Deep Thought

There's a fair probability that Vin Diesel made more money mumbling "I am groot" than you've made your whole fucking career.

As depressed as you may be because of the pandemic, and worrying about the entire world's continuing slide into fascism, just remember that it can actually get worse - and probably will.

Gimme

Invisibility shield

New Video

Updated

 So when President Stoopid says we're doin' great - we're not.

COVID-19 Update

USA

• New Cases:  35,696
• New Deaths:      969

Projected - Dead Americans

• By Election Day: 252,000
• By Year's End:    335,000

WaPo:

A single-shot coronavirus vaccine from Johnson & Johnson will be tested in 60,000 people

Three other candidates have a head start, but J&J’s vaccine could be easier to administer and distribute if it is proved safe and effective

The first coronavirus vaccine that aims to protect people with a single shot has entered the final stages of testing in the United States in an international trial that will recruit up to 60,000 participants.

The experimental vaccine being developed by pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is the fourth vaccine to enter the large, Phase 3 trials in the United States that will determine whether they are effective and safe. Paul Stoffels, chief scientific officer of J&J, predicted that there may be enough data to have results by the end of the year and said the company plans to manufacture 1 billion doses next year.

Three other vaccine candidates have a head start, with U.S. trials that began earlier in the summer, but the vaccine being developed by Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, a division of J&J, has several advantages that could make it logistically easier to administer and distribute if it is proved safe and effective.

The company is initially testing a single dose, whereas the other vaccines being tested in the United States require a return visit and second shot three to four weeks after the first one to trigger a protective immune response. The J&J vaccine can also be stored in liquid form at refrigerator temperatures for three months, whereas two of the front-runner candidates must be frozen or kept at ultracold temperatures for long-term storage.

“A single-shot vaccine, if it’s safe and effective, will have substantial logistic advantages for global pandemic control,” said Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who partnered with J&J to develop the vaccine.

The United States has invested billions of dollars in an array of vaccine technologies, including close to $1.5 billion to support the development of the J&J vaccine and an advance purchase of 100 million doses. The J&J vaccine is the second to use a viral-vector approach, taking a harmless virus and inserting into it a gene that contains the blueprint for a distinctive part of the novel coronavirus.

“It is a really good thing that we have this diversity of platforms because this is a critical crisis in terms of our global circumstance,” said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “Now, here in the U.S. with 200,000 deaths, we want to do everything we can without sacrificing safety or efficacy.”

In a monkey study published in Nature in July, Barouch showed his approach successfully taught the immune system to protect against a real infection. Data from early-stage human trials that included 400 participants in the United States and Belgium was scheduled to be submitted to a preprint server Wednesday, but Stoffels said that overall, the vaccine showed that it triggered a promising immune response and that side effects of the vaccine were tolerable, including some fevers that resolved within one to two days.

J&J, like other vaccine companies, promised to publish the full protocol for its trial, which includes detailed information on how researchers will determine whether it is safe and effective. The protocol also includes the rules by which an independent committee would take peeks at the data over the course of the trial to see whether there were clear early signals of success or failure.

Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that once there were 154 cases of covid-19 in the trial, it would be possible to tell whether the vaccine was effective. But there are also predetermined intervals in which a data and safety monitoring board evaluates the progress to see whether the vaccine shows early signs that require stopping the trial for one of several reasons — the vaccine is very successful, it is causing harm or it is futile, that is, unlikely to yield a result.

The trial is designed to be twice as large as the initial design of other Phase 3 trials in the United States, although the Pfizer trial has also expanded to include 44,000 participants. Half the participants will receive a vaccine, and half will receive a placebo.

As the other coronavirus trials in the United States have struggled to recruit diverse populations, the size and international scope of the J&J trial could provide an advantage.

“The vaccine trials need to have participation that reflect the diversity of our nation,” said Michelle Andrasik, director of community engagement for the Covid-19 Prevention Network, the federal network partnering with companies to run trials. “We need everyone involved to ensure that we find a vaccine that is effective for everyone.”

In addition, at a time when the safety of the vaccine is very much part of the public debate because of worries that bringing one to market so quickly could cut corners, it could provide more data to assure people of the vaccine’s track record.

“With a larger trial, it also increases the safety data set,” Barouch said. “Safety has been a lot in the public eye, and increasing the size of trials increases the safety data set as well.”

Can't wait to see what weirdness manifests itself around this one.

Fauci has been getting death threats because of the "perception" of the knuckle-draggers that he's somehow thwarting 45*'s noble efforts.

In the meantime, the Anti-Vax douche nozzles haven't shown up big on my radar lately, but you put them together with the COVID-is-a-hoax crowd, and that's a wildcard with enormous promise for mischief as our national paranoid delusions intertwine and morph into a new iteration of a monster that's potentially even worse than the pandemic itself.

Clean Hands

The Clean Hands Doctrine - Glenn Kirschner, Justice Matters

COVID-19 Update

Cult45 has (imo) put a choke hold on the flow of COVID-19 information coming from CDC in order to make it look like we're getting a handle on the thing.

While it could be true that the deaths and the new cases are suddenly falling precipitously, it just looks more than a little suspect at this point.

There are smart people in the administration who know how to massage numbers to make the thing look much better than it actually is.

Because a good Marketing Department can prove any foregone conclusion management desires

USA

• New Cases:   36,372
• New Deaths:       388

Anybody happen to notice we popped up over 7,000,000 cases yesterday?

Pandemic-adjacent, but more along the lines of: What kinda fucked up government we got goin' here anyway?

WaPo:

Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor

Shortly after Congress passed the Cares Act, the Pentagon began directing pandemic-related money to defense contractors

A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used for making things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.

The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed roughly 200,000 Americans, was instead diverted toward patching up long-standing perceived gaps in military supplies.

The Cares Act, which Congress passed earlier this year, gave the Pentagon money to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But a few weeks later, the Defense Department began reshaping how it would award the money in a way that represented a major departure from Congress’s original intent.

The payments were made even though U.S. health officials believe there are still major funding gaps in responding to the pandemic. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Senate testimony last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year. There remains a severe shortage of N95 masks at numerous U.S. hospitals. These are the types of problems that the money was originally intended to address.

“This is part and parcel of whether we have budget priorities that actually serve our public safety or whether we have a government that is captured by special interests,” said Mandy Smithberger, a defense analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group.

The $1 billion fund is just a fraction of the $3 trillion in emergency spending that Congress approved earlier this year to deal with the pandemic. But it shows how the blizzard of bailout cash was — in some cases — redirected to firms that weren’t originally targeted for assistance. It also shows how difficult it has been for officials to track how money is spent and — in the case of Congress — intervene when changes are made. The Trump administration has done little to limit the defense firms from accessing multiple bailout funds at once and is not requiring the companies to refrain from layoffs as a condition of receiving the awards.

Some defense contractors were given the Pentagon money even though they had already dipped into another pot of bailout funds, the Paycheck Protection Program.

Congress, at Trump’s urging, is now debating whether to pass another massive stimulus package, and the Pentagon and defense contractors have called for another $11 billion to be directed toward their programs.

The $1 billion fund was allocated under the Defense Production Act, which allows President Trump to compel U.S. companies to manufacture products in the nation’s interest.

Trump has described the law as a “tremendous hammer” and boasted in August that he has “used the DPA more comprehensively than any president in history.” His administration was under intense pressure this spring to use the law to address dire shortages in medical-grade masks and other supplies.

But in the months after the stimulus package was passed, the Pentagon changed how the money would be used. It decided to give defense contractors hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund, mostly for projects that have little to do with the coronavirus response. Defense Department lawyers quickly determined that the funds could be used for defense production, a conclusion that Congress later disputed.

Among the awards: $183 million to firms including Rolls-Royce and ArcelorMittal to maintain the shipbuilding industry; tens of millions of dollars for satellite, drone and space surveillance technology; $80 million to a Kansas aircraft parts business suffering from the Boeing 737 Max grounding and the global slowdown in air travel; and $2 million for a domestic manufacturer of Army dress uniform fabric.

DOD officials contend that they have sought to strike a balance between boosting American medical production and supporting the defense industry, whose health they view as critical to national security. The Pentagon, which as of 2016 employed more than 156,000 people working in acquisitions alone, has also lent its expertise to the Department of Health and Human Services as it seeks to purchase billions of dollars in needed medical equipment.

Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said her office has worked closely with Congress and federal agencies to meet the needs of both the medical and defense industries.

“We are thankful the Congress provided authorities and resources that enabled the [executive branch] to invest in domestic production of critical medical resources and protect key defense capabilities from the consequences of COVID,” Lord said in a statement. “We need to always remember that economic security and national security are very tightly interrelated and our industrial base is really the nexus of the two.”

The Democratic-controlled House Committee on Appropriations has made clear that the Defense Department’s decision to funnel the DPA funding to defense contractors went against its intent in that section of the Cares Act, which was to spur the manufacturing of personal protective equipment.

“The Committee’s expectation was that the Department would address the need for PPE industrial capacity rather than execute the funding for the DIB (defense industrial base),” the committee wrote in its report on the 2021 defense bill.

Pentagon officials counter that they have been fully transparent with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress on their plans for the funds.

(translated: you can't stop us, so it's your fault we're doin' it - fuck you)

Defense officials say the Pentagon’s funding priorities were influenced heavily by an industry study drawn up in 2018. The study, prompted by an early executive order from Trump and by economic adviser Peter Navarro and carried out in close consultation with defense industry associations, pointed to several hundred supply chain shortfalls that could hamper the U.S. military’s ability to compete with China.

The Pentagon receives funding under the Defense Production Act each year to shore up companies it deems critical, but in much smaller amounts — the 2020 allocation was about $64 million. The money is disbursed by the Pentagon’s industrial policy office under the law’s Title III, which gives the president broad authority to mobilize domestic industry.

The pandemic funding “became an opportunity for the Department to take what is almost a windfall and use it to try and fill what are some very critical industrial base needs … but that are only tangentially related to COVID,” said Bill Greenwalt, a visiting fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute who oversaw defense acquisitions in the George W. Bush administration.

The virus-related funding came at a time when U.S. military spending was already near all-time highs. The $686 billion defense budget for fiscal year 2019 is comparable to a typical year during the Cold War or the period shortly after 9/11, although it has declined somewhat as a percentage of the economy. Major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman have remained financially healthy despite some pandemic-related disruption, and have continued paying stock dividends to investors.

Defense industry groups argue that the DOD awards are crucial to ensuring that important niche manufacturers don’t wither away during the economic shock caused by the pandemic. Companies that sell aircraft parts for both military and commercial jets, for example, have been financially wrecked by a global slowdown in air travel.

“As you lose some of these capabilities, some of them are gone forever, and it comes at a very high price to reconstitute them,” said Wes Hallman, vice president for policy at the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade group.

Over a third of the awards were for less than $5 million and went to smaller firms such as the American Woolen Company in Connecticut, which received $2 million to help make Army dress uniforms. Executives at the company did not return voice mails and emails. A batch of small awards went to companies working on drone technology.

“At the root of this was an enormous unprecedented crisis we were facing, and the need for government to move quickly, which it did,” said Eric Fanning, a former Army secretary who is president of the Aerospace Industry Association.

But hundreds of millions of dollars also flowed to several large, established companies, such as GE Aviation, a subsidiary of General Electric, which received two awards worth $75 million in June. A subsidiary of Rolls-Royce — a company best known for its luxury cars but that also has a lucrative line of business as a military supplier — received $22 million to upgrade a Mississippi plant.

Rolls-Royce did not respond to specific questions about the award.

“This funding pulled planned work on existing signed contracts between GE Aviation and the U.S. Government forward and is an important way to help ensure our engineering activities and supply chain, which includes many small and medium-sized companies, can continue to deliver for the Armed Forces, sustain jobs and support the economy,” said Perry Bradley, a GE Aviation spokesman.

Critics say it’s unclear why the defense industry should have gotten what amounts to a dedicated bailout fund when few other sectors of the economy got the same treatment.

And government data shows that at least 10 of the approximately 30 companies known to have received the Defense Department DPA funds also got loans through the Paycheck Protection Program, another relief package created by the Cares Act. That program, overseen by the Small Business Administration, offered millions of firms forgivable loans if they used the lion’s share on payroll.

For instance, Weber Metals, a California-based subsidiary of German firm Otto Fuchs, received between $5 million and $10 million through PPP in April to support 412 jobs, and then got an extra boost through a $25 million DOD relief award in June. Weber officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Defense Department spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said the two bailout programs are not “in conflict or duplicative,” because a PPP loan does not make any directive with respect to supporting national defense.

ModalAI, a small California company that builds drone flight controllers and computing platforms, received $3 million through the Pentagon program for an 18-month effort to develop a new flight controller. In April, it received a PPP loan of between $150,000 and $350,000.

Chad Sweet, chief executive and co-founder of ModalAI, said the company’s proposal was long-planned — it started applying for the Pentagon funds last summer, several months before the pandemic hit. The process gained steam in March and April.

The Defense Department asked ModalAI for documentation on how its business was affected by the pandemic, as well as information on other relief funding it has received. The Pentagon then made the decision unilaterally that ModalAI’s award would come out of the Cares Act funding.

“I don’t know how they made that decision,” Sweet said. He said his firm has been able to hire about five to seven employees as a result of the DOD award.

The Pentagon did initially plan to spend the bulk of the $1 billion fund on medical supplies. In April, Lord told reporters that three-quarters would go toward medical resources, and the rest to defense contractors.

But in June, she told lawmakers during a congressional hearing that the department soon realized that defense contractors had “critical needs as well.”

So DOD lawyers approved an arrangement whereby some $17 billion in HHS funds would be used for the medical industry instead, freeing up more money for defense contractors.

“So it expands the pool, and allows us to use even more money while taking the balance of the $1 billion that came through for DPA Title III, and use a portion of that for the defense industrial base,” Lord said at the hearing. Ultimately, in the spending plan that the Pentagon presented to Congress in June, it set aside $688 million for the defense industry.

Thomas Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, said Pentagon officials contend they have thrown all the money they can at the effort to produce the medical supplies needed to combat the pandemic.

“Their belief is that any investment that could be made to increase the production of covid-19 items has been made,” he said.

One midsized company that benefited from the DOD awards was SolAero Technologies, an Albuquerque firm that makes satellite solar power systems and employs about 320 people.

When the pandemic hit, the firm was squeezed between the huge companies it supplies, which slowed down production, and the smaller, often cash-based businesses that make up its own suppliers, which it was trying to support, said chief executive Brad Clevenger.

Around March, the company heard from Lord’s office, which was reaching out to defense contractors to understand how the pandemic was affecting them. SolAero worked with the Pentagon to check if the company was eligible for other relief programs, which it was not, Clevenger said.

In late May, the Pentagon announced a $6 million award to SolAero to expand production. Clevenger praised the process, which he said involved multiple layers of review but still delivered needed help in a span of two months.

In its news release announcing the deal, the Defense Department said the funds would “enable SolAero to retain critical workforce capabilities throughout the disruption caused by COVID-19 and to restore some jobs lost because of the pandemic.” Clevenger estimated that the award saved the jobs of 25 SolAero employees.

But the Pentagon did not impose any requirement that SolAero refrain from layoffs as a condition of receiving the funds, only that it deliver on the agreed project, Clevenger said.

“How we do that, with what workforce, is up to us,” he said.

... I'm sure they're all perfectly honorable people who would never use any of my money dishonestly.

SCOTUS

First, I'd just like to say a simple "fuck you" to all those purity-minded dickheads who shit-talked Hillary to the point of making people whose votes we'd normally get to count on, either stay home or vote Jill Stein or write in Bernie, or whatever other hip, fart-breathing bullshit they used to rationalize their way through their oh-so-smart and strategic decisions in the 2016 election.

Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Rosario Dawson, et al - seriously -

 fuck you 

So anyway - WaPo has a look at the obvious political venality of another possible Cult45 nominee for SCOTUS:

A broad cross-section of Florida Republicans, from acolytes of President Trump to former top aides to Jeb Bush, lined up over the weekend behind Barbara Lagoa, propelling the federal judge and Miami-born daughter of Cuban exiles to the top of the shortlist of potential replacements for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The swift ascension of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals judge to serious consideration by members of Trump’s team, along with Amy Coney Barrett of the 7th Circuit and several others, reflects the blunt political calculations informing the White House’s decision-making 45 days from an election that could turn on the outcome in Florida, which has never sent a justice to the nation’s highest court. The president, facing a tight race in the state, whose electoral college votes are seen as critical for his path to reelection, is intensifying his courtship of Hispanics, especially the heavily Republican Cuban American community in South Florida.

Within 48 hours of Ginsburg’s death, a push for Lagoa, 52, has taken shape in the battleground state, drawing on years of goodwill she and her husband have built in Florida’s legal and political circles and their extensive ties with the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal group.

- and -

“She is a Cuban woman from Miami, and Florida is the most important state in the election,” said Jesse Panuccio, former acting associate attorney general in Trump’s Justice Department and a member of the Florida Supreme Court Judicial Nominating Commission, which vetted her before Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) named her to the state’s top court in January 2019.

- and -

Lagoa concurred this month in a federal appeals court ruling that is expected to keep many of the 85,000 felons who have registered to vote in Florida from casting ballots. Lagoa’s role in the case has prompted backlash from Senate Democrats, who sent her a letter this summer alleging that her failure to recuse herself “appears to violate the Code of Conduct for United States Judges” given her role last year in an advisory opinion handed down on the issue by the Florida Supreme Court.

On Florida’s high court, and before that, on a state appeals court, she repeatedly sided with businesses, helping to turn back a higher minimum wage in Miami, limiting recourse for homeowners facing foreclosure, and reversing or rejecting cases of employees who sued Caterpillar and Uber. Lagoa also wrote a controversial decision finding that DeSantis had broad executive authority to suspend a county sheriff over his handling of the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Fla.

And while the judge has not expounded at length on abortion and its legal limits — saying in written answers submitted to the Senate last year that she would “faithfully apply . . . precedents” when it came to Roe v. Wade — one of her main advocates, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), said she is “very pro-life, reliably pro-life.”

“The hardcore Catholics usually stick with us,” the congressman added. “Her faith guides her perspective on life.”

Daniel Goldberg, legal director of the liberal Alliance for Justice, was critical of Lagoa’s record, saying she is a judge “who has showed contempt for our democracy.” Goldberg said he has “no doubt that she will meet Donald Trump’s litmus test” for a Supreme Court nominee and support his pledge to overturn Roe and the Affordable Care Act.

COVID-19 Update

New Deaths for the US were way down yesterday. And wouldn't it be loverly if we could trust our government to tell us something a little more truth-adjacent on these occasions.

USA

• New Cases:  33,344
• New Deaths:      294

Top 20 Countries

Top 20 States

BTW, "conservatives", I've been meaning to ask you - if COVID-19 is all a big phony hoax, what's up with the whole vaccine thing?

WaPo:

The fall opening of colleges: Upheaval, pandemic weirdness and a fragile stability

When the school year began, Gettysburg College looked well-positioned to weather the tumult of the coronavirus pandemic and Arizona State University seemed vulnerable.

The private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania planned meticulously for the arrival of more than 2,200 students to its small-town campus in August, pledging to test them all for the novel coronavirus and do its utmost to safeguard public health while teaching as much as possible in person.

The public university in Arizona confronted the steep challenge of squelching infection threats on multiple campuses in the Phoenix area as it delivered a mix of face-to-face and online instruction to 74,000 students. What’s more, the virus surged across Arizona during the summer and made the state one of the nation’s most worrisome hot spots.

Yet Gettysburg’s opening crumbled, while Arizona State’s held up.

The college sent more than half its students home this month after infections were found to be spreading at an alarming rate. The university, meanwhile, kept its teaching and housing plans intact while it conducted tens of thousands of coronavirus tests on students and employees since Aug. 1. Arizona State reported 355 active cases among students as of last week, and just 96 of those lived in campus housing.

Arizona State President Michael M. Crow is cautiously optimistic about the fall term. But he knows the virus isn’t going to vanish any time soon.

“We’re operating under the assumption that Covid is a permanent partner to the human ecosystem that we have to manage for the foreseeable future,” Crow said. “And we’re operating under that very, very daunting notion because it affects so many things that we do.”

The reopening of colleges amid a deadly pandemic has brought upheaval and uncertainty to campuses from coast to coast, with a staggering academic and emotional toll for students. But the chaos is not uniform.

This is where a little consistency from Cult45 would've come in handy. Just a little. If 45* had made practically any effort at all to concentrate on the pandemic, he'd be sailing towards re-election and we'd be 10 times as fucked as we are right now.

"Trump always makes things worse for Trump." --Bob Cesca

Variations in testing protocols, campus locations and student housing patterns from school to school can play a huge role in success or failure. So do school culture, state politics and luck. Pauses and delays of in-person teaching can shape the outcome. Geography is critical: The pandemic waxes in some regions as it wanes in others.

A degree of stability, perhaps tenuous, has taken hold at many schools that brought students to campus. It is a remarkable turn after the spring crisis that forced students nationwide to evacuate and professors to pivot practically overnight from classrooms to remote instruction. Leaders of these schools say they are gaining confidence they can keep campuses on track with research, teaching and learning. Students are settling into the strangeness.

Sarah O’Brien, 21, is one of 1,800 undergraduates who came to Worcester, Mass., for the fall term at the private Clark University. She and her peers are tested every three days with nasal swabs, and so far there have been no outbreaks. People wear masks everywhere on campus, she said. In one of her classes, half of the students are seated in person on a given day and half are connected online. The next time, the groups switch. Taking turns helps maintain adequate physical distance.

“Some of my professors will joke that class is the safest place to be,” O’Brien said. It’s far from optimal, but it beats the alternative. “I think I’d go crazy if I was at home,” said the senior from Milford, Conn.

Extraordinarily difficult calls

Across America, though, many are still at home or living with friends away from campus and attending class remotely.

As of early September, 34 percent of 1,442 four-year colleges and universities tracked by researchers at Davidson College were teaching fully or primarily in person. Another 37 percent were teaching fully or primarily online. Most others took a combined approach known as “hybrid” learning. The researchers also found that public community colleges were more likely than four-year schools to be operating online.

For higher education leaders, these are extraordinarily difficult calls. They face competing and overlapping pressures from governors, governing boards, faculty, alumni, neighbors, parents and students.

Every day they are checking caseloads on campus and surrounding communities and wondering whether they have enough funding to operate, enough hospital beds nearby to handle any surge in cases, and enough dorm or hotel rooms to isolate those who are infected and quarantine those who might be. Parties at fraternity and sorority houses and other venues pose constant threats. Layered onto all that is the national debate over the wisdom of playing college football.

“I have had many agonizing conversations” with school leaders about the pandemic, said Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. “This has been one of the toughest sets of decisions that presidents have made in their careers.”

Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, sees a pattern that reflects regional differences over the need for pandemic restrictions. Schools in the South and Midwest, he said, tend to be opening more fully in person than those in the Northeast and on the West Coast. “It pretty much mirrors what you’re seeing in the politics of the country,” he said.

There is consensus on one point: Coronavirus testing helps. Frequent testing helps even more.

“Schools that are doing it every couple of days are staying on top of it,” said Gerri Taylor, co-chair of the American College Health Association’s covid-19 task force. Methods are evolving. Some schools are using less-invasive techniques than the testing that relies on long nasopharyngeal swabs. Some also are checking dorm wastewater for the virus.

McDaniel College, in Westminster, Md., tested 1,150 students when they moved onto campus, and it tests about 300 a week who are randomly selected. There have been a handful of cases at the private college. McDaniel President Roger Casey credits student commitment to public health but acknowledges: “Obviously, part of this is luck.”

Creating a bubble

Some small schools rely more on control of their campuses.

At Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, the country’s oldest historically Black college or university, 624 students live on or near the campus outside Philadelphia. The public school is not administering its own coronavirus tests.

Students who show symptoms are referred to an outside testing facility. Cheyney President Aaron A. Walton said there have been no reports of virus cases among students during the semester that began Aug. 10. Faculty have sought wide-scale testing, but the school has focused instead on enforcing the use of masks and physical distance between students. It also has established a campus perimeter.

“We’ve actually created a bubble with one way in and one way out,” Walton said. Food deliveries and Uber drivers enter only at the front gate. Campus visitors must complete health screenings, and students must pass temperature checkpoints in residence halls. Guests aren’t allowed inside dorms. Curfews are 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends for students who leave campus.

“We have a fairly strict code of conduct,” Walton said.

In North Carolina, the private Duke University so far has dodged the viral surges that slammed two nearby public institutions in the state’s Research Triangle. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University were forced last month to send students home.

Through Sept. 11, nearly 30,000 tests of Duke students had turned up 40 positive cases. All but seven of those had been cleared by that date.

One lesson from Duke: Density matters. While Duke tested students more aggressively than UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State, it also brought fewer to campus. Only freshmen, sophomores and a few others moved into dorms — 3,000 in all. Everyone has a single room, and traffic is much reduced in bathrooms and hallways.

Those who live nearby in Durham are only allowed on campus when they have a class. They can’t go to the dining halls, dorms or other places students would normally gather.

Duke officials are acutely aware that conditions could change at any moment. “Our mantra has been like a tournament: Survive and advance,” said Duke spokesman Michael Schoenfeld, who knows exactly how many days are left in the semester. “We want to get there. But we also want to get to Thursday.”

Fraternities and sororities are popular at Duke, but in contrast to counterparts elsewhere, they don’t have separate houses. That means there is more supervision. As a private university with a substantial endowment, Duke also has the funding to do what it wants.

Pressure on public universities

Public universities often face taller hurdles. They get significant pressure from politicians and students to reopen, but with less funding than prestigious private schools and less control over sprawling campuses and the many bars and restaurants that cater to them. Flagship universities in Alabama and Wisconsin have each reported more than 2,300 positive tests among students.

Campus culture matters

“Testing alone obviously is not enough,” said Joshua M. Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Testing tells you where the virus is, but it doesn’t slow the virus down if people are not doing what they need to do to protect themselves or others.”

Educators have stressed personal responsibility in these huge schools, discouraging parties and promoting masks. Success can be elusive.

“We’re in a dance,” said West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee. His 26,000-student university returned partially in person in August under a plan he likened to “a fox trot.” Then infections spiked, he said, “so we started dancing the waltz.” On Sept. 9, the university halted most face-to-face teaching of undergraduates for 2½ weeks to contain the outbreak. “Now we’re dancing the rumba,” Gee said. But the president himself recently misstepped. On Sept. 13, someone uploaded onto Twitter a photo of Gee shopping in a local pharmacy without wearing a mask. Gee subsequently apologized.

At the University of Tennessee, which has about 29,000 students, there were 600 active cases on the flagship campus in Knoxville within three weeks of its Aug. 19 start. More than 2,100 students were reported in quarantine or isolation in early September.

On Sept. 8, Tennessee Chancellor Donde Plowman said case counts were “going up way too fast” and expressed frustration with fraternities holding off-campus parties “crammed with lots of people in close quarters.” Some Greek life organizations were suspended for violating public health rules. To stem infections, the university switched campus dining to carryout, barred visitors from dorms and closed the fitness center. As of Saturday, the active case count had ebbed to about 340.

Instructors scrambled to adapt. Idil Issak, a graduate teaching assistant in anthropology, began the semester with an in-person course that met twice a week. But after six of her students were forced to isolate, Issak added online instruction to ensure no one would be left out.

Issak said students should not bear the brunt of blame for spikes in cases. The situation, she said, is Tennessee’s responsibility. “If they’re really being honest with themselves,” Issak said, university officials know “it’s their fault. They’re just wanting to make money off these kids.”

Some universities have opened in phases, buying time to guard against outbreaks. The University of Virginia, with 25,000 students, began undergraduate courses online in August. But many undergrads moved onto campus this month in Charlottesville, and in-person teaching launched after Labor Day. The 40,000-student University of Maryland at College Park took a similar path as a small share of classes met in person starting last Monday.

The delay helped U-Md. expand testing and gave faculty more time to prepare. “It certainly made me feel more secure about going back. It was less stressful for me,” said Sarah Ann Oates, a journalism professor who returned to the classroom. “In the end, it did make me feel safer.”

Geography matters

Geography helps the University of Vermont, in a state where the virus appears to be largely contained. More than 10,000 students descended last month on its Burlington campus. They have been tested frequently. Of nearly 33,000 tests administered as of last week, the university reported 19 positive cases. The university has worked hard to enforce public health rules. But Vermont President Suresh Garimella said responsibility for keeping the community safe should not be placed entirely on the students.

“Student behavior is important, but I didn’t want to set them up for failure,” Garimella said. Testing, he said, “is the basis of a sound strategy.”

The virus can wreak havoc even when schools put sharp limits on face-to-face teaching. California State University at Chico, which has about 16,000 students in Northern California, brought 750 into campus housing when the semester started in August. About 8 percent of its courses were offered in person, echoing the pattern elsewhere in the state.

Within days of opening, the university knew it had a problem. Several resident assistants, key to the operation of campus housing, were discovered to be infected with the virus or exposed to it. There was also a surge in campus-connected infections. And Butte County, which encompasses Chico, warned that more cases were appearing among young adults.

University President Gayle Hutchinson said she had no choice but to shift to all-online teaching and ask most dorm students to leave. “Probably one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to make,” Hutchinson said. “On paper, it should have worked. But in real life, with how this disease spreads, it wasn’t so.”

'Hindsight is 20/20'

Gettysburg College felt secure about the plan it dubbed “Better Together.” The liberal arts school, founded decades before the Civil War battle that the town is forever identified with, had expanded student housing, consulted with public health experts and arranged for viral testing.

Starting on Aug. 10, students showed up in staggered sequence at a gymnasium, checked in, underwent a throat-swab test and collected room keys. Then they quarantined until receiving results. Only a handful were positive for the virus.

But a second round of testing yielded more troubling data: 33 positives as of Aug. 29. The Gettysburgian student news outlet reported that a fraternity faced disciplinary action after hosting a social gathering without masks and distancing.

On Aug. 30, Gettysburg President Bob Iuliano pleaded with students to follow public health rules. “We are at an inflection point,” he said in an online town hall, “that requires all of us to take stock of how committed we are to staying together in our residential mode.” The college imposed an “all-student quarantine” on Sept. 1. But it was not enough. On Sept. 4, Iuliano announced the college would “de-densify” — sending 1,300 students home.

Up to 900 remain on campus — freshmen, transfers and certain others — and the new case count has dropped into the single digits.

Anna Cincotta, 21, a senior from Princeton, N.J., said she and other students got the move-out order in a mass email at 4:11 p.m. that Friday. She had less than two days to clear out. “All of us are reeling from being sent home,” she said.

What are the lessons from Gettysburg? Were there too many careless parties? Was the school overconfident? Or was it just bad luck? “That’s the question on everyone’s mind,” Cincotta said. “Hindsight is 20/20. I do empathize with the administration. It was hard to predict everything going up in flames so quickly.”

"... hard to predict everything going up in flames so quickly"? What the fuck, little girl? No - it wasn't - you listen to the fucking doctors - to the people who actually know about this shit and no, it wasn't hard to predict at-fucking-all.

We are The Stoopid Country.

 

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— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) September 20, 2020

Steve Schmidt

Do Not Be Afraid. Do not tremble. Do not waiver. Do not doubt either the goodness of our people or the possibilities for our future.

Do not let small men with tyranny and malice in their heart (Donald Trump) or hypocrites with no core (Mike Pence) make you afraid for our future or for your countrymen and women. Do not let the fascists, racists and conspiracy theorists make you afraid of your neighbors or the stranger who could be your friend. 

We should all be grateful that we have been chosen by this rancid and dangerous hour to stand up and fight.

What we do now matters. Our capitol is occupied by a cabal of small and low men and women who have betrayed all of us, the American experiment, their oaths and basic decency in service of a corrupt and malignant cult of personality that is vandalizing our principles, ideals, inheritance, future and fundamental goodness. 

200,000 of our country men and women are dead. At least 150,000 of them could be alive but for Trump’s lethal lying and the immoral, supine complicity of his collaborators and enablers. 

Let us resolve to rise up and strike down Trumpism. Let us put it down with righteous anger and fury. Let us resolve to never let this happen again. Let us do our duty as American citizens. Let us be conscious that we are called to safe action when we consider the blood, sacrifice and courage of ordinary people who stood their ground on a fields in Lexington and Gettysburg. The men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and dropped from the skies over France to crush fascism are smiling at our cause. 

The men and women who taught the world the meaning of the words “human dignity” as they protested segregation, absorbed the beatings and marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge are watching and judging us. We are in the right and for the right. We are fighting for the good. Trumpism is UNAMERICAN. It is illiberal, demagogic, dishonest, cruel, corrupt and disgusting. Let us strike it down. We will. 

Have joy in this fight. RBG is with her husband again. She is arguing with Scalia and meeting Washington and Lincoln. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas are there. Susan B Anthony is there and so is Elise Wiesel. A great champion of freedom has arrived in heaven. Her work is done. Her burden is now our’s. Let us honor her legacy by doing our duty.

Fight - Register - Vote.

"I DISSENT" are the most American of words. Thank you, Madame Justice. May your memory be a blessing. We all know that it is.