The Scold

I just finished reading the most interesting thread on Twitter from a poster regarding the state of the Tech Community. I provide a link and read at your own pace and find that most of the replies are positive and affirmative. I have long believed that many are preferring the working from home and that in turn are becoming increasingly lazy and self involved the longer they remain indoors. The generation of children coming out of this will have true socialization issues (regardless of school as that environment will have to change frankly) and adaption into larger social roles when it comes to going places, shopping, cooking and the rest of life’s daily demands. When all of it comes to your door and is done for you how can you ever learn to do it yourself?

Having worked in Education on and off for the last 25 years I am more than familiar with some of the issues he describes, the tech industry is simply paid better, but the mantra of education is not unlike Tech and their saving the world. Education has always been about making a greater generation and building children into functioning adults. I am not sure I agree with any or all of it, as my thoughts on the subject were to bring knowledge and insight on a specific subject matter and build minds and possibly bridges in which to build community. (I taught English and History so hence that is why) It is why I worked in public education as it provided the natural diversity that you do not find in private schools, or those I grew up in. Again, as I wrote in the last post, school districts do their best to ensure that on the surface education is diverse and open but the reality is that through testing and defining schools as Magnet or labeling them STEAM or whatever the popular acronym of the day is and in turn enabling them to segregate without being directly discriminatory. And with that endless meetings and arguments and of course lawsuits dictate to the point that massive amounts of needed money is diverted to settle the argument. I laugh as in my former school district in Seattle had a massive lawsuit over Racism in the School Board and treatment of staff which led to an investigation (not the first but one of many as I recall from my time there) and found that everyone was at fault. Okay, then. The policy of wokeness is the policy of scold. And I loved that as I am writing this I am listening to Thomas Frank discuss this issue on how it backfires and continually stifles actual Democratic progress. I get it, I really do.

And as I read through the thread on Twitter I was reminded of a recent online exchange that of course was again a negative response that I have found regardless of one’s political affiliation there are grades/teams and litmus tests by each to define just how conservative or liberal are you. I do what I call the Dave Chappelle test where you ask someone if they laughed or liked it and if they get up and leave you at the dinner table as was done to me, you are fucked as you are not liberal enough. And as he railed more insults I kept up positive affirmations, telling him how great these are and they continue to prove my point until he gave up and then another tried to throw out some bait but this fish don’t bite and I moved off the post.

As a liberal white privileged woman the only thing it has enabled me to do is manage to cobble together a private life where I am not beholden to the daily trials and tribulations of my co-workers. I can come and go and take a job when I want and leave immediately after to pursue other things. I am largely happy and while I am concerned about Covid, I am only in the matter of regards to my own personal health. I am responsive with regards to the community at large, old habits are hard to stop, but they also stop with me giving a flying fuck about Trump, MAGA folks, Joe Rogan and other distractions that do nothing that fuel further negativity and divisiveness. What good comes from that. I feel that way about ALL of our lives and that we should ALL try to be our best (thanks Melania) and do our best for all. There is only so much we can do or not but we can at least respect those who we may not always agree with and find that common ground. And as I read that Twitter thread I understood every single word and laughed at some of it and some of it I simply recognized as while it was his truth I could not fully agree with all of it. Funny the difference were in the one area I do miss and that is home ownership, investing and restoring properties. I do believe in rent control and having some type of affordable housing and laws protecting those who are tenants. But with that I find that large real estate firms and investment companies are getting and are entitled to huge tax breaks and incentives not available to the individual buyer so we are seeing Vulture firms buying up individual homes, renting them out at exorbitant prices, not maintaining the property and in turn selling them at higher prices driving up prices in a market. That is your gentrification on steroids. And with that comes access and availability to Politicians who can craft said deals to protect said assets. The current fire in the Bronx is one such an example and may explain why the Mayor elected to blame the victims when he spoke on the event that killed 19.

But again a calm exchange and allowance for differences to be had tears down walls versus build them. And with that I admire him for being honest in a thread that spoke truths, again, not all ones we agree with and perhaps that is the problem which he was addressing, that we need to always be in full agreement and cannot have any diversity of thought as it is too disruptive. Irony on top of irony coming from the Tech Sector but again that has been the marker of education for as long as I know it. It is exhausting trying to defend and explain your every decision, thought or action. The ability to apologize and move on is not possible in today’s new cancel culture. But with it we lose the very thing we are seeking, resolution. Abdication is not the solution but it makes it easier to walk away from any responsibility and accountability of taking someone’s mistake and making them pay for it forever. Wow just wow. Shoe on the other foot, empathy and compassion seem to be the traits the Liberal left profess to have but seem to give little of it. I know, I am very Liberal and have never had one apology for the names, the lies and abuse I have faced and more importantly I would not know what to do with it if I received one.

And with this I give you this article about The Covid hysteria from a year ago. Cannot see that much has changed.

The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown

Progressive communities have been home to some of the fiercest battles over COVID-19 policies, and some liberal policy makers have left scientific evidence behind.

By Emma Green The Atlantic

Teachers in Massachusetts protest a school-reopening plan. (MediaNews Group / Boston Herald / Getty)

May 4, 2021

Lurking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates.

Last year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme care was warranted. People all over the country made enormous sacrifices—rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling graduations, avoiding the family members they love—to protect others. Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up their freedoms. But this is a different story, about progressives who stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.

For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk. “If he said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me. Gandhi describes herself as “left of left,” but has alienated some of her ideological peers because she has advocated for policies such as reopening schools and establishing a clear timeline for the end of mask mandates. “We went the other way, in an extreme way, against Trump’s politicization,” Gandhi said. Geography and personality may have also contributed to progressives’ caution: Some of the most liberal parts of the country are places where the pandemic hit especially hard, and Hetherington found that the very liberal participants in his survey tended to be the most neurotic.

The spring of 2021 is different from the spring of 2020, though. Scientists know a lot more about how COVID-19 spreads—and how it doesn’t. Public-health advice is shifting. But some progressives have not updated their behavior based on the new information. And in their eagerness to protect themselves and others, they may be underestimating other costs. Being extra careful about COVID-19 is (mostly) harmless when it’s limited to wiping down your groceries with Lysol wipes and wearing a mask in places where you’re unlikely to spread the coronavirus, such as on a hiking trail. But vigilance can have unintended consequences when it imposes on other people’s lives. Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning.

“Those who are vaccinated on the left seem to think overcaution now is the way to go, which is making people on the right question the effectiveness of the vaccines,” Gandhi told me. Public figures and policy makers who try to dictate others’ behavior without any scientific justification for doing so erode trust in public health and make people less willing to take useful precautions. The marginal gains of staying shut down might not justify the potential backlash.

Even as the very effective COVID-19 vaccines have become widely accessible, many progressives continue to listen to voices preaching caution over relaxation. Anthony Fauci recently said he wouldn’t travel or eat at restaurants even though he’s fully vaccinated, despite CDC guidance that these activities can be safe for vaccinated people who take precautions. California Governor Gavin Newsom refused in April to guarantee that the state’s schools would fully reopen in the fall, even though studies have demonstrated for months that modified in-person instruction is safe. Leaders in Brookline, Massachusetts, decided this week to keep a local outdoor mask mandate in place, even though the CDC recently relaxed its guidance for outdoor mask use. And scolding is still a popular pastime. “At least in San Francisco, a lot of people are glaring at each other if they don’t wear masks outside,” Gandhi said, even though the risk of outdoor transmission is very low.

Scientists, academics, and writers who have argued that some very low-risk activities are worth doing as vaccination rates rise—even if the risk of exposure is not zero—have faced intense backlash. After Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, argued in The Atlantic in March that families should plan to take their kids on trips and see friends and relatives this summer, a reader sent an email to her supervisors at the university suggesting that Oster be promoted to a leadership role in the field of “genocide encouragement.” “Far too many people are not dying in our current global pandemic, and far too many children are not yet infected,” the reader wrote. “With the upcoming consequences of global warming about to be felt by a wholly unprepared worldwide community, I believe the time is right to get young scholars ready to follow in Dr. Oster’s footsteps and ensure the most comfortable place to be is white [and] upper-middle-class.” (“That email was something,” Oster told me.)

Sure, some mean people spend their time chiding others online. But for many, remaining guarded even as the country opens back up is an earnest expression of civic values. “I keep coming back to the same thing with the pandemic,” Alex Goldstein, a progressive PR consultant who was a senior adviser to Representative Ayanna Pressley’s 2018 campaign, told me. “Either you believe that you have a responsibility to take action to protect a person you don’t know or you believe you have no responsibility to anybody who isn’t in your immediate family.”

Goldstein and his wife decided early on in the pandemic that they were going to take restrictions extremely seriously and adopt the most cautious interpretation of when it was safe to do anything. He’s been shaving his own head since the summer (with “bad consequences,” he said). Although rugby teams have been back on the fields in Boston, where he lives, his team still won’t participate, for fear of spreading germs when players pile on top of one another in a scrum. He spends his mornings and evenings sifting through stories of people who have recently died from the coronavirus for Faces of COVID, a Twitter feed he started to memorialize deaths during the pandemic. “My fear is that we will not learn the lessons of the pandemic, because we will try to blow through the finish line as fast as we can and leave it in the rearview mirror,” he said.

Progressive politics focuses on fighting against everyday disasters, such as climate change and poverty, struggles that may shape how some people see the pandemic. “If you’re deeply concerned that the real disaster that’s happening here is that the social contract has been broken and the vulnerable in society are once again being kicked while they’re down, then you’re going to be hypersensitive to every detail, to every headline, to every infection rate,” Scott Knowles, a professor at the South Korean university KAIST who studies the history of disasters, told me. Some progressives believe that the pandemic has created an opening for ambitious policy proposals. “Among progressive political leaders around here, there’s a lot of talk around: We’re not going back to normal, because normal wasn’t good enough,” Goldstein said.

In practice, though, progressives don’t always agree on what prudent policy looks like. Consider the experience of Somerville, Massachusetts, the kind of community where residents proudly display rainbow yard signs declaring In this house … we believe science is real. In the 2016 Democratic primary, 57 percent of voters there supported Bernie Sanders, and this year the Democratic Socialists of America have a shot at taking over the city council. As towns around Somerville began going back to in-person school in the fall, Mayor Joseph Curtatone and other Somerville leaders delayed a return to in-person learning. A group of moms—including scientists, pediatricians, and doctors treating COVID-19 patients—began to feel frustrated that Somerville schools weren’t welcoming back students. They considered themselves progressive and believed that they understood teachers’ worries about getting sick. But they saw the city’s proposed safety measures as nonsensical and unscientific—a sort of hygiene theater that prioritized the appearance of protection over getting kids back to their classrooms.

With Somerville kids still at home, contractors conducted in-depth assessments of the city’s school buildings, leading to proposals that included extensive HVAC-system overhauls and the installation of UV-sterilization units and even automatic toilet flushers—renovations with a proposed budget of $7.5 million. The mayor told me that supply-chain delays and protracted negotiations with the local teachers’ union slowed the reopening process. “No one wanted to get kids back to school more than me … It’s people needing to feel safe,” he said. “We want to make sure that we’re eliminating any risk of transmission from person to person in schools and carrying that risk over to the community.”

Months slipped by, and evidence mounted that schools could reopen safely. In Somerville, a local leader appeared to describe parents who wanted a faster return to in-person instruction as “fucking white parents” in a virtual public meeting; a community member accused the group of mothers advocating for schools to reopen of being motivated by white supremacy. “I spent four years fighting Trump because he was so anti-science,” Daniele Lantagne, a Somerville mom and engineering professor who works to promote equitable access to clean water and sanitation during disease outbreaks, told me. “I spent the last year fighting people who I normally would agree with … desperately trying to inject science into school reopening, and completely failed.”

In March, Erika Uyterhoeven, the democratic-socialist state representative for Somerville, compared the plight of teachers to that of Amazon workers and meatpackers, and described the return to in-person classes as part of a “push in a neoliberal society to ensure, over and above the well-being of educators, that our kids are getting a competitive education compared to other suburban schools.” (She later asked the socialist blog that ran her comments to remove that quote, because so many parents found her statements offensive.) In Somerville, “everyone wants to be actively anti-racist. Everyone believes Black lives matter. Everyone wants the Green New Deal,” Elizabeth Pinsky, a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. “No one wants to talk about … how to actually get kindergartners onto the carpet of their teachers.” Most elementary and middle schoolers in Somerville finally started back in person this spring, with some of the proposed building renovations in place. Somerville hasn’t yet announced when high schoolers will go back full-time, and Curtatone wouldn’t guarantee that schools will be open for in-person instruction in the fall.

Policy makers’ decisions about how to fight the pandemic are fraught because they have such an impact on people’s lives. But personal decisions during the coronavirus crisis are fraught because they seem symbolic of people’s broader value systems. When vaccinated adults refuse to see friends indoors, they’re working through the trauma of the past year, in which the brokenness of America’s medical system was so evident. When they keep their kids out of playgrounds and urge friends to stay distanced at small outdoor picnics, they are continuing the spirit of the past year, when civic duty has been expressed through lonely asceticism. For many people, this kind of behavior is a form of good citizenship. That’s a hard idea to give up.

And so as the rest of vaccinated America begins its summer of bacchanalia, rescheduling long-awaited dinner parties and medium-size weddings, the most hard-core pandemic progressives are left, Cassandra-like, to preach their peers’ folly. Every weekday, Zachary Loeb publishes four “plague poems” on Twitter—little missives about the headlines and how it feels to live through a pandemic. He is personally progressive: He blogs about topics like Trump’s calamitous presidency and the future of climate change. He also studies disaster history. (“I jokingly tell my students that my reputation in the department is as Mr. Doom, but once I have earned my Ph.D., I will officially be Dr. Doom,” he told me.) His Twitter avatar is the plague doctor: a beaked, top-hat-wearing figure who traveled across European towns treating victims of the bubonic plague. Last February, Loeb started stocking up on cans of beans; last March, he left his office, and has not been back since. This April, as the country inched toward half of the population getting a first dose of a vaccine and daily deaths dipped below 1,000, his poems became melancholy. “When you were young, wise old Aesop tried to warn you about this moment,” he wrote, “wherein the plague is the steady tortoise, and we are the overconfident hare.”

Mother’s Day

I am not a Mother and in Christian dogma I am a worthless slut. Yay for me! I have spent the better part of the last two weeks searching the varying Facebook and YouTube pastors who seemingly manage to avoid any of the filters and screening that is in place to avoid riling up the white supremacist crew. The free speech mantra of hate has a special place in many of the ramshackle churches that turned to the social medium forums when the pandemic hit thanks to to restrictions in attendance numbers in public/private settings. All that is coming to an end as we our in the tri-state area, day 418 of quarantine. I am not sure which is my favorite supressive speech about women. There is of course my dear former friend Ethan explaining the role of women in the Church, (Feminism is not about equality its about power) or this assholes idea of how men must work with women in the home to not dress or act like a worthless slut. There are many others with similar tones which tells me that Christianity is not something I will take a pass on, like Covid vaccines for some of the more ill informed.

As we now have our final day of reckoning on May 19th, it brings us to 432 days spent in fear. That aspect doesn’t end that day it just means for us folks vaccinated we can fully rejoin the living with some risk but far less than it was when this officially began which was 2019.

So this will be for many a Sunday of brunches and family gatherings for some it will be better than last year and for others not any better as Grandmother may have been one of the dead, or she may be an anti vaxxer or has not been able to access it due to health or physical restrictions have prohibited her from getting the vaccine. Here is where a modified version of meals on wheels is becoming a proactive way of getting this to homes and hoping to also reduce the additional confusion and fear associated with vaccine resistance. And no folks I am not letting up as long as we have anti vaxxers in a our midst we are at risk for variants and continued spread in the community which will require us to be endlessly on guard when put into a confined space. Who wants to be the one who managed to be the .05 percent that bypasses vaccine resilience? And frankly I don’t want to deal with any of these assholes and it is why I am boycotting any business or individual who professes to think that my shot is their cover for their ignorance. Go fuck yourself.

As we know Women and Faces of Color will be the most harmed if not physically from Covid but the fallout economically due to the shutdown. Jobs will not just “come back” and everyone is back at their old gig with better pay and health care in place to secure that this bullshit doesn’t happen again. Companies have found that the last 418 days of remote work may be worth investigating more fully as a way of reducing costs and enhancing profit. The most effective way a business does this is by staff reductions or RIFF’s as that is quick and easy. Cutting operational costs, such as physical space and logistics is rarely done and certainly not CEO or Managerial pay is ever done. Well on the logistical demands this fell into the laps of their CFO and I am sure that it will be a factor in re-opening businesses in the months ahead.

Americans are a different breed than say 50 years ago when faced with another type of flu epidemic. There was no closing of schools, no hysterical pronouncements daily by leaders, no shutting of borders and closing businesses. There was little to no economic fallout and hospitals were not sites of massive Black Friday rushes. Well that is because the amount of hospital beds in 1957 when the Asian Flu arrived (yes it was called the Asian flu as that is where it originated from). Now the transmission rate was lower, it was 1.65 to Covid’s 2.5 to 3. That means likely about the same as normal flu 1 to 1 with a likelihood of a 1 to 2 spread (which again factors the rate of spread by how new the contagion was contracted and of course the health of the exposure of those to whom close contact was made). So in the case of Covid I like the use the former acquaintance of mine: His wife had Covid, a mild case, she transmitted it to both him and their daughter (she is 8, so yes kids get it). And this child transmitted it to her Grandfather. Spread with children is smaller and they don’t have the true high virus load required to further transmission and get very sick. And with Covid the random way it did sicken people we know killed more with pre-exisisting conditions, or just old as the immune system is weaker. Of the original 3 that contracted Covid all of their symptoms were mild. The Grandfather admitted to the hospital. Now we don’t know who else contracted the disease from the two adults, as he is also a Covid denier and in turn did not cooperate let alone tell me within in a reasonable time frame from the original date of exposure that he had it. I knew when I saw him in the car with the family half masked, him half masked picking up takeout and going to get tested. To this day I still laugh at what a fucking piece of garbage he is and then the family went to Hawaiil within 14 days of their original contraction, with the explanation that they had to quarantine there anyway and could not leave the house they rented. I did not ask if they had tested negative prior to going as I knew he would lie or come up with a convoluted justification for his assholeness.

But it was then I knew air and circulation, outdoors and distance matter. Close contact, longer contact were factors as I nor the Barista inside (but doors open and he wearing a mask) did not contract Covid. But as we look back as to now almost two years there were so many lies, so many contradictions and confusion I can see why we were not the beach goers dancing to the summer hit, Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu, by the Huey Smith and the Clowns.

The number of deaths in 1957-58 were approximately 116,000 versus the current 550K we have faced in Covid and again we know that these numbers can never be accurate in either case but this is a fair comparison. The death rate of Covid has been 80% in the ages 65+ and of that again we know like Cop violence the death rate among faces of color hovers around 40%. But that was not how the rollout began to focus on the most vunerable and getting them into qurantine and tested, isolated if positive right away, it largely affected the youngest, the wealthiest who were least affected by both Covid and the economic restraints the lockdown caused. Once again we demonstrated institutional racism at its finest. Had we rolled out testing and closed borders earlier, sped up a tracking and tracing program to meet those needs the same way we did vaccines we may not have had these deaths and collapse of economy. Again the rich have been doing just fine; however walk through towns and see the businesses and doors shut, the small employers holding on without customers that used to come from the offices next door. Their story is not yet told, along with the owners of rental properties who are not wealthy landowners and have not been able to meet obligations in the same way larger businesses (like Kushner) who have. That fallback has yet to happen, but it is coming.

But what is more distressing and explains much of the reasoning behind the lockdown, was hospitals being overwhelmed. Again we know that some did not have the Black Friday crush and others were devastated with patients to the point many were sent home, which in 1957 was the preferred course of action and treatment despite the fact that hospital beds per 1,000 were at a high of 9.18 and today they are 2.77. So in other words we don’t have the access and availability to provide care and that is where economics and race came into factor and why public facilities were simply unable to provide care to the level needed and may have inadvertantly contributed to more deaths than needed. Lack of coordinated efforts, lack of equipment and simply just a lack of funding for public health overall are all factors involved in the failures of the pandemic.

Looking at Eisenhower Administration at the time they shifted money to public health services requesting 2.5 million (23 million in today’s dollars) to do the equivalent of Operation Warp Speed and the father of vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman. As for closures and demands on public lockdowns, it did not happen. As for the sick, the public messaging was that Americans were to do what we do best; pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and stay home and drink fluids. Wow Dr. Fauci was very much alive during that time I wonder what he did? Man I hate that dude.

And lastly the issues of the schools which has become the most divisive issue over all of those made during the lockdown. Schools were not closed in 1957 and there was the attitude that the earlier diseases of Mumps, Rubella, Chicken Pox and Measles (the most virulent of contagions) had swept through towns and schools in the late 1940’s led people to take the Asian Flu in stride. That is the up by the bootstraps mentality I have met among many older folks who are the anti-mask, vaccine resistant folks that Trump embodies. Again even Biden who is actually older than Trump would be; however, that is why he gets the need for better public health and education as that is a real issue for us to go forward. Trump’s world view is myopic and narcissistic and that is the one reason we truly failed in response to new Asian Flu.

Jack Kerouac summed up the decade the best in “Off the Road” – “I just gotten over a serious illnesss that I won’t talk about.” And that marks the Beat Generation, they beat a virus and hit the road to study the way America had changed. I am not sure we have that kind of self reflection or stamina. And we owe it all to our Mothers. So happy Mother’s Day, this wanton slut will spend the day doing what she does best – telling anyone who crosses her path to go fuck themselves, this pussy is out of business.

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.

Covid Chronicles Episode 4

As these are the times in the days of our lives another week of Covid Chronicles ends with new models, predictions and fuck ups.  And yes both red and blue and every color in between seem to prove how fucked up data that they endlessly quote to validate decision making, to testing, to actually knowing shit about Covid continues to confuse, misinform and frustrate all of America.  The Bible of the Country, The Times did a lengthy story about how and why this is the way it is and it is largely thanks to the Dr of the Lab of Frankenstein who simply is not grasping facts, reality (irony or oxymoron?) and communications.

But the week really began with the infamous Axios interview with the biggest Australian Journalist to come to America since Murdoch, only clearly liberal or at least seemingly one, Jonathan Swan, to put Crazy Dopy Grandpa like a shrimp on the barbie.  Well with 1,000 deaths a day, the CDG responds: “It is what it is.”  And never have been truer words spoken. That and the infamous 1917 flu which apparently preceded the one in 1918, but killed fewer.

The current crop of modelers have decided that now is a good time to double down on the scare tactics and the University of Washington, the fav of the Bride of Frankenstein (now ostracized by her creator and spouse) and Bill Gates, who has decided climate change is a better topic, are moving away from the lab in some attempt to save themselves and fuck the rest of us. SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN! will be the new phrase shouted at the Republican Presidential cluster fuck.  Which again brings us to the only thing we Democrats care about, which Black women is Biden choosing?  Nothing says pandering and condescension more than simply picking a woman due to both gender and color.  Well its better than nothing and really what Vice President since LBJ has ever accomplished anything and that was due to a President being assassinated, so let’s just hope Biden lives through the first term as he won’t make a second one.  And then we can elect a woman of color or not but anyone other than an old white man.

And as aid to help small businesses and Americans flounders, thanks to Richard III, Mitch McConnell, (we are going Shakespearean now with Nancy as Henry Tudor) did little leaving the Dr. to go it alone and we all know how that works out.  Get those torches ready, Tiki for the racist crowd and just IPhones for the regular liberal folks.  And the virus keeps raging. But Americans are determined to catch it or defy it, so  they will head to bars, churches and send kids to schools to prove they are exceptional in every way.   And some get it and the CDC are using families as lab rats to figure this shit out. Science is a guessing game or in this case a game made as we go along, either/or neither/nor and this is one game that needs all ideas to the table and Igor to take a backseat for a change as he really lends nothing to the discussion other than shaking his head or face grimacing.  

My favorite is that kids, staff and teachers of schools, who are the unsuspecting lab rats, who have come to school pending a test result but shoved out the door with a cut lunch and a prayer or the kid who is sure they have done it all right but still contracted it try to figure out what this is and why they are forced to do this. Well the adults in the room are fucking morons, and yes Volleyball practice in a  poorly ventilated gym with no masks and confined for over an hour means the potential for contracting it rises, so kid you need to study some science while in lockdown.

As the virus rages on, the witches stir the pot and see trouble ahead.

Possible Coronavirus ‘Trouble Ahead,’ U.S. Cities Warned, Ohio Governor Tests Positive

By Reuters
Aug. 6, 2020

WASHINGTON — White House health experts warned that even small rises in the percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19 in some U.S. cities could mean trouble and urged local leaders to remain vigilant to avoid a surge.

“This is a predictor of trouble ahead,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases official, told CNN on Thursday.

The U.S. death toll is now over 159,000 – the most in the world – with 4.8 million known cases.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Thursday became the latest senior elected official to test positive. He said did not have symptoms and was tested ahead of a planned meeting with President Donald Trump.

Fauci was speaking after White House coronavirus task force coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, identified new areas of concern in a telephone call with state and local officials on Wednesday.

Baltimore and Atlanta remain at a “very high level,” as well as Kansas City, Portland, Omaha and the Central Valley in California, Birx said on the call, a recording of which was obtained by the journalism nonprofit Center for Public Integrity.

White House data shows small increases in the percentage of positive coronavirus tests in Chicago, Boston, Detroit and Washington. Those cities need to “get on top of it,” Birx said.

Even where most people are doing things right, Fauci said, those who do not wear masks or follow social distancing guidelines can keep the virus smoldering.

“Unless everybody pulls together … we’re going to continue to see these kind of increases that Dr. Birx was talking about in several of those cities,” he said, noting that rising hospitalizations and deaths often follow such increases.

Tennessee and North Carolina reported record single-day increases in deaths on Thursday with 42 and 73, respectively.

The U.S. outbreak, once centered around highly populated New York City, has since spread to communities from coast to coast, driven in part by summer vacation travel.

On the positive side, medical professionals have a better understanding of what they are dealing with, said Dr. Khalilah Gates, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

“We don’t know all of it, but it’s not the fear of the unknown anymore,” she told Reuters.

“INEVITABLE MOMENT”

Birx has been traveling around the country, warning local and state officials not to let their guard down, a message often at odds with that of Trump, who on Wednesday said the virus “will go away like things go away.”

Trump has urged state and local authorities to re-open public schools for in-person learning to help get Americans back to work and spending again. A strong economy is one of the pillars of Trump’s campaign for re-election on Nov. 3.

In rural Mississippi’s Corinth school district, where schools opened two weeks ago, five confirmed COVID-19 cases forced some students and teachers into quarantine, Superintendent Edward Lee Childress said on Facebook Live, without specifying how many.

The decision to reopen schools took into account the “inevitable moment” that COVID-19 would be detected and contact tracing plans triggered, he said.

“We’re going to have some more positive cases. We know it will happen,” Childress said.

Although the number of Americans seeking jobless benefits fell last week, a staggering 31.3 million people were receiving unemployment checks in mid-July. Other data on Thursday showed a 54% surge in job cuts announced by employers in July.

The State Department on Thursday lifted an advisory from March that U.S. citizens should avoid all international travel due to the pandemic. But American travelers are still restricted or banned in many parts of the world, including in the European Union.

Okay then of course American exceptionalism was found out to be another myth to be added to the ever increasing heap of bullshit shoveled to us in schools, remember those, that also taught history with a  white supremacist bent.    And it is why the loathed Electoral College exists. Another balm and pacifier to the South and their racist history.  It is a farce and needs to be dumped.  Hand me a torch, we need to vote.  The dog whistle is out and is summoning the monster and the mythical violence and suburbs that good white people are being invaded by aliens aka Mexicans and free Blacks who want your home, your jobs and your children. Well I mean you are there and what else is there to do right now?

Well you could fill in your census, if convenient. As this gentleman informed the Times regarding the subject:

Roger Alexander, 32, a resident of Marietta, Ga., was in downtown Lithonia on Tuesday finishing up work on a hip-hop-themed video encouraging people to register and vote. Mr. Alexander said he had heard that the decennial count was being taken: “I feel like I’ve seen something about the census trying to get it together,” he said.Mr. Alexander had not filled out a form yet but said that he would eventually do so — “if it is something convenient for me to do.”

Mr. Alexander is not alone in his suspicion, ignorance and of course conspiracy theories that center around everything from Covid to the Census, but without that data, which again we have had shoved down our throat like a Covid test up our nose, is critical in funding our cities and states. Those crappy schools and public health and housing that is currently dilapidated beyond repair will get worse.  So while it seems inconvenient to register to vote and fill a form in that is even shorter than the Voter’s registration, is that much of a challenge then have at it.  And don’t scream racist tropes or march in the street demanding action when you actually refuse to be a part of America when it doesn’t suit you.

 Ah Macbeth has come to the stage and cried:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

End Scene. Another week and another tale of the Covid Chronicles. 

Covid Chronicles Episode 3

Well another week ends and another begins or does any of that time space continum matter anymore? Space the final frontier is actually looking like a good idea, maybe the crackpots Bezos and Musk, are right to hit the rocket and get the fuck out.  Ad Astra does a great job of showing what insanity looks like in space and Tommy Lee Jones could be our space leader, there is something very Trumpian about him.

Trump has returned to our nightly schedule and the ratings are off the roof! I have no idea I just read the recaps as doing anything, cleaning my toilet, going about the street cleaning dog shit has to be more important that watching a doddering crazy old man ramble on incoherently about bullshit that he makes up to validate that he is  doddering crazy old man.  The Lincoln Project is doing a great job highlighting just how crazy he is but they fail to mention the enablers of the GOP who allow this to continue.  All of the worst players in this game are the Southern leadership cohort from Senators Mitch McConnell,  Lindsay Graham, Marsha Blackburn, Thom Tillis are all vociferous cock suckers in ways that defy how I have said repeatedly that the South will bury race, sexual identity and dignity for money.  Look at Mitch McConnell’s wife and just ask Miss Lindsay about his love for his former work husband, John McCain.  Blackburn was a former beauty queen, aka, cum dumpster, and Tillis is the 15th richest in the Senate and tried to cash in on Trump’s impeachment.   The South has a special kind of trash sleaze unlike any other. Again they have the Noble Cause as they refer to the Civil War to justify well being losers. Again they like the idea that the war between the States was an economic one and the right to secede from the Union. Okay then go with that lie.  Again I have never met more prodigious liars than I have met, better than Southern liars.

As for our Congress on both sides of the aisle, they have made Prostitution legal for years they just fuck everyone over for a fee. As for William Barr he is all that John Bolton wishes he was, for Barr is not about Trump, it is about the office and the agenda of establishing a path for clear Presidential powers in the future when the GOP Rise again like the dicks they are fueled on Viagra.   Trump is their seat filler and a great cover for the politics they do in the darkness, seat Judges, change laws, redistricting, voting right suppression, reproductive access and other economic policies that keep the rich and the checks flowing.

So we are down to less than a 100 days and we are not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and this tunnel is looking more like the ones the Thai boys were stuck in when Elon Musk was the craziest person in media, declaring their Coach a Pedophile.  Good pre-pandemic times!  Is there a Lifetime movie coming out on this? I could use one right now.

As Europe has done a fairly good job leveling Covid but the Southern Hemisphere deep in winter has found themselves now facing a risk they thought they could New Zealand it and shove it back into the closet with the Gays, Liberal Women and Black people.  Oh wait that is the GOP.  Melbourne, Australia is now declaring a state of emergency, and meanwhile Brexit Johnson the PM of Britain is circle jerking with his man-boys to get that country back to his agenda, whatever that was, as folks are jumping off that sinking ship like the Lusthania.

And on the celebrity front, Madonna has finally proven that her talent has largely been appropriated from others, from Gay folks, from Black folks, from sane folks, as she descends into Covid meltdown.  I give her Kayne two stars crazy, as well again I am not sure how much of his descent into madness is real or for Keeping it 100 with the Kardashian real.  They could invite Dr. Immanuel over for one of Kayne’s Sunday Meetings.  I would enjoy that as an episode she could discuss the qualities of how a bleach bath removes ashiness, along with your skin, but hey whatever works!

Is any of this shocking? No, not really. Given the lack of education of most Americans, from poor schooling to the individual who has no access to a library (remember those where the homeless hung out all day) or to newspapers where reading is fundamental is a part of the problem.  The inter webs and the magic 3×5 cards don’t lend well to reading while searching Facebook for misinformation.  I was told by a friend that he could not handle reading news where it continues on another page and having to do that on his phone.  I gave him the app info for the Daily, the Times podcast, as a source and reprint now all news on single pages to inform him. His colleague had never heard about Podcasts and what they are, so well, sigh and shakes head,  one down one thousand more to go before I lose it with the quarantine. But it won’t matter  as the press is banned from the GOP convention which again darkens the message to policy and plans of the GOP.  Ah yes Democracy really is being done in darkness.

And this brings me back to our current state and that is state by state crazy and the quiet uptick in Covid numbers which the Crazy Dopey Grandpa denies and then wanders off to make another claim: Change the election date, ban Tik Tok, Fauci is wrong, I’m the baby Jesus.  All of this throw down is a distraction to keep the great unwashed from focusing on the problem at large – Covid.

By day one, not week one, but day one, a school immediately had to go into lockdown in Indiana when a Student’s covid test came back positive.  Proving once again that personal responsibility is zero when it comes to handling yourself during a pandemic.  As that parent knew a test was pending, clearly was not sure if they had been exposed but enough to get tested and then in turn said to their kid, “Go to school you are fine, will be fine and fuck this I can’t take one more minute of your pre-teen bullshit.” Again proving that education is second place to finding a place to day care your kids the same way you institutionalize your old, you dump them into dumpsters and then they scrounge around for something to do all day from Bingo to disrupting a classroom, at least we can see the circle of life in real time.   But let’s just deep clean it into hygiene perfection as that is the solution. Yeah sure, washing hands in a public school with no soap, no paper towels but shitloads of cockroaches, worn out buildings and windows that won’t open. Not a problem.  Again the hysteria over all this cleaning is another goal post that moves with the wind when it comes to theories about how its spread.  Its blood borne without the fucking.. herpes folks without dick. Well a big one or small one given what we know about Trump. Irony that the Golden State Killer also small dicked, explains that rampage that lasted over 40 years before amateurs stepped in to revive the crime.  Here is another podcast, Man in the Window, aside from the subject of the GSK, it reminds you why we are protesting the Police, they are IDIOTS -too//two/to. (My Trump tweet for the day). The Book, I’ll be Gone in the Dark, also touches on how long and insidious that maniac terrorized California.  This is what white men do, fuck you over until they don’t.    You know what?   I am just going to wash that man right out my hair; If I can get a hairdressing appointment before the next lockdown. And yes that is the next phase of the endless moving goal post on this episode of Friday Night Lights.

But the real drama I have contrasted this to repeatedly – Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein. Yes the Monster is free and Igor and the Bride cannot restrain him, the Villagers have risen their Tiki torches and lit the way for the Monster to cross the bridges to the South and he has brought with him the best gift to give to a host – Covid – its the gift that keeps on giving. Taking re-gifting to new heights. So the only way to stop it is to crush it and how? Shut it down and put in the dumpster with all the rest of the shit we put in there and take it to the crusher versus recycling and renewing. I know we need to go green and all but its time to actually do something of use.  Right now we have done nothing but to end each episode with the dramatic musical cue to leave us to wait for the next episode. And anyone whoever watched a soap knows that is not possible or how else could it go on.  Shit I watch the British one East Enders it now has the kids of the former kids who are now the Adults doing the same shit that they did 20 years ago.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Yeah I do need to go to a hairdresser.

Coronavirus threat rises across U.S.: ‘We just have to assume the monster is everywhere’

The Washington Post
By Joel Achenbach, Rachel Weiner and Chelsea Janes
August 1, 2020

The coronavirus is spreading at dangerous levels across much of the United States, and public health experts are demanding a dramatic reset in the national response, one that recognizes that the crisis is intensifying and that current piecemeal strategies aren’t working.

This is a new phase of the pandemic, one no longer built around local or regional clusters and hot spots. It comes at an unnerving moment in which the economy suffered its worst collapse since the Great Depression, schools are rapidly canceling plans for in-person instruction and Congress has failed to pass a new emergency relief package. President Trump continues to promote fringe science, the daily death toll keeps climbing and the human cost of the virus in America has just passed 150,000 lives.

“Unlike many countries in the world, the United States is not currently on course to get control of this epidemic. It’s time to reset,” declared a report released this week by Johns Hopkins University.

Another report from the Association of American Medical Colleges offered a similarly blunt message: “If the nation does not change its course — and soon — deaths in the United States could be well into the multiple hundreds of thousands.”

The country is exhausted, but the virus is not. It has shown a consistent pattern: It spreads opportunistically wherever people let down their guard and return to more familiar patterns of mobility and socializing. When communities tighten up, by closing bars or requiring masks in public, transmission drops.

That has happened in some Sun Belt states, including Arizona, Florida and Texas, which are still dealing with a surge of hospitalizations and deaths but are finally turning around the rate of new infections.

There are signs, however, that the virus is spreading freely in much of the country. Experts are focused on upticks in the percentage of positive coronavirus tests in the upper South and Midwest. It is a sign that the virus could soon surge anew in the heartland. Infectious-disease experts also see warning signs in East Coast cities hammered in the spring.

“There are fewer and fewer places where anybody can assume the virus is not there,” Gov. Mike DeWine (R) of Ohio said Wednesday. “It’s in our most rural counties. It’s in our smallest communities. And we just have to assume the monster is everywhere. It’s everywhere.”

Dire data

An internal Trump administration briefing document prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and obtained Friday by The Washington Post counted 453,659 new infections in the past week.

Alaska is in trouble. And Hawaii, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma. Those are the five states, as of Friday, with the highest percentage increase in the seven-day average of new cases, according to a Post analysis of nationwide health data.

“The dominoes are falling now,” said David Rubin, director of the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has produced a model showing where the virus is likely to spread over the next four weeks.

His team sees ominous trends in big cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Washington, with Boston and New York not far behind. And Rubin warns that the expected influx of students into college towns at the end of this month will be another epidemiological shock.

“I suspect we’re going to see big outbreaks in college towns,” he said.

Young people are less likely to have a severe outcome from the coronavirus, but they are adept at propelling the virus through the broader population, including among people at elevated risk. Numbers of coronavirus-related hospitalizations in the United States went from 36,158 on July 1 to 52,767 on July 31, according to The Post’s data. FEMA reports a sharp increase in the number of patients on ventilators.

The crisis has highlighted the deep disparities in health outcomes among racial and ethnic groups, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week showed that hospitalization rates due to the coronavirus are roughly five times higher among Black, Hispanic and Native Americans than Whites.

Thirty-seven states and Puerto Rico will probably see rising daily death tolls during the next two weeks compared with the previous two weeks, according to the latest ensemble forecast from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that combines more than 30 coronavirus models.

There are glimmers of progress. The FEMA report showed 237 U.S. counties with at least two weeks of steady declines in numbers of new coronavirus cases.

But there are more than 3,100 counties in America.

“This is not a natural disaster that happens to one or two or three communities and then you rebuild,” said Beth Cameron, vice president for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and a former White House National Security Council staffer focused on pandemics. “This is a spreading disaster that moves from one place to another, and until it’s suppressed and until we ultimately have a safe and effective and distributed vaccine, every community is at risk.”

A national strategy, whether advanced by the federal government or by the states working in tandem, will more effectively control viral spread than the current patchwork of state and local policies, according to a study from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published Thursday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The coordination is necessary because one state’s policies affect other states. Sometimes, that influence is at a distance, because states that are geographically far apart can have cultural and social ties, as is the case with the “peer states” of New York and Florida, the report found.

“The cost of our uncoordinated national response to covid-19, it’s dramatic,” said MIT economist Sinan Aral, senior author of the paper.

Some experts argue for a full six-to-eight-week national shutdown, something even more sweeping than what was instituted in the spring. There appears to be no political support for such a move.

Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said fresh federal intervention is necessary in this second wave of closures. Enhanced federal unemployment benefits expired at the end of July, with no agreement on a new stimulus package in sight.

“Congress, on a bipartisan basis, was trying to create a bridge to help individuals and businesses navigate the period of a shutdown,” Bradley said. “Absent an extension of that bridge, in light of a second shutdown, that bridge becomes a pier. And then that’s a real problem.”

With the economy in shambles, hospitals filling up and the public frustrated, anxious and angry, the challenge for national leadership is finding a plausible sea-to-sea strategy that can win widespread support and simultaneously limit sickness and death from the virus.

Many Americans may simply feel discouraged and overtaxed, unable to maintain precautions such as social distancing and mask-wearing. Others remain resistant, for cultural or ideological reasons, to public health guidance and buy into conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

DeWine is struggling to get Ohio citizens to take seriously the need to wear masks. A sheriff in rural western Ohio told the governor Wednesday that people didn’t think the virus was a big problem. DeWine informed the sheriff that the numbers in his county were higher per capita than in Toledo.

“The way I’ve explained to people, if we want to have Friday night football in the fall, if we want our kids back in school, what we do in the next two weeks will determine if that happens,” DeWine said.

The crucial metric

The coronavirus has always been several steps ahead of the U.S. government, the scientific community, the news media and the general public. By the time a community notices a surge in patients to hospital emergency rooms, the virus has seeded itself widely.

The virus officially known as SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted by people who are infectious but not symptomatic. The incubation period is typically about six days, according to the CDC. When symptoms flare, they can be ambiguous. A person may not seek a test right away. Then, the test results may not come back for days, a week, even longer.

That delay makes contact tracing nearly futile. It also means government data on virus transmission is invariably out of date to some degree — it’s a snapshot of what was happening a week or two weeks before. And different jurisdictions use different metrics to track the virus, further fogging the picture.

The top doctors on the White House coronavirus task force, Deborah Birx and Anthony S. Fauci, are newly focused on the early warning signs of a virus outbreak. This week, they warned that the kind of runaway outbreaks seen in the Sun Belt could potentially happen elsewhere. Among the states of greatest concern: Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

Fauci and Birx have pointed to a critical metric: the percentage of positive test results. When that figure starts to tick upward, it is a sign of increasing community spread of the virus.

“That is kind of the predictor that if you don’t do something — namely, do something different — if you’re opening up at a certain pace, slow down, maybe even backtrack a little,” Fauci said in an interview Wednesday.

Without a vaccine, the primary tools for combating the spread of the virus remain the common-sense “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” including mask-wearing, hand-washing, staying out of bars and other confined spaces, maintaining social distancing of at least six feet and avoiding crowds, Fauci said.

“Seemingly simple maneuvers have been very effective in preventing or even turning around the kind of surges we’ve seen,” he said.

Thirty-three U.S. states have positivity rates above 5 percent. The World Health Organization has cited that percentage as a crucial benchmark for governments deciding whether to reopen their economy. Above 5 percent, stay closed. Below, open with caution.

Of states with positivity rates below 5 percent, nine have seen those rates rise during the last two weeks.

“You may not fully realize that when you think things are okay, you actually are seeing a subtle, insidious increase that is usually reflected in the percent of your tests that are positive,” Fauci said.

The shutdown blues

Some governors immediately took the White House warnings to heart. On Monday, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) said at a news conference that he had met with Birx the previous day and was told he was getting the same warning Texas and Florida received “weeks before the worst of the worst happened.”

To prevent that outcome in his state, Beshear said, he was closing bars for two weeks and cutting seating in restaurants.

But as Beshear pleaded that “we all need to be singing from the same sheet of music,” discord and confusion prevailed.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said Thursday she wasn’t convinced a mask mandate is effective: “No one knows particularly the best strategy.”

Earlier in the week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) demurred on masks and bar closures even as he stood next to Birx and spoke to reporters.

“That’s not a plan for us now,” he said. He added emphatically, “We are not going to close the economy back down.”

The virus is spreading throughout his state, and not just in the big cities. Vacationers took the virus home from the honky-tonks of Nashville and blues clubs of Memphis to where they live in more rural areas, said John Graves, a professor at Vanderbilt University studying the pandemic.

“The geographical footprint of the virus has reached all corners of the state at this point,” Graves said.

In Missouri, Gov. Michael L. Parson (R) was dismissive of New York’s imposition of a quarantine on residents from his state as a sign of a worsening pandemic. “I’m not going to put much stock in what New York says — they’re a disaster,” he said at a news conference Monday.

Missouri has no mask mandate, leaving it to local officials to act — often in the face of hostility and threats. In the town of Branson, angry opponents testified Tuesday that there was no reason for a mask order when deaths in the county have been few and far between.

“It hasn’t hit us here yet, that’s what I’m scared of,” Branson Alderman Bill Skains said before voting with a majority in favor of the mandate. “It is coming, and it’s coming like a freight train.”

Democratic mayors in Missouri’s two biggest cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, said that with so many people needing jobs, they are reluctant to follow Birx’s recommendation to close bars.

“The whole-blanket approach to shut everybody down feels a little harsh for the people who are doing it right,” said Jacob Long, spokesman for St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson. “We’re trying to take care of some bad actors first.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey also got a warning from Birx. On Wednesday, he said all bar drinking must move outside.

“We don’t want to be heading in the direction of everybody else,” said Kristen Ehresmann, director of the infectious-disease epidemiology division at the Minnesota Department of Health. She acknowledged that some options “are really pretty draconian.”

The problem is that less-painful measures have proven insufficient.

“The disease transmission we’re seeing is more than what would have been expected if people were following the guidance as it is laid out. It’s a reflection of the fact that they’re not,” she said.

‘A tremendous disappointment’

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) tried to implement broad statewide measures early in the pandemic, only to have his “Safer at Home” order struck down by the state’s Supreme Court.

With cases in his state rising anew, he tried again Thursday, declaring a public health emergency and issuing a statewide mask mandate.

“While our local health departments have been doing a heck of a job responding to this pandemic in our communities, the fact of the matter is, this virus doesn’t care about any town, city or county boundary, and we need a statewide approach to get Wisconsin back on track,” Evers said.

Ryan Westergaard, Wisconsin’s chief medical officer, said he is dismayed by the failures of the national pandemic response.

“I really thought we had a chance to keep this suppressed,” Westergaard said. “The model is a good one: testing, tracing, isolation, supportive quarantine. Those things work. We saw this coming. We knew we had to build robust, flexible systems to do this in all of our communities. It feels like a tremendous disappointment that we weren’t able to build a system in time that could handle this.”

There is one benefit to the way the virus has spread so broadly, he noted: “We no longer have to keep track of people traveling to a hot spot if hot spots are everywhere.”

Lockdown Showdown

I have suspected we are moving toward a national lock down right after Labor Day as there is no way to contain Covid and open the schools without a large scale program to force down the virus numbers and slow down positive cases and of course increasing death numbers.

I read this in the Washington Post and once that idea is floated with the Chamber of Commerce no less demanding Congressional intervention (a notoriously conservative leaning group) means that the heat is on to resolve the current issues being debated in Congress and that seems centered on the additional UI benefits that the GOP want to reduce to 70% of the unemployed workers last wages.  Again that would be fine if it was possible but in reality our States have very antiquated systems that cannot simply upgrade, alter or even calculate the equation correctly.  If no one recalls the fiasco about even simply getting benefits to people in a timely basis and in fact some are just receiving them so we have 99 problems when it comes to nationalized systems and policies regarding well fuck all anything.

But here we are with the fuckwits in the White House, the economy is in the shithole,  and Covid is not going away as this first wave is now a Tsunami.  

Coronavirus threat rises across U.S.: ‘We just have to assume the monster is everywhere’

The Washington Post

By Joel Achenbach,  Rachel Weiner and Chelsea Janes

August 1, 2020 a

The coronavirus is spreading at dangerous levels across much of the United States, and public health experts are demanding a dramatic reset in the national response, one that recognizes that the crisis is intensifying and that current piecemeal strategies aren’t working.

This is a new phase of the pandemic, one no longer built around local or regional clusters and hot spots. It comes at an unnerving moment in which the economy suffered its worst collapse since the Great Depression, schools are rapidly canceling plans for in-person instruction and Congress has failed to pass a new emergency relief package. President Trump continues to promote fringe science, the daily death toll keeps climbing and the human cost of the virus in America has just passed 150,000 lives.

“Unlike many countries in the world, the United States is not currently on course to get control of this epidemic. It’s time to reset,” declared a report released last week by Johns Hopkins University.

Another report from the Association of American Medical Colleges offered a similarly blunt message: “If the nation does not change its course — and soon — deaths in the United States could be well into the multiple hundreds of thousands.”

The country is exhausted, but the virus is not. It has shown a consistent pattern: It spreads opportunistically wherever people let down their guard and return to more familiar patterns of mobility and socializing. When communities tighten up, by closing bars or requiring masks in public, transmission drops.

That has happened in some Sun Belt states, including Arizona, Florida and Texas, which are still dealing with a surge of hospitalizations and deaths but are finally turning around the rate of new infections.

There are signs, however, that the virus is spreading freely in much of the country. Experts are focused on upticks in the percentage of positive coronavirus tests in the upper South and Midwest. It is a sign that the virus could soon surge anew in the heartland. Infectious-disease experts also see warning signs in East Coast cities hammered in the spring.

“There are fewer and fewer places where anybody can assume the virus is not there,” Gov. Mike DeWine (R) of Ohio said Wednesday. “It’s in our most rural counties. It’s in our smallest communities. And we just have to assume the monster is everywhere. It’s everywhere.”

Dire data

A briefing document released Friday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency counted 453,659 new infections in the past week.

Alaska is in trouble. And Hawaii, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma. Those are the five states, as of Friday, with the highest percentage increase in the seven-day average of new cases, according to a Washington Post analysis of nationwide health data.

“The dominoes are falling now,” said David Rubin, director of the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has produced a model showing where the virus is likely to spread over the next four weeks.

His team sees ominous trends in big cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Washington, with Boston and New York not far behind. And Rubin warns that the expected influx of students into college towns at the end of this month will be another epidemiological shock.

“I suspect we’re going to see big outbreaks in college towns,” he said.

Young people are less likely to have a severe outcome from the coronavirus, but they are adept at propelling the virus through the broader population, including among people at elevated risk. Daily coronavirus-related hospitalizations in the United States went from 36,158 on July 1 to 52,767 on July 31, according to The Post’s data. FEMA reports a sharp increase in the number of patients on ventilators.

The crisis has highlighted the deep disparities in health outcomes among racial and ethnic groups, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week showed that Black, Hispanic and Native American coronavirus hospitalization rates are roughly five times that of Whites.

Thirty-seven states and Puerto Rico will probably see rising daily death tolls during the next two weeks compared with the previous two weeks, according to the latest ensemble forecast from the University of Massachusetts Amherst that combines more than 30 coronavirus models.

There are glimmers of progress. The FEMA report showed 237 U.S. counties with at least two weeks of steady declines in numbers of new coronavirus cases.

But there are more than 3,100 counties in America.

“This is not a natural disaster that happens to one or two or three communities and then you rebuild,” said Beth Cameron, vice president for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and a former White House National Security Council staffer focused on pandemics. “This is a spreading disaster that moves from one place to another, and until it’s suppressed and until we ultimately have a safe and effective and distributed vaccine, every community is at risk.”

A national strategy, whether advanced by the federal government or by the states working in tandem, will more effectively control viral spread than the current patchwork of state and local policies, according to a study from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published Thursday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The coordination is necessary because one state’s policies affect other states. Sometimes, that influence is at a distance, because states that are geographically far apart can have cultural and social ties, as is the case with the “peer states” of New York and Florida, the report found.

“The cost of our uncoordinated national response to covid-19, it’s dramatic,” said MIT economist Sinan Aral, lead author of the paper.

Some experts argue for a full six-to-eight-week national shutdown, something even more sweeping than what was instituted in the spring. There appears to be no political support for such a move.

Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said fresh federal intervention is necessary in this second wave of closures. Enhanced federal unemployment benefits expired at the end of July, with no agreement on a new stimulus package in sight.

“Congress, on a bipartisan basis, was trying to create a bridge to help individuals and businesses navigate the period of a shutdown,” Bradley said. “Absent an extension of that bridge, in light of a second shutdown, that bridge becomes a pier. And then that’s a real problem.”

With the economy in shambles, hospitals filling up and the public frustrated, anxious and angry, the challenge for national leadership is finding a plausible sea-to-sea strategy that can win widespread support and simultaneously limit sickness and death from the virus.

Many Americans may simply feel discouraged and overtaxed, unable to maintain precautions such as social distancing and mask-wearing. Others remain resistant, for cultural or ideological reasons, to public health guidance and buy into conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

DeWine is struggling to get Ohio citizens to take seriously the need to wear masks. A sheriff in rural western Ohio told the governor Wednesday that people didn’t think the virus was a big problem. DeWine informed the sheriff that the numbers in his county were higher per capita than in Toledo.

“The way I’ve explained to people, if we want to have Friday night football in the fall, if we want our kids back in school, what we do in the next two weeks will determine if that happens,” DeWine said.

The crucial metric

The coronavirus has always been several steps ahead of the U.S. government, the scientific community, the news media and the general public. By the time a community notices a surge in patients to hospital emergency rooms, the virus has seeded itself widely.

The virus officially known as SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted by people who are infectious but not symptomatic. The incubation period is typically about six days, according to the CDC. When symptoms flare, they can be ambiguous. A person may not seek a test right away. Then, the test results may not come back for days, a week, even longer.

That delay makes contact tracing nearly futile. It also means government data on virus transmission is invariably out of date to some degree — it’s a snapshot of what was happening a week or two weeks before. And different jurisdictions use different metrics to track the virus, further fogging the picture.

The top doctors on the White House coronavirus task force, Deborah Birx and Anthony S. Fauci, are newly focused on the early warning signs of a virus outbreak. Last week, they warned that the kind of runaway outbreaks seen in the Sun Belt could potentially happen elsewhere. Among the states of greatest concern: Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

Fauci and Birx have pointed to a critical metric: the percentage of positive test results. When that figure starts to tick upward, it is a sign of increasing community spread of the virus.

“That is kind of the predictor that if you don’t do something — namely, do something different — if you’re opening up at a certain pace, slow down, maybe even backtrack a little,” Fauci said in an interview Wednesday.

Without a vaccine, the primary tools for combating the spread of the virus remain the common-sense “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” including mask-wearing, hand-washing, staying out of bars and other confined spaces, maintaining social distancing of at least six feet and avoiding crowds, Fauci said.

“Seemingly simple maneuvers have been very effective in preventing or even turning around the kind of surges we’ve seen,” he said.

Thirty-three U.S. states have positivity rates above 5 percent. The World Health Organization has cited that percentage as a crucial benchmark for governments deciding whether to reopen their economy. Above 5 percent, stay closed. Below, open with caution.

Of states with positivity rates below 5 percent, nine have seen those rates rise during the last two weeks.

“You may not fully realize that when you think things are okay, you actually are seeing a subtle, insidious increase that is usually reflected in the percent of your tests that are positive,” Fauci said.

The shutdown blues

Some governors immediately took the White House warnings to heart. On Monday, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) said at a news conference that he had met with Birx the previous day and was told he was getting the same warning Texas and Florida received “weeks before the worst of the worst happened.”

To prevent that outcome in his state, Beshear said, he was closing bars for two weeks and cutting seating in restaurants.

But as Beshear pleaded that “we all need to be singing from the same sheet of music,” discord and confusion prevailed.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said Thursday she wasn’t convinced a mask mandate is effective: “No one knows particularly the best strategy.”

Earlier in the week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) demurred on masks and bar closures even as he stood next to Birx and spoke to reporters.

“That’s not a plan for us now,” he said. He added emphatically, “We are not going to close the economy back down.”

The virus is spreading throughout his state, and not just in the big cities. Vacationers took the virus home from the honky-tonks of Nashville and blues clubs of Memphis to where they live in more rural areas, said John Graves, a professor at Vanderbilt University studying the pandemic.

“The geographical footprint of the virus has reached all corners of the state at this point,” Graves said.

In Missouri, Gov. Michael L. Parson (R) was dismissive of New York’s imposition of a quarantine on residents from his state as a sign of a worsening pandemic. “I’m not going to put much stock in what New York says — they’re a disaster,” he said at a news conference Monday.

Missouri has no mask mandate, leaving it to local officials to act — often in the face of hostility and threats. In the town of Branson, angry opponents testified Tuesday that there was no reason for a mask order when deaths in the county have been few and far between.

“It hasn’t hit us here yet, that’s what I’m scared of,” Branson Alderman Bill Skains said before voting with a majority in favor of the mandate. “It is coming, and it’s coming like a freight train.”

Democratic mayors in Missouri’s two biggest cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, said that with so many people needing jobs, they are reluctant to follow Birx’s recommendation to close bars.

“The whole-blanket approach to shut everybody down feels a little harsh for the people who are doing it right,” said Jacob Long, spokesman for St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson. “We’re trying to take care of some bad actors first.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey also got a warning from Birx. On Wednesday, he said all bar drinking must move outside.

“We don’t want to be heading in the direction of everybody else,” said Kristen Ehresmann, director of the infectious-disease epidemiology division at the Minnesota Department of Health. She acknowledged that some options “are really pretty draconian.”

The problem is that less-painful measures have proven insufficient.

“The disease transmission we’re seeing is more than what would have been expected if people were following the guidance as it is laid out. It’s a reflection of the fact that they’re not,” she said.

‘A tremendous disappointment’

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) tried to implement broad statewide measures early in the pandemic, only to have his “Safer at Home” order struck down by the state’s Supreme Court.

With cases in his state rising anew, he tried again Thursday, declaring a public health emergency and issuing a statewide mask mandate.

“While our local health departments have been doing a heck of a job responding to this pandemic in our communities, the fact of the matter is, this virus doesn’t care about any town, city or county boundary, and we need a statewide approach to get Wisconsin back on track,” Evers said.

Ryan Westergaard, Wisconsin’s chief medical officer, said he is dismayed by the failures of the national pandemic response.

“I really thought we had a chance to keep this suppressed,” Westergaard said. “The model is a good one: testing, tracing, isolation, supportive quarantine. Those things work. We saw this coming. We knew we had to build robust, flexible systems to do this in all of our communities. It feels like a tremendous disappointment that we weren’t able to build a system in time that could handle this.”

There is one benefit to the way the virus has spread so broadly, he noted: “We no longer have to keep track of people traveling to a hot spot if hot spots are everywhere.”

As it Was, Ever and Will Be

The daily Covid Chronicles continue with two more significant points: Data Not Complete and Costs and Coordination for Medical Facilities

Here in the hot bed of Covid, the Three Stooges ran around commandeering Naval ships, public parks, conference centers and other facilities to house the thousands of Covid patients expected to arrive on the shores.  They failed to provide adequate testing, tracking and tracing and more importantly do adequate coverage and protections for those in more confined situations that are petri dishes for the virus – the old folks homes, prisons, public housing and veteran facilities. Well that takes time and we are at war with Trump so off with their heads!

By the time you are now tested a week or longer has passed and you have passed on the virus to your two friends and family and they have passed it on and finally when the results are back or quarantine for  you have ended you are onto the next.

Again the mysterious Covid parties are apparently another urban myth with little substantiation, the other, “we never left the house” is actually another myth, as someone did at sometime and they brought back with the essentials a little something extra.

The states have always had odd numbers and data collection from those who test positive to deaths as we have counties and cities not complying nor compiling in any consistent manner.  The reality is that those who have died from “covid related” symptoms are still charted on death certificates as cause of death the primary reason so again not Covid.

Then of course the private Physicians who have tests and in turn do not release the data nor are required to thanks to HIPAA or that again we have everything from false positives to false negatives gumming up the numbers so the real count is just that an anathema.   Shocking, I know. Not really.

We will never know the full numbers and we have a President and his administration that simply refuse to actually take responsibility and accountability for the failures that have continued now well into the year when this all began.  But the question remains: Would this have been any different regardless? And given what we are seeing world wide with regards to stockpiles, surpluses, inventories of needed PPE to even drugs just a basic crisis would have exposed the system as a piece of shit.   Then we have the horrific red tape, lack of communication and coordination systems that have been repeatedly tested and repeatedly failed and never once dealt with. This includes the deluge of Unemployment claims that States across the country demonstrated our outdated systems.  The curtain pulled back, the rock is now overturned and the soft underbelly exposed. And I have not seen or heard anyone discuss this with meaning, intent and a plan. Same as it ever was, is and will be.

Former CDC chief: Most states fail to report data key to controlling the coronavirus pandemic
Not a single state reports on the turnaround time of diagnostic covid-19 tests.

The Washington Post
By Lena H. Sun
July 21, 2020
Six months after the first coronavirus case appeared in the United States, most states are failing to report critical information needed to track and control the resurgence of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to an analysis released Tuesday by a former top Obama administration health official.

The analysis is the first comprehensive review of covid-19 data that all 50 states and Washington, D.C., are using to make decisions about policies on mask-wearing and opening schools and businesses. In the absence of a national strategy to fight the pandemic, states have had to develop their own metrics for tracking and controlling covid-19. But with few common standards, the data are inconsistent and incomplete, according to the report released by Resolve to Save Lives, a New York nonprofit led by former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden and part of the global health organization Vital Strategies.

Some essential information that would show response effectiveness is not being reported at all. Only two states report data on how quickly contact tracers were able to interview people who test positive to learn about their potential contacts. Not a single state reports on the turnaround time of diagnostic tests, the analysis found. Week-long waits for results hobble efforts to track real-time virus spread and make contact tracing almost irrelevant.

“Despite good work done in many states on the challenging task of collecting, analyzing, and presenting crucial information, because of the failure of national leadership, the United States is flying blind in our effort to curb the spread of COVID-19,” Frieden said in a statement. “If we don’t get the virus under control now, it will get much, much worse in the coming months.”

Publicly available, standard dashboards with information on life-or-death metrics can make more of a difference than anything else U.S. officials can do in the weeks and months ahead, he said. Of the hundreds of projects the team has done since January, Frieden said Tuesday’s report was the most important.

His team and other public health leaders are recommending that states and counties report 15 indicators they say are essential for an effective response. The metrics were drafted with input from states and public health organizations and modeled after practices from around the world, Frieden said. States should be able to report on nine of the metrics now and the other six within several weeks.

The nine include information about confirmed and probable cases, rates of hospitalization per capita, and emergency department trends showing people who have symptoms of influenza-like illness and covid-19-like illness.

While almost all states report cases, 20 percent of state dashboards did not report same-day data by 5 p.m. local time. Kansas updates data only three times a week.

The CDC, in a statement, said it has been working since the beginning of the outbreak with states and other partners “to collect, analyze and report out data critical to formulate the nation’s response to this unprecedented public health crisis.”

The CDC is already tracking, or has plans with the states to track, 14 of the 15 indicators, the agency statement said. The CDC said the data is posted on its website and many states are also tracking some indicators on their state websites. The statement added: “CDC is always looking at best practices for ways to enhance, consolidate and report data, to make it easier for states and the public to access.”

The CDC said it has no plan to calculate data on the percentage of people wearing masks correctly in public, one of the metrics included in the report.

Without a national coordinated strategy, public health experts say consensus from governors will be vital to suppress and eventually recover from covid-19. That includes agreement on common metrics, a regular system for reporting data, and triggers for implementing social distancing policies and stay-at-home orders.

Most states are not collecting most of these measures, or if they are, reporting on only a small fraction, said Tom Inglesby, an infectious-disease physician and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“The more we agree on the targets for response that states should achieve, the better the public will understand what it’s going to take to bring this epidemic under control,” Inglesby said in an email. If the target benchmark for a state’s diagnostic test positivity rate should be below 5 percent, for example, but if the state is reporting a positivity rate of 20 percent, that’s a sign that “things are going quite badly.”

Similarly, if a state is reporting that only a small fraction of new covid-19 cases can be linked to prior cases, “things are not going well no matter what a national or local leader might say.”

The D.C. health department published that key metric for the first time Monday. It said the percentage of new coronavirus cases linked to already known cases is just 2.8 percent — meaning most people contracting the virus aren’t aware of who might have exposed them. The city’s goal is 60 percent.

Groups representing state public health officials support the measures.

“Having some standard metrics to compare across the country will make a big difference in identifying where things are going well and where there is need for additional resources and improvements,” said Michael Fraser, chief executive of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, said the organization supports using consistent indicators to give people information that will help them change behavior and understand the threat of the pandemic.

It’s also important, she said, that Frieden’s team recognized the relative importance of each metric and that “the optimal target may change based on the local status of the pandemic.”

While they praise the effort, public health experts are also concerned that overwhelmed state and local health departments don’t have the resources to report some of these measures at a time when the pandemic is surging and states are experiencing record numbers of infections and hospitalizations.

“Some of these data are going to be very very hard to get without a workforce dedicated to just charting these metrics week by week,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine.

“If we had this as a road map at the start in confronting the pandemic, that would have been the bomb,” she said.

And across the country today, cities are looking to shut down in States from Los Angeles to Atlanta, the outbreaks are not following the protocol established by the varying Governors, Medical Advice and of course the Millennials who are the largest cohort simply not giving a shit.   Meanwhile we are paying the price for this, in more ways than one.  When it comes to hospital bills this one is a whopper.

This Hospital Cost $52 Million. It Treated 79 Virus Patients.

Red tape and turf battles marked the race to create temporary hospitals for the coronavirus onslaught in New York.

By Brian M. Rosenthal
The New York Times
July 21, 2020

The Queens Hospital Center emergency department has a capacity of 60, but on its worst night of the coronavirus pandemic, more than 180 patients lay on stretchers in the observation bays and hallways. Alarms rang incessantly as exhausted doctors rushed from crisis to crisis.

Less than four miles away, a temporary hospital opened the next morning, on April 10. The facility, which was built at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to relieve the city’s overwhelmed hospitals, had hundreds of beds and scores of medical professionals trained to treat virus patients.

But in the entire month that the site remained open, it treated just three patients from the Queens Hospital Center emergency department, records show. Over all, the field hospital cost more than $52 million and served only 79 patients.

The pandemic has presented unique challenges for officials grappling with a fast-moving and largely unpredictable foe. But the story of the Billie Jean King facility illustrates the missteps made at every level of government in the race to create more hospital capacity in New York. It is a cautionary tale for other states now facing surges in cases and for New Yorkers bracing for a possible second wave.

Doctors at the Queens Hospital Center, a public hospital in Jamaica, and at other medical centers wanted to transfer patients to Billie Jean King. But they were blocked by bureaucracy, turf battles and communication failures, according to internal documents and interviews with workers.

New York paid as much as $732 an hour for some doctors at Billie Jean King, but the city made them spend hours on paperwork. They were supposed to treat coronavirus patients, but they did not accept people with fevers, a hallmark symptom of the virus. Officials said the site would serve critically ill patients, but workers said it opened with only one or two ventilators.

“I basically got paid $2,000 a day to sit on my phone and look at Facebook,” said Katie Capano, a nurse practitioner from Baltimore who worked at Billie Jean King. “We all felt guilty. I felt really ashamed, to be honest.”

As the coronavirus spread in March, the federal government, state leaders, city officials and hospital executives all began creating their own temporary medical facilities, at times competing against each other. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office oversaw most transfers to the centers, but city officials say the state did not closely coordinate with other players.

The federal government’s biggest contribution, the Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort, arrived in New York with great fanfare but initially did not accept coronavirus patients at all, prompting one hospital executive to call it “a joke.”

Even once the Comfort began treating people with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, the hospital ship and another overflow facility run by the state, located at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, mostly accepted patients transferred from private medical centers, not from the public hospitals that were the most besieged, according to government data.

Billie Jean King, the only emergency hospital built by the city, should have been a success story: It opened at the height of the pandemic, with a full staff eager to treat virus patients.

An aide to Mayor Bill de Blasio who helped oversee the site, Jackie Bray, said the city acted quickly to open it but ultimately concluded patients were best treated at existing hospitals, even if they were crowded. She added that she expected the federal government to reimburse the city for the cost of the facility.

Officials with the city and the state said Billie Jean King and other temporary sites treated so few patients because New York’s statewide shutdown curtailed the virus and hospitals expanded their own capacity, reducing the need for extra beds.

“The alternative space was less used than we expected it to be because we broke the curve, thank goodness,” Ms. Bray said.

Doctors disagreed.

“The conditions in the emergency room during this crisis were unacceptable and dangerous,” said Dr. Timothy Tan, the director of clinical operations at the Queens Hospital Center emergency department. “Knowing what our patients had to endure in an overcrowded emergency department, it’s frustrating how few patients were treated at facilities such as Billie Jean King.”

In past disasters, such as during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the state created a unified system across multiple agencies to transfer patients between hospitals. That did not happen during the coronavirus pandemic, leaving hospitals in low-income areas overwhelmed, while some wealthy private medical centers had open beds.

Instead, with projections forecasting a severe shortage of beds, officials focused on building field hospitals.

The largest facilities opened in Manhattan in late March — the Comfort and the Javits Center. They treated about 1,400 patients, although only about 300 came from public hospitals, data shows.

Hospitals also opened overflow locations, including a Central Park tent hospital that treated 300 patients from Mount Sinai Hospital. The city’s public hospital system created a wing at a nursing home on Roosevelt Island.

Facing a projected shortage of 50,000 beds, federal officials spent more than $320 million to build facilities at two state colleges and the Westchester County Center, and the city spent about $20 million on a center at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, records show. In the end, reality never neared the dire projections, and none of those facilities opened.

The only makeshift hospital the city opened was at Billie Jean King.

The complex, home of the U.S. Open, is at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows and is one of the largest tennis centers in the world.

Officials put out a call on March 18, saying they needed a contractor that could open a hospital in seven days and run it. Only one vendor said it could do it: SLSCO, a company from Galveston, Texas, best known for helping build part of President Trump’s border wall.

SLSCO had spent $90,000 annually to lobby New York in recent years and received contracts after Hurricane Sandy, records show. The company referred questions to city officials.

The contract paid SLSCO whatever costs it incurred for creating and operating 470 beds for “Covid-positive patients of medium and high acuity” — plus an additional 18 percent for profit and overhead, the deal said. The final bill is still being tallied; it could top $100 million.

“This is a war effort,” Mr. de Blasio said in a news conference at the tennis center in late March, announcing it would open April 7. “This facility will be crucial.”

The site opened on April 10, during the grimmest week of the pandemic, with records in statewide hospitalizations and deaths.

The night before, the patients in the Queens Hospital Center emergency department included 66 who were so sick that they had already been admitted and were waiting for beds, according to a hospital log.

City officials said emergency department patients were inappropriate for Billie Jean King. The site did not have all of the equipment, drugs and services available at a permanent hospital, so it was not the best place for unstable patients, they said.

Dani Lever, communications director for Mr. Cuomo, said the Queens Hospital Center transferred 11 patients to the Javits Center that night, and could have sent more. The state accommodated every transfer request from hospitals, Ms. Lever said.

Other nearby hospitals were also in crisis, including Elmhurst Hospital Center and several small private hospitals.

SLSCO had recruited hundreds of workers from across the country. It paid most doctors about $600 an hour, or $900 for overtime, according to the contract — far more than the typical rates at hospitals. Registered nurses made more than $250 an hour, as did pharmacists and physician assistants.

But in the early days, they spent hours in orientation to learn computer systems, waiting to get fitted for masks and looking for equipment, workers said. They also said they had to complete repetitive paperwork.

“Extreme dysfunction,” Dr. Kim Sue said about working there. “Bureaucracy and dysfunction, and all kinds of barriers to serving patients.”

But the biggest barrier was simple: Hospitals did not send many patients to Billie Jean King.

The city did not allow ambulances to take 911 calls to Billie Jean King because health officials said they did not trust the facility to triage patients. The site had its own ambulances, but they could not pick up transfers because, according to some workers at the site, hospitals had exclusive agreements with ambulance companies. So doctors had to wait for transfers. Few came.

In interviews, doctors at overwhelmed private hospitals said they were told they could not transfer to Billie Jean King because it was only for patients from public hospitals.

Several doctors at public hospitals said they believed their bosses did not want to transfer because the hospitals in the public system each had their own budgets, and they did not receive revenue from patients they sent away. Some said they were told Billie Jean King could treat only people with extremely mild symptoms.

There were at least 25 medical conditions that disqualified patients from being transferred to Billie Jean King, including “spiking” fevers, a city spokesman acknowledged. The Javits Center had similar rules.

At Billie Jean King, seven workers said in interviews that even with limited ventilators, they could treat most severely ill patients. They said they grew increasingly frustrated to report every day to a sea of empty beds. Several mentioned that three men with mild symptoms died while quarantining at a Manhattan hotel.

“We were sitting on all of these beds with hundreds of people trained to watch over patients exactly like that, and these people died,” said Elizabeth Ianelli, a social worker at the site. “That was preventable.”

City officials said the men were not sick enough for Billie Jean King’s level of care. They said all hospitals could transfer to the site, which had enough ventilators, and said the ambulances did not pick up because they needed to be available in case patients at Billie Jean King deteriorated and needed to be transferred. Nobody was thinking about patient revenue, they said.

“The thing that saved the most lives was to treat them in expanded capacity in the hospitals, and bring staff into the hospitals, and that’s what we were focused on,” said Matt Siegler, a senior vice president at the city’s public hospital system, which oversaw the site.

Mr. Siegler said he could not think of anything the city should have done differently.

On April 27, the city amended the contract to pay SLSCO for only a 100-bed facility for patients with “low to moderate” needs, records show. The site became a quarantine location for homeless people, and some staffers left to work in other hospitals.

Billie Jean King closed on May 13, and workers returned home.

Enter at your own risk

Once again reading the paper I had to put it down to compose myself.  Not that I was surprised by the article, in fact I was anything but; however, when you read the facts and the truths in black and white confirming what you believed was true given what you know about how the medical industrial complex operates (pun intended) in the best of time, I knew that in the worst it would be more of the same only in fact even worse.   I have never understood the hero worship nor the giving or donating anything to these hospitals unless they are publicly owned and managed as they actually needed it. But they are also largely mismanaged, poorly maintained and have few advocates who give one flying fuck.  This article only again confirms this.   Enter at your own risk as they don’t give a shit.

This article once again proves the failings by the great white Daddies who held daily meetings, announced the lottery numbers without one clear plan, without knowledge or even the ability to communicate coherently and truthfully about how Covid was a dangerous deadly virus, they did not know what to do and they were going to try anything and everything to make this somehow work but whatever the public at large could do to stop this would be welcome, appreciated and necessary and that may evolve over time but with support and cooperation this may not fully go away but it will be manageable with many sacrifices on all our parts to do so.  Nope, here in New Jersey we were called knuckleheads, and each city in the region came up with  its own bullshit with no logic and even less communication, all of it via Facebook. They too had no real idea what they were doing but they were going to do it nonetheless.  Funny California was considered a model and then not so there you go.  Meanwhile the Governors who were acclaimed, DeWine, Cuomo and Inslee had no clue but they were telegenic, competent sounding and of course had visual aids and the appropriate staff standing by to scold, reprimand and remind everyone to be afraid, be very afraid.

From testing fiasco’s to the old folks homes to just overall neglect and failure to actually address the day to day, from homeless in the subways to the overgrowing pockets of Covid in poor and largely minority communities as after thought was just another day in the park of Covid.  It was clear that the President and his “Covid” geniuses had no fucking clue, the CDC was a farce of inconsistency so why not just say that and tell people they are on their own and that they have little to go on but faith.  But nope.  And Cuomo was the figure that many turned to for no other reasons that he was there but once you look at the failures of the hospitals in New York you can only say fuck you asshole this is all on you.  This is where the division of New York is clear and that is literally life and death.  If anyone votes for this fucking asshole they have blood on their hands.  There was no White Knight, no Calvary to the rescue there was just chaos and bullshit.

Why Surviving the Virus Might Come Down to Which Hospital Admits You

In New York cities poor neighborhoods, some patients have languished in understaffed hospitals, with substandard equipment.  It was a different story in Manhattan’s private medical centers.

By Brian M. Rosenthal, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Otterman and Sheri Fink

The New York Times

July 1, 2020

In Queens, the borough with the most coronavirus cases and the fewest hospital beds per capita, hundreds of patients languished in understaffed wards, often unwatched by nurses or doctors. Some died after removing oxygen masks to go to the bathroom.

In hospitals in impoverished neighborhoods around the boroughs, some critically ill patients were put on ventilator machines lacking key settings, and others pleaded for experimental drugs, only to be told that there were none available.

It was another story at the private medical centers in Manhattan, which have billions of dollars in endowments and cater largely to wealthy people with insurance. Patients there got access to heart-lung bypass machines and specialized drugs like remdesivir, even as those in the city’s community hospitals were denied more basic treatments like continuous dialysis.

In its first four months in New York, the coronavirus tore through low-income neighborhoods, infected immigrants and essential workers unable to stay home and disproportionately killed Black and Latino people, especially those with underlying health conditions.

Now, evidence is emerging of another inequality affecting low-income city residents: disparities in hospital care.

While the pandemic continues, it is not possible to determine exactly how much the gaps in hospital care have hurt patients. Many factors affect who recovers from the coronavirus and who does not. Hospitals treat vastly different patient populations, and experts have hesitated to criticize any hospital while workers valiantly fight the outbreak.

Still, mortality data from three dozen hospitals obtained by The New York Times indicates that the likelihood of survival may depend in part on where a patient is treated. At the peak of the pandemic in April, the data suggests, patients at some community hospitals were three times more likely to die as patients at medical centers in the wealthiest parts of the city.

Underfunded hospitals in the neighborhoods hit the hardest often had lower staffing, worse equipment and less access to drug trials and advanced treatments at the height of the crisis than the private, well-financed academic medical centers in wealthy parts of Manhattan, according to interviews with workers at all 47 of the city’s general hospitals.

“If we had proper staffing and proper equipment, we could have saved much more lives,” said Dr. Alexander Andreev, a medical resident and union representative at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, a struggling independent hospital in Brooklyn. “Out of 10 deaths, I think at least two or three could have been saved.”

Inequality did not arrive with the virus; the divide between the haves and the have-nots has long been a part of the web of hospitals in the city.

Manhattan is home to several of the world’s most prestigious medical centers, a constellation of academic institutions that attract wealthy residents with private health insurance. The other boroughs are served by a patchwork of satellite campuses, city-run public hospitals and independent facilities, all of which treat more residents on Medicaid or Medicare, or without insurance.

The pandemic exposed and amplified the inequities, especially during the peak, according to doctors, nurses and other workers.

Overall, more than 17,500 people have been confirmed to have died in New York City of Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. More than 11,500 lived in ZIP codes with median household incomes below the city median, according to city data.

Deaths have slowed, but with the possibility of a second surge looming, doctors are examining the disparities.

At the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the city’s largest private hospital network, 20 doctors drafted a letter in April warning leadership about inequalities, according to a copy obtained by The Times. The doctors had found that the mortality rate at an understaffed satellite was more than twice as high as at a flagship center, despite not treating sicker patients.

At NYU Langone Health, another large network, 43 medical residents wrote their own letter to the chief medical officer expressing concerns about disparities in hospital care.

Both networks said in statements that they deliver the same level of care at all their locations.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have spoken throughout the pandemic of adding hospital beds across the city, transferring patients and sending supplies and workers to community hospitals, implying that they have ensured all New Yorkers with Covid-19 receive the same quality care.

“We are one health care system,” Mr. Cuomo said on March 31. The same day, he described the coronavirus as “the great equalizer.”

In interviews, doctors scoffed at that notion, noting, among other issues, that government reinforcements were slowed by bureaucratic hurdles and mostly arrived after the peak.

“There was no cavalry,” said Dr. Ralph Madeb, surgery director at the independent New York Community Hospital in Brooklyn. “Everything we did was on our own.”

In a statement, Dani Lever, the governor’s communications director, said Mr. Cuomo has repeatedly pointed out inequalities in health care. The state worked during the peak to transfer patients so everybody could at least access care, she said.

“The governor said Covid was the ‘great equalizer’ in that it infected anyone regardless of race, age, etc. — not that everyone would receive the same the level of health care,” she said. “The governor said we are one health system in terms of ensuring that everyone who needed it had access to a hospital.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, Avery Cohen, said the mayor agreed that the pandemic had exposed inequalities, and the city had worked to address disparities.

“From nearly tripling hospital capacity at the virus’ peak, to creating a massive testing apparatus from the ground-up, we have channeled every possible resource into helping our most vulnerable and remain undeterred in doing so,” she said.

New York has never had a unified hospital system. It has several different hospital systems, and in recent years, they have consolidated and contracted, through mergers and more than a dozen hospital closures.

Today, most beds in the city are in hospitals in five private networks. NewYork-Presbyterian, which has Weill Cornell Medical Center and Columbia University Irving Medical Center; NYU Langone; the Mount Sinai Health System; Northwell Health; and the Montefiore Medical Center.

Most of the private networks are based at expansive campuses in Manhattan, as are some of the public hospitals. (Montefiore is based in the Bronx; many of Northwell’s hospitals are outside of New York City.)

The hospital closures have largely been outside of Manhattan, including three beloved safety-net hospitals in Queens in just a few months in 2008 and 2009.

There are now five hospital beds for every 1,000 residents in Manhattan, while only 1.8 per 1,000 residents in Queens, 2.2 in Brooue reading the main story

These networks are wealthy nonprofits aided by decades of government policies that have steered money to them. They also rake in revenue because, on average, two-thirds of their patients are on Medicare or have commercial insurance, through their employer or purchased privately.

Collectively, they annually spend $150 million on advertising and pay their chief executives $30 million, records show. They also pay their doctors the most, and score the highest marks on industry ratings regarding safety, mortality and patient satisfaction.

The city has 11 public hospitals. This is the city’s safety net, along with the private networks’ satellite campuses and a shrinking number of smaller independent hospitals, which have been financially struggling for years.

At the safety-net hospitals, only 10 percent of patients have private insurance. The hospitals provide all the basic serviceklyn and 2.4 in the Bronx, according to government data.

Yet in a cruel twist, the coronavirus has mostly clobbered areas outside of Manhattan.

Manhattan has only had 16 confirmed cases for every 1,000 residents, while there have been 28 per 1,000 residents in Queens, 23 in Brooklyn and 33 in the Bronx, the latest count shows.

These areas have lower median incomes — $38,000 in the Bronx versus $82,000 in Manhattan — and are filled with residents whose jobs have put them at higher risk of infection.

“Certain hospitals are located in the heart of a pandemic that hit on top of an epidemic of poverty and stress and pollution and segregation and racism,” said Dr. Carol Horowitz, director of the Institute for Health Equity Research at Mount Sinai.

At the pandemic’s peak, ambulances generally took patients to the nearest hospital — not the one with the most capacity. That contributed to crushing surges in hospitals in areas with high infection rates, overwhelming some hospitals and reducing their ability to care for patients.

In Manhattan, where many residents fled the city, hospitals also found patient release valves. Mount Sinai sent hundreds to a Central Park tent hospital. NewYork-Presbyterian sent 150 to the Hospital for Special Surgery.

In all, the census at some emergency rooms actually declined.

At Lenox Hill Hospital, a private hospital on the Upper East Side, Dr. Andrew Bauerschmidt said on April 8 — near the city’s peak in cases — that the hospital had more patients than usual, but not by much.

“Nothing dire is going on here, like the stories we’ve heard at other hospitals,” he said.

After weeks battling the virus at the Elmhurst Hospital Center, a public hospital in Queens that was overwhelmed by Covid-19 deaths, Dr. Ravi Katari took a shift at the Mount Sinai Hospital.

When he arrived at the towering campus just east of Central Park, he was surprised to see fewer patients and more workers than at Elmhurst, and a sense of calm.

Dr. Katari was a fourth-year emergency medicine resident in a program run by Mount Sinai that rotates residents through different hospitals, to give them varied experiences.

In interviews, seven of these residents described vast disparities during the pandemic — especially in staffing levels.

At the height of the crisis, doctors and nurses at every hospital had to care for more patients than normal. But at the safety-net hospitals, which could not deploy large numbers of specialists or students, or quickly hire workers, patient-to-staff ratios spiraled out of control.

In the emergency room, where best practices call for a maximum of four patients per nurse, the ratio hit 23 to 1 at Queens Hospital Center and 15 to 1 at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, both public hospitals, and 20 to 1 at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, an independent facility in Brooklyn, workers said.

“We could not care for the number of the patients we had,” said Feyoneisha McGrath, a nurse at Kingsbrook. “I worked 16 hours a day, and then I got in my car and cried.”

In intensive-care units, where patients require such close monitoring that the standard ratio is just two patients per nurse, ratios quadrupled at some hospitals, including at Interfaith Medical Center in Brooklyn, an independent facility, and at NewYork-Presbyterian’s satellite in Queens, workers said.

The city’s public hospital system disputed those ratios cited by workers. It added that during the pandemic, it recruited thousands of nurses and streamlined monitoring, including by opening doors to patient rooms. The chief executive of Kingsbrook and Interfaith also disputed the ratios at those hospitals.

Research has shown that staffing levels affect mortality, and that may be even more true during this pandemic because many Covid-19 patients quickly deteriorate without warning.

At Brookdale, the independent hospital, three doctors said that many patients on ventilators had to remain for days or weeks in understaffed wards because the intensive-care unit was full. Amid shortages in sedatives, some patients awoke from comas alone and, in a reflexive response, removed the tubes in their airways that were keeping them breathing. Alarms rang, and staff rushed to reintubate the patients. But they all eventually died, the doctors said.

A hospital spokesman, Khari Edwards, said, “Protocols for sedation of intubated patients are in place and are monitored by our quality improvement processes.”

Similar episodes occurred at Kingsbrook, the Queens Hospital Center and the Allen Hospital, a NewYork-Presbyterian hospital in Northern Manhattan, according to workers.

Dr. Dawn Maldonado, a resident doctor at Elmhurst, described a worrisome pattern of deaths on its understaffed general medicine floors. She said at least four patients collapsed after removing their oxygen masks to try to walk to the bathroom. Workers discovered their bodies later — in one case, as much as 45 minutes later — in the bathroom or nearby.

“We’d call them bathroom codes,” Dr. Maldonado said.

As the coronavirus raged, Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx kept running into problems with ventilators.

Lincoln, a public hospital, had a limited number, and it could not acquire many more, so it had to increasingly use portable ventilators sent by the state. The machines did not have some settings to adjust to patients’ breathing, including a high-pressure mode called “airway pressure release ventilation.”

Virtually every hospital had to use some old ventilators. But at hospitals like Lincoln, almost all patients received emergency machines, doctors said.

Safety-net hospitals also ran low on dialysis machines, for patients with kidney damage. Many independent hospitals could not provide continuous dialysis even before the pandemic. At the peak, some facilities like St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Queens had to restrict dialysis even further, providing only a couple hours at a time or not providing any to some patients.

While many interventions for Covid-19 are routine, like supplying oxygen through masks, safety-net hospital patients also have not had much access to advanced treatments, including a heart-lung bypass called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or E.C.M.O.

For weeks, many independent hospitals did not have remdesivir, the experimental anti-viral drug that has been used to treat Covid-19.

“We are not anybody’s priority,” said Dr. Josh Rosenberg of the Brooklyn Hospital Center, a 175-year-old independent facility that took longer than others to gain entry to a clinical trial that provided access to the drug.

Historically, safety-net hospitals have not been chosen for many drug trials.

Dr. Mangala Narasimhan, a regional director of critical care at Northwell, said just participating in a trial affects outcomes, regardless of whether the drug works.

“You’re super attentive to those patients,” she said. “That is an effect in itself.”

Some low-income patients have even missed the most basic of treatment strategies, like being turned onto their stomach. The technique, called proning, has helped many patients breathe, but because it requires several workers to keep IV lines untangled, some safety-net hospitals have been unable to provide it.

Many private centers have beds that automatically turn.

Near the corner of 1st Avenue and East 30th Street in Manhattan sit two hospital campuses that illustrate the disparities on the most tragic of measures: mortality rate.

One is NYU Langone’s flagship hospital. So far, about 11 percent of its coronavirus patients have died, according to data obtained by The Times. The other is Bellevue Hospital Center, the city’s most renowned public hospital, where about 22 percent of virus patients have died.

In other parts of the city, the gaps are even wider.

Overall, about one in five coronavirus patients in New York City hospitals has died, according to a Times data analysis. At some prestigious medical centers, it has been as low as one in 10. At some community hospitals outside Manhattan, it has been one in three, or worse.

Many factors have affected those numbers, including the severity of the patients’ illnesses, the extent of their exposure to the virus, their underlying conditions, how long they waited to go to the hospital and whether their hospital transferred healthier patients, or sicker patients.

Still, experts and doctors agreed that disparities in hospital care have played a role, too.

“It’s hard to look at the data and come to any other conclusion,” said Mary T. Bassett, who led the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene from 2014 until 2018 before joining Harvard University’s School of Public Health. “We’ve known for a long time that these institutions are under-resourced. The answer should be to give them more resources.”

The data was obtained from a number of sources, including government agencies and the individual hospital systems.

Many of the sharpest disparities have occurred between hospitals in the same network.

At Mount Sinai, about 17 percent of patients at its flagship Manhattan hospital have died, a much lower rate than at its campuses in Brooklyn (34 percent) and Queens (33 percent).

Dr. David Reich, chief executive at the Mount Sinai Hospital and the Queens site, said the satellites were located near nursing homes and transferred out some of their healthy patients, making their numbers look worse. But he added that he was not surprised that large hospitals with more specialists had better mortality rates.

There have even been differences within the public system, where most hospitals have had mortality rates far higher than Bellevue’s.

At the Coney Island Hospital, 363 patients have died — 41 percent of those admitted.

In an interview, Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, the head of the public system, strenuously objected to the use of raw mortality data, saying it was meaningless if not adjusted for patient conditions. He agreed public hospitals needed more resources, but he defended their performance in the pandemic.

“I’m not going to say that the quality of care that people got at my 11 hospitals wasn’t as good or better as what people got at other hospitals,” he said. “Our hospitals worked heroically to keep people alive.”

On April 17, NYU Langone employees received an email that quoted President Trump praising the network’s response to Covid-19: “I’ve heard that you guys at NYU Langone are doing really great things.”

The email, from Dr. Fritz François, the network’s chief medical officer, infuriated residents who had worked at both NYU Langone and Bellevue. They believed that if the private network was doing great, it was because of donors and government policies letting it get more funding.

“When given the ear of the arguably most powerful man in the world — who has control over essential allocation of resources and government funding — it is a physician’s duty to take this opportunity and to advocate for the resources that all patients need,” they responded.

At the same time, another conversation was happening. It began in late March, when doctors at the Lower Manhattan Hospital concluded their mortality rate for Covid-19 patients was more than twice the rate at Weill Cornell, a prestigious hospital in its same network, NewYork-Presbyterian.

The doctors saw an alarming potential explanation. In a draft letter dated April 11, they said their nurses cared for up to five critically ill patients, while Weill Cornell nurses had two or three. They also noted staffing shortages at the Allen Hospital and NewYork-Presbyterian Queens.

“What hospital a patient goes to (or that E.M.S. takes them to) should not be a choice that increases adverse outcomes, including mortality,” the draft letter said.

It is unclear if the doctors sent the letter. But in mid April, network leaders sent more staff to the Lower Manhattan Hospital, and that gap narrowed.

Another group of network doctors undertook a deeper study and found that some of the gap was explained by differences in the ages of patients and their health conditions. But even after controlling for those issues, they found a disparity, and they vowed to study it further.

In a statement, the network denied that any nurses had to monitor five critically ill patients. “Short-term, raw data snapshots do not show an accurate or full picture of the entire crisis,” it said.

Still, one doctor who works at both hospitals said he was disturbed by one episode during the peak at the Lower Manhattan Hospital.

The doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had been warned against talking to reporters, recalled he had three patients who needed to be intubated. When he called the intensive-care unit, he was told there was only space for one.

One man was in his mid-40s, younger than the other two, who were both over 70.

“Everyone looked bad, but he had the best chance,” the doctor said. “The others had to wait.”

The doctor said he did not know what happened to the patients after he left work. Given the high mortality rate at the hospital, he said he was reluctant to look it up.

“What good is it going to do me, to know what happened?” he said.

Friday. Okay, whatever

I am still on unofficial lockdown as the area begins to open up to Stage 2, 3, 16, whatever at this point it is all just smoke, mirrors, games and bullshit.  That said I have no interest in contacting, speaking or giving a shit as these next two weeks will be game changers.

Today in the Washington Post there was considerable alarm at the way we as a country have emerged from our cocoon but rather than a butterfly we are some type of moth that will race to the flame and ultimately die.  Yes folks, while I have long been calling bullshit on all of this I was always sure there was a serious virus, it was and is killing people but what was being done, what is being done and will be done will continue to allow this to happen. At this point they have run out of cards and have nothing left to even bluff with.  The overwhelming failure of all countries regarding Covid other than a few, New Zealand, Iceland to name those with land in their names have done not just a stop the spread but made it literally a flatline.  Why? Each had very unique strategies and of course they were countries run by women, go figure. Women can rule just not in America. What? Ever.

The New Yorker does an excellent piece on why Iceland was a success story despite the numbers that in the U.S. was akin to a death sentence and in turn why Europe is working so well to stem the tide that they are now laughing while secretly being received that Britain did BREXIT given the state of that country’s fiasco handling Covid, as Boris and Trump are two strands alike and both fatal to their country’s well being.   This is an article about the horrific contact tracking/tracing Britain has assembled and it only beats the U.S. in that there is one. No State has taken that on and I just received an email that they are looking for an appropriate administrator of such a program here and will be letting us know soon. In other words they are just hoping numbers go down enough to make that moot and they can move on.  What? Ever.

The posturing today in Cuomo’s last state of the state of covid speech veered to tears as he of course takes no responsibilities for the numerous fiascos of any of it, while DiBlasio is still trying to figure out how to run the city during a pandemic and civil unrest.  It is clear he could barely manage in the best of times so why do it any differently.  And here the third amigo of the posse of stupid, Murphy, once again bores us to the point that there is no point except to remind us that we have a lot of malls here and they need to be open. Okay, then. What? Ever.

Covid is quite serious and every day between protest stories another runs about a drug that is working or failing or how it is spread or not spread, to mask or not and basically how no one is social distancing and Fauci is now backtracking on the second wave and capitulating to the moron in charge who is having a racist rally and whining about Bolton as if he was shocked that an asshole would turn on him. Well had he given him a war to keep him busy then no he wouldn’t but hey what? Ever.

Everyday is another story about Covid, how asymptomatic people spread or don’t spread the virus. **note the constant corrections, contradictions and oxymorons when it comes to this.*** Again I think it is like Herpes and in the first few days, 3 or so, the virus sheds and goes dormant until it leaves the body and again we believe that is after 14 days.  Apparently because no disease actually manifested no antibodies are found meaning there is no immunity but that also may apply to those with Covid as many are coming back testing positive and getting sick. Meaning it is dormant like Herpes and then it flairs up.  Funny that it is steroids that are having the strongest affect as that is often the same treatment for what? Herpes.  (tricked you there, just like herpes)  I may not be a Doctor but watching this and remembering Herpes and AIDS,  the parallels are not lost it is just the transmission that is different.  And again we are being warned that the phase one is getting worse.  Or is that the first wave is now just kinda bigger and longer.  Really or is that NOT a second wave? So is there a third? Folks we are confused about what waves mean and this is now into full blown Tsunami versus Hurricane.  And the difference is that Tsunami starts with an earthquake under water that is stage one then it turns the water into tidal waves which bash the shore with force that comes from the quake A Hurricane is a water gathering wind that passes over land so the first wave is damage via wind and its second wave is the water that follows.  Okay they are kinda the same. Like Covid only not. Okay, then. What?Ever.

We don’t know shit and the CDC has deferred much of the prognostication and projection onto two schools of thought and they are east versus west and it appears that the are dueling it out for who kills more.  Okay, then.  But one thing is certain Covid ain’t leaving anytime soon, like Herpes it is the guest for life. They have never found a cure for it either.

Today is Juneteenth and I found this opinion in the Times much like I too learned of it when I was teaching, like Kwanza I had no real traction on it but it has gained a strong hold of positive energy and for that let’s end on it.

Why Juneteenth Matters

It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln’s promise of “a new birth of freedom.”

By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
The New York Times
June 18 2020

Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction.

Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.

“Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the heart of the abolition movement.”

“Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition,” Sinha writes, and “fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led the abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.”

When secession turned to war, it was enslaved people who turned a narrow conflict over union into a revolutionary war for freedom. “From the first guns at Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were the slaves themselves,” the historian Ira Berlin wrote in 1992. “Lacking political standing or public voice, forbidden access to the weapons of war, slaves tossed aside the grand pronouncements of Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict was only a war for national unity and moved directly to put their own freedom — and that of their posterity — atop the national agenda.”

All of this is apropos of Juneteenth, which commemorates June 19, 1865, when Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston, Texas, to lead the Union occupation force and delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to enslaved people in the region. This holiday, which only became a nationwide celebration (among black Americans) in the 20th century, has grown in stature over the last decade as a result of key anniversaries (2011 to 2015 was the sesquicentennial of the Civil War), trends in public opinion (the growing racial liberalism of left-leaning whites), and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Over the last week, as Americans continued to protest police brutality, institutional racism and structural disadvantage in cities and towns across the country, elected officials in New York and Virginia have announced plans to make Juneteenth a paid holiday, as have a number of prominent businesses like Nike, Twitter and the NFL.

There’s obviously a certain opportunism here, an attempt to respond to the moment and win favorable coverage, with as little sacrifice as possible. (Paid holidays, while nice, are a grossly inadequate response to calls for justice and equality.) But if Americans are going to mark and celebrate Juneteenth, then they should do so with the knowledge and awareness of the agency of enslaved people.

Emancipation wasn’t a gift bestowed on the slaves; it was something they took for themselves, the culmination of their long struggle for freedom, which began as soon as chattel slavery was established in the 17th century, and gained even greater steam with the Revolution and the birth of a country committed, at least rhetorically, to freedom and equality. In fighting that struggle, black Americans would open up new vistas of democratic possibility for the entire country.

To return to Ira Berlin — who tackled this subject in “The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States” — it is useful to look at the end of slavery as “a near-century-long process” rather than “the work of a moment, even if that moment was a great civil war.” Those in bondage were part of this process at every step of the way, from resistance and rebellion to escape, which gave them the chance, as free blacks, to weigh directly on the politics of slavery. “They gave the slaves’ oppositional activities a political form,” Berlin writes, “denying the masters’ claim that malingering and tool breaking were reflections of African idiocy and indolence, that sabotage represented the mindless thrashings of a primitive people, and that outsiders were the ones who always inspired conspiracies and insurrections.”

By pushing the question of emancipation into public view, black Americans raised the issue of their “status in freedom” and therefore “the question of citizenship and its attributes.” And as the historian Martha Jones details in “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” it is black advocacy that ultimately shapes the nation’s understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. “Never just objects of judicial, legislative, or antislavery thought,” black Americans “drove lawmakers to refine their thinking about citizenship. On the necessity of debating birthright citizenship, black Americans forced the issue.”

After the Civil War, black Americans — free and freed — would work to realize the promise of emancipation, and to make the South a true democracy. They abolished property qualifications for voting and officeholding, instituted universal manhood suffrage, opened the region’s first public schools and made them available to all children. They stood against racial distinctions and discrimination in public life and sought assistance for the poor and disadvantaged. Just a few years removed from degradation and social death, these millions, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction in America, “took decisive and encouraging steps toward the widening and strengthening of human democracy.”

Juneteenth may mark just one moment in the struggle for emancipation, but the holiday gives us an occasion to reflect on the profound contributions of enslaved black Americans to the cause of human freedom. It gives us another way to recognize the central place of slavery and its demise in our national story. And it gives us an opportunity to remember that American democracy has more authors than the shrewd lawyers and erudite farmer-philosophers of the Revolution, that our experiment in liberty owes as much to the men and women who toiled in bondage as it does to anyone else in this nation’s history.