Governors Like Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott And Brian Kemp Are Killing Their State's Residents For Trump's Politics

Back To School With Betsy And Donald by Nancy Ohanian

The Wednesday Washington Post headline was likely chilling for many people: U.S. reports highest number of covid-19 deaths in one day since mid-May. Brady Dennis and Jacqueline Dupree reported that "As the United States reported its highest number of deaths from the novel coronavirus in a single day since mid-May, President Trump on Wednesday continued to press for the nation’s schools to bring children into classrooms, for businesses to open and for athletes to fill stadiums. 'We’ve got to open up our schools and open up our businesses,' Trump said at an evening news conference at the White House, adding that he wanted to see a college football season this fall. 'Let them play,' he said. The president also made his latest concerted push to get students back into U.S. schools, saying that '99.9 percent' of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic involve adults. He threatened to divert federal money from schools that don’t open, and warned of the intellectual damage that could result if children remain at home indefinitely."

Speaking from painful first hand and very consequential experience, Trump added that "When you sit at home in a basement looking at a computer, your brain starts to wither away... all schools should be making plans to resume in-person classes as soon as possible." Unfortunately, many schools in the Trump states that were stampeded into unsafe, hasty openings are already re-closing down.

Mr Potato Head

On Wednesday, the country reported its highest number of deaths in a single day since mid-May, at nearly 1,500. The country has now seen its seven-day average of newly reported deaths remain above 1,000 for 17 consecutive days. Georgia reported 105 deaths Wednesday, marking its second triple-digit day in a row. North Carolina reported an additional 45 deaths Wednesday, tying its highest daily number, from July 29. Texas reported 324 additional deaths from the disease.

School systems around the country continue to take different approaches as the academic year begins. Some have already insisted they will stick to virtual learning for the time being. Others have adopted a hybrid model in which students attend in person only periodically. And some school systems have opened their doors to full-time instruction, with mixed results so far.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) has said the city’s public schools expect to welcome some 700,000 students who want in-person learning when campuses open in September. That represents the majority of the 1.1 million students in the school district, the largest in the country.

New York City is poised to be the only one of the country’s 10 largest school districts to open schools for the start of the 2020-2021 school year. That became possible when the state-- once the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic-- dramatically lowered its infection rate through strict public health measures.

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) announced last week that school districts could choose to reopen as long as the percentage of people who test positive for the virus in a region is under 5 percent.

Other school systems continue to wrestle with the specter of outbreaks. At Etowah High School in Woodstock, Georgia, dozens of seniors packed together to pose side-by-side for a photo when classes began Aug. 3. Not a single smile was covered with a mask.

Just over a week later, the students all have been sent home and the school is shut.

In all, more than 900 students and staff in the Cherokee County School District had been ordered to quarantine as of Tuesday morning after 59 students and staff tested positive for the coronavirus, according to school officials. A third of those quarantined are from Etowah High School, which has had 14 confirmed cases.

Cherokee County School District Superintendent Brian V. Hightower said in a message to the community this week that the high school will be shut until Aug. 31, and that the number of people who need to quarantine could “increase dramatically” as more positive test results come in.

Meanwhile, at another Georgia school district, parents, teachers and students voiced conflicting beliefs on school safety and leadership in an emotional meeting late Tuesday.

The Paulding County School District was shoved onto the national stage in the past week when at least two North Paulding High School students shared pictures and video that went viral of a crowded hallway of mostly maskless students.

The students were suspended for posting the images, a decision that was later reversed for at least one of them. The school shuttered its doors this week for a third day for cleaning after six students and at least three staff members tested positive for the virus.

During a school board meeting this week, some parents underscored the need for in-person learning as they try to maintain full-time jobs, and others asked the district to provide a data-driven agenda for in-person learning as well as mask mandates.

The increasing loss of life and the wave of joblessness the pandemic has created have not stopped a rebound on Wall Street.

...The S&P’s climb upward, like other rallies in recent months, offers a stark contrast in economic signals.

Joblessness remains at historically high levels, with more than 30 million Americans receiving some kind of unemployment assistance. The U.S. economy shrank by a stunning 9.5 percent from April through June, in what was the fastest quarterly rate drop in modern record-keeping. And corporations have suffered staggering losses as many American consumers are confined to their homes, have abandoned travel and have curtailed retail spending.

In the latest reminder that the virus is altering the U.S. retail landscape, discount chain Stein Mart filed for bankruptcy Wednesday and announced plans to close most, if not all, its stores while it searches for a buyer for its e-commerce business.

The Jacksonville, Florida.-based company said it had run out of cash to keep operating during the pandemic, despite a $10 million small-business loan from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program. In its bankruptcy filing, it said it owed between $500 million and $1 billion to as many as 10,000 lenders.

“The combined effects of a challenging retail environment coupled with the impact of the pandemic have caused significant financial distress on our business,” Hunt Hawkins, the retailer’s chief executive, said in a statement.

More than a dozen major retailers, including J.C. Penney, J. Crew and Neiman Marcus, have filed for Chapter 11 protection since the coronavirus crisis took hold. Lord & Taylor and the parent company of Men’s Wearhouse, Tailored Brands, filed last week.

Other nations are also coping with economies rocked by the virus.

The British economy has officially plunged into a record-shattering recession, according to data released Wednesday, shrinking by a fifth in the second quarter and posting the steepest decline of any Group of Seven nation.

Alongside huge job losses announced a day earlier, Britain now finds itself with the worst economy and highest death toll in Europe from the coronavirus. Its death toll is behind only the United States, Brazil and Mexico.

The official data released Wednesday by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that gross domestic product fell 20.4 percent in the second quarter compared with the first quarter. The downturn reflected losses across all sectors.

“The recession brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has led to the biggest fall in quarterly GDP on record,” said Jonathan Athow, ONS deputy national statistician.

A recession is when two consecutive quarters show contraction in gross domestic product. Britain’s first quarter in January, February and March was down 2.2 percent. This is Britain’s first recession in 11 years, since the global downturn in 2009.

Meanwhile, the number of new daily coronavirus cases is rising in several major European countries, including Germany, France and Spain.

Germany on Wednesday announced 1,226 new cases, the highest figure since early May. Speaking to the country’s public broadcaster, German Health Minister Jens Spahn cautioned that the rise in cases was attributable to clusters “in almost all regions of the country.”

Counting Sheep by Nancy Ohanian

Many of the deaths in the U.S. are in states run by Trumpist governors obsessed with opening up schools and businesses quickly and ignoring warning from scientists that they will kill people and the economy. These are the half dozen Trumpist governors who murdered the most people on Wednesday and ---> Thursday:

• Greg Abbott (TX) +225 ---> 274
• Ron DeSantis (FL) +212 ---> +147
• Doug Ducey (AZ) +148 ---> +36
• Brian Kemp (GA) +105 ---> +82
• Henry McMaster (SC) +46 ---> +42
• Tate Reeves (MS) +45 ---> +22

Meanwhile, CDC Director Robert Redfield old WebMD that if the public-- even in the most politically backward and primitive counties in idiot places like Georgia and Tennessee don't follow recommended coronavirus mitigation measures, the whole country will have the worst fall for public health in U.S. history. We should have let them goo when they seceded. "For your country right now and for the war that we’re in against Covid, I’m asking you to do four simple things: wear a mask, social distance, wash your hands and be smart about crowds... I’m not asking some of America to do it. We all gotta do it."

Yesterday, during a panel for National Geographic Fauci stated flatly that "You can't run away from the numbers. You can't run away from the numbers of people who've died, the number of people getting hospitalized, the surges we're seeing... How long we're going to have to be doing this depends totally on us. If we keep running away from the reality of the need to do it, it could linger on and linger on."

If you think it's odd that deaths are soaring but that the number of reported cases is flat. That;'s not a coincidence. Trump and his enablers are making sure there are far fewer tests being administered so that it looks like cases are going down. Tests are way, way down in states where Trump has complete control and where the GOP governors don't care about being labeled genocidal maniacs, especially Texas (-45%), Arizona (-36%), Florida (-27%) and South Carolina (-17%). Testing should be increasing gigantically now in any state interested in stemming the pandemic.

Axios reported that The U.S. is cutting back on coronavirus testing. Nationally, the number of tests performed each day is about 17% lower than it was at the end of July, and testing is also declining in hard-hit states... Even as states with particularly bad outbreaks pull back on their testing, the proportion of tests coming back positive is still high-- which would normally be an indication that they need to be doing more tests. In Texas, 19% of tests are coming back positive, according to Nephron Research. In Florida, the rate of positive tests is 18%, and in Nevada, 17%."

Not all the bad news is in the U.S., of course. AP reported that "Researchers at Imperial College estimate 6% of England’s population-- or 3.4 million people-- have been infected by COVID-19."

The U.K. has the most deaths of any European country-- 41,347-- and their caseload has been rising again. On Tuesday there were 1,148 new cases and another 1,009 on Wednesday, bringing their total cases to 313,798, second only to Spain in western Europe-- and even worse than Georgia's 228,668 cases-- although Georgia has 21,537 cases per resident and the U.K. "just" 4,620 cases per resident.

Badly Handled School Reopenings Are Absolutely Deadly-- Wave II Starting Overseas?

Leana Wen, who formerly served as Baltimore’s health commissioner and is now teaching emergency medicine at George Washington University, wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post Tuesday, Stop justifying school reopening based on false statements. Wen is furious that "people"-- meaning Trump and his sycophantic supporters like governors Brian Kemp (GA), Ron DeSantis (FL), Kevin Stitt (OK), Greg Abbott (TX), Doug Ducey (AZ), Mike Parson (MO), Bill Lee (TN), Chris Sununu (NH), Kristi Noem (SD), Kay Ivey (AL), Pete Ricketts (NE), Henry McMaster (SC) and Kim Reynolds (IA)-- keep saying that children don’t get sick from the coronavirus and don’t spread it. "These statements," she wrote, "are being used to justify school reopening, and they’re just not true.

First, children do get infected. In fact, a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association found that 338,000 kids have been diagnosed with covid-19 in the United States. More than 97,000 cases were diagnosed in the last two weeks of July. The majority of these infections were in states undergoing surges, suggesting that high levels of community transmission directly translates to infections among children.

It is true that children tend to get less severely ill than adults, particularly when compared with older adults with underlying medical conditions. But some children do become very sick and require hospitalization. Among children admitted to the hospital, 1 in 3 end up being admitted to the intensive care unit-- a similar ratio as adults. Racial disparities seen in adult patients are also mirrored in children: The rates of hospitalization among Hispanic and Black children are nearly eight and five times higher, respectively, than the rate in White children.

Even though the virus that causes covid-19 is transmitted through the respiratory system, that’s not all it affects. The virus can cause damage to multiple organs in children, just as it does to adults. There is even a rare but serious associated disease specific to children that we are just beginning to understand, the multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). In a New England Journal of Medicine study, 92 percent of children with this syndrome experience effects on their gastrointestinal system and 80 percent on their cardiovascular system. Some develop coronary artery aneurysms. There are case reports of children suffering from a toxic shock-like multi-organ failure, which has led to death.

Counting Sheep by Nancy Ohanian

It’s also true that children spread covid-19. The largest study involving children and transmission is one from South Korea that traced nearly 60,000 people. It found that children 10 and older transmit the virus at least as well as adults. Children under 10 appeared to transmit it about half as much-- though here the study was limited to only 57 younger children. Another study in JAMA Pediatrics found that children carry just as much virus in their nasal passages in adults; in fact, kids under 5 may carry 10 to 100 times more.

That children can transmit to one another and to adults around them is also evident in a case report from a Georgia summer camp. After a teenage counselor developed symptoms, the camp was shut down. By then, 260 of 344 campers and staff for whom testing data is available had the infection. Among children ages 6 to 10, more than half were infected. More than half of the staff, too, tested positive.

Some who support on-time school reopening point to European countries that have had few outbreaks after resuming in-person instruction. However, these countries undertook many safety measures, including enforcing social distancing and implementing regular testing. They also had far lower rates of covid-19 in the community than we do. A cautionary tale should be Israel, where rapid school reopening with few safeguards contributed to a resurgence across the country. One school had a superspreader event after which 154 students and 26 staff members tested positive. A month after reopening, nearly half of the country’s new infections were thought to have originated in schools.

Short answer: absolutely not-- completely false... another dangerous Trump lie

And countries that botched their school reopenings seem to have kicked off Wave 2. New cases are astronomical in Israel and Spain and rapidly on the rise in France, Germany and the U.K. These are the new cases for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in countries where Wave II seems to have started:

• Spain +2,873 ---> +3,632 ---> +3,172
• Israel +1,720 ---> +1,871 ---> +1,558
• Germany +1,219 ---> +1,030 ---> +1,320
• Japan +1,207 ---> +938 ---> +1,282
• U.K. +816 ---> +1,148 ---> +1,009
• France +785 ---> +1,397 ---> +2,524
• Belgium +781 ---> +468 ---> +388
• Netherlands +630 ---> +779 ---> +654

A new poll Morning Consult did for Politico indicates that most Americans understand the danger of rapid reopening on schools a lot better than DeVos, Trump and his band of criminal governors do. Among registered voters, the number opposing in-person elementary and high school openings rose from 53% in early July to 59% today.

Writing for the NY Times yesterday, Richard Fausset asked facetiously if 925 people quarantined for COVID-10 defines a successful school reopening. He starts off by describing Cherokee County as "a bucolic and politically conservative stretch of suburbs north of Atlanta." The county only gave Hillary 22.7% of its vote in 2016. Two years later-- the so-called "blue wave"-- and Cherokee County was all in on Brian Kemp-- 72.1% to 26.4% for Stacey Abrams. The county performance for the local congressional neo-fascist crackpot Barry Loudermilk was R+49. You got the picture? So they opened their schools idiotically and immediately, the kids started getting COVID-- in all 10 elementary schools. Over 900 in the first week (students and staff) and one of the high schools re-closed.

Trump counties in rural and suburban Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana have been reopened for two weeks. "Students and teachers," wrote Fausset, "have immediately tested positive, sending others into two-week quarantines and creating whiplash for schools that were eager to open, only to have to consider closing again right away. All of this has only further divided communities where parents and teachers have passionately disagreed over the safety of reopening. 'This is exactly what we expected to happen,' said Allison Webb, 44, who quit her job as a Spanish and French teacher in the district because of her concerns about reopening schools, and who put her daughter, a senior, in the district’s remote-learning program. 'It’s not safe' to return to the classrooms now, Ms. Webb said. But to Jenny Beth Martin, who wanted schools to reopen-- even appealing directly to President Trump in a visit to the White House-- the district’s return has been a rousing success. 'I think that the opening plan is working,' said Ms. Martin, a district parent and co-founder of the national Tea Party Patriots, a conservative political group. 'They’re checking, they’re making sure when people have tested positive that they’re watching the exposure and spread.'"

Cherokee County had its own firestorm. A photo taken outside Etowah High School on the first day back showed scores of students crowded shoulder to shoulder, smiling and unmasked. A similar photo from Sequoyah High School was also posted to social media. Beneath the photo, a commenter wrote, “Most of these kids are gonna be sick in the next few days … was it really worth it to appease the anti-mask parents? At what cost?”

The county’s reopening plan was unanimously approved by the school board on July 9. Families could choose online or in-person, five-days-a-week instruction, and masks would be encouraged, but not required, for the district’s 42,500 students.

Opposition began to coalesce almost immediately. Ms. Webb, the foreign language teacher, organized a group on Facebook called Educators for Common Sense and Safety. The group started an online petition asking for, among other things, a mask mandate for students and a delayed start to allow time to rework schedules, classrooms and the curriculum “to be safe and engaging for our students.” It attracted more than 1,100 signatures.

In mid-July, the group, which Ms. Webb said currently counts hundreds of members, picketed outside a board meeting. A former English teacher, Miranda Wicker, 38, became its spokesperson-- a necessity, she said, because current teachers lacked union protection and feared retaliation if they spoke out.

“They’re terrified,” Ms. Wicker said. “They’re being asked, literally, to risk their lives.”

...Late last month, Ms. Martin was an organizer of a Washington news conference featuring people who identified themselves as doctors and who made misleading statements about the coronavirus, including unsupported claims that the drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment. Mr. Trump tweeted a video of the event, which was later removed from major social media platforms on the grounds that it was spreading misinformation.

In early July, when the school board approved reopening, case tallies in Cherokee County, with about 260,000 people, had only begun to rise after remaining flat and relatively low-- an average of about 10 new confirmed cases a day-- for most of June. Since then, though, the numbers have climbed steadily, mirroring the state as a whole, with the county averaging more than 90 new confirmed cases daily over the past week. Sixty-four people in the county have died of Covid-19, including eight in the past week.

...Ms. Morrison said she and her husband do not wear masks either. “I feel like before we’re even born, God has a plan for when he’s going to take us to heaven,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do to stop it.”