonaro at his Mar-a-Lago resort, warmly shook his hand, and dismissed a reporter’s question about whether he was concerned that the virus was “getting closer to the White House.” In the three weeks since, more than 20 members of Bolsonaro’s U.S. delegation have tested positive for the coronavirus. (Bolsonaro and Trump both say they’ve tested negative.) Bolsonaro ignored his own health ministry’s advice to self-isolate for a couple of weeks and to discourage large gatherings. He made a defiant show of shaking hands and taking selfies at a rally that attracted hundreds of his supporters.

“We could be sitting on a time bomb here,” especially for the country’s most vulnerable citizens, Paulo Sotero, an expert on Brazil at the Wilson Center, told me. “It is amazing that [Bolsonaro is maintaining] this ignorant attitude toward a public-health emergency … It is lunacy what this man is doing.” The president “is a bomb thrower” by nature, Sotero argued, when what the nation needs right now is a bomb defuser.

Indeed, while Brazil has roughly 3,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and 77 deaths, far less than the countries most afflicted by the virus at the moment, it has the most cases in Latin America, and its growth of cases is on a worrying trajectory. Bolsonaro’s health minister, whom the president appears to be freezing out of his deliberations, warned last week that the country’s health-care system “will collapse” by the end of April from a surge of COVID-19 patients.

Sotero noted that Brazil celebrated its famously raucous Carnival only a month ago, a concerning fact given that a major coronavirus outbreak in New Orleans has been linked to Mardi Gras festivities. He pointed out that many of Brazil’s poor don’t even have access to clean, running water to wash their hands. That problem could become particularly acute in rural areas and the dense urban slums known as favelas, where coronavirus cases have already been reported.

“If in New York City, the most important city in the richest country in the world, they’re facing the calamity that they’re facing right now, you can imagine what could happen in much more vulnerable countries and their very large cities, like São Paulo, like Rio,” Sotero said. “We have many talented doctors in Brazil, but we don’t have an NIH with a Doctor Fauci counterpunching on television.”

“Bolsonaro is genuinely concerned about the impact a long quarantine would have on the economy, especially in a country like Brazil where so many people just barely get by on a day-to-day basis,” Brian Winter, the editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, told me in an email. “Street vendors can’t work from home.” That’s a tough balance to strike for any policy maker, Winter noted. About a quarter of the country’s population of more than 200 million live in poverty. “We know that deep recessions can kill people too,” he wrote.

As Bolsonaro has put it, “If we cower, opt for the easy discourse, everyone stays home, it will be chaos. No one will produce anything, there will be unemployment, refrigerators will go empty, no one will be able to pay bills.” Bolsonaro may also be seeking to dissociate himself from the stringent social-distancing measures that his government will have to adopt, so as to escape blame for the inevitable damage they’ll cause to Brazil’s already-troubled economy.

But Winter added that Bolsonaro’s motivations are probably ideological as well, and a function of his populism: “a refusal to take science seriously, to disregard whatever ‘the media’ says as a hostile elitist conspiracy, to reject the establishment generally.” Populists tend to bet that they can “create their own reality,” but “Bolsonaro is simply not going to stop a virus by insisting on Facebook that it’s no worse than a ‘little flu.’”

Trump has declined to criticize Bolsonaro for his coronavirus skepticism, but has not gone nearly as far as his Brazilian counterpart. In fact, Bolsonaro has been more extreme in his denialism than any world leader. Even Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, another right-wing populist-nationalist, has ordered the largest lockdown in human history.*

[Read: The callousness of India’s COVID-19 response]

For now, Trump seems torn between the guidance of advisers seeking to avert a public-health catastrophe, and his own instincts to buck the experts in order to revive the economy, whose performance is central to his reelection. “The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success,” the president tweeted this week. “The real people want to get back to work ASAP.”

Bolsonaro’s handling of the outbreak illustrates what the United States could look like if Trump were to go all in on his argument that the cure is worse than the disease.

“I personally hope that Trump and Bolsonaro get to stand on a stage two months from now and have a big Make Brazil Great Again rally where they mock all the haters and snowflakes for blowing the virus out of proportion,” Winter told me. “Because that will mean we all got through this without tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths. But unfortunately I have my doubts.”

---

*This article originally misstated Narendra Modi's position. He is the prime minister of India, not the president.

Washington state was the initial epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. And New York is now the hardest-hit part of the country so far, with hospitalizations increasing at rapid rates — more than 37,000 people had been diagnosed with the coronavirus in New York as of late Thursday afternoon.

Because COVID-19 hit blue, coastal states first, and because politics is politics, the response to the pandemic hasn’t exactly been apolitical.

But blue states are hardly alone in what is becoming a nationwide epidemic. Jefferson Parish, Louisiana — which went for Trump by 15 percentage points in 2016 — has a death rate about equal to that of Manhattan. And as terrifying as the hospital situation is in New York City, hospital capacity is also under strain in states such as Michigan and Georgia.

Overall, although the number of detected cases is higher in blue states, the number is increasing at a more rapid rate in red states.²⁸ Moreover, blue states have conducted more tests per capita than red states, so — given that the large majority of coronavirus cases remain undetected — the lower rate of cases in red states may partially be an artifact of less testing.

Here is the data as of late Thursday afternoon, with states sorted by the increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases between Monday (March 23) and Thursday (March 26).²⁹ All data is taken from the invaluable COVID Tracking Project.

Detected COVID-19 cases are on the rise in red states

Known COVID-19 cases as of March 23 and March 26, according to The COVID Tracking Project

	March 23		March 26
State	Detected cases	Per 10k pop.	Detected cases	Per 10k pop.	Change	2016 winner
Texas	352	0.12	1396	0.48	297%	Trump
West Virginia	16	0.09	51	0.28	219	Trump
Massachusetts	777	1.12	2417	3.48	211	Clinton
Oklahoma	81	0.2	248	0.63	206	Trump
Alabama	167	0.34	506	1.03	203	Trump
Missouri	183	0.3	502	0.82	174	Trump
Alaska	22	0.3	59	0.81	168	Trump
Pennsylvania	644	0.5	1687	1.32	162	Trump
Idaho	47	0.26	123	0.69	162	Trump
Indiana	259	0.38	645	0.96	149	Trump
Connecticut	415	1.16	1012	2.84	144	Clinton
New Jersey	2844	3.2	6876	7.74	142	Clinton
Arizona	265	0.36	577	0.79	118	Trump
Michigan	1328	1.33	2856	2.86	115	Trump
North Carolina	297	0.28	636	0.61	114	Trump
Vermont	75	1.2	158	2.53	111	Clinton
Montana	34	0.32	71	0.66	109	Trump
Kansas	82	0.28	168	0.58	105	Trump
Wyoming	26	0.45	53	0.92	104	Trump
Maryland	288	0.48	580	0.96	101	Clinton
Florida	1171	0.55	2355	1.1	101	Trump
District of Columbia	116	1.64	231	3.27	99	Clinton
Georgia	772	0.73	1525	1.44	98	Trump
Illinois	1285	1.01	2538	2	98	Clinton
Louisiana	1172	2.52	2305	4.96	97	Trump
Ohio	442	0.38	867	0.74	96	Trump
Mississippi	249	0.84	485	1.63	95	Trump
Arkansas	174	0.58	335	1.11	93	Trump
Delaware	68	0.7	130	1.34	91	Clinton
Kentucky	104	0.23	198	0.44	90	Trump
Colorado	591	1.03	1086	1.89	84	Clinton
Virginia	254	0.3	460	0.54	81	Clinton
New York	20875	10.73	37258	19.15	78	Clinton
New Hampshire	78	0.57	137	1.01	76	Clinton
California	1733	0.44	3006	0.76	73	Clinton
North Dakota	30	0.39	52	0.68	73	Trump
New Mexico	65	0.31	112	0.53	72	Clinton
Nevada	245	0.8	420	1.36	71	Clinton
Oregon	191	0.45	327	0.78	71	Clinton
Iowa	105	0.33	179	0.57	70	Trump
Wisconsin	416	0.71	707	1.21	70	Trump
Hawaii	56	0.4	95	0.67	70	Clinton
South Dakota	28	0.32	46	0.52	64	Trump
Utah	257	0.8	402	1.25	56	Trump
Rhode Island	106	1	165	1.56	56	Clinton
Tennessee	615	0.9	957	1.4	56	Trump
South Carolina	299	0.58	456	0.89	53	Trump
Minnesota	235	0.42	346	0.61	47	Clinton
Nebraska	50	0.26	73	0.38	46	Trump
Maine	107	0.8	155	1.15	45	Clinton
Washington	1996	2.62	2580	3.39	29	Clinton

Sources: The COVID Tracking Project, U.S. Census

Nine of the 10 states that have seen the most rapid increase in coronavirus from Monday to Thursday are states that voted for Trump in 2016, led by Texas, where the number of reported cases increased by 297 percent.

On average, states that voted for Trump saw a 119 percent increase in cases over this 3-day period, as compared to an 88 percent increase in states that voted for Hillary Clinton (plus the District of Columbia). Weighted by state populations, the difference is slightly larger: 141 percent in states Trump won and 88 percent in states Clinton won.

For now, states Clinton won do have considerably more total reported cases. As of Thursday, Clinton states had 4.29 positive tests per 10,000 people, as compared to 1.13 per 10,000 people in Trump states. A lot of that difference is attributable to New York; without New York, Clinton states have 1.89 cases per 10,000 people.

But the nature of exponential growth is such that these differences could evaporate in a hurry. If reported cases in Trump states continued to increase at 119 percent every three days (about 30 percent per day) while reported cases in Clinton states increased by 88 percent every three days (about 23 percent per day), then the per capita case count in Trump states would surpass that in Clinton states within about 30 days, or by late April.

Hopefully, the rate of increase will slow in both types of states as we begin to see further effects of social distancing measures in the data. However, these measures were generally enacted earlier and have been more forceful in blue states. That means the rate at which new cases are being diagnosed could slow down faster in blue states than in red states, meaning that red states would catch up earlier.

Blue states have also conducted more testing than red states. In states with reliable estimates of the number of positive and negative tests as of Thursday night,³⁰ Clinton states had conducted 21.8 tests per 10,000 people as compared to 12.5 tests per 10,000 people in Trump states.³¹

Blue states have done more COVID-19 testing

Tests completed per capita as of March 26, in states with reliable reporting on the number of negative tests

State	Tests completed per 10k people*	2016 winner
New York	62.8	Clinton
Louisiana	38.8	Trump
New Mexico	37.2	Clinton
Massachusetts	34.0	Clinton
Vermont	32.2	Clinton
Maine	26.4	Clinton
District of Columbia	26.3	Clinton
Alaska	25.4	Trump
Utah	24.0	Trump
New Jersey	23.1	Clinton
New Hampshire	23.1	Clinton
Minnesota	23.0	Clinton
South Dakota	22.8	Trump
Tennessee	21.8	Trump
Wisconsin	21.1	Trump
Montana	20.6	Trump
Connecticut	18.6	Clinton
Oregon	17.3	Clinton
Nevada	16.6	Clinton
Ohio	14.8	Trump
Rhode Island	14.2	Clinton
Pennsylvania	14.2	Trump
Illinois	13.1	Clinton
Idaho	12.2	Trump
Florida	12.2	Trump
Kansas	10.4	Trump
Michigan	9.4	Trump
Nebraska	8.6	Trump
Georgia	8.4	Trump
Alabama	8.4	Trump
Texas	7.4	Trump
Kentucky	7.4	Trump
Virginia	7.3	Clinton
Arkansas	6.1	Trump
West Virginia	6.0	Trump
California	5.2	Clinton
Oklahoma	3.0	Trump

* Excluding tests that are listed as pending.

Sources: The COVID Tracking Project, U.S. Census

That means the true gap in the number of cases may not be as large as the roughly fourfold difference in reported cases between blue states and red states right now. States such as Louisiana have discovered they have far more cases than they originally realized as they’ve ramped up testing over the past week, and other red states (and blue states) could follow.

COVID-19 has also led to a slightly higher case fatality rate (the number of deaths as a share of the number of known cases) in red states so far. As of Thursday evening, the death rate per case was 1.7 percent in Trump states as compared to 1.3 percent in Clinton states. This could reflect a variety of factors, including potential underreporting of cases in Trump states,³² the age and health of the populations in each set of states, or the efficacy of responses by local health care systems.

However, the higher fatality rate it is a somewhat troubling sign for red states given that many of them are generally at an earlier point in their epidemic curves, meaning that many people who have acquired COVID-19 in those states have done so recently and have not yet developed the most serious symptoms that could lead to long-term hospitalization or death.

The EPA’s top compliance official, Susan P. Bodine, announced a new policy rolling back restrictions and regulations on businesses’ requirements to report air and water pollution late Thursday. The New York Times reports that the EPA cited the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason for the relaxation of these important public health and environmental restrictions. 

According to the Times, the new order gets rid of the requirement for businesses to report when they have hit or exceeded certain levels of pollution that affect the air or water surrounding their business. “In general, the E.P.A. does not expect to seek penalties for violations of routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, sampling, laboratory analysis, training, and reporting or certification obligations in situations where the E.P.A. agrees that Covid-19 was the cause of the noncompliance and the entity provides supporting documentation to the E.P.A. upon request.”

Cynthia Giles, who was the head of the EPA’s enforcement division under Obama, told the Times that this order amounted to a complete “waiver of environmental rules. It is so far beyond any reasonable response I am just stunned.” An EPA spokesperson, Andrea Woods, disagreed with Giles assessment, saying that “for situations outside of routine monitoring and reporting, the agency has reserved its authorities and will take the pandemic into account on a case-by-case basis.”

Conservatives in control of government agencies have a penchant for pretending that when they defang those agencies, those agencies somehow are able to “reserve” their “authority” to do anything. It’s not a bug—it’s a feature. And the promises that conservatives ask for from big business are always broken. Once again, not a bug.

While national emergencies have a way of bringing important government programs into existence and highlight the need for more well-thought-out infrastructure, they also allow terrible policy moves to be made. It’s painfully perfect, however, that during a national public health crisis the current Republican administration would offer up deregulation that directly and very adversely affects public health.

Some Mississippi mayors had put controls in place to help fight the spread of coronavirus—until Gov. Tate Reeves issued an order overruling mayors and reopening many businesses. Reeves has made his choice about what’s important, at least in the short term.

“There’s no question that the purpose of the order was to keep businesses open, which is good for the economy,” Tupelo Mayor Jason Shelton told the Mississippi Free Press. “It’s definitely putting protections in place for the state’s economy. The flipside is that it’s doing that at the expense of human lives.”

Moss Point Mayor Mario King had closed restaurants for dining in, salons and barbershops, houses of worship, and more. Reeves’ order “completely makes our order null and void” and reopens much of what was closed. “So barbershops and salons are open today. People are actually at church making up Bible studies lost on Wednesday, so they’re having Thursday Bible studies. There are restaurants that re-opened their dine-in services today,” King told the Mississippi Free Press. “I understand they’re just trying to make a dollar, but if one person sneezes who has COVID-19 and someone else comes in, they’re possibly exposed to that. So his order puts our people at risk.”

King described Reeves’ action as “complete foolishness and foolery” that makes him “embarrassed not just as a mayor, but as a citizen of Mississippi. We are the laughingstock of the country because our governor has enacted an order that does not only protect the safety and welfare of the people, but puts Mississippians in harm’s way.”

On Thursday Mississippi had 485 cases of COVID-19, 108 of which were new. In other words, its numbers were growing fast, and the governor just put them on the fast track.

[Reports from USA Today and ProPublica highlight CDC missteps that set back the United States' Covid-19 response.]

It is generally accepted that widespread testing will be key to successful control of Covid-19. Identifying where the virus has (and has not) spread, who is infected, and who may be immune are all important. The tracing and isolation of infected and potentially infected individuals is essential if quarantine and containment efforts are to be targeted. Yet as ProPublica reports:

The lack of testing continues to be a source of deep frustration across the country, with worried patients unable to find out whether they have the ordinary flu, the coronavirus or something else entirely. The availability of testing in regions that aren't hot spots still faces an array of bottlenecks, from shortages of cotton swabs to the capacity of the labs processing the tests.

Why isn't there more testing? And why haven't we been able to ensure testing occurs where necessary? Among other things, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) focused on the development of its own test and discouraged the development of alternatives by others. This turned out to be a particularly bad misstep because the CDC's test was not particularly accurate.

A new investigative report from USA Today paints an even more damning picture of a CDC that simultaneously sought to monopolize testing while deceiving state officials about its capacity, As a consequence, parallel efforts to develop and produce tests in private labs were set back, placing the United States well behind the curve of where we needed to be.

From its biggest cities to its smallest towns, America's chance to contain the coronavirus crisis came and went in the seven weeks since U.S. health officials botched the testing rollout and then misled scientists in state laboratories about this critical early failure. Federal regulators failed to recognize the spiraling disaster and were slow to relax the rules that prevented labs and major hospitals from advancing a backup.

Scientists around the country found themselves shackled as the disease spread.

"We were watching a tsunami and standing there frozen," said Dr. Debra Wadford, director of the public viral disease laboratory in California, where some of the country's earliest patients were identified.

The nation's public health pillars — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration — shirked their responsibility to protect Americans in an emergency like this new coronavirus, USA TODAY found in interviews with dozens of scientists, public health experts and community leaders, as well as email communications between laboratories and hospitals across the country.

The result was a cascading series of failures now costing lives.

As they say, read the whole thing.

The reality is that if it were not for some of the actions taken by the CDC, and the Food and Drug Administration, the United States would have had a greater number of more reliable coronavirus tests available for use far more quickly. We might have even been ahead of the curve.

Another report from ProPublica further supplements the picture of a CDC that fumbled some of its key responsibilities, revealing some of the problems of trying to quarterback the nation's entire response from within a few expert offices.

These stories highlight that scientific and technical expertise does not necessarily translate into administrative expertise. Centralized bureaucratic structures face inherent limitations that make them brittle and magnify the costs of failure. No amount of medical expertise can overcome the Hayekian knowledge problem, and the more centralized the government response, the greater the downside risk if someone makes a mistake, such as by underestimating a threat or distributing a botched test.

Institutions such as the CDC and FDA are important, but they also have their limitations. One of the lessons from the Covid-19 outbreak thus far is that giving them to much power and responsibility can have serious negative consequences.

140%

During an unhinged interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Thursday night, President Donald Trump suggested that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is exaggerating the state’s need for ventilators to provide lifesaving care to coronavirus patients.

On Hannity, Trump says he doesn't believe NY Gov. Guomo actually needs the ventilators he's asking for.

TRUMP: "I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators." pic.twitter.com/tm6jXmPtdC

— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) March 27, 2020

“I am getting along with Governor Cuomo,” Trump told Hannity. “I think that a lot of things are being said that are more — I don’t think certain things will materialize. A lot of equipment is being asked for but I don’t think they’ll need. …

“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump added. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You know, you go into major hospitals sometimes and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

Trump also used the interview to trash other Democratic governors who have criticized the federal government’s to the crisis, including Washington’s Jay Inslee and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.

Trump bashes Gov. Inslee and Gov. Whitmer (whose name he can't remember), then suggests he might not approve a disaster declaration requested by Michigan because Whitmer has complained about the federal response pic.twitter.com/iaencGQUgG

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2020

“We have people like Governor Inslee. He should be doing more. He shouldn’t be relying on the federal government,” Trump said. “That’s the state of Washington. He was a failed presidential candidate and he is always complaining.

“And the governor of Michigan, she’s not stepping up,” Trump said. “I don’t know if she knows what’s going on, but all she does is sit there and blame the federal government. She doesn’t get it done, and we send her a lot. Now she wants a declaration of emergency and we’ll have to make a decision on that.

“We have had some trouble with the state of Washington, and he ran for president, didn’t exactly do well, he got zero and we had a big problem with a woman governor, you know who I’m talking about, from Michigan. Though we can’t — we don’t like to see the complaints,” he said.

In related news, the White House is backing away from a deal with General Motors and Ventec Life Systems to build 80,000 ventilators over concerns about the cost of the project, according to a report from the New York Times.

Watch Trump’s full interview with Hannity, and check out a few reactions to his comments, below.

TRUMP JUST NOW: "I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators."

Make no mistake: Many Americans are going to die because of Trump. pic.twitter.com/58OBpZotRv

— CAP Action (@CAPAction) March 27, 2020

New York City received more 911 calls yesterday than they did on 9/11 and Trump says he doesn't believe that they need ventilators https://t.co/iRwnTWizA6

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) March 27, 2020

Kind of like he thought we’d be down to zero cases right now…
Should we blame this sort of BS he says on his arrogance or stupidity?

— KalliJo (@kallijo68) March 27, 2020

pic.twitter.com/9uAqJl04zb

— Baligubadle (@Baligubadle1) March 27, 2020

This guy can’t make material for negative campaign ads quick enough. https://t.co/rTpOcun8Ja

— Paul Scheer (@paulscheer) March 27, 2020

The post Trump Downplays Need for Ventilators, Trashes Democratic Governors During Insane ‘Hannity’ Interview: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

(917): Everything is scary i hate being an adult i hate responsibility tell me a dick joke.