You have likely seen the growing clinical evidence that COVID is not only a respiratory disease but frequently strikes at the brain and nervous system. A group of new studies out of Spain provide more detailed evidence. Our Spanish correspondent TPM Reader SH sent me this article in El Pais (English language version). The headline is that over half of COVID patients in Spain developed neurological problems of one sort of another.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s remarks about human rights yesterday are among the most disturbing utterances I’ve heard come out of this administration thus far.
JoinYes, we are wondering what’s going on in Portland too. Here’s where to start. We’ll try to bring you more tomorrow.
You saw Gov. Kemp’s (R-GA) order prohibiting cities and counties in Georgia from requiring people to wear masks. Look at this chart – apologies in advance that it’s a bit messy.
Let me direct your attention to this very important photo:
JoinCongratulations to Dr Fauci on his @InStyle cover???? pic.twitter.com/eaoFzMf8Hx
— Priyanka Aribindi (@priaribi) July 16, 2020
This is a remarkable statistic I had not seen. 31.1% of Florida children (people under 18) who have been tested for COVID have been positive. That is about three times higher than the rest of the population.
It’s not entirely clear what to make of this statistic. Only about 50,000 people under the age of 18 have been tested, out of about 2.8 million tests in the state. So it seems quite possible that the percentage is so high because the kids who are being tested are either clearly symptomatic or living with parents who are positive. In other words, an artifact of the testing protocol itself. Still, it’s a high number. And the public health director in Palm Beach County is warning that we simply don’t know what kind of long term damage these infections could be doing.
As was reported yesterday, the White House has taken the collection of COVID data out of the hands of the CDC and given it over to a private medical data company in Pittsburgh. On its face the company doesn’t seem obviously scammy. It’s not some fly-by-night set up by Brad Parscale’s uncle. So we don’t know quite what the angle to this is, not the specifics. My best guess is that it is simply to maintain a tighter hold on information and keep it out of the hands of the CDC, which even under its stalwartly Trumpian current leadership has shown some recent signs of bucking the President’s demands for COVID denial and no-holds-barred school reopenings.
What we can say more definitively is that at the moment the full weight of the federal government appears harnessed toward covering up and denying the bad news about the resurgent epidemic and force-marching the economy and the nation’s schools into a dead cat bounce that will salvage the President’s flagging reelection prospects.
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TPM Reader PC nails it:
JoinLongtime TPM reader in Canada. The other comments from abroad got me thinking about the alleged White House strategy of getting the public accustomed to living with a high level of outbreaks. It might seem delusional to expect people to accept mass illness and death – but there’s plenty of precedent.
As Summer Concepcion and I discussed how to cover President Trump’s press briefing last night, we were both utterly gaping at his behavior — that’s coming from two journalists who have been following the ins-and-outs of the Trump-era since Day 1.
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From TPM Reader SA …
JoinI’m a long-time TPM reader (back to 2002 or something) and one of the original prime members and also a TPM insider. I live in NYC, most of the time. My wife and I are both professors at a university in New York City and we have small children (ages 6 and 4). We are overall extremely lucky: no one got sick and we are not in much danger of losing our jobs. But, the lack of child care, and the *uncertainty* around child care, has just been really tough.
About a month ago we were in a zoom meeting with the school where our smallest is registered for pre-K when we were blindsided by the sudden realization that ***they were really contemplating not opening the schools full time.***