In recent days, the government of the United Kingdom has been pursuing a COVID-19 plan that struck most of the world’s public health experts as little short of insanity. Instead of ‘bend the curve’ they were pursuing a plan that might best be described as ‘bring it on.’ (The description comes from TPM Reader JG, an American academic teaching this year in the UK.) The idea was to rush through the epidemic quickly, build up herd immunity among the young and middle aged and be well-positioned to avoid a second wave of the epidemic in the fall. Over the last 48 hours the government has shifted radically against this plan toward the shutdown model being adopted around Europe and North America. But it’s the economic plan just announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, (more or less their Treasury Secretary) that I want to alert you to. It’s truly radical, especially for a Tory government, and may be a model for other countries preparing to leap over or into the abyss.
In short, the British government has agreed to pay the salaries of everyone who can’t currently work.
From TPM Reader CK …
So this is day 5 of confinement in Paris. The wife, our three kids, and me. It’s, uh, pretty goddamn difficult. And since all happy confinements are alike, and all unhappy confinements are unhappy in their own way, I’ll spare you the report… I imagine you can only slog through so many “here’s a detailed email of my own personal confinement hell.”
Instead, I wanted to share one bright spot and that’s what’s been happening here at 8p.m. every night since Tuesday. All over France (and apparently Europe as well, since one of the personal videos is from friends in Madrid), people are opening their windows and clapping in support of medical/hospital personnel. It’s truly amazing to behold/hear and to participate in.
February 26th, 2020. President Trump: “When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
March 20th, 2020. Confirmed cases in the United States rise to 16,064.
In recent days there has been a flood of reports suggesting, if not always saying quite directly, that many more young people (<50 or <60) are getting sick and even severely ill than we were expecting based on data out of China from earlier in the year. As best I can tell (and I’m looking very carefully at the available data) this is not true. Many young and middle aged people are getting sick. But not at rates that are beyond what we should expect or out of line with data out of China or other parts of the world that are running ahead of us in the pandemic.
When you’ve lost Tucker Carlson, it might be time to throw in the towel.
During his show on Thursday evening after news broke that Senate Intelligence Committee Richard Burr (R-NC) sold off a significant portion of his stock amid private coronavirus briefings, Carlson laid into the powerful Republican.
TPM reader MZ writes from Bratislava:
I am a US citizen but have lived in Slovakia for the past 7 years. I must begin by noting something about the perception of Slovakia (and former Eastern Bloc countries generally) by many “Western” Europeans and North Americans; this is relevant because the response to Covid-19 in Slovakia seems very different from the response west of here.
It now seems very clear that New York state has the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the country and it’s epicenter is in New York City. Out of self-interest I had hoped this was an artifact of aggressive testing. It is now clear that is not the case. The United States now has 11,723 confirmed COVID-19 cases. More than a third of those — 4,152 — are in New York State. Sixty percent of those cases — 2,469 — are in New York City. If you include cases that are in the city’s suburbs the number pushes up toward 4,000.
Let’s dig into these numbers to get a sense of how this relates to the rest of the country, how much these big numbers are driven by aggressive testing and how much lower tallies in other parts of the United States are driven by the absence of testing.
It is a brutal, merciless race. But Italy has now surpassed China in its death toll from COVID-19. To date, Italy is now over 3,400 fatalities. China’s current number is 3,245. China still has double the number of confirmed cases. But the growth in China is minimal while it rushes ahead in Italy.
A TPM reader who is a physician and on a medical school faculty is watching the Trump’s ongoing press conference at the White House:
Today’s presser is unbelievable. I am an MD and member of our hospital executive administration in the thick of Covid preparation.