American Exceptionalism-- Under Trump

I was talking with one of my oldest friends early in the pandemic. He had locked himself up in his small New York City apartment and was extremely stressed out, insisting his spouse, who would walk down and then back up the 8 flights of stairs to the lobby to pick up delivered items they had ordered, immediately put all clothing into their washer and dryer. My friend didn't need a mask. He wasn't leaving his apartment and no one was coming in. He's not a very political guy-- maybe moderately political, having been a union member-- but he was happy enough to hear me heap blame on Trump for the way the pandemic was unfolding. But when I mentioned that Cuomo was also doing a bad job, my friend lost it. He came close to hanging up on me in anger. Cuomo (who only represents his own career ambitions and the wealthy donor class), he said with passion, was all New Yorkers had protecting them. He wasn't capable of hearing that Cuomo's reluctance to take bold action early doomed New York to what has turned out to be 448,140 confirmed cases-- more than any other states other than California, Florida and Texas-- and 32,815 deaths, the most, by far, than any other state. With 23,036 cases per million residents, New York has had a worse pandemic than any states other than Louisiana, Arizona and Florida (although Mississippi is catching up rapidly). New York's 23,036 cases per million stacks up poorly against the worst-hit western European nations':

• New York- 23,036 cases per million
• Sweden- 8,111 cases per million
• Spain- 7,582 cases per million
• Belgium- 6,137 cases per million
• Iceland- 5,652 cases per million
• Ireland- 5,335 cases per million
• Portugal- 5,107 cases per million
• U.K.- 4,537 cases per million
• Switzerland- 4,169 cases per million
• Italy- 4,122 cases per million
• Netherlands- 3,325 cases per million
• France- 2,996 cases per million
• Germany- 2,568 cases per million

American political leadership failed and failed miserably. In New York's case, it was clearly bipartisan failure. Trump may be far worse than Cuomo, and Cuomo may look relatively good compared to Trumpist shills like Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Doug Ducey (R-AZ), Greg Abbott (R-TX), Kim Reynolds (R-IA) and Kristi Noem (R-SD), but if New Yorkers think it's enough that they have relatively better governance than South Dakota... well then Andrew Cuomo is just what the doctor ordered.

In his epic NY Times report yesterday, The Unique U.S. Failure To Control The Virus, David Leonhardt puts the blame not just on the American tradition of prioritizing individualism over social good (ie, selfishness) but also on abysmal political leadership. The pandemic, he shows, has been worse for the U.S. than for any other developed country-- by far. "Over the past month," he wrote, "about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus. That’s more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined. Even though some of these countries saw worrying new outbreaks over the past month, including 50,000 new cases in Spain the outbreaks still pale in comparison to those in the United States. Florida, with a population less than half of Spain, has reported nearly 300,000 cases in the same period. When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead to far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations [slaves], like Bahrain and Oman. As in several of those other countries, the toll of the virus in the United States has fallen disproportionately on poorer people and groups that have long suffered discrimination. Black and Latino residents of the United States have contracted the virus at roughly three times as high of a rate as white residents."

Leonhardt's reporting attributes the U.S. experience of the pandemic on "a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions. That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes-- including higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy-- than in most other rich countries. The second major theme is... that the poor results in the United States stem in substantial measure from the performance of the Trump administration." I suppose the failures in Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Iowa, Arizona, etc can be attributed to the Trump administration, but what about the failures of governmental leadership in New York, New Jersey, California, Nevada and Illinois, where anti-Trumpist governance is, well... absolute.

In no other high-income country-- and in only a few countries, period-- have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.

In recent days, Mr. Trump has continued the theme, offering a torrent of misleading statistics in his public appearances that make the situation sound less dire than it is.

Some Republican governors have followed his lead and also played down the virus, while others have largely followed the science. Democratic governors have more reliably heeded scientific advice, but their performance in containing the virus has been uneven.

“In many of the countries that have been very successful they had a much crisper strategic direction and really had a vision,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who wrote a guide to reopening safely for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “I’m not sure we ever really had a plan or a strategy-- or at least it wasn’t public.”

Together, the national skepticism toward collective action and the Trump administration’s scattered response to the virus have contributed to several specific failures and missed opportunities, Times reporting shows:

• a lack of effective travel restrictions;
• repeated breakdowns in testing;
• confusing advice about masks;
• a misunderstanding of the relationship between the virus and the economy;
• and inconsistent messages from public officials.

Already, the American death toll is of a different order of magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per capita death rate about half as large. And these gaps may worsen in coming weeks, given the lag between new cases and deaths.

For many Americans who survive the virus or do not contract it, the future will bring other problems. Many schools will struggle to open. And the normal activities of life-- family visits, social gatherings, restaurant meals, sporting events-- may be more difficult in the United States than in any other affluent country.

A travel policy that fell short

In retrospect, one of Mr. Trump’s first policy responses to the virus appears to have been one of his most promising.

On Jan. 31, his administration announced that it was restricting entry to the United States from China: Many foreign nationals-- be they citizens of China or other countries-- would not be allowed into the United States if they had been to China in the previous two weeks.

It was still early in the spread of the virus. The first cases in Wuhan, China, had been diagnosed about a month before, and the first announced case in the United States had come on Jan. 21. In announcing the new travel policy, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, declared that the virus posed “a public health emergency.” Mr. Trump described the policy as his “China ban.”

After the Trump administration acted, several other countries quickly announced their own restrictions on travel from China, including Japan, Vietnam and Australia.

But it quickly became clear that the United States’ policy was full of holes. It did not apply to immediate family members of American citizens and permanent residents returning from China, for example. In the two months after the policy went into place, almost 40,000 people arrived in the United States on direct flights from China.

Even more important, the policy failed to take into account that the virus had spread well beyond China by early February. Later data would show that many infected people arriving in the United States came from Europe. (The Trump administration did not restrict travel from Europe until March and exempted Britain from that ban despite a high infection rate there.)

The administration’s policy also did little to create quarantines for people who entered the United States and may have had the virus.

Authorities in some other places took a far more rigorous approach to travel restrictions.

South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan largely restricted entry to residents returning home. Those residents then had to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival, with the government keeping close tabs to ensure they did not leave their home or hotel. South Korea and Hong Kong also tested for the virus at the airport and transferred anyone who was positive to a government facility.

Australia offers a telling comparison. Like the United States, it is separated from China by an ocean and is run by a conservative leader-- Scott Morrison, the prime minister. Unlike the United States, it put travel restrictions at the center of its virus response.

Australian officials noticed in March that the travel restrictions they had announced on Feb. 1 were not preventing the virus from spreading. So they went further.

On March 27, Mr. Morrison announced that Australia would no longer trust travelers to isolate themselves voluntarily. The country would instead mandate that everyone arriving from overseas, including Australian citizens, spend two weeks quarantined in a hotel.

The protocols were strict. As people arrived at an airport, the authorities transported them directly to hotels nearby. People were not even allowed to leave their hotel to exercise. The Australian military helped enforce the rules.

Around the same time, several Australian states with minor outbreaks shut their own borders to keep out Australians from regions with higher rates of infection. That hardening of internal boundaries had not happened since the 1918 flu pandemic, said Ian Mackay, a virologist in Queensland, one of the first states to block entry from other areas.

The United States, by comparison, imposed few travel restrictions, either for foreigners or American citizens. Individual states did little to enforce the rules they did impose.

“People need a bit more than a suggestion to look after their own health,” said Dr. Mackay, who has been working with Australian officials on their pandemic response. “They need guidelines, they need rules-- and they need to be enforced.”

Travel restrictions and quarantines were central to the success in controlling the virus in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia, as well as New Zealand, many epidemiologists believe. In Australia, the number of new cases per day fell more than 90 percent in April. It remained near zero through May and early June, even as the virus surged across much of the United States.

In the past six weeks, Australia has begun to have a resurgence-- which itself points to the importance of travel rules. The latest outbreak stems in large part from problems with the quarantine in the city of Melbourne. Compared with other parts of Australia, Melbourne relied more on private security contractors who employed temporary workers-- some of whom lacked training and failed to follow guidelines-- to enforce quarantines at local hotels. Officials have responded by banning out-of-state travel again and imposing new lockdowns.

Still, the tolls in Australia and the United States remain vastly different. Fewer than 300 Australians have died of complications from Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. If the United States had the same per capita death rate, about 3,300 Americans would have died, rather than 158,000.

Enacting tough travel restrictions in the United States would not have been easy. It is more integrated into the global economy than Australia is, has a tradition of local policy decisions and borders two other large countries. But there is a good chance that a different version of Mr. Trump’s restrictions-- one with fewer holes and stronger quarantines-- would have meaningfully slowed the virus’s spread.

Traditionally, public health experts had not seen travel restrictions as central to fighting a pandemic, given their economic costs and the availability of other options, like testing, quarantining and contact tracing, Dr. Baeten, the University of Washington epidemiologist, said. But he added that travel restrictions had been successful enough in fighting the coronavirus around the world that those views may need to be revisited.

“Travel,” he said, “is the hallmark of the spread of this virus around the world.”

The double testing failure

On Jan. 16, nearly a week before the first announced case of the coronavirus in the United States, a German hospital made an announcement. Its researchers had developed a test for the virus, which they described as the world’s first.

The researchers posted the formula for the test online and said they expected that countries with strong public health systems would soon be able to produce their own tests. “We’re more concerned about labs in countries where it’s not that easy to transport samples, or staff aren’t trained that thoroughly, or if there is a large number of patients who have to be tested,” Dr. Christian Drosten, the director of the Institute for Virology at the hospital, known as Charite, in Berlin.

It turned out, however, that the testing problems would not be limited to less-developed countries.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed their own test four days after the German lab did. C.D.C. officials claimed that the American test would be more accurate than the German one, by using three genetic sequences to detect the virus rather than two. The federal government quickly began distributing the American test to state officials.

But the test had a flaw. The third genetic sequence produced inconclusive results, so the C.D.C. told state labs to pause their work. In meetings of the White House’s coronavirus task force, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, played down the problem and said it would soon be solved.

Instead, it took weeks to fix. During that time, the United States had to restrict testing to people who had clear reason to think they had the virus. All the while, the virus was quietly spreading.

By early March, with the testing delays still unresolved, the New York region became a global center of the virus--without people realizing it until weeks later. More widespread testing could have made a major difference, experts said, leading to earlier lockdowns and social distancing and ultimately less sickness and death.

“You can’t stop it if you can’t see it,” Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to the director general at the World Health Organization, said.

While the C.D.C. was struggling to solve its testing flaws, Germany was rapidly building up its ability to test. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a chemist by training, and other political leaders were watching the virus sweep across northern Italy, not far from southern Germany, and pushed for a big expansion of testing.

By the time the virus became a problem in Germany, labs around the country had thousands of test kits ready to use. From the beginning, the government covered the cost of the tests. American laboratories often charge patients about $100 for a test.

Without free tests, Dr. Hendrik Streeck, director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Bonn, said at the time, “a young person with no health insurance and an itchy throat is unlikely to go to the doctor and therefore risks infecting more people.”

Germany was soon far ahead of other countries in testing. It was able to diagnose asymptomatic cases, trace the contacts of new patients and isolate people before they could spread the virus. The country has still suffered a significant outbreak. But it has had many fewer cases per capita than Italy, Spain, France, Britain or Canada-- and about one-fifth the rate of the United States.

The United States eventually made up ground on tests. In recent weeks, it has been conducting more per capita than any other country, according to Johns Hopkins researchers.

But now there is a new problem: The virus has grown even more rapidly than testing capacity. In recent weeks, Americans have often had to wait in long lines, sometimes in scorching heat, to be tested.

One measure of the continuing troubles with testing is the percentage of tests that come back positive. In a country that has the virus under control, fewer than 5 percent of tests come back positive, according to World Health Organization guidelines. Many countries have reached that benchmark. The United States, even with the large recent volume of tests, has not.

“We do have a lot of testing,” Ms. Rivers, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, said. “The problem is we also have a lot of cases.”

The huge demand for tests has overwhelmed medical laboratories, and many need days-- or even up to two weeks-- to produce results. “That really is not useful for public health and medical management,” Ms. Rivers added. While people are waiting for their results, many are also spreading the virus.

In Belgium recently, test results have typically come back in 48 to 72 hours. In Germany and Greece, it is two days. In France, the wait is often 24 hours.

The double mask failure

For the first few months of the pandemic, public health experts could not agree on a consistent message about masks. Some said masks reduced the spread of the virus. Many experts, however, discouraged the use of masks, saying-- somewhat contradictorily-- that their benefits were modest and that they should be reserved for medical workers.

“We don’t generally recommend the wearing of masks in public by otherwise well individuals because it has not been up to now associated with any particular benefit,” Dr. Michael Ryan, a World Health Organization official, said at a March 30 news conference.

His colleague Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove explained that it was important to “prioritize the use of masks for those who need them most.”

The conflicting advice, echoed by the C.D.C. and others, led to relatively little mask wearing in many countries early in the pandemic. But several Asian countries were exceptions, partly because they had a tradition of mask wearing to avoid sickness or minimize the effects of pollution.

By January, mask wearing in Japan was widespread, as it often had been during a typical flu season. Masks also quickly became the norm in much of South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and China.

In the following months, scientists around the world began to report two strands of evidence that both pointed to the importance of masks: Research showed that the virus could be transmitted through droplets that hang in the air, and several studies found that the virus spread less frequently in places where people were wearing masks.

On one cruise ship that gave passengers masks after somebody got sick, for example, many fewer people became ill than on a different cruise where people did not wear masks.

Consistent with that evidence was Asia’s success in holding down the number of cases (after China’s initial failure to do so). In South Korea, the per capita death rate is about one-eightieth as large as in the United States; Japan, despite being slow to enact social distancing, has a death rate about one-sixtieth as large.

“We should have told people to wear cloth masks right off the bat,” Dr. George Rutherford of the University of California, San Francisco, said.

In many countries, officials reacted to the emerging evidence with a clear message: Wear a mask.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada began wearing one in May. During a visit to an elementary school, President Emmanuel Macron of France wore a French-made blue mask that complemented his suit and tie. Zuzana Caputova, the president of Slovakia, created a social media sensation by wearing a fuchsia-colored mask that matched her dress.

In the United States, however, masks did not become a fashion symbol. They became a political symbol.

Mr. Trump avoided wearing one in public for months. He poked fun at a reporter who wore one to a news conference, asking the reporter to take it off and saying that wearing one was “politically correct.” He described former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decision to wear one outdoors as “very unusual.”

Many other Republicans and conservative news outlets, like Fox News, echoed his position. Mask wearing, as a result, became yet another partisan divide in a highly polarized country.

Throughout much of the Northeast and the West Coast, more than 80 percent of people wore masks when within six feet of someone else. In more conservative areas, like the Southeast, the share was closer to 50 percent.

A March survey found that partisanship was the biggest predictor of whether Americans regularly wore masks-- bigger than their age or whether they lived in a region with a high number of virus cases. In many of the places where people adopted a hostile view of masks, including Texas and the Southeast, the number of virus cases began to soar this spring.

In March I asked almost everyone member of Congress I know for a photo of themselves wearing a mask. Only two replied enthusiastically, one progressive, Andy Levin (D-MI) and one moderate, Tom Suozzi (D-NY). A month later, no one would mind being photographed wearing a mask, but in March (when I was already walking around Los Feliz in an improvised HazMat outfit, members of Congress were still reticent about being seen in a mask. That was worrying at the time.

There was foresight under those masks-- Andy Levin (l) & Tom Suozzi (r)

The first rule of virus economics

Throughout March and April, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and staff members held long meetings inside a conference room at the State Capitol in Atlanta. They ordered takeout lunches from local restaurants like the Varsity and held two daily conference calls with the public health department, the National Guard and other officials.

One of the main subjects of the meetings was when to end Georgia’s lockdown and reopen the state’s economy. By late April, Mr. Kemp decided that it was time.

Georgia had not met the reopening criteria laid out by the Trump administration (and many outside health experts considered those criteria too lax). The state was reporting about 700 new cases a day, more than when it shut down on April 3.

Nonetheless, Mr. Kemp went ahead. He said that Georgia’s economy could not wait any longer, and it became one of the first states to reopen.

“I don’t give a damn about politics right now,” he said at an April 20 news conference announcing the reopening. He went on to describe business owners with employees at home who were “going broke, worried about whether they can feed their children, make the mortgage payment.”

Four days later, across Georgia, barbers returned to their chairs, wearing face masks and latex gloves. Gyms and bowling alleys were allowed to reopen, followed by restaurants on April 27. The stay-at-home order expired at 11:59 p.m. on April 30.

Mr. Kemp’s decision was part of a pattern: Across the United States, caseloads were typically much higher when the economy reopened than in other countries.

COVID-Kemp (R-GA)

As the United States endured weeks of closed stores and rising unemployment this spring, many politicians-- particularly Republicans, like Mr. Kemp-- argued that there was an unavoidable trade-off between public health and economic health. And if crushing the virus meant ruining the economy, maybe the side effects of the treatment were worse than the disease.

Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, put the case most bluntly, and became an object of scorn, especially from the political left, for doing so. “There are more important things than living,” Mr. Patrick said in a television interview the same week that Mr. Kemp reopened Georgia.

It may have been an inartful line, but Mr. Patrick’s full argument was not wholly dismissive of human life. He was instead suggesting that the human costs of shutting down the economy-- the losses of jobs and income and the associated damages to living standards and people’s health-- were greater than the costs of a virus that kills only a small percentage of people who get it.

“We are crushing the economy,” he said, citing the damage to his own children and grandchildren. “We’ve got to take some risks and get back in the game and get this country back up and running.”

The trouble with the argument, epidemiologists and economists agree, was that public health and the economy’s health were not really in conflict.

Early in the pandemic, Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist and former Obama administration official, proposed what he called the first rule of virus economics: “The best way to fix the economy is to get control of the virus,” he said. Until the virus was under control, many people would be afraid to resume normal life and the economy would not function normally.

The events of the last few months have borne out Mr. Goolsbee’s prediction. Even before states announced shutdown orders in the spring, many families began sharply reducing their spending. They were responding to their own worries about the virus, not any official government policy.

And the end of lockdowns, like Georgia’s, did not fix the economy’s problems. It instead led to a brief increase in spending and hiring that soon faded.

In the weeks after states reopened, the virus began surging. Those that opened earliest tended to have worse outbreaks, according to a Times analysis. The Southeast fared especially badly.

In June and July, Georgia reported more than 125,000 new virus cases, turning it into one of the globe’s new hot spots. That was more new cases than Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Australia combined during that time frame.

Americans, frightened by the virus’s resurgence, responded by visiting restaurants and stores less often. The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits has stopped falling. The economy’s brief recovery in April and May seems to have petered out in June and July.

In large parts of the United States, officials chose to reopen before medical experts thought it wise, in an attempt to put people back to work and spark the economy. Instead, the United States sparked a huge new virus outbreak-- and the economy did not seem to benefit.

“Politicians are not in control,” Mr. Goolsbee said. “They got all the illness and still didn’t fix their economies.”

The situation is different in the European Union and other regions that have had more success reducing new virus cases. Their economies have begun showing some promising signs, albeit tentative ones. In Germany, retail sales and industrial production have risen, and the most recent unemployment rate was 6.4 percent. In the United States, it was 11.1 percent.

The message is the response

The United States has not performed uniquely poorly on every measure of the virus response.

Mask wearing is more common than throughout much of Scandinavia and Australia, according to surveys by YouGov and Imperial College London. The total death rate is still higher in Spain, Italy and Britain.

But there is one way-- in addition to the scale of the continuing outbreaks and deaths-- that the United States stands apart: In no other high-income country have the messages from political leaders been nearly so mixed and confusing.

These messages, in turn, have been amplified by television stations and websites friendly to the Republican Party, especially Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which operates almost 200 local stations. To anybody listening to the country’s politicians or watching these television stations, it would have been difficult to know how to respond to the virus.

Mr. Trump’s comments, in particular, have regularly contradicted the views of scientists and medical experts.

The day after the first American case was diagnosed, he said, “We have it totally under control.” In late February, he said: “It’s going to disappear. One day-- it’s like a miracle-- it will disappear.” Later, he incorrectly stated that any American who wanted a test could get one. On July 28, he falsely proclaimed that “large portions of our country” were “corona-free.”

He has also promoted medical misinformation about the virus. In March, Mr. Trump called it “very mild” and suggested it was less deadly than the common flu. He has encouraged Americans to treat it with the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, despite a lack of evidence about its effectiveness and concerns about its safety. At one White House briefing, he mused aloud about injecting people with disinfectant to treat the virus.

These comments have helped create a large partisan divide in the country, with Republican-leaning voters less willing to wear masks or remain socially distant. Some Democratic-leaning voters and less political Americans, in turn, have decided that if everybody is not taking the virus seriously, they will not either. State leaders from both parties have sometimes created so many exceptions about which workplaces can continue operating normally that their stay-at-home orders have had only modest effects.

“It doesn’t seem we have had the same unity of purpose that I would have expected,” Ms. Rivers, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, said. “You need everyone to come together to accomplish something big.”

Across much of Europe and Asia, as well as in Canada, Australia and elsewhere, leaders have delivered a consistent message: The world is facing a deadly virus, and only careful, consistent action will protect people.

Many of those leaders have then pursued aggressive action. Mr. Trump and his top aides, by contrast, persuaded themselves in April that the virus was fading. They have also declined to design a national strategy for testing or other virus responses, leading to a chaotic mix of state policies.

“If you had to summarize our approach, it’s really poor federal leadership-- disorganization and denial,” said Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicare and Medicaid from 2015 to 2017. “Watch Angela Merkel. Watch how she communicates with the public. Watch how Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand does it. They’re very clear. They’re very consistent about what the most important priorities are.”

New York-- both the city and the state-- offers a useful case study. Like much of Europe, New York responded too slowly to the first wave of the virus. As late as March 15, Mayor Bill de Blasio encouraged people to go to their neighborhood bar.

Soon, the city and state were overwhelmed. Ambulances wailed day and night. Hospitals filled to the breaking point. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo-- a Democrat, like Mr. de Blasio-- was slow to protect nursing home residents, and thousands died. Earlier action in New York could have saved a significant number of lives, epidemiologists say.

By late March, however, New York’s leaders understood the threat, and they reversed course.

They insisted that people stay home. They repeated the message every day, often on television. When other states began reopening, New York did not. “You look at the states that opened fast without metrics, without guardrails, it’s a boomerang,” Mr. Cuomo said on June 4.

The lockdowns and the consistent messages had a big effect. By June, New York and surrounding states had some of the lowest rates of virus spread in the country. Across much of the Southeast, Southwest and West Coast, on the other hand, the pandemic was raging.

Many experts now say that the most disappointing part of the country’s failure is that the outcome was avoidable.

What may not have been avoidable was the initial surge of the virus: The world’s success in containing previous viruses, like SARS, had lulled many people into thinking a devastating pandemic was unlikely. That complacency helps explains China’s early mistakes, as well as the terrible death tolls in the New York region, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Britain and other parts of Europe.

But these countries and dozens more-- as well as New York-- have since shown that keeping the virus in check is feasible.

For all of the continuing uncertainty about how this new coronavirus is transmitted and how it affects the human body, much has become clear. It often spreads indoors, with close human contact. Talking, singing, sneezing and coughing play a major role in transmission. Masks reduce the risk. Restarting normal activity almost always leads to new cases that require quick action-- testing, tracing of patients and quarantining-- to keep the virus in check.

When countries and cities have heeded these lessons, they have rapidly reduced the spread of the virus and been able to move back, gingerly, toward normal life. In South Korea, fans have been able to attend baseball games in recent weeks. In Denmark, Italy and other parts of Europe, children have returned to school.

In the United States, the virus continues to overwhelm daily life.

“This isn’t actually rocket science,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the New York City health department and the C.D.C. for a combined 15 years. “We know what to do, and we’re not doing it.”

This morning, as Señor Trumpanzee was flying to Ohio for a campaign appearance with Gov. Mike DeWine, DeWine was routinely tested and found positive for COVID-19-- and then negative a few hours later. What an elaborate way of getting out of having to see Trump! In any case, what a shame that he didn't infect Trump! Ohio had 1,165 new cases confirmed today, bringing their total caseload to 97,490. Remember this? Millions of Americans have watched it.

In Case You Haven't Noticed Yet, Trump Is Now Directly And Viciously Attacking Dr. Fauci; It Was Inevitable

USA Today reported that the news that the creepy Orange Menace will hold a rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, this Saturday "has raised concerns among some local medical experts about what his visit will do to the relatively low COVID-19 numbers in the area. Compared to other states, like Florida and Texas, the Northeast seems to be managing the pandemic fairly well. Some fear a large, crowded rally will reverse that positive trend. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu urged residents to wear masks and practice social distancing at the outdoor rally. 'It is imperative that folks attending the rally wear masks,' he said." Sununu also told the media that though he's "going to go and greet the President as the governor, I will not be in the crowd of thousands of people, I'm not going to put myself in the middle of a crowd of thousands of people, if that's your question specifically. I try to-- unfortunately, you know, I have to be extra cautious as the governor, I try to be extra cautious for myself, my family." Sununu may well lose his reelection bid because of his strange refusal to mandate masks.

The progressive Democrat challenging Sununu this cycle, Andru Volinsky, was terse and to the point regarding the rally he obviously isn't attending. "I am calling on Gov. Sununu to publicly state that Donald Trump is not welcome in New Hampshire. The public health risks are far too great to use New Hampshire for a photo op."

In his NY Times column published around the same time Sununu was making an ass out of himself, David Leonhardt noted that "There is no country in the world where confirmed coronavirus cases are growing as rapidly as they are in Arizona, Florida or South Carolina. The Sun Belt has become the global virus capital. The only countries with outbreaks as severe as those across the Sunbelt are Bahrain, Oman and Qatar-- three Middle Eastern countries with large numbers of low-wage migrant workers who are not citizens. These workers often live in cramped quarters, with subpar social services, and many have contracted the virus."

These are Tuesday's and Wednesday's numbers conparing Sun Belt states' two one day increases of confirmed cases with the the 10 European countries experiencing the most severe spikes right now.

• Texas +9,414 ---> 10,199
• California +8,631 ---> 8,561
• Florida +7,347 ---> 9,989
• Arizona +3,653 ---> 3,520
• Georgia +3,406 ---> 3,420
• Louisiana +1,936 ---> 1,888
• North Carolina +1,748 ---> 1,028
• Tennessee +1,359 ---> 2,472
• Missouri +1,135 ---> 755
• South Carolina +972 ---> 1,557
• Mississippi +957 ---> 674
• Alabama +907 ---> 1,177
• Nevada +876 ---> 516
• Oklahoma +858 ---> 673
• U.K. +581 ---> 630
• Ukraine +564 ---> 807
• France +475 ---> 663
• Romania +397 ---> 555
• Spain +341 ---> 383
• Serbia +299 ---> 357
• Germany +298 ---> 410
• Portugal +287 ---> 443
• Poland +257 ---> 277
• Moldova +235 ---> 330

Trump lied (again) on Twitter, claiming, absurdly, that coronavirus deaths are "down tenfold." Someone in the White House forced the ignorant pig to delete the tweet. Trump also went on the attack against Dr. Fauci, belittling him and his assessment of the battle against the pandemic. Señor Trumpanzee to Greta Van Susteren: "Well, I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him. Dr. Fauci said don't wear masks and now he says wear them. And he said numerous things. Don't close off China. Don't ban China. I did it anyway. I didn't listen to my experts and I banned China. We would have been in much worse shape. We've done a good job. I think we are going to be in two, three, four weeks, by the time we next speak, I think we're going to be in very good shape."

Fauci on Monday had specifically pointed to "a series of circumstances associated with various states and cities trying to open up" too early as a key factor in the virus's surge and emphasized the US "should use the public health effort as a vehicle and a pathway to get to safe reopening."

"So we've got to make sure that we don't create this binary type thing of 'it's us against them,' " he said of public health efforts and the US economy.

"It's not. We're all in it together."

Trump conceded Tuesday that there are spikes in the virus in "some areas that looked like we were going to escape, that they were going to escape, and all of a sudden it became hot."

"But I think you're going to see with all of the things that we're doing, and with all of the therapeutics that are coming out, and then ultimately the vaccine, we're going to be in very good shape very soon," he claimed.

Fauci's assessment built on the stark warning he had issued to lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week, telling them he wouldn't be surprised if the US sees new cases of coronavirus rising to a level of 100,000 a day.

"We are now having 40-plus-thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around, and so I am very concerned," Fauci told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

He specifically expressed dismay over people congregating in crowds and not wearing masks and inadequate attention being paid to guidelines on reopening.

"We're going to continue to be in a lot of trouble," he said. "And there's going to be a lot of hurt if that does not stop."

Jesus Was Not A Centrist-- In Fact Almost No One Who Accomplished Anything Worthwhile Was

Make America Great Again-- But For Real This Time

Basically, Bernie began his career fighting for working families. Biden began his fighting for segregation. Last week an Ipsos poll for Reuters asked Democratic primary voters who was best in a series of issues Democrats are considering using to help guide them to a candidate to face Trump next year. Relevant results:

• Health care

Bernie- 27%
Status Quo Joe- 17%
Elizabeth- 12%
Mayo- 5%

• Environment

Bernie- 22%
Elizabeth- 13%
Status Quo Joe- 12%
Mayo- 6%

• Economy/Jobs

Bernie- 22%
Status Quo Joe- 18%
Elizabeth- 14%
Mayo- 5%

• Immigration

Bernie- 18%
Status Quo Joe- 17%
Elizabeth- 10%
Mayo- 7%

• Strong Progressive

Bernie- 24%
Elizabeth- 17%
Status Quo Joe- 13%
Mayo- 7%

• A new and difference voice

Bernie- 18%
Elizabeth- 18%
Mayo-n 15%
Status Quo Joe- 10%

• Most likely to beat Trump

Status Quo Joe- 31%
Bernie- 17%
Elizabeth- 10%
Mayo- 4%

So Bernie’s the favorite to be the nominee, right? Not the favorite of the media or punditocracy. And when you ask those same voters who they would vote for it. The election were today...

• Status Quo Joe- 25%
• Bernie- 19%
• Elizabeth- 13%
• Mayo- 6%
• Bloomberg- 6%
• Yang- 3%

And actual match-ups with all voters-- not just Democrats-- show Biden beating Trump 39-35% (plus 4), Bernie beating him 40-36% (plus 4), Elizabeth beating him 38-36% (plus 2), Bloomberg beating him 36-35% (plus 1) and Mayo losing to him 36-35% (minus 1). Something’s wrong here. And David Leonhardt tried tackling this disconnect for his NY Times readers this week: How ‘Centrist Bias’ Hurts Sanders And Warren. Leonrardt looked at his colleagues in the media. He started with former Washington Post political editor-- more recently a founder of insistently centrist website, Politico-- John Harris. “Last month, Harris wrote a column that I can’t get out of my head. In it, he argued that political journalism suffers from ‘centrist bias.’ As he explained, ‘This bias is marked by an instinctual suspicion of anything suggesting ideological zealotry, an admiration for difference-splitting, a conviction that politics should be a tidier and more rational process than it usually is.’”

The bias caused much of the media to underestimate Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Donald Trump in 2016. It also helps explain the negative tone running through a lot of the coverage of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders this year.

Centrist bias, as I see it, confuses the idea of centrism (which is very much an ideology) with objectivity and fairness. It’s an understandable confusion, because American politics is dominated by the two major parties, one on the left and one on the right. And the overwhelming majority of journalists at so-called mainstream outlets-- national magazines, newspapers, public radio, the non-Fox television networks-- really are doing their best to treat both parties fairly.

In doing so, however, they often make an honest mistake: They equate balance with the midpoint between the two parties’ ideologies. Over the years, many press critics have pointed out one weakness of this approach: false equivalence, the refusal to consider the possibility that one side of an argument is simply (or mostly) right.

But that’s not the only problem. There’s also the possibility that both political parties have been wrong about something and that the solution, rather than being roughly halfway between their answers, is different from what either has been proposing.

This seemingly radical possibility turns out to be quite common, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.-- author of the classic book, The Vital Center, no less-- pointed out. The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor rights, the New Deal, civil rights for black Americans, Reagan’s laissez-faire revolution and same-sex marriage all started outside the boundaries of what either party favored. “The most consequential history,” Harris wrote, “is usually not driven by the center.”

Political and economic journalism too often assumes otherwise and treats the center as inherently sensible. This year’s Democratic presidential campaign has been a good case study. The skeptical questions posed to the more moderate Democrats are frequently about style or tactics: Are you too old? Too young? Too rich? Too far behind in the polls?

The skeptical questions for the more progressive candidates, Sanders and Warren, often challenge the substance of their ideas: Are you too radical? Are you being realistic? And, by golly, how would you pay for it all?

I recently took a detailed look through the coverage of the wealth tax, favored by both Sanders and Warren, and centrist bias seeps through much of it. The coverage has slanted negative, filled with the worries that centrists have — that the tax wouldn’t work in practice or would slow economic growth.

Experts who favor a wealth tax, like Gene Sperling, Felicia Wong and Heather Boushey, or whose academic research suggests it would work, like Lily Batchelder and David Kamin, have received less attention than experts who don’t like the idea. For that matter, the complaints of obscure billionaires have gotten more attention than the arguments of sympathetic experts. “Billionaire whining about a wealth tax,” as Ilyana Kuziemko, a Princeton economist who’s sympathetic to a wealth tax, told me, mostly isn’t newsworthy.

I’m not suggesting that journalists lather the wealth tax with praise. There are real questions about it, and journalists are supposed to be skeptical. I’m also not suggesting that Sanders or Warren is necessarily the best nominee. As regular readers know, I’m a moderate on Medicare, immigration and college debt, among other subjects. John Harris, for his part, confesses to “a pretty strong bout” of centrist bias.

But maybe that’s why we recognize it and pine for more objective coverage. Not every policy question posed to Democrats needs to have a conservative assumption, and not every question posed to Republicans needs to have a liberal one. If Warren and Sanders are going to be asked whether their solutions go too far, Joe Biden should be asked whether his solutions are too timid: Mr. Vice President, many economists believe that inequality is bad for an economy, so are you doing enough to attack inequality?

Once you start thinking about centrist bias, you recognize a lot of it. It helps explain why the 2016 presidential debates focused more on the budget deficit, a topic of centrist zealotry, than climate change, almost certainly a bigger threat. (Well-funded deficit advocacy plays a role too.) Centrist bias also helps explain the credulousness of early coverage during the Iraq and Vietnam wars. Both Democrats and Republicans, after all, largely supported each war.

The world is more surprising and complicated than centrist bias imagines it to be. Sometimes, people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are right. Even when they’re not, they deserve the same skepticism that other politicians do-- no less, no more.

Mostly they're right. And one thing we know for sure... the rightists and corporatists and net-libs never are. So... how about a Christmas gift for a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who's been right about everything and torn apart by a biased media day in and day out for decades and decades and now most of all?

Norman Solomon put it slightly more… directly this week. “For the United States,” he wrote, “oligarchy is the elephant-- and donkey-- in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it. Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word ‘oligarchy’ was heard once. ‘We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,’ Bernie Sanders said, ‘where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.’ Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy-- defined as ‘a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes’-- can’t really be a democracy. The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don’t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.”

Over the weekend, the Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.” The editorial went on to praise “the relative moderates in the race”-- Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar-- for “offering a more positive future.”

…The Washington Post‘s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign-- from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and “public” outlets like the PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

…Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago, “Almost every problem facing our country-- from runaway greed on Wall Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis—can be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden’s campaigns for president.”

While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and corporations “pay their fair share,” you won’t hear Buttigieg or Biden use the word “oligarchy.” That’s because, to serve the oligarchy, they must pretend it doesn’t exist.

Trump's Destruction Of The Tax System Can Only Be Remedied By Progressives, Not By Less Toxic Conservatives

David Leonhardt's NY Times column yesterday about the wealthiest 400 Americans paying lower taxes than the rest of us, is just another indication-- as if we need one-- that Trump lied about everything he said when he ran for president... and continues to do so. Did you ever think this claim was anything other than pure bullshit?

He was laughing at you

Do you know what a progressive tax rate is? The idea goes all the way back to the Roman Republic since he was meant to mitigate some of the societal ills associated with out of control income and wealth inequality. Bernie's political career has always been about this mitigation. Republicans and conservative Democrats have always sought to defend the wealthy against progressive tax rates, which began when Lincoln replaced a flat tax in 1862. The idea of progressive taxation is that the RATE increases as your taxable income increases. One of the key ways conservatives have gotten around progressive taxation is by exempting certain income. Trump and his Republican cheerleaders have brought taxes on the rich down so precipitously that the country is in fiscal danger. "For the first time on record," wrote Leonhardt the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate-- spanning federal, state and local taxes-- than any other income group. This depressing milestone has two main causes: President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the long-term rise of tax avoidance by both companies and individuals."

The average tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23%, down from 70% in 1950 and 47% in 1980. Why? In recent decades, the top income-tax rate and the estate tax have both fallen, and corporate taxes-- which are effectively paid by shareholders-- have plummeted. Middle-class and poor families, on the other hand, haven’t benefited much if at all from the falling corporate tax or estate tax, and they now pay more in payroll taxes than in the past. Overall, their taxes have remained fairly flat.

The combined result is that over the last 75 years the U.S. tax system has become radically less progressive.

The data here come from the most important book on government policy that I’ve read in a long time-- called The Triumph of Injustice, to be released next week. The authors are Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both of the University of California, Berkeley. Saez has won the award that goes to the top academic economist under age 40, and Zucman was recently profiled by Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine as “the wealth detective.”

They have constructed a historical database that tracks the tax payments up and down the income spectrum since 1913, when the federal income tax began. The story they tell is maddening-- and yet ultimately energizing.

“Many people have the view that nothing can be done,” Zucman told me. “Our case is, ‘No, that’s wrong. Look at history.’” When the United States has raised tax rates on the wealthy and made rigorous efforts to collect taxes, it has succeeded in doing so.

And it can succeed again.

Saez and Zucman portray tax history as a struggle between people who want to tax the rich and those who want to coddle the rich. The story starts in the 17th century, when Northern colonies created more progressive tax systems-- including wealth taxes-- than Europe had. The Southern colonies, by contrast, were hostile to taxation, out of a fear that taxes could undermine slavery, as historian Robin Einhorn has explained.

By the middle of the 20th century, the high-tax advocates had prevailed. The United States had arguably the world’s most progressive tax code, with a top income-tax rate of 91%. But the second half of the 20th century was mostly a victory for the low-tax side. Companies found ways to dodge taxes. Politicians cut every tax that fell mostly on the wealthy, with the justification that the economy would benefit.

The justification turned out to be wrong. The wealthy, and only the wealthy, have done fantastically well over the last several decades. The American economy just doesn’t function very well when tax rates on the rich are low and inequality is sky high. It was true in the lead-up to the Great Depression, and it’s been true recently. Which means that raising high-end taxes isn’t about punishing the rich (who, by the way, will still be rich). It’s about creating an economy that works better for the vast majority of Americans.

In their book, Saez and Zucman sketch out a modern progressive tax code. The overall tax rate on the richest 1% would roughly double, to about 60%. The tax increases would bring in about $750 billion a year, enough to pay for universal pre-K, an infrastructure program and much more. Those are the kinds of policies that do lift economic growth.

One crucial proposal is a minimum global corporate tax of at least 25%. A company would have to pay the tax on its American profits even if it set up headquarters in Ireland or Bermuda. Saez and Zucman also favor a wealth tax; Elizabeth Warren’s version is based on their work. And they call for the creation of a Public Protection Bureau, to crack down on tax dodging.

I already know what some critics will say in response-- that the rich will always figure out a way to avoid taxes. That’s simply not the case. True, they will always be able to avoid some taxes. But history shows that serious attempts to collect more taxes usually succeed.

Ask yourself this: If efforts to tax the super-rich were really doomed to fail, why would so many of the super-rich be fighting so hard to defeat those efforts?

For the same reasons, no doubt, they are fighting to defeat Elizabeth Warren and, even more so, Bernie, the serious two candidates who actually want to deliver on fundamental change. It's also the reason why progressive candidates for Congress are always up against the forces of conservatism, whether in Democratic primaries-- where progressives have to battle the DCCC and their corrupt candidates for nominations-- or in general elections (when Republicans are always the greater evil).

Eva Putzova is the Blue America-endorsed candidate running against Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat (Blue Dog) Tom O'Halleran, a consistent voter against everything even vaguely progressive. Eva-- who is adamantly opposed by both the Republicans and the conservative DCCC-- told us that "If we doubled the tax rate on the rich, closed corporate tax loopholes, and imposed a wealth tax, we could raise the money we need to invest in healthcare, education, and green infrastructure. It would produce millions of good paying jobs which would benefit people who have been neglected for decades. We built the greatest middle class in history after World War II by enacting a strong progressive tax system and we can do it again if we elect politicians with the guts to take on corporate interests."

Jason Butler, our progressive pastor in Wake County, North Carolina is running against a reactionary Republican, George Holding, whose record shows he doesn't think rich people should pay taxes, just working people. Jason could disagree more: "Let’s get this straight-- taxes pay for our national defense, our infrastructure, healthcare for the vulnerable, our public schools, they preserve our national parks and our national treasures, they provide a safety net for the suffering, assist those in need, help rebuild communities after disasters, fund pivotal programs for economic development, and so much more… and the rich are constantly trying to pay less. Why? Like it or not, paying taxes is one of the most patriotic ways we participate in a shared nation. And as the old saying goes, 'to those who have been given much, much is required'-- yes, the rich have benefited tremendously from America and much is required. I’d like to see more stop trying to hide from their responsibility and more embrace their potential role as leaders in our patriotic duty."

Kim Williams, a Central Valley progressive running for the 16th district seat held by Blue Dog-- quasi-Republican-- Jim Costa noted that "Nowhere in California are the failures of our current system more apparent than in the Central Valley. We are home to one of the most unequal regions in California with high-income households making 14 times as much as poor households. And since 2007, incomes at the bottom 10 percent have dropped by 26 percent, which means that the poor continue to get even poorer. The conversation around fair taxation tends to center itself on whether the rich will pay and how hard they will fight to hold onto their wealth. But for many people in this Valley, the conversation should be around life or death. Because while billionaires are complaining about taxes on their yachts and vacation homes, people here are choosing between medicine and food. I will absolutely support a millionaire wealth tax, and I will vigorously support efforts to enforce it."

Another broken promise-- this one just a few minutes ago

Rachel Ventura is running for a Chicagoland seat held by multimillionaire New Dem who is a conservative on all fiscal matters. She disagrees with him and the GOP on taxation. She told us that she likes "the idea of a universal corporate tax rate on companies that try to dodge taxes by setting up shop in foreign countries. One could argue that businesses use as much or more of our taxpayer infrastructure than citizens do. Businesses depend on roadways to get their goods to market. In Will County, where I serve as an elected official, the roads that are pounded by truck traffic are in constant need of repair, costing taxpayers. The oil and gas industry is the dominant benefactor of our taxpayer-funded military presence in the Middle East and pharmaceutical companies benefit from the millions of dollars that taxpayers invest into research and development."

Rachel also told us she agrees "that we need to restore the 1950’s era progressive tax rates on the wealthy and I am a supporter of closing tax loopholes that are written by the wealthy, for the wealthy. Not only is Trump’s tax cut destructive to our economy, looking at the Republicans and their 2020 tax messaging is also important. The anti-tax wing of the Republican Party is already trying to boil things like the Green New Deal down to a 'meat tax' coupled with fear-based messages about 'taking away your hamburger.' In addition to having to call out Trump’s lies about his tax cuts helping working people, we also have to counter their entire 2020 campaign about the Democrats wanting to 'tax everything.' If we allow weak Democrats to handle the messaging in 2020, they will no doubt get clobbered by the anti-tax message. It will be important to go into the 2020 election cycle with strong progressives who can inspire the working poor to go to the polls in large numbers. We need to be talking about wealth inequality, taxing the rich, strengthening the middle class, protecting and expanding social security, creating good paying jobs and investing in real fixes to the climate crisis."