Trump And His GOP Enablers Have Killed 222,000 Americans With COVID-- And They're Not Even Close To Being Done Yet

 

"Don't Let It Dominate Your Life" by Nancy Ohanian

Confirmed reports of new COVID cases on Thursday confirmed that the whole world is in the midst of a raging-- not petering out-- pandemic. There were over 390,000 confirmed new cases, spread out worldwide in countries that resist mask wearing. There were just 11 new cases in China, 570 in Japan, 110 in South Korea, 13 in Thailand, 27 in Cuba, 3 in Singapore, 2 in Vietnam, 12 in Hong Kong and just 1 in Taiwan. People in these countries don't whine that masks taking away their freedom. They know a lot better than some ugly bearded freak with a gun collection in Ohio what an infringement of their freedom looks like-- and they know it isn't wearing masks to protect society from a deadly viral plague.

In the parts of the world unwilling or incapable of protecting themselves from the coronavirus, new case counts were horrific on Wednesday (along with number of cases per million residents:

• U.S. +64,312 (24,775 cases per million residents)
• India +60,365 (5,322 cases per million residents)
• France +30,621 (12,397 cases per million residents)
• Brazil +29,498 (24,278 cases per million residents)
• U.K. +18,980 (9,908 cases per million residents)
• Argentina +17,096 (20,944 cases per million residents)
• Russia +13,754 (9,278 cases per million residents)
• Spain +13,318 (20,807 cases per million residents)
• Czechia +9,720 (13,907 cases per million residents)
• Italy +8,804 (6,314 cases per million residents)
• Belgium +8,271 (15,642 cases per million residents)
• Poland +8,099 (3,962 cases per million residents)
• Netherlands +7,791 (11,895 cases per million residents)
• Germany +7,074 (4,159 cases per million residents)
• Colombia +6,823 (18,358 cases per million residents)
• Ukraine +5,062 (6,442 cases per million residents)
• Iran +4,616 (6,143 cases per million residents)
• Indonesia +4,411 (1,273 cases per million residents)
• Mexico +4,056 (6,413 cases per million residents)
• Romania +4,013 (8,776 cases per million residents)
• Nepal +3,749 (4,157 cases per million residents)
• Iraq +3,587 (10,297 cases per million residents)
• Morocco +3,317 (4,419 cases per million residents)
• Peru +2,977 (25,887 cases per million residents)
• Switzerland +2,613 (8,223 cases per million residents)
• Jordan +2,423 (2,986 cases per million residents)
• Canada +2,345 (5,067 cases per million residents)
• Philippines +2,261 (3,170 cases per million residents)
• Portugal +2,101 (9,157 cases per million residents)
• South Africa +1,770 (11,730 cases per million residents)
• Israel +1,701 (32,639 cases per million residents)

European cities are moving back into lockdowns. MarketWatch reported that "London has joined a raft of other European cities plunged into tighter COVID-19 restrictions, while in Germany there are further controls on gatherings, and nighttime curfews are being implemented in nine French cities. Millions of households in London will be banned from mixing indoors with other households on Saturday, as European leaders battle to prevent the spread of a second wave of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus."

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who has been pushing hard for tighter restrictions, warned on Thursday that the virus was spreading rapidly “in every corner of our city”-- a large number of boroughs now has an average of 100 cases per 100,000 people.

The U.K. has one of the highest death tolls from the disease in Europe, at 43,155, because of the high density of people in its cities and its high level of overweight citizens.

The U.K. has implemented restrictions in three tiers, with the third tier the most severe. London, which has a population of nine million and is Europe’s wealthiest city, has been moved up to Tier 2, which bans the mixing of households. Schools, shops, and pubs remain open.

Khan warned the capital has “a difficult winter ahead … But, just as we’ve always done throughout our city’s great history, I know we’ll get through this dark time by pulling together.”

In France, starting tonight, Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Toulouse, Aix-en-Provence, Grenoble, Montpellier, Saint Etienne and Rouen have curfews from 9pm to 6am. Violators will be fined $160 for a first offense, $1,760 for a second offense.

As for tourists or, more likely, would-be tourists... "Despite the holiday season now being in full swing, some [EU countries] are now shutting down again." Tourists are allowed in from Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan, New Zealand, Rwanda, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay and China.

Reporter Jennifer Calfas tried explaining to Wall Street Journal readers why COVID is on the rise again in the U.S. Short answer: fatigue, colder weather, eased restrictions. We just experienced a 7th consecutive day of reported new cases over 50,000 daily. She spoke with epidemiologists and public-health researchers about what's causing the spike.

The virus has spread to more rural counties and other communities, exposing vulnerable populations that hadn’t yet experienced it significantly and who are now reacting instead of taking steps to prevent the virus, public-health researchers said.

Some people have grown tired of restrictions on their movements and might be taking more risks than they did in the spring, they said. Mixed and inconsistent messaging over preventive measures has sowed confusion and complacency. Some local governments have eased restrictions on businesses and requirements to wear masks. Meanwhile, college students returned to campuses, leading to some spreading of the virus, and the onset of cooler weather has led many Americans indoors, where the virus is more transmittable, the public-health researchers said.

...Daily case-count tallies are likely to increase or remain at high levels without concerted use of such strategies as enhanced testing, widespread mask-wearing and clear, consistent messaging, epidemiologists and public-health researchers said.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” said Jewel Mullen, the associate dean for health equity at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. “The longer it takes for us to adopt behaviors to lower collective risk, the longer it’s going to take for us to recover socially, economically from a pandemic standpoint.”





New case counts are high nationally, but it is far from uniform across the country; often one area surges when another improves. While cases have ebbed in Sunbelt states like Arizona, they have gone up throughout parts of the rest of the country, especially the upper Midwest. And community transmission has persisted in states like Florida and Texas where cases have dropped recently.

“It’s almost like we never ended the first wave,” said Marissa Levine, a professor at the University of South Florida College of Public Health. “We may be going into the third hump of the first wave.”

On a national scale, the U.S. never saw the same substantial drops in cases experienced in European countries before infections rose there again.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report that divisiveness and mixed messages over mask-wearing might have contributed to a rise in coronavirus cases among younger people in a Wisconsin county. Another CDC report found increases in positivity rates among older age groups followed surges in younger populations. This week, a judge upheld Gov. Tony Evers’s mask mandate and public-health emergency after three residents challenged the actions.

Without a vaccine or a therapeutic breakthrough, prevention tools are the best approach for controlling the spread. Precautions like wearing masks and maintaining distance help lower risk of transmission but don’t entirely eliminate it, especially without full compliance, according to health officials.

“We have been saying it for months now that if everybody doesn’t do it, we’re not going to have this huge, overwhelming success,” said Jasmine Marcelin, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and infectious-diseases physician. “It’ll be in fits and starts.” Communities might continue to slide back and forth between phases of the pandemic, Dr. Marcelin warned.

Compliance fatigue has been seen as a contributing factor to the second wave of infections that has spread across Europe in recent weeks. Across the Continent, restrictions are snapping back into place as cases rise and hospitals once again fill up.

In the U.S., swelling cases have already spurred record-high hospitalizations in states including Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Montana and Utah. The U.S. recorded the highest number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 since the end of August on Wednesday, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project.

More deaths and hospitalizations are likely to follow as cases edge higher and potentially shift from younger people to more vulnerable populations, a situation that is already playing out in Europe. The latest projections from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation indicate that nearly 180,000 additional deaths could occur in the U.S. by Feb. 1.

Health-care professionals are able to provide better care when not overwhelmed with patients or short on critical supplies, said Ryan Demmer, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota.

“If we get back to 70,000 a day and we get beyond that, then the system probably is not really prepared to absorb those additional hospitalizations,” he said. “And then when you can’t provide adequate care, the death rates get worse.”

Epidemiologists and public-health leaders have continued to urge Americans to stay vigilant to avoid this outcome.

“The most frustrating thing for me as an epidemiologist is to know that we can make a change and we can make a difference in the trends. We know what to do,” said Loren Lipworth, an epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “The virus is not going away.”

Europe Is Closing Up Again, While Trump Under-Boss Mobster William Barr Compares Quarantines To Slavery

 

Magical Mystery Cure by Chip Proser

I can remember back in mid-March thinking how horrible the pandemic was for Italy and being certain would never been that bad for us over here. (That Trump is in charge must have slipped my mind.) Yesterday Italy reported 1,585 new cases of COVID, bringing the country's total to 293,025 (4,848 cases per million residents). 4,848 cases per million residents is, at least relative to the U.S. pandemic, a very small number. Italy, in fact, is better off than every American state other than Maine (3,691 cases per million residents) and Vermont (2,732 cases per million residents). You want to see tragedy? Look at these ghastly numbers from the dozen worst-hit states in the U.S., which helps explain why Americans are banned from virtually every country on earth:

• Louisiana- 34,268 cases per million residents
• Florida- 31,403 cases per million residents
• Mississippi- 30,891 cases per million residents
• Arizona- 29,079 cases per million residents
• Alabama- 28,911 cases per million residents
• Georgia- 28,167 cases per million residents
• South Carolina- 26,050 cases per million residents
• Tennessee- 26,085 cases per million residents
• New York- 24,709 cases per million residents
• Texas- 24,460 cases per million residents
• Iowa- 24,425 cases per million residents
• Nevada- 24,218 cases per million residents

The U.S. average is 20,706. Italy is in another-- more habitable-- universe entirely. Except... It looks like Europe's second wave has begun, not just in Italy, but all across Europe. CNN reported that the World Health Organization warned that coronavirus cases are surging alarmingly in Europe, as a 'very serious situation' unfolds across the continent. As Covid-19 infections spike to record numbers, European governments are imposing strict local measures and weighing up further lockdowns in a bid to halt a second wave of the pandemic. But WHO regional director Hans Kluge said at a Thursday news conference that the increase in cases should serve as a warning of what is to come. 'Weekly cases have now exceeded those reported when the pandemic first peaked in Europe in March,' Kluge said. 'Last week, the region's weekly tally exceeded 300,000 patients.' More than half of European nations have reported an increase of more than 10% in new cases in the past two weeks, Kluge added. 'Of those, seven countries have seen newly reported cases increase more than two-fold in the same period,' he said."

There are now full blown emergencies unfolding across the continent. These were the reported new cases on Tuesday ---> Wednesday and ---> yesterday (along with cases per million residents):

• Spain +9,437 ---> +11,193 ---> +11,291 (13,380 cases per million residents)
• Belgium +851 ---> +489 ---> +1,153 (8,271 cases per million residents)
• Russia +5,529 ---> +5,670 ---> +5,762 (7,436 cases per million residents)
• France +7,852 ---> +9,784 ---> +10,593 (6,362 cases per million residents)
• Romania +1,111 ---> +1,713 ---> +1,679 (5,658 cases per million residents)
• U.K. +3,105 ---> +3,991 ---> +3,395 (5,615 cases per million residents)
• Netherlands +1,379 ---> +1,542 ---> +1,753 (5,138 cases per million residents)
• Italy +1,229 ---> +1,450 ---> 1,585 (4,848 cases per million residents)
• Ukraine +2,905 ---> +2,958 ---> +3,584 (3,806 cases per million residents)
• Czechia +1,674 ---> +2,136 ---> _1,707 (3,989 cases per million residents)
• Germany +1,623 ---> +2,021 ---> +1,393 (3,200 cases per million residents)

Kluge told CNN that "In the spring and early summer we were able to see the impact of strict lockdown measures. Our efforts, our sacrifices, paid off. In June cases hit an all-time low. The September case numbers, however, should serve as a wake-up call for all of us. Although these numbers reflect more comprehensive testing, it also shows alarming rates of transmission across the region. This pandemic has taken so much from us... And this tells only part of the story. The impact on our mental health, economies, livelihoods and society has been monumental."

While there was an increase in cases in older age groups, those aged 50 to 79, in the first week of September, Kluge said, the biggest proportion of new cases is still among 25- to 49-year-olds.

Countries across the continent have been easing lockdowns and reopening their economies, but governments are now scrambling to avert further outbreaks.

In France, Covid-19 hospitalizations have risen in recent days in large cities such as Paris, Bordeaux and Marseille.

Earlier this year, the first coronavirus wave spiked fast in France, but it was cut short by a strict nationwide lockdown. In total more than 31,000 people died there from the disease, out of more than 443,000 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University (JHU).

Now, the number of new infections is rising fast. A record was set over the weekend with more than 10,000 new cases in a single day. The number of clusters has been rising steadily and, most worryingly, nationwide, the number of people in intensive care has risen 25% in the past week.

Cases in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Italy have also increased.

New restrictions were imposed across England this week barring people from meeting socially in groups of more than six, of all ages, indoors or outdoors. Scotland and Wales have also tightened their social distancing rules.

From Friday, even stricter measures will apply in the northeast of England amid a "concerning rise" in Covid-19 infection rates there, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced in Parliament on Thursday.

The measures include a ban on socializing outside households or "support bubbles" and a mandated closing time of 10 p.m. for all bars, pubs, restaurants and leisure centers. They will apply to seven areas-- including the cities of Newcastle, Sunderland and Durham-- and will affect more than 1.5 million people.

Hancock stressed the need to take "immediate action" against the virus with winter approaching.

At least 41,773 people have died with coronavirus in the UK, according to JHU, the highest toll in Europe and fifth-largest number of any country in the world.

The UK government has come under pressure over recent failings in its coronavirus testing system, with some people-- including health care workers-- experiencing difficulty in accessing tests or being directed to testing sites far from home.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson defended Britain's coronavirus testing record Wednesday, saying it compared favorably to other European countries and that recent problems were due to a "colossal spike" in demand.

Authorities in the Spanish capital of Madrid are to announce new coronavirus restrictions on Friday as the country also responds to an uptick in the number of cases.

Spain has now recorded more than 30,000 deaths since the start of the outbreak, with more than 600,000 total cases.

Madrid accounts for approximately a third of all new cases, according to data from the country's health ministry.

The president of Madrid's regional government, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has suggested that migrant populations are partly to blame.

"(The outbreaks are partly) due to the way of life of Madrid's immigrants and the population density of these districts," she said Tuesday. "It is a way of life in Madrid."

Meanwhile, German authorities have imposed new restrictions and ordered more testing in a popular Bavarian ski resort after a coronavirus outbreak that has been linked to a US citizen working at a lodge operated by the US Army.

The state prosecution service in Munich said it had launched an investigation into the American who may have caused the surge in cases.

New regulations imposed in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen over the weekend mean local bars will now close at 10 p.m. Parties are limited to 100 people-- down from 200-- and groups eating indoors are capped at five, down from twice that.

In America... it's all denialism from the nation's leaders-- pretending. Trump and the Trumpist governors first and foremost. Oh... and the goons I hope to see at Nuremberg-like trials one day, like his consiglieri William Barr. He likened the effort to protect the country from a pandemic he doesn't understand to slavery. Watch the idiot:





New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio thought again about opening up his city's schools. He was smart to do so, while most "leaders" are trying to shove decisions like that off on anyone they can. The NY Times' Eliza Shapiro reported that he acknowledged that "the system had still not fully surmounted the many obstacles that it faced in bringing children back during the pandemic." Shapiro is too dull-witted to understand that DeBlasio was doing the right thing and the courageous thing and she slanted her entire piece to disparage him. What a piece of crap this one is! Most of her writing made me want to vomit. It could have been written by anyone from inside the Trump Regime.

She did note, however that "The mayor said that he decided to delay the start of the school year and opt instead for a phased-in reopening after a three-hour conversation at City Hall on Wednesday with the leaders of the unions representing the city’s principals and teachers, along with senior mayoral aides. Those union leaders have been explicitly warning for weeks that schools were not ready to reopen for myriad reasons, from poor ventilation in some aging buildings to a severe staffing crunch that the principals’ union estimated could leave the city needing as many as 10,000 educators. A Thursday report from the city’s Independent Budget Office put that number closer to 12,000. Some principals have said in recent days that they lacked dozens of teachers for their schools. Mr. de Blasio said that the teacher shortage was his main reason for again delaying in-person classes. But he did not explain why he waited until just before the start of the school year to acknowledge the seriousness of the staffing issue, even though union leaders and his own aides have been raising alarms about it for weeks... No large district in the country has yet attempted to reopen schools on a hybrid basis, and New York’s challenges may discourage other systems from trying a similar approach. The nation’s other large school systems decided earlier in the summer to start their school years remote-only, but none have a virus transmission rate as low as New York’s." I hope the school's in L.A. get a clue. God knows they have no leadership worth calling a leader. And the teachers' unions' officials in California need to grow some balls or step aside for younger members.

The Pandemic Doesn't Go Away Because People Are Tired Of It-- Europe's Wave II Has Begun

The results of the big motorcycle rally in Sturgis are starting to come in, not just in South Dakota, but in all the states around South Dakota where bikers came from, caught the disease and then went home to spread it. These are the new case reports from Thursday ---> Friday and today --->:

• Missouri +1,614---> +1,474 ---> +231
• Iowa +1,566 ---> +2,571 ---> +1,081
• Minnesota +1,154 ---> +850 ---> +1,017
• South Dakota +623 ---> +323 ---> +425
• Nebraska +374 ---> +335 ---> +317
• Colorado +349 ---> +430 ---> +268
• North Dakota +333 ---> +310 ---> +374
• Montana +144 ---> +134 ---> +188
• Wyoming +38 ---> +41 ---> +21

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, says the South Dakota rally will continue to contribute to higher COVID-19 case counts nationwide. He expects the real impact to show up in 3 or 4 weeks. "At Sturgis," he said, "there are many bar-related outbreaks and tattoo parlor-related outbreaks. A number of different indoor locations were visited. We’re now seeing these cases pour back out across the United States... We’ve already seen outbreaks here, in Minnesota. Small clusters of cases, that actually started in its first instance with an individual from Sturgis who came back infected, who then transmitted the virus on to others. I think you’re going to see that number grow substantially. That by itself will not drive a big, new national outbreak but it’ll sure contribute to that issue."

AP reported that new polling shows major dissatisfaction with how the federal government is handling the pandemic.

Yesterday, a friend of mine, an American whose wife and children are French and spends most of his time there, told me he's been "stranded" in L.A. and is going back to his family next week. I'm sure he is aware that the pandemic is getting worse all over Europe again-- especially in France, which is now reporting more new cases than California and Texas. Yesterday, Washington Post Europe-based reporters Michael Birnbaum, Chico Harlan and James McCauley, wrote that cases are surging again "after months of relative calm, but the second wave looks different from the first: Fewer people are dying, and the newest and mostly younger victims of the pandemic need less medical treatment." So far.

But the increase is widespread, and it is unsettling societies that had hoped the worst was behind them. Paris on Friday joined some other French jurisdictions in imposing a citywide mask requirement, with cases spiking. France, Germany, Spain and others posted caseloads in recent days that had not been seen since April and early May. Spain has been hit particularly hard, with per capita cases now worse than in the United States-- a notable marker in Europe, which after the initial springtime spike had generally controlled the virus more successfully than America.

And with almost every European country planning a return to in-person schooling, many starting next week, public health officials are holding their breath for the impact.

The surge is a first test of the efforts Europe has made to improve its resilience in the half-year since the pandemic unleashed a wave of suffering across the world. Most European countries have improved their testing capacity. They have hired contact tracers to combat big outbreaks. They have masks and gloves for their doctors and nurses. And as summer travelers return home and classes resume, experts and leaders say they hope to be able to avoid bigger lockdowns in the coming months.

Many countries, including Italy, endured grinding lockdowns this spring. Now citizens are exhausted, and economies are still flagging.

“I don’t think the country can survive another lockdown. And to be frank, there is no reason to,” said Ranieri Guerra, a World Health Organization assistant director general who is advising the Italian Health Ministry. “It’s very unlikely we’ll see anything like it was in the past. The likely scenario is that we’ll have some clusters here and there, even heavier than now, but very localized.”

Italy was ravaged by the virus in the spring. And now it is seeing something of a resurgence. On Friday, it reported 1,469 new cases, the biggest increase in a 24-hour period since it was emerging from lockdown in early May. In Italy, many of the new cases have been tied to travels abroad. Over the past month, the average age of a person who tested positive was 31. Throughout March, it was above 60.

Italian officials say that hospitals and nursing homes are better prepared and treatments more advanced. Though some Italians have dropped their guard, older people in particular remain cautious, wearing masks outdoors and staying away from crowds.

But Guerra said that containment depends on contact tracing and testing.

“If you don’t have a system to track, trace and quarantine localized clusters, it’s really difficult. This virus is very contagious,” he said. “Moving from 100 cases to 200 may take a few days, but moving from 2,000 to 4,000 may take hours.”

At least part of the surge in cases may stem from testing that is far more widely available than it was in the spring. Younger people who have moderate symptoms are being encouraged to get tested, unlike in March, when only those who were sick enough to be hospitalized qualified for a test in most countries.

“In February, in March, we had no clue what was circulating. We were only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” said Steven van Gucht, the head of viral diseases at Sciensano, Belgium’s national public health institute. “Now we are trying to see the iceberg and to adapt our behavior accordingly.”

But with summer fading into fall, questions remain about how long the virus can spread among younger people before it spreads to more vulnerable older generations.

Belgium had one of the world’s worst per capita death rates this spring, with most of the mortality occurring in nursing homes. Now, even though cases have nearly quintupled compared to their lowest point in late June, Belgian hospitals remain calm. Very few cases are appearing in nursing homes, and 40 percent of new cases have been diagnosed among people between the age of 20 and 40.

During the first wave, anti-pandemic measures in most European countries were far more stringent than in the United States. In some countries, police officers fined people for venturing past their front doors. The measures lasted for months. The payoff was that by early June, the virus had been brought under control in most countries across the continent.

This time, the European approach seems more American: decentralized, localized, a hodgepodge of individual measures that policymakers hope will add up to a pandemic that is kept in check. In Belgium and France, for example, mask-wearing is now required in many cities facing a second wave. Belgian authorities earlier this month asked citizens to drastically curtail their social interactions, limiting their close household contacts to a “bubble” of just five other people.

Whether that will be enough remains an open question.

“It’s a bit too early to be too complacent about ourselves, whether we have found the magic formula,” van Gucht said. “Maybe I can tell you after next winter whether this still will work.”

Among European countries, Spain presents the most ominous picture. It is reporting nearly as many daily cases as it did in March, when it suffered as acutely as any country on the continent.

Experts say the country has squandered many of the gains from its springtime lockdown by reopening too quickly — without building up the deep network of contact tracers used in other Western European countries. Its latest cases largely stem from the kind of activities that the Spanish government had banned early in the pandemic: family gatherings, celebrations, dancing at nightclubs, according to epidemiologists.

“We moved very fast to reopen, and the virus was still circulating too [widely] in order to achieve a sustained reduction of cases,” said Antoni Trilla, dean of the University of Barcelona Medical and Health Sciences School.

But the country is hoping that this increase won’t hit with the same tragic force as the first wave. The new cases have been detected largely among the young. Coronavirus hospitalizations, despite having quadrupled over the past month, remain manageable for the health system. In Madrid, 13.6 percent of hospital beds are occupied by coronavirus patients; in March the city’s hospitals were full.

The country’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has rejected the idea of a new national lockdown and said that conditions and knowledge of the virus have improved since the spring. Short of a lockdown, smaller measures have been taken, including the closure of nightclubs. The region of Madrid has delayed the return to school for some students and further reduced its planned class sizes.

But it is unclear whether those measures can prevent the virus from leaping to older generations when young, infected people return to their homes. Trilla said it would be “difficult” but necessary to use targeted measures to keep the virus at bay.

“We have to look at the local situation and move with surgical precision to close some schools, to isolate certain areas for a while,” Trilla said.

In France, meanwhile, the government on Friday recorded a spike of 7,379 new cases in the past 24 hours-- the second-largest single-day caseload since the pandemic began and the latest data point in an upward swing that began last month. Friday’s number was up more than a third from the already high figure posted just two days earlier.

France imposed one of Europe’s strictest nationwide lockdowns between mid-March and mid-May, and authorities have since said that a second period of closures would be devastating for the economy.

“We’re doing everything to avoid another lockdown and in particular a nationwide lockdown,” President Emmanuel Macron told journalists Friday. But he added: “Nothing can be ruled out.”

In light of the recent case uptick, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced Thursday that the government had prepared a set of new lockdown plans to be deployed if necessary.

Leaders implored citizens to remain vigilant, especially as students return to class on Tuesday, masks in hand.

“Washing your hands, keeping your distance and wearing masks will be our daily life for several months,” said French Health Minister Olivier Véran. “I’m not saying it’s easy-- I’m saying we have no choice.”

These are the new case reports for western European countries on Wednesday ---> Thursday and ---> Friday ---> today:

• France +5,429 ---> +6,111 ---> +7,379 ---> +5,453
• Spain +3,594 ---> +3,781 ---> +3,829 ---> [no report]
• Germany +1,428 ---> +1,565 ---> +1,549 ---> +711
• Italy +1,365 ---> +1,409 ---> +1,462 ---> +1,444
• U.K. +1,048 ---> +1,522 ---> +1,276 ---> +1,108
• Netherlands +571 ---> +510 ---> +507 ---> +501
• Switzerland +383 ---> +361 ---> +340 ---> +376
• Portugal +362 ---> +399 ---> +401 ---> +374
• Belgium +355 ---> +583 ---> +470 ---> +452
• Austria +327 ---> +328 ---> +229 ---> +395
• Greece +293 ---> +251 ---> +269 ---> +177
• Sweden +246 ---> +134 ---> [no report] ---> [no report]
• Ireland +162 ---> +90 ---> +125 ---> +142
• Denmark +57 ---> +90 ---> +73 ---> +79
• Norway +40 ---> +38 ---> +23 ---> +29

No, It Is NOT Getting Better-- It's Getting Worse

COVID-palooza by Chip Proser

Funny; yesterday I was trying to figure out how to say that, though she isn't a villain, Deborah Birx is also not exactly a hero many of us were hoping for. And then I noticed Birx trying to defend her sullied reputation on State of the Union, telling Dana Bash that Pelosi and the NY Times are wrong about her. "I have never been called pollyannish, or nonscientific, or non-data driven. And I will stake my 40-year career on those fundamental principles of utilizing data to really implement better programs to save more lives." The Times had accused her, credibly, of feeding the Trump regime the pollyannish reports it wanted-- which helped account for the plan Kushner had come up with (which probably would have save 100,000 Americans' lives) being shit-canned.

Last Thursday, Pelosi had told Mnuchin and Meadows, with whom she was negotiating a new pandemic relief bill, that "Deborah Birx is the worst. Wow, what horrible hands you’re in," accusing her of spreading disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, while praising Fauci who "came to his senses, and is now a hero." Most Americans know who to blame, ultimately-- and that's Trump, but, like I was saying, Birx is no Fauci. Yesterday, she did admit, though, that the US is in a new phase in its fight against the pandemic and that it's more widespread than when it first took hold. "What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal urban areas... To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus. If you’re in multi-generational households, and there’s an outbreak in your rural area or in your city, you need to really consider wearing a mask at home, assuming that you’re positive, if you have individuals in your households with co-morbidities."

People keep telling me-- and by people, I include "the media"-- that things are getting better, that the pandemic is receding and that we can start planning our trips to France and Bali and Italy. Not me. I'll wait 'til after a vaccine is real, safe, widely distributed, working and victorious over the virus.

On Sunday morning, we took a look at how western Europe is re-exploding with cases. It's getting so bad in Spain and France again that neither country reported how many new cases they had on Saturday or Sunday. And even without those reports, Spain is back in the top ten. The pandemic is raging out of control in the U.S., Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, the Philippines, Iran, Bangladesh, Iraq, Chile and Bolivia and picking up steam again-- after having partially died out-- in western Europe, Australia and Israel.

In the U.S., small, relatively out-of-the-way states that haven't had horrific outbreaks yet, are starting to. These were numbers for Saturday to ---> Sunday with cases per million residents.

• Oklahoma +1,244 ---> +494 (9,660 cases per million Sooners)
• Idaho +393 ---> 230 (11,944 cases per million Idahoans)
• Alaska +146 ---> +144 (4,484 cases per million Alaskans) Note: Alaska shut down non-essential businesses today and starting Aug. 11th, non-residents coming to Alaska from the Lower 48 will have to have proof of a negative test within the last 3 days
• Nevada +986 ---> +1,131 (16,299 cases per million Nevadans)
• North Dakota +133 ---> +58 (8,739 cases per million North Dakotans)
• Missouri +897 ---> 32 (8,447cases per million Missourans)
• Montana +116 ---> +112 (3,923 cases per million Montanans)
• West Virginia +93 ---> +119 (3,824 cases per million West Virginians)
• Hawaii +86 ---> 45 (1,583 cases per million Hawaiians)

Writing for the Washington Post Joel Achenbach, Rachel Weiner and Chelsea Janes reported that "The coronavirus is spreading at dangerous levels across much of the United States, and public health experts are demanding a dramatic reset in the national response, one that recognizes that the crisis is intensifying and that current piecemeal strategies aren’t working. This is a new phase of the pandemic, one no longer built around local or regional clusters and hot spots. It comes at an unnerving moment in which the economy suffered its worst collapse since the Great Depression, schools are rapidly canceling plans for in-person instruction and Congress has failed to pass a new emergency relief package. President Trump continues to promote fringe science, the daily death toll keeps climbing and the human cost of the virus in America has just passed 150,000 lives. 'Unlike many countries in the world, the United States is not currently on course to get control of this epidemic. It’s time to reset,' declared a report released last week by Johns Hopkins University. Another report from the Association of American Medical Colleges offered a similarly blunt message: 'If the nation does not change its course-- and soon-- deaths in the United States could be well into the multiple hundreds of thousands.'"

Re-Opening by Nancy Ohanian

The country is exhausted, but the virus is not. It has shown a consistent pattern: It spreads opportunistically wherever people let down their guard and return to more familiar patterns of mobility and socializing. When communities tighten up, by closing bars or requiring masks in public, transmission drops.

That has happened in some Sun Belt states, including Arizona, Florida and Texas, which are still dealing with a surge of hospitalizations and deaths but are finally turning around the rate of new infections.

There are signs, however, that the virus is spreading freely in much of the country. Experts are focused on upticks in the percentage of positive coronavirus tests in the upper South and Midwest. It is a sign that the virus could soon surge anew in the heartland. Infectious-disease experts also see warning signs in East Coast cities hammered in the spring.

“There are fewer and fewer places where anybody can assume the virus is not there,” Gov. Mike DeWine (R) of Ohio said Wednesday. “It’s in our most rural counties. It’s in our smallest communities. And we just have to assume the monster is everywhere. It’s everywhere.”

A briefing document released Friday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency counted 453,659 new infections in the past week.

Alaska is in trouble. And Hawaii, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma. Those are the five states, as of Friday, with the highest percentage increase in the seven-day average of new cases, according to a Washington Post analysis of nationwide health data.

“The dominoes are falling now,” said David Rubin, director of the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has produced a model showing where the virus is likely to spread over the next four weeks.

His team sees ominous trends in big cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Washington, with Boston and New York not far behind. And Rubin warns that the expected influx of students into college towns at the end of this month will be another epidemiological shock.

“I suspect we’re going to see big outbreaks in college towns,” he said.

Young people are less likely to have a severe outcome from the coronavirus, but they are adept at propelling the virus through the broader population, including among people at elevated risk. Daily coronavirus-related hospitalizations in the United States went from 36,158 on July 1 to 52,767 on July 31, according to The Post’s data. FEMA reports a sharp increase in the number of patients on ventilators.

The crisis has highlighted the deep disparities in health outcomes among racial and ethnic groups, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week showed that Black, Hispanic and Native American coronavirus hospitalization rates are roughly five times that of Whites.

How Trump And The Republican Party Failed The Country... Catastrophically

...“This is not a natural disaster that happens to one or two or three communities and then you rebuild,” said Beth Cameron, vice president for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and a former White House National Security Council staffer focused on pandemics. “This is a spreading disaster that moves from one place to another, and until it’s suppressed and until we ultimately have a safe and effective and distributed vaccine, every community is at risk.”

A national strategy, whether advanced by the federal government or by the states working in tandem, will more effectively control viral spread than the current patchwork of state and local policies, according to a study from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published Thursday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The coordination is necessary because one state’s policies affect other states. Sometimes, that influence is at a distance, because states that are geographically far apart can have cultural and social ties, as is the case with the “peer states” of New York and Florida, the report found.

“The cost of our uncoordinated national response to COVID-19, it’s dramatic,” said MIT economist Sinan Aral, lead author of the paper.

Some experts argue for a full six-to-eight-week national shutdown, something even more sweeping than what was instituted in the spring. There appears to be no political support for such a move.

True, I've said all along that for a political appetite from that, the U.S. will need to see Trump gone plus between a million and two million deaths. Right now there are "only" 158,000, which doesn't touch, let alone phase, most American idiots. Blaming national leadership only tells half the story-- well maybe more than half, but just part of the story. "With the economy in shambles, hospitals filling up and the public frustrated, anxious and angry," wrote our 3 Post reporters, "the challenge for national leadership is finding a plausible sea-to-sea strategy that can win widespread support and simultaneously limit sickness and death from the virus. Many Americans may simply feel discouraged and overtaxed, unable to maintain precautions such as social distancing and mask-wearing. Others remain resistant, for cultural or ideological reasons, to public health guidance and buy into conspiracy theories and pseudoscience."

DeWine is struggling to get Ohio citizens to take seriously the need to wear masks. A sheriff in rural western Ohio told the governor Wednesday that people didn’t think the virus was a big problem. DeWine informed the sheriff that the numbers in his county were higher per capita than in Toledo.

“The way I’ve explained to people, if we want to have Friday night football in the fall, if we want our kids back in school, what we do in the next two weeks will determine if that happens,” DeWine said.

The coronavirus has always been several steps ahead of the U.S. government, the scientific community, the news media and the general public. By the time a community notices a surge in patients to hospital emergency rooms, the virus has seeded itself widely.

The virus officially known as SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted by people who are infectious but not symptomatic. The incubation period is typically about six days, according to the CDC. When symptoms flare, they can be ambiguous. A person may not seek a test right away. Then, the test results may not come back for days, a week, even longer.

That delay makes contact tracing nearly futile. It also means government data on virus transmission is invariably out of date to some degree-- it’s a snapshot of what was happening a week or two weeks before. And different jurisdictions use different metrics to track the virus, further fogging the picture.

The top doctors on the White House coronavirus task force, Deborah Birx and Anthony S. Fauci, are newly focused on the early warning signs of a virus outbreak. Last week, they warned that the kind of runaway outbreaks seen in the Sun Belt could potentially happen elsewhere. Among the states of greatest concern: Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

Fauci and Birx have pointed to a critical metric: the percentage of positive test results. When that figure starts to tick upward, it is a sign of increasing community spread of the virus.

“That is kind of the predictor that if you don’t do something-- namely, do something different-- if you’re opening up at a certain pace, slow down, maybe even backtrack a little,” Fauci said in an interview Wednesday.

Without a vaccine, the primary tools for combating the spread of the virus remain the common-sense “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” including mask-wearing, hand-washing, staying out of bars and other confined spaces, maintaining social distancing of at least six feet and avoiding crowds, Fauci said.

“Seemingly simple maneuvers have been very effective in preventing or even turning around the kind of surges we’ve seen,” he said.

Thirty-three U.S. states have positivity rates above 5%. The World Health Organization has cited that percentage as a crucial benchmark for governments deciding whether to reopen their economy. Above 5%, stay closed. Below, open with caution.

Of states with positivity rates below 5%, nine have seen those rates rise during the last two weeks.

“You may not fully realize that when you think things are okay, you actually are seeing a subtle, insidious increase that is usually reflected in the percent of your tests that are positive,” Fauci said.

Some governors immediately took the White House warnings to heart. On Monday, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) said at a news conference that he had met with Birx the previous day and was told he was getting the same warning Texas and Florida received “weeks before the worst of the worst happened.”

To prevent that outcome in his state, Beshear said, he was closing bars for two weeks and cutting seating in restaurants.

But as Beshear pleaded that “we all need to be singing from the same sheet of music,” discord and confusion prevailed.

COVID-Kim, bringer of death and disease

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said Thursday she wasn’t convinced a mask mandate is effective: “No one knows particularly the best strategy.”

Earlier in the week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) demurred on masks and bar closures even as he stood next to Birx and spoke to reporters.

“That’s not a plan for us now,” he said. He added emphatically, “We are not going to close the economy back down.”

The virus is spreading throughout his state, and not just in the big cities. Vacationers took the virus home from the honky-tonks of Nashville and blues clubs of Memphis to where they live in more rural areas, said John Graves, a professor at Vanderbilt University studying the pandemic.

“The geographical footprint of the virus has reached all corners of the state at this point,” Graves said.

In Missouri, Gov. Michael Parson (R) was dismissive of New York’s imposition of a quarantine on residents from his state as a sign of a worsening pandemic. “I’m not going to put much stock in what New York says-- they’re a disaster,” he said at a news conference Monday.

Missouri has no mask mandate, leaving it to local officials to act-- often in the face of hostility and threats. In the town of Branson, angry opponents testified Tuesday that there was no reason for a mask order when deaths in the county have been few and far between.

“It hasn’t hit us here yet, that’s what I’m scared of,” Branson Alderman Bill Skains said before voting with a majority in favor of the mandate. “It is coming, and it’s coming like a freight train.”

Democratic mayors in Missouri’s two biggest cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, said that with so many people needing jobs, they are reluctant to follow Birx’s recommendation to close bars.

“The whole-blanket approach to shut everybody down feels a little harsh for the people who are doing it right,” said Jacob Long, spokesman for St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson. “We’re trying to take care of some bad actors first.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey also got a warning from Birx. On Wednesday, he said all bar drinking must move outside.

“We don’t want to be heading in the direction of everybody else,” said Kristen Ehresmann, director of the infectious-disease epidemiology division at the Minnesota Department of Health. She acknowledged that some options “are really pretty draconian.”

The problem is that less-painful measures have proven insufficient.

“The disease transmission we’re seeing is more than what would have been expected if people were following the guidance as it is laid out. It’s a reflection of the fact that they’re not,” she said.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) tried to implement broad statewide measures early in the pandemic, only to have his “Safer at Home” order struck down by the state’s Supreme Court [R].

With cases in his state rising anew, he tried again Thursday, declaring a public health emergency and issuing a statewide mask mandate.

“While our local health departments have been doing a heck of a job responding to this pandemic in our communities, the fact of the matter is, this virus doesn’t care about any town, city or county boundary, and we need a statewide approach to get Wisconsin back on track,” Evers said.

Ryan Westergaard, Wisconsin’s chief medical officer, said he is dismayed by the failures of the national pandemic response.

“I really thought we had a chance to keep this suppressed,” Westergaard said. “The model is a good one: testing, tracing, isolation, supportive quarantine. Those things work. We saw this coming. We knew we had to build robust, flexible systems to do this in all of our communities. It feels like a tremendous disappointment that we weren’t able to build a system in time that could handle this.”

There is one benefit to the way the virus has spread so broadly, he noted: “We no longer have to keep track of people traveling to a hot spot if hot spots are everywhere.”

On Saturday, Wisconsin reported 1,062 new cases, on Sunday another 922 cases, and today 404 more bringing the state total to (55,328) which comes to 9,503 cases per million Cheeseheads... and that's more than any European country including the hardest hit countries, like Sweden (8,017 cases per million), Spain (7,360 cases per million), Belgium (6,024 cases per million), the U.K. (4,500 cases per million) and Italy (4,106 cases per million). Every death certificate in Wisconsin should come with a letter of apology from state Assembly Speaker Robin Vox and state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald, who has the temerity to be running for Congress this year.

Is The Second Wave Starting-- Can We Learn From Europe What NOT To Do?

Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian

On the last day of July, California became the first state in the U.S. to top 500,000 cases. There is no country in Europe with that many cases (unless you count Russia, which spans two continents, as part of Europe). The worst hit European countries are Spain (335,602 cases-- 7,178 cases per million residents), the U.K. (303,952 cases-- 4,475 cases per million residents), Italy (247,537 cases-- 4,095 cases per million residents) and Germany (210,697 cases-- 2,514 cases per million residents). On Saturday, California reported xxxx new cases, bringing the state's total to xxxxxx (12,888 cases per million Californians). This week Florida and Texas the week after will also top half a million cases. On Saturday, Florida reported 9,642 new cases, bringing the statewide total to 480,028 (22,350 cases per million Floridians) and Texas reported xxx new cases, bringing their total to xxxxx (15,482 cases per million Texans).

I watch those numbers daily, but I also closely watch trends around the world and what I've been seeing in Europe has been disconcerting for the last few weeks. I noted almost a month ago that Israel had started spiking dangerously-- after an irresponsible, politically-motivated early school reopening. With barely over 9 million people, Israel now has over 71,000 cases-- worse measured by cases per million residents than any European country other than Sweden, whose neoliberal government had virtually taken the decision to use the pandemic as an opportunity to kill off a sizable chunk of its elderly and chronically ill population.

But the country that worried me most of the last few weeks has been Spain. First their daily new case rate had risen to about a thousand a day after having gone way down. Then it was 2,000 a day. On Thursday, Spain reported 2,789 new cases; on Friday it was 3,092 new cases and yesterday it must have been horrible; Spain didn't report any numbers at all. As of Friday Spain had 335,602 confirmed cases, worse than all but 4 U.S. states-- California, Florida, New York and Texas. Is it a second spike-- or start of the universally-feared second wave?

Europe-based Washington Post reporters Loveday Morris, Michael Birnbaum, Fiona Weber-Steinhaus wrote that "Several European countries that had their coronavirus outbreaks under control have begun to see a rise in cases that is feeding fears of a second wave. Governments are urging their citizens to be more vigilant amid the lure of summer gatherings and vacations, while health officials warn that lax public attitudes are putting the continent on a dangerous trajectory."

A spike in infections has led Belgium to ramp up restrictions on social contact, while Spain has closed gyms and nightclubs in Barcelona.

Meanwhile, German health officials have called a rise in infections in the past two weeks deeply concerning.

“People are being infected everywhere,” said Ute Rexroth, head of surveillance at Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, which sounded the alarm on rising numbers on Tuesday. “Weddings, meetings with friends, sadly, also nursing homes or health institutes. We are worried that this could be a change of trend.”

The rise in cases across several countries follows weeks of stability that had ushered in a growing sense of normalcy. A wave of reopening measures had come and gone without significant ill effect. People went to movies, dined at restaurants and started working from offices again.

But some virologists had warned that openings would inevitably be followed by new infections. Others stressed that successful reopening was dependent on citizens wearing masks and maintaining social distance. And there are signs adherence has been slipping.

On the tree-lined streets of Brussels, masks have been a rare sight. In Berlin, famed for its 24-hour pre-pandemic party scene, police have struggled to break up crowds of weekend revelers who gather in parks and open spaces for illicit dance parties. Spanish nightclubs and beaches brimmed with vacationers after European travel restrictions eased.

“More and more people are getting relaxed,” said Dirk Brockmann, a professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University who works on pandemic modeling with the Robert Koch Institute. “People are wearing a face mask going shopping or on the subway, but other than that they are going back to normal.”

He said that if the rise in infections was linked to reopenings rather than subsequent relaxed behavior, there would have been a stronger indication earlier.

What happens now may similarly depend on human behavior, he added.

“Potentially people will change their behavior again and we will mitigate,” he said.

The number of new cases is still far below what European countries saw during the peak of their outbreaks-- or what is happening in the United States.

Germany, for instance, recorded 633 new cases on Tuesday, compared with more than 6,000 daily cases at its peak. But German health authorities said the nature of the new infections is concerning, with outbreaks no longer largely confined to slaughterhouses or nursing homes.

“Corona is coming back with all its might,” warned Bavarian state premier Markus Söder, according to German news site Merkur.

In France, new cases hit an average of 850 over the past three days-- nowhere near the average of 2,582 in April. But the Health Ministry noted that recent progress has been erased, and Health Minister Olivier Véran warned of as many as 500 active clusters.

In Belgium, cases suddenly started rising this month after declining consistently since April. There were 707 cases diagnosed nationwide the week of July 6. Just two weeks later, the figure had tripled to a level not seen since early May.

Belgian policymakers are tightening restrictions. Customers are required to wear masks in stores. Starting Wednesday, Belgian households will be asked to limit consistent close social contact to no more than five people, down from 15. The maximum size of social gatherings, such as weddings, has been slashed to 10 people, down from 50. A country that had insouciantly planned to reopen schools without significant restrictions in September is now questioning whether that will happen.

“What is happening is a situation that is worrying, not terrifying,” Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès told Le Soir newspaper. However, she has warned that a second lockdown may be necessary.

There’s debate about whether Europe might be at the beginning of a second wave. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested as much on Tuesday.

“Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s happening in Europe, amongst some of our European friends. I’m afraid you are starting to see in some places the signs of a second wave of the pandemic,” he said.

Johnson was defending an advisory against nonessential travel to Spain, where the region of Catalonia has reemerged as a hot spot, with thousands of new cases reported in the past two weeks. Spanish Health Minister Salvador Illa has largely linked new cases to seasonal farmworkers, people attending family get-togethers and nightclubs.

“We aren’t at the beginning of a second wave,” said Pamela Vallely, a medical virologist from Manchester University. “This is just the continuation of the virus being in our communities.”

Resurgences are “just what’s going to happen,” she said. “We are going to have to continue to try to contain things to levels we can cope with.”

But as governments now have experience with how to cope with the virus, including tools such as localized lockdowns, testing and contact tracing, she said she doesn’t envisage a large surge.

“I’m relatively optimistic,” she said.

Sounds like famous last words. These are the numbers of new cases reported in the half dozen worst-spiking western European countries Friday and ---> Saturday (along with total COVID-deaths).

• Spain +3,092 ---> no report (28,445 deaths)
• France +1,346 ---> no report (30,265 deaths)
• Germany +1,012 ---> +412 (9,226)
• U.K. +880 ---> +771 (46,193 deaths)
• Belgium +671 ---> +745 (9,841 deaths)
• Italy +379 ---> +295 (35,146 deaths)

If those deaths can't get people to drastically change their behavior, one can only imagine what it's going to take in places like Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Alabama... and southern California! Maybe humor-- like this best new parody-ad of the week from Trump 2020?




Before their congressional testimony on the pandemic Friday, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC and Adm. Brett Giroir, Trump's testing czar, issued a joint statement conceding that there is no end in sight. "While it remains unclear how long the pandemic will last, COVID-19 activity will likely continue for some time. It is also unclear what impact the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will have on health care and public health systems during the upcoming influenza season. If there is COVID-19 and flu activity at the same time, this could place a tremendous burden on the health care system related to bed occupancy, laboratory testing needs, personal protective equipment and health care worker safety," they added. "In the context of likely ongoing COVID-19 activity, getting a flu vaccine is more important now that ever."