Savor the COVID-19 Plateau; Another Wave Is Coming
Everything is political, and it’s universally understood that this is a critical election year.
I know, every election is supposedly critical and every fundraising deadline is life-and-death.
This time it really, really, really is serious. Donald Trump and his merry band of science-denying profiteers, the cratered economy, and the weaknesses in our healthcare system exposed by COVID-19 should be all the evidence any voter needs. And then there are all those politically inconvenient dead people, who are disproportionately people of color.
The question to be answered here is whether or not people will take these warnings seriously.
Over the past six weeks, the chorus of voices saying America should let down its guard has steadily grown louder. Amplified by media outlets desperate for traffic, politicians who cast doubt on the science, and bottom of the barrel nutcases, it would be easy to see why the pace of re-opening has picked up even as new infections (nationwide) are merely plateauing.
Nine top scientists who advised Barack Obama in the White House are warning that the US has just three months to rebuild its national stockpile of emergency medical supplies or risk further drastic shortages of testing kits and protective gear should coronavirus strike again in the fall.
The dramatic warning from Obama’s former science advisers contains an implicit criticism of Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic. In a seven-page missive, the group says that federal government preparations for a possible resurgence of the disease must be triggered immediately if a repeat of the “extraordinary shortage of supplies” that was seen in March and April is to be avoided.
Ed Yong’s exhaustive reporting at the Atlantic (not behind a paywall) on our country’s patchwork response to the pandemic provides a deeply disturbing picture of the probable paths the nation will follow in the coming months.
I strongly encourage readers to take a few minutes out of their lives to digest the entire article.
The COVID-19 pandemic is not a hurricane or some other disaster that will come and go, signaling an obvious moment when recovery can begin. It is not like the epidemics of fiction, which get worse until, after some medical breakthrough, they get better. It is messier, patchier, and thus harder to predict, control, or understand. “We’re in that zone that we don’t see movies made about,” says Lindsay Wiley, a professor of public-health law at American University.
The refusal of the Trump administration to do anything more than cheerlead when it’s politically expedient means the fifty states and three thousand or so health departments who have direct dealings with providers are going to face very real challenges moving forward.
Of all the threats we know, the COVID-19 pandemic is most like a very rapid version of climate change—global in its scope, erratic in its unfolding, and unequal in its distribution. And like climate change, there is no easy fix. Our choices are to remake society or let it be remade, to smooth the patchworks old and new or let them fray even further.
The New York Times says the administration’s indecisiveness on taking action --despite numerous warnings from all kinds of sources-- likely resulted in a minimum of 36,000 additional COVID-19 deaths.
Here’s Mark Sumner at Daily Kos:
The numbers in the United States have eased somewhat over the last two weeks—only 1,400 Americans died from COVID-19 on Wednesday, which would have been an unthinkable horror had we not seen even larger numbers all the way back to the first week of April. But the good numbers of May result from the lockdowns of April. What results from the reopening of mid-May won’t be visible in most areas until sometime in June. And by then, it will likely be too late for thousands of Americans.
Day by day we’re learning about how the patchwork nature of social services allows ignorance and misinformation to fester. What we’re headed into now amounts to an elaborate scheme of “cocooning” vulnerable populations while the rest of society proceeds as normal.
The Big Lies about this are that social separation measures aren’t really an option for the non-wealthy; ignoring the inherent racism built into our systems, and --drum roll-- things will return to a comfortable level of normalcy.
Meanwhile, the “re-open” drumbeat rolls on. Fox News is featuring an outlier group of physicians recruited by the Trump campaign.
...the Associated Press's Michael Biesecker and Jason Dearen revealed Republican political operatives and allies of the president are rallying “'extremely pro-Trump' doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the federal [CDC] to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.”
Locally, Supervisor Nathan Fletcher’s high profile advocacy for following the science in setting county health policy has resulted in... ...a recall campaign.
It’s little more than a Facebook page (which also targets Assm. Lorena Gonzalez), but it was considered serious enough to generate a fundraising letter for Fletcher’s 2022 campaign.
Considering that this is the third recall Fletcher Facebook page launched over the past decade, I’m inclined to take this ask with a grain of salt. As far as I’m concerned, these punitive attempts by assorted wingnuts should be considered a badge of honor, not a threat.
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Speaking of lies, it’s time to get serious about these vaccine stories making the rounds.
First up, we’ve been seeing press releases instead of data.
Moderna, the company first out the gate with ‘big news’ has not released its data for the scientific community to analyze.
From StatNews:
Several vaccine experts asked by STAT concluded that, based on the information made available by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company, there’s really no way to know how impressive — or not — the vaccine may be.
While Moderna blitzed the media, it revealed very little information — and most of what it did disclose were words, not data. That’s important: If you ask scientists to read a journal article, they will scour data tables, not corporate statements. With science, numbers speak much louder than words.
The biotechnology company said it would seek to raise more than $1.3 billion in cash via a public share offering following the announcement.
Word of promising vaccine test results in monkeys came just as Johnson & Johnson announced it was phasing out baby talcum powder products due to concerns (and lawsuits) over the presence of asbestos.
In March, the federal government awarded $450 million to Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of Johnson & Johnson, to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
Let’s face it. The COVID-19 crisis has been a magnet for grifters of many pursuations.
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Presidential Statistics 101:
https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers/status/1263459814442704896?s=20
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