We’re starting to see herd behavior around social distancing measures, and it’s pretty powerful. The more people do it, the easier it for everyone to do it. But TPM Reader JA has a good point that it starts at the top*:
Kudos to TPM for keeping folks out of the office. I am thinking this morning about why leadership from on high is so important relative to COVID-19 and social distancing, and that’s because half measures aren’t good enough in themselves, and because for me half measures lead to quarter measures.
You have to find good news where you can at the moment.
There is at least good evidence that testing is starting to pick up. Terribly, terribly below where it needs to be, but here are some numbers. According to imperfect but best available statistics, by March 10th 4,889 people had been tested. By yesterday it was 7,617. As of this morning it’s 8,900. It seems likely to go well over 10,000 today.
We are all coming up to speed with phrases like social distancing, containment and mitigation, disease curves and more. From everything I have heard – and I’ve been listening very closely – a blanket ban on travel to and from Europe is largely irrelevant to the current situation. There is probably a logic to barring travel to and from northern Italy. Screenings at airports make sense. But the virus is here, apparently seeded at multiple locations in the United States and on a growth curve that looks very similar to those of countries that were two or three weeks ahead of us. If I heard him correctly that was the only substantial new policy the President announced other than still quite vague stimulus efforts, which focused on ‘liquidity’, even though liquidity isn’t the core of the economic dimension of the crisis.
One persistent dimension of this crisis is the federal government being slow or silent and seeing, over time, states, cities, private corporations and educational institutions step into the void. The White House’s communications operation at least is significantly improved from late February, which is of course not saying much. But the real information, the big decisions are mostly coming from elsewhere.
I mentioned below that it would be a terrible mistake to shut down the Democratic presidential primary process now. Obviously here I don’t literally mean shut it down. The primaries are official elections. But I mean in the broader sense of trying to push things forward to Biden being the presumptive nominee. No more debates. Stuff like that.
But TPM Reader PP just wrote in and says he’s a 70 year old election judge in a state with an upcoming primary and, yeah, he thinks there is a reason to rush.
It is extremely belated. We know this. But the CDC is finally getting some real information up and online. The key page is here, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Summary. There are links toward the upper left to a series of charts and graphs on cases in the US, testing in the US and more.
Anthony Fauci’s “things will get worse” statement this morning – no surprise to anyone paying attention – seems like the second inflection point of this crisis within the United States. The first was CDC’s Nancy Messonnier’s February 25th ‘not if but when’ comment.
Why did Joe Biden do so much better in Michigan against Bernie Sanders in 2020 than Hillary Clinton, who lost state, did in 2016? I think the answers to this say something, maybe obvious, about the voters’ preference for Biden this year and their support for Sanders in 2016. Read More
As you can see in the footer of this post and every Editors’ Blog post for the foreseeable future we’ve added a section of critical links about the COVID-19 Crisis. There are some key, canonical information sources I’ve already added which you can see below (you need to click through to the full post). I’ll be adding more and cycling ones in and out going forward. Some will be important articles; most will be key data sources as opposed to particular news reports. I will try to keep the list short because my goal is to keep the key information sources at your fingertips, ready at hand.