Today is the last day TPM’s offices will be open for the foreseeable future. The entire staff, including the editorial, tech and business teams, will begin working remotely tomorrow.
I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m closely following the press conferences by the Governor and Mayor of New York State and City. Overall I’ve been impressed by their decisions and communication with the public. I watch both as a journalist and as a resident and parent in this city. In addition to all the wonderful emails you’re already sending, I would encourage you to let us know how the crisis is being managed by local officials in your cities, counties and states. What are the decisions, what is your sense of the public response in your community. Also let us know how clearly local officials are communicating what’s happening, how they’re reacting to those events and why.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has announced a “containment zone” in New Rochelle, New York, a suburb of New York City. He is also deploying the state National Guard. It’s not quite as dramatic as the wording suggests. They are creating a one mile radius around the synagogue which is the epicenter of the outbreak. Within that area they’re closing schools and banning large public gatherings. The National Guard will be deployed for cleaning and to ensure the delivery of food and necessities to people in quarantine. Most infections in New York state are in this single community.
As we make our way into this period of crisis, I’ve endeavored to speak and write very deliberately and as precisely as I can. That’s good practice generally. But words, emphasis and precision are more consequential now than usual. When I got TPM Reader JT’s fascinating follow up to my Korea post from yesterday, I realized I had not been as precise as I’d intended. South Korea is very different from the U.S., culturally, economically, geographically. No approach from there is going to be easily adaptable to the U.S. I thought I’d been clear on that but I think not enough. My point was that it is a model that lacks a lot of approaches in China which seem like simple nonstarters in the U.S., for cultural, constitutional and a host of other reasons.
Voters in five states will head to the polls today to choose between the two candidates still hacking it out for the Democratic nomination.
A quick reminder. On March 6th we announced we’re moving everything we publish about the COVID-19 crisis in front of our Prime paywall. We plan to do this as long as the period of acute crisis lasts. As I explained here in more detail, this leaves us a bit exposed as a company since our paywall is our main tool for sustaining and growing our membership numbers. So if you’ve considered joining and have the means to do so now would be a great time!
We should pay close attention to what is happening in South Korea. According to the latest data, South Korea has the second largest outbreak of COVID-19 in the world after China. Italy and Iran have only slightly fewer cases though it’s likely that South Korea’s higher number is driven in part by more aggressive testing.
But they appear to be making progress getting the outbreak under some control. In the last four days the numbers of new cases have been 518 (Thursday), 483 (Friday), 367 (Saturday) and 248 (Sunday). The country is doing sufficient numbers of tests at scale that those decreases likely correspond to a significant degree to what’s happening in the larger community. South Korea has so far done more than 190,000 tests. They currently have the capacity for approximately 15,000 tests per day.
One thing we’re already starting to see is that the current COVID-19 pandemic is only one part of, though clearly the biggest and driving part of, an unfolding global crisis. The economic knock-on effects are now ramifying across the globe in ways that will not only complicate the disease response but create new realities and crises that have a life of their own.
There have been plenty of reports that President Trump is a bit of germaphobe (who also has a fear of being poisoned).
Join
The following is an absolutely fascinating report from TPM Reader AK on the COVID-19 clampdown in Shanghai. We get so many great accounts from TPM Readers, always with different dimensions and different kinds of information depending on the kind of news story over so many years. This one is particularly rich. But I’m reminded how great an asset and value this is to the TPM community and our ability to bring you the news.