Assistant Secretary of Health Brett Giroir on Monday agreed with White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx about the “peak week” ahead for COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths. Continue reading “HHS Official Agrees With Birx: ‘Don’t Go Every Day To The Grocery Store’”
Amid COVID19 Crisis, Voting Rights Groups Get Wins In Longstanding Battles
While chaos continues to reign over plans for the 2020 primary elections, voting rights groups secured victories in two battles that started well before the pandemic.
How To Fight A Politicized Supreme Court The American Way
The following is the first installment in a TPM series, “Not Safe At Home: Solutions For Our Democratic Crisis.” As America battles the coronavirus, this series takes a look at fixes the next Congress and President should consider to how our democracy works — ideas that predate the coronavirus, and that will resurface after it has passed. This essay is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Many smart progressives today argue for various plans aimed at depoliticizing the Supreme Court, often through elaborate and difficult-to-enact schemes that involve changing how the court is constituted and how each justice is appointed. One oddity of these reform schemes is that if you had the political power to enact one of them (i.e. the White House, supermajorities in Congress, and, in some cases, enough state legislatures to ratify an Amendment), you’d likely also have the power to do simpler stuff, such as appoint better justices to the Court.
But there is a deeper and more interesting problem. Depoliticization schemes aim to make the Court something it has never been. The Court is no umpire, standing apart from politics. Instead, it has always been engaged in what scholars sometimes call “high politics” or constitutional politics. The lesson of the first 150 years of American history is that when you believe the Court is profoundly wrong, you don’t fix the Court through depoliticizing reforms. You confront the Court through politics. When the Court is far enough out of step with Congress, the President, and the American people, the elected branches can use a range of constitutional hardball tactics to induce the Court to change direction. These begin with fights about who should be on the Court, but they don’t end there. It’s worth knowing this history because we may soon need to dust off the rest of the playbook.
I.
The framers of the Constitution envisioned a politics without political parties. The collapse of this vision was almost comically instantaneous. By the election of 1800, the first two parties were at each other’s throats, fighting for (among other things) control of the courts. President John Adams and his Federalist party lost the election, but attempted to entrench their allies in the federal judiciary through two techniques that became time-honored American strategies of court-packing. First, a lame-duck session in early 1801, the Federalist majority in Congress created many new federal judgeships, which Adams quickly filled (the “midnight judges”). Second, they adjusted the size of the Supreme Court — downward, from six members to five (effective on the retirement of any of the existing six) — in what turned out to be a futile attempt to block incoming President Thomas Jefferson from appointing anybody to the Court.
II.
Lincoln clashed openly with the Supreme Court at the start of the Civil War. When pro-slavery Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Lincoln lacked the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, Lincoln simply refused to obey the ruling. In 1863, with the war raging, in an effort to reduce Southern power on the Court and entrench pro-union control, the Republican majority added a tenth justice (who turned out to be the gun-toting Californian Stephen J. Field, a pro-union Democrat and advocate of economic liberty). After Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the Presidency passed to Vice President Andrew Johnson, another pro-union Democrat, but one with more dangerous views: Johnson was determined to eviscerate Reconstruction and allow ex-Confederates to regain power. As part of their protracted battle with Johnson, which would eventually result in his impeachment, the Republicans in Congress in 1866 reduced the size of the Supreme Court from ten justices to seven — meaning that the first three justices to depart would not be replaced. This time the tactic worked. Johnson was unable to appoint any justices to the Court. Johnson’s successor, Republican Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union general and our most pro-Reconstruction President, was much more closely aligned with Republicans in Congress. Once he was safely in office, the Republicans increased the size of the Court back up to nine justices, where it has remained. Grant got to fill one seat on the Court immediately, and soon filled three more.
The most interesting thing about this early history for twenty-first century Americans is not necessarily the method partisans in Congress used to secure control of the Court. Adding and subtracting justices is perhaps the bluntest, most obvious method they could have devised, given that the Constitution says the justices have life tenure but doesn’t say how many there should be. The most interesting thing about these early fights is that Americans, from the start, have understood the Court to be a branch of government engaged in constitutional politics.
The “high politics” of the Supreme Court is not exactly the same as regular, low politics. We don’t expect or want justices to strike down every law they disagree with. But the most important debates about how to interpret the Constitution — pro-slavery or anti-slavery, pro-federal power or pro-states’ rights — also tend to be central axes of our politics. They’re often near the heart of what divides the parties and the American people. The problem is: what do you do when the Court is out of step with Congress, the president, and the people on such important questions?
III.
The evolution of the Republican Party is a fascinating story all its own. By the end of the nineteenth century, its vision of economic liberty had morphed into a defense of wealth, corporations, and capital, against labor, government regulation, and taxes. The Republican-dominated federal courts, including the Supreme Court, advanced these views as a constitutional vision. The federal courts in those days routinely issued injunctions blocking union organizing tactics such as strikes and picketing. When farmer-labor populist unrest swept the country and a Democratic Congress enacted a peacetime income tax, in 1894, the Supreme Court reversed a century of precedents to strike down the tax as exceeding congressional power. None other than Justice Stephen J. Field wrote that the tax unconstitutionally discriminated against the wealthy. “The present assault upon capital is but the beginning,” he wrote in his opinion: we were hurtling toward “a war of the poor against the rich.”
The populists and progressives who favored redistributive taxation responded to Field and the conservative justices by calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision. This strategy eventually worked: the 16th Amendment, granting the federal government the power to tax incomes “from whatever source derived,” was ratified in 1913. But that was the first and last time in modern American history that the “let’s reverse a single bad Supreme Court decision with an Article Five Amendment” strategy has ever succeeded.
IV.
When the Great Depression hit, the Supreme Court was still dominated by its pro-business, anti-labor, anti-redistribution Republican majority. President Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats in Congress began to fight the Depression by enacting key components of the New Deal; the Supreme Court quickly found reasons to strike them down. In his 1936 campaign, Roosevelt campaigned against both the “economic royalists” and the Supreme Court. He argued that the Court’s constitutional vision was nothing more than a “new despotism wrapped … in the robes of legal sanction.” He famously threatened to increase the size of the Court and pack it with new justices. This plan never had the votes in Congress, and went nowhere. But the Court backed off. It didn’t strike down a single New Deal statute after 1937, acquiescing instead to a new constitutional vision of national congressional power to regulate the economy. In that way — the most important way — FDR’s campaign against the Court was not the failure some assume it was, but a massive success.
FDR’s confrontation with the Court provides the clearest template for the set of conflicts that are likely in our future: conflicts between more progressive elected branches and a more conservative Court. Indeed, many of the key axes of disagreement are lifted straight from the 1930s. Does the Constitution protect the right to strike, or the right to not have your business picketed by strikers? Does it protect a broad power to tax — perhaps to enact a wealth tax? How about the power to build strong federal systems of social insurance, such as universal health insurance and unemployment insurance? Or the power to block plutocrats from buying politicians? These are simultaneously political questions and constitutional questions. To change the Court’s answers, Congress may need to play some constitutional hardball.
V.
In addition to the time-tested strategy of threatening to add justices, Congress could attempt to pursue various other, more exotic strategies of constitutional hardball in its coming confrontations with the Court. For instance, consider jurisdiction-stripping: providing by statute that the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, do not have the jurisdiction to hear some particular type of challenge to a particular statutory provision. Oddly enough, this is probably legal. Congress could also place triggers in legislation to dissuade the Court: Write the statute to hold that if program X is struck down by a court, then program Y will appear in its place — where Y is even less politically appealing to the Court’s majority than X, but Y sits on such firm constitutional foundations that striking it down would leave the Court even more politically exposed. And so on. The objective of such hardball tactics is not to depoliticize the Court, but to deter it from proceeding down its path of economically-conservative politics dressed up in constitutional clothes. Ideally, there is no need to carry out the biggest threats, such as packing the Court. The best outcome, as in 1937, is for the Court to back off.
Confronting the Court works best with a tailwind of wide and deep popular support. It has not yet been tried in the era of Fox News, which could present special challenges. Nonetheless, it is our best hope. The only real umpires in American politics are the American people. If they find the Court out of bounds, the elected branches may be able to push the Court back into line. It has worked before.
This story has been updated in light of helpful comments the author received from Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet.
Corrections: This story initially stated that Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled “for the Court” that President Abraham Lincoln lacked the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. In fact, Taney issued the ruling while riding circuit as circuit Justice. The story has been updated to reflect that.
Also, this story initially stated that the 16th Amendment was the only time in U.S. history that an amendment was used to reverse a single bad Supreme Court decision. In fact, this did happen one other time, in a very different era: the 11th Amendment, in 1795. The story has been updated to reflect this.
Joseph R. Fishkin is the Marrs McLean Professor in Law at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. His first book, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, was published by Oxford University Press.
It’s Hardly Shocking the Navy Fired a Commander for Warning of Coronavirus Threat. It’s Part of a Pattern.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Capt. Brett Crozier, fired last week from command of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, joins a growing list of Navy officers who attempted to raise concerns about the safety of their ships and crew, only to pay with their jobs.
Crozier wrote a letter dated March 30 warning that an outbreak of the coronavirus on his ship was a threat to his crew of some 4,000 sailors unless they disembarked and quarantined.
“We are not at war, and therefore cannot allow a single sailor to perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily,” Crozier wrote. “Decisive action is required now.”
We do not know all the facts that prompted the letter. But we know that once it was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the acting secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, relieved Crozier of command. Crozier, 50, had been a rising star in the officer corps. He will remain in the Navy at his current rank, though his career future is uncertain. In viral videos, Crozier’s sailors can be seen cheering him loudly as he disembarks the Roosevelt, alone, before driving away.
Navy experts believe that the cumulative effects of the service’s decisions over the past several years to punish those who speak out will result in silencing sailors with legitimate concerns about their health and safety.
“This may have the effect of chilling the responses of other commanding officers because it will be perceived, fairly or not, as a shoot the messenger scenario,” said James Stavridis, a retired admiral and former head of the United States Naval Institute, who called for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the dismissal.
The Navy’s top officer, Adm. Mike Gilday, initially praised Crozier’s attempt to warn his superiors. But the next day, Thursday, Modly, the Navy’s civilian boss, reversed course, telling reporters that he fired Crozier because he lost confidence in the officer for not using a secure email network to properly route his complaint.
Crozier’s unclassified email wound up with 20 or 30 other individuals and at some point was provided to the Chronicle reporters. Modly said the public airing of the complaint had unnecessarily alarmed sailors and provided enemies with information that exposed weaknesses on one of the country’s most important warships.
As part of our 2019 investigation into the incidents in the Navy’s 7th Fleet, its largest overseas presence, ProPublica found repeated instances of frontline commanders warning superiors of risks the fleet was facing — a lack of training, exhausted crews, deteriorating ships and equipment. Those warnings, all sent through the normal chain of command, were met with indifference.
Disaster in the fleet struck in June 2017, after the USS Fitzgerald, a destroyer, collided with a cargo ship in the Sea of Japan. Two months later, a second destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, collided with an oil tanker in the Singapore Strait. The two accidents cost the Navy 17 sailors — the biggest loss of life in maritime collisions in more than 40 years.
Navy investigations laid blame on nearly the entire chain of command in the 7th Fleet, punishing commanders and sailors for failing to properly train and equip its crews and ships.
Adm. Joseph Aucoin, the head of the 7th Fleet, was fired. Vice Adm. Thomas Rowden, who oversaw training, was forced from his job. Cmdr. Bryce Benson, captain of the Fitzgerald, was recommended for court-martial.
But ProPublica reported that all three men had repeatedly tried to warn higher-ups of dangerous safety issues in the vaunted fleet, based at Yokosuka, Japan. They argued to their superiors that the Navy was running ships in the 7th Fleet too hard, too fast. Their warnings were dismissed.
Some of the Navy’s criminal cases against the officers collapsed after court rulings found possible bias in the Navy’s prosecution.
Benson, the Fitzgerald commander whose court-martial case was dismissed, said that Crozier “was right to strongly advocate for the safety of his crew and it was wrong for the SecNav [secretary of the Navy] to fire him for doing so.”
Senior leaders “continue to under-resource ships at sea and are slow to respond to commanders’ pleas for assistance,” said Benson, who is now retired. “From one tragedy to the next, senior Navy leaders continue to break faith with the fleet.”
Dismissing Crozier, Benson said, “sends a clear message to commanders: The authority and responsibility that you enjoy is yours alone and an absolute liability even when under resourced and thinly supported.”
Modly emphasized that he did not intend his actions to discourage officers from coming forward to report their concerns through the chain of command.
“I have no doubt in my mind that Capt. Crozier did what he thought was in the best interests of the safety and well-being of his crew. Unfortunately, it did the opposite,” Modly said at a press conference.
But Crozier’s firing has raised alarm anew that the Navy is more interested in its public image than in fixing problems raised by its sailors. It did not go unnoticed by fellow officers that Crozier was dismissed within two days of his letter becoming public. Such haste is unusual, and raised questions about the due process afforded to Crozier.
Some now believe that the cumulative effects of the Navy’s decisions over the past several years to punish those who speak out will silence sailors who have legitimate concerns about their health and safety.
“His removal sends a really strong message that coming forward will end people’s careers,” said Mandy Smithberger, a military expert at the Project on Government Oversight. “Before this I’d say that risk was more so implied through both social and professional retaliation. This is much more explicit.”
Crozier’s firing comes amid increased concern that the Pentagon is not acting quickly enough to protect whistleblowers. Glenn Fine, the principal deputy inspector general for the Defense Department, testified that the agency has shown a reluctance to punish officials who take punitive action against whistleblowers.
“We have seen a disturbing trend in the DoD disagreeing with the results of our investigations or not taking disciplinary action in substantiated reprisal cases without adequate or persuasive explanations,” Fine testified in January to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “Failure to take action sends a message to agency managers that reprisal will be tolerated and also to potential whistleblowers that the system will not protect them.”
Navy commanders may be fired at any time by their superiors. And the captains of Navy ships are uniquely responsible for any mishaps on their ships.
A study published earlier this year of more than 2,000 disciplinary cases found that Navy commanders were historically dismissed for “crimes of command” — such as a ship colliding with another vessel or running aground.
More lately, however, the study documented that it has become harder to tell if those punished are being disciplined less because of their performance and more because they had either internally or publicly called the Navy out for neglect.
“In the modern Navy,” wrote Capt. Michael Junge in the Naval War College Review, “a commander is most likely to be removed for personal misconduct or when the crime of command includes one or all of the following elements: death, press coverage, or significant damage to the Navy, whether materially or to its reputation.”
Do you have access to information about how the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, or the Army is responding to the coronavirus that should be public? Email t.christian.miller@propublica.org or megan.rose@propublica.org or robert.raturechi@propublica.org. Here’s how tosend tips and documents to ProPublica securely.
For more coverage, read ProPublica’s previous reporting on the Disaster in the Pacific.
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Who Has Emergency Authority Over Elections? Nobody’s Quite Sure.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In each of the past seven years, Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin has sought authority to revamp or reschedule elections in case of emergency. Every time, the legislature has blocked him. These rebuffs had repercussions in Westborough, a Boston suburb that was set to hold its town election last month.
As COVID-19 cases rose across the state, the governor shut down gatherings of more than 25 people two days before ballots were to be cast, making it illegal for voters to congregate at the local polling place, a senior center, on election day, March 17. Yet neither Galvin’s office nor the local elections administrator, Town Clerk Wendy Mickel, had the power to reschedule the election.
On March 16, town selectmen voted to postpone the election. But Westborough, which has 20,000 residents, needed an order from either a court or the governor. After waiting in vain for the governor’s signature, Mickel located a judge, who issued a restraining order, postponing the election 15 hours before polls were to open.
“I’m sure I have another 100 gray hairs,” Mickel said. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Recent headlines have focused on Wisconsin, where the governor and the Legislature have been unable to agree on whether to delay or reconfigure Tuesday’s primary and who has the authority to do so. But such confusion surrounding procedures to change or postpone elections in an emergency is the norm nationwide during the pandemic. A lack of clear lines of authority, and the powerlessness of state and local officials with the most experience managing elections, are fostering paralysis and tugs of war. They also raise concerns that, if shelter-at-home orders persist into the fall, states may struggle to adopt alternatives such as voting by mail or drive-by voting in time for the presidential election.
There are only six states where election officials have the authority both to delay an election and shift polling places, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In six others, they can only reschedule an election, and in 18, their powers are limited to relocating poll sites. In Massachusetts and Idaho, secretaries of state, who generally oversee elections, have pressed unsuccessfully for more emergency clout. Opponents questioned the wisdom of vesting too much authority over an election in any one individual, and contended that, since democracy depends on regular voting at predictable intervals, arrangements for postponement should not be overly nimble.
“Election officials have literally zero authority,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of Vote at Home, a nonprofit that helps policymakers and election officials improve their vote by mail processes and policies. “An issue that this pandemic has exposed is the lack of agility with respect to elections.”
The impotence of state election officials forces governors and legislators with no experience running elections to make choices that they don’t understand the implications of, said David Levine, the Elections Integrity Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit. “Short of a compelling reason otherwise, election officials need to have the ability to act quickly so that the accessibility and the integrity and the security of the vote aren’t questioned,” he said.
In most states, the governor has emergency power to suspend or change laws and regulations. While this authority has been interpreted to apply to elections, the relevant statutes don’t specifically mention them. As a result, governors may have been reluctant to postpone voting, for fear of being accused of partisanship or overstepping their bounds, said Matthew Weil, director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
Weil expressed concern that state legislatures — many of which are not in session — would be unable to solve the problem before November’s election. “This was a partisan issue before this all hit,” he said. “How states are going to do this now I don’t know.”
Texas is among the states that have made hardly any provisions for an election emergency. The Legislature is out of session this year, and existing law allows the state to do almost nothing to change local election procedure. The state has been reduced to offering guidance to local officials, such as instructions to sanitize certain voting machines “with 50% or higher clear, fragrance-free, isopropyl alcohol solution and a lint-free wipe.”
Idaho vests no emergency authority in election officials. Chad Houck, the chief deputy secretary of state, said that emergency planning was already on their to-do list at the start of the year, but it became more urgent as COVID-19 spread. With Idaho’s primary scheduled for May 19, “We thought, ‘Boy, we really should try and get this squared up,’” he said. But when he consulted the Senate committee that oversees his office, “there wasn’t support for it.”
One member of that committee, Cherie Buckner-Webb, said political considerations influenced its reluctance to expand the secretary of state’s authority. “There is a degree of posturing and a degree of uncertainty,” she said. “All of these things play into what’s palatable.”
Instead, the secretary of state was forced to wait for the governor’s office to declare a state of emergency and adopt universal voting by mail. “If it had happened the other way, we probably would have been able to act a week or two faster” to inform the public, Houck said.
In Ohio, neither the secretary of state nor the governor has emergency power to delay an election. When the secretary of state sought court approval to postpone its March 17 primary, a federal judge refused. The director of the Ohio Health Department, Dr. Amy Acton, then declared an emergency and closed polling places, effectively stopping the election. Rejecting a proposal by Secretary of State Frank LaRose for an in-person vote on June 2, the legislature instead adopted a proposal for his office to send postcards with instructions on how to receive an absentee ballot application to anyone who had not already voted early. A coalition of voting-rights groups challenged the plan, contending that it would disenfranchise some minorities and low-income voters, but a federal judge upheld it on Friday.
All of this confusion pales in comparison to Wisconsin, where local election administrators are still unsure if an election will be held — or how they should hold it. Even though the primary is scheduled for Tuesday, most polling places will be closed for lack of workers.
The impasse traces its roots to former Gov. Scott Walker’s administration, which reduced the state’s non-partisan elections office to a largely gridlocked bipartisan agency, said Kevin Kennedy, who served as the state’s chief elections official between 1982 and 2016. Then, after Walker’s 2018 re-election defeat, the Republican Legislature forced through bills that neutered the authority of the incoming Democratic governor in emergency situations.
“There were decisions made not to be prepared for this,” Kennedy said.
The Democratic governor, Tony Evers, has ordered residents to stay home. But he has rejected calls to postpone the election, saying he lacks the necessary authority. Instead, he proposed universal voting by mail, but the Legislature rejected the idea.
On Friday afternoon, Evers abruptly called the Legislature back into session after U.S. District Judge William Conley declined to delay the election. Conley did offer voters one additional day to request absentee ballots and six additional days to return them. In his decision, the judge castigated both the governor and the Legislature for failing to act.
States have had plenty of warning that their emergency procedures were lacking, Weil said. While COVID-19 may be unprecedented, the need to adjust elections in times of crisis is not. “This is one of the things I’ve been concerned about long before this pandemic,” he said. “Even after 9/11, jurisdictions didn’t address emergency powers.”
The 9/11 attacks alerted Galvin, who has been Massachusetts’ secretary of state since 1995, to the limits of his emergency powers, according to his spokeswoman, Debra O’Malley. When the state sent utility workers to New York to assist with cleanup and disconnect live electrical wires, Galvin’s office had no authority to email them ballots, as it did with overseas voters. Many had not requested an absentee ballot by the deadline and were unable to vote.
Since then, the issue has resurfaced periodically. In the weeks after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, the Boston Public Library was supposed to be used as a polling place for a primary for a special election to the U.S. Senate. A fire that was later determined to be unconnected to the bombing had broken out at the library. The secretary of state lacked authority to move voting; so did the governor, who could only act if there was a statewide emergency.
“It was just a stroke of luck that the crime scene tape came off by the time the polls had to open,” O’Malley said. “We wouldn’t have been able to move it.”
Galvin’s office has also had to sue local election officials so that a judge could postpone voting during snowstorms. “The towns were happy to be sued,” O’Malley said.
Last month, when Galvin’s office again filed its bill seeking power to postpone elections, The Boston Globe editorialized against it. “Entrusting that power to one person — no matter who it is — goes too far,” the editorial board wrote. “It might be more cumbersome to go through the courts in order to delay elections, but it’s a layer of protection to ensure that only genuine emergencies interfere with the central act of democracy.”
So, as Westborough’s elections approached, the secretary of state’s office felt it had run out of options. “We almost said, ‘Just cancel your election and we’ll deal with the consequences after,’” O’Malley said. “That’s where we were at.”
A few days after Westborough’s voting was postponed, the governor signed legislation allowing election officials across the state to reschedule local elections through June. The change does not apply to the fall, leaving little recourse if large gatherings are still banned in November.
Tiger At NYC Zoo Tests Positive For Coronavirus
NEW YORK (AP) — A tiger at the Bronx Zoo has tested positive for the new coronavirus, in what is believed to be the first known infection in an animal in the U.S. or a tiger anywhere, federal officials and the zoo said Sunday.
Continue reading “Tiger At NYC Zoo Tests Positive For Coronavirus”
WH Trade Adviser Claims He’s Qualified To Speak On COVID-19 Treatment Because He’s A ‘Social Scientist’
On Monday morning, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro argued that his background in social science means he has the aptitude for handling the COVID-19 outbreak.
Japanese Prime Minister To Declare State Of Emergency
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that he will declare a state of emergency for Tokyo and six other prefectures as early as Tuesday to bolster measures to fight the coronavirus, but that there will be no hard lockdowns.
Continue reading “Japanese Prime Minister To Declare State Of Emergency”
Spain Sees Some Positive Signs As Number Of New COVID Cases Eases
MADRID — Health officials in Madrid say the strain of incoming patients is easing in hospitals and allowing authorities to think about how to start reverting those facilities to normal operations.
Patients awaiting treatment in emergency wards across the region of 6.6-million that has been hard hit by the new coronavirus went down Monday to 390 cases. That’s one tenth of the arrivals that were seen one week ago.
Continue reading “Spain Sees Some Positive Signs As Number Of New COVID Cases Eases”
British PM Boris Johnson Remains In Hospital For Coronavirus
LONDON — Britain Prime Minister Boris Johnson is reportedly in good spirits following his first night in the hospital for what his office described as a “precautionary step” after contracting the new coronavirus.
Johnson remains in charge of government despite being sent to St Thomas’ Hospital after COVID-19 symptoms of a cough and fever persisted. His spokesman James Slack says he remains in hospital under observation.
The 55-year-old leader had been quarantined in his Downing Street residence since being diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 26. He is the first known head of government to fall ill with the virus.
He has released several video messages during his 10 days in isolation.