Coronavirus / COVID-19

[a completely inoffensive name]

-

This is abusive language and is not healthy. I urge you to reach out for real counseling with a licensed therapist which is still possible over the internet or phone during these times.

[CrossLOPER]

Well, no, because the Spanish Flue was a direct consequence of the upheaval of WW1 - as much as Pannonian might like to claim otherwise Brexit has not caused Corvid-19.

You are being intentionally dense.

WWI was a factor in the spread, but isn't directly related to the disease or the condition of preparedness of the world for an outbreak. Brexit makes it more difficult to restrain/ease the current outbreak because new supply lines have not been established.

-

Do you need to see a therapist every week, or are you just upset you can't meet with people for a while? If it is the latter, you need to really calm down. You can skype or discord or whatever. Actually, you can skype or discord with a therapist, so I don't really see the issue, unless your therapist really wants an excuse for a vacation right now. If that is the case, your therapist kind of sucks and hates making money.

[edyzmedieval]

A small announcement from the moderation team - we are very aware of the comments made earlier. As per the rules of the Org and obviously our gentleman's agreement with every single patron, the well-being of EVERY Org patron is the utmost importance for us.

This is not something we take lightly. And we are looking carefully at every single post especially in delicate topics, like this one.

[Montmorency]

There are those who feel particularly distressed or depressed at living with the conditions imposed by the pandemic response. To the extent they were satisfied with their pre-crisis lives, they can hold to that feeling as a lodestar. And definitely don't personalize global politics, both because it is unlikely a narrow perspective will offer insight or sound guidance, and because it will just feel like the whole world is conspiring against you and that's a scary and awful feeling.

Some great COVID-19 resources I've come across.

NYT Graph of Coronavirus Deaths over Time by US State and Country - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...y-country.html

Crude Polemical Three-Month US Fatality Projections According to Degree of Response - https://covidactnow.org/
For example:






Finally, finally, I found a database tracking all US COVID-19 testing! https://covidtracking.com/data/

Still amazing that we haven't caught up with South Korea, and that New York continues to maintain 25%+ of cumulative testing.
[Correction: South Korea has slowed testing dramatically in the last couple weeks, so with ~360K tests conducted the US has exceeded SK's current count of ~350K]

I mean, the economy is going to be in dire straits either way. This guy just makes me shake my head honestly. It's too late to go back on what they've already decided, then you just exacerbate the situation. Texas decided to sit in the middle of doing something or doing nothing, luckily some of the larger counties are locking down, which is promising albeit later than ideal. Our entire government seems like a train wreck.

It goes well beyond the abstract moral and empirical qualities of his position.

This is a wealthy and politically powerful man, almost literally telling us "Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make." It's the profligate general commending the valorous sacrifices of the army man on behalf of the nation while sending his army forward after a nugatory objective. His risk compared to the rest of his age cohort is small, and he is certainly not speaking for himself in any meaningful way when advancing putative tradeoffs between the wellbeing of elderly populations and the continence of the economy.

(Regarding which, see yet again:)

The choice is not

a) everyone stays home, economy hurt
or
b) everyone goes out again, economy fine

it's

a) everyone stays home, economy hurt
or
b) everyone goes out again, millions die, hospitals collapse, social chaos, economy hurt just as bad if not worse

It's not the men who have the political connections, the money, the priority of healthcare, the advantage and opportunity for having achieved higher baseline health who would be worst affected as part of the equation on the weighing of competing interests. It's the poor, the black, the Latino, the rural...

We should not begin to pretend that these rascals should even potentially be humored until they have displayed documentation refusing all but palliative medical treatment in the event of illness.

[Montmorency]

ATTENTION AMERICANS

Here is a resource that collects reports on grocery store crowding, availability of product, senior hours, etc.
https://survey123.arcgis.com/share/e...iIkR1oiZ0_kK2k
https://htorpey.maps.arcgis.com/apps...b71a8c74cc18b1

Unfortunately, it's not currently helpful because there's almost no user base. But in general, crisis or not, tools like this hopefully become the SOP of the cybernetic future.



The new party line: https://www.esquire.com/news-politic...people-stocks/

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

Good satire: I regret that I have but one grandparent to give for my country

“No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, ‘Are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in. … I just think there’s lots of grandparents out there in this country like me.”

— Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas

“We have to go back to work much sooner than people thought.”

— President Trump, who wants the country “up and raring to go by Easter”

YOUR COUNTRY STOCK MARKET NEEDS YOU! IS ASKING YOU TO GIVE YOURSELF, NEEDLESSLY AND TO NO ULTIMATE LONG-TERM BENEFIT!

Brave boomers, hardy millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, rise to the call! Will you make the ultimate sacrifice so that Donald Trump’s chain hotels will not have to remain closed for more than 14 days? Will you lay down your precious life, against expert medical advice, for literally no reason at all?

No death is too unnecessary, no gain too small.

Ask yourself whether your so-called reason for not volunteering your life in the hope that Donald Trump’s branded properties will not lose another day’s income is not instead a selfish excuse! Is your not getting to share the world with your grandchildren so great a prize that Donald Trump should be forced to be marginally worse off for a brief time? Think of all the money he has given up already to be president, which, he assured us, is LOTS — even when you remember what he gained back through emoluments!

Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic

Dare you not requite his sacrifice with all you have to give? This is rude and selfish of you, to say that your life is worth more than someone’s money. And I am not speaking of the money of people who need to go to work to feed their families, who are being devastated by this, who might be helped with a spreading of the social safety net. I am speaking of something greater. I am speaking of the stocks!
AD

We have the ability to support the individuals and businesses who would suffer from a shutdown of the length medically necessary to stem the virus, but why bother? When instead we can toss aside precious, irreplaceable human beings? Now is not the time for sensible measures. Think about what a good idea World War I was! Think of the stirring music and the posters! Is now any less the time for a senseless, massive loss of human life that will ultimately devastate the country far more than a failure to return to work for the months required? We cannot put a price on what will be lost — so how much could it possibly be worth?

Doctors, why do you hesitate to fling in your lot? Is the single mask you have been issued not sufficient? Do you not know that there is MONEY somewhere, dwindling? I would suggest that you plaster dollar bills to your face, but they are all needed to bolster the Businessmen in this difficult time. Yes, you have a family, but is the family LEGAL TENDER? Then why do you fear that you might never see it again?

What joy are people? What is so precious in being alive, a human being with the ability to experience this maddening and brilliant world, when you know that somewhere, the Dow is going down instead of up? The chance to make it go up instead of down — even for a flicker of a moment — is that not worth everything? What makes life worth living? I am pretty sure it is not “possessing any connection whatsoever to other human beings”; or else the president has been doing it very wrong.

Here is your chance to serve! And there is still a place in the line for the people who did not ask to be volunteered — but you must help them! You can sacrifice them, too, by your decision, because this disease conveniently does not understand who is stepping up and who is not.

Just as we do not make any attempt to regulate traffic so that people do not perish needlessly in car accidents, just as when buildings are aflame we do not keep people from congregating inside them, so, too, must we now rush back to normalcy, at an unthinkable cost, to no purpose whatsoever.

We’ll have the country open by Easter! Think what more glorious fate there could possibly be than to die for nothing at all!

[ReluctantSamurai]

A day in the life of a hero:

https://www.vox.com/2020/3/24/211929...twitter-thread

[Montmorency]

Aesop wrote it first: Trump quietly seeks allies' coronavirus help even as he insists 'a lot is being done'

The US has reached out to South Korea and other nations for help in getting enough supplies to fight the coronavirus pandemic in a sharp counterpoint to President Donald Trump's narrative that the domestic response is enough to combat the crisis.

Seoul's Blue House issued a statement describing a Tuesday call between Trump and President Moon Jae-In that focused on the outbreak. Trump used the conversation to ask Moon if South Korea could provide medical equipment to the United States, the Blue House said. A White House readout of the same call made no mention of Trump's appeal.
The White House request to South Korea appears to be just one of several it has made to allies and other countries for equipment to fight the novel coronavirus. Foreign Policy magazine reported that the State Department sent US ambassadors in eastern Europe and Eurasia to ask their hosts to "ramp up exports and production of life-saving medical equipment and protective gear for the United States."
[...]
The Pentagon has expressed its thanks to South Korea for supplying coronavirus tests for US military use until American testing equipment arrived on the peninsula. On Tuesday, the Blue House said that South Korea was once again happy to come to Washington's aid.
According to the Blue House, Moon responded to Trump's request for equipment by saying, "If there's spare in the country, (we) will support as much as possible," and telling Trump that FDA approval might be needed for the medical equipment. According to the statement, Trump said he would take action so any South Korean exports could be approved immediately.

Wow. This clip of Trump at his presser should probably be training material for resident psychiatrists.
https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1242231879488716800

And while raving about the beautiful vision of packed churches on Easter Day, he said the quiet part yet again.

"They had things in there that were terrible — windmills all over the place ... windmills that kill the birds and ruin the real estate, right?" Trump said.

Washington must focus on "the workers," the president said. "Workers first."

Trump said in his second interview on Fox that he wasn't concerned about the costs associated with what could be a $2 trillion stimulus package, because he considered that to be an investment.

"It's not really spending, because a lot of it is helping companies" through loans, he said. "It's loaded to save corporations," he said, specifically mentioning Boeing.

Always remember, this is what they believe. For a parallel example, look at what Baba Yaga has to say about coronavirus (hint: take a close look at her cite).

More on the Republican party line, literally lol:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

No conscience. But a bill appears set to pass today.




A study challenging the approach taken by the Imperial College. Author suggests the global pandemic may be at a more advanced stage than is typically thought, with the current testing regime everywhere massively underreporting the true scope of contagion. If anything, these controversies are a reminder of how fast this has hit us and how little we know for certain. No antibody test for prior infection has yet been developed to my knowledge, for example.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...lf-of-u-k.html

[ReluctantSamurai]

Gotta love this tweet:

Inability to smell and/or taste is a symptom of Covid-19. Inability to read a simple chart is a symptom of being Ann Coulter.

Almost fell out of my chair laughing

No conscience

No ability to think for themselves and post something original, either

[ReluctantSamurai]

With the United States now claiming the third highest number of SARS-CoV-2 cases identified, the situation is pretty much like a "bullet train" heading across the nation. This woman's situation is being repeated over and over again:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52019509

Frustrated and even more ill, Dr Bahorik calls the Department of Health. Despite exhibiting symptoms, and given her age and previous spells of pneumonia, they were inflexible. On protesting, a nurse suggests she speak to her congressman. She calls the office of Senator Bob Casey, where she is advised to contact the Department of Health.

After several terrible days of sickness, Dr Bahorik hears of eight coronavirus testing sites in the neighbouring county of Lehigh Valley. It is an hour's drive and she is feeling weak but goes to the test centre in Macungie, Pennsylvania. Once again she is told that because she had not travelled to a high risk country or been in known contact with someone with coronavirus, she cannot have a test. Having once been a doctor in the US Army Reserve, Dr Bahorik contacts her Veterans Affairs hospital. They later tell her that they do not have Covid-19 testing kits. By this stage, Dr Bahorik's chest pain and coughing has worsened.

"They keep reporting that there are so few cases in my county, but they are not testing," Dr Bahorik tells me. "I feel like I've done as much as I can, but that the system has beaten me down," she says. "I almost feel like I'm a lone voice screaming, 'Open your eyes, we have to do something about this!'"

And yet, our Fearless Leader gets on the TV saying how "beautiful" it would be to see churches full for Easter Sunday.

Yep. Fear porn. Whelp....if churches fill for Easter Sunday in two and a half weeks......be very afraid if you live in the US.

[Csargo]

Testing based on coming into contact with someone who's been tested positive is stupid, considering everything we know there's probably tens of thousands of people infected without even knowing if not more than that.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Testing based on coming into contact with someone who's been tested positive is stupid, considering everything we know there's probably tens of thousands of people infected without even knowing if not more than that.

That is likely true for Pennsylvania, but not for areas with low rates of infection. Wasn't the point I was trying to make, which was, after just about everything else was eliminated, and the doctor was getting sicker and sicker, ya think someone would say it was time to make absolutely sure it was a COVID-19 case? And that the VA, which is filled with elderly vets, has not a single test kit??

[Csargo]

That is likely true for Pennsylvania, but not for areas with low rates of infection. Wasn't the point I was trying to make, which was, after just about everything else was eliminated, and the doctor was getting sicker and sicker, ya think someone would say it was time to make absolutely sure it was a COVID-19 case? And that the VA, which is filled with elderly vets, has not a single test kit??

I mean, I agree I'm not sure what's going on. The VA is testing:

VA has administered over 3,378 COVID-19 tests nationwide while taking aggressive steps to prevent COVID-19 transmission.

So I don't know...

[Montmorency]

Boeing is begging for a bailout as an officially Too Big To Fail firm. But:

Boeing chief executive David Calhoun on Tuesday suggested that the aircraft manufacturer would not accept federal aid as part of a pending economic rescue bill if it meant giving the Treasury Department a stake in the company.

Calhoun said in an interview with Fox Business Network that it’s “not ideal” for Boeing to surrender equity to the federal government and “if they force it, we just look at all the other options, and we’ve got plenty of them.”

Hahahahaha

Whom do you trust for #coronavirus info:

Dems:

CDC 87%
Your governor 75%
National media 72%
Friends/family 72%
Religious leaders 44%
Trump 14%

Republicans:

Trump 90%
CDC 84%
Friends/family 81%
Religious leaders 71%
You governor 65%
National media 13%

-CBS/YouGov

aaaaaaaaauuugh

EDIT: Added image

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

BTW the new contrarian Oxford study I referenced above may have been misrepresented in reporting. But we'll resolve these questions in a month or two anyway.
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/sta...11599405277184

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

In brighter news my friend Jess, 32, two kids, husband, Registered Nurse, is not home recovering after three days in hospital.

Of course, this just reinforces the image that it's "not that bad" for young people.

[Hooahguy]

Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook



Pretty damning stuff here. This is what happens when an administration doesnt care about expertise or even governing well.

[a completely inoffensive name]

In brighter news my friend Jess, 32, two kids, husband, Registered Nurse, is not home recovering after three days in hospital.

Of course, this just reinforces the image that it's "not that bad" for young people.

That is wonderful news! If you are worried about any of your close friends thinking that they can handle the disease, you can bring up this counter example from the UK:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-not-priority?

[Beskar]

Things are scary.

There was an official warning sent out for NHS staff due to significant increase in attacks on them. This is either due to apparently healthcare staff being "plague bearers" or trying to mug them for their NHS ID badges so they have go in the quicker checkout at the super market. People are breaking in their cars for handgel whilst staff are on home visits. People turning up in A&E and robbing vital supplies and PPE used to prevent cross infection. There are reports of NHS staff being evicted from rented accommodation as landlords are not wanting the "plague bearers" in. There have been a spat of arson attacks on food parcel & medication delivery vans too. Destroying the ability of services trying to get supplies to the most vulnerable in society. There are terrible decisions and vital services being cut off, which will kill people, all in the name of covid-19.

It is really disgusting what is happening in society at the moment and this is getting no where the attention it needs.

[Strike For The South]

The information is all over the place. We are flying blind.

It also doesn't help that we don't do a good enough job communicating exponential growth and statistics to the lay man.

[ReluctantSamurai]

OMG payback is a bitch!

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52053656

A bit of humor:

https://twitter.com/mokciknab/status...61584535580673

[Beskar]

Well, there was a massive surprise. There was a viral "come out and clap for frontline workers" at 8pm today. The whole street was out in force giving a round of applause. I was expecting it to be pretty silent.

[edyzmedieval]

Unfortunately, at the first sign of distress, the whole pretence of society somehow disappears and that's why you get hoarding, people fighting over toilet paper, breaking into NHS staff' cars...

In Romania they've enforced a total lockdown and to make it so nobody will complain or dodge, a very swift army order was imposed so the Police is patrolling with the Army on the street. Army dressed in full combat uniform.

[ReluctantSamurai]

In Romania they've enforced a total lockdown and to make it so nobody will complain or dodge, a very swift army order was imposed so the Police is patrolling with the Army on the street. Army dressed in full combat uniform.

The whole country or just selected areas? With just over 1,000 cases reported, and 22 confirmed deaths there, a lock-down should go a long ways towards keeping cases and deaths low. Don't know much about the political climate in Romania, so is this something well received, or too early to tell?

Elsewhere, I imagine that this is going to become more commonplace in the near future:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-...id-19/12093542

[Montmorency]

Unemployment claims:




We can speak of media failures once again, for failing to be alarmist (again), indeed for performing anti-alarmism, in the first month of global reporting on novel coronavirus. But this was also a failure shared by much of the intelligentsia as well as the political classes of almost every country, such that most countries' responses have been different shades of 'unsatisfactory', indicating a general status quo bias. Sounds familiar... [Seamus may be interested in this one]
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...ronavirus.html
In a way, rory's comment that government's would prioritize short-term economic stability over effective readiness was prescient, but with the wrinkle that people prioritize the most recent simulus. That is, they will only act to reconceptualize their worldview when events overtake them. Yesterday's sentiment displaces sustained rational planning for most of us, leading to a general pattern with almost any kind of crisis you can name, really, a pattern towards decisive action only toward or subsequent to the crisis' peak. One of the great cognitive flaws of the species, when early action will almost always dramatically reduce the final cost of any challenge. But we tergiversate until the drywall has already fallen off around the leak.

In just two months, what sounded like hysteria to scolding experts has become conventional wisdom among even cautious epidemiologists. “We’re looking at something that’s catastrophic on a level that we have not seen for an infectious disease since 1918,” Dr. Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia professor projecting the spread of the virus, told the New York Times on Friday. Where had I read that before?

There may be particular questions, in other words, about particular data points and comparisons contained in Feigl-Ding’s rushed thread — though it’s worth pointing out that even in the initial thread, he suggested the true R0 might be closer to 2.5, and in subsequent tweets corrected the other points. And the broad message? The purposeful incitement of public alarm? If the question is whether Feigl-Ding was right to be alarmed by what he was reading, whether alarm was an appropriate response to what we knew even then about the infectiousness and lethality of this disease, and whether it was therefore responsible to induce panic in the public, we can say — with the benefit of hindsight, yes, but also definitively — it was. And if the question is whether, on January 20, the world as a whole should have freaked out considerably more about the coronavirus, initiating emergency planning and launching medical preparation on a war footing immediately, the answer, eight weeks later, is blindingly obvious: Yes, of course we should have, and we would all be in a much better, safer, and probably more prosperous place if we had.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and there are surely plenty of situations where we would want to guard against overreactions as zealously, or more zealously, as we would underreactions. But in a time of good governance, this is a central function of government: to prepare for the risks that the public can’t process rationally. And though we often feel, on social media especially, that we live swimming in a sea of alarm, it may be the case, instead, that the general din prevents us from hearing real cries of alarm by teaching us that almost anybody raising their voice above the crowd is a nut, or a narcissist, or a troll.

This is bad. As I’ve written before about climate change, when the news is alarming, the only responsible response is to be alarmed — and raise alarm. And like runaway climate change, the threat of a global pandemic, which graybeards have been warning about for years, is a reminder that we should always build public policy around the precautionary principle, rather than waiting until uncontestable and inarguable evidence arrives that action is necessary. If we wait that long, it will always be too late. Would it have been better if Feigl-Ding’s tweet thread had made a more precisely accurate comparison to SARS, and included some more caveats around the R0 3.8 figure? Perhaps. But science proceeds by increments, and in times of rapid, onrushing crisis the direction is important, too, not just the degree. The fact that we are now living more or less precisely through the situation Feigl-Ding warned us about in January suggests that two months ago we should have understood that this outcome was, at the very least, a possibility, and therefore worth planning for — rather than dismissing it as irresponsible fearmongering.

Writers and thinkers often use the phrase “wicked problem” to describe the challenge of climate change, driven by so many divergent interests and actors it can seem impossible to untangle even at a conceptual level, let alone a practical one. The philosopher Timothy Morton has coined the related term “hyperobject” — a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended. The present pandemic crisis takes all of those hard-to-wrap-your-head-around features and adds another — hyperspeed. Along with everything else, the pace of this pandemic has been dizzying. Patient zero was less than six months ago. Three months ago, you had probably never heard of the disease, and now, in the space of just a few weeks, it has completely upended your life and the lives of billions of others.

As Governor Cuomo said, the world we once knew is gone, and we have to accept that.


Elizabeth Warren has a short post on how Congress can spur increased testing. Although it is good news that - according to the data from the COVID testing tracker I posted yesterday - we've finally hit the milestone of testing 100K daily nationally, which I said was the bare minimum earlier. At this stage we need a million tests daily. New York has tested almost 20K in the past day, reaching near top-of-the-world in testing per capita. The entire country needs to get to at least New York's level.

Satellite imagery of Iranian mass graves.

Aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt docked to manage a COVID outbreak.


Boom. Broad, trans-partisan, cross-generational support for a national quarantine. Of course, this was conducted just before Trump flipped his script again..

OMG payback is a bitch!

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52053656

A bit of humor:

https://twitter.com/mokciknab/status...61584535580673

But AMLO, Mexico's president, is vying for the honor of having the worst pandemic response in the world...
https://www.motherjones.com/coronavi...irus-dios-mio/


As for humor, this is a good Trump impression.

[edyzmedieval]

The whole country or just selected areas? With just over 1,000 cases reported, and 22 confirmed deaths there, a lock-down should go a long ways towards keeping cases and deaths low. Don't know much about the political climate in Romania, so is this something well received, or too early to tell?

Elsewhere, I imagine that this is going to become more commonplace in the near future:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-...id-19/12093542

Whole country, total lockdown. I can only go to work (work from home for me), to the supermarket to buy food and to the medic. That's it.

Our health system is very very fragile in Romania so I'm glad they took the steps of total lockdown. Fortunately, with some exceptions, people are more or less taking this seriously and the lockdown doesn't need significant enforcing which I am quite happy with.

Adding the visual effect of the military to enforce the ban should be very useful in the long term. People started complaining but their voices were drowned out quite quickly when the cases skyrocketed from 150 to 1000 in about 4 days.

[Crandar]

Here the number of cases has increased relatively stably, but I think the main reason behind this is that testing is done only in exceptional circumstances. Some of the victims were diagnosed post-mortem, including a 41-years old women, who was never hospitalised.

[Shaka_Khan]

There's an uprising in Wuhan, China.

[Montmorency]

‘I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators’: Trump questions New York’s plea for critical equipment

At a news conference earlier this week, Cuomo (D) excoriated the Trump administration for its response to the global pandemic, pointing to the worsening situation in New York as a harbinger of what’s to come for states and cities nationwide that are also battling rising numbers of cases. Chief among Cuomo’s concerns for his state was a shortage of ventilators.

As of Tuesday morning, Cuomo said New York needed 30,000 ventilators, noting that the state had so far acquired about 7,000 units, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency offering to provide 400 more. Later that day, Vice President Pence said the White House would be sending an additional 4,000 ventilators as part of an effort to “surge resources” to New York.

During his call with Hannity on Thursday, the president put the onus on local leaders to shoulder the brunt of the response in their respective states, emphasizing the federal government’s role as “a second line of attack.”

Trump went on to single out Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, accusing the two Democrats of not doing enough to address the health crisis. Both Inslee and Whitmer have called on Trump to provide more resources to their states.

“He shouldn’t be relying on the federal government. He’s always complaining,” Trump said of Inslee.

The president then turned to Whitmer, whose name he did not appear to know.

“And your governor of Michigan, she’s not stepping up,” he said. “I don’t know if she knows what’s going on. All she does is sit there and blame the federal government.”

But although Trump insisted that he is “getting along” with Cuomo and a majority of the other governors, he continued to challenge their requests for help.

“I think that a lot of things are being said that are more — I don’t think that certain things will materialize,” he said. “A lot of equipment’s being asked for that I don’t think they’ll need."

President Trump cast doubt Thursday on New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s assertion that his state, which has become the epicenter for the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, will need 30,000 ventilators to properly care for the influx of patients anticipated to flood hospitals in coming weeks.

“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in a phone interview. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You know, you go into major hospitals sometimes they’ll have two ventilators, and now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

The president’s comments came shortly after the New York Times reported that the White House had abruptly called off a plan to announce this week that General Motors and Ventec Life Systems would be partnering to produce as many as 80,000 ventilators, citing concerns with the deal’s $1 billion price tag.

Snark time: Clearly it is impossible to suitably respond to and prepare for catastrophes with such a price tag, a whole half a percent of the real estate developer tax cuts smuggled into the Phase 3 stimulus!!!

Meanwhile...

After Trump Attacks Whitmer, She Says Vendors Aren't Sending Desperately Needed Coronavirus Supplies

The other stuff was Trump speaking with Sean Hannity on FOX News about Whitmer, a Democrat who has said very pointed things about the federal government's lack of coordinated response to the coronavirus crisis. Trump said of Whitmer, "She is a new governor, and it's not been pleasant ... "We've had a big problem with the young — a woman governor. You know who I'm talking about — from Michigan. We don't like to see the complaints."

Michigan's request for disaster assistance has not yet been approved by the White House, and Trump told Hannity he's still weighing it.

"She doesn't get it done, and we send her a lot. Now, she wants a declaration of emergency, and, you know, we'll have to make a decision on that. But Michigan is a very important state. I love the people of Michigan."

Translation:

Trump to Blue States: DROP DEAD

But what's most horrific, in a practical sense, is that the President has abdicated the fundamental role of central government as logistical manager in emergencies (offer still valid for some Republicans). Coordinating and distributing resources to lower jurisdictions is almost the entirety of the state's responsibility! So out of his stupidity, laziness, and above all, evil pettiness, he will condemn thousands of my countryfolk and fellow New Yorkers to death. This is effectively Stalinism.



The bottleneck for any large institution is the decision-making of its highest authorities. It doesn't matter how much money you can marshall, or how good your personnel are, or how potent your doctrines, up to the point of those in power squandering them.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/25...tory-covid-19/


DATA!
https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/sta...81598037913600

On the stunning failure - or better to say, non-existence - of US-China cooperation over the pandemic, courtesy of Robert Farley.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...t-coronavirus/
https://warontherocks.com/2020/03/ch...-the-pandemic/
https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/comb...without-china/

[Pannonian]

There's an uprising in Wuhan, China.

Is there anything readable in English about this? I'm wary of taking a youtube video at their word, in another language I don't understand no less.

[ReluctantSamurai]

So out of his stupidity, laziness, and above all, evil pettiness, he will condemn thousands of my countryfolk and fellow New Yorkers to death. This is effectively Stalinism.

Well, he did promise "America First." And so we are.....first in the world in the number of infectious cases. Soon to be followed by first in deaths. Thanks Donny Baby

[Hooahguy]

We voted in a reality show president so now we are in Survivor.