Lost Year

We all had a lost year and in that there were some major setbacks and for others major successes as they found new businesses, found new perspectives and thrived. For others there was the loss of employment, loss of a business, family members, illness and overall stress of coping through what has been like nothing we have ever experienced in living on earth and may never again.

I fall somewhere in the middle of how I feel about the year, there were times I thrived and others that the sensation of being trapped in my hamster cage has taken a toll. Of late it has been more about the endless weather, the cold the rain and it’s challenge on my willingness to look past it and do things that give me pleasure. But the sun is out, my second vaxx is done and in two weeks I will have 95% or so immunity. And yes folks we are going to need a booster as the Nurse I met yesterday believes that is the next step given what he knows about the longevity of the current one. With that he shared his story of working in Miami during the peak of the pandemic. Shocking or not, the hospital he was at disregarded much of the protocols in place, including masks and distancing, and a seeming amusement over the hyper-vigilence that was demanded over care. This of course contradicts what was read in the papers but also was illustrated by the behaviors in the street by residents and visitors alike, so I suspect that his experience was in fact true and again much of a reflection of the overall composition of life in Florida, pandemic or not. Florida, the State of Idiocy should be its tourism slogan. (Trump, Gaetz and others who live there says it all) And as we enter the era of vaccines we are seeing true problems in Michigan and there the Governor has elected to not change the move forward, and do you blame her as the last time she mandated a lockdown a group of Militia crackpots planned to kidnap her. California is also doing so, as Newsom is pending a recall and the reality is that across the country there is little support for going back to the quarantine mentality that frankly did nothing from changing the course of the virus. Everywhere across the globe has found themselves dancing that ever changing seesaw where numbers decline during a lockdown only to rise again once lifted. So in other words we are right where we are in the beginning only now we have vaccines. With a mass vaccination program the reality is then the virus can actually be studied, tracked and traced in real time environments instead of theoretical ones. I recall in the beginning so many absurd studies, beliefs and other theories that have been either rescinded or ignored as time passed. Whatever happened to the South Korea restaurant where a person sitting 27 feet away contracted the virus from a positive patron. Or the gyms that were studied in July with maskless trainers and clients in a high intensity classes? Has that been studied since now gyms have begun to increase capacity? Then the Covid Theater of package transmission that only just was retracted by the CDC. I recall Fauci endorsing that despite the man having the credentials he possesses advocating such idiocy. But then again I had long thought he and the CDC under the leadership team of Evangelicals are not ones to follow. I turned to many other sources of information and used them to guide and inform me with regards to my behavior and safety. But then again I have the time and the desire for knowledge and truth. Funny that Governors and Presidents seemed to not do so and often disregarded and ignored many public health professionals who may have found better ways to manage the way the disease was tested, tracked, traced and isolated. They chose to go their own way and in a haphazard chaos was the result. It shows itself again with vaccine distribution and opening of industry. We are still very fucked folks .

So the lost year is another phrase that is used to demonize, demoralize Teachers and Students as if any of the efforts made to work with kids online to educate and accommodate the demands of families to meet their expectations and hopes to further them along the ladder. Well like the public health issues we found that we are also drastically underfunded when it comes to public education. Supplies are non-existent, consistency in leadership and organization when it comes to moving quickly into a new manner of business is not lost. Like Hospitals overrun and ill prepared to handle a new virus from PPE to treatment, our schools quickly had to become online facilities and still provide the services that a physical entity provides – from food to books/computers. And with that open and close doors as if it was a revolving one to meet the arbitrary and ever changing metrics of what defines risk. Private schools never did and does that make them better or just different because families pay money in which to make sure that they have all they need. Just like private hospitals. You get what you pay for in America when it comes to health and education. And that lost year will also be one of debate for it will be as unequal as our economy is.

To understand how or why medical care was the true reason we were forced into lockdown versus the endless competing models of expected deaths should we not, read ProPublica’s article on these front line EMT workers and how broken that line is. You will see hospitals without oxygen, space and staff able to care for the numbers that came and keep coming despite lockdown. So did quarantine accomplish what we heard endlessly, “slowing the curve”. I it did only partially as we have come to realize that we are not being told the correct numbers and demographic breakdowns of the victims. We know Nursing Homes, Hospital workers, Meat processors, usually essential workers, and others trapped in poorly ventilated confined working spaces. Every story I hear of a wealthy person contracting Covid they seem to not know how they got it but they recovered. Access and availability to early care may be the reason. Again we don’t understand the virus but we know it is prolonged exposure usually low ventilation. So are you really going to enter a restaurant or a gym when we know that they are the lowest to fix that issue. I went repeatedly to Home Depot a large space, with fewer customers and well I am fine. Without contact tracking and tracing we cannot know if the workers and customers there were exposed there or from another family member who worked at the Grocery Store and they brought it home and passed it onto other workers/customers. So here is the plan we won’t test them every day/week and monitor them as a test/lab case and then just hope people do their own version of it. That is not working out. Hunting something invisible is impossible without a big team and commitment. So why not have staggered work times, better health care and paid leave when sick. Try that one.

Which also brings me to the lost year for women. It will undoubtedly affect women in ways we will see in decades to come. The career and education loss is already begun. Despite that it was a woman, Kari Kariko, behind the RNA use in vaccines, she spent years trying to fund and support her theories and without a “beard” to help get this work done we may be still in lockdown. So go figure it would be a woman, but she is like many Scientists of that same gender who will be further marginalized in their work despite it all. And that is crossing the lines of all professions, white, blue or pink.

And lastly to vaccines itself. The Johnson & Johnson pause is not in response to the six blood clots, no, it is because of the scandal at the lab contracted to manufacture their vaccine. Had the New York Times not exposed the endless errors of a facility known to be shoddy, the lack of training and clear oversight I am sure the vaccine side effects would have been passed over. The sheer number of percent of those with the side effect versus the number of vaccines given, again is a confusing thing with folks, like Covid, where there is less than 10% of cases making it to ICU’s. But that is a big number when there are 1000’s of cases and just 100 overwhelm a poorly equipped ER. Did I say we are still fucked?

With that we have the issue of race and class. I am done with my rounds of shots. I am pushy and aggressive and of course lied. I learned early on to do that with this bullshit. My neighbor who I talked into getting one called the City hotline was honest and was declined. Her co-worker shamed her, she called Walgreen’s and lied and was given one that afternoon. They cannot ask for medical records, did we not learn anything here people? This is an honor system and I have long lost my honor with this. I talked another friend into a shot and he got it the next day as I found the loophole that anyone working in “essential” services regardless of where they live gets one. He lives in New York but works here, was shot up the next day. And the last was the young Black man who was my Barista. I have spoken about him and walked out on that one. And I read this editorial in The New York Times and the reality is that this is America, where lies, conspiracy’s and cabals rule the thoughts of many regardless of color. We love our lies they make us feel superior or inferior.

Racism Makes Me Question Everything. I Got the Vaccine Anyway.

Surviving in an anti-Black society requires some personal negotiations. This was one of them.

By Damon Young

Mr. Young is a contributing opinion writer and the author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays.”

April 9, 2021

Last summer, when Covid-19 vaccines were in development, friends on text threads and Zoom calls asked if I’d get one. My response was always the same: Sure, I’ll be right in line — after 100 million of y’all go first. I told them I’d seen too many zombie movies. But my hesitancy was actually grounded in a less cinematic reality: I just don’t trust America enough.

This mistrust comes from an awareness of the ubiquity of American anti-Blackness — a dynamic that can, um, modify your sense of reality. That’s what happened, for instance, with the persistent myth of Tommy Hilfiger’s racist comments.

In 1996, owning a Tommy Hilfiger shirt was everything to 17-year-old me. But a year later, I’d completely extracted Hilfiger fits from my rotation. Word had spread that Tommy Hilfiger, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, had complained about Black people wearing his clothes. The shirts, windbreakers and parka I owned were immediately relegated to the deepest parts of my closet.

Mr. Hilfiger never actually made those racist comments. In fact, he hadn’t even been a guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” when the rumors started. But the myth wouldn’t die because it felt so true that to question it felt like gaslighting your own Blackness. Of course this white man with aggressively preppy oxfords and an American flag aesthetic would believe that people like me sullied his brand. It just fit.

The same way, a story about Dorothy Dandridge and a pool just fits: As the urban legend goes, the movie star was visiting a hotel in Las Vegas in the 1950s, and she dipped a single toe into the all-white swimming pool. This so disgusted the hotel’s management that they drained the entire thing. This story, which was also depicted in the HBO biopic about her life, has never actually been confirmed. But to anyone familiar with the history of America’s relationship with its Black citizens, the anecdote is believable. Maybe it ain’t true, but it also ain’t exactly a lie.

To question whether this bottomless skepticism is justified is like asking whether a cow has cause to be wary of butchers. From redlining and gerrymandering to the Tuskegee experiment and Cointelpro, the proven conspiracies against Black Americans are so devious, so deep and so absurd that they blast open pathways for true-sounding non-truths to enter, too.

The terrible spoken word poems I wrote in college (“We’ll never get justice, because justice for just-us just-aint-for-us”) habitually referenced the so-called Willie Lynch letter — an instruction manual for controlling Black slaves that I, along with many others, believed was written by a slave owner in 1712 and contained deep insights into modern race relations. The truth: Willie Lynch never existed and the document was forged. I believed that the government conspired to track my thoughts and movements — as if my flaccid stanzas and banded collar Wilsons Leather biker jackets were a threat to the state. I even once allowed myself to entertain an argument that the natural color of milk is not white, but brown. (Don’t ask.)

The term “hotep” has become a catchall among Black people to describe other Black people who still believe some of these easily debunked stories — but the reality is that most of us have some hotep in us. And not because we don’t know how America really works, but because we know too much. The lack of trust in our nation’s systems and structures is a force field; a bulwark shielding us from the lie of the American dream. And nowhere is this skepticism more justified than with the institution of medicine.

I don’t trust doctors, nurses, physician assistants, hospitals, emergency rooms, waiting rooms, surgeries, prescriptions, X-rays, MRIs, medical bills, insurance companies or even the food from hospital cafeterias. My awareness of the pronounced racial disparities in our health care system strips me of any confidence I would have otherwise had in it. As critics of a recent Saturday Night Live skit suggesting that Black people are illogically set against getting vaccinated pointed out, the vaccine hesitancy isn’t due to some uniquely Black pathology. It’s a direct response to centuries of anecdote, experience and data. (Also, the demographic among the least likely to get a vaccine? White evangelicals.)

Despite all this, in March, I stood in a long line to receive my first dose of a vaccine to prevent me from becoming seriously ill from a virus that I had no idea even existed 14 months ago.

My journey from “I don’t even eat hospital pizza” to “voluntary Pfizer guinea pig” is complicated, but not singular. Existing in America while Black requires a ceaseless assemblage of negotiations and compromises. Even while recognizing the anti-Blackness embedded in society, participation is still necessary to survive.

For instance, I am dubious that American schools are able to sufficiently nurture and prepare Black children for 21st-century life. But my interest in home-schooling my kids is the same as my interest in letting them attend school on Neptune. So my compromise is to allow them to attend school, but then to also fortify them with as many academic, social, and political supplements as possible.

Sometimes the negotiation is just the choice to participate: My parents were two of the tens of thousands of Black victims in the subprime lending crisis. I watched them be evicted from their home after loan terms they just couldn’t meet kept multiplying. But when I was ready to buy a house, the gateway to homeownership was through those same banks.

The trust still isn’t there. Will never be there. But the negotiation that placed me in that vaccination line last month required me to weigh that distrust against all that I miss. I miss the year we just lost. I miss playing basketball. I miss watching it with my dad. I miss barbecues. Malls. Movie theaters. Restaurants. Cities other than Pittsburgh. I miss only needing to be hypervigilant about racism and gluten, and not whether the air inside of a Giant Eagle supermarket might kill me too. And I know other people miss their years and their hobbies and their dads and their homies. With the disproportionate havoc this plague has wreaked on Black and brown people, my desire to return to some semblance of normalcy and prevent more death is a force greater than my cynicism.

I’ve already begun to fantasize about the cookout I’ll host after I get my second shot, and each of my equally-suspicious-about-America family members and homies get their shots, and enough time has passed to feel safe gathering. Maybe we’ll laugh about how us seeing each other was only possible because we trusted an institution that has been pathologically untrustworthy. Or maybe we won’t. Because that’s not actually funny.

Covid Chronicles – the Doom Loop

When I read the stories of families and individuals who have struggled with long haul Covid, the families who never said good bye to their loved ones and the endless struggles of medical professionals to seek answers and find resolution to the never ending slog of Covid it does not take a village to realize how we need a leader to help us find the ways of building and rebuilding all that is broken.

We have many targets of ire, from the varying Governors who tried to assert leadership and instead contributed to the chaos, the endless parade of Medical Officials who seemingly had no answers, often contradicting themselves and of course the media who seems to grab any brass ring to fill the endless hours of news time with some relevant new spin on Covid. They need a dose of STFU frankly as they seemingly make it worse.

I am going to refer to the lengthy and comprehensive piece in The New Yorker, The Plague Year, by Lawrence Wright. Simply put it is a must read and with it you will see all the mishaps, mistakes and missteps made by varying players in this Covid Theater. And one for the record is Dr. Fauci and the Surgeon General, the Director of the CDC, and the FDA, the Secretary of HHS, as well as Steven Mnuchin who also felt that closing down the country in order to save lives was (I am using my own pun here) overkill. Even Birx who I have nothing but loathing for did at one point argued strongly that he was wrong and how many hundreds of thousands of deaths will it take to alter your negative view. In this data centric world there was none only projections by varying competitive Universities and again this is not that easy to predict. But this is what we were using and all of them or none of them had it right as no one can predict human behavior.

And that is where we are now. We have reached a point like the mass shootings where we no longer feel empathy or are driven by rage to force politicians to enact change and in turn we allow a minority to rule a majority and that is what it was like for me living in Nashville, fighting odds with people uneducated over religious and utterly obsessed with money. Our federal Government reminds me of Tennessee every day, mismanaged, poor communicators and utter liars.

What it takes is patience to read and comprehend both science and math. In the article I found it interesting that Birx and a colleague went on a cross country road trip to varying states to try to cajole and encourage the varying Governors of many States to embrace mask wearing. This of course came AFTER Fauci and the Surgeon General had stated that mask wearing was not necessary. And in the beginning Fauci did not agree that Covid was spread by asymptomatic carriers. Ah the what if’s and if only. This is the Doom Loop: “Our political system is caught in a “doom loop” of partisanship and polarization, as both major parties trade long-term institutional stability for short-term political gain in what they rationalize as a fight for the soul of our country.” And the Covid Task Force was formed and did little as it was where the arguments centered on political capital and tending to a vituperative volatile President versus actually doing what is right for the public and the people. Setting up camps to ensure one’s own position than doing right. The endless doom loop of going nowhere but trapped in a circle of jerks.

The article does have heroes and none of them are the players we see in the news or hear of, a Government employee who ironically was once a reporter. And he had front row to the greatest seat in the theater of the absurd as he watched one moron enter the room only to leave followed by another. Matt Pottinger, the deputy national-security officer whose brother was a Physician in off all places Seattle, a former Marine, who spoke Mandarin and had massive contacts in Asia as the outbreak began. He knew day one we are on ride to hell and while the idiots spun their tops he tried to figure out how and what to do right. And it was at the first meeting with Senators where Fauci and Robert Redfield (CDC) said at the briefing in January ” We are prepared for this.” Lie number one

The irony was that in 2019, the HHS dept. conducted a simulation called, the Crimson Contagion, which is to test the government’s response in a pandemic. It concluded that well you know the answer today. At that time nothing was done to remedy the shortcomings and issues that the test results provided.

But back to heroes who immediately began to do what the do best, dig into research and reaching out to colleagues in the field. One stands out, Dr. Barney S. Graham, the chief architect of the first authorized Covid vaccine. One of his partners in this venture is Jason McLellan who was studying HIV and that began the two to work together on the vaccine that is now being produced by Moderna. Again, if you think these are people on the money train, think again, the U.S. Government funded much of this (well so did Dolly Parton) and they own the patent rights.

Meanwhile the Doom Loop continues with another Oval Office meeting where in January Trump was warned that this was the big one, and told it would be the “biggest national security threat you will ever face.” At that same meeting Fauci said, “It would be unusual for an asymptomatic person to drive the epidemic in a respiratory disorder.” Lie #2.

I call them lies as at this point anyone in science and research should know there are no clear facts, no clear black and whites unless it has been studied, analyzed and verified. At that point in late January there was little to no information about Covid as China was covering its tracks and downplaying it globally while simultaneously locking down and shutting down anyone doing otherwise than keeping quiet. Even at this meeting the Kudlow idiot that Trump has an econ adviser thought it was not serious as apparently the stock market would somehow know this and reflect it. He asked if the money was dumb and then said, “Is everyone asleep at the switch. I have a hard time believing that.” He does not recall that remark. Lie #3

But another crackpot Trump adviser, Peter Navarro was the first to call for borders to be shut, equating it with a black swan event. And he was the odd man out.. not the first time but the first time he was actually right. His posture on this led him to be banned from future meetings. More crimes and misdemeanors follow.

And from this more began to devise the strategy to become what we know now, the quarantine lockdown. And the name, flatten the curve, came when Dr. Markel and a CDC director, Marin Cetron, devised while looking at a mass of Thai noodle takeout. There you go, inspiration in all forms.

By the end of February the reality that the virus was here and moving across the globe and the United States made a sense of urgency that required money, diligence and of course cooperation. Three things that our Government in its current state of the doom loop make such a challenge if not an impossibility. And again of all people Peter Navarro devises a budget for 3 Billion dollars to cover costs of an accelerated vaccine process, PPE equipment and other therapeutics. This passed muster with Secretary Azar but the access to the door via the “acting” chief of staff Mulvaney, was shut upon arrival. He gave an 8 Million pass as enough. And this begins the denial that fuels the jet for Trump to continue to equate Covid with the flu. Lie #4

By March the warnings were out and we know that in some states the emergency bell was ringing but here in New York, Mayor DiBlasio was encouraging people to eat out. Okay, then. Where do you suggest, Bellevue Hospital cafeteria?

The chaos that follows is all part of our current memory and is our recent history which is our current present. The idiocy, the lies presented by Trump alone are in double if not triple digits. His enablers and cult followers have continued to live in the river of denial that they float on the passenger ship to hell. The Governors who cruised their ships into ports of shit and bullshit are still pretending to helm the vessel with no more knowledge or skills that even the most green of Bosun’s on Bravo’s Below Deck possess. The reality is that much of this could have been, should have been, might have been prevented if not reduced had anyone gotten out of the circle of jerks and the doom loop. We can talk about the Nursing Home patients sent back Covid positive to infect others and themselves die, or how about the Veteran Homes such as the one in Massachusetts, so badly understaffed and underfunded, that aging Vets were shoved into single wards, not monitored, isolated nor cared for. Even in New York many patients so overwhelmed the system that one a Broadway director was shoved into a hall, where he soiled himself and was not given food nor water for 12 hours. Maybe he should have gone to the Javitz Center they had all of a 100 folks. Our health care system was as disabled and fractured as the patients they treated.

And here we are a country at risk with a President trying to jigger votes, find conspiracies where there are none and a coalition of Congress men and one idiot woman (from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn) trying to pander to this pathological liar. Covid is not going away, you cannot swipe right and rid yourself of it. This is the long haul, only without delusions, endless fevers, pain, breathing challenges, it is by far an easier one to truck. We have to wear masks, avoid small congregations and poorly ventilated spaces, such as bars and restaurants. Once again in Nashville, home of morons, I read where they are sure if the Mayor allowed the bars to stay open to 1 a.m that the spread of Covid would be reduced: “I think it was a mistake by the Health Department to not allow bars to stay open until 1 a.m.,” said Barrett Hobbs, chair of Metro’s hospitality recovery committee and owner of several downtown businesses. “The science shows that people gathering in homes is the largest viral spreader.”

Now this moron is well first a Tennessean, second a bar owner and third a white man. The biggest of all the liars in the lying world. For the record guess what? Wrong again.

The hospitalitysector’sprotestsaround the world over bans on their activities, limiting them at best to selling takeaways, contrasts with the scientific evidence: well-meaning restaurant and bar owners insist they have complied scrupulously with health and safety measures, but there is no getting away from the fact that a business where people must remove their masks in order to eat or drink, has increased infection rates.

At the aggregate level, the first study to portray the obvious correlation between restaurant openings and the spread of COVID-19 was published in June by Johns Hopkins University, using data on credit card spending by 30 million customers in the United States and correlating it to the evolution of the pandemic in each state. The relationship was clear: the more spending on restaurants, the greater the number of infections.

That study was followed by another, carried out by Stanford University and published on November 10. Using a very different methodology, the outcome was nevertheless the same: researchers tracked the smartphones of more than 98 million people between March and May, taking into account the number of times their subjects went to restaurants, gyms and hotels, and concluding that if restaurants were authorized to open at full capacity, they would be responsible for more than 600,000 infections in a city like Chicago, and that, in addition, the distribution was irregular and impossible to predict: 10% of the premises were responsible for 85% of the expected infections.

And yesterday I finished an article in the The New York Times Magazine about going forward with College Football and its role of spreading Covid while the same State leaders who were demanding a total lockdown capitulated on this one issue. Mike DeWine of Ohio is perhaps the biggest hypocrite in that crowded field.

They found this: The week the season resumed, the mayors of 11 of the 14 Big Ten cities wrote to the conference expressing their concern that football games would encourage people to congregate. “It’s a normal tradition on game day that you watch with other people,” Dr. Mysheika Roberts, the health commissioner for Columbus, told me. “And we’ve seen our cases go up. Since the first game, our cases have exploded.” When we spoke the week I visited Columbus, Roberts seemed confident that Ohio State’s football players could remain safe. They were motivated by both the carrot of being able to continue playing and the stick of a season potentially shut down if they helped foment an outbreak. She was less optimistic about Buckeye fans around the city and across Ohio. “We’re trying to change the behavior of all those people,” she said. “But what’s their motivation?”

Well it apparently is this….

At halftime, I left Ohio Stadium and headed to a party on West Lane Avenue, a few blocks from campus. By the time I arrived, Fields had thrown for another touchdown; I saw the replay on a television that someone had carried out to the lawn. At the time of the Rutgers game, the incidence of positive tests in Columbus approached 11 percent. Private gatherings were capped at 10 people. But these fans seemed to have created an exemption for themselves. Perhaps 50 people were gathered outside the multiunit brick building, which housed mostly students. Plastic cups of beer were being distributed from a wooden table. Nobody I saw wore a mask.

When Ohio State’s season finally started, several students told me, it was as though the party animals had been released from their cages. Football, said Kaleigh Murphy, a sophomore I talked with, “gave people a reason to get up on a Saturday and go to a frat and start drinking.” For Murphy, part of Ohio State’s allure was the spectacle of a football weekend. During the previous season, her group of friends would gather in the stadium parking lot before home games. Maybe they would eventually go in, maybe they wouldn’t. With no fans permitted this season, they moved their festivities elsewhere. “If people aren’t going to parties,” she said, “they’re at the bars.”

Later that night, I drove to the Short North neighborhood near downtown. At Seesaw, a restaurant and bar on the corner of East First Avenue and High Street, I saw revelers partying as though 2020 had never happened. There were five televisions on the ground floor and more upstairs. The bar was crowded with patrons, one for nearly every seat. Most seemed to be shouting. Two were kissing in a corner. Five were jammed around a table meant for four, playing a drinking game. Only the bartenders wore masks. It was Saturday night. “A football Saturday night,” the bouncer checking IDs at the door said.

Two days later, on Monday, Ohio’s 9,750 new coronavirus cases broke its existing record by more than 1,500. The state’s governor, Mike DeWine, addressed the crisis. He described the virus as a “runaway freight train.” He asked families to scale back their plans for the coming holiday season. Yet in terms of the impact across the state, every Ohio State game might as well have been its own Thanksgiving, just with different catering. DeWine was clearly mindful of the popularity of the Buckeyes among his constituents, which may explain why he wasn’t willing to try to curtail those weekly gatherings. When I asked him about it, his answer was blunt: “I can’t impact who you have over to eat pizza and watch the Ohio State game.”

So you see that all of this blustering and posturing and fear mongering accomplished only so much and we are where we are. We are in a perpetual doom loop. Hunker down as we still have a long winter left.

A Shit Show

I think of that phrase in application to many things, a bad program on television or a chaotic attempt to do something that failed miserably and that sums up the Covid response with regards to the Trump Administration. The daily shit shows or as I called them the lottery drawings held by both the Idiot in the White House or Crazy Dopey Grandfather and the varying Governors across the Country rivaled in their sheer level of arrogance and idiocy, the Siamese twins of Covid response. I cannot say what I found more repellent, the daily scolding by Cuomo and the parroting by Murphy in New Jersey with DiBlasio coming in to remind them of his dick size or that the day end was marked by some incoherent rambling with Igor and the Bride standing by making medicine taste bad faces, standing alongside the rotating crew of cheerleaders and others to somehow defend, support or just be there in case of some medical/personal mishap that would require their expertise. It was a debacle and while Rome burned the idiot fiddled. Now which idiot is debatable as we also have the Siamese Twins of Pence and Jared Kushner who were also assigned responsibilities and duties regarding allocation of resources, establishing testing sites and coordinating with states and hospitals to assure them help was on the way. Only it wasn’t.

When the Commission inevitably established on both federal and state levels begin to look back and examine the massive failures with regards to the protocol, the massive executive orders and of course the number of dead, known and unknown, and of course the economic failures that resulted from this shit show I suspect even then the truth will be buried with the ever increasing dead from Covid. And Americans are becoming immune not to Covid but to that fact as they race around the clock like Bill Haley to also ignore protocols and lie about their own failings and health. Whose Bill Haley you ask? Well that will be a common refrain soon enough when it comes to asking, whatever happened to…?

I have shared numerous articles about how events became superspreaders and in turn when did we know, how did we know, when did we believe or learn how Covid came to U.S. shores and the aftermath of what followed as we tracked the virus across the country and the globe. And we have much to learn still. Anyone who thinks we have a robust tracking and tracing program think again as in the current pandemic bill awaiting CDG signature is in fact funding for said programs as they lack. A subject I have also covered and in fact applied for a position and since learned that there is no said position as there is no actual program. I validated this when a friend found a co-worker had been tested POS and she contracted it from a family member who arranged a photo shoot and neglected to mention their own pending test that had yet come back but while waiting went ahead with their plans assuming what? Testing NEG? Well shocking, no, not really. They weren’t, but by then the damage done and of the attendees she was one who managed to get the luck of the draw. Again at this point we know transference is 1:3 but with the new strain it may in fact be more extensive and may rival its competitors, like Whooping Cough (1:4) or Measles (1:7). Either way who the fuck plans anything when they have no confirmation about their tests? What is wrong with you fucking idiot, there is optimism and there is stupidity. Clearly we know that most people fall into the latter versus the former on that one. And were any of this person’s co-workers contacted by the tracking agency? No. Why? There is not one and what exists is an extremely poorly trained and coordinated one, a problem that exists in most cities and countries. And now on the verge of a preventative drug I don’t think this will improve it will in fact utterly kill off that too. Man Covid is deadly.

I suspect the vaccine rollout to be comparable to the testing rollout, in other words as fucked up as that was only without the addition of Kushner to further screw it up. That doesn’t mean there will be anyone in place January 20th to assume the role of Covid Czar and be able to quickly assemble a team, a plan and in turn create a logistical plan that will ensure parity of distribution across state lines. Not.going.to.happen.

We have “recommendations” and suggestions but right now it is quite interesting to see varying GOP delegates who eschewed much of Covid’s havoc, line up and get their first shot, with of course the medical professionals as they get theirs being the actual and critical front line workers who are most at risk. Round two will more of a challenge as who defines “essential worker” and how they in turn will be assigned to receive their inoculation. That will end badly and the last rollout will be to the general public and once again will be a cluster fuck of a shit show with how that be allocated. Expect the 1% to buy theirs with their drug cocktails that can treat Covid successfully and in turn allow them to retire to their second homes to await the rest of the world’s eventual turn. In other words we are still fucked but some lube is available, just how we get it is another matter. It sure as hell won’t be in the numerous tubs like hand sanitizer found everywhere, that much is sure. It will be more like toilet paper, hoarded and stashed. The next set of Siamese Twins – Access and Availability. Aka the rich versus the poor, income meet inequality.

The next step is trying to find the light in the dark for the vaccination process is two fold, two shots over 28 days and during the interim and following there is to be the same protocol that we may or may not have followed earlier. Again this too is confusing and deliberately so to force compliance without understanding. The endless contradictions, misinformation, and continual changing of the guard as if that somehow is a way to build trust and secure safety is absurd. Let us not forget the overall behavior of many elected officials and that of Birx of Frankenstein whose own actions contradicted their messages. How was that dinner at the French Laundry, Gavin?

What this is about is idiocy and a lack of knowledge about basic science. Again a virus that transmits itself is like all others, close contact, prolonged exposure and of course the ability of access via numbers. In and of itself it cannot exist in a transient state. I have yet to hear anything otherwise to change that view, so I seriously doubt it flies across a room over 27 feet, lands on Amazon packages and enters your home that way or simply lays dormant in the body for 14 days and then just vacates the premises without so much as a genital wart, herpes it ain’t. And yes there are vaccines that work more quickly today thanks to the money flooding in its direction, the eyes and hands all touching (gloved of course) the endless samples and the ability to roll out a massive testing protocol as there are ample volunteers who want to do right by the world. But then again Science in not perfect, infallible or without its own inherent bias. This is why the Brown/Black community are concerned as they have been victims in many ways by the mishandling of medicine. And we have yet to test the virus on children and given the angst of the anti-vaxx crowd there will be many who simply refuse. As for the MAGA group they will be just like the rest of the GOP, lining up for there free shot and decrying government handouts all at the same time. Too bad, social Darwinism would have had a hell of test there.

Below is an article about the failures and malfeseance of our Government and the lack of leadership that led to what we have today. Over 300K dead and a vaccine that will not reach the greater good for months or longer to reach “herd immunity.”

Dire PPE shortages. Limited Covid tests. Political negligence. A Guardian/KHN investigation reveals what went wrong

Christina Jewett and Robert Lewis |Guardian | Wed 23 Dec 2020 \

Workers at Garfield medical center in suburban Los Angeles were on edge as the pandemic ramped up in March and April. Staffers in a 30-patient unit were rationing a single tub of sanitizing wipes all day. A May memo from the chief executive said N95 masks could be cleaned up to 20 times before replacement.

Patients showed up Covid-negative but some still developed symptoms a few days later. Contact tracing took the form of texts and whispers about exposures.

By summer, frustration gave way to fear. At least 60 staff members at the 210-bed community hospital caught Covid-19, according to records obtained by KHN and interviews with eight staff members and others familiar with hospital operations.

The first to die was Dawei Liang, 60, a quiet radiology technician who never said “no” when a colleague needed help. A cardiology technician became infected and changed his final wishes – agreeing to intubation – hoping for more years to dote on his grandchildren.

Few felt safe.

Ten months into the pandemic, it has become far clearer why tens of thousands of healthcare workers have been infected by the virus and why so many have died: dire PPE shortages. Limited Covid tests. Sparse tracking of viral spread. Layers of flawed policies handed down by healthcare executives and politicians, and lax enforcement by government regulators.

All of those breakdowns, across cities and states, have contributed to the deaths of more than 2,900 healthcare workers, a nine-month investigation by over 70 reporters at KHN and the Guardian has found. This number is far higher than that reported by the US government, which does not have a comprehensive national count.

The healthcare worker fatalities have skewed young, with the majority under age 60 in the cases for which there is age data. People of color were disproportionately affected, and account for about 65% of fatalities in cases in which there is race and ethnicity data. After conducting interviews with relatives and friends of about 300 victims, Guardian and KHN learned that one-third of the deaths involved concerns over inadequate PPE.

Many of the deaths occurred in New York and New Jersey, and significant numbers also died in southern and western states as the pandemic wore on.

Workers at well-funded academic medical centers – hubs of policymaking clout and prestigious research – were largely spared. Those who died tended to work in less prestigious community hospitals like Garfield, nursing homes and other health centers in roles where access to critical information was low and patient contact was high.

Garfield medical center and its parent company, AHMC Healthcare, did not respond to multiple calls or emails regarding workers’ concerns and circumstances leading to the worker deaths.

So as 2020 draws to a close, we ask: did so many of the nation’s healthcare workers have to die?

New York’s warning for the nation

The seeds of the crisis can be found in New York and the surrounding cities and suburbs. It was the region where the profound risks facing medical staff became clear. And it was here where the most died.

As the pandemic began its US surge, city paramedics were out in force, their sirens cutting through eerily empty streets as they rushed patients to hospitals. Carlos Lizcano, a blunt Queens native who had been with the fire department for two decades, was one of them.

He was answering four to five cardiac arrest calls every shift. Normally he would have fielded that many in a month. He remembers being stretched so thin he had to enlist a dying man’s son to help with CPR. On another call, he did chest compressions on a 33-year-old woman while her two small children stood in the doorway of a small apartment.

“I just have this memory of those kids looking at us like: ‘What’s going on?’”

After the young woman died, Lizcano went outside and punched the ambulance in frustration and grief.

The personal risks paramedics faced were grave.

More than 40% of emergency medical service workers in the New York fire department (FDNY) went on leave for confirmed or suspected coronavirus during the first three months of the pandemic, according to a study by the department’s chief medical officer and others.

In fact, healthcare workers were three times more likely than the general public to get Covid-19, other researchers found. And the risks were not equally spread among medical professions. Initially CDC guidelines were written to afford the highest protection to workers in a hospital’s Covid-19 unit.

Yet months later, it was clear that the doctors initially thought to be at most risk – anesthesiologists and those working in the ICU – were among the least likely to die. This could be due to better PPE or patients being less infectious by the time they reach the ICU.

Instead scientists discovered that “frontdoor” health workers such as paramedics and those in acute-care “receiving” roles – such as in the emergency room – were twice as likely as other healthcare workers to be hospitalized with Covid-19.

For FDNY first responders, part of the problem was having to ration and reuse masks. Workers were blind to an invisible threat that would be recognized months later: the virus spread rapidly from pre-symptomatic people and among those with no symptoms at all.

In mid-March, Lizcano was one of thousands of FDNY first responders infected with Covid-19.

At least four of them died, city records show. They were among the 679 healthcare workers who have died in New York and New Jersey to date, most at the height of the terrible first wave of the virus.

“Initially we didn’t think it was this bad,” Lizcano said, recalling the confusion and chaos of the early pandemic. “This city wasn’t prepared.”

Neither was the rest of the country.

Silence from the government

The virus continued to spread like a ghost through the nation and proved deadly to workers who were among the first to encounter sick patients in their hospitals or nursing homes. One government agency had a unique vantage point into the problem, but did little to use its power to cite employers – or speak out about the hazards.

Health employers had a mandate to report worker deaths and hospitalizations to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha).

When they did so, the report went to an agency headed by Eugene Scalia, son of the conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. The younger Scalia had spent part of his career as a corporate lawyer fighting the very agency he was charged with leading.

Its inspectors have documented instances in which some of the most vulnerable workers – those with low information and high patient contact – faced incredible hazards, but Osha’s staff did little to hold employers to account.

Beaumont, Texas, a town near the Louisiana border, was largely untouched by the pandemic in early April.

That’s when a 56-year-old physical therapy assistant at Christus Health St Elizabeth hospital named Danny Marks called in sick with a fever and body aches, federal Osha records show.

He told a human resources employee that he had been in the room of a patient who was receiving a breathing treatment – the type known as the most hazardous to health workers. The CDC advises N95 respirators be used by all in the room for the so-called “aerosol-generating” procedures. (A facility spokesperson said the patient was not known or suspected to have Covid at the time Marks entered the room.)

Marks went home to quarantine. By 17 April he was dead.

The patient whose room Marks entered later tested positive for Covid-19. And an Osha investigation into Marks’ death found there was no sign on the door to warn him that a potentially infected patient was inside, nor was there a cart outside the room where he could grab protective gear.

The facility did not have a universal masking policy in effect when Marks went into the room, and it was more than likely that he was not wearing any respiratory protection, according to a copy of the report obtained through a public records request. Twenty-one more employees had contracted Covid by the time he died.

“He was a beloved gentleman and friend and he is missed very much,” Katy Kiser, Christus’s public relations director, told KHN.

Osha did not issue a citation to the facility, instead recommending safety changes.

The agency logged nearly 8,700 complaints from healthcare workers in 2020. Yet Harvard researchers found that some of those desperate pleas for help, often decrying shortages of PPE, did little to forestall harm. In fact, they concluded that surges in those complaints preceded increases in deaths among working-age adults 16 days later.

One report author, Peg Seminario, blasted Osha for failing to use its power to get employers’ attention about the danger facing health workers. She said issuing big fines in high-profile cases could have a broad impact – but Osha had not done so.

“There’s no accountability for failing to protect workers from exposure to this deadly virus,” said Seminario, a former union health and safety official.

A dangerous lack of protective equipment

There was little outward sign this summer that Garfield medical center was struggling to contain Covid-19. While Medicare has forced nursing homes to report staff infections and deaths, no such requirement applies to hospitals.

Yet as the focus of the pandemic moved from the east coast in the spring to southern and western states, healthcare worker deaths climbed. And behind the scenes at Garfield, workers were dealing with a lack of equipment meant to keep them safe.

Complaints to state worker-safety officials filed in March and April said Garfield medical center workers were asked to reuse the same N95 respirator for a week. Another complaint said workers ran out of medical gowns and were directed to use less-protective gowns typically provided to patients.

Staffers were shaken by the death of Dawei Liang. And only after his death and a rash of infections did Garfield provide N95 masks to more workers and put up plastic tarps to block a Covid unit from an adjacent ward. And this may have been too late.

Covid can easily spread to every corner of a hospital. Researchers in South Africa traced 119 cases in a hospital – 80 among staff – to a single ER patient. Those included 62 nurses from neurology, surgical and general medical units that typically would not have housed Covid patients.

By late July, Thong Nguyen, 73, a Garfield cardiac and respiratory technician, learned he was Covid-positive days after he collapsed at work. Nguyen loved his job and was typically not one to complain, said his youngest daughter, Dinh Kozuki. A 34-year veteran at the hospital, he was known for conducting medical tests in multiple languages. His colleagues teased him, saying he was never going to retire.

Kozuki said her father spoke up in March about protective gear rationing but his concerns were not allayed.

The PPE problems at Garfield were a symptom of a broader problem. As the virus spread around the nation, chronic shortages of protective gear left many workers in community-based settings fatally exposed. Nearly one in three family members or friends of about 300 healthcare workers interviewed by KHN or the Guardian expressed concerns about a fallen worker’s PPE.

Healthcare workers’ labor unions asked for the more-protective N95 respirators when the pandemic began. But Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines said the unfitted surgical masks worn by workers who feed, bathe and lift Covid-19 patients were adequate amid supply shortages.

Mary Turner, the Minnesota Nurses Association president and an ICU nurse, said she protested alongside nurses all summer demanding better protective gear, which she said was often kept from workers because of supply chain shortages and the lack of political will to fix them.

“It shouldn’t have to be that way,” Turner said. “We shouldn’t have to beg on the streets for protection during a pandemic.”

At Garfield, it was even hard to get tested at the facility. Tony Ramirez, a critical care technician, said he had started feeling ill on 12 July. He had an idea of how he might have been exposed: he had cleaned up urine and feces of a patient suspected of having Covid and worked alongside two staffers who also turned out to be Covid-positive. At the time, he had been wearing a surgical mask and had worried that it was not protecting him.

Yet he was denied a free test at the hospital, and went on his own time to Dodger Stadium to get one. His positive result came back a few days later. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ChHh1rFAPA8?wmode=opaque&feature=oembed Facebook Twitter Pinterest

As Ramirez rested at home, he texted Alex Palomo, 44, a Garfield medical secretary who was also at home with Covid, to see how he was doing. Palomo was the kind of man who came to many family parties but would always slip away unseen. A cousin finally asked him about it: Palomo said he just hated to say goodbye.

Palomo would wear only a surgical mask when he would go into the rooms of patients with flashing call lights, chat with them and maybe bring them a refill of water, Ramirez said.

Ramirez added that Palomo had no access to patient charts, so he would not have known which patients had Covid: “In essence, he was helping blindly,” he said. Advertisementhttps://323e8577c39618342f3fceee3be3b764.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Palomo never answered the text. He died of Covid-19 on 14 August.

And Thong Nguyen had fared no better. His daughter, a hospital pharmacist in Fresno, had pressed him to go on a ventilator after seeing other patients survive with the treatment. It might mean he could retire and watch his grandkids grow up. But it made no difference.

“He definitely should not have passed [away],” Kozuki said.

Nursing homes devastated

During the summer, as nursing homes recovered from their spring surge, Heather Pagano got a new assignment. The Doctors Without Borders humanitarianism adviser had been working in cholera clinics in Nigeria. In May she arrived in south-eastern Michigan to train nursing home staff on optimal infection-control techniques.

Federal officials required worker death reports from nursing homes, which by December tallied more than 1,100 fatalities. Researchers in Minnesota found particular hazards for these health workers, concluding they were the ones most at risk of getting Covid-19.

Pagano learned that staffers were repurposing trash bin liners and going to the local Sherwin-Williams store for painting coveralls to backfill shortages of medical gowns. The least-trained clinical workers, nursing assistants, were doing the most hazardous jobs, turning and cleaning patients and brushing their teeth.

She said nursing home leaders were shuffling reams of federal, state and local guidelines, yet had little understanding of how to stop the virus from spreading.

“No one sent trainers to show people what to do, practically speaking,” she said.

As the pandemic wore on, nursing homes reported staff shortages getting worse by the week: few wanted to put their lives on the line for $13 an hour, the wage for nursing assistants in many parts of the US.

The organization GetusPPE, formed by doctors to address shortages, saw almost all requests for help were coming from nursing homes, doctors’ offices and other non-hospital facilities. Only 12% of the requests could be fulfilled, its October report says.

A pandemic-weary and science-wary public has fueled the virus’s spread. In fact, whether or not a nursing home was properly staffed played only a small role in determining its susceptibility to a lethal outbreak, the University of Chicago public health professor Tamara Konetzka found. The crucial factor was whether there was widespread viral transmission in the surrounding community. Advertisementhttps://323e8577c39618342f3fceee3be3b764.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

“In the end, the story has pretty much stayed the same,” Konetzka said. “Nursing homes in virus hotspots are at high risk and there’s very little they can do to keep the virus out.”

The vaccine arrives

From March through November, 40 complaints were filed about the Garfield medical center with the California department of public health, nearly three times the statewide average for the time. State officials substantiated 11 complaints and said they were part of an ongoing inspection.

For Thanksgiving, the AHMC Healthcare chairman, Jonathan Wu, sent hospital staff a letter thanking “frontline healthcare workers who continue to serve, selflessly exposing themselves to the virus so that others may cope, recover and survive”.

The letter made no mention of the workers who had died. “A lot of people were upset by that,” said Melissa Ennis, a critical care technician. “I was upset.”

By December, all workers were required to wear N95 respirators in every corner of the hospital, she said. Ennis said she felt unnerved taking it off. She took breaks to eat and drink in her car.

Garfield said on its website that it was screening patients for the virus and will “implement infection prevention and control practices to protect our patients, visitors, and staff”.

On 9 December Ennis received notice that the vaccine was on its way to Garfield. Nationwide, the vaccine brought health workers relief from months of tension. Nurses and doctors posted photos of themselves weeping and holding their small children.

But it proved too late for some. A new surge of deaths drove the toll among health workers to more than 2,900.

And before Ennis could get the shot, she learned she would have to wait at least a few more days, until she could get a Covid test.

She found out she had been exposed to the virus by a colleague.

Covid Chronicles – The Holiday Edition

With about two weeks left to Christmas and the inevitable third wave or fourth depending on who is counting.. again we had Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Thanksgiving. We we warned repeatedly during each to stay long and distant and while Covid spiked in some places it declined in others and round and round we went bringing us all back to ground zero with the same hysterical warnings, the same threats, the increasing numbers of hospitalizations and deaths which have never stopped while all the world’s a stage and we are all players in this macabre scenario that reminds me of the Jerry Lewis telethon of my youth, with the never ending pleading, begging, and tears just to remember the ones being lost to a disease that could be cured. That is what we need America, a COVID telethon! Dolly Parton would be the perfect host as she is already a winner in the Covid Chronicles donating a cool Million to Vanderbilt one of the hospitals working with Big Pharma on the vaccine.

And that is where we are America the roll out of vaccine number one to hot spots in America. Undoubtedly Jared Kushner who really showed his talents and gifts for crisis management during the nascent days with the PPE and Ventilator distribution issues will perhaps hopefully take a backseat on this one and let professionals take over to distribute the drugs to those in need. Remember those days with naval ships arriving in ports, field hospitals being erected in convention centers and the charity tents in public parks? Good times folks as those numbers of cases handled and the outcomes are still in question and the costs have yet to be fully explained on how and why many hospitals remained under utilized while others were maxed out with portable tents in parking lots and refrigerator trucks for the dead left on side streets by dumpsters which became a rather significant marker to explain how we were handling Covid in Phase One.

We have had several months to improve and centralize communications, to figure out how to educate and operate schools, how to handle crowd control and compliance and yet we have done fuck all nothing other than posture and threaten. It is working out great, or not.

The issues of self responsibility continue as now violence has begun on the streets over the failed re-election of the Dr. Frankenstein who has no interest in the continuing crisis and once again Governors are assuming control, co-opting Igor for their own agenda and like the media whore he is he simply pipes in supportive yet cautious remarks which mean nothing except to remind everyone to mask up. I recall that same messaging from him back in the 80’s, no love without a glove or something like that. While I do respect Fauci I feel he is not who we need to reach a younger and more diverse audience especially faces of color and those who are not well into Science. This has been another of the more insidious issues using Fauci and Birx two white Seniors to somehow communicate to the Tik Tok age and find a voice in those larger at-risk groups that are not old folks. Fauci’s recent affirmation with Big Daddy Bully Cuomo to close restaurants with no data to back this up is again another issue across the country in California that evoked the same mandate. There is so little real contact tracing and tracking that few believe indoor dining is the cause and reason behind the uptick when the last stat mentioned by Cuomo was that 76% of the cases were tied to “small gatherings.” Okay so they were where? Homes or in a public place or again the big perp – Churches – where they can no longer mandate closures on thanks to the Supreme Court. Again, here is where religious leaders would be an effective messengers to talk to those about how one can still be a participant in a religious community without the need to congregate in a specific place. But nope, crickets.

So we can keep schools open despite the fact that few educators wish to keep open but the consultants and policy wonks and those parents who hate caring for their kids see otherwise. The constant citing of statements like “falling behind” or the “lost generation” have been used to somehow validate that opening schools and allowing full attendance is the key to something, that something again seems economic in value and not about health and safety of those who work inside said buildings, you know the Teachers and Admins as well as all the other back of the house players who keep schools operating. You know that village thing.

I have always thought it was odd that the only data we ever hear are the positive cases, the number of hospitalizations and deaths. We have no idea how many are tested a day, what the status of thier case was/is and the number of recovered. Europe does provide that but even ages, gender race are not given. If we had a robust contract tracking and tracing we would but we don’t. Jared get on that you must have time on your hands.

The overwhelming failure by our Government be it on the Federal or State level is quite clear and it is why there is little compliance and at times sheer confusion as to what the current protocol is to be on a daily basis with now the incoming Administration adding their two cents further confusing and infuriating the Trumptards.

As for the media they do their best to further lend a voice not needed to the din with their endless stating conflicting studies and data that have not been vetted and tested to the level that should be before reporting. Facts matter and the most bizarre story was one in The Washington Post about South Korea finding a patron who contracted Covid in a restaurant with limited exposure of a scant 5 minutes from another seated over 23 feet away. Really? Of course that story was a rewrite of an LA Times story. No mention in either about possible extenuating circumstances or full examination of the strain verifying it through DNA testing and complete tracking/tracing of all the participants movements, their exposures to others? Wow that South Korea is amazing that is K Pop level shit right there. Or not. The article had no South Korean sources other than a person NOT involved in the study.. okay then. As for the American scientists and doctors contacted had doubt, one saying this:

“The problem that you tend to have is one of missing information,” says Richard Martinello, an associate professor at Yale School of Medicine and a specialist in adult and pediatric infectious diseases.“They may know well what happened within that restaurant,” Martinello adds, “but they don’t know what happened on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. They don’t know what happened back in the kitchen at the restaurant. There are so many other aspects,” including the fact that one in five people infected with the coronavirus will experience no symptoms, but may still spread the virus. But then again there is a story there that will scare the shit out of everyone and in turn validate the latest round of closing just restaurants, but not anything else. I see said the reporter who upon examining his credentials I see his was one with regards to restaurant reviews not science or foreign reporting including failing to list the CDC’s findings on indoor dining. Good job, I like BimBap too!

And if you question any of this you are labeled “histrionic” as that is the man’s way of saying to a woman, “I don’t like what you have to say, it confuses me.” Ah yes my menses is the problem, shame I don’t have menses anymore. The lack of true effective communication is a bigger problem than Covid at this point and it contributes to why few are truly grasping the urgency. And that many rely upon “social” media for information, shame that social distancing can’t be applied to that as well.

I read this report in of all things USA Today about the failures of the U.S. Government from the very early stages of this disease and how the haphazard manner of coordination and control led to what we are now dealing with. There is no way of knowing if better management could of stopped or offset this entirely but there are valid issues surrounding the death toll that clearly is related to this issue.

This says it all:

The virus shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on the United States. The world’s most powerful nation, historically among the most successful at stymieing infectious illnesses, had ample lead time during which the deadly pandemic was rampaging through Asia, and then Europe.

But in an early vacuum of leadership at almost every government level, with the message from the White House that the virus was not anything to worry about, Americans unwittingly spread the lethal virus to loved ones and strangers alike.

The U.S. squandered its early advantage. Roughly one year after the virus first came into existence, the country has suffered a loss of life far worse than any other.

I have written much about Covid and kept up with many studies, theories and stories about the virus, its transmission and the issues about vaccines and efficacy. I am over Fauci but I have been for a long time frankly and would like to see new faces (not celebrities there Cuomo but actual medical professionals) who could message more effectively than another aging white man, second wave fast approaching, January 20th. I also would like real information, better and more comprehensive data in which to understand the who/what/where/when/why. Shouting out numbers like I am in Vegas is not working for me and it is not improving my histrionics in the least. There is no cure for that apparently either.

The Test

The true issue is mass testing and what and why it is a problem across the country.  Here in Jersey City we have two public access sites, one walk in and one drive up. Reservations must be made in advance, you must exhibit all the symptoms in order to be tested (again this is verbal and my understanding is NOT through a Physician which allows for ways to skirt the requirement by lying) and has a cap of 400 a day if you do the numbers.  Okay they are not doing anywhere near that and from what I can tell only come close to it twice on the charts per the Government page.  Meanwhile New Jersey is such a hot mess that it made the cover of the New York Times as a state with real problems. But then again most are.

So again you have an appointment, you do the paperwork and the swab is shoved into your nose. That should take a maximum of 5 minutes but to be generous lets say 10.   That means 6 tests an hour.  400 tests means that you would be done in 6 hours. They close at 5 and they return results in 72 hours.  They are using the same labs that the state uses.. how is that possible when the New York Times said differently. Which is it? And note this caveat: Officials did not say what the testing capacity of either site will be.  

So we know that they are running close to 300 on some days but most days it tests run numbers  h parallels oddly the same number average pos cases of the same day. Shocking I know as that again you are supposed to have all the symptoms in order to get tested so even with those who don’t have it and margin of error it is running close.  So picking a random date, April 7, the city ran 272 tests and the total cases for that day that are POS are 299.  So the other 27 cases I assume came from private labs? Again disclosure would help in understanding the numbers and explaining that difference.

Which means I question the the number of deaths versus cases and again it just says “deaths” not of Covid specifically and the numbers has a lag time of what appears 48 hours I presume for legal reasons, next of kin, confirmation of death etc.  Again cause of “death” unclear.  And it states clearly that the  bizarre number of new cases that seem to come from only two sources, the public testing facilities and public hospitals so again they don’t match total cases so I have to assume those additional numbers are from private Doctors/Hospitals/Clinics. But it does not disclose that so who knows?

And today I read about a Broadway actor who lost his leg today due to Covid.  And this was essential to note buried at the bottom of the article:  Cordero first entered the ICU on March 31 when he was “having a hard time breathing” after being diagnosed with pneumonia. He had tested negative for COVID-19 twice before a third test came back positive.

The below is a timeline to explain the world of testing and why it is one hot fucking mess.  Yes, yes it is.

What we know about delays in coronavirus testing

By Washington Post Staff
April 18, 2020

Reports of a respiratory virus spreading in Wuhan, China, emerged in late 2019. After the number of cases outside China increased rapidly, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic on March 11.

With no cure or vaccine currently available, diagnostic testing is crucial to containing the spread of the virus.

Opportunities to mitigate the pandemic’s impact in the United States were lost amid bureaucratic delays and a breakdown in efforts to produce a reliable test kit at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Here are the major developments to understand what happened:

1. Contaminated tests

The failure by the CDC to quickly produce a test kit to detect the coronavirus was triggered by a glaring scientific breakdown at the CDC’s lab in Atlanta. The CDC facilities that assembled the kits violated manufacturing practices, resulting in contamination of one of the three test components used in the detection process. The troubled segment of the test was not critical to detecting the novel coronavirus, experts said. After false-positive results emerged, CDC officials took weeks to remove the unnecessary step from the kits.

2. Early warning signs on flawed testing ignored

Trump administration officials continued to rely on flawed CDC tests even as many lab scientists eager to help grew increasingly alarmed and exasperated by the federal government’s actions, according to emails and documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Scientists at academic, hospital and public health labs were frustrated by the bureaucratic demands that delayed their attempts to develop alternatives to the CDC test.

3. Limited testing

The initial decision to test only a narrow set of people and delays in expanding testing to other labs gave the virus a head start to spread undetected — and helped perpetuate a false sense of security that leaves the United States dangerously behind.

Initial guidelines were so restrictive that states were discouraged from testing patients exhibiting symptoms unless they had traveled to China and come into contact with a confirmed case, when the pathogen had by that point almost certainly spread more broadly into the general population. The limits left top officials largely blind to the true dimensions of the outbreak.

4. Complicated process and paperwork

As they struggled to make the test kit work, many public health labs realized they might succeed by eliminating one of its three main chemical components. But under the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency rules, they could use the test only as it was approved. Public health labs spent much of their time and energy on the FDA’s paperwork and data demands to win approval for their own tests.

5. Denial and dysfunction at the highest levels of government

The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for President Trump to treat the coronavirus pandemic seriously. The president consistently played down the threat and became a font of misinformation and confusion. While visiting the CDC in Atlanta on March 6, Trump incorrectly stated: “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test.” In fact, the nation is desperate for more testing, leading some states to conserve testing for only health-care workers.

Late December

Reports of a new virus causing mysterious pneumonia begin to trickle out of Wuhan, China.

Jan. 3

A Chinese official officially informs CDC Director Robert Redfield of the outbreak. Redfield relays the report to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and Azar notifies the Trump administration of the outbreak of the coronavirus.

Jan. 7

The CDC begins planning for tests.

Jan. 8

The CDC issues a health advisory informing state and local health departments about the outbreak and requesting that health-care providers ask patients with severe respiratory disease about travel history to Wuhan.

Jan. 12

Chinese authorities submit to the World Health Organization the gene sequence data of the novel coronavirus, which is shared globally.

Jan. 15

The first known person in the United States to be infected with the virus arrives in Seattle from China.

Jan. 17

Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, says that Japan and Thailand are already using the genetic sequence to detect cases, adding: “We at the CDC have the ability to do that today — but we are working on a more specific diagnostic.’’

Jan. 20

A report from the CDC references the first positive case of the coronavirus in the United States.
The CDC’s laboratory test kit for the new coronavirus. (CDC/AP)

Jan. 21

A Seattle man who had recently traveled to Wuhan is confirmed as positive for the coronavirus, becoming the first known infection case on U.S. soil. Messonnier says the CDC’s test kit was used to confirm the diagnosis of the man.

Technicians begin assembling a new batch of test kits, to be sent to 26 public health labs. In coming days all but two of those labs observe false-positive reactions that invalidate the test results.

Jan. 22

Trump receives his first question about the coronavirus. Asked whether he is worried about a potential pandemic, Trump says: “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. … It’s going to be just fine.”

Jan. 24.

The CDC shares the details of the U.S. test publicly.

Jan. 27

The CDC raises its travel warning to the highest level, urging U.S. citizens to avoid all nonessential travel to China.

Jan. 28

Azar touts the CDC test development: “This was really a historic accomplishment. Within one week — within one week, the CDC had invented a rapid diagnostic test.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar speaks at a news conference on Jan. 28 in Washington. With him, from left, are CDC Director Robert Redfield, CDC official Nancy Messonnier and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

Jan. 30

The WHO declares the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern.”

Jan. 31

The United States declares a public health emergency, triggering “emergency use authorizations.” Although this process is designed to speed the development of diagnostic tests and intended to keep the quality of testing high, it would eventually lead to delays in the development of coronavirus tests at clinical labs. The policy discouraged labs from developing in-house testing because it required the approval of the FDA to do so.

Feb. 4

The CDC receives the first “emergency use authorization” from the FDA and prepares to distribute its test more widely. The CDC will ship out about 200 test kits to labs nationwide. It is the only test kit design available in the United States.

Feb. 5

The CDC informs clinical labs of the new test kit.

Feb. 6-9

The CDC begins to distribute 90 kits to state-run health labs. Meanwhile, the WHO reports it has shipped 250,000 test kits around the world.

Feb. 8

Additional CDC test kits arrive at labs in New York, Nebraska, Colorado, Minnesota and elsewhere. By the end of the day, lab directors share bad news: They aren’t working properly. Through the weekend, lab directors share notes of the test and start to realize “this could be really bad.”

Feb. 10

The CDC confirms the 13th coronavirus infection in the United States. At a political rally, Trump declared the virus will go away “by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

Feb. 12

The first public hint of trouble with the test kits emerges when the CDC’s Messonnier mentions unspecified “issues’’ at the public health labs. “Some of the states identified some inconclusive laboratory results,’’ Messonnier tells reporters. “We have multiple levels of quality control to detect issues just like this one.”

Feb. 13

Azar testifies in Congress that the CDC is working with five cities to add coronavirus testing to its regular flu surveillance to see whether “there is broader spread than we have been able to detect so far.” The labs are in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. However, the tests do not work.

Susan Butler-Wu, director of medical microbiology at the Los Angeles County and University of Southern California Medical Center, warns in an email in response to an inquiry from Congress: “We’re screwed from a testing standpoint if this thing takes off in the US.”
A technician prepares coronavirus patient samples for testing at a laboratory on Long Island on March 11. (John Minchillo/AP)

Feb. 14

The United States has 15 confirmed cases, mostly in travelers returning from Wuhan.

Feb. 15

An Association of Public Health Laboratories lab alert reports that there are issues with the CDC’s instruction for testing.

Feb. 18

The CDC warns clinical laboratories across the country against testing on their own without FDA approval. Meanwhile, it has still not provided public health labs with instructions on how to modify its test to make it work properly.

Feb. 23

Timothy Stenzel, a top FDA official for regulating diagnostic devices, meets with CDC officials in Atlanta to discuss the malfunctioning test kits. Stenzel will conclude that the problems are caused entirely by the CDC’s in-house manufacturing. He soon advises the CDC to assign any additional manufacturing of the kits to an outside contractor.

Feb. 24

A coalition of public health labs asks the FDA for permission to make their own tests: “We are now many weeks into the response with still no diagnostic or surveillance test available outside of CDC for the vast majority of our member laboratories.”

Feb. 25

In a congressional hearing, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) presses Azar, the HHS secretary, on whether the CDC test was faulty. He denies that the test does not work. But in a news briefing going on about the same time, the CDC’s Messonnier says that she was “frustrated” about problems with the test kits and that the CDC hoped to send out a new version to state and local health departments soon.

[A faulty CDC coronavirus test delays monitoring of disease’s spread]

Feb. 26

The FDA commissioner sends a letter to the coalition of public health labs that had asked for permission to make tests: “False diagnostic test results can lead to significant adverse public health consequences — not only serious implications for individual patient care but also serious implications for the analyses of disease progression and for public health decision-making.”

The CDC announces to public health labs that a workaround for the test has been approved.
What went wrong with coronavirus testing in the U.S. | The Fact Checker

Feb. 27

Redfield, the CDC director, testifies to the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and nonproliferation that the “CDC believes that the immediate risk of this new virus to the American public is low.”

On a conference call with a range of health officials, a senior FDA official lashes out at the CDC for its repeated lapses.

Jeffrey Shuren, the FDA’s director for devices and radiological health, tells the CDC that if it were subjected to the same scrutiny as a privately run lab, “I would shut you down.”

Privately, the CDC concludes that a “much broader” effort to testing is needed.

Feb. 28

Dozens of clinical laboratory scientists from across the nation write to Congress asking for permission to create new tests, saying “this regulatory process is significantly more stringent than that required for every other virus we test for.”

Forty-seven days after the Chinese had distributed the virus’s genetic sequence, the CDC abandons the test’s once-touted third component. Messonnier announces that the component “can be excluded from testing without affecting accuracy.’’

Feb. 29

The CDC announces the first U.S. death from the virus, a man in his 50s in Washington state. So far, the CDC and public health labs have tested only 3,999 people nationwide.

The FDA announces a new policy to make it easier for hospital laboratories to develop their own tests.

March 1

New York confirms the state’s first case of the coronavirus, announcing that a woman in her late 30s contracted the virus after traveling to Iran.

March 6

Trump tours the facilities at the CDC wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat. He says that the CDC tests are nearly perfect and that “anybody who wants a test will get a test.”

March 11

The WHO declares the coronavirus a pandemic.

Redfield tells the House Oversight and Reform Committee that the malfunction with the test kits was caused by either “a li’’ or an unspecified “biologic’’ factor. When pressed, Redfield says, “This is currently under an investigation at this point, and I think I’m going to leave it there.’’

March 12

Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies to Congress about the testing: “The system does not is not really geared to what we need right now,” he said. “Yes, it is a failure, let’s admit it.”

March 13

Trump declares a national emergency.

March 27

Federal health officials green light a point-of-care coronavirus test that can provide results in less than 15 minutes, using the same technology that powers some rapid flu tests.

April 5

Lack of widespread testing in the early weeks of the outbreak means the official U.S. death toll is an underestimation. The CDC count includes only deaths in which the presence of the coronavirus is confirmed in a laboratory test.

The Gumshoe

This was the old fashioned Detective that used shoe leather to track and expose the liar, the cheater, the fraud or whomever he was hired to expose.  Clearly here we could use some Columbo as there is no one sourcing the varying outbreaks and stopping the spread. So now we are to do so by never leaving our homes unless “essential” and in turn have others do all of our heavy lifting.  It clearly is not working.

In the meantime as more draconian and other absurd measures are added daily to change the behavior of a city and their inhabitants we comply with no clear idea what if anything is actually being done to stop Corvid other than pure fucking luck.  We have no comprehensive testing strategy, numerous labs processing them, protocols that must be met 100% in order to be tested, a shortage of tests, or of labs to process said test or of drugs needed to compose said tests and trained personnel to perform said tests. There are antibody tests that are providing false negatives and on that case we have no way of knowing that margin or error or the same in reverse, false positives.  Meanwhile CDG is going the states will fix it.  No, no they wont and any resident of New Jersey can attest to that for the fucked up testing across the state, the cities doing their own and the numbers that seem to have odd totals.. are they just public health testing/diagnosis or is it all inclusive showing total cases? Then we have the death count and that is per day or is it? As there is a lag time, again unclear as to that time frame, before added to the death tolls.  The number of tests that are scheduled in advance seem to always have more patients than tests. How is that?  How do your run out of something you have an allotment for and schedule people for?  And the never ending screed of we are trying to protect you but finding masks, protective gear and other essential items for health care workers is akin to Black Friday and is a game where we fight over the last Sony TV.

I have tried to figure out the numbers and try to verify the endless stories of the gangs, groups and others hanging out, causing disruption which explains why we cannot walk in parks or go anywhere without putting on a costume in which to be compliant and safe.  There are endless laws and ordinances that prohibit this and yet it is not enforceable or is that due to a lack of law enforcement? As I see daily SWAT, Police, State Patrol, Sheriffs, Park Rangers and basically anyone willing to throw on a uniform and be vigilant or do I mean vigilante to ensure public safety.

But I have read of numerous idiots throwing parties and soirees and attending meetings, getting on planes all after being tested and yet not self quarantining.  Who are they are why are they not also cited and arrested if and when the recover. Its not as if we haven’t shackled pregnant women to hospital beds.

So when I read this about Boston and their attempt to manually track and trace exposed individuals I laughed as this was standard during the HIV crisis but this is not about securing public safety this is about a failure of our Government and in turn a way to finally evict Trump from the White House so why would any Governor take it upon themselves to try to do something, anything.

Then have the warehouses for the dead that have been a pandemic on their own accord, where in New Jersey some old people were shoved in a closet and in Queens they are not sure what the fuck went on but hey let’s get busy closing parks and yelling about shit that has been beaten over our head for over a month now.

Then we have food hoarding, food being trashed and food banks at full on capacity and desperation as the unemployment numbers rise and yet that gets glossed over if not ignored. But post a question on Facebook about Corvid you will be reprimanded as I was by the Jersey City Dept of Health woman whose degree from Harvard is in Business and Econ not Health or Medicine but repeats the talking points of the CDC and extrapolates incorrectly facts from a Lancet article in which to do so. Comforting I am sure but for whom I have no fucking clue.

As we continue to move forward blindly we are heading into a social climate that we will not be able to distance ourselves from. The end of Small Town America  as we know it is gone. We have an entire ecosystem in conflux and somehow we are to restart an entire economy how as clearly it was not that great after all.    

The Small Business plan has already collapsed so now what?And the recent unrest by the right wing fringe will expand as while they are premature on this it is coming. And the Stimulus is of course fucked up and again this will be another insufficient bandaid to a seeping wound, as when Steve Munchin thought 1,200 bucks was good money explains it all.

But the reality is that renters have an opportunity to be heard as there is bill in the House that addresses this issue that moratoriums on evictions fails to do.

And lastly the TV Doctors who have come out of the closet to make it clear that they don’t get it/agree with or well give a shit. Here is the deal I get the idea of asking questions but use actual numbers, have coherent comparisons  on which to provide as an analogy and ask logical ones that put the ending conflicting data and facts on watch.  Again why this now and not then? Why the change when three weeks ago it was not needed and how do you substantiate it.  As I said in my encounter with the Jersey City Public Health woman when she explained to me that Corvid can live for 37 days and have 14 day spread period. HUH. Is it 37 or 14?  What she meant is that there are patients who have had the virus for 37 days, that it has an incubation period in a human for up to 14 days and the virus can live outside on surfaces for up to 72 hours on certain types of materials. NONE of that is what she said it was gibberish.  I didn’t go to Harvard however.

Lessons Learned

Funny how Trump loves strong armed Dictators and there is no country more exemplary than Singapore when it comes to the concept of Big Brother. 

While China initially fucked this up they are now seeing declines in new cases once they shoved their fists up the asses of the population via testing and quarantines.  Now again we knew this months ago and we have Trump laughing during a whatever that is he does when he rambles on, perhaps he should do what he did during Puerto Rico’s hurricane crisis just throw toilet paper to the herds of hysterical Americans at least that is better than what he is doing or more importantly not.  

So instead we have crazy fucking DeWine in Ohio coming up with this shit in a way to subvert Democracy as if this virus was a wet dream to Republicans now being duplicated across the country and in turn each leader throwing down another flag to prove they are the toughest bestest leader in the country.   Like Trump is doing. 

Clearly again none of it has been actually handled correctly (as in sufficient notice or actually supporting this with financial compensation or laws and enforcement of said laws) or with any real plan of action as we have Hoboken a light rail stop away from Jersey City on shelter in place but sure come here fuckers and bring your diseases or whatever with you meaning our already fragile resources will finally close, thanks assholes.   Then we have San Francisco and its environs locked down but Los Angeles a two hour drive just following careful parameters.  Does Jake Tapper know?   Now in NYC DeBlasio is backtracking the shelter in place idea as Cuomo has mandated all businesses have 50% or less workforce present at any given time so that means Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s will finally have to close.  Bye Forty Carrots.  I assume all ongoing construction will also largely cease. But it also includes Wall Street and the infamous stock market.  Trading goes on but electronically but I suspect that will stave off the hysterics and swings that are only making things worse.    All of this while Amazon has a warehouse with a worker testing positive.  So much for prime delivery from that location anytime soon.

Chaos, confusion, lack of coherent cohesive messaging makes me think that I would like to age out in Singapore.  I am a clean freak and good with limited Democracy at this point.  Not full Putin but if the best we have is Trump this is a sign that we have a virus that is way more deadly.

How the U.S. can defeat coronavirus: Heed Asia’s lessons from past epidemics

By
Shibani Mahtani and
Simon Denyer
The Washington Post
March 18, 2020

HONG KONG — When authorities in Wuhan announced on Dec. 31 that they had detected a cluster of viral pneumonia in the Chinese city, with 27 cases linked to a seafood market, they said the disease was preventable and controllable, with “no obvious signs of human-to-human transmission.”

But in wealthy places on China’s periphery — Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea — a rapid response swung into action.

One reason was that they had learned from the past.

“We were the SARS countries,” said Leong Hoe Nam, an ­infectious-disease specialist at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore who contracted severe acute respiratory syndrome during the 2002-2003 outbreak. “We were all burned very badly with SARS, but actually it turned out to be a blessing for us.”

Political will, dedicated resources, sophisticated tracking and a responsible population have kept coronavirus infections and deaths in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore relatively low. South Korea, with more deaths, has led the way in widespread testing. Now, after seeing unprecedented increases of imported cases, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have all moved to implement travel bans, essentially closing their borders to nonresidents or mandating 14-day quarantines, to prevent a new uptick of cases.
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This offers lessons for the United States and Europe as they grapple with thousands of new cases and sometimes-confused responses to the crisis.

Just hours after China’s disclosure of the first cases in the city of Wuhan, Hong Kong’s Center for Health Protection warned local doctors to obtain travel and exposure histories from patients who had fever and acute respiratory symptoms, and to isolate those patients. In Taiwan, officials boarded planes arriving from Wuhan and assessed passengers for symptoms before allowing anyone to disembark. Within days, Singapore, South Korea and other Asian states had implemented similar steps.
A police officer stands guard outside the market where the coronavirus was detected in Wuhan, China.
A police officer stands guard outside the market where the coronavirus was detected in Wuhan, China. (Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images)

Asian economies have close links with mainland China and were among the first hit by the novel coronavirus. Yet, with 100 cases in Taiwan, 181 in Hong Kong and 266 in Singapore, their infection rates are dramatically lower than the West’s. Spain has recorded more than 11,000 cases; New York state — whose population is similar to Taiwan’s — has more than 2,300 cases.
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China learned some lessons from SARS but failed to grasp the danger of covering up an outbreak, while South Korea learned plenty after grappling with Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, in 2015. Both countries struggled with big outbreaks of the coronavirus this year but appear to have brought them under control, thanks to stringent and sometimes unprecedented measures within their borders.
South Korean hospital opens ‘telephone booth’ coronavirus testing facility
The Yang Ji General Hospital in Seoul opened booths on March 16, where people can get tested for coronavirus without being in direct contact with medical staff. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

Experts are urging countries including the United States, France and Spain to use time bought by newly enforced social-distancing measures, lockdowns and quarantines to reset and work out their strategies before it is too late. These Western nations, they say, were simply not ready.

“So many countries have sat there, wondering what will happen,” said Dale Fisher, a professor in infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore who also chairs the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network and was part of the WHO’s mission to China in February. “It is extremely disappointing, as a member of the mission, that we couldn’t make it clear to the world that this was coming.”

Taiwan’s quick action

After getting off the mark early, countries and territories around China ramped up border restrictions as the scale of the epidemic became clear.

Taiwan, unencumbered by political obligations to China — the self-governing island has a tense relationship with Beijing, which views Taiwan as its territory — had the structure in place to cope. A year after SARS, Taiwan established a National Health Command Center that brought together all levels and branches of government, preparing for the possibility of another disease outbreak. Its interventions over the past two months have been decisive in keeping Taiwan ahead of the curve, said C. Jason Wang, director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention at Stanford University.

“They didn’t hesitate, they didn’t want to die,” Wang said. “The mortality rate was so high [during SARS] and they didn’t know how bad this one was going to be. Nobody thought it was like the flu.”

As early as Jan. 5, Taiwan was tracing people who had been in Wuhan in the previous 14 days. Those with symptoms of respiratory infections were quarantined.

In subsequent weeks, authorities used data and technology to identify and track cases, communicated effectively to reassure the public, offered relief to businesses and allocated medical resources where they were needed most — rationing face masks and dramatically increasing their production.

On Jan. 27, Taiwan combined the databases of its National Health Insurance Administration and National Immigration Agency, allowing it to track everyone who had been in Wuhan in the recent past and alert doctors to patients’ travel histories.

Now, Taiwan is hoping to keep its infection numbers down and has asked residents not to travel abroad after its biggest single-day jump of cases — 23 — on Wednesday. It is also barring most noncitizens from entering.

China has won plaudits from the WHO for its massive mobilization of medical resources to test and treat people suffering from the coronavirus, but it failed to learn from its coverup of SARS. Chinese authorities initially silenced doctors who tried to raise the alarm about the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak, denying the rest of the world precious early days to assess the risks.

South Korea, meanwhile, has become the poster child for testing. Its success is rooted in a previous failure: The limited availability of test kits was seen as having aggravated the 2015 MERS outbreak, when the country suffered the second-highest caseload after Saudi Arabia.

Whereas the United States and Japan keep testing tightly controlled by a central authority, South Korea opened the process to the private sector, introducing a path to grant “emergency usage approval” to tests for pathogens of pandemic potential.

More than 260,000 people in South Korea have been tested for the virus, the highest per capita anywhere, with testing and treatment fees covered by the government and drive-through centers capturing global attention. On a visit to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, President Moon Jae-in called the expansion in testing “a great achievement that is acknowledged around the world.”

Singapore, too, benefited from its own capabilities to test, as did Hong Kong and Japan. All developed their own diagnostic tests when the covid-19 genome sequence was published.

“Singapore, through SARS, learned it the very hard way, that we have to develop these capabilities at the word go,” said Mount Elizabeth Hospital’s Leong. “Once you are in control of your own fate, you can decide what way to go.”

Few cases in Hong Kong

Rocked by eight months of protests, Hong Kong’s embattled leadership began responding to the outbreak from a position of weakness and was criticized for not moving fast enough to close schools and borders.

Outside mainland China, the territory had been the biggest casualty of the Communist Party’s coverup of the SARS outbreak, with some 300 deaths and little clarity on what was unfolding until it was too late.

This time, though, and without needing to be told much, Hong Kong residents took matters into their own hands. The city’s financial district was reduced to a ghost town in early February as companies closed offices. Bakeries known for hour-long weekend lines were abandoned.

Parties, weddings and family gatherings were canceled — without any government order. Almost everyone rushed to ­procure masks; a recent study ­estimated that 74 percent to 98 percent of residents wore them when leaving their homes. Voluntary social distancing was hailed as a key reason for the lower rate of infections.

“Hong Kong is a population which takes the idea of quarantine, masks and social distancing very seriously,” said Keiji Fukuda, director of the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health and former assistant director general for health security at the WHO.

Big Brother looks after you

From electronic wristbands to smartphone trackers, Asian jurisdictions have pulled out all the stops to ensure that suspected patients comply with quarantine and isolation orders, monitoring that is backed by laws that were tightened post-SARS.

Singapore used its FBI equivalent, the Criminal Investigation Department, to effectively interrogate every confirmed case with stunning granularity — even using patients’ digital wallets to trace their footsteps. Those caught lying face fines and jail time.

The city-state has been lauded as the gold standard for identifying cases, with a study by Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics finding that Singapore was 2.5 times more likely to detect infected people than the global average, because of “very strong epidemiological surveillance and contact-tracing capacity.”

In South Korea, information on the movements of infected people before they were tested is collected and relayed over smartphones, creating a real-time map of areas to avoid. Taiwan tracks infected people’s whereabouts via smartphones: Stray too far from home and you receive a message; ignore it and the police will pay a visit.

In Hong Kong, everyone subject to a compulsory quarantine must activate real-time location-sharing on their phone or wear an electronic wristband.

These measures have been backed by local populations that lived through previous epidemics and have largely shed concerns about privacy and tracking.

All these places have stopped short of a Wuhan-style lockdown. Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Global Health Policy and Governance Initiative at Georgetown University, said Americans should not focus “only on the kind of high-profile displays of state power that have made headlines from China” but also look at countries such as South Korea that are “balancing Democratic openness with rapid, concerted public-health action.”

Experts agree, though, that Western governments must be prepared to limit their citizens’ movements, mandate isolation for positive cases and track contacts regardless of privacy concerns.

“This is the process it will take to save thousands of American and European lives, billions of dollars of the economy, your own businesses,” said Fisher, the Singapore university professor. “Otherwise, it is just carnage.”

This Club is Private

There is this consistent drumbeat mantra philosophy belief by the Ayn Rand supplicants who have met the Grover Norquist wing of the right that the function of the U.S. Government is minimal and that there is little that needs to be done by an actual functional Government agency, individual or well Congress. And to prove that they have spent the last part of three decades ensuring that this may well be true.

They do it by eliminating funding, outsourcing or privatizing functioning entities to non profits who in turn bilk the U.S. Government for millions to billions, as noted in yesterday’s blog entry about the war non profit group; then we have the medical fraud by all three of its public groups, medicaid, medicare and the veterans getting substandard care or private “non profits” generating millions in fees for services that are utterly useless. Or grants to private education “non profits” that produce paper but little else for graduates left with thousands of student loans. Or how this works in the lower level with regards to Charters and the love of Teach for America which now has about a 90% churn and burn rate of its group leaving the profession after their “sentence” is served.

Need I go about how the systemic underfunding and push toward private businesses running governmental groups has done little to actually prove these lunatics right but in fact demonstrated how dangerous and costly this notion is.

When the Government is properly funded, it can hire and demand the best from its employees. They can and should have that ability. When the Government chooses not to you see we have one step removed from say Pakistan. I just heard today about how in Pakistan they are looking at varying criminal cases and realizing their system is broken. Hey get in line we were here first! There is little good I can say comparing us to Pakistan.

We have never fully audited and investigated the agencies within our government. The IRS is one example and the NSA but we continue to elect the same idiots over and over again. The current crop of war mongering decibel seeking individuals who have little to offer but the same rhetoric about Unions and the need to crush them as we crush ISIS. Seriously that comparison alone is disturbing. And then after the dust clears you have Oklahoma, Louisiana or Wisconsin or New Jersey whose recent negotiation with Exxon left millions off the table and the millions that were left went mostly to the cabal that came up with that deal, the legal team associated with the Governor. When really it is about States co-opting funds from pension funding and other shenanigans to pay the bills as they have cut taxes to the point where there is little left to beg borrow or steal from. So the next idea is to eliminate entire Government offices which again they are doing in Wisconsin with the Treasury office. They will eliminate in places like Ferguson the city police which is not a bad idea but do it in Colorado too where an entire force exists solely to give tickets.

I get the point we have strange monopolies on top of bureaucracies that seem to serve no function or purpose other than redundant groups that duplicate and replicate another group who don’t do it that well either but hey more is better.

Here is an idea let’s demand case by case, line by line audit. Like the IRS on each town, each city, each state and each federal agency and see what they do, dollar for dollar, line by line and find out each contract, each agreement and what they do, how much they do it for, how and why is it done. Could it be done better and cheaper this way. See this actually takes work, it takes talented people to do such forensic accounting and they do it all the time for Wall Street and are paid millions to do so. And once again I point to a high school grad with minimum education and money who figured out all kinds of shit and said “no more.” So please tell me where are more of them we need them.

Keep telling me why you vote these morons in and I will keep telling you you get what you deserve. Is this what we deserve?

The Perils of Privatization

ANN HAGEDORN
American Prospect
MARCH 3, 2015

When a public function is privatized, the result is a muddled middle ground.

This article appears as part of a special report, “What the Free Market Can’t Do,” in the Winter 2015 issue of The American Prospect magazine.

One November morning in 2004, three U.S. military men boarded a small turboprop plane at Bagram Air Base near Kabul for a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Farah, a base in western Afghanistan. They were Lieutenant Colonel Michael McMahon, Chief Warrant Officer Travis Grogan, and Specialist Harley Miller, the only passengers on Flight 61. The flight was operated by an affiliate of Blackwater, the private military company under U.S. contract for air transport of mail, supplies, and troops.

Forty minutes after takeoff, flying far north of the customary route from Bagram to Farah, the plane crashed into the side of a mountain. McMahon, Grogan, the pilot, co-pilot, and the mechanic apparently died instantly. At the time, McMahon was the highest-ranking U.S. soldier to die in the war. Miller, though he suffered internal injuries, may have lived for as long as ten hours after the crash, but the route was so obscure that rescuers could not locate the wreckage in time to save him.

In the years afterward, investigators for a joint U.S. Army and Air Force task force and for the National Transportation Safety Board would reveal that the Flight 61 pilots had never flown the route between Bagram and Farah and, in fact, had been in Afghanistan for only 13 days. Also, they deviated from the standard course almost immediately after leaving the ground. Further, according to investigators, Blackwater failed to follow standard precautions to track flights, failed to file a flight plan, and failed to maintain emergency communications in case of an accident. The NTSB report included a cockpit voice recording of the plane’s crew, which Representative Henry Waxman read to members of Congress at an October 2007 hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Parts of it depict the pilots’ unprofessional behavior and their jollity as they flew through narrow canyons on their wayward route:

“You’re an X-wing fighter Star Wars man,” said one of the pilots.

“I swear to God they wouldn’t pay me if they knew how much fun this was.”
“You are [expletive] right. This is fun,” the co-pilot replied and later said, “I swear to God they wouldn’t pay me if they knew how much fun this was.”

Blackwater went into the annals of government contracting as one of the great disgraces of privatization. A staff report prepared for the Oversight Committee found that Blackwater billed the government $1,222 per day per guard, “equivalent to $445,000 per year; over six times more than the cost of an equivalent U.S. soldier.” Reeling from scandals, Blackwater later reorganized and changed its name to Xe, and then again to Academi, which is now part of a holding company called Constellis.

With this record, how could the company continue to get government contracts for several more years? It had cozy relationships with military brass on the ground. Its top officials and directors included Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s counter-terrorist center; Bobby Ray Inman, former head of the NSA and deputy director of the CIA; former Attorney General John Ashcroft; and Jack Quinn, former White House counsel to President Clinton and chief of staff to Al Gore.

Blackwater, however, is hardly a one-off in the abuses of privatization, though it is a useful place to start. According to enthusiasts of free-market discipline, privatizing a public service—in this case, military support operations—offers efficiency and cost savings. Private companies, presumably, are under market discipline and are free of cumbersome bureaucracies and stultifying government monopolies. They are thus free to innovate. But the reality is far messier.

As Blackwater showed, many of the efficiencies are spurious, because contractors cut corners. The notion of market discipline can be short-circuited by political influence that steers contracts to favored companies despite their poor performance. Often, apparent savings are bogus because of costs that are passed along to the government. In some cases, privatizing something as necessarily public as national defense is convenient because the contractor, not the government, takes the fall when something goes wrong. This is precisely the opposite of accountability.

Moreover, efficiency in the sense of cost savings is not always the right goal in the public sector, nor does it define success. The most successful option in a military campaign may not be the quickest or the least expensive. As the Blackwater experience showed, hiring military contractors in war zones introduces significant risks—such as deficiencies in vetting, training, and oversight, especially at the level of subcontractors—that can potentially detract from overall military effectiveness. As one military analyst noted in his study of the risks of privatizing counterinsurgency operations, “Whenever efficiency outweighs accountability, the possibility exists of efficiency undermining effectiveness of services and democratic values.”

Further, the cost savings so often proclaimed by privatization advocates as the measurement of success are the immediate and apparent ones, which are short-term. But costs are frequently hidden, especially considering that for every U.S. contract there can be as many as five layers of subcontracting. If the oversight is weak, there is always the potential for abuse, waste, and corruption, resulting in human costs as well as financial. For example, in Afghanistan in October 2009, when insurgents attacked a U.S. combat outpost purportedly protected by Afghan security guards under U.S. contract, the guards fled, and were found “huddling in their beds.” Lost in the controversy over the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in the 2012 Benghazi attack was the role of private contractors. When the attack began, the subcontractors hired by a U.S.-contracted private security firm to guard the perimeter and entrance to the diplomatic compound fled, leaving the guards on the inside vulnerable.

According to a report from the Senate Armed Services Committee, there were U.S.-contracted guards in Afghanistan working directly for the local Taliban.

According to a report from the Senate Armed Services Committee, there were U.S.-contracted guards in Afghanistan working directly for the local Taliban. The committee’s report found that private security contractors were “funneling U.S. taxpayers dollars to Afghan warlords and strongmen linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery as well as Taliban and other anti-Coalition activities,” including more than $12,000 a month to the salary of a Taliban supporter. And more recently, a nasty legal feud between military auditors and the big defense contracting firm KBR exposed the striking fact that the company had continued to submit bills to the U.S. government for nine months after the 2012 end of its multimillion-dollar contract to provide training in detecting improvised explosive devices.

Equally unsettling and revealing is the multibillion-dollar industry of prison privatization. The U.S. imprisons more people than any nation in the world, resulting in a potential bonanza for private prison companies whose business model depends on high incarceration rates. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “The private prison industry has been a key player over the past two decades in driving the explosion of mass incarceration in the U.S.” Between 1990 and 2009, the number of inmates in private prisons nationwide, including state and federal, has increased by more than 1,600 percent.

In Texas, an auditor’s report at a privately held juvenile facility revealed that living conditions were abhorrent, depicting the cells as “filthy, smelled of feces and urine.”

Studies and audits of privately held prisons in recent years show that the cost-cutting incentive threatens the quality of food, medical care, and sanitation and may even contribute to heightened violence. In 2012, a federal judge in Mississippi described the abuse and beatings at a privately operated youth correctional facility as “a picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world.” In Texas, an auditor’s report at a privately held juvenile facility revealed that living conditions were abhorrent, depicting the cells as “filthy, smelled of feces and urine.”

In 2012, The New York Times, after a ten-month investigation of privately held halfway houses in New Jersey, exposed an array of horrors, ranging from sexual abuse of female inmates to lax security and a significant number of escapes, and from drug dealing and gang activity to fraudulent records of drug treatment with fabricated rehabilitation progress. And all such incidents could easily be bundled into one immense deceit: inadequate oversight, well concealed by a tangle of corporate influence and New Jersey politicians from both parties, including Governor Chris Christie. The governor, in fact, was once the lobbyist for a company operating several New Jersey halfway houses, such as one 900-bed facility that was run by his close friend, former partner, and political adviser, and publicly endorsed and praised often by the governor himself. Workers at that facility told reporters that robbery, sexual assault, and violence drove inmates to “regularly ask to be returned to prison, where they feel safer.” And within a day of escaping another of the company’s “houses,” one inmate had murdered a former girlfriend.

Privatization, in sum, is effectively a fraud. When a product is provided purely via the market, and there are no public purposes involved, market accountability can work. Consumers can compare price and quality, and give their business to the vendor offering the best product at the most attractive cost. Alternatively, when government performs a function directly, there are public forms of accountability, such as congressional hearings and GAO investigations. But when a public function is privatized, the result is a muddled middle ground, where neither market accountability nor public accountability works well because of all the layers of intermediaries. Enthusiasts of markets claim that government is the domain of political corruption, while markets are transparent. But the actual track record of privatization shows that there can be at least as much corruption and deception in privatizing a service as in providing it directly. For all the rhetoric about public-private partnerships, our society works better when we keep public functions public and private ones private.

Under the Covers

As we have come to learn this week the FBI posed as a local reporter to ensnare a teenager who was making bomb threats against his school. They have posed as internet repairmen who have come to fix the cable they broke and now we find out they are busy posing as everyone and anyone deemed a threat to the American way.

And that clearly is working out well – or not.

More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and WILLIAM M. ARKIN
NOV. 15, 2014

WASHINGTON — The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show.

At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice.

At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers or accountants or drug dealers or yacht buyers, court records show.

At the Agriculture Department, more than 100 undercover agents pose as food stamp recipients at thousands of neighborhood stores to spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said.

Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous, was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. But outside public view, changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of the federal government, according to officials, former agents and documents.

Agencies across the federal government have undercover teams to monitor threats, fraud, theft and other illegal activity.

Supreme Court Police

Monitor activists and detect possible terrorist attacks or criminal activity during protests near the Supreme Court building.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Focus on counterintelligence of NASA employees and contractors, as well as theft or illicit trafficking of technology.

Small Business Administration

Identify organizations involved in committing fraud and abuse of federal lending and contracting programs.

Department of Energy

Protect the movement of nuclear materials within the United States.

Government Accountability Office

Verify vulnerability assessments of government agencies, airports, borders, railroads and other related sectors.

Internal Revenue Service

Investigate money laundering, identity theft and also bank, mail and tax fraud.

Department of Agriculture

Root out illegal food stamp transactions by individuals and businesses or any financial fraud involving U.S.D.A. programs.
Source: New York Times analysis

Some agency officials say such operations give them a powerful new tool to gather evidence in ways that standard law enforcement methods do not offer, leading to more prosecutions. But the broadened scope of undercover work, which can target specific individuals or categories of possible suspects, also raises concerns about civil liberties abuses and entrapment of unwitting targets. It has also resulted in hidden problems, with money gone missing, investigations compromised and agents sometimes left largely on their own for months or even years.

“Done right, undercover work can be a very effective law enforcement method, but it carries serious risks and should only be undertaken with proper training, supervision and oversight,” said Michael German, a former F.B.I. undercover agent who is a fellow at New York University’s law school. “Ultimately it is government deceitfulness and participation in criminal activity, which is only justifiable when it is used to resolve the most serious crimes.”

Some of the expanded undercover operations have resulted from heightened concern about domestic terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But many operations are not linked to terrorism. Instead, they reflect a more aggressive approach to growing criminal activities like identity theft, online solicitation and human trafficking, or a push from Congress to crack down on more traditional crimes.

At convenience stores, for example, undercover agents, sometimes using actual minors as decoys, look for illegal alcohol and cigarette sales, records show. At the Education Department, undercover agents of the Office of Inspector General infiltrate federally funded education programs looking for financial fraud. Medicare investigators sometimes pose as patients to gather evidence against health care providers. Officers at the Small Business Administration, NASA and the Smithsonian do undercover work as well, records show.
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Part of the appeal of undercover operations, some officials say, is that they can be an efficient way to make a case.

“We’re getting the information directly from the bad guys — what more could you want?” said Thomas Hunker, a former police chief in Bal Harbour, Fla., whose department worked with federal customs and drug agents on hundreds of undercover money-laundering investigations in recent years.

Mr. Hunker said sending federal and local agents undercover to meet with suspected money launderers “is a more direct approach than getting a tip and going out and doing all the legwork and going into a court mode.”

“We don’t have to go back and interview witnesses and do search warrants and surveillance and all that,” he added.

But the undercover work also led federal auditors to criticize his department for loose record-keeping and financial lapses, and Mr. Hunker was fired last year amid concerns about the operations.

‘A Critical Tool’

Most undercover investigations never become public, but when they do, they can prove controversial. This month, James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., was forced to defend the bureau’s tactics after it was disclosed that an agent had posed as an Associated Press reporter in 2007 in trying to identify the source of bomb threats at a Lacey, Wash., high school. Responding to criticism from news media advocates, Mr. Comey wrote in a letter to The New York Times that “every undercover operation involves ‘deception,’ which has long been a critical tool in fighting crime.”

Just weeks before, the Drug Enforcement Administration stoked controversy after disclosures that an undercover agent had created a fake Facebook page from the photos of a young woman in Watertown, N.Y. — without her knowledge — to lure drug suspects.

And in what became a major political scandal for the Obama administration, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed guns to slip into Mexico in 2011 in an undercover operation known as Fast and Furious.

In response to that episode, the Justice Department issued new guidelines to prosecutors last year designed to tighten oversight of undercover operations and other “sensitive” investigative techniques, officials said. Before prosecutors approve such tactics, the previously undisclosed guidelines require that they consider whether an operation identifies a “clearly defined” objective, whether it is truly necessary, whether it targets “significant criminal actors or entities,” and other factors, the officials said.

Peter Carr, a department spokesman, said that undercover operations are necessary in investigating crime but that agents and prosecutors must follow safeguards. “We encourage these operations even though they may involve some degree of risk,” he said.

Those guidelines apply only to the law enforcement agencies overseen by the Justice Department. Within the Treasury Department, undercover agents at the I.R.S., for example, appear to have far more latitude than do those at many other agencies. I.R.S. rules say that, with prior approval, “an undercover employee or cooperating private individual may pose as an attorney, physician, clergyman or member of the news media.”
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An I.R.S. spokesman acknowledged that undercover investigators are allowed to pose in such roles with approval from senior officials. But the agency said in a statement that senior officials “are not aware of any investigations where special agents have ever posed as attorneys, physicians, members of the clergy or members of the press specifically to gain information from a privileged relationship.”

The agency declined to say whether I.R.S. undercover agents have posed in these roles in an effort to get information that was not considered “privileged,” meaning the type of confidential information someone shares with a lawyer or doctor.

José Marrero, a former I.R.S. supervisor in Miami, said he knew of situations in which tax investigators needed to assume the identity of doctors to gain the trust of a medical professional and develop evidence that is tightly held.

“It’s very rare that you do that, but it does happen,” Mr. Marrero, who has a consulting firm in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and continues to work with federal agents on undercover investigations, said in an interview. “These are very sensitive jobs, and they’re scrutinized more closely than others.”

Oversight, though, can be minimal. A special committee meant to oversee undercover investigations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, for instance, did not meet in nearly seven years, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general. That inquiry found that more than $127 million worth of cigarettes purchased by the bureau disappeared in a series of undercover investigations that were aimed at tracing the black-market smuggling of cigarettes.

In one investigation, the bureau paid an undercover informant from the tobacco industry nearly $5 million in “business expenses” for his help in the case. (The agency gained new authority in 2004 allowing it to take money seized in undercover investigations and “churn” it back into future operations, a source of millions in revenue.)

Financial oversight was found lacking in the I.R.S.’s undercover operations as well. Detailed reviews of the money spent in some of its undercover operations took as long as four and a half years to complete, according to a 2012 review by the Treasury Department’s inspector general.

Wires Crossed

Across the federal government, undercover work has become common enough that undercover agents sometimes find themselves investigating a supposed criminal who turns out to be someone from a different agency, law enforcement officials said. In a few situations, agents have even drawn their weapons on each other before realizing that both worked for the federal government.

“There are all sorts of stories about undercover operations gone bad,” Jeff Silk, a longtime undercover agent and supervisor at the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in an interview. “People are always tripping and falling over each other’s cases.”

Mr. Silk, who retired this year, cited a case that he supervised in which the D.E.A. was wiretapping suspects in a drug ring in Atlanta, only to discover that undercover agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were trying to infiltrate the same ring. The F.B.I. and the New York Police Department were involved in the case as well.
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To avoid such problems, officials said, they have tightened “deconfliction” policies, which are designed to alert agencies about one another’s undercover operations. But problems have persisted, the officials said.

It is impossible to tell how effective the government’s operations are or evaluate whether the benefits outweigh the costs, since little information about them is publicly disclosed. Most federal agencies declined to discuss the number of undercover agents they employed or the types of investigations they handled. The numbers are considered confidential and are not listed in public budget documents, and even Justice Department officials say they are uncertain how many agents work undercover.

But current and former law enforcement officials said the number of federal agents doing such work appeared to total well into the thousands, with many agencies beefing up their ranks in recent years, or starting new undercover units. An intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the agency alone spent $100 million annually on its undercover operations. With large numbers of undercover agents at the F.B.I. and elsewhere, the costs could reach hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

In a sampling of such workers, an analysis of publicly available résumés showed that since 2001 more than 1,100 current or former federal employees across 40 agencies listed undercover work inside the United States as part of their duties. More than half of all the work they described is in pursuit of the illicit drug trade. Money laundering, gangs and organized crime investigations make up the second-largest group of operations.

Significant growth in undercover work involves online activity, with agents taking to the Internet, posing as teenage girls to catch predators or intercepting emails and other messages, the documents noted. The F.B.I., Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon all have training programs for online undercover operations.

Defendants who are prosecuted in undercover investigations often raise a defense of “entrapment,” asserting that agents essentially lured them into a criminal act, whether it is buying drugs from an undercover agent or providing fraudulent government services.

But the entrapment defense rarely succeeds in court.

In terrorism cases — the area in which the F.B.I. has used undercover stings most aggressively — prosecutors have a perfect record in defeating claims of entrapment. “I challenge you to find one of those cases in which the defendant has been acquitted asserting that defense,” Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, said at an appearance this year.

The Times analysis showed that the military and its investigative agencies have almost as many undercover agents working inside the United States as does the F.B.I. While most of them are involved in internal policing of service members and defense contractors, a growing number are focused, in part, on the general public as part of joint federal task forces that combine military, intelligence and law enforcement specialists.

At the Supreme Court, all of the court’s more than 150 police officers are trained in undercover tactics, according to a federal law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity because it involved internal security measures. At large protests over issues like abortion, small teams of undercover officers mill about — usually behind the crowd — to look for potential disturbances.

The agents, often youthful looking, will typically “dress down” and wear backpacks to blend inconspicuously into the crowd, the official said.

At one recent protest, an undercover agent — rather than a uniformed officer — went into the center of a crowd of protesters to check out a report of a suspicious bag before determining there was no threat, the official said. The use of undercover officers is seen as a more effective way of monitoring large crowds.

A Supreme Court spokesman, citing a policy of not discussing security practices, declined to talk about the use of undercover officers. Mr. German, the former F.B.I. undercover agent, said he was troubled to learn that the Supreme Court routinely used undercover officers to pose as demonstrators and monitor large protests.

“There is a danger to democracy,” he said, “in having police infiltrate protests when there isn’t a reasonable basis to suspect criminality.”

Turn the Beat Around

The culture of violence at New York’s Rikers Prison is getting of course front page coverage in the New York Times

Yesterday they found that children, teens whatever moniker you wish to apply sustain the most serious of beatings.

And we have the Police Union (that goes without saying) defending the chokehold used to murder Eric Garner

And today no charges on Officers who brutally assaulted inmates at Rikers.

You can dismiss this as New York and they are felons, deadbeats, criminals, whatever moniker you wish to apply to these men (in this case but it is not exclusively men) but I get the same option to do so when it comes to those in the position of doing most harm.  Abuser, Sociopath, Psychopath, Freak, Murder, Rapist are just some that come to mind.  For those are the same applied to the individual who is the defendant, so let’s keep that equal thing going here.

What I found disturbing were the witnesses who either fearing for their jobs or threatened to do so remained silent.  I can assure you if I was a Teacher at that hellhole, silent would not be my minority.

When you “whistleblow” on a culture of incompetency expect not thank you’s, hurray’s but a seat on a plane next to Edward Snowden or cell adjacent to Chelsea Manning. And the Government will ensure that as a real possibility.

If you are really really lucky you keep your job but you are now in the rest room as the bathroom attendant, the receptionist to the basement or in a closet somewhere spending your time and  our taxpayer monies funding this non existent job.  See if they fire them there is that lawsuit stuff and more ugly coming out of the closet, so here’s a plan – put them in a closet see how long they like it and maybe they will quit!

This is a great article in the Washington Post discussing what happens when you choose to do the right thing and then end up on the wrong end of the stick.  There are no carrots for those who dare rock the cart.

America is insane. We have lost our collective marbles.

So what do you think we actually do something about it by kicking out any all legislators who have no interests but special ones, get moving on getting money out of politics and demanding that all in the field of jurisprudence have full transparency and acceptability.  No immunity, no exemptions and no more bullshit.

Wow that would require of course us to in fact ensure that these individuals do in fact follow through and that takes time, effort and more importantly consistency.  Imagine the Koch’s doing good with their money rather than spending it on elections and buying Judges and Politicians.   If they can’t spend their money on such frivolity then perhaps they may spend it on some good things, such as affordable housing, great schools and an infrastructure that rivals any emerging nation. Oh shit who are we kidding.

We are a do nothing nation who lets those with money do it all and they do what serves them best. Fuck the rest.