Important new numbers out this evening from New York City that for the first time allow us to take a preliminary look the city’s excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Josh Kovensky has pulled together the numbers.
Sometimes we adopt a metaphor for a big societal question that, even though we know it’s a metaphor, still significantly distorts our thinking about what we’re talking about. I’m thinking here of when we “reopen the economy”. At least in its more antic forms, President Trump himself seems to be the big driver of this catchphrase. So that may explain the confusion behind it. The economy isn’t closed and we’re not going to reopen it. Not any time soon.
A small but notable collection of data was published yesterday in The New Journal of Medicine. One major New York City hospital evaluated and tested every expectant mother who was admitted to the hospital for childbirth. Almost 14% were COVID positive and almost all of lacked any symptoms. This is an early and still very small window into the kind of universal and/or random sample testing that will be necessary to get an accurate understanding of the prevalence of COVID19 in the population at large.
His impeachment acquittal may have left him with the impression that he holds the keys to an unbound presidency. And he may be stoking secret pipe dreams that the pandemic will delay the presidential election. But President Trump is clearly getting increasingly fed up with the fact that he is leading a democratic nation and not something more totalitarian.
Wisconsin Republicans took the unconscionable step of forcing an in-person election during a deadly pandemic last week because they were sure a low turnout election would ensure victory for the conservative candidate in a state Supreme Court race. But in a stunning development, the conservative lost. Jill Karofsky, the liberal candidate in a technically non-partisan race, is the winner.
As Congress is consumed by how best to confront and combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, Senate Republicans have been forced to toss their efforts — to confirm a string of conservative judges while Republicans still hold the majority in the upper chamber — to the backseat.
I wanted to flag your attention to this oped in the Times, now a couple weeks old. It notes that other countries in Europe are not seeing the scale of job loss that we are in the US, even though they’re shutting down their economies just as much. It’s from March 30th. So it’s from eons ago in COVID terms. But it holds up pretty well. There are two points I want to focus on.
On Friday I noted news reports that claimed US military intelligence was warning as far back as late November of a possible new virus in China with a possible global impact. The problem is that these US intelligence reports would predate by weeks our earliest understanding of when the first cases emerged and well before the Chinese themselves knew they had a new disease on their hands. That chronology of the outbreak comes from news reports from major dailies in the United States and Hong Kong. But there’s another body of evidence which points to a similar and more definitive timeline. That’s hidden in the COVID-19 genome itself.
All month we’ve been talking about Project Air Bridge, the federal government organized airlift of medical supplies which are then handed over to private sector distributors to distribute around the country. A few media reports have suggested, often on the basis of unnamed sources, that there is a 50-50 deal. The distributors agree to route 50% of the supplies to hotspots as defined by FEMA while the other 50% they can sell on an ordinary commercial basis. But we don’t have to rely on these reports. An April 8th FEMA bulletin, flagged to me by TPM Reader GG, lays it all out pretty clearly. There’s even a handy graphic.
To quote the April 8th bulletin: “Per agreements with distributors, 50 percent of supplies on each plane are for customers within the hotspot areas with most critical needs. The remaining 50 percent is fed into distributors’ normal supply chain to their customers in other areas nationwide. HHS and FEMA determine hotspot areas based on CDC data.”
The Washington Post has a new story out about the chaotic and overlapping efforts to acquire and distribute medical supplies across the country. We get yet more evidence that FEMA is routinely jumping into private transactions, either at the front end of overruling a purchase or seizing it when it’s being transported to whatever hospital or state purchased it. As my hospital system board member source told me a couple days ago this isn’t just happening it’s pervasive.