Don't Blame The Pandemic On Trump-- Blame It On Trump And The Republican Party

A new poll from CNN found that almost 70% of Americans now know someone personally who has been diagnosed with COVID-19 and about the same number (69%) of Americans say the U.S. response to the coronavirus outbreak makes them feel embarrassed. About 8 in 10 (79%) say they are angry about the way things are going in the country today, including a horrifying-- for GOP candidates-- 51% who say they are very angry. Only 12% of voters say they are not angry at all. Anger can be a strong motivator at election time-- both for turn out and for decisions up and down the ballot. 58% of voters say they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the pandemic.

Despite Trump's nonsensical babbling about how the pandemic will just disappear, 55% of voters say they know the worst is yet to come. They're right, too-- and the 43% who say they believe that economic conditions caused by the pandemic are worsening, are also right.

On Tuesday, there were a quarter of a million new cases worldwide, bringing the total worldwide number of confirmed cases to 22,297,453, along with 783,519 deaths. In Western Europe, where a second wave appears to be starting, countries that looked like they had tamed the beast through strict social distancing and masking mandates are now starting to see serious increases of new cases again. The reports from Monday, ---> Tuesday, ---> Wednesday and ---> Thursday augur poorly for the U.S., where the mandates have been much more lax almost everywhere-- the Trump states primarily. The worst hit western European countries this week (and cases per million residents as of Thursday):

• Spain +1,833 ---> 2,128 ---> +3,715 ---> 3,349 (8,645 per million residents)
• Germany +1,689 ---> 1,419 ---> +664 ---> +1,584 (2,759 cases per million residents)
• U.K. +713 ---> +1,089 ---> +812 ---> +1,182 (4,744 cases per million residents)
• France +493 ---> +2,238 ---> 3,776 ---> 4,771 (3,520 cases per million residents)
• Netherlands +482 ---> +489 ---> +552 ---> +529 (3,795 per million residents)
• Belgium +454 ---> +211---> +363 ---> +582 (6,854 per million residents)
• Italy +320 ---> +401 ---> +642 ---> +840 (4,237 per million residents)

It's far worse in the U.S. and we're still riding out Wave One. The Trump governors are causing unnecessary sickness and deaths in their states and each of them has far, far worse situations than even the worst-hit European countries. These are the worst of the Trumpist governors with their new cases Tuesday, ---> Wednesday and ---> Thursday and the number of cases per million residents in their states. Notice how that last crucial statistic compares to countries like Italy, Spain and Belgium, the countries that were so badly devastated by Wave One and are getting hit again now.

• Ron DeSantis (FL) +3,838 ---> +4,115 ---> +4,555 (27,405 cases per million residents)
• Doug Ducey (AZ) +915 ---> +637 ---> +723 (26,966 cases per million residents)
• Tate Reeves (MS) +795 ---> +1,348 ---> +894 (25,351 cases per million residents)
• Brian Kemp (GA) +2,816 ---> +2,305 ---> 2,759 (23,239 cases per million residents)
• Kay Ivey (AL) +1,357 ---> +1,117 ---> +971 (22,934 cases per million residents)
• Henry McMaster (SC) +719 ---> +739 ---> 909 (21,232 cases per million residents)
• Bill Lee (TN) +1,034 ---> +2,002 ---> 1,375 (20,379 cases per million residents)
• Greg Abbott (TX) +7,872 ---> +5,965 ---> 5,184 (20,370 cases per million residents)
• Mike Parson (MO) +1,185 ---> +960 ---> 1,125 (11,837 cases per million residents)

On Wednesday, Wall Street Journal reporters Allison Prang and Talal Ansari noted that colleges "have felt the impact of the virus on the start of the new school year. The University of Notre Dame moved in-person classes online for at least two weeks after seeing an increase in coronavirus cases. 'The virus is a formidable foe,' University of Notre Dame President Rev. John Jenkins said in a statement on Tuesday. 'For the past week, it has been winning. Let us as the Fighting Irish join together to contain it,' he added. The South Bend, Indiana college reported an additional 82 positive cases of 420 people tested Monday, the highest number of cases the school has reported and of tests completed in a single day by far. An additional 73 positive cases were reported on Tuesday, bringing the total to 222, according to a publicly available tracking system set up by the university. The cases have been linked to two off-campus parties on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, according to university officials. The majority of students testing positive are seniors, mostly male." And Notre Dame is certainly not the only college filled with idiots.

Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian

Michigan State University President Samuel Stanley Jr. said the school would hold all fall semester classes online, citing safety concerns for students and staff. That comes a day after University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said it was moving undergraduate classes online starting Wednesday, after a series of Covid-19 outbreaks on and around campus since starting classes last week.

Public schools in several states, including Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Georgia, closed to in-person learning this month after students and staffers tested positive for Covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, sending thousands into quarantine and remote learning. Several superintendents working to reopen schools also tested positive, and at least one died.

Thomas Tsai, an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Health Policy and Management, said colleges and universities have put a lot of thought into testing for the virus, and he hasn’t seen that level of discussion for school districts on a national level.

“There’s one opportunity to do this well because once you open you want the schools to stay open as much as possible,” he said on a press call Wednesday.

In New York City, where the school year is scheduled to start next month, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city’s positivity rate for the virus was 0.24%, the lowest since the pandemic started, but that the city is “nowhere near” herd immunity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines herd immunity as when “a sufficient proportion of a population is immune to an infectious disease” to make it unlikely to spread among people.

Mr. de Blasio also said he didn’t have an estimate of how many New Yorkers have permanently left the city because of the pandemic. “It is way too soon to know what the long term” effect will be, he said.

The city’s seven-day average of new cases was 320. The mayor said 16 cases in Borough Park in Brooklyn were tied to a big wedding.

And Thursday morning, the Washington Post reported that evidence is growing that children are playing a larger role in transmission than originally believed. A study released yesterday by the Journal of Pediatrics confirms two other credible stdies that offer insights about children and COVID-19 transmission, namely that children younger than 5 with mild or moderate illness have much higher levels of virus in the nose compared to older children and adults. But "because children tend to exhibit mild symptoms or none at all, they were largely ignored in the early part of the outbreak and not tested. But they may have been acting as silent spreaders all along."

Among the other preliminary findings: Age did not impact viral load (or amount of virus present) and that viral load appeared especially high about two days into the infection.

Another eye-opening finding involves immune receptors known as ACE2 that the virus uses to invade the body. Scientists had hypothesized that because children may have lower numbers of the receptors, they may be less likely to be infected or to transmit the virus. The data confirmed that younger children do have lower numbers of receptors than older children and adults-- but that this did not seem to be related to viral load.

One more thing-- and I hope all DWT readers had already figured this out on their own: Russia's claims of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine are "bogus," according to Fauci... and everyone else who understands what's going on with the vaccines being experimented with now. On Putin's spurious claims, Fauci said "It's not bogus because he has a vaccine, what's bogus is to say you have a vaccine that's safe and effective. There's a big difference between having a vaccine and proving in trials, that are really well-designed, randomized placebo-controlled trials, that when you're starting to give it widely to hundreds of millions of people, that you're giving a safe and effective vaccine. The Russians, to my knowledge and I'm pretty sure I'm correct, have not been studying this intensively in very large, randomized, placebo-controlled trials."




And that same CNN poll referenced above asked respondents "If a vaccine to prevent coronavirus infection were widely available at a low cost, would you, personally, try to get that vaccine, or not?" 40% answered "NO." They were also asked "How confident are you that the ongoing trials for a vaccine to prevent coronavirus are properly balancing speed and safety as they move toward making a vaccine available to the public?" 37% said they are not confident, almost half of whom are aggressively not confident. Perhaps that will change once Trump is out of the White House and adults start filling important positions in government. If not... we're in big trouble. The immunization program won't work if 40% of the population refuses to participate.