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Javier E

Epidemics expert Jonathan Quick: 'The worst-case scenario for coronavirus is likely' | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...an-quick-q-and-a-laura-spinney

epidemic pandemic disease politics crisis emergency

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • n 2018 global health expert Jonathan D Quick, of Duke University in North Carolina, published a book titled The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It. In it he prescribed measures by which the world could protect itself against devastating disease outbreaks of the likes of the 1918 flu, which killed millions and set humanity back decades. He is the former chair of the Global Health Council and a long-term collaborator of the World Health Organization (WHO).
  • The worst case is that the outbreak goes global and the disease eventually becomes endemic, meaning it circulates permanently in the human population.
  • If it becomes a pandemic, the questions are, how bad will it get and how long will it last? The case fatality rate – the proportion of cases that are fatal – has been just over 2%, much less than it was for Sars, but 20 times that of seasonal flu.
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  • If the worst-case scenario comes true, are there still things we can do to minimise the pandemic’s impact?Absolutely. We can mobilise more health officials and keep engaging the public, implementing sensible travel controls and ensuring that frontline health workers have ready access to diagnostic tests and are vigilant – that they don’t send anyone who may have been exposed home without testing them, for example
  • Was an epidemic like that of Covid-19 inevitable?From a biological standpoint an outbreak of a novel pathogen was inevitable, but this one happened in the worst place at the worst time. Wuhan is a big city and a crossroads,
  • is in people’s minds – even though the risk of another one is real. I’ve written about a hypothetical situation in which a new and dangerous pathogen emerges, a vaccine is developed, and you still get a pandemic, because large numbers of millennials refuse the vaccine. In the US, 20% of millennials believe that vaccines cause autism.
  • You have said that time and trust are critical to good epidemic management. What do you mean?The delay between the frontline health workers noticing something unusual, in the form of an emerging disease, and that information travelling up the line to central decision-makers is critical. To illustrate that, a 2018 simulation that the Gates Foundation conducted of a flu pandemic estimated that there would be 28,000 after one month, 10 million after three months, and 33 million after six months. The virus used in that simulation was more contagious and deadly than Covid-19 – though they are both respiratory viruses – but the example shows how all epidemics grow exponentially. So if you can catch an epidemic in the first few weeks, it makes all the difference.
  • The problem is bad information. As my students often remind me, news tends to be behind paywalls, while fake news is free.
  • y (GHS) Index – that scores countries on six dimensions: prevention, detection, response, health system, risk environment and compliance with international standards. No country scores perfectly on all six. China has detected and responded to this epidemic pretty well, though its health system is now stretched beyond capacity, but it is weak on prevention
  • How well is the US prepared?The US ranks high on the GHS index, but is still unprepared for a severe pandemic, should one happen. Malfunctioning coronavirus tests have frustrated public health labs and delayed outbreak monitoring. Supplies of masks, suits and other protective material for health workers are running low in the midst of a moderately severe flu season.
  • Since the creation of a much-needed public health emergency preparedness fund in the aftermath of 9/11, its budget and the public health functions it supports have been steadily reduced. This is the mentality that left the world vulnerable to the devastating 2014 outbreak of Ebola in west Africa – that is, close the fire department and cancel the fire insurance as nobody’s house or factory has burned down lately. It’s time we learned that the bugs never stop mutating and crossing over to humans.
  • What exactly should we be doing faster?Fewer than one in three countries are close to being prepared to confront an epidemic, which leaves the vast majority of the world’s population vulnerable.
Javier E

Our politics isn't designed to protect the public from Covid-19 | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ublic-covid-19-tobacco-johnson

politics government anti-government intervention bureaucracy public policy

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • he worst possible people are in charge at the worst possible time. In the UK, the US and Australia, the politics of the governing parties have been built on the dismissal and denial of risk.
  • Just as these politics have delayed the necessary responses to climate breakdown, ecological collapse, air and water pollution, obesity and consumer debt, so they appear to have delayed the effective containment of Covid-19.
  • I believe it is no coincidence that these three governments have responded later than comparable nations have, and with measures that seemed woefully unmatched to the scale of the crisis
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • to have responded promptly and sufficiently would have meant jettisoning an entire structure of political thought developed in these countries over the past half century.
  • Politics is best understood as public relations for particular interests. The interests come first; politics is the means by which they are justified and promoted
  • On the left, the dominant interest groups can be very large – everyone who uses public services, for instance
  • On the right they tend to be much smaller. In the US, the UK and Australia, they are very small indeed: mostly multimillionaires and a very particular group of companies: those whose profits depend on the cavalier treatment of people and planet
  • I’ve seen how the tobacco companies covertly funded an infrastructure of persuasion to deny the impacts of smoking. This infrastructure was then used, often by the same professional lobbyists, to pour doubt on climate science and attack researchers and environmental campaigners.
  • these companies funded rightwing thinktanks and university professors to launch attacks on public health policy in general and create a new narrative of risk, tested on focus groups and honed in the media
  • They reframed responsible government as the “nanny state”, the “health police” and “elf ’n’ safety zealots”. They dismissed scientific findings and predictions as “unfounded fears”, “risk aversion” and “scaremongering”.
  • Public protections were recast as “red tape”, “interference” and “state control”. Government itself was presented as a mortal threat to our freedom.
  • The groups these corporations helped to fund – thinktanks and policy units, lobbyists and political action committees – were then used by other interests: private health companies hoping to break up the NHS, pesticide manufacturers seeking to strike down regulatory controls, junk food manufacturers resisting advertising restrictions, billionaires seeking to avoid tax
  • Between them, these groups refined the justifying ideology for fragmenting and privatising public services, shrinking the state and crippling its ability to govern.
  • Now, in these three nations, this infrastructure is the government. No 10 Downing Street has been filled with people from groups strongly associated with attacks on regulation and state interventio
  • Modern politics is impossible to understand without grasping the pollution paradox. The greater the risk to public health and wellbeing a company presents, the more money it must spend on politics – to ensure it isn’t regulated out of existence. Political spending comes to be dominated by the dirtiest companies
  • The theory on which this form of government is founded can seem plausible and logically consistent. Then reality hits, and we find ourselves in the worst place from which to respond to crisis, with governments that have an ingrained disregard for public safety and a reflexive resort to denial
  • It is what we see today, as the Trump, Johnson and Morrison governments flounder in the face of this pandemic. They are called upon to govern, but they know only that government is the enemy.
Javier E

UK schools to be closed indefinitely and exams cancelled | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...definitely-and-exams-cancelled

schools uk pandemic response policy

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Local authorities in England have already begun contacting parents, asking them to define themselves as a “key worker”. Those who are will be able to send their children into school for supervised care from Monday. Williamson said “examples of these workers include NHS staff, police and supermarket delivery drivers who need to be able to go to work to support the country’s fight to tackle coronavirus”.
  • Vulnerable children will include those who have a social worker and those with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) – a legal document that describes a child’s special educational needs and the support they require.
  • Williamson later told MPs that teachers and social workers would also be classed as key workers, increasing the number of children who could potentially be looked after in schools into hundreds of thousands
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  • “Schools will be ready to help the children and families that we serve. Even above GCSE and A-level exams, the first priority must be to keep vulnerable children safe, looked after and properly fed. This is our bread and butter and we will step up.”
Javier E

When Johnson says we'll turn the tide in 12 weeks, it's just another line for the side of a bus | Marina Hyde | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...covid-19-prime-minister-brexit

PM uk pandemic politics crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 21 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • hat great line from last year’s Chernobyl drama series. “When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
  • His other area of expertise is disguising rather basic points with needlessly obscure language. Once this made him a highly overrated prose stylist; now it could make him accomplice to the death of your relatives and friends. “The key message,” Johnson key-messaged on Tuesday, is that people follow the advice “sedulously”. Ah, sedulously. Sedulously. The signal for 10 million hardworking families to draw down the leather-bound thesaurus from their shelves and browse synonyms for the word “twat”.
  • Unfortunately, as indicated, Johnson is basically just a columnist. I don’t want to spaff what we might euphemise as my own area of expertise too early, but trust me on this: he is hardwired to spin that shit out for 1150 words. How to put this in terms that even a wildly overeducated prime minister can understand? JUST TELL US THE INFORMATION. It’s a public safety briefing, not a fricking ring quest.
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  • The government’s crisis communications strategy could not be going worse if it was being led by the last speaker of a dead language, with Typhoid Mary on bass. People are still clearly extremely confused by what the advice is. Never have bullet points been more called for, and you’d think someone as obsessed with the second world war as Johnson is would know that an effective Ministry of Information was inextricably linked to the success of the war effort.
  • Of course, we are not the only nation to be conducting an interesting social experiment to determine what happens if you elect a clinical narcissist to run a country which later turns out to be facing grave danger. At this stage, the US’s experiment appears to be going rather worse, and you certainly wouldn’t rule out Donald Trump judging November’s elections to be something that had better be suspended under the circumstances.
  • That the music should stop when Boris Johnson of all people is prime minister is the darkest of cosmic ironies. We are being asked to put our trust – our lives – in the hands of a man whose entire career, journalistic and political, has been built on a series of lies. It is the work of seconds to dredge up Johnson columns about radical population control, or Johnson buses about the NHS enjoying vast savings from the EU. Who knows which of these, if any, he ever really believed
Javier E

This coronavirus crisis has forced the retirement of pantomime Johnson | Andrew Rawnsley | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...etirement-of-pantomime-johnson

UK response pandemic

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The government is moving towards banning sports fixtures and other mass gatherings, but is still resistant to a more comprehensive shutdown. The scientific reasoning behind Britain’s approach is that more draconian steps won’t make that much difference at this stage, are not sustainable over the longer term, and may well turn out to be counterproductive because it will lead to a second wave of infections when restrictions are eased – possibly in winter, when the NHS is most stretched.
  • Sir Patrick has lucidly explained what the strategy is designed to achieve. It expects those on whom the disease has mild effects, the great majority, to be gradually exposed to the virus, building up “herd immunity”. Over time, this will lower the risk of infection for the vulnerable
  • kneejerk responses by frantic governments can end up doing more harm than good. One scientist drew my attention to the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan in 2011. Later studies found that around 20 people died from radiation. Many more, about a thousand, lost their lives as a result of the decision to evacuate: casualties of car crashes, heart attacks and other medical emergencies triggered by trying to clear the area in a rush.
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  • arious models for tackling the pandemic are now being live trialled around the world
  • My conversations have convinced me that the British approach is rooted in scientific logic and a careful calibration of the different risks. I’m no epidemiologist so I won’t pretend to be a qualified judge of whether they are doing the right thing. I am persuaded that they are sincerely endeavouring to do the right thing.
andrespardo

Black people four times more likely to die from Covid-19, ONS finds | Society | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...to-die-from-covid-19-ons-finds

coronavirus crisis corona economics race

shared by andrespardo on 07 May 20 - No Cached
  • Black people four times more likely to die from Covid-19, ONS finds
  • Black people are more than four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people, according to stark official figures exposing a dramatic divergence in the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in England and Wales. The Office of National Statistics found that the difference in the virus’s impact was caused not only by pre-existing differences in communities’ wealth, health, education and living arrangements.
  • after other pre-existing factors had been accounted for, and females from those ethnic groups were 1.6 times more likely to die from the virus than their white counterparts.
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  • The risk of Covid-19 death for people from Chinese and mixed ethnic groups was found to be similar to that for white people.
  • Guardian research last month confirmed suspicions that minority groups faced the greatest risk from the coronavirus and showed that areas with high ethnic minority populations in England and Wales tended to have higher mortality rates in the pandemic.
  • “We cannot ignore how important racial discrimination and racial inequalities, for example, in housing, are, even among poorer socio-economic groups,” she said. “These factors are important but are not taken into account in most statistical modelling of Covid-19 risk factors.”
  • These groups are more likely to work in frontline roles in the NHS in England: nearly 21% of staff are from ethnic minorities, compared with about 14% of the population of England and Wales. Black, Bangladeshi and Pakistani populations have been shown to face higher levels of unemployment and child poverty than white groups.
  • The authors called for further research on the contribution of occupational risk and whether people from BAME backgrounds were placed at increased risk of exposure and infection.
  • To try to understand how much of the difference in Covid-19 morbidity was to do purely with ethnicity, the statisticians adjusted for age as well as region, rural and urban classification, area deprivation, household composition, socio-economic position, highest qualification held, household tenure, and health or disability as recorded in the 2011 census.
  • After all these factors were accounted for, Indian men and women were less likely than people from Bangladeshi and Pakistani background to die from Covid-19, but were still 1.3 times and 1.4 times more vulnerable than white people.
  • The ONS also checked to see if, within ethnic groups, socio-economic class made a difference. They found that the differences in risk of Covid-19-related death across ethnic groups were of similar magnitudes within all three socio-economic classes.
  • Some groups may be over-represented in public-facing occupations and could be more likely to be infected by Covid-19 . About 12.8% of workers from Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds work in public-facing transport jobs such as bus, coach and taxi driving, compared with 3.5% of white people. The ONS said it plans to conduct further work to identify occupations that are particularly at risk.
  • Like the ONS data, the study found that people of black and Asian backgrounds were at higher risk of death, and it ruled out the idea that this was largely due to higher rates of underlying medical problems in these groups.
  • “It doesn’t have to be like this. As a society that prides itself on justice and compassion, we can and must do better.”
  • The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that people from deprived social backgrounds were also at a higher risk, and again this finding could not be explained by other risk factors.
  • The research accounts for health problems reported by people who filled in the 2011 census, but Hanif said differences in the extent of other underlying diseases in different ethnic groups in Britain – so-called co-morbidities – which have not been accounted for by the ONS, may be significant. For example, in the UK people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent are
  • “We have commissioned Public Health England to better understand the different factors, such as ethnicity, obesity and geographical location that may influence the effects of the virus.”
Javier E

Democrats Should Worry about British Labour's Collapse | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...about-british-labours-collapse

labour UK Politics crisis history policy Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 09 May 21 - No Cached
  • With the rise of Momentum, what had been implicit in Blair and Brown’s politics — the parties’ identification with London and the university towns — became codified in the group’s support for a cultural politics that broke with Labour’s historical commitments to family, community, and nation
  • This politics consisted of enthusiastic support for Remain.  In the runup to the 2019 vote, the activists joined hands with the pro-Blair MPs to favor a second referendum, a “people’s vote,” which they assumed would repudiate the 2016 results
  • They championed “open borders,” immediate eligibility for migrants to Britain’s extensive social services, including its free National Health Services, and voting rights for migrants, regardless of their citizenship, in national elections. They extolled “diversity” and condemned supporters of Leave as bigots and xenophobes.  Patriotism itself was identified with xenophobia.
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  • At the pre-election Labour Conference in Brighton in September 2019, which I attended, speakers called on Britain to provide reparations to make amends for its imperial past and even condemned Britain for global warming — presumably, by initiating the industrial revolution.
  • The young activists also espoused controversial views on family and gender
  • Prior to the 2019 election, an ad hoc group, the Labour Committee for Trans Rights, called for the expulsion from the party of two longstanding feminist organizations that restricted membership in their rape shelters to biological women
  • But Labour’s equivocal stand on Brexit and its identification with the cultural views of young, urban, college-educated activists overrode any appeal that its economic platform might have had.
  • In a post-election study, Paula Surridge, Matthew Goodwin, Oliver Heath, and David Cutts found the that support for Brexit was “strongly associated with cultural values.”  These values “cut across the traditional left-right divide” and undermined Labour’s historic identification with the economic left. 
  • After the election, trade unionist Paul Embery, a member of the group, wrote in his book Despised, “Labour today has virtually nothing to say to the small town and post-industrial Britain, the kind of places out there in the provinces which were once its mainstay.  It is no longer the ‘people’s party’, but the party for the woke, the Toytown revolutionary and Twitter.”
  • The other factor in Labour’s defeat in 2019 and on Thursday was Boris Johnson’s ability to get a deal on Brexit and his  move leftward on economic policy.
  • Johnson, who replaced May in July 2019,  made none of those mistakes. He got parliament to endorse the outlines of a Brexit deal, and he pledged to increase funding for the NHS and to initiate an industrial policy to “level up” Britain’s deindustrialized regions. Johnson’s politics hit the sweet spot in the British electorate: social democratic on economics, but conservative (although not in the American sense of the religious right) on social and cultural policy.  That’s the magic formula that allowed the Tories to lay siege to Labour’s Red Wall.
  • Johnson’s success with the vaccine and his budget boosted his popularity and laid the basis for the Tories’ success in Thursday’s election.
  • Starmer tried to distance Labour from Momentum, Corbyn, and the cultural left.  He declared that he was “proud to be patriotic” and advised Labour officials to display the Union Jack at their appearances.  He opposed the demand to expel the feminist groups and called on the party to “put family first.”  But as Thursday’s results showed, the damage was already done.  Barring a major misstep by Johnson and the Tories, Labour could be out of power for the rest of the decade.
  • the Democrats’ success in 2020 could prove fleeting.  In 2020, they were blessed with a candidate who was able to stem, and in a few instances slightly reverse, the flight of working class voters in middle America from the Democratic Party. That was critical to Biden’s success in a state like Pennsylvania.
  • But Biden is a 78-year-old relic who in his person and in his emphasis on economics reflects an older labor-oriented Democratic party that is being replaced by a party preoccupied with culture and identity.
  • Many of the young Democrats elevate racial issues above those of class — framing what could be universal appeals to national betterment in racial terms; they want to increase immigration and grant citizenship to unauthorized immigrants, but appear indifferent to securing America’s borders
  • they justifiably champion the rights of transgender women —  biological men who identify as women — to be free from discrimination in employment or housing, but dismiss concerns that a blanket identification of sex with declared gender could threaten rights specific to biological women;
  • and as homicides rise, and as justifiable protests against police brutality turned into mayhem and looting, they have advocated defunding  rather than reforming the police.
  • Democrats’ identification with these kind of views played a role in Democratic losses in Congressional races in 2020.
  • Democrats in 2020 were also blessed with a perfect opponent in Donald Trump.  Trump’s bigotry and corruption turned off far more voters than it attracted.
  • If Trump continues to be the poster-boy for the Republican Party, Democrats will benefit in 2022 and 2024, but if he recedes, and his most ardent followers fade into the background, the Democrats could suffer defeat in Congressional elections and in the presidential election of 2024
johnsonel7

Boris Johnson: Brexit will mark 'new chapter' for UK, says PM - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-politics-50956221

johnson britain brexit

shared by johnsonel7 on 01 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • In his new year message, the prime minister said he hoped the country would "move forward united" after it leaves the EU on 31 January.He vowed to govern "for everyone", not just those who backed him at the polls.
  • The Conservatives' resounding election victory on 12 December had "driven an electoral bulldozer" through the deadlock in Parliament, he said, and offered a way out of the "division, rancour and uncertainty" surrounding the Brexit debate since the 2016 referendum vote.
  • Ahead of what is traditionally the most difficult time of the year for the health service, Mr Johnson insisted it was his "top priority" and his ambition was to provide "state of the art" healthcare which remained free at the point of use."The loudest message I heard during the election campaign is that people expect us - expect me - to protect and improve the NHS."
katherineharron

Ranking the Top 5 Democrats in the 2020 race - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
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  • But the level of not-knowing-what-the-hell-is-going-to-happen is much higher in this race than any we've seen in modern memory. Just four in 10 Iowa Democrats said they were locked in on their candidate choice in a CNN/Des Moines Register poll earlier this month. That's significantly lower than the 59% who said they had made up their minds about a candidate at the same time in 2016.
  • 5. Amy Klobuchar: The Minnesota senator wanted (needed?) a star turn at the debate earlier this week in Iowa to close the gap between herself and the four top candidates in Iowa.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 3 (tie). Elizabeth Warren: We're moving the senior senator up on our list for two reasons. First, although Warren is arguably in a worse position than Buttigieg in Iowa and New Hampshire, she is in a better position than he is nationally.
  • 3 (tie). Pete Buttigieg: Buttigieg is, weirdly, the most divisive candidate in the field. Just take his debate performance on Tuesday night as an example. Chris wrote that he came across as well-versed on the issues, authoritative and possessing the necessary gravitas to serve as commander-in-chief.
  • . Bernie Sanders: We've both written about how it's not far-fetched at all that the junior senator from Vermont could win the nomination.
  • 1. Joe Biden: The former vice president has the easiest path to the nomination. If Biden wins in Iowa, he is the heavy favorite to be the nominee.
lmunch

UK emergency Covid-19 field hospitals asked to be 'ready' to admit patients - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

UK Pandemic policy

shared by lmunch on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • UK health workers are preparing to reactivate seven emergency Covid-19 field hospitals, as a surge of coronavirus cases fueled by the spread of a new, more contagious variant threatens to overwhelm intensive care units.
  • Some London hospitals are now almost two-thirds full with Covid-19 patients, President of the Royal College of Physicians Andrew Goddard said Saturday.
  • the UK recorded its highest daily rise in coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, with 57,725 new cases registered Saturday and a further 445 deaths, according to the government's dashboard.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "There is no doubt the new variant is more transmissible and the escalation of cases that we've seen in South Wales, London, Essex and the South East has been at a much greater rate than we've seen with the previous strains," Goddard added.
  • Plans announced Wednesday by the head of the UK's medicines regulator, MHRA, to delay giving second doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in order to prioritize first doses for as many vulnerable people as possible have prompted opposition from doctors' groups.The new strategy means that the interval between doses could be extended to up to 12 weeks, instead of the three weeks previously stipulated. However, Pfizer has said it has no data to show that just a single dose of its vaccine would provide protection against the disease after more than 21 days.
  • "It is almost certainly true that the NHS has not yet seen the impact of the infections that will have occurred during mixing in Christmas and that unfortunately is rather sobering."As of January 1, at least 30 countries, including the United States, had reported cases of the more infectious variant of the coronavirus first detected in the UK.
kaylynfreeman

What Time Do the Polls Close? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...poll-closing-times.html

US politics

shared by kaylynfreeman on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Because so many Americans are voting by mail, it’s very possible that we won’t know who won on election night, or even Wednesday morning.
  • 8 p.m. 238 electoral college votes in 21 states and Washington, D.C. </polygon
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 03 Nov 20
       
      DE
Javier E

Opinion | Trump's biggest argument is failing him. New polls explain why. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ling-him-new-polls-explain-why

law and order trump politics biden 2020

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Recent New York Times/Siena polling found that voters in Minnesota and Wisconsin — both states where violence has broken out — put Biden at parity or slightly above Trump to handle both violent crime and law and order, and a majority (51 percent to 42 percent) favor Biden to handle protests.
  • Political scientist Omar Wasow recently offered an explanation for all this. Wasow noted that during Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” campaign, a supposed model for Trump’s, public sentiment was better classified as a tripartite set of opinions, as opposed to Trump’s binary.
  • Well, that polling also showed that majorities in Minnesota and Wisconsin believe Trump has encouraged violence in America. Meanwhile, national polls have shown that majorities see Trump as making things worse, not better.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The upshot: Whatever doubts persist about Biden, the balance he strikes is still seen as preferable to Trump’s false binary, which is seen as destructive, even deliberately so. Biden’s balance would be more effective in addressing the deep civic tensions and even the violence unleashed in the wake of police killings.
  • This is the case even though that same polling showed that many voters believe Biden hasn’t done enough to condemn violence. How can this be?
  • In that scheme, Wasow noted, voters perceived the existence of an extreme position, the promise to “use all available force.” Nixon was seen as a moderate, between liberal Hubert Humphrey and segregationist George Wallace, who helped moderate Nixon’s position by being associated with the extreme one.
  • Wasow concluded that it’s plausible Biden is becoming the candidate of “safety,” even as Trump is becoming the Wallace-like extremist. As Jonathan Chait notes, Trump is the candidate of Wallace’s “vicious authoritarianism,” while Biden is “the one candidate opposed to violence in American cities across the board.”
  • Trump’s position just is the exhortation to “use all available force.” Trump’s position at bottom is law and order without the rule of law, which really amounts to unshackled state and even vigilante violence, something Trump has actively encouraged, provided it’s waged by his people.
Javier E

This rural liberal set out to talk to his pro-Trump neighbors - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-talk-his-pro-trump-neighbors

liberal NH right-wing culture conservatives politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Dick Burchell, a 77-year-old former Belknap County commissioner, speak of old-timers. “The people I’m closest to,” Burchell says, “the people I tried to represent, they’re traditional. They’re hard-working and down-to-earth. They’ve never made a lot of money, and now the forces of our economy are tilted against them.”
  • As Burchell sees it, “There’s such an imbalance between these working-class people and affluent second homeowners. There’s a real difference between their local conservatism and a more global way of looking at things.”
  • Black Lives Matter, Burchell believes, is a “myopic” organization that’s “fomenting violence” to serve a globalist agenda. “There’s some very powerful forces driving it,” he says, “Wall Street establishment types. Globalization works for them.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “We’ve become increasingly fragile as a society,” Burchell continues. “The hypertension surrounding race these days is totally unnecessary. And what’s being ignored is that you can be marginalized in ways beyond race. There are people who’ve been here for generations, and they’re working two jobs and just getting by.”
  • She moved here in 1983, a decade after undergoing a turbulent identity struggle. Her great-grandmother was a Mi’kmaq Indian, and when she was 16 she read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” Dee Brown’s unsparing account of White people’s mistreatment of Indians in the 19th-century American West. When her history teacher delivered a different rendition of what happened — “it was just ‘the Indians scalped everyone,’ ” as she remembers it — Cote initiated a heated argument and then abruptly quit school for good. “I slammed the door and broke the glass on the way out,” she says. “They were lying to me. I was done.”
  • “I can understand that people are a product of where they come from,” she says, “and the inner city, where drugs are available left and right — it’s a lot like an Indian reservation. But the question is, ‘How do you pull yourself up out of it?’ Charles Payne” — she’s referring to a Fox Business Network host who is Black — “he went to school carrying a briefcase when he was a kid. He got picked on, but he didn’t let that stop him. Look, white privilege exists only if you let it exist.”
  • Great conversations are rooted in courage and trust. We need them to keep our nation civil and stable, and during the past few weeks I’ve seen just how difficult it is to make them happen. Over and over, I’ve been stonewalled and reminded that a lot of people would rather say cruel things online than talk in person.
Javier E

Unless the government changes tack, the UK's lockdown will have been for nothing | Devi Sridhar | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...esting-second-wave-coronavirus

pandemic strategies response UK

shared by Javier E on 12 May 20 - No Cached
  • Governments have three choices in how they respond. The first and most difficult path is to contain the virus through a programme of mass testing, contact tracing and isolating. This requires a huge effort: building a large infrastructure to monitor cases of the virus and identify hotspots, ensuring this system runs efficiently, providing adequate PPE to everyone who needs it, and deploying border controls to vet who is entering the country.
  • The second path is far simpler. It involves slowing the spread of the virus by using timed cycles of lockdown and release, with the government issuing guidance on how much social distancing is required. But the side effects of this path are very costly: it risks wrecking the economy, straining health and social care systems, and creating social unrest
  • The third and easiest path available to governments is simply to do nothing. The virus sweeps across the population, the economy remains open and whoever makes it through is lucky to still be alive.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • It’s almost impossible to decipher which path the UK government has chosen.
  • Without these measures in place, the past seven weeks of lockdown will have been completely pointless. As quarantine measures are lifted, the virus will continue to spread, the number of daily cases will rise and a second peak will become inevitable
  • this debate misses a more fundamental point: containment (the first path) is the best strategy for public health, the economy and society. The decision in early March to shift from containing to mitigating the virus was disastrous on all three of these fronts
  • Now, the key challenge facing the government is to replace this lockdown with a package of public health interventions involving mass testing, surveillance and real-time data to identify clusters of the virus and quarantine those who are infected.
  • The confusion turns on an internal struggle between two opposing camps. The first seems to think the government should attempt to get over the worst of the pandemic by allowing the virus to spread through the population, albeit at a slower pace to ease the strain on the NHS, and by creating more hospital and mortuary capacity to cope with a spike in deaths. The second camp wants to drive down the number of coronavirus cases and reduce the rate of infection – or R – to as close to zero as possible. It recognises the uniquely dangerous nature of this virus, and the emerging evidence that it can cause long-term health complications in survivors and that immunity may only be temporary.
  • Everyone agrees that we need to get out of the lockdown as soon as possible, but doing so will require massive investment in public health infrastructure. Countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia have already built this capacity
  • why has the government made such little progress in building the public health infrastructure necessary to control the virus and ease the lockdown? You could be forgiven for thinking that the lockdown was simply a way to reassure the public that the government was “doing something”. We need to be asking: what measures has the government put in place to ensure we’re in a better position to release the lockdown and prevent a second wave?
  • Everyone wants to know when the lockdown will end and life will go back to “normal”. The better question to ask is how we ease lockdown measures in the coming months and years while preventing a second wave of infections and keeping R well below one
  • There are a number of endings to this story. First, an accessible and affordable vaccine could become available within the next 18 months; second, the government could embark on a resource-intensive and gruelling campaign to eliminate the virus, particularly if emerging data proves coronavirus is as dangerous as diseases such as smallpox and polio; or third, antiviral therapies could become available to treat Covid-19 that make it a mild illness, so the population would gradually and safely build up natural herd immunity.
  • on our current path we seem destined for a disastrous ending. Lifting lockdown without the public health infrastructure in place to contain the virus will allow Covid-19 to spread through the population unchecked. The result could be a Darwinian culling of the elderly and vulnerable, and an individual gamble for those exposed to the virus. This should be avoided at all costs.
Javier E

The Coronavirus Could End American Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...611605

learning trends history crisis pandemic international

shared by Javier E on 21 May 20 - No Cached
  • many American politicians, especially those on the right, have in recent years paradoxically doubled down on American exceptionalism (we have a president who ran on an “America first” platform, after all) even as American power has declined relative to other countries’.
  • This kind of insularity might have been “relatively harmless when America bestrode the world like a colossus, but it’s dangerous when the country faces a raft of global challenges from China, to climate, to COVID-19,” Dominic Tierney, a political-science professor at Swarthmore College
  • Pandemics are, in fact, particularly ripe moments for cross-cultural learning
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.
  • “The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.
  • When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March.
  • We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.”
  • By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.
  • Rather than using diagnostic tests that the World Health Organization had distributed to other countries early in the global outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own, only to botch the rollout of those tests.
  • Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country
  • It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.
  • Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. The president has repeatedly claimed that the United States is leading the world in testing, which in part is an unflattering reflection of the U.S. outbreak’s huge scale and also is not true on a per-capita basis
  • As an example of ideas the United States could borrow from other countries, Tierney cited the fact that 750,000 people in Britain, which would be equivalent to nearly 4 million Americans, responded to the British government’s request to enlist in a “volunteer army” to help deliver food to vulnerable populations and provide other assistance.
  • A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.
  • “Things have moved so quickly that there hasn't been much time for considered lesson-drawing,” he noted. Some countries were slow to institute strict lockdowns, despite witnessing the horrifying spread of the virus in Italy, while others “embraced approaches that broke with the broader consensus,” including “Sweden’s proposal
  • New Zealand’s record of learning
  • His colleague at the University of Otago, Michael Baker, told me that as a government adviser on the nation’s coronavirus taskforce, he was personally very influenced by a February 2020 WHO-China Joint Mission report, which suggested that the pandemic could be contained, and led him to advocate for New Zealand’s current strategy of eliminating the virus entirely from the country.
  • Yet Wilson added that New Zealand has lagged behind Asian countries in encouraging mass mask wearing, in rigorously quarantining incoming travelers, and in using digital technologies for contact tracing
  • In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change
  • “The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.
  • as a senator, Romney is urging the U.S. government to follow South Korea’s lead and “learn from those countries that were successful” in dealing with their outbreaks. Conservatives are championing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach as a blueprint for how to mitigate public-health damage while preserving freedom and the economy.
  • with the exception of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, “most of our economic-policy response has ignored useful lessons from abroad, explaining why our unemployment rate is skyrocketing above those in many other affected countries.”
  • Kelemen noted that the coronavirus crisis has led to a surge in interest among the American public and U.S. policy makers in harvesting lessons from other countries, most evident in the fact that everyone is following “the comparative charts of how countries are doing over time on infection rates or changes in year-on-year death counts.
katherineharron

US Coronavirus: Daily deaths from Covid-19 just exceeded the deaths from 9/11 on this big day for vaccine development - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The United States should be celebrating a day of great hope today, as a Covid-19 vaccine could get authorized for emergency use very soon.
  • Vaccine advisers for the US Food and Drug Administration are meeting Thursday to discuss the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
  • That's more deaths than those suffered in the 9/11 attacks.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • A new composite forecast from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects a total of 332,000 to 362,000 Covid-19 deaths by January 2.
  • Covid-19 hospitalizations also reached a new record high of 106,688 on Wednesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • more than 221,000 new infections were reported in just one da
  • "We are in a totally unprecedented health crisis in this country,"
  • Health care workers are exhausted. Hospitals are totally full."
  • "Unfortunately, with the volume of new cases that we are seeing and the implications it has on hospital utilization, during a period of widespread, community transmission, activities such as eating, drinking and smoking in close proximity to others, should not continue."
  • If the FDA grants emergency use authorization in the coming days, the first Americans outside of clinical trials could start getting inoculated this month.
  • in the coming months it's crucial that Americans stay vigilant and follow safety guidelines, like wearing face masks, social distancing and hunkering down in their social bubbles.
  • But the country will likely not see any meaningful impact until well into 2021 -- and that's if enough people get vaccinated, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
  • "Let's say we get 75%, 80% of the population vaccinated. I believe if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer ... we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we could approach very much, some degree of normality that is close to where we were before,"
  • "We want to make sure that the vaccines are actually administered, and we're afraid that won't happen," Paul Ostrowski, who is leading supply, production and distribution for Operation Warp Speed, told "Good Morning America" Wednesday.
  • "Baltimore City has not had to implement such severe restrictions since the very earliest days of the pandemic and the implementation of the stay-at-home order," the city's health department tweeted.
  • The daily death toll from Covid-19 reached a record high of 3,124 Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
  • Indiana's Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb ordered hospitals to postpone or reschedule non-emergency procedures done in an inpatient hospital setting from December 16 through January 3 to preserve hospital capacity.
  • In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey announced Wednesday she's extending the state's Safer at Home order, which includes a statewide mask mandate for another six weeks.
  • About 53% of respondents said they would get the vaccine promptly -- up from 51% before Thanksgiving and 38% in early October.
  • The first emergency use authorization for a vaccine is expected soon, and about 20 million people could likely get vaccinated in the next few weeks, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Wednesday.
  • In the UK, "thousands" of people were already vaccinated Tuesday, the first day of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine rollout there, according to the National Health Service (NHS).
  • The FDA will not "cut any corners" when deciding whether to authorize the vaccine, Azar said, saying he was sure what happened in the UK would be "something the FDA looks at."
  • "For now, we need to double down on the steps that can keep us all safe."
lilyrashkind

Some evidence shows omicron appears in your throat first. Should at-home Covid tests change? - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...swab-home-covid-test-rcna12096

tests crisis

shared by lilyrashkind on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • As omicron cases continue to sweep the United States, the Food and Drug Administration is being urged to gather more information about how well at-home Covid-19 tests are able to detect the variant.
  • But medical experts argue that anecdotes from people who test negative with a nasal swab at home but then test positive with a throat swab can be misleading. FDA officials say there isn’t enough data to support the practice.&nbsp;“We do know the tests are picking up on omicron, but with less sensitivity,” acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said during a Senate Health Committee hearing Tuesday. “What we need to do is to see whether the throat swab could provide more sensitivity.”
  • None of the at-home rapid antigen tests available over the counter in the U.S. are designed for throat swabs. There’s also a reason medical professionals are the ones who perform throat swabs for other infections, such as strep throat. Swabbing the back of your own throat is not easy to do.&nbsp;
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The United Kingdom’s National Health Service recommends swabbing both the nose and the throat when using a rapid antigen, or later flow, Covid test, the kind used at home.
  • “The virus grows in your nose and throat and somewhat at different time scales,” Michael Mina, chief science officer for the biotech software company eMed, who was an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said at a testing technology news briefing this week.
  • “The agency recommends that individuals closely follow the tests’ instructions,” FDA spokesperson Jim McKinney told NBC News in an email.
  • Dr. Jonathan Li, an infectious disease physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, cautions against altering the testing strategy that has been validated and authorized by the FDA.
  • “What we’ve learned is that every variant seems to have its own characteristics, and it’s important that we not be locked into thinking we know everything based on what we’ve learned from the last variant,” he said
  • Before advocating the altered approach, Li said, he would need to see data that showed it was effective. User error will likely be higher with self-administered throat swabs compared with nasal swabs, he said.
  • “The nose and the throat have different pH levels and we have seen people take Coke or coffee and put it in an antigen test and had a line to appear,” she said. “We don’t know exactly why this happens, but the hypothesis is acidity.”&nbsp;
  • Miller notes that a small preprint paper out of South Africa, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggested that more detectable virus may reside in the throat than in the nose when a person is infected with omicron compared to the delta variant, though the study compared PCR to antigen, or rapid, tests, which are not the same type of tests.&nbsp;
  • Miller said that although she would not be surprised if omicron indeed does show up in the throat before it does in the nose, that concrete data has yet to be shown.&nbsp;
  • According to Matt Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic, the fact that positivity rates are soaring in the U.S. is a testament to how well Covid tests are still working.
  • According to Miller, it’s best to take a rapid test on day one, day two and day three of symptoms if you are testing negative but your symptoms persist. You should also isolate.&nbsp;“If you have symptoms, you have Covid until proven otherwise,” she said.&nbsp;
Javier E

The Conservatives know they are beat | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...nservatives-know-they-are-beat

tories UK conservatism history culture crisis 2022

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • the national culture has moved in a very different direction – because of earlier things the Tories did.
  • First, Brexit. A Right-wing victory that will benefit the Left in the long-run. Why? Because it taps into collectivist themes of sovereignty, identity and community. Because promises were made to spend more and defend workers from migrant competition. And because the Tories won a landslide off it that included parts of Britain that traditionally vote Labour, compelling Boris to adopt a populist programme for government out of the Disraeli playbook
  • Then Covid hit. The Tories could have taken a mighty risk and told us to wash our hands and go about our business, but instead they adopted a kind of war communism and ran the country from Whitehall
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  • lockdown has proved that money can be conjured up in emergencies, the NHS is sacrosanct and we should always put the vulnerable first. So why not vote socialist?
  • One downside of the inept way we've managed capitalism, even with constant handouts, is gross inequality – especially in assets such as home ownership – which is ultimately unconservative. It unbalances society, feeding civil unrest
  • The Torie
  • rarely talk about good music, art, nature; they routinely trash the humanities and are forever rowing with the church. They have lost touch with the soul of Toryism, which could conjure a gentle loyalty among many voters. In its place – their last weapon – is cultural populism, a war on gender woo woo and asylum seekers. That's what John Major did in the Nineties.
  • to top it all off, the late Queen died. A woman who stood for sacrifice and putting your country first. Keir Starmer has brilliantly exploited these themes, making out that Elizabeth II was a closet socialist
  • And it is just wrong that while the Tories can sign off on a 45p tax cut, they drag their feet over raising benefits.I am against that infamous tax cut because I think it's bad politics but also because I don't want it. With the choir of Westminster Abbey still ringing in our ears, this might be the time to invest a little more in our people.
Javier E

Opinion | Meet the Shadowy Groups Behind Britain's Liz Truss - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...truss-kwarteng-uk.html

uk right-wing politics history policy intellectual

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • For the past decade or more, Tufton Street has been the primary command center for libertarian lobbying groups, a free-market ideological workshop cloistered quietly in the heart of power.
  • the package was more than folly. It was the consummation of plans designed on Tufton Street, and of an alliance with Ms. Truss stretching back years. Under her watch, Britain has become a libertarian laboratory.
  • Those plans are, in outline, very simple. The libertarian groups based on the street — by the latest count, there were six of them (with two more close by) — operate as a coordinated nexus of policy wonks and media whisperers. In the words of Shahmir Sanni, who worked for the Vote Leave pro-Brexit referendum campaign originally based at 55 Tufton Street, they have one basic instinct: “that anything funded by the state is wrong.” Shrinking the state, cutting taxes and ushering private companies into the public realm are their guiding principles.
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  • This battalion of free-market thinkers has now been welcomed into 10 Downing Street. Five of the new prime minister’s closest advisers are Tufton Street alumni, including Ms. Truss’s chief economic adviser and her political secretary, and at least nine Tufton Street alumni are scattered across other major government departments. Tellingly, Mr. Littlewood says that Ms. Truss has spoken at his think tank’s events more than “any other politician over the past 12 years.”
  • Notoriously opaque about their sources of funding, something they defend as a right to privacy for donors, they have been found by investigative reporters to have financial links to the oil giants BP and Exxon Mobil, big tobacco companies and American libertarian groups. But the picture depicted is only partial. We simply do not know who is bankrolling the groups now at the heart of the British government.
  • First and foremost, they are significant operatives in Conservative circles: The Center for Policy Studies, for example, claims that it was “responsible for developing the bulk of the policy agenda that became known as Thatcherism.” Given that Margaret Thatcher herself co-founded the think tank, it’s not an idle boast. In the decades since, groups like it have multiplied as the Tufton Street network evolved from a pseudo-academic forum to an orchestrated lobbying outfit whose influence stretches well beyond the Conservative Party.
  • It’s common for a representative from these groups to appear on flagship current affairs programs, blandly presented as an impartial expert. There are striking parallels with America, where — as described by Jane Mayer in “Dark Money” — libertarian billionaires fund an assembly line of anti-tax, anti-regulation politics, gamely diffused through the media. In setting the terms of political debate, skewing perceptions of the state and the economy to the right, it has been a remarkably successful strategy.
  • Under Ms. Truss, once nicknamed the “human hand grenade” for her ideological obduracy, the libertarian right has detonated the British economy. The cost, for all but the richest, could be incalculable.
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