Nov 11, 2020
Today's Today
the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month
They Didn't Know
he lay there
under the sun
dried blood on his lips.
the heat was oppressive.
his clothes were dusty,
dark blotches on them.
i could see the ants
moving,
entering him
exiting him.
how i hate this place.
how i hate the people
who're responsible
for all this unbelievable madness.
how i hate myself
for volunteering to be here.
i watched the ants
crawling over the body.
i wanted to hate them too
but they didn't know
and the hating
had to stop somewhere.
--Kyle Schlicher, USMC 05-15-1968
COVID-19 Update
World
- New Cases: 542,492 (⬆︎ .96%)
- New Deaths: 9,191 (⬆︎ .72%)
USA
- New Cases: 135,653 (⬆︎ 1.30%) 🥳 NEW RECORD! 🎉
- New Deaths: 1,346 (⬆︎ .55%)
USAmerica Inc has logged over 100,000 new cases 7 days in a row.
With coronavirus cases spiking nationwide, all signs point to a harrowing autumn
This is the dismal reality America faces as the coronavirus continues its unchecked surge around the country: In North Dakota, health-care workers with asymptomatic cases of the coronavirus will be allowed to keep working as the number of infected patients outstrips the staff members needed to care for them, the governor said this week.
In multiple states, hospital leaders warned that the current spike is straining resources and sidelining the very staffers needed to face growing numbers of sick people. From Maryland to Iowa, local officials have pleaded for tighter restrictions that might help slow the virus’s accelerating spread.
As a worrisome summer gives way to a harrowing fall, the nation’s surge of coronavirus cases shows no signs of easing. With little help and scant guidance from a Washington stuck in political limbo, some states and localities rushed to put in place new restrictions aimed at slowing the virus’s spread. Still, almost every metric appeared headed in an ominous direction.
On Tuesday, the country hit another one-day record, logging more than 135,000 new coronavirus cases, along with 1,403 additional deaths. At least five states, including Missouri and Wisconsin, set single-day highs for fatalities. At least five more, including Illinois and Pennsylvania, set single-day highs for new cases. Almost nowhere in the country are caseloads actually subsiding.
“We’re now seeing widespread community transmission,” said Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R). “More people are getting infected with the virus, more people are being hospitalized and going into intensive care, and more people are dying.”
He announced plans to return the state to restrictions that haven’t been in place for months, including a 50 percent capacity limit on restaurants and a new health advisory urging a 25-person cap on indoor gatherings. Hogan also issued an updated travel advisory, asking residents to avoid nonessential travel to 35 states with high infection rates.
Nearly 62,000 infected Americans currently lie in hospital beds — a number the nation has not experienced since April. More than a dozen states have hit new highs for hospitalizations this month, with many setting records again on Tuesday, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post.
“I’m not sure it disappoints me as much as it scares the hell out of me,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “This is like one huge coronavirus forest fire, and I don’t think it’s going to spare much human wood out there unless we change our behavior.”
More likely, he said, the grim present will grow only darker as the fall wears on. Despite positive news this week, no vaccine will arrive in time to quickly alter the current trajectory. In many places, bars, gyms and restaurants remain open. Weddings and funerals continue. People fighting pandemic fatigue or who are dismissive of the risks are gathering with friends and family, and doing so more often indoors as cold weather arrives.
Osterholm believes the United States will soon see new confirmed cases climb above 200,000 a day — a figure that would have seemed unfathomable when daily infections peaked at roughly 30,000 new cases a day last spring.
“I don’t see anything changing this right now. The behaviors are not changing,” he said. “The deaths will go up precipitously over the course of the next month. It’s going to happen.”
As the numbers climbed, governors and state health departments appealed to their residents to wear masks and maintain social distancing — echoing President-elect Joe Biden’s message to Americans that masks are not partisan.
“Today’s data is alarming,” Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, tweeted Tuesday, as he reported another 6,508 cases, 386 hospitalizations and 23 deaths. “Everyone must take this pandemic seriously.”
In a growing number of states, officials expressed concern about keeping hospitals open for anyone who might need them.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) on Monday announced a plan to allow health-care workers with asymptomatic cases of the coronavirus to continue working in covid-19 wards of hospitals while in full protective gear. The change is meant to ease some of the burden on hospitals facing staffing shortages as doctors and nurses become infected or quarantine because of contact with an infected person, Burgum told reporters.
Asymptomatic employees awaiting test results can also continue working, which the governor said should free dozens of staff members at a time in each hospital. North Dakota has further tried to reduce the strain on hospitals by contracting with nurses from out of state and implementing surge plans. Still, Burgum said, the state’s hospitals “are under enormous pressure.”
In Ohio this week, hospital executives said routine care and non-emergency procedures could be delayed if the number of available staff members falls further or infections grow exponentially.
In Oklahoma, health officials are confronting similar dilemmas.
“Every day, we’re scrambling to try to get every single patient to a bed that has a nurse and a doctor, and respiratory therapist, and all of the things that they need to care for them,” said Julie Watson, chief medical officer of Integris Health, which operates 18 hospitals across Oklahoma. “So it’s exhausting, to be honest with you. It’s exhausting, because there’s just no break.”
Watson said the system has hired hundreds of additional nurses on a contract basis, but resources are still stretched.
“The part that is most frustrating for us as physicians is it does not have to be this way,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to choose between surgeries that patients need and caring for patients who get covid because they’re not wearing their mask, or, God forbid, someone who was around someone who wasn’t. That, to me, is unjust.”
That same worry persisted in Minnesota, where Amy W. Williams, chair of the Department of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, said the number of covid-19 patients in the hospital rose sharply in the past two weeks as the virus spread rapidly in the Upper Midwest.
Williams said her top concern was maintaining adequate staff because Mayo personnel were becoming exposed or infected in the community along with other people, forcing them to quarantine and miss work.
The startling surge has compelled new efforts in some parts of the country to slow the rampant virus.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) announced Tuesday that by week’s end, bars and restaurants must stop serving at 10 p.m. In addition, he put in place new caps on weddings, funerals and other social gatherings.
Iowans also will soon be subject to stricter coronavirus rules, as the state faces a daily case count that has nearly doubled since the first day of the month.
Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said Tuesday at a news conference that masks will be required at indoor gatherings of more than 25 people and outdoor gatherings of over 100 people. Groups that congregate at restaurants, bars or other gatherings will be limited to eight people, unless they are all from the same household.
Each participant in a youth or high school sporting event will be allowed only two spectators, and masks will be required for staff members and customers at personal-services businesses such as hair salons.
The new restrictions are notable for Reynolds, who has resisted implementing a statewide mask mandate since the spring. She stressed Tuesday that Iowa’s restrictions still are less severe than those of many other states.
“Iowa is open for business, and we intend to keep it that way,” she said.
Earlier in the week, Utah’s outgoing governor, Republican Gary R. Herbert, declared a state of emergency aimed at easing hospital overcrowding and quelling the spike in infections. The move includes a statewide mask mandate and a household-only requirement on social gatherings for two weeks.
“We cannot afford to debate this issue any longer,” Herbert said in a video posted to Twitter. “Individual freedom is certainly important, and it is our rule of law that protects that freedom.”
Even as the pandemic continued to rage, glimmers of hope emerged.
The disclosure Monday that Pfizer’s experimental coronavirus vaccine is more than 90 percent effective in ongoing trials sharply increased prospects that federal regulators will authorize the vaccine on an emergency basis as early as mid-December, and that the first shots could be administered before the end of the year or early 2021. The news bodes well for other vaccines currently in the pipeline, scientists said, even as they warned of the difficulty in distributing any drug to hundreds of millions of people.
Regulators this week also granted emergency authorization to the first covid-19 treatment to protect people with mild illness from developing severe disease.
The drug, a laboratory-brewed antibody that imitates the immune system’s attack on the virus, is made by Eli Lilly & Co. Health experts have championed the class of medicine as a powerful tool to change the course of the pandemic and work as a bridge to a vaccine. It is in the same family of medication as an experimental treatment President Trump received when he was stricken with covid-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
But the initial scarcity of the drug and the logistical complexities of administering it could mute its immediate impact on the pandemic and raise questions about whether it will find its way to the patients in greatest need.
Nov 10, 2020
COVID-19 Update
World
- New Cases: 485,830 (⬆︎ .96%)
- New Deaths: 6,696 (⬆︎ .53%)
USA
- New Cases: 125,759 (⬆︎ 1.21%)
- New Deaths: 692 (⬆︎ .26%)
We've been over 100,000 new cases per day for 6 days in a row now - with no end in sight.
Not long ago, President Stoopid asserted that we'd stop hearing anything about the pandemic immediately after November 3rd.
I thought I might be able to say, "That was LIE NUMBER THUS AND SUCH", but we have no idea how many outright lies he's told now. It's a very large number - way north of 22,000 - so while it's important to try to keep track in a general way, it's pretty much impossible to know precisely. It's a big fuckin' number.
Pandemic Reaches Grim Milestone as Biden Moves to Take Charge
With average new infections totaling 111,000 per day, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is confronting a coronavirus pandemic that is surging out of control
Coronavirus cases surged to a new record on Monday, with the United States now averaging 111,000 cases each day for the past week, a grim milestone amid rising hospitalizations and deaths that cast a shadow on positive news about the effectiveness of a potential vaccine.
As the number of infected Americans passed 10 million and governors struggled to manage the pandemic, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. tried on Monday to use his bully pulpit — the only tool at his disposal until he replaces President Trump in 72 days — to plead for Americans to set aside the bitterness of the 2020 election and wear a mask.
“It doesn’t matter who you voted for, where you stood before Election Day,” Mr. Biden said in Delaware after announcing a Covid-19 advisory board charged with preparing for quick action once he is inaugurated. “It doesn’t matter your party, your point of view. We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democratic or Republican lives — American lives.”
Hours before Mr. Biden’s remarks, the drug maker Pfizer announced that an early analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial suggested the vaccine was robustly effective in preventing Covid-19, a promising development that sent stock prices soaring. The world has waited anxiously for any positive sign that there will be an end to the pandemic that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide.
“It’s extraordinary,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said on CNN. “It is really a big deal.”
Mr. Biden called the development “excellent news” but cautioned that the country was still “facing a very dark winter.” The average daily death toll in the United States is inching back toward 1,000, and hospitals nationwide are strained with patients. The president-elect said that Americans would need to rely on basic precautions, like wearing masks, to “get back to normal as fast as possible.”
“It’s clear that this vaccine, even if approved, will not be widely available for many months yet to come,” he said. “The challenge before us right now is still immense and growing.”
The sheer breadth of that challenge was striking on Monday: More than 784,000 cases have been announced in the United States over the past week, more than in any other week of the pandemic. The country now averages 900 deaths each day, and 28 states added more cases in the seven-day period ending Sunday than in any other weeklong stretch of the pandemic. No states are reporting sustained reductions in cases.
Coronavirus hospitalizations, perhaps the clearest measure of how many people are severely ill, are approaching record levels set during earlier surges of the pandemic, according to data collected by the Covid Tracking Project. A wave of more than 59,200 patients threatened to overwhelm hospitals in communities across the country on Monday.
The outlook is especially grim in the Midwest and Great Plains, where North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska had more new cases per capita over the past week than any others. In the Iowa county that includes Des Moines, more than 400 cases are being identified on an average day. In Milwaukee County, Wis., around 900 new cases are emerging each day. The Nebraska county that includes Omaha is averaging about 460 cases daily, a roughly threefold increase in one month. In Ohio, reports of new cases have risen by 91 percent over the past two weeks.
At the White House, which has been the site of several high-profile outbreaks in recent months, Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday, according to a spokesman for the agency. He became the latest in a long list of administration officials, including Mr. Trump himself, to contract the virus.
At least three people who attended an election party at the White House last week, including Mr. Carson, have tested positive for the virus. At the event, several hundred people gathered in the East Room for several hours, many of them not wearing masks as they mingled while watching the election returns.
David Bossie, an adviser to Mr. Trump who attended the election night party, tested positive on Sunday, two people familiar with the diagnosis said. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, tested positive for the virus the day after the election, aides said, although he tried to keep it quiet.
Mr. Carson, a neurosurgeon who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, has defended Mr. Trump’s response to the virus and is a member of the White House virus task force. An aide said he was in “good spirits” but declined to specify his treatments.
Beyond the impact of the virus itself, when Mr. Biden takes office, he will face a sobering economic reality.
Even as the Dow Jones industrial average gained nearly 3 percent on news of the vaccine, the economy remained depressed by the spread of the virus. There were 10 million fewer Americans working in October than in February, according to the Labor Department, and the pace of job growth has slowed every month since June. Airlines and other tourism-related industries are nowhere close to regaining their normal levels of customers. And several indicators suggest consumers have pulled back on dining and some other activities in recent weeks as infections have surged anew.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York raised doubts that the Trump administration could handle vaccine distribution, even if a vaccine did become available in the coming weeks, suggesting that governors would have to step in.
“The Trump administration is rolling out the vaccination plan, and I believe it’s flawed,” Mr. Cuomo said Monday on “Good Morning America” on ABC. “They’re basically going to have the private providers do it, and that’s going to leave out all sorts of communities that were left out the first time when Covid ravaged them.”
Mr. Biden, moving to signal to Americans that he is prepared to take charge after a chaotic year, named a new coronavirus task force headed by a former commissioner of food and drugs, Dr. David Kessler; a former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy; and a Yale public health expert, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith.
Mr. Biden will have the difficult task of governing a country that is deeply divided about how much the government should do to slow the virus at the expense of jobs, schooling, recreation, socializing and religious gatherings. The president-elect vowed to “spare no effort” in fighting the virus, with the goal of getting the economy “running at full speed again.”
His comments contrasted Mr. Trump’s. The president has spent the past eight months dismissing or playing down the need for Americans to wear masks, saying frequently — and falsely — that public health experts disagree about masks’ effectiveness.
Vice President Mike Pence, who serves as the chairman of Mr. Trump’s coronavirus task force, convened the group on Monday after meeting about once a week over the past several months. But Mr. Trump, who remains in office until January, is openly at odds with his own virus advisers, including about mask wearing.
The wave of cases sweeping through much of the country remains largely a matter for state and local officials whose citizens are divided over the need for restrictions, impatient to improve the economy and fatigued by the pandemic.
The piece goes on, but you get the picture. The Forces of Stoopid are relentless.
We have so much work still to do.
Today's Tweet
But it's not just the accent.
Somehow, hearing BBC’s very serious coverage of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping story in a British accent makes it so much funnier pic.twitter.com/mn2F5nzfQ3
— Laura Bassett (@LEBassett) November 9, 2020
Nov 9, 2020
Love A Nerd
Nerds rule.
Of course, I have no idea if this is really a thing, but I don't care. It's too cool.
Bigger Than It Looks
Extrapolating out from current vote totals, I project Biden winning the popular vote by 4.3 percentage points and getting 81.8 million votes to President Trump’s 74.9 million, with a turnout of around 160 million. This is significant because no candidate has ever received 70 million votes in an election — former President Barack Obama came the closest in 2008, with 69.5 million votes — let alone 80 million. That may also be a slightly conservative projection, given the blue shift we’ve seen so far and the fact that late-counted votes such as provisional ballots often lean Democratic. I’d probably bet on Biden’s popular vote margin winding up at closer to 5 points than to 4, and 6 points isn’t entirely out of the question either.
The margin is also a bit more impressive in the context of our highly polarized political era, which has tended to produce close elections. If I’m right about the popular vote margin, Biden’s win would come via the second-largest popular vote margin since 2000, exceeding Obama’s 3.9-point margin against Mitt Romney in 2012 but lagging behind Obama’s 7.3-point win over John McCain in 2008.
Snippets from the WaPo editorials offices:
I have spent the past five years, four months and 23 days of my life fighting Trump — ever since he came down the garish escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential run with insults at Latino immigrants. Over that time I have written hundreds of columns — often appearing on television, too — to call attention to his awfulness. The fight against Trump was all consuming and utterly exhausting. Others have been doing far more — organizing, registering voters, marching, suing, donating, speaking out, passing legislation, producing commercials. All of us were united by a conviction that this was no mere political campaign. This was not about petty partisan differences. This was a fight to save our country.
And there were many times during the past four years when I thought the battle would be lost. Trump turned out to be even worse than I had expected: Who could have imagined that after four years of his malign and incompetent presidency nearly 240,000 Americans would be dead in a pandemic and our economy would be in ruins? And yet he did not suffer the catastrophic loss of support that he deserved.
It was enough to make me despair — to wonder if the United States was no longer the country that I had loved ever since arriving here as a 7-year-old immigrant from the Soviet Union in 1976. The rise of Trump jolted me out of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, caused me to question many of the shibboleths I advocated throughout my adult life, and even called into doubt the faith in America that had always been my secular religion.
EJ Dionne
Myths often grow out of mistaken first impressions. So it needs to be asserted unequivocally that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is far more substantial than the conventional take would have it and more revelatory about the future than Donald Trump’s election was four years ago.
The electorate decisively rejected the extremism that Trump kept on display this weekend as he continued to issue one diabolically false claim after another to discredit an election that he lost. Biden rebuilt the Democrats’ blue wall even as he extended the party’s reach in the South and Southwest.
It was, as Biden has said more colorfully in other contexts, a big deal.
But because Democrats did not win all they hoped for in the House, Senate and state legislative races, the magnitude of what happened last Tuesday is being defined down. And so many who oppose Trump simply can’t believe that more than 70 million of their fellow citizens would vote to reelect such a profoundly flawed man.
This is understandable, but it also feeds a double standard that distorts our view of the decision the country made.
Consider that in 2016, Trump won only 46 percent of the popular vote, losing it to Hillary Clinton by nearly 2.9 million ballots. He carried the three key states by minuscule margins — Michigan by 10,704, Wisconsin by 22,748 and Pennsylvania by 44,292.
Yet conservative commentators used this flimsy victory to insist that the media, liberals, academics and “coastal people” bow before the altar of “the Trump voter.” (As it happens, most Democrats, and particularly Biden, needed no lessons in empathy for working-class voters — of all races.) A thuggish Republican whose share of the vote was barely larger than John McCain’s in 2008 and smaller than Mitt Romney’s in 2012 was suddenly the prophet of a new age.
Now, look at what Biden achieved. He won the vote with 75 million ballots — more than any presidential candidate in history — and enjoys a lead of more than 4 million that is likely to grow substantially.
Biden’s margins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are comparable to Trump’s in 2016 while his margin in Michigan is more than 10 times larger. The former vice president could win as many as 306 electoral votes, exactly Trump’s 2016 haul.
Yet there is no clamor for Republicans to get to know “the Biden voter,” no call on conservatives to be more in touch with the country they live in.
Some of this may have to do with race and racism, given who voted for Biden, and with the well-honed skill of conservative elites in mobilizing anti-elitism against liberals. But there were also pandemic-induced differences between the two elections in how results were reported and absorbed.
- snip -
There can be no denying that Trump’s ability to energize his supporters hurt Democratic House candidates who made inroads into hostile territory in 2018, as well as the party’s state legislative candidates. It turned out that it was too much to expect a miraculous resolution of the deep divisions in our politics. They go back to the 1990s, have hardened since 2000 — and Trump exploited them relentlessly.
So there’s still a lot of work to do, and Biden started doing it in an evocative and moving victory speech Saturday night that stressed healing and asked of Trump’s supporters: “Let’s give each other a chance.” Graciousness is good politics and good for the country, but so is understanding the brute facts of our political life: Democrats have won a popular vote majority in three of the last four presidential elections; Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last 28 years. The country is changing in ways profoundly challenging to the GOP and the right. They’re the ones who should start worrying about being out of touch.
Right on cue, the usual narrative is emerging that "it's all about Trump and Trumpism".
Bullshit. 70 million votes in favor of "Trumpism"? Maybe the cult is going to behave more like a cult when you put a guy like Trump at its head, but the legion of morons has grown to a level of near-critical mass. It's very very very close to a self-sustaining contagion. And ain't it funny how we have a political disease at the same time as a coronavirus pandemic, and that those two things are so perfectly analogous of each other?
No - sorry - not funny at all.
Fortunately, the American transition tradition — much of it enshrined in laws such as the Presidential Transitions Improvements Act of 2015 — includes important formalities governing the transfer of power.
Unfortunately, the United States has never had a departing president like Donald J. Trump.
With at least 74 million votes cast for Biden (the most in U.S. history), Trump acts as if he isn’t going anywhere. Unlike his modern-day presidential predecessors, Trump is calling into question the democratic process by claiming an election night victory for himself.
That is a sad and startling contrast with American transition history as meticulously compiled by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition.
Case in point: A meeting between the outgoing president and the incoming president is an essential early step in the transition of power. It signals the peaceful nature of America’s democratic tradition, as the Center for Presidential Transition observed. It also is an opportunity for the president-elect to hear directly from the outgoing president about the issues that will be on the table after the presidential oath is administered.
Six days after the Nov. 4, 2008, election, President George W. Bush met with President-elect Barack Obama to brief him on several major international issues.
President Obama met with President-elect Trump right after the 2016 election. Obama brought Trump up to speed on several pressing foreign policy concerns, including the threat from North Korea. But the Obama-Trump conversation didn’t stop there. Several phone calls followed.
In addition, Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, met with Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and he went a step further.
McDonough, according to the Center for Presidential Transition, “arranged a luncheon for Priebus and 10 former chiefs of staff from every administration dating back to President Jimmy Carter.”
Because of Trump’s intransigence, no such meeting appears in the works, as of this hour.
Ed note: It's not unreasonable to assume there will be no cooperation. I think all of 45*'s "administration" is far too busy shredding evidence and burying bodies. They've spent 4 years looting the joint, so they have no time or energy left to do anything helpful to this country.Plus they've had no inclination to do anything honorable - why would they start now?
Trump needs to face the truth that governance was not given but only entrusted to him. And he blew it, big time.
Biden has already done his part by forming an early White House transition team staffed with seasoned Obama administration officials and Capitol Hill veterans under the leadership of longtime Biden adviser and former Delaware Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman. Their aim is to ensure continuity in government.
Trump’s aim is his own continuation in government.
Whether Trump likes it or not, there are transition-related legal requirements that he must observe.
Some are in place, such as an official White House Transition Coordinating Council and agency transition directors to work with the incoming team.
But more is required.
Trump’s staff must ensure that career federal executives are positioned to serve in acting capacities with succession plans during the handover phase after Trump appointees clean out their desks. The Trump team also has to provide Biden’s teams with a list of all of the politically appointed officials in the federal government, a brief description of their responsibilities, including those of senior Trump White House advisers Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro and the like. Between now and 11:59 a.m. on Jan. 20, they will have to turn in their building passes and vacate the White House premises.
Trump, despite his bitterness, has an obligation to prepare for a smooth national security handover by ensuring that Biden’s incoming national security team is completely informed about all pending intelligence and national security issues. America’s security cannot be left in limbo.
With years of White House and congressional service under his belt, Biden won’t be starting from scratch. For the sake of the nation, however, Biden deserves a chance to move through his presidential transition without having to clear hurdles and stumbling blocks placed in his way by a departing, disgruntled and defeated Donald Trump.
Taking over the presidency of the United States cannot be left to whim, capriciousness or vengeance. Our nation’s interests deserve more than that.
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