Month: March 2020

What is justice for people like this?

One former White House official said Trump’s reelection campaign advisors are terrified that the coronavirus outbreak, which so far has hit largely Democratic coastal cities hardest, will soon scythe across the rural areas that remain deeply loyal to Trump.

The advisors have warned Trump that the political consequences at the ballot box in November will be even worse if he is seen as too lax.

“Pay attention. You’re going to lose the election,” the former official said, summarizing the intervention.

I get that political advisers have to be concerned about election outcomes, but the way they do their calculation is that Trump can weather images of body bags being piled on refrigerator trucks just so long as the dead people are presumably Democrats.

Just so long as those “deeply loyal to Trump” aren’t dropping like flies, then there’s really no political problem at all.

I don’t think this is sound political advice, but that’s not what outrages me. It’s the cynicism of it that makes me want to go to war with these people. If they insist that it’s only “my people” who are dying and that “their people” are hardly scathed, then I know all I need to know about them.

This isn’t a political dispute anymore. It’s life and death.

Seemingly everything is a potential invasion of our privacy these days, which is precisely why I’d ordinarily be about the last person to buy an internet-connected thermometer. But it turns out that it’s a very good thing that this product exists. Made by a company called Kinda Health, the thermometers allow us to pick up hot spots where an unusual number of people are running fevers.

Kinsa’s thermometers upload the user’s temperature readings to a centralized database; the data enable the company to track fevers across the United States.

Owners of Kinsa’s thermometers can type other symptoms into a cellphone app after taking their temperature. The app offers basic advice on whether they should seek medical attention.

Kinsa has more than one million thermometers in circulation and has been getting up to 162,000 daily temperature readings since Covid-19 began spreading in the country.

This serves as a better early warning device than anything the government possesses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tries to pick up on flu outbreaks through a clunky reporting system that relies on doctors’ offices and hospitals, but people don’t generally go to see a doctor on the first day that they’re running a fever. The thermometer data come in quicker and are easy to sort.

The thermometers are now serving another valuable purpose. Quarantines and self-isolation have been in place in enough places for enough time for Kisna to measure their effectiveness. The good news is that our disruptive safety precautions seem to be working.

To identify clusters of coronavirus infections, Kinsa recently adapted its software to detect spikes of “atypical fever” that do not correlate with historical flu patterns and are likely attributable to the coronavirus.

As of noon Wednesday, the company’s live map showed fevers holding steady or dropping almost universally across the country, with two prominent exceptions.

One was in a broad swath of New Mexico, where the governor had issued stay-at-home orders only the day before, and in adjacent counties in Southern Colorado.

By Friday morning, fevers in every county in the country were on a downward trend, depicted in four shades of blue on the map.

Fevers were dropping especially rapidly in the West, from Utah to California and from Washington down to Arizona; in many Western counties, the numbers of people reporting high fevers fell by almost 20 percent. The numbers were also declining rapidly in Maine.

The parts of New Mexico and Colorado that had been slightly “warm” on Wednesday were in light blue, indicating that they were cooling. So were the Louisiana counties.

One thing they’ve discovered is that “simply declaring a state of emergency or limiting the size of public gatherings did not affect the number of people reporting fevers,” but “closing restaurants and bars and asking people to stay in their homes produced dramatic results.”

For example, in Manhattan, reports of fevers steadily rose during early March, despite a declaration of emergency on March 7 and an order on March 12 that public gatherings be restricted to less than 500 people.

The turning point began on March 16, the day schools were closed. Bars and restaurants were closed the next day, and a stay-at-home order took effect on March 20. By March 23, new fevers in Manhattan were below their March 1 levels.

Last Friday, New York State’s own data showed the same trend that Kinsa’s fever readings had spotted five days earlier.

We’re seeing a lot of really alarming news out of New York City about the spread of COVID-19, so it’s encouraging to know that there is good reason to believe that they’re preventing new infections.

When this pandemic is over and we’re trying to learn our lessons so that we’re better prepared in the future, I think the early detection afforded by opt-in internet-thermometers will have to be a big part of the government’s solution. It really should help save lives, and not only with novel viruses. More visibility on more familiar flu outbreaks will help us hold done how many people die from influenza each year, and so will many of other things we’ve learned during this crisis, like how to avoid spreading our sickness to others.

Now I’m thinking maybe buying one of those thermometers would be a public service rather than just another way to have my life tracked. I’m also comforted to know that there’s a point to being locked in my house.

Rick Wilson isn’t always careful to be meticulously fair to the president. For example, this goes too far:

Sunday, the president said that 100,000 deaths would be a great win. Only in the world of Trumpian dumbfuckery could anyone brighter than a toaster oven think 100,000 avoidable deaths is a win. That’s like saying, “Hey, honey, I went to the strip club, caught an STD, knocked up a stripper named Destynee, and got a second mortgage to bail her meth tweaker boyfriend out of jail… but at least I didn’t touch the kids’ college fund.”

President Trump could have done everything right, and there would still have been a lot of people in this country who died from COVID-19. It’s wrong to suggest that every death is an excess death. Yet, when they final tally is determined, we know that there the bodycount will be much higher than it should have been. The only question is how many zeroes we’ll have to put on that number. Will we measure it in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions?

During a February 26 press conference in the White House, President Trump told us that “we have a total of 15 [cases of COVID-19 in this country]…and they’re getting better, too… we have a total of 15 people, and they’re in a process of recovering, with some already having fully recovered.”

His point was that there was nothing to be concerned about. The problem was contained. This was the White House line at the time. A day earlier, Trump’s chief economic adviser Lawrence Kudlow went on television and said, “We have contained this. I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight.” He added, “I don’t think it’s going to be an economic tragedy at all.”

If they didn’t know that they were wrong, it could only be because they refused to listen to their own experts when they explained the nature of the disease and what would be required to limit its lethality. I’m sure that’s a part of the explanation, but they also seem to have more focused on the day to day swings on Wall Street than on the public’s health. They hoped that their reassurances would prevent a sell-off of stocks, as if their words alone could stop the tsunami that was coming.

The new White House line is that we’re almost definitely going to see between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths, assuming we do everything right from here on out. We could see this new line take shape on the Today show when Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said on Monday that “if we do things together well, almost perfectly, we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities.”

That was consistent with the expectations President Trump set during his Sunday night press conference. No less than 16 times during that appearance, the president cited a Imperial College London study that estimated 2.2 million Americans could die if no measures were taken to limit the outbreak of COVID-19. The Washington Post reported on the study on March 17, but Trump claimed to have seen its findings for the first time on Sunday.

He’s using that number now for only one reason, to make whatever the actual number is look like some kind of great success.

We don’t have to compare Trump to Rick Wilson’s fictional husband to understand that “success” already left the building. Trump was forced to recommend social distancing measures be extended through to the end of April, despite his recent call to relax things in time for Easter services.

He’s been acting like he could spin this pandemic from the beginning, and it is going to cost a lot of people their lives. He tries to beat one tactical retreat after another as reality catches up with his bullshit, but he’s still hasn’t changed his basic strategy.

It’s far too late now for him to declare any outcome a “win.”

Photo credit: Bruce Gilbert

I really barely knew “Homeboy Steve” Antonakos. I played a couple of gigs with him, backing up Sean Kershaw, more years ago than I can remember. One of those was a Christmas party for an all-cop biker club in Paterson, New Jersey. I remember their clubhouse was called the Pigpen.

Anyway, Steve was a funny guy, and a really good guitar player. Judging from how many of my New York musician friends are mourning right now, he was a hell of a person.

He died, from COVID-19, yesterday. Probably just a few years older than me (I’m 49).

Steve shouldn’t be dead. This shouldn’t have happened.

It ain’t right, we’re told, to make politics from someone’s death, but the fact remains—if Donald Trump hadn’t dismantled the CDC, ignored warnings from his own intelligence services about the pandemic, and pretended there wasn’t a growing problem, Steve would be alive today.

That’s just a fact.

I’d like to do something for Tony Sizemore, but there’s nothing I can really do. His girlfriend was the first person from Indiana to die from COVID-19, condemned by her job which required her to drive airport rental cars around the country. It figures she’d get exposed to the virus before anyone else in her state. Sixty-nine years old, suffering from diabetes, damaged lungs and high blood pressure, she wasn’t in strong enough health to fight the thing off. It didn’t help that it took them a while to figure out what was ailing her.

Sizemore is at home, self-quarantining. He’s looking at her clothes, her car in the driveway, her curling iron in the sink. He has no idea which bills are paid and which aren’t, and he just managed to get the power turned back on after a cut-off.

I haven’t eaten much, and it’s probably making me weak. I’m bone tired and coughing like crazy. They called me back to the hospital for a chest X-ray, but the doctors said I looked good. No fever. No trouble breathing. They decided not to even give me a test. They have 12 nurses quarantined over there now and a whole floor of people with the virus, but I got lucky. They told me I’ll be fine.

I know Tony is not going to be fine. He’s going to be sad and miserable. It’s a story that is going on all over the country, but it’s never easy be first or the live with what amounts to really bad luck. Sometimes bad luck is the hardest thing to digest. A friend of our family lost their niece last week when a tree branch managed to land on her head while she was riding her bike. With everything going on in New Jersey, it’s hard to believe that a family has to deal with that kind of tragedy. What do you do when the universe sends such a strong message that it doesn’t care?

I guess we do what people have always done. We process the pain and we keep moving.

But sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we just give up. The world can break a person.

That’s why I worry about Tony. I worry about all the people who are unable to mourn in the normal way because we’re locked in our homes, isolated from everyone.

Maybe his decision to tell his story will help. By his own admission, he’s not very tech-savvy, but I bet a lot of people will reach out to him–to share their stories, to try to console him, to offer him an opportunity that might help him keep the lights on and provide a reason to keep going.

We’re all in this together–me in Pennsylvania, Tony in Indiana, and you, wherever you are.

 

Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles, courtesy Wikipedia.

It’s been raining off and on all day here in Philadelphia, but it looks like the skies will clear long enough for me to get a run in later this afternoon. I’m heading over the Tacony Palmyra Bridge to a nature preserve and back, hoping to put in 6-10 miles or more.

All things considered, I consider myself very lucky right now. I’ve been asymptomatic since arriving on March 20th, and knock on wood I’ll continue this way. It’s actually been nearly two weeks since I was in contact with someone who could have been carrying, but considering the current situation, I think I’m justified by exercising an abundance of caution.

I’m also lucky in that I had somewhere to go. As I wrote previously, my decision to leave Tennessee for the time being was driven by predictions that the state’s already-inadequate hospital systems would be overwhelmed. That remains a wise decision healthwise, especially in light of affirmative decisions on the part of neighboring states Alabama and Mississippi to do absolutely nothing to stop the spread of the virus. My worries about state border and highways being shut down also seem to have been prescient, as Rhode Island and Florida take unprecedented actions in the absence of a functional coordinated federal response, and Kentucky’s governor is forced to consider the same. I’m currently living in a de facto mother-in-law studio with a makeshift kitchen I put together in the garage. Thank God I know how to cook.

I’m also lucky in that I’m used to being alone. Self-isolation doesn’t bug me that much. And I’m lucky to have a savings I can tap into—it’s not enough, but should hold me ’til unemployment starts flowing. And I’m lucky to have a lot of creative and athletic pursuits. Things could be a LOT worse.

During the downtime, I’ve been playing more guitar and learning clawhammer banjo. I’ve been playing some tunes on a couple of the live music Facebook groups that have sprung up, including the Quarantine Cover Challenge and Fergie’s Pub Quarantine Mic. I’m writing a lot more too, although some of it has no place here at the Pond. I’ve been doing a lot of video messaging on Instagram. I even picked up a little writing gig that should funnel a couple of hundred bucks into my wallet.

So despite all the unpleasantness, death and destruction, economic collapse, dislocation, and loss of physical contact… well, I’m not doing THAT bad.

More importantly, how are y’all doing out there? How are you enduring your freedom, as we used to say forever ago. Everything is going to be sucky for a long time. Take care of yourselves the best you can.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting of the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas.

I started with my now usual pencil grid, upon which I began my sketch. Note that I draw the same grid over the photo for purposes of an accurate pencil sketch on the canvas. The result is a reasonably accurate outline sketch of the scene. I’ve added a bit of paint to start.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

As Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman point out in the Washington Post, Trump’s recent uptick in public approval is historically tiny under the circumstances and really should cause him more concern than comfort. The American people are always reticent to criticize their leaders during a crisis, and I’ve heard plenty of liberals recently suggesting that they’re rooting for Trump to do his job. I find this incredibly confounding, since there’s zero chance he will do his job, but that doesn’t prevent a few people who are normally vocally unhappy with him from tamping that sentiment down in surveys.

Enough people still hate Trump to make it a huge uphill climb for him to win reelection, and nearly every potential voter against him can see that he’s a blithering sociopathic idiot who has and continues to completely blunder the nation’s pandemic response.

It’d be nice if people told the pollsters what they really think, but right now there are some that are going more on hope than experience.

There have now been three pandemic-related spending bills passed by the U.S. Congress, and Mitch McConnell has had precious little influence over any of them. This ought to be embarrassing for someone who prides himself on his mastery of Senate procedure.

In the first case, McConnell punted from the outset by telling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to work out a deal with the administration. The result was an $8.3 billion dollar package that passed without controversy. This was followed by a second bill that was harder for Senate Republicans to stomach:

McConnell faced more problems when Pelosi and Mnuchin negotiated a second, larger bill in mid-March. Many Republican senators weren’t happy with that deal, which expanded paid sick leave for workers and pumped billions of dollars to states for food programs and unemployment benefits.

Senate Republicans had to be cajoled into passing that bill, with the promise that they would lead on the next effort.

McConnell would later complain that he’d passed the second bill with “only marginal participation…because the country was desperate for results,” and “I literally told my own Republican colleagues to ‘gag and vote for it.’”

In reality, McConnell had to do more than simply tell his colleagues to gag on the bill.

Senate Republicans had to be cajoled into passing that bill, with the promise that they would lead on the next effort.

So, last week, when Congress began drafting a third bill, McConnell took a decisive lead; unveiling a $1-trillion proposal focused on key priorities supported by Republicans and the White House.

But this didn’t turn out any differently than the first two bills. McConnell tried to ram his bill down the Democrats’ throats but he lost two procedural votes and was thereafter cut out of the deal-making by the White House.

A Pelosi spokesperson openly mocked McConnell, stating that she would never make the mistake of bringing up a bill if she didn’t have the votes. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was even more brutal:

Schumer’s response was cutting: He would update McConnell and the Senate when he and [Treasury Secretary Steve] Mnuchin reached an agreement.

“The negotiations continue no more than 30 feet away from the floor of the Senate in our offices where the real progress is taking place,” he said.

Once again, McConnell was little more than a spectator, and it was his caucus that had to gag on a bill out of fear of the repercussions of opposing it. It passed 96-0.

Pelosi later crowed, “we did jiu-jitsu on it, that it went from a corporate-first proposal that the Republicans put forth in the Senate to a Democratic workers-first legislation.” And she was right. The bill had only one proposed amendment, and it was an effort to limit payments to low-income Americans. Almost every Republican voted for it but it still failed 48-48 when it needed 60 votes to pass. The Republicans then sucked it up and unanimously supported the bill anyway.

McConnell is a genius at obstructing when he’s in the minority and he’s been very successful in remaking the federal judiciary into a group of mouth-breathing troglodytes, but he showed with his failed effort to repeal and replace Obamacare that he’s a crap legislator. His completely ineffectual leadership has been exposed again, first with his decision to let Pelosi take the lead on the pandemic response, and then with his inability to take the reins away from her even after he’d promised his caucus that he would.

The man is a menace, but he’s still overrated.

America now has more COVID-19 cases than any country in the world, including China. This is despite the president of the United States saying the following at a February 26 press briefing in the White House:

“As most of you know, the — the level that we’ve had in our country is very low, and those people are getting better, or we think that in almost all cases they’re better, or getting. We have a total of 15. We took in some from Japan — you heard about that — because they’re American citizens, and they’re in quarantine. And they’re getting better too.

“But we felt we had an obligation to do that. It could have been as many as 42. And we found that we were — it was just an obligation we felt that we had. We could have left them, and that would have been very bad — very bad, I think — of American people. And they’re recovering.

“Of the 15 people — the “original 15,” as I call them — 8 of them have returned to their homes, to stay in their homes until fully recovered. One is in the hospital and five have fully recovered. And one is, we think, in pretty good shape and it’s in between hospital and going home.

“So we have a total of — but we have a total of 15 people, and they’re in a process of recovering, with some already having fully recovered.”

On Tuesday the 23rd of March, 13 people died of COVID-19 at the Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens. That’s just one hospital. How does that comport with what White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told us on February 25?

“We have contained this,” Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, said during an interview with CNBC. “I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight.”

“This is a human tragedy,” he continued. “That’s the worst part of this. The business side and the economic side ― I don’t think it’s going to be an economic tragedy at all.”