We're America-- This Virus Cannot Beat Us... Right?

Reopening by Nancy Ohanian

On Friday, America's most consistent Prophet of Wrong, coke-freak Larry Kudlow, told the Fox & Friends crew that "There is no emergency. There is no second wave. I don’t know where that got started on Wall Street."

Although Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, acknowledged he is “not the health expert," he said he had spoken with the administration’s top public health officials “at some length” Thursday evening. “They are saying there is no second spike. Let me repeat that. There is no second spike,” he said.

Second Spike by Nancy Ohanian

“What you do have is certain spots are seeing a little bit of a jump up. Some small metropolitan areas are seeing it. The CDC and the health people are all over it. They’ve sent some task forces out to deal with it,” Kudlow added, partly attributing increases in Covid-19 cases to more widespread testing availability.

Kevin Hassett, another top economic adviser to the White House, told Fox News he had spoken to Dr. Deborah Birx, the administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, earlier Wednesday morning, and conceded “there are some embers flaring up in a few places.”

Hassett specifically cited incoming data from Arizona and South Carolina as showing “some cause for concern,” but remained largely dismissive of the notion of a second wave of the coronavirus.

“For sure, the battle is not over,” he said. “But the trends that have been so positive in recent weeks, we’ve not deviated sharply from them-- although there are some hotspots around the country.”

The remarks from the two top aides come as new coronavirus hotspots continue to emerge across the United States, with 18 states reporting an increase in Covid-19 case counts, including spikes in Arizona, Florida and Texas. Additionally, hospitalizations have been rising rapidly in at least nine states since Memorial Day.

As we've been saying, early states like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Connecticut has cut their new daily case loads down dramatically, states that have followed Trumpian advice to pretend there is no pandemic are paying dearly now. With New York at 893 new cases Saturday and New Jersey at 642, some of the worst spiking situations in the country are in states with Trumpist governors:

• Texas +2,012
• Florida +1,902
• Arizona +1,654
• Georgia +810
• Alabama +865

And most of the states with the big increases in cases per million in their populations are also states with Trumpist governors who ignored scientists' warnings and based pandemic response on Trump Regime happy-talk instead:

• Nebraska- 8,536 cases per million
• Iowa- 7,401
• South Dakota- 6,491
• Mississippi- 6,415
• Georgia- 5,254
• Alabama- 4,836
• Arizona- 4,523
• Tennessee- 4,265
• Utah- 4,235
• North Dakota- 3,958
• New Hampshire- 3,862
• Florida- 3,304
• Texas- 2,948

Relatively speaking, neither blue state Oregon (total cases-- 5,377 (1,275 cases per million) nor red state Utah (total cases-- 13,577 (4,235 cases per million) has had a bad first round pandemic and in the last couple of weeks, both started the process of reopening. Unlike much worse off states, both have now paused the reopening process, despite howls of protest from deranged Trumpists.

"This is essentially a statewide ‘yellow light.’ It is time to press pause for one week before any further reopening,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) said in a statement Thursday evening.

“I will work with doctors and public health experts to determine whether to lift this pause or extend it or make other adjustments,” she added.

...In Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert (R) said during a Thursday night press conference most of the state would remain in the “yellow” phase of the reopening plan for the time being, which allows all businesses to open, including for in-door dining services.

While those measures are generally less restrictive than what other states have done to slow the spread of COVID-19, Herbert pointed out, he added Utah needs to pause further reopening efforts as it investigates the rise in new cases.

Most of the state had already moved past the red and orange phases of reopenings, which had more restrictive measures in place. The state has confirmed more than 13,000 cases since the pandemic began, including 131 deaths.

“I don’t want to go forward and then take a step backward,” Herbert said.

Governors in other states seeing increases in COVID-19 cases-- including Florida and Arizona-- have indicated they will continue with their reopening efforts.

North Carolina has a Democratic governor and a lunatic fringe Republican legislature always looking to infringe on his constitutional prerogatives. The legislators have been opposed to all of his efforts to protect the state and have encouraged their followers to disregard safety measures. On Friday, Newsweek reported that the sate might "re-implement a stay-at-home orders if coronaviruses cases continue to increase, according to the head of the state's health department. 'If we need to go back to stay-at-home [orders], we will,' Department of Health Secretary Mandy Cohen told NPR's Morning Edition. "I hope we don't have to. I think there are things we can do before we have to get there, but yes, we are concerned.' Cohen's comments come as the state is in the second phase of its reopening plan, which began on May 22 after the state lifted its stay-at-home order. But data from the health department show coronavirus cases are on the rise. North Carolina saw its largest increase in cases just a day after the order was lifted, 1,107 on May 23, the health department reported. But this number has since been surpassed on five different occasions. There were over 1,100 newly confirmed cases on May 30, June 4, June 5 and June 11, with a new record number for a single day, 1,370, on June 6.

With Trump threatening to come to North Carolina to hold his campaign hate rallies, Cohen said that "the data and science tells us that mass gatherings are one of the most concerning kinds of activities related to viral spread-- right?-- when lots of people close together can spread this virus. And we have seen that happen here in our state where there have been gatherings that have spread the virus. So right now, we are asking our folks in North Carolina: If you've been to a mass gathering like a protest or going back to church, we want you to get tested. We think that that is exposure. We think that that's a risk. And we want folks to get tested. So am worried about mass gatherings. For us in North Carolina, our rules still are that we do not want to have any mass gatherings. [W]e want to make sure that we are particularly focused on getting people to wear face coverings, wait 6 feet apart and wash their hands. There are individual actions that people can take right now, and I think they're so important. We really need to get our testing up. And then we need to trace folks. And folks need to stay isolated and stay home if they're sick."

Yesterday, in an ominously titled essay-- The Virus Will Win-- for The Atlantic Yascha Mounk addressed the lack of political will tragically being demonstrated by America's bankrupt political elites. Contradicting the clueless Kudlow, he wrote that "A second wave of the coronavirus is on the way. When it arrives, we will lack the will to deal with it. Despite all the sacrifices of the past months, the virus is likely to win-- or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it already has. In absolute terms, the United States has been hit harder than any other country. About a quarter of worldwide deaths have been recorded on these shores. And while the virus is no longer growing at an exponential rate, the threat it poses remains significant: According to a forecasting model by Morgan Stanley, the number of American cases will, if current trends hold, roughly double over the next two months."

But neither the impact of mass protests over police brutality nor the effect of the recent reopening of much of the country-- including the casinos in Las Vegas-- is reflected in the latest numbers. It can take at least 10 days for people to develop symptoms and seek out a test, and for the results to be aggregated and disseminated by public-health authorities.

Even so, the disease is slowly starting to recede from the public’s attention. After months of dominating media coverage, COVID-19 has largely disappeared from the front pages of most national newspapers. In recent polls, the number of people who favor “reopening the economy as soon as possible” over “staying home as long as necessary” has increased. And so it is perhaps no surprise that even states where the number of new infections stands at an all-time high are pressing ahead with plans to lift many restrictions on businesses and mass gatherings.

When the first wave of COVID-19 was threatening to overwhelm the medical system, back in March, the public’s fear and uncertainty were far more intense than they are now. So was the reason to hope that some magic bullet might rescue us from the worst ravages of the disease.

At this point, such hopes look unrealistic. After months of intense research, an effective treatment for COVID-19 still does not exist. A vaccine is, even if we get lucky, many months away from deployment. Because the virus is spreading especially rapidly in parts of the Southern Hemisphere, from Latin America to Africa, heat is clearly no impediment to its dissemination.

Perhaps most important, it is now difficult to imagine that anybody could muster the political will to impose a full-scale lockdown for a second time. As one poll in Pennsylvania found, nearly nine out of 10 Republicans trusted “the information you hear about coronavirus from medical experts” back in April. Now just about one in three does. With public opinion more polarized than it was a few months ago, and the presidential election looming, any attempt to deal with a resurgence of the virus is likely to be even more haphazard, contentious, and ineffective than it was the first time around.

In the fullness of time, many books will be written about why a country as rich, powerful, and scientifically advanced as the United States failed quite so badly at coping with a public-health emergency that experts had predicted for many years. As is always the case, competing explanations will quickly emerge. Some will focus on the incompetence of the Trump administration, while others will draw attention to the country’s loss of state capacity; some will argue that the United States is an outlier, while others will put its failure in the context of other countries, such as Brazil and Russia, that are also faring poorly.

...If the virus wins, it is because Donald Trump was more interested in hushing up bad news that might hurt the economy than in saving American lives.

If the virus wins, it is because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, created to deal with just this kind of emergency, has proved to be too bureaucratic and incompetent to do its job.

If the virus wins, it is because the White House did not even attempt to put a test-and-trace regime into place at the federal level.

...If the virus does win, then, it is because American elites, experts, and institutions have fallen short-- and continue to fall short-- of the grave responsibility with which they are entrusted in ways too innumerable to list.

...Scientists have desperately searched for a vaccine. Despite the real risks to their health, doctors, nurses, cooks, cleaners, and clerical staff have reported for duty in their hospitals. Suddenly declared “essential,” workers who have long enjoyed little respect and low wages helped to keep society afloat.

For the rest of us, the order of the day was simply to stay at home and slow the spread. It was a modest task, which made it all the more galling that some people fell short. But this nitpick obscures how many people did do what they could to get us all through the crisis: They checked in with their relatives and cooked for the elderly. They took to their balconies to thank health-care workers or sang songs to cheer up the neighbors. By and large, they stayed at home and slowed the spread.

Thanks to the effort of millions of people, we were close to a great success story. But because of the failures of Trump and Chauvin, of the CDC and the WHO, of public-health experts and Fox News hosts, we are, instead, likely to give up—and tolerate that hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens will die needless deaths.

Pandemics reveal the true state of a society. Ours has come up badly wanting.