The Worst-Case Scenario, Con't

Understand something, guys.

If we don't practice social distancing, if we don't flatten the curve, if we don't prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, then people are going to start dying by the thousands.

Your state already has instructions on who lives and who dies in a COVID-19 overload situation with limited respirators.  Alabama certainly does, and it will be replicated nationally.

In the coming weeks, difficult decisions about who will live and who will die in Alabama may hinge on a little-discussed document outlining the state’s suggested “criteria for mechanical ventilator triage” during pandemics like the current COVID-19 outbreak.

According to the state document, any of a wide range of underlying health conditions – such as metastasized cancer, AIDS, “severe mental retardation,” advanced dementia and “severe burns” – could disqualify patients from being put on potentially lifesaving ventilators if a pandemic grows dire enough. And some people already on ventilators could be removed from them to make space for people impacted by the pandemic, according to the guidance.

Over the past two weeks, doctors in Italy have called on the world to take the disease more seriously, sharing horror stories about having to choose which people to put on ventilators. They have had to make those dire decisions based on patients’ age, underlying health problems and other considerations.

Under the triage criteria, which the Alabama Department of Public Health initially drafted in 2009, many patients could be denied access to ventilators and instead relegated to in-patient or home palliative care.

In April 2010, the State Committee of Public Health approved a revised version of the protocol detailing the exact processes hospitals and health care facilities should follow when making such decisions during a deadly flu outbreak or other major pandemic.

“ADPH suggests that hospitals utilize this criteria as a template for local and regional disaster management plans,” according to a 2009 ADPH study on the ethics of disaster response that analyzed the draft version of the protocol.

Let me reiterate.




The triage code blue people get palliative care.  That means end-of-life.  That means they die.  The red people get moved to blue if there aren't enough respirators.  The yellow are saveable to an extent but if they get worse and slip into red, they risk a doctor saying "We need this respirator to save someone who has a better chance of surviving."

And then they die.

When I say "hospitals are going to be overloaded" I mean they will be forced to make decisions like this.  Decisions where people no longer get treatment and are made comfortable in their final moments.

And then they die.

Do we understand now about why social distancing is important?

Stay home.

StupidiNews!

• Indian President Nahrendra Modi has ordered a complete lockdown for all of India's 1.3 billion people for three weeks in the largest quarantine in human history.
• After a six-month trial eight members of a neo-Nazi organization have been convicted in a German state court on terrorism charges.
• Aerospace giant Boeing says it plans to restart production of its troubled 737 MAX jetliners in May after the planes were grounded worldwide for software issues that crashed two planes.
• Targeting Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the White House says all New York residents should self-quarantine for at least two weeks and should not leave the state.
• The US Supreme Court has sided with North Carolina in a dispute over the wreck of famed pirate Blackbeard's ship, and has ruled that states cannot be sued for copyright infringement.

Last Call For Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Trump now says he expects America back to work by Easter weekend as Congress says they are close to a COVID-19 mega-package and the stock markets loved it.

President Trump on Tuesday said he hopes to have the country’s economy back up and running by Easter — Sunday, April 12 — his most concrete goal to date for easing off restrictions meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Trump in a Fox News virtual town hall doubled down on his push to reopen businesses in a matter of weeks in order to reinvigorate the U.S. economy amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“It's not built to shut down. Our people are full of vim and vigor and energy. They don’t want to be locked in a house or an apartment or some space,” Trump said during a Fox News town hall Tuesday afternoon.

“You can destroy a country this way, by closing it down, where it literally goes from being the most prosperous,” Trump said, remarking on the strength of the U.S. economy just three weeks ago before the coronavirus started to have severe impacts in the United States.

"I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” Trump later added.

The markets jumped up by more than 10%, their best day since 1933.

But here's the reality: Americans aren't going back to work without massive testing.  And increasingly it's looking like massive testing is never coming.

The ability to test at scale appears to have been a crucial—though far from the only—means by which China, South Korea, Singapore, and other countries have been able to control their epidemics. In the U.S., the imposition of lockdowns in Washington, New York, and California have only amplified the demand for a comprehensive testing program that would, ideally, allow for a more targeted strategy of contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine. During an interview on CNN on Monday night, Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “That’s how we’ll restart the economy.” But multiple public-health officials told me that the supply-chain constraints mean that such a program will be, for the near future, impossible to implement. And if there’s anything worse than not having tests for covid-19 broadly available, they say, it’s treating what testing capacity we do have like an unlimited resource.

“Had we had access to high-volume, quality testing prior to there being community transmission,” Rakeman, the director of the New York City lab, told me, “a lot of testing would have been helpful, and maybe would have helped containment.” But, given the prevalence of covid-19 in the city, she said, test results for people who are mildly or moderately ill have little therapeutic or epidemiological value. “When we talk about testing capacity, it sort of gives this tacit message that people should be tested, and feeds into that anxiety: ‘I need to get tested. I need to know my status,’ ” Rakeman said. “You don’t need to know your covid status.” Anyone who suspects they have covid-19 should call a doctor, but in New York, unless you belong to a high-priority category, the recommendation will likely be the same regardless of whether you have the test: stay home for two weeks, or until you’re fever-free for seventy-two hours. In any case, Rakeman said, “If you have a cough and a fever and a sore throat, or any of those, you probably have it.”

A larger problem, Rakeman told me, is that widespread demand for testing is exacerbating the critical shortage of masks and other P.P.E. The supply of available P.P.E. in New York is currently so low that, on Friday, Cuomo put out a public call to manufacturers to address it: “We will pay a premium for these products,” he said. As Rakeman told me, “Hospitals are going to run out of P.P.E. in the next couple of weeks, if not sooner. And any mask that is used now at a doctor’s office or a pop-up tent that’s providing ‘drive-through testing’ is a mask that’s not going to be available for a health-care worker in a couple of weeks.”

Patients seeking testing can also be potent vectors for the disease. “Take a scenario where, say, I have a cough, or a sore throat and a fever, but I’m not sick enough that I need to go to the hospital,” Rakeman said. “If I travel from my home to an urgent-care facility, I’m going to spread the virus to whomever I come into contact with. When I get there, the person who collects my specimen has to wear P.P.E. I’ve also exposed that health-care worker and everybody who works in that office, and all of the other patients, who may not be there for flulike illness.” She added, “By going out and getting a test, you’re potentially killing somebody’s loved one.”

Even outside of New York City, Khani told me, “You have to prioritize who gets tested. We don’t have the testing capacity that we need, and that’s why we want to make sure that those who need testing most have access to testing.” In Missouri, where the odds that someone has covid-19 are still likely lower than they are in other states, Bill Whitmar said that he understands why the first instinct for someone suffering covid-like symptoms would be to seek out confirmation. The tests “give people a feeling that they’re being taken care of. It’s a step that will make you feel a little bit better in this time of unease.” Nevertheless, he said, it was crucial to suppress this urge, at least for the time being. “I understand that the policymakers are trying to help their constituents. However, by doing that, you’re actually reducing the ability for people who really need the test to be able to get the test.”

And yes, as Jon Chait points out, Trump can definitely coerce governors who defy him on an Easter end to closures.

The question, though, is exactly what Trump can do to reopen the country. He can announce a date. But Trump didn’t close anything down to begin with. The closings have been directed by state and local officials. They will retain the legal authority to keep schools, restaurants, and other gathering places shuttered.

Yet his lack of a legal authority doesn’t make Trump helpless. He has several tools he could use if governors and mayors fail to come around to Arthur Laffer’s public-health theories:

1) Refuse to back more federal aid. States are only able to sustain their closures because they have the federal government as a fiscal backstop. States have to balance their budgets, which makes them helpless during a sharp contraction, when tax revenue plummets and social spending needs rise. The federal government, which can borrow, is needed to keep them operational. If Trump withdraws his support for fiscal stimulus to support the states, they will lose their ability to maintain public-health shutdowns.

2) Call on his followers to ignore the bans. Trump can’t open the schools, but he can get his supporters to flout the bans on aggregating in groups. The social distancing requirements depend on voluntary compliance. If Fox News tells its audience to listen to the president rather than their governors, many of them will.

3) Punish the states. Trump has always played favorites between red and blue states, showering those that supported him with attention and cash, and denying aid to blue states that anger him.

Trump has continued to openly state that his level of cooperation depends on governors showering him with praise. “Usually we’ll have 50 governors that will call it the same time,” he said on Fox News today. “I think we are doing very well. But it’s a two-way street. They have to treat us well, also. They can’t say, ‘Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.’”

States are dependent on help from FEMA, the military, and other arms of the federal government. New York’s Andrew Cuomo is pleading for Washington to send him ventilators, which he will need within days, or New Yorkers will begin dying for lack of treatment. As the coronavirus spreads, more and more governors will find themselves in this position. Trump has made clear his willingness to use government spending as a political weapon. He could bring recalcitrant governors to heel by withholding aid. What are they gonna do, impeach him?

What, indeed.

Big Sister Is Listening

If you're working from home like many of us, and you have an Amazon Alexa or other voice-activated internet appliance like Google Assistant, you should burn the thing. You guys know how I feel about these corporate surveillance devices, but if you do own one absolutely turn it off while you're working.

Those not used to working from home must be going through several stages of spiritual discomfort.

Yes, ZDNet's more experienced hands can help you acclimatize to the new working style, now that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted modern working life.

Yet some professionals may not be so able to deal with life sans their office perks. Lawyers, for example.

Many are used to sitting in their enclosed chambers, closing their doors and holding vital conversations about lawyerly matters. There, they feel secure.

Working in their homes, they worry who may be spying on them. Alexa, for example, and her band of vastly intelligent speakerpersons.

Bloomberg reports that famed UK law firm Mishcon de Reya -- motto: "It's Business. But It's Personal." (seriously) -- is telling its fine employees to mute or even totally disable domestic smart speakers for confidential business calls.

Joe Hancock, the Mishcon de Reya partner who leads its cybersecurity discipline, offered these words: "Perhaps we're being slightly paranoid, but we need to have a lot of trust in these organizations and these devices. We'd rather not take those risks."
Paranoia is one of the three essential skills every lawyer should have. The other two are, of course, an aggressive billing department and a cataclysmic ability to out-lie even a politician.

When Hancock refers to devices, he means every gadget you've bought to fully express your inability to make an effort around the house and your comfort with the surveillance state. Yes, even the devastatingly ineffective Amazon Ring doorbell.

The law firm conceded there may be a lesser chance of being spied on by, say, an Amazon Echo or Google Home than some tawdry facsimile, but paranoia is paranoia. It really can't be slight.

Assume someone's listening.

Because they probably are.  Again, if you needed yet another reason to not buy one of these, there you are.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump is plowing ahead with plans to find a way to force states to lift school and work closures and "get everyone back to work" next week.

President Trump egged on by a growing number of advisers and business leaders, believes the economy will crater absent a strong signal, and wants to stagger the reopening of work nationwide, people who’ve spoken to him tell Axios. 

Behind the scenes: Trump has been hearing from lots of people in the business community and conservative media telling him the economy can't survive this shutdown much longer. The sources say that "horrific," "truly scary" economic consequences were described to Trump. 

"We have to get this going," Trump said during a dinnertime briefing that lasted nearly two hours. 

"[T]he faster we get it going, the more likely it is that those stores, little businesses, big businesses, medium-sized businesses open up." 

"And we'll get [the economy] going very fast. ... As soon as we say 'let's go' — and it's gonna be pretty soon. ... It's gonna be sooner than people would think." 

What's next: Nothing has been decided yet. But Trump has been persuaded, in line with his instincts, that the economy can’t sustain this shutdown for much longer. 

The administration is discussing different tiers to ease Americans back into normal life after the 15-day period that ends next Monday. 

People with underlying health issues or in the highest risk age range will likely be asked to stick with isolation. 

But others could be encouraged to get back into a more normal routine. 

Between the lines: Remember that Trump has no public health professionals in his circle of informal advisers. Those are not his go-to calls when he's in the residence late at night. They’re all business or media folks. 

The president wants an end date to give businesses, markets and consumers — hence his fixation on the 15-day deadline.

There are a lot of ways Trump can make governors miserable right now and everyone knows it.  The question is will he next week?

StupidiNews!

• Some 13,000 Americans are stranded overseas as COVID-19 lockdowns, international travel restrictions and flight cancellations are making it tough to get home.
• Texas is joining Ohio in banning all abortion procedures in the state during COVID-19 restrictions as "elective procedures" taking up hospital beds needed for virus patients.
• A massive $2 trillion economic package remains stalled in the Senate for a third day as Republicans continue to insist on a $500 billion business slush fund overseen by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin.
• House Speaker Pelosi has introduced a $2.5 trillion Democratic version of the COVID-19 relief bill that would put a national moratorium on rental payment, mortgages, and credit card bills.
• The Justice Department says it's going after COVID-19 scam artists as a top priority to prevent Americans from being ripped off or harmed medically by bogus "cures" for the virus.

Last Call For Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Meanwhile, Chinese-Americans are now being openly assaulted thanks to the Racist-in-Chief.

Yuanyuan Zhu was walking to her gym in San Francisco on March 9, thinking the workout could be her last for a while, when she noticed that a man was shouting at her. He was yelling an expletive about China. Then a bus passed, she recalled, and he screamed after it, “Run them over.”

She tried to keep her distance, but when the light changed, she was stuck waiting with him at the crosswalk. She could feel him staring at her. And then, suddenly, she felt it: his saliva hitting her face and her favorite sweater.

In shock, Ms. Zhu, who is 26 and moved to the United States from China five years ago, hurried the rest of the way to the gym. She found a corner where no one could see her, and she cried quietly.

“That person didn’t look strange or angry or anything, you know?” she said of her tormentor. “He just looked like a normal person.”

As the coronavirus upends American life, Chinese-Americans face a double threat. Not only are they grappling like everyone else with how to avoid the virus itself, they are also contending with growing racism in the form of verbal and physical attacks. Other Asian-Americans — with families from Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar and other places — are facing threats, too, lumped together with Chinese-Americans by a bigotry that does not know the difference.

In interviews over the past week, nearly two dozen Asian-Americans across the country said they were afraid — to go grocery shopping, to travel alone on subways or buses, to let their children go outside. Many described being yelled at in public — a sudden spasm of hate that is reminiscent of the kind faced by American Muslims and other Arabs and South Asians after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But unlike in 2001, when President George W. Bush urged tolerance of American Muslims, this time President Trump is using language that Asian-Americans say is inciting racist attacks.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies are intent on calling the coronavirus “the Chinese virus,” rejecting the World Health Organization’s guidance against using geographic locations when naming illnesses, since past names have provoked a backlash.

Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he was calling the virus “Chinese” to combat a disinformation campaign by Beijing officials saying the American military was the source of the outbreak. He dismissed concerns that his language would lead to any harm.

On Monday evening, Mr. Trump tweeted, “It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community in the United States.” He added they should not be blamed for the pandemic.

“If they keep using these terms, the kids are going to pick it up,” said Tony Du, an epidemiologist in Howard County, Md., who fears for his son, Larry. “They are going to call my 8-year-old son a Chinese virus. It’s serious.”

If it's not "Mexican rapists" or "The Blacks" or "Jewish globalists" it's now the "Chinese virus" among us who are the enemy we should hate in order to distract the people from Trump and the GOP literally looting the US Treasury.

After all, the White House position is that Americans are going to have to be sacrificed to the almighty Capitalist Mammon Machine.

Officials have said that the initial 15-day period for social distancing — limiting close contact between people by banning gatherings, closing schools and offices, encouraging remote work and urging people to maintain a six-foot distance from one another — is vital to slowing the spread of the virus, for which more than 30,000 people in the United States have tested positive. The 15-day period would end Monday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, an infectious diseases expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, has said in interviews that he believed that it would take several more weeks until people can start going about their lives in a more normal fashion. Other infectious disease experts suggest even harsher measures than social distancing are required to truly beat back the outbreaks in the United States.

But at the White House, in recent days, there has been a growing sentiment that medical experts were allowed to set policy that has hurt the economy, and there has been a push to find ways to let people start returning to work. Some Republican lawmakers have also pleaded with the White House to find ways to restart the economy, as financial markets continue to slide and job losses for April could be in the millions.
Vice President Mike Pence indicated on Sunday at a White House briefing about the virus that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would issue new guidelines on Monday, allowing some people who have been exposed to the coronavirus to resume working outside their homes if they wear masks.

The move could set the stage for states with relatively low numbers of cases to begin to unfreeze their economies, while large states like California and New York — where there are more cases and where state officials have ordered nonessential businesses to close for the time being — could continue remaining in a holding pattern.

The assumption that there are states with "small numbers of cases" means the Trump regime is more than ready to feed their corpses to the economy, and they already have their scapegoat to blame, the evil Chinese among us who "brought in this plague".

It's racism that's literally going to kill people.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

There's nothing in the big stimulus "phase 3" bill to protect the nation's 40 million rental households, and nothing really being discussed, and whole hell of a lot of people are going to get evicted come middle of April.

As millions of Americans are being told to stay inside their homes, eviction notices are still being issued by landlords across the country.

President Trump on Wednesday declared that the Department of Housing and Urban Development would be “providing immediate relief to renters and homeowners by suspending all foreclosures and evictions until the end of April."

But Trump misstated what is actually occurring.

The federal actions announced last week would protect more than 30 million homeowners from eviction, but they do not cover the nation’s 40 million renters. HUD issued a 60-day moratorium on evictions for homeowners who are unable to pay their federally backed mortgages. The Federal Housing Finance Agency also granted relief to homeowners with loans backed by two government-controlled companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Some public housing authorities, including New York, the largest in the nation, also imposed moratoriums on evictions, but that reprieve only applies to tenants in federally subsidized apartments.

While some governors, mayors, city councils and judges are taking action, most state- and municipal-wide moratoriums on evictions last only a few weeks. The day after Ferguson received her eviction notice, a Milwaukee judge ordered that sheriff’s deputies stop serving eviction orders in the county, but only until April 9.

Without a national moratorium on evictions, housing advocates say, some of the country’s most vulnerable people will lose the homes that could keep them from contracting the virus. Black and Hispanic Americans, who are more likely to be renters and work low-wage jobs, would be disproportionately affected.

“It’s important that there be a uniform policy that gives everyone in America an assurance that we won’t lose our home in the midst of a public health emergency,” said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

It's almost assuredly not going to happen.  People are going to be tossed out into the street starting a few weeks from now, and the nation's big rental management companies, that own hundreds of properties and tens of thousands of units, are going to start tossing thousands, maybe millions into the streets.

Unless Congress and Trump do something about a national moratorium, you're going to have millions of people told to shelter in place with no shelter to be placed in, and they will start dying. Not all of them from COVID-19, either.

There will be no help from the GOP.  Increasingly the plan is to force states to end shelter-in-place and "restart the economy" at the end of the month.

President Trump and some of his senior officials are losing patience with the doctors’ orders.

The state of play: Amid dire predictions for jobs and the economy, the White House is beginning to send signals to business that there's light at the end of the tunnel — that the squeeze from nationwide social distancing won't be endless. 

Trump tweeted at 10 minutes to midnight: "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD [which began a week ago, March 16], WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!" 

Vice President Pence, who heads the White House's Coronavirus Task Force, had signaled the change in tone earlier when he said the CDC will issue guidance today allowing people exposed to the coronavirus to return to work sooner by wearing a mask for a certain length of time.

Why it matters: Taken together, Trump’s tweet and Pence's comment supply the strongest public signals we've seen that the administration is looking for ways to get people out in the world again to fire up the economy — perhaps much sooner than Dr. Fauci would like. 

Trump is responding both to his own instincts and to messages that key outside allies have been sending for days. 

He retweeted a number of those outside allies echoing similar stances on Monday morning.

Between the lines: Senior Trump officials, including the president himself, have only limited patience for keeping the economy shut down. They are watching stocks tumble and unemployment skyrocket.

I fully expect Trump to make things extremely difficult for states that do not end emergency measures like school and work closures by April 1 at the latest, and he's going to make that clear this week, regardless of how many COVID-19 cases and deaths are evident by then.

Never mind that millions don't have jobs to go back to right now.  Rent's due, gotta pay up.

Get back to work during the pandemic, you lazy parasites.  We have profit to make!

Our Little Domestic Terrorist Problem, Con't

White supremacist terrorist groups in the US have been openly plotting using COVID-19 as a makeshift bioweapon, deliberately spreading the illness into black, Hispanic, and Asian communities with the intent of killing as many non-white people as possible.

White supremacists discussed plans to weaponize coronavirus via “saliva,” a “spray bottle” or “laced items,” according to a weekly intelligence brief distributed by a federal law enforcement division on Feb. 17.

Federal investigators appeared to be monitoring the white nationalists’ communications on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app that has become popular with neo-Nazis. In the conversations, the white supremacists suggested targeting law enforcement agents and “nonwhite” people with attacks designed to infect them with the coronavirus.

“Violent extremists continue to make bioterrorism a popular topic among themselves,” reads the intelligence brief written by the Federal Protective Service, which covered the week of Feb. 17-24. “White Racially Motivated Violent Extremists have recently commented on the coronavirus stating that it is an ‘OBLIGATION’ to spread it should any of them contract the virus.” 

The Federal Protective Service, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is a law enforcement agency responsible for protecting buildings owned or leased by the federal government.

The intelligence brief, marked for official use only, noted the white supremacists “suggested targeting … law enforcement and minority communities, with some mention of public places in general.” According to the document, the extremists discussed a number of methods for coronavirus attacks, such spending time in public with perceived enemies, leaving “saliva on door handles” at local FBI offices, spitting on elevator buttons and spreading coronavirus germs in “nonwhite neighborhoods.” 

The February document appears to show that at least some white nationalists were already taking the threat of the coronavirus seriously at a time when some in government were downplaying the threat. On Feb. 26, President Trump said that he expected the cases to go down to zero in the United States in “a couple of days.” The Washington Post reported on Friday that intelligence agencies were issuing “ominous” warnings about the virus in January and February.

Three things:

One, feds took this seriously only because they were targets too.

Two, the feds took this seriously because they were targets and they didn't buy Donald Trump's lies. Intelligence agencies have been warning about a pandemic scenario for months and were ignored.  Now we know federal law enforcement treated the threat of COVID-19 seriously as well.

Three, feds sure didn't tell anyone in my neighborhood that neo-Nazis were trying to deliberately infect non-white folk in order to try to kill us.  This bulletin was five, six weeks ago.  You think anyone got a heads up?

I didn't.

Again, that was five weeks ago.

They knew.  They did nothing.

StupidiNews!

• New York state, California, and Washington state have all activated their respective National Guard along with FEMA funding to help limit the spread of COVID-19.
• Global COVID-19 fatalities topped 13,000 over the weekend as some one billion people worldwide are under shelter-in-place orders in over 100 countries.
• The Trump regime eliminated a CDC position last year that was supposed to train Chinese doctors in dealing with pandemic conditions.
• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has reached a tentative agreement with election winner Benny Gantz's party to form an emergency government that would keep Netanyahu in power for 18 months.
• NOAA says April showers could bring major spring flooding to much of the US as warmer temperatures means the US is at a higher risk of heavy rains.