COVID-19 Update

If the last 24 hours is any indication, it's hard for me to feel reassured that somehow we're leveling off, or getting over the hump, or rounding the corner on this thing.

We added another 4,000 dead Americans to the list since yesterday morning.

Which means we're still on track, with one of us dying every 23 seconds or so.

And that means we're back on track for 100,000 dead Americans before the end of April.

But yeah - let's all stop this distancing nonsense and have a big ol' Back To Work Party.

US Exports

(thanks, Allan)

We don't make much anymore here in USAmerica, Inc.

We make noise. We make asses of ourselves all over the world. But we don't make a whole lot of stuff, so we don't export too much.

'Cept now, we can proudly crow about being a leading exporter of COVID-19 infection.

LA Times:

The Trump administration has deployed a team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Guatemala to “review and validate” the country’s coronavirus testing after officials there reported more than 70 deportees on two recent flights from the United States were infected, according to authorities in both countries.

At the same time, Guatemalan officials said Thursday they have indefinitely suspended deportations from the U.S.

About 30 deportees on a March 26 flight from Arizona and 44 more on a flight Monday from Texas tested positive soon after arriving in the Central American country, Guatemalan officials said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement subjects deportees to a health screening before boarding but does not test them for the coronavirus. Guatemalan officials have been testing them after arrival.

Oops. I'm thinking Stephen Miller is one bummed-out Nazi vampire today.

What We Don't Know

Almost 4 months into this COVID-19 thing, and we're still in the fucking dark about the two main points:

1. Who has this shit?
2. When somebody gets this shit, what are their chances?

The Hill:

The novel coronavirus has killed more than 31,000 people in the United States and top health officials project about 60,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by August, but two experts say the majority of deaths may have been avoided if social distancing measures were implemented just two weeks earlier than they were.

Epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell Tuesday wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times that 90 percent of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. could have possibly been avoided if social distancing began March 2, when there were only 11 deaths recorded in the nation. If such policies would have been put in place one week earlier, on March 9, the epidemiologists say there could have been a 60 percent reduction in fatalities.

“Whatever the final death toll is in the United States, the cost of waiting will be enormous, a tragic consequence of the exponential spread of the virus early in the epidemic,” the experts wrote.

NYT:

Coroners in some parts of the country are overwhelmed. Funeral homes in coronavirus hot spots can barely keep up. Newspaper obituary pages in hard-hit areas go on and on. Covid-19 is on track to kill far more people in the United States this year than the seasonal flu.

But determining just how deadly the new coronavirus will be is a key question facing epidemiologists, who expect resurgent waves of infection that could last into 2022.

As the virus spread across the world in late February and March, the projection circulated by infectious disease experts of how many infected people would die seemed plenty dire: around 1 percent, or 10 times the rate of a typical flu.

But according to various unofficial Covid-19 trackers that calculate the death rate by dividing total deaths by the number of known cases, about 6.4 percent of people infected with the virus have now died worldwide.

In Italy, the death rate stands at about 13 percent, and in the United States, around 4.3 percent, according to the latest figures on known cases and deaths. Even in South Korea, where widespread testing helped contain the outbreak, 2 percent of people who tested positive for the virus have died, recent data shows.

These supposed death rates also appear to vary widely by geography: Germany’s fatality rate appears to be roughly one-tenth of Italy’s, and Los Angeles’s about half of New York’s. Among U.S. states, Michigan, at around 7 percent, is at the high end, while Wyoming, which reported its first two deaths this week, has one of the lowest death rates, at about 0.7 percent.

Virology experts say there is no evidence that any strain of the virus, officially known as SARS-CoV-2, has mutated to become more severe in some parts of the world than others, raising the question of why there appears to be so much variance from country to country.

Under the best of circumstances, figuring this out would be a real bitch. It doesn't help when the people running a dozen or more countries are complete assholes who think their political careers are more important than the lives of those who keep them in power - and who put them in power in the first fucking place.

COVID-19 Update

I don't know what it means - if anything, but:

• We've tested just over 1% of the US population
• 19.6% of those tested have been confirmed as COVID-19
• We're being told that anyone can get a test, but nobody really knows where to go or who to ask
• If the numbers are correct (and nobody trusts they are), then the Case Fatality Rate in the US is right at 5%, while the world CFR is at 6.7%.

Today's Brian

Brian Tyler Cohen

45* is playing his old familiar tune - "I'm mad too - I'm just like you - they never told me - they kept me in the dark and now I have to fix it for you - blah blah fucking blah."

He's the president.

And he's the guy who claims absolute authority while never accepting even the slightest responsibility.

Some Parodies

...are better than others.

And sometimes I love people - as long as they don't get try to get too cozy.

click

⬇︎👁⬇︎

How Stoopid Are They?

...pretty fuckin' stoopid.

WaPo:

If all roads in Michigan lead to the state capitol, conservative protesters on Wednesday made sure they were closed.

For miles, thousands of drivers clogged the streets to demand that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) ease restrictions and allow them to go back to work. They drowned downtown Lansing, Mich., in a cacophony of honking. They blared patriotic songs from car radios, waving all sorts of flags from the windows — President Trump flags, American flags and the occasional Confederate flag.

- and the kicker -

But in the massive demonstration against Whitmer’s stay-at-home executive order — which they have argued is excessive and beyond her authority — the pleas from organizers that protesters to stay in their vehicles went unheeded. Many got out of their cars and crashed the front lawn of the capitol building, with some chanting, “Lock her up!” and “We will not comply!”

So these boneheads decided to organize a protest against an order that says they need to stay away from each other, which brought them all together, while admonishing the protesters to stay in their cars and away from each other.

Do we kinda see the fucking problem here?

And we wonder why the Chinese cops were welding people's doors shut - just a coupla months ago.

Men In Black

J: "People are smart - they can handle it."

K: "A person is smart. People are dumb panicky dangerous animals - and you know it."

My dearest conservative brothers & sisters:

When we ask "How stoopid can you get?"

it's a rhetorical question -

please stop taking it as a challenge.

COVID-19 Update

Idiot Republicans refuse to do the right thing, and the plague continues apace.

And to this rolling fuckup, we can add the fairly high probability that the number of cases in the US is under-reported because we can't get the fucking testing straight, which means the number of dead is being under-reported too.

Today's Tweet

Follow the thread

I've compiled a side-by-side comparison of the reaction to coronavirus by Trump and the World Health Organization.

The timeline is utterly, comprehensively damning to Trump.

What it shows about him is far worse than what it shows about WHO.

New piece:https://t.co/ujv6EVqIEr

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) April 15, 2020

Today's Pix

click

⬇︎👁👁⬇︎

COVID-19 Update

As suspected, we found out yesterday that some COVID-19 deaths weren't reported as such, so the death toll rose rather sharply.

Pop Prophesy

50 years ahead of its time - a tribute to 45* and his devotees.

American Horror Stories

Rolling Stone:

While Americans died of the modern plague, President Trump sang happy birthday to a fading Fox News personality. On March 7th, a who’s who of the Republican establishment gathered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lavish retreat in Florida, for the 51st-birthday party of Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of the former co-hosts of The Five, and now the girlfriend of Donald J. Trump Jr. All the usual suspects were there, including Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham; Tiffany Trump; Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner; and Trump’s younger son Eric and his wife, Lara. They sang happy birthday to Guilfoyle and lit a big sparkler. At the end, she pumped her fist and shouted “Four more years!” This is what passes for a cozy family celebration in Trumpland. But out in the real world, darkness was falling fast.

There were already 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, around the world, and 3,600 people had died. In the U.S., more than 100 new cases had been reported that day, a rate that was doubling every three days. Other nations knew how serious this was: By that time, China had shut down major cities, all but quarantining 760 million people. Singapore and Hong Kong and South Korea had put in aggressive travel restrictions and testing procedures. In the U.S., fear was rising. South By Southwest, the giant music/tech conference in Austin had just been canceled. Grocery stores were stripped in panic buying. On Wall Street, stocks were in free fall.

There's also an AUDM version embedded at their site - you can listen or download it.

Two of the big points:

• 45* is responsible for dismantling the pandemic response team that was in place in the NSC. He let Bolton scrub that whole fucking thing.
• The "China Travel Ban" was a Swiss cheese measure. He blocked travel, but only for Chinese nationals (which is why it was in fact a racist asshole thing to do). Everybody else was free to come and go as they pleased. And he didn't block any manufactured goods coming in from China. It could have given us a little lead time to get something in place before the thing took off, but he sat on his ass doing that stoopid fucking wishful thinking thing he always does.

This is on him, and I've not seen any good evidence that we're not being played - that this is not the standard Shock Doctrine bullshit that the plutocrats have been using to fuck people over for 50 years.

History is not a series of random independent events - and there's not such thing as mere;y coincidental, un-connected happenstance in politics.

If you've got about 9 hours, give a listen to Naomi Klein:

Go, Joe

Obama talks up Joe Biden

We'll see if Biden is any kind of smart. I have my doubts. I know he's not dumb, but I don't know that's he's smart in the right ways

I know he can work the legislature, but can he motivate us to keep the pressure on the congress critters? Can he teach us how to bring that pressure for him - for us?

We need him to do exactly that, but yeah - we'll see.

Overheard

"...and if you still don't think of him as your president, then you better not cash the check he's sending you..."

Dude - c'mon - not only will I be cashing that check, I'll be laughing my ass off the whole way into town, knowing that every check I get is an open admission from this administration - as well as from every Republican - that trickle-down economics has failed again, and that these clear-eyed steel-nerved social Darwinists have had to fall back on a radical left idea like Minimum Basic Income to keep this joint from goin' tits up for-fuckin'-ever.

Seriously, what part of your feverish brain can make you believe I won't enjoy getting back a thousand of my tax dollars in the form of a check that basically says, "Ya'll were right - we was lyin' about that shit the whole time" on the memo line?

Gotta Be Something Left

Gillian Welch - One Little Song

COVID-19 Update

The first death in the US was reported February 29. Since that day, on average, one American has died of this plague every 3 minutes.