Reopen, but not like that.
While it took some goading, President Trump criticized his friend and fellow Republican Brian Kemp on Wednesday evening for his plan to push businesses in his state to reopen, a move that the President has been hyping for weeks.
One of the many things Donald Trump has done badly for the country in recent months is focus this debate – largely around himself – about whether to ‘open up’ or not. This argument is good for generating intractable arguments. But it’s not terribly productive. Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Obama administration official involved in the US ebola response and other international aid efforts, suggests this analogy. Your house is on fire. You can shut the windows to deprive the fire of oxygen. That will slow it down. But eventually you’ll suffocate. We’ve now got a public debate which amounts to whether to be incinerated or suffocate. What we need is the fire brigade to show up and hose down the house. The fire brigade, as Konyndyk explains, is a system of widespread testing, contact tracing, isolation for the infected and beefed up hospital capacity to make an interim new normal possible.
This is very hard work to do.
One of the enduring features of the early Obama administration and the 2008/2009 global financial crisis was how quickly the Republican party pivoted to being the chief critic of efforts to clean up the mess their incumbent President and party had in many respects created. Suddenly the GOP barely knew George W. Bush and the 43rd President was retrospectively rebranded as the exponent of something called ‘big government conservatism’ that the GOP absolutely had nothing to do with and had never truly supported. Months into office Barack Obama was the spendthrift leading the country toward hyperinflation, decadence and ruin.
They’ll have what everyone else is having.
Eric Trump, who is overseeing the operations of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. while his father is president, has requested the same rent relief from the General Services Administration that other federally owned buildings are getting while the nation grapples with the COVID-19 outbreak.
Since the first reports in January of a novel coronavirus spreading out of control in China, people around the globe have been trying to figure out just how lethal the disease is. As the pandemic has ravaged the United States and shuttered large sections of the national economy the question has only become more controversial and politicized. An infected individual’s chances of dying or becoming gravely ill from COVID19 are not only important in themselves. They directly inform what costs society should be willing to incur to slow or halt the spread of the disease.
That question is now engaged again in the furious public debate over when or how quickly to restart economic life in the country. We’ve seen the crazy talk and denial on Fox News and other pro-Trump media. But I want to discuss a version of this debate being carried on by real doctors and public health scientists, with very direct impacts on what Americans do next as they combat COVID19.
It’s still an initial study, not the kind of double blind controlled study that is the gold standard of drug studies. But the largest study to date, based on data from the VA, shows that hydroxychloroquine, the purported miracle drug repeatedly touted by President Trump, showed slightly MORE deaths from COVID19 among those who were treated with the drug. Read More
There’s been a lot of discussion about how deadly COVID19 is. It’s always seemed highly unlikely that the number of fatalities per lab-confirmed cases is at all representative of the true percentage of people who die from being infected with COVID19. That number was over 3% in China, about 5.4% in the US currently and has ranged as high as 10% in Italy. Far too many cases are escaping lab confirmed detection for those to be close to accurate.
Beyond perpetuating his own political objective, President Trump’s latest Twitter announcement on temporary immigration action likely won’t bring much substantial change to policies or programs his administration has already halted in the wake of the pandemic.
You remember the controversy. To me it was one of the most unconscionable acts of the whole COVID19 Crisis in the US, which is saying a lot. The Wisconsin GOP forced an in-person in election in the midst of a deadly epidemic because they believed that a low turnout election would help them retain a seat on the state Supreme Court. As it happened, they lost the seat. But did forcing Wisconsinites out of their houses and to voting stations spur new infections in any documentable way?
Let me start by saying the evidence looks ambiguous to me at least. But it’s gotten some discussion online. So I put together a chart to see what happened.
I’ve told you a few times that the news business has been thrown into severe crisis by the COVID19 epidemic. It’s not necessarily the most hard hit industry. Hospitality, travel and related service industries have been far more drastically affected in absolute terms. But those industries were all doing well pre-crisis. They faced no structural challenges to their business models. The news business has been in an evolving and protracted crisis for years.