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Anthony Fauci: Trump suggests he might fire infectious disease expert after election - ... - 0 views

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shared by katherineharron on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump suggested to a Florida crowd he may fire Dr. Anthony Fauci after the election, escalating his feud with the nation's leading expert on infectious diseases and providing a window into a potential post-November 3 administration purge.
  • "Don't tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election," Trump said to cheers. "I appreciate the advice."
  • Trump claimed Fauci is "a nice guy but he's been wrong a lot."
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  • Trump's handling of the coronavirus outbreak remains the backdrop of this year's election.
  • Trump has proceeded with rallies in states with rampant coronavirus outbreaks, believing his message of reopening will resonate with voters.
  • Trump has previously claimed Fauci opposed mask wearing earlier in the pandemic, though at the time the administration was concerned about supply levels of medical grade equipment.
  • Trump's comments about Fauci came a day after the White House unleashed on the doctor, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
  • Deputy press secretary Judd Deere said Fauci had decided to "make his political leanings known," though acknowledged he "has a duty to express concerns or push for a change in strategy."
  • While Trump and Fauci put forward a show of cooperation earlier in the pandemic, their relationship has deteriorated significantly. Fauci has said he no longer briefs the President and has been replaced by Dr. Scott Atlas, whom the President has relied on for advice on handling the coronavirus.
  • In public polls, Americans have said they trust Fauci more than Trump to provide reliable information about the pandemic.
  • Trump has held off on any major Cabinet shakeups in the leadup to the election, hoping to avoid negative headlines about administration chaos before votes are cast. But how he acts after the election remains an open question; aides said they expected significant changes should Trump win reelection.
  • Under federal law, Trump doesn't have the power to directly fire Fauci, a career civil servant, and remove him from government. He could try ordering his political appointees to dismiss him, but it would be a time-consuming process that Fauci could appeal.
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CDC Says Nurses Are at High Risk for Covid-19 - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Among health care workers, nurses in particular have been at significant risk of contracting Covid-19, according to a new analysis of hospitalized patients by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • About 6 percent of adults hospitalized from March through May were health care workers, according to the researchers, with more than a third either nurses or nursing assistants.
  • The study looked at 6,760 hospitalizations across 13 states, including California, New York, Ohio and Tennessee.
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  • From the beginning of the pandemic in the United States, front-line medical personnel have complained of shortages of personal protective equipment. Some of the shortages abated for a while, but supplies have become strained in certain areas of the country as a surge of coronavirus outbreaks has reached daily records.
  • Calling the findings no surprise, Ms. Mahon criticized federal officials for not having more robust guidelines in place. Her organization, which issued a report on workers’ deaths last month, says about 2,000 health care workers have so far died from the virus.
  • She says that workers should be tested more frequently so they can be identified and isolated so the infection does not spread, and that supplies of protective gear remain uneven, with some facilities unprepared for an increase in cases.
  • Most of the hospitalized workers in the analysis were female. They also tended to be older, and more were Black employees than the overall group of health care workers who contracted the virus.
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Caregivers Have Witnessed the Coronavirus's Pain. How Will They Vote? - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • At the Pennsylvania long-term care facility where Tisheia Frazier works, the coronavirus was a terror. During the most harrowing weeks of the pandemic in April and May, she said, four residents died in a matter of hours, and 70 people in an 180-bed unit died in less than a month.
  • At the height of the pandemic, he sat at his desk, a shield over his face, so frustrated by the government’s handling of the virus and his own organization's bureaucracy that he thought to himself: “I don’t want to do this.”
  • The deaths of almost 40 percent of all Americans killed by the coronavirus have been linked to nursing homes and similar facilities — indoor spaces crowded with vulnerable adults.
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  • In interviews ahead of the election with more than a dozen caregivers in Pennsylvania, one of the country’s most important battleground states, they described how their experiences are shaping their political outlooks. It has hardened some convictions and transformed some caretakers, otherwise apolitical, into activists. It has forced others to reassess their beliefs about American exceptionalism, the role of government in their lives and their industry, and their decision about whom to vote for in November.
  • Nine months ago, I would have told you that I was 100 percent behind Trump,” Mr. Lohoefer, a lifelong Republican, said of the president. “But as a result of Covid, I’m not 100 percent sure where I stand now.”
  • There were struggles to procure personal protective equipment, difficulties with rapid testing, staffing shortages, disagreements between local, state and federal government agencies and new rules piled onto an already heavily regulated industry.
  • stakeholders in every corner of caregiving agree that the pandemic exposed the country’s overburdened health care system, testing the mental, emotional and physical limits of all of the people who work in it.
  • If you don’t see it, you really don’t understand how difficult it is,”
  • In interviews, caregivers as well as patient advocates, medical professionals, facility managers and residents themselves said they had never experienced anything like the first six months of the pandemic.
  • The chaos was so pervasive that it was nearly impossible, everyone said, to separate what was happening from the politics at play. As caretakers endured day after exhausting day, state officials set forth new regulations to govern how nursing homes should work. And President Trump delivered a drumbeat of dangerous claims — mocking masks, praising unproven treatments, speculating about bleach and about the virus disappearing.
  • And top officials at care facilities voiced deep frustration about how the virus response rapidly devolved from a public health issue to a partisan fight.
  • Surveys of Pennsylvania voters show that Mr. Trump’s standing has been damaged in recent months by his administration’s handling of the coronavirus.
  • Four years later, with its 20 electoral votes, Pennsylvania looms as one of the most important swing states in the election. Many of Mr. Trump’s remaining paths to victory require him to win the Keystone State, and to do that, he needs voters like Mr. Lohoefer, the nursing director, in his camp.
  • Mr. Lohoefer voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. But he has been pushed to his limits. He recalled with derision how the government and his corporate office would send sudden, often conflicting mandates during the early days of the pandemic.
  • Over all, he thinks the reaction to the virus was “overkill,” but he also thinks Mr. Trump was wrong to suggest it was “nothing to worry about.”
  • As the virus spread across her facility, Ms. Frazier, the caretaker who witnessed dozens of deaths, said she would see Mr. Trump on television without a mask and grow frustrated. And although she has voted for Republicans and had been a fan of Mr. Trump’s when he was on reality television, she began to blame his cavalier response for her worsening situation at work.
  • Americans, she came to believe, would not act until the virus affected them personally.
  • “If we want to make America great again, then we need to change the political face of our country,”
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News: U.S. and World News Headlines : NPR - 0 views

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shared by mattrenz16 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In particular, Philadelphia has been a focus for Trump; four years ago, only 15% of the city's voters picked him. Trump has claimed — with little evidence — that the local election system is corrupt. His critics say the president is trying to suppress turnout in the city.
  • There have been issues, including technical hiccups on the first day of early, in-person voting. A laptop used to program voting machines was stolen. A reporter for NPR member station WHYY got inside a warehouse where voting machines are stored, although city officials beefed up security after that.
  • A new state law has made it much easier to vote early and by mail.
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  • That's one reason why Philadelphia spent $5 million on new equipment to speedily process the deluge of mail-in ballots.
  • One machine sorts returned ballots in hours, instead of days if done manually. Another machine cuts open envelopes and spreads them apart with suction cups so workers can quickly pull out the ballots.
  • And there are 12 high-speed scanners that process 32,000 ballots an hour.
  • Meanwhile, President Trump continues to sow doubt about the veracity of voting in Philadelphia. The Trump campaign videotaped people putting ballots in drop boxes.
  • That prompted Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner to issue a warning. "Anyone who comes to the cradle of American democracy to try to suppress the vote — and violates the law and commits crimes — is going to find themselves in a jail cell talking to a Philadelphia jury," he said last month.
  • So far, there have been no reports of voter intimidation.
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Justice Barrett Joins Supreme Court Arguments For The First Time : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...t-arguments-for-the-first-time
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  • she asked questions in turn in a set of cases that presented difficult procedural questions but no headlines.
  • Barrett could well be forgiven for bowing out of the court's work last week, with six days to prep before her Monday debut.
  • Barrett's choice to forgo participating last week meant she did not vote in two significant cases decided by the court in opinions released Monday.
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  • even if his role in leading the protest onto the highway was negligent, it couldn't make him personally liable for the actions of an individual whose only association to him was attendance at the protest.
  • On Monday, the Supreme Court threw out the suit for now, declaring that the 5th Circuit's interpretation of state law "is too uncertain a premise on which to address" the question currently at issue.
  • any reasonable officer should have realized that Taylor's conditions of confinement offended the Constitution,
  • whether Louisiana would permit such a suit.
  • In a second case — involving cruel and unusual punishment of a prisoner — the justices also repudiated a 5th Circuit decision.
  • the prison officers responsible for this treatment could not be sued because the law "wasn't clearly established" that "prisoners "couldn't be housed in cells teaming with human waste" "for only six days." Thus, the 5th Circuit granted the officers qualified immunity from being sued.
  • The constitutional question — namely whether such a suit violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech — is only raised if Louisiana law in fact permits such a suit in the first place,
  • The telephone format allows each justice only a few minutes to ask questions so there was no way to compare Barrett's questioning with other newbies in recent years.
  • New Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett heard her first oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Monday. Participating by phone with the other justices
  • Barrett could well be forgiven for bowing out of the court's work last week, with six days to prep before her Monday debut. But Chief Justice John Roberts also had just six days to prepare in 2005
  • Barrett's choice to forgo participating last week meant she did not vote in two significant cases decided by the court in opinions released Monday.
  • In an important First Amendment case involving a Black Lives Matter protest, the court sided with activist DeRay Mckesson in his effort to avoid a lawsuit by a police officer who was severely injured by an unknown assailant.
  • On Monday, the Supreme Court threw out the suit for now, declaring that the 5th Circuit's interpretation of state law "is too uncertain a premise on which to address"
  • Acknowledging these "exceptional circumstances," the high court, in essence, then asked the Louisiana Supreme Court to decide what the state law actually is — in short, whether Louisiana would permit such a suit.
  • This one involved a Texas state prisoner, Trent Taylor, who alleged that for six days in 2013 he was held in what the court called "shockingly unsanitary cells."
  • Taylor did not eat or drink for nearly four days. Correctional officers then moved Taylor to a second, frigidly cold cell, which was equipped with only a clogged drain in the floor to dispose of bodily wastes.
  • Because the cell lacked a bunk, and because Taylor was confined without clothing, he was left to sleep naked in sewage."
  • the Supreme Court noted that the 5th Circuit "properly held that such conditions ... violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment."
  • went on to say that the prison officers responsible for this treatment could not be sued because the law "wasn't clearly established" that "prisoners "couldn't be housed in cells teaming with human waste" "for only six days."
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Australia almost eliminated the coronavirus by putting faith in science - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-ad53-4c1fda49907d_story.html australia pandemic response history culture politics Policy crisis
shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • SYDNEY — The Sydney Opera House has reopened. Almost 40,000 spectators attended the city's rugby league grand final. Workers are being urged to return to their offices.
  • Australia has become a pandemic success story.
  • The nation of 26 million is close to eliminating community transmission of the coronavirus, having defeated a second wave just as infections surge again in Europe and the United States.
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  • America's daily new cases topped 100,000 on Wednesday, and its death toll exceeds 234,000, a staggering figure even accounting for its greater population than Australia, which has recorded 907 deaths.
  • Meanwhile, in the United States, 52,049 people are hospitalized and 10,445 are in an ICU
  • No new cases were reported on the island continent Thursday, and only seven since Saturday, besides travelers in hotel quarantine. Eighteen patients are hospitalized with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. One is in an intensive care unit. Melbourne, the main hotbed of Australia's outbreak that recently emerged from lockdown, has not reported a case since Oct. 30.
  • Australia provides a real-time road map for democracies to manage the pandemic. Its experience, along with New Zealand's, also shows that success in containing the virus isn't limited to East Asian states (Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) or those with authoritarian leaders (China, Vietnam).
  • Several practical measures contributed to Australia's success
  • The country chose to quickly and tightly seal its borders, a step some others, notably in Europe, did not take.
  • Health officials rapidly built up the manpower to track down and isolate outbreaks.
  • And unlike the U.S. approach, all of Australia's states either shut their domestic borders or severely limited movement for interstate and, in some cases, intra­state travelers.
  • Perhaps most important, though, leaders from across the ideological spectrum persuaded Australians to take the pandemic seriously early on and prepared them to give up civil liberties they had never lost before, even during two world wars.
  • "We told the public: 'This is serious; we want your cooperation,' 
  • A lack of partisan rancor increased the effectiveness of the message
  • The conservative prime minister, Scott Morrison, formed a national cabinet with state leaders — known as premiers — from all parties to coordinate decisions
  • Political conflict was largely suspended, at least initially, and many Australians saw their politicians working together to avert a health crisis.
  • "Regardless of who you vote for, most Australians would agree their leaders have a real care for their constituents and a following of science," McLaws said. "I think that helped dramatically.
  • Australians' willingness to conform — especially in Melbourne, where residents endured a lengthy state-ordered lockdown — reflects political attitudes that differ from those in parts of the United States
  • In a nation where compulsory voting produces conventionally center-left or center-right political leaders, governments tend to be regarded as the solution to society's problems rather than the cause.
  • Australia's national response was led by Health Minister Greg Hunt, a former McKinsey & Co. management consultant and a Yale University graduate. Hunt and Morrison worked with the state premiers, who hold responsibility for on-the-ground health policy, to develop a common approach to the pandemic.
  • The government closed Australia's borders to travelers from China on Feb. 1, the same day as the Trump administration in the United States. But unlike the Trump administration, which has criticized its primary infectious-disease adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, Hunt relied heavily on health experts from the start.
  • "In January and February, we were focused on containing the risk of a catastrophic outbreak," Hunt said in an interview. "We had a clear strategic plan, which was the combination of containment and capacity-building."
  • "We closed the border and concentrated on testing, tracing and social distancing," he added. "We built up our capacity to fight the virus in primary and aged care and hospitals. We invested in ventilators, and vaccine and treatment research."
  • Hunt's department oversaw the purchase of huge amounts of protective equipment and clothing, including masks, which became mandatory on Aug. 2 in the state of Victori
  • After a sick doctor in his 70s treated more than 70 people in the city before being diagnosed, Hunt accelerated a 10-year plan to phase in video consultations with physicians. Within 10 days, almost anyone in Australia could see a doctor over the Internet under Australia's highly subsidized health-care system, including psychiatrists.
  • When private hospitals said they were in danger of going broke because non-urgent surgery had been canceled, the government stepped in with emergency funding, securing beds that could be used for coronavirus patients.
  • In private, Hunt swapped ­practical stories with his wife, Paula Hunt, a former infectious-diseases nurse who kept a 1995 bestseller by U.S. science journalist Laurie Garrett, "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance," on her bedside table, he said.
  • While opinion polls show strong support for the tough measures, many people have been badly affected. Australia entered its first recession in 29 years, small businesses have closed, and reports of depression are up. On Tuesday, an anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne turned violent. Police arrested 404 people.
  • for a time, it appeared Australia's early success was imperiled, after lax security at hotels in Melbourne that were housing returned travelers led to a second outbreak in July. By August, more than 700 cases a day were diagnosed. It looked like Australia could lose control of the virus.
  • Almost all public life in Melbourne ended. After 111 days of lockdown, the number of average daily cases fell below five. On Oct. 28, state officials allowed residents to leave their homes for any reason.
  • Australia currently bans its citizens and residents from overseas travel, a decision that has been particularly tough on its 7.5 million immigrants.
  • Most Australians will have access to a vaccine by the middle of next year, Hunt said, a major step toward allowing them to travel.
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Opinion | American exceptionalism has become a hazard to our health - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Taiwan gets the gold medal for its coronavirus strategy. It has close ties with mainland China, where the disease originated, receiving almost 3 million visitors from there in a typical year. It is a densely populated land, and Taipei, the capital city, has crowded public transit. And yet, with a population of nearly 24 million, Taiwan has had just seven deaths. New York state, with a smaller population, has had 33,000.
  • SARS also came out of China, where authorities bungled the initial response and withheld information from the outside world. The Taiwanese were caught unprepared and made several mistakes. In the aftermath, they totally overhauled their pandemic preparedness procedures. They ensured they had adequate supplies of equipment on hand. They made plans to act early, smartly and aggressively.
  • Many Asia-Pacific countries have succeeded against covid-19 — South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia. All were hit by SARS or witnessed its economic damage, and they learned from the experience. The only non-Asian country with a SARS outbreak was Canada, and it, too, changed its procedures after 2003 and took precautions.
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  • SARS doesn’t explain the success of every country that has handled covid-19 well, but it reveals an important aspect of the story.
  • Consider, on the other hand, countries that have handled covid-19 badly. Anthropologist Martha Lincoln, writing in Nature, points out that several of these countries tend to think of themselves as exceptional in some way. She notes that the United States, Britain, Brazil and Chile all have strong national narratives that see themselves as separate, distinct and better than others.
  • That sense of being special makes a country unlikely to adopt the standard attitude of any business when confronting a challenge — to look for best practices.
  • Bill Gates recently wrote that he has always approached problem-solving by starting with two fundamental questions: “Who has dealt with this problem well? And what can we learn from them?
  • And yet the United States is remarkably uninterested in how other countries approach similar challenges.
  • Dozens of advanced countries have health-care systems that deliver better results at half the cost of America’s. Most have a fraction of our homicide rates. Many much poorer countries have better infrastructure, which they build at far lower cost. They ensure that money does not dominate their elections. Not only do we not learn from them, we barely bother to look.
  • In an essay in Foreign Affairs, Jeremy Konyndyk argues that “American exceptionalism — the notion that the United States is unique among nations and that the American way is invariably the best — has blinded the country’s leaders (and many of its citizens) to potentially lifesaving lessons from other countries.
  • He quotes the eminent U.S. historian Eric Foner, who once explained that American exceptionalism translates into “hubris and closed-mindedness, and . . . ignorance about the rest of the world. Since the United States is so exceptional, there is no point in learning about other societies.” Konyndyk concludes: “That mentality is now costing American lives.”
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Opinion | How America could have fought covid-19 better - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Back in the spring, I listed many ways that the United States was uniquely well-positioned to fight this virus
  • Americans generally demand a lot more personal space than people in other countries; we stand farther apart, our houses are bigger and our public spaces tend to be larger and better ventilated than those inEurope. We drive rather than taking mass transit.
  • We are richer and can afford to spend more on virus-proofing our homes and businesses — or paying for the ones that can’t be virus-proofed to be closed until the pandemic ended.
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  • We have more intensive care beds per capita, more equipment and more pricey specialists than almost anywhere else. We have a fantastically innovative biotech sector.
  • Two major American assets I didn’t list, and should have, were weather and time.
  • America’s weather was more favorable to fighting covid-19 because more of our landmass falls in southern latitudes where it’s comfortable, for most of the year, to spend time outside.
  • we had time to figure all that out, because Europe got hit hard first, giving us a valuable preview of horrors to come. That bought us priceless extra days
  • only we squandered them and every other advantage we started with.
  • Sure, America doesn’t have the absolute worst death rate in the industrialized world — not yet, anyway
  • Either way, we’ll still be doing much worse than we could have — and much worse than we should have. And I mean all of us, not just President Trump.
  • everyone, left or right, who turned this into a political battle with their fellow Americans, rather than a desperate fight our country needed to unite to win.
  • Yes, Trump was by far the worst bungler in this whole affair. But there is plenty of blame to go around:
  • I include myself in that number. I think of all the times I lost my temper with covid skeptics, even though I knew it was counterproductive, and I regret every one of them.
  • I look back at my columns and wonder if I should have advocated for less intrusive policies that might have garnered broader support, or if I would have convinced more people if I’d evinced a little more humility in my conviction that America needed to take radical action immediately.
  • I’ll always wonder: How many people could we have saved if everyone, from the president on down, had acted as if saving American lives from a deadly virus was the most important thing we had to do this year?
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Why You Can Dine Indoors but Can't Have Thanksgiving - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617204 pandemic response us politics crisis culture Policy economics gop transparency
shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Because the state and city had reopened restaurants, Josh, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy, assumed that local health officials had figured out a patchwork of precautions that would make indoor dining safe.
  • They were listening to the people they were told to listen to—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently released a book about how to control the pandemic—and following all the rules.
  • Josh was irritated, but not because of me. If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe?
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  • Before you can dig into how cities and states are handling their coronavirus response, you have to deal with the elephant in the hospital room: Almost all of this would be simpler if the Trump administration and its allies had, at any point since January, behaved responsibly.
  • In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it. “When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,”
  • “That erodes public trust and makes it harder to implement rules that do make sense.” Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.
  • Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it.
  • Early federal financial-aid programs could have been renewed and expanded as the pandemic worsened. Centrally coordinated testing and contact-tracing strategies could have been implemented. Reliable, data-based federal guidelines for what kinds of local restrictions to implement and when could have been developed.
  • The country could have had a national mask mandate. Donald Trump and his congressional allies could have governed instead of spending most of the year urging people to violate emergency orders and “liberate” their states from basic safety protocols.
  • But that’s not the country Americans live in. Responding to this national disaster has been left to governors, mayors, and city councils, basically since day one
  • When places including New York, California, and Massachusetts first faced surging outbreaks, they implemented stringent safety restrictions—shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates, indoor-dining and bar closures. The strategy worked: Transmission decreased, and businesses reopened. But as people ventured out and cases began to rise again, many of those same local governments have warned residents of the need to hunker down and avoid holiday gatherings, yet haven’t reinstated the safety mandates that saved lives six months ago
  • Even in cities and states that have had some success controlling the pandemic, a discrepancy between rules and reality has become its own kind of problem.
  • it’s a lot of wasted time and money.” Instead of centralizing the development of infrastructure and methods to deal with the pandemic, states with significantly different financial resources and political climates have all built their own information environments and have total freedom to interpret their data as they please.
  • beneath this contradiction lies a fundamental conflict that state and local leaders have been forced to navigate for the better part of a year. Amid the pandemic, the people they govern would generally be better served if they got to stay home, stay safe, and not worry about their bills. To govern, though, leaders also need to placate the other centers of power in American communities: local business associations, real-estate developers, and industry interest groups
  • The best way to resolve this conflict would probably be to bail out workers and business owners. But to do that at a state level, governors need cash on hand; currently, most of them don’t have much. The federal government, which could help states in numerous ways, has done little to fill state coffers, and has let many of its most effective direct-aid programs expire without renewal.
  • If you make people safe and comfortable at home, it might be harder to make them risk their lives for minimum wage at McDonald’s during a pandemic.
  • However effective these kinds of robust monetary programs may be at keeping people fed, housed, and safe, they are generally not in line with the larger project of the American political establishment, which favors bolstering “job creators” instead of directly helping those who might end up working those jobs
  • Why can’t a governor or mayor just be honest? There’s no help coming from the Trump administration, the local coffers are bare, and as a result, concessions are being made to business owners who want workers in restaurants and employees in offices in order to white-knuckle it for as long as possible and with as many jobs intact as possible, even if hospitals start to fill up again. Saying so wouldn’t change the truth, but it would better equip people to evaluate their own safety in their daily life, and make better choices because of it.
  • Kirk Sell stopped me short. “Do you think it might be the end of their career, though?” she asked. “Probably.”
  • With people out of work and small businesses set up to fail en masse, America has landed on its current contradiction: Tell people it’s safe to return to bars and restaurants and spend money inside while following some often useless restrictions, but also tell them it’s unsafe to gather in their home, where nothing is for sale.
  • Transparency, Kirk Sell told me, would go a long way toward helping people evaluate new restrictions and the quality and intentions of their local leadership. “People aren’t sheep,” she said. “People act rationally with the facts that they have, but you have to provide an understanding of why these decisions are being made, and what kind of factors are being considered.”
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How Exactly Do You Catch Covid-19? There Is a Growing Consensus - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-growing-consensus-11592317650 Covid-19 response personal infection patterns
shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • It’s not common to contract Covid-19 from a contaminated surface, scientists say. And fleeting encounters with people outdoors are unlikely to spread the coronavirus.
  • Instead, the major culprit is close-up, person-to-person interactions for extended periods. Crowded events, poorly ventilated areas and places where people are talking loudly—or singing, in one famous case—maximize the risk.
  • “We should not be thinking of a lockdown, but of ways to increase physical distance,” said Tom Frieden, chief executive of Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit public-health initiative. “This can include allowing outside activities, allowing walking or cycling to an office with people all physically distant, curbside pickup from stores, and other innovative methods that can facilitate resumption of economic activity without a rekindling of the outbreak.”
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  • The group’s reopening recommendations include widespread testing, contact tracing and isolation of people who are infected or exposed.
  • One important factor in transmission is that seemingly benign activities like speaking and breathing produce respiratory bits of varying sizes that can disperse along air currents and potentially infect people nearby.
  • Health agencies have so far identified respiratory-droplet contact as the major mode of Covid-19 transmission. These large fluid droplets can transfer virus from one person to another if they land on the eyes, nose or mouth. But they tend to fall to the ground or on other surfaces pretty quickly.
  • Proper ventilation—such as forcing air toward the ceiling and pumping it outside, or bringing fresh air into a room—dilutes the amount of virus in a space, lowering the risk of infection.
  • An estimated 10% of people with Covid-19 are responsible for about 80% of transmissions, according to a study published recently in Wellcome Open Research. Some people with the virus may have a higher viral load, or produce more droplets when they breathe or speak, or be in a confined space with many people and bad ventilation when they’re at their most infectious point in their illness
  • that is only a rule of thumb, he cautioned. It could take much less time with a sneeze in the face or other intimate contact where a lot of respiratory droplets are emitted, he said.
  • When singing, people can emit many large and small respiratory particles. Singers also breathe deeply, increasing the chance they will inhale infectious particles.
  • Similar transmission dynamics could be at play in other settings where heavy breathing and loud talking are common over extended periods, like gyms, musical or theater performances, conferences, weddings and birthday parties.
  • The so-called attack rate—the percentage of people who were infected in a specific place or time
  • additional protocols to interrupt spread, like social distancing in workspaces and providing N95 respirators or other personal protective equipment, might be necessary as well, she said.
  • Another factor is prolonged exposure. That’s generally defined as 15 minutes or more of unprotected contact with someone less than 6 feet away
  • The attack rate for Covid-19 in households ranges between 4.6% and 19.3%, according to several studies. It was higher for spouses, at 27.8%, than for other household members, at 17.3%, in one study in China.
  • The 37-year-old stay-at-home mother was hospitalized with a stroke on April 18 that her doctors attributed to Covid-19, and was still coughing when she went home two days later.
  • She pushed to get home quickly, she said, because her 4-year-old son has autism and needed her. She kept her distance from family members, covered her mouth when coughing and washed her hands frequently. No one else in the apartment has fallen ill, she said. “Nobody went near me when I was sick,” she said.
  • Being outside is generally safer, experts say, because viral particles dilute more quickly. But small and large droplets pose a risk even outdoors, when people are in close, prolonged contac
  • No one knows for sure how much virus it takes for someone to become infected, but recent studies offer some clues
  • In one small study published recently in the journal Nature, researchers were unable to culture live coronavirus if a patient’s throat swab or milliliter of sputum contained less than one million copies of viral RNA.
  • “Based on our experiment, I would assume that something above that number would be required for infectivity,” said Clemens Wendtner, one of the study’s lead authors
  • He and his colleagues found samples from contagious patients with virus levels up to 1,000 times that, which could help explain why the virus is so infectious in the right conditions: It may take much lower levels of virus than what’s found in a sick patient to infect someone else.
  • Current CDC workplace guidelines don’t talk about distribution of aerosols, or small particles, in a room, said Lisa Brosseau, a respiratory-protection consultan
  • overall, “the risk of a given infected person transmitting to people is pretty low,” said Scott Dowell, a deputy director overseeing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Covid-19 response. “For every superspreading event you have a lot of times when nobody gets infected.”
  • Some scientists say while aerosol transmission does occur, it doesn’t explain most infections. In addition, the virus doesn’t appear to spread widely through the air.
  • “If this were transmitted mainly like measles or tuberculosis, where infectious virus lingered in the airspace for a long time, or spread across large airspaces or through air-handling systems, I think you would be seeing a lot more people infected,” said the CDC’s Dr. Brooks.
  • High-touch surfaces like doorknobs are a risk, but the virus degrades quickly so other surfaces like cardboard boxes are less worrisome,
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The Lancet's editor: 'The UK's response to coronavirus is the greatest science policy f... - 0 views

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  • The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again is a short polemical book, building on a series of excoriating columns Horton has written in the Lancet over the past few months. He lambasts the management of the virus as “the greatest science policy failure for a generation”, attacks the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) for becoming “the public relations wing of a government that had failed its people”, calls out the medical Royal Colleges, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the British Medical Association (BMA) and Public Health England (PHE) for not reinforcing the World Health Organization’s public health emergency warning back in February, and damns the UK’s response as “slow, complacent and flat-footed”, revealing a “glaringly unprepared” government and a “broken system of obsequious politico-scientific complicity”.
  • As editor of the Lancet, he’s particularly aggrieved that the series of five academic papers the journal published in late January first describing the novel coronavirus in disturbing detail went unheeded. 
  • “In several of the papers they talked about the importance of personal protective equipment,” he reminds me. “And the importance of testing, the importance of avoiding mass gatherings, the importance of considering school closure, the importance of lockdowns. All of the things that have happened in the last three months here, they’re all in those five papers.”
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  • What he does know, from the published reports of Sage meetings, is that scientists were “trying to be as sensitive to economic issues as they were to health issues”. That, he says, “is a dangerous place to be” because it compromises the ability of the advisory group to protect health.
  • Horton believes this pandemic is a watershed moment in history, an event that is much larger than simply a crisis in health. “Covid-19 has held a mirror up to our society,” he says, “and forced us to look at who really is vulnerable, who really does make society work, who has to literally put their lives on the line while the rest of us are secluded in our houses. We’ve discovered something about ourselves that we may have been conveniently able to hide before but we can’t hide any more. And so the question is what do we do with that knowledge now?”
  • Despite his ill-health, Horton is a boyish-looking 58 who, incredibly, has been editor of the Lancet for a quarter of a century. In that time he’s turned the journal into a major international success, frequently setting the agenda for global health. Last year he received the $100,000 Roux prize for lifetime achievement in population health, being cited as one of the field’s most “committed, articulate, and influential advocates”.
  • The debts refer to Horton’s role in publishing Andrew Wakefield’s discredited paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccination and autism. The panic that ensued led to a significant drop in vaccinations across the world, growth of the anti-vaccination movement, and lethal outbreaks of measles. Although the science was questioned from the beginning, Horton strongly defended Wakefield, whom he knew from their time working together at the Royal Free. It took 12 years before Horton finally retracted the paper, after a General Medical Council inquiry found Wakefield to have been guilty of dishonesty and deception.
  • Horton “made a catastrophic mistake in publishing that article, and that had enormous consequences both in the UK and globally”.
  • the British government and its senior scientific advisers. Horton believes that in order to restore their damaged reputation they need to acknowledge their mistakes. 
  • “I think that’s going to have to start with Sage, the chief scientific officer and the chief medical officer being very clear that the signals were missed from January. And there needs to be an acknowledgment that there was a collusion that took place between scientific and medical advisers and politicians which was in the end damaging to public health.”
  • Horton acknowledges that from the last conversation he had with him, Whitty “thinks that I don’t understand what he’s trying to achieve”. Yet there remains a case to answer about why we took so long to lock down, and why, despite all the warnings first from China and then from Italy, that we seemed to be caught unawares by the speed and lethality of the virus.
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The pandemic and the dawn of an 'Asian Century' - The Washington Post - 0 views

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  • America’s failings — and, for that matter, Britain’s — were made all the more stark by successes elsewhere. “South Korea rolled out testing at ‘walk-in’ booths all over the country, then used credit card records and location data from mobile phones to trace the movements of infected people — a tactic Britain has failed to master after months of effort,” Pankaj Mishra wrote in an essay for the London Review of Books that excoriated the Anglo-American handling of the crisis. “Other East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore are also faring much better. Vietnam swiftly routed the virus.”
  • Its struggles may come to mark a historic inflection point: the moment the world’s preeminent superpower had to relinquish a certain vision of its own primacy as other countries — especially some rising powers in Asia — led the way.
  • “Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm,” wrote Mishra, pointing to both the United States’ punitively expensive health-care system and the hollowing out of Britain’s social services. “It has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.”
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  • “America and Britain’s poor responses to Covid-19 can be traced partly to post-cold war self-congratulation — the belief that neither had much to learn from the rest of the world,” wrote Edward Luce of the Financial Times. “In a few short months a microbe has exposed the underside to Anglo-American hubris.”
  • that hubris is no small thing — it’s in many ways at the heart of the ideological project that sculpted the post-World War II international order, the “Anglo-Saxon” principles of laissez-faire liberal democracy that seemed irrevocably ascendant until not so long ago.
  • instead of setting the terms of a hemispheric “Pax Americana,” they find themselves adjusting to new realities forged elsewhere.
  • “Half a millennium of potted history tells Anglo-Americans they are destined always to be on the winning side,” Luce added. “It blinds both to how the rest of the world increasingly views them, which is with sadness and growing mockery.”
  • In the age of the coronavirus, Asia’s dramas have become global ones. A deadly standoff between Indian and Chinese forces in the Himalayas heralded the advent of a new 21st-century fault line separating two nuclear powers. The existential threats facing free societies in Hong Kong and Taiwan have galvanized support throughout the West. The ponderous deliberations in Europe about its political future now cannot be made without an eye to the Far East.
  • Chinese officials insist that such rivalry is unnecessary. “The world should not be viewed in binary thinking, and differences in systems should not lead to a zero-sum game,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a speech Thursday, seeking to tamp down tensions with Washington. “China will not, and cannot, be another U.S.”
  • In an unfortunate paradox, the phenomenal rise of China may have created the very conditions for the demise of the Asian century,” wrote the Indian commentator C. Raja Mohan. “That China has become far more powerful than all of its Asian neighbors has meant Beijing no longer sees the need to evoke Asian unity. As it seeks to surpass the United States and emerge as the top dog in the world, it is no surprise that Beijing’s imagination has turned to the construction of a Chinese century.”
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Opinion | As the Trump disaster gets worse, a new political theory helps explain it - T... - 0 views

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  • Law professors David Pozen and Kim Lane Scheppele present “executive underreach” as a species of leadership failure that’s as destructive as executive overreach, defining it as:ADa national executive branch’s willful failure to address a significant public problem that the executive is legally and functionally equipped (though not necessarily legally required) to address.
  • But crucially, the paper links this phenomenon to fundamentally illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies: Hostility to science and expertise; and the leader’s abiding faith in his ability to confuse the public with disinformation as a substitute for acting in the national interest, all typical of “demagogic populists” like Trump and Bolsonaro.
  • all this can be understood as a manifestation of illiberal, anti-democratic impulses.
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  • Defining executive underreach isn’t easy, since the executive is endowed with the discretion to opt for inaction. So the paper suggests this:Underreach occurs when domestic and international legal sources are widely seen to authorize, if not also encourage or oblige, an executive to tackle a particular sort of problem with particular sorts of tools and yet the executive declines to do so.
  • the paper notes that it occurs when the rationale for inaction is offered in naked and destructive bad faith, as Trump has been doing for months.
  • Authoritarian and autocratic impulses perhaps belong in a separate category from illiberal and anti-democratic ones. But there’s plenty of overlap: Wielding disinformation to supplant solutions in the public interest and prodding friendly governors into putting untold constituents at risk — all to serve the leader’s cultish political needs — surely partake from both.
  • In the leadership context, when incompetence and the distraction of narcissism do appear, they don’t necessarily hamper the realization of illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies. They are rooted in the same tangle of impulses, and mutually reinforce each other in a uniquely toxic way that compounds the wreckage.
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Denial and Defiance: Trump and His Base Downplay the Virus Ahead of the Election - The ... - 0 views

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  • From resistance to face masks and scorn for the science of the coronavirus to predicting the imminent arrival of a vaccine while downplaying the death count, President Trump and a sizable number of his supporters have aligned emphatically behind an alternate reality minimizing a tragedy that has killed an overwhelming number of Americans and gutted the economy.
  • it is also a direct result of the look-the-other-way message that the Trump administration has sent with increasing urgency, pollsters and strategists say, as the president faces a strong challenge to re-election
  • Mr. Trump has called on Twitter for people to “LIBERATE” states that have imposed stay-at-home orders, threatened to withhold aid from Democratic governors and undercut medical professionals who have cautioned against the use of unproven medical treatments and premature school reopenings.
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  • Polls show that Republicans approve of how he has handled the response to the virus by overwhelming margins and — unlike much of the country — think the United States has moved too slowly to reopen.
  • “President Trump was a terrible role model,” said former Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, a Republican who has said he will vote for Mr. Biden.
  • Tucker Carlson told his viewers on Fox News the other night that Covid-19 was “not dangerous to the overwhelming number of people who are destroyed by the Covid restrictions.”
  • The message has been reinforced by figures on Fox News and elsewhere in the pro-Trump news media.
  • These disagreements reflect old and conflicting beliefs about the role of government in America. Leave-me-alone libertarianism and deep suspicion of an overly intrusive federal government have long animated conservatives and taken root in the frontier West. Now those resentments, fanned by Mr. Trump, are colliding with a contagious disease and the most contentious election in recent memory.
  • “I don’t believe that the federal government could have done much more,” said Linda Jackson, 60, a Trump supporter who lives in North Cornwall Township, in Lebanon County, Pa. “The president, in my opinion, thinks outside the box, and he enlisted public-private partnerships to get the equipment, the ventilators, the P.P.E., all the things that we needed on the local level to combat the virus. And he’s really ramped up this testing for a vaccine.
  • “I think he’s done a really good job,” she said.
  • The president has tried to present himself as someone who has aggressively sought to confront the virus from the start. For any shortcomings or failures, he and his allies have tried to shift blame to others: China, the states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the World Health Organization. And he continues to provide projections that experts warn are overly optimistic or misguided. Last week he said that a vaccine could be ready “very, very soon,” and insisted that the virus would simply vanish. “It’s going to disappear,” he said in an interview with ABC News.
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As the Coronavirus Surges, a New Culprit Emerges: Pandemic Fatigue - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-pandemic-fatigue.html pandemic fatigue psychology international crisis politics Culture
shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • With no end in sight, many people are flocking to bars, family parties, bowling alleys and sporting events much as they did before the virus hit, and others must return to school or work as communities seek to resuscitate economies. And in sharp contrast to the spring, the rituals of hope and unity that helped people endure the first surge of the virus have given way to exhaustion and frustration.
  • In parts of the world where the virus is resurging, the outbreaks and a rising sense of apathy are colliding, making for a dangerous combination. Health officials say the growing impatience is a new challenge as they try to slow the latest outbreaks, and it threatens to exacerbate what they fear is turning into a devastating autumn.
  • The issue is particularly stark in the United States
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  • But a similar phenomenon is sending off alarms across Europe, where researchers from the World Health Organization estimate that about half of the population is experiencing “pandemic fatigue.”
  • “Citizens have made huge sacrifices,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, the W.H.O.’s regional director for Europe. “It has come at an extraordinary cost, which has exhausted all of us, regardless of where we live, or what we do.”
  • If the spring was characterized by horror, the fall has become an odd mix of resignation and heedlessness. People who once would not leave their homes are now considering dining indoors for the first time — some losing patience after so many months without, others slipping in a fancy meal before the looming winter months when the virus is expected to spread more readily
  • “In the spring, it was fear and a sense of, ‘We are all in it together,’” said Vaile Wright, a psychologist at the American Psychological Association who studies stress in the United States.“Things are different now,” she said. “Fear has really been replaced with fatigue.”
  • In some parts of the world, behavior has changed and containment efforts have been tough and effective
  • “We were doing sprints in the beginning, and now it’s a marathon. We’re a little tired.”
  • “We have very little backlash here against these types of measures,” said Siddharth Sridhar, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong. “If anything, there’s a lot of pushback against governments for not doing enough to contain the virus.”
  • Infections have stayed relatively low for months in places like South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and China, where the virus first spread.
  • Sick people are telling contact tracers they picked up the virus while trying to return to ordinary life. Beth Martin, a retired school librarian who is working as a contact tracer in Marathon County, Wis., said she interviewed a family that had become sick through what is now a common situation — at a birthday party for a relative in early October.
  • Mark Harris, county executive for Winnebago County, Wis., said he had been frustrated by the “loud minority” in his county that had been successfully pushing back against any public health measures to be taken against the pandemic.They have a singular frame of mind, he said: “‘This has been inconveniencing me long enough and I’m done changing my behavior.’”
  • There are growing signs that the ongoing stress is taking a toll. In the United States, alcohol sales in stores are up 23 percent during the pandemic, according to Nielsen, a figure that could reflect the nation’s anxiety as well as the drop in drinks being sold at restaurants and bars.
  • Overdose deaths, too, are on the rise in many cities. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, there were recently 19 overdose deaths in a single week, far more than most weeks.
  • The response in the United States and much of Europe has been far different. While residents willingly banded together in the spring, time has given rise to frustration and revolt.
  • Dr. Michael Landrum, who treats coronavirus patients in Green Bay, Wis., said mask use is more widespread than in the spring, personal protective equipment is easier to come by for hospital workers and treatment of the virus is more sophisticated.
  • “The scary scenario is the number of patients who really just don’t know where they got it,” Dr. Landrum said. “That suggests to me that it’s out there spreading very easily.”
  • The challenge ahead, he said, would be convincing people that they need to take significant steps — all over again — to slow down spread that could be even worse than before.
  • “We’re trying to get people to change their behavior back to being more socially distanced and more restrictive with their contacts,” Dr. Landrum said. “There’s been a false sense of complacency. And now it’s just a lot harder to do that.”
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How Trump and Biden Are Gearing Up for the Last Presidential Debate - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by yehbru on 21 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Thursday in the last major prime-time opportunity for Mr. Trump to try to change the trajectory of the race before Election Day.
  • Republicans would like to see the president offer an affirmative vision for the country and draw policy contrasts with Mr. Biden in terms that resonate with the few undecided voters remaining
  • polls show the president trailing nationally and confronting close races even in states he won handily four years ago.
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  • they have also urged the president not to interrupt Mr. Biden repeatedly
  • The president has signaled he intends to focus on Mr. Biden’s son Hunter and his business dealings, after an unsubstantiated New York Post report on that subject
  • . But some advisers fear he will not be able to control himself and will attack the younger Mr. Biden in a way that engenders sympathy for the Biden family, a dynamic that unfolded in the first debate when Mr. Trump mocked Hunter Biden’s history of battling drug addiction.
  • “The president, in order to have a successful debate, has to go on offense without being offensive,”
  • Mr. Biden, for his part, is working to protect his advantage by relying on arguments that have defined his pitch for months: that he is the candidate best equipped to lead the nation out of the pandemic and its attendant economic fallout, and that he can restore stability and a measure of civility to the office after Mr. Trump’s turbulent tenure.
  • In particular, allies expect that he will face questioning on expanding the Supreme Court, a matter he has repeatedly dodged, though he has said that he will clarify his position before Election Day
  • Last week, Trump advisers tried gently suggesting, as they prepared him for his NBC town hall event with Savannah Guthrie, that he needed to be more controlled and less caustic than in the first debate. Aides claim he has processed that information, though he was combative and refused to disavow a conspiracy theory movement during the first part of that appearance, too.
  • Mr. O’Donnell, the Republican strategist, suggested that Mr. Trump’s frequent interruptions in the previous debate prevented viewers from absorbing some of Mr. Biden’s shakier responses
  • The president’s advisers have also gone over with him his third debate against Hillary Clinton in 2016, which they believe was his best of the three he had in that campaign, in part because he was relatively articulate while being specific in discussing policies, despite the moment when Mrs. Clinton called him a “puppet” of Russia and his response was: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.”
  • “He does need to communicate to swing voters that the real stakes in this election are not the past, not even the present, but they are the future, of rebuilding the economy.”
  • Mr. Biden’s advisers see the race as a referendum on Mr. Trump’s leadership during the pandemic, and they view the debate as another chance to highlight differences with the president as coronavirus cases rise across the country
  • Mr. Biden is expected to highlight his own plans around health care and reviving the economy in a week when Mr. Trump has sharply criticized Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. The former vice president’s team has also signaled that it will cast personal attacks as an attempted diversion from the most urgent issues facing the nation. And some close to the Biden campaign have pointed to polls that showed a backlash to Mr. Trump’s first debate performance and his sharp personal attacks.
  • A number of Biden allies said in interviews that there was nothing wrong with a flash of righteous anger. But they said that the wisest course was to dismiss any personal attacks by pivoting back to voters’ more tangible concerns, something Mr. Biden tried to do in the first debate by noting that many Americans have family members who struggle with addiction.
  • Senator Kamala Harris, suggested on Wednesday that it was unlikely he would turn to attacks on Mr. Trump’s children
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How Trump and Biden Are Gearing Up for the Last Presidential Debate - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • The president’s advisers want him to present an affirmative vision for the country. Joe Biden’s team is bracing for ugly attacks.
  • Mr. Trump to try to change the trajectory of the race before Election Day.
  • Mr. Trump’s advisers hope that he can get under Mr. Biden’s skin on Thursday at the debate in Nashville
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  • The debate comes 12 days before Election Day, as many Americans have already cast ballots, and as polls show the president trailing nationally and confronting close races even in states he won handily four years ago.
  • But some advisers fear he will not be able to control himself and will attack the younger Mr. Biden in a way that engenders sympathy for the Biden family, a dynamic that unfolded in the first debate when Mr. Trump mocked Hunter Biden’s history of battling drug addiction.
  • Mr. Biden, for his part, is working to protect his advantage by relying on arguments that have defined his pitch for months: that he is the candidate best equipped to lead the nation out of the pandemic and its attendant economic fallout, and that he can restore stability and a measure of civility to the office after Mr. Trump’s turbulent tenure.
  • But his behavior in the second half of the town hall, during which he answered policy questions without attacking Ms. Guthrie, is what advisers hope to see from him on Thursday night.
  • “He does need to communicate to swing voters that the real stakes in this election are not the past, not even the present, but they are the future, of rebuilding the economy.”
  • Mr. Biden and his allies are skeptical that Mr. Trump will confine his remarks to such subjects.
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Trump Waves To Supporters Outside Walter Reed In Brief Drive-By : Live Updates: Trump T... - 1 views

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  • President Trump briefly left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Sunday evening to wave to supporters gathered outside. A masked Trump was seen waving to supporters from a black SUV. Other images showed Secret Service personnel in the vehicle with personal protective equipment on.
  • Some experts swiftly characterized Trump's drive-by greeting as reckless. Dr. James Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University, lambasted the move as being made for "political theater."
  • "That Presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID-19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play," he wrote on Twitter.
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  • American adults say they're drinking 14% more often during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report in the journal JAMA Network Open. The increase in frequency of drinking for women was more pronounced, up 17% compared to last year.
  • Stores sold 54% more alcohol in late March compared the year prior, according to Nielsen.
  • "Alcohol compromises the body's immune system and increases the risk of adverse health outcomes," the WHO stated. "Therefore, people should minimize their alcohol consumption at any time, and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic."
  • Two weeks after the killing of George Floyd, crowds inspired by Black Lives Matter protests in America marched to the statue of a slave trader named Edward Colston in the center of the English port city of Bristol. They wrapped ropes around the neck of the bronze effigy, pulled it to the pavement, rolled and dragged it through the streets, and then pushed it into the harbor.
  • Colston was Bristol's biggest philanthropist. His name adorned the city's concert hall, an office tower, as well as schools and streets. The plaque beneath the statue, which was erected in 1895, called him "one of the most virtuous and wise sons" of Bristol. What it failed to mention – and what angered the protesters – is that Colston made much of his fortune with the Royal African Company, which shipped tens of thousands of enslaved people across the Atlantic to work on plantations during Colston's tenure. An estimated one in five people died during the crossing.
  • A reader poll in the Bristol Post found about 60% of respondents backed protesters pulling down the statue, while around 40% thought it shouldn't have been toppled.
  • Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees, who has lived in Washington and Philadelphia, has had his own unnerving experiences with American police. He said he was flabbergasted when a cop in the U.S. once threatened to arrest him for jaywalking
  • After that, Rees says, he changed the way he dealt with police in the U.S. When asking for directions in New York City one day, he made sure to speak as he took care to approach an officer from the front.
  • Some white residents were doubly angry. They were still mad that the Colston statue had been pulled down illegally and that another statue had gone up without government authorization or public input.
  • "I think it's beautiful," Aidid said. "It stands for so much that Bristol has needed. When I walked past here today, I finally felt like it's not a direct insult to my humanity, to my life."
  • The next morning, government workers unbolted the statue and took it down, leaving the pedestal empty, once again.
  • In July, a London sculptor had his own statue hoisted up on the pedestal. It depicted a Black female protester holding her fist up in a Black power salute.
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Biden Team Unveils New Asylum System To Address Migrant Backlog : NPR - 0 views

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  • The Biden administration will begin phasing in a new asylum process on Feb. 19 for the backlog of people seeking asylum on the southern U.S. border, but Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told NPR that migrants must avoid traveling to the U.S. border while the new system gets up and running.
  • "It's a very, very important cautionary note that they should not travel to the border. That will only increase the pressure on the humanitarian effort to provide for them carefully and safely,"
  • The Department of Homeland Security plans to start allowing in a trickle of asylum-seekers — about 300 people per day — from among an estimated 25,000 people with "active cases" in the now-defunct Migrant Protection Protocols program.
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  • Former President Donald Trump called the program "Remain in Mexico" because it forced migrants from Central American countries to await asylum hearings outside the United States. Biden has called that policy "inhumane," and ending the program was one of Biden's first actions when he took office, part of a sweeping rollback of Trump's measures aimed at curbing immigration.
  • Mayorkas said the administration has been rebuilding the asylum system "really from scratch."
  • Migrants who believe they are eligible will first register with NGOs, nongovernmental organizations that will identify those who are most vulnerable and stuck in limbo the longest. The Department of Homeland Security is building "electronic portals" for migrants to be able to register and check their status.
  • "I cannot overstate the fact that the prior administration completely dismantled the program, and it takes time to rebuild it in a way that addresses the humanitarian needs of the individuals who seek to access it," he told NPR.
  • "We'll be doing a huge amount of media. We'll be working with our international organization partners who have excellent social media networks that reach migrant communities to make sure that people understand who will be eligible for this program and who will not," a senior U.S. official told reporters.
  • After initial screening by the NGOs — which are not yet being revealed — migrants will be given an appointment to go through a port of entry. They will first be tested for the coronavirus and will be equipped with masks.
  • The asylum-seekers will be enrolled in "alternative detention programs" after they cross the border to a final destination inside the country, where their asylum cases will eventually be heard, officials told reporters. No court proceedings will occur at the border.
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No, The Power Crisis In Texas Wasn't Caused By Renewables Failing : Live Updates: Winte... - 0 views

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  • Earlier this week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott appeared on local TV in Dallas and blamed the state's power crisis on the devastating storm that disrupted power generation and froze natural gas pipelines.
  • "Wind and solar got shut down," he said. "They were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis."
  • The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank with ties to the fossil fuel industry, alleged that the storm "never would have been an issue had our grid not been so deeply penetrated by renewable energy sources."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Grid operators say it simply doesn't make sense to pinpoint any one generation source for criticism.
  • Wind turbines did, in fact, freeze. But so did natural gas wells. And pipelines. And critical pipes at coal and nuclear power plants. And equipment panels.
  • Blaming wind and solar is a political move, Bird says. What's really needed — in Texas and elsewhere — is better preparation.
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