I’ve noted repeatedly in recent weeks that for all the calamities of our national COVID response, we are actually doing a lot of testing.

As you can see, we’re doing a lot of tests and the growth over time has been steady and sustained.

Over the last seven days the average number of daily tests was 681,374, with the highest daily number 845,777. That’s a lot of tests. And we stack up fairly well against other large countries in Europe in terms of per capita testing.

Despite the Texas Republican Party’s most valiant efforts to hold its annual gathering in Houston this week, the state’s all-conservative Supreme Court on Monday blocked the GOP’s ongoing appeals to hold the gathering in-person.

Here is a very concerning article just published by a practicing physician in Vox. He reports, admittedly on very limited clinical evidence and anecdotal reports from colleagues, that people appear able to get reinfected with COVID after fully clearing an initial infection. He also suggests that such reinfections may be more severe. He compares it to diseases like dengue fever where you get a worse case each time you get it.

We’ve seen a handful of reports like this over the last four or five months. I have generally dismissed them because in every case I had seen (mostly out of East Asia), more thorough analysis showed the reports to be mistaken.

I had been working last night on a lengthy post, covering a range of topics, but with emphasis on the fact that we may be going back to a second shutdown because of how catastrophically we bungled the epidemic in this country. If this happens it will mean all the struggle and sacrifice of the Spring, along with at least a trillion dollars of crisis spending, will have been wasted.

Along those lines I’m looking now at a press release for a Meet the Press interview this morning with Admiral Brett Giroir, a key Trump administration pandemic official. Asked about calls for another shutdown Giroir says: “I don’t think we need to shut down, at least in most places around the country.”

Read More

In a screed that historians will cite as a hallmark of Trumpism, the president has commuted the prison sentence of Roger Stone:

Read More

Most of us know that with COVID and many other diseases there is seldom a clear binary division between ‘died’ and ‘went back to life as though nothing had ever happened’ post-recovery. One of the things that has increasingly driven my news interest and personal concern are the many studies showing how many people who survive critical or severe cases of COVID face permanent disability or organ damage or other lifelong diminutions of health and quality of life. There are also many people who have mild or moderate cases of COVID, now dubbed “long-haulers”, who get the disease but don’t clearly get better. Weeks or months later they’re still experiencing old symptoms or new symptoms or a changing parade of new and old. Doctors don’t seem clear whether these are attenuated recoveries or permanent damage. A limited but still non-trivial number of patients suffer various neurological symptoms or what could well be permanent brain damage.

One of my all-time fave reader emails just landed in the inbox. Indulging a little fanciful (but not completely implausible!) speculation on a summertime Friday afternoon, here is TPM Reader ST:

Read More

Dr. Anthony Fauci has played a vital role and has been a consistent, therapeutic presence in the U.S.’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic since the earliest days of the White House task force.

Matt Shuham has a good run-down here of the comical toadying behind the scenes in “Sharpie-Gate” which was unearthed by the newly-released Inspector General’s report. Read it.

It is worth remembering that while Sharpie-gate was from the start comical and absurd it was never “funny.” Taxpayers pay hundreds of millions of dollars to collect, distribute and publicize data about the weather to protect lives, property, economic vitality and more. When the President falsifies that data for trivial and self-serving reasons that’s a big problem. But this episode is best seen as an almost novelistic foreshadowing of the falsification of data and corruption of the country’s public health apparatus which only months later would lead directly to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and immiseration of millions more.

An Alabama Republican political leader (Senate President pro-tem) is back to pushing the “herd immunity” strategy as cases mount in his state.

There are a number of problems with this approach, not least of which is that having everyone get the disease as a way of combating the disease is a rather logically and conceptually confused approach. But more particularly we have the case of New York City.