This is the worst pandemic in our lifetime. And it is the first time we have had a pandemic in the United States in which we have had such a total, abysmal failure of our federal government.
—epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, interviewed by Steven Levy, “Larry Brilliant on How Well We Are Fighting Covid-19,” Wired, 2020.07.09.
Back in March, Donald Trump started image-craftingly throwing around the word war to describe the effort to check the coronavirus pandemic. Ever since, Trump’s “war”-fighting strategy has followed his approach to most other challenges: just declare victory and pretend that saying something makes it so.
While Trump wants us to believe he’s piloting the Enola Gay over Hiroshima in 1945, the nation’s coronavirus surge makes him look more like MacArthur fleeing Corregidor in 1942:
The breadth of the spread is staggering. Forty-three states have seen the number of cases confirmed on an average day increase in the last two weeks. The number of patients in hospitals has risen over the same period in 29 states. More than 80 percent of intensive care beds are occupied in Alabama, Arizona and Georgia.
The same models that predicted surges in Phoenix, Houston and Miami now show a new and broader round of cities as the likely next epicenters. The number of confirmed cases is likely to rise substantially in places like Atlanta, Kansas City, Mo., Tulsa, Okla., and Greenville, S.C. [Reid Wilson, “Covid-19 Surge Pushes US Toward Deadly Cliff,” The Hill, 2020.07.12]
It’s not like coronavirus adopted some clever new strategy to thwart our pandemic defenses. Coronavirus attacks the same way now as it did in Wuhan in January: it spreads when people congregate and don’t wear masks. We just never got serious about fighting the war at the national level:
“We never gave communities a real chance at success as we lacked a national strategy around masking and limiting gathering sizes to act as a buffer as places reopened,” [director of PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia David] Rubin and his colleagues Gregory Tasian and Jing Huang wrote.
“So, do we admit that we’ve failed and try to salvage the reopening of our schools in fall by quickly enacting a national approach to pause all reopenings and try to get our country back onto stable footing?” he asked. “It may not be what people want to hear, but the situation is that dire that we need to consider this” [Wilson, 2020.07.12].
The Philippines waged strong guerrilla resistance on their own, but they didn’t kick the Japanese out for good until General MacArthur marched ashore with the full force of the United States Armed Forces.
Staying home and wearing masks can slow the pandemic. We were doing it back in April. We can get back to doing it. We just need resources and leadership from the federal government to back us up.
We can still get to that inverted V, but we have to do three different things. First, we have to develop a way to deal with the clusters—nursing homes, refugee settlements, immigrant workers, homeless encampments. We should look to Japan, which had similar problems, and they created a team which called the Cluster Busters. In an act of humility, we should be inviting the Japanese epidemiologists to come and teach us their techniques for being Cluster Busters.
The second thing that we should be doing is basic epidemiology 101. We should be finding every active case. You find someone who has symptoms of the disease, and a human being talks to them and identifies all the people they’ve been in contact with, looking backwards to try to find where the disease came from, what was their source of the disease. Those who test positive, you either treat them or you quarantine them for 14 days. Those who test negative, you isolate them for 14 days. You do whatever the hell you need to do, because you’ve got to stop the virus from walking into a bar. It’s not a joke. You’ve got to stop the virus from walking into a super-spreader event.
…What’s the third thing?
A sensible, nationwide requirement for those places where there are clearly going to be super-spreader events to stay closed: bars, indoor restaurants, churches, megachurches, the kinds of places that we know will spread the disease. Those places can’t be reopened.
GOP = Good Old Pandemic party. As long as it kills (in their minds) mostly minorities, mostly elderly, they don’t care.
Back to work! Because God forbid we do anything that Europe did, such as pay people to stay home and solvent and well.
Back to school! And even if it does kill the kids, they’ll find a reason to excuse that too – Sandy Hook stopped nothing.
And it gives such a wonderful excuse to close voting booths anywhere and everywhere…
Ouch. Truth to power. Pelosi is asking for compromise. I can hold my breath a long time. Here goes. GOP, come save us. Otherwise, rot in hell. We are sorry we called you “deplorable” so you could stampede-message us off the cliff into the world’s destruction.
This morning’s ON BEING (pseudo sunday spiritual NPR program outlined the BOLD way forward through our 400 plus years of American racism that politics seizes as a cudgel when convenient to hold onto power. Deep embracement of white privilege and work to avoid infecting our children and grandchildren. Someday POC can smile.) Elsewhere here the BOLDNESS of a New Democracy is apparent and the foundation for it must be laid by the next eight years of a Biden administration. Impunity of GOP lawlessness and norm-breaking ends now.
Deaths:
137,581
and pandemicing upward @ 11:38 iowa time this very day.
Cory, a bit of a typo with some humor:
“MacArthur feeling Corregidor in 1942:”
Yeah, I read the Brilliant article too. The plan fact of the matter is that Pandemic Pottymouth is a complete and utter failure as leader protecting Americans. He hasn’t done one thing right.
A measure of the depth of his colossal ineptitude is that after he finally wore a mask, his aides all wrote tweets about how manly and macho he looked. They were hoping if they piled on enough empty flattery, he’d wear a mask again.
The president. This is how they must manipulate the president of the United States of America in 2020 to coerce a modicum of decent behavior.
Stunning.
MacArthur would have to do without today’s Marines as they are sick with the Covid and locked down thanks to Donald John trump along with his senate sidekicks, EB5 Short Rounds and Waldo (who you never hear from, Thune).
“Two US Marine bases in Japan’s Okinawa have been put into lockdown after dozens of coronavirus infections, with local officials criticizing the American military’s containment efforts.
There are tens of thousands of US servicemen stationed on the southern Japanese island, which has recorded roughly 150 civilian Covid-19 infections.”
Yikes, what if they gave a war and nobody came? Should make a movie about that sometime.