The hoopla over hydroxychloroquine has died down now that Agent Orange has moved on to name calling of various Democratic leaders, promoting a slanderous and completely false accusation of murder against Joe Scarborough and attacking Twitter. But despite my best efforts, I am unable to resist weighing in. So few in the media have actually asked the right questions about it. Granted it was not worth covering in the first place but since they did, they could have made the best of it.
The obvious question: was he really taking it? Since a lie is 45’s only friend, I’m betting no. It’s just the schtick for his celebrity endorsement of a product in which he has some financial interest. The company no doubt has ramped up production for an anticipated inclusion in the national emergency stockpile.
Beyond the actual pill swallowing, does it matter? Nancy Pelosi has probably upped the Donald’s presence in her prayers, given what she calls his age, morbid obesity and lifestyle choices, risk factors for severe COVID-19 disease. Counterbalancing that, he has never smoked or drunk alcohol, by his own generally unreliable account (could this be his one truth when he’s lied about the country from which his grandfather immigrated?). In addition, his physician impersonators have pronounced his health equivalent to that of a far younger man.
Still, hydroxychloroquine has a long history of safe use. Millions of people around the world take it for malaria prophylaxis, as any traveler to areas where malaria is endemic can attest. Thousands of others take it chronically for autoimmune diseases, at much higher doses. With chronic use comes adverse side effects, the most serious of which is that the drug can disrupt cardiac rhythms which could be fatal. The media has stressed the worst scenario to frighten the archetypical less knowledgeable common man from killing himself with unsupervised use. Included in the cautionary group are less knowledgeable, unscrupulous or partisan physicians who are happy to prescribe the drug for their own profit. Even so, this complication is rare, enhanced by the presence of other chronic medical conditions.
The next question is for what purpose was the RealityTVPresident taking it, beyond the press diversion, the financial interest, the contrariness and the hoopla? The president has said repeatedly that he has tested negative for the virus, again it’s only his word and that ain’t worth much. He hasn’t appeared to be ill, but he could have asymptomatic infection, given his known multiple previous exposures. In that case, he was taking it for treatment.
I’m not completely familiar with the studies being cited by the Donald’s crew since I only read peer-reviewed well designed studies for myself in order to evaluate the methodology, appropriateness of statistical analysis, and statistical results. From that perspective, I know of no studies of hydroxychloroquine treatment of asymptomatic COVID-19. Hydroxychloroquine has been studied in severe SARS-COVID-2 disease, and found wanting and potentially dangerous, but not in mild or asymptomatic disease. In addition, timing is often critical; the earlier the medication is started, the higher the chance that it will have an impact.
Most of the data so far has come from studies outside established protocols, more like case reports where the drug is started because nothing else has worked. Those are not the best circumstances to begin therapy, particularly because a variety of other therapies have been used and probably continued simultaneously. This complicates analysis of the effect of any single agent. In addition, a small sample size may mean that a significant difference could be missed because the amount of difference between the treated and untreated comparison group may look like a chance observation by probability rules when in a larger sample, it would be revealed as a larger difference as more patients are added to the sample.
In the best possible scenario, hydroxychloroquine may slow the progression or shorten the length of the disease, but it has no potential as a cure. The caveat to slowing the progression is early intervention; without that it will likely prove to be a bandaid at best. The FDA has asserted itself to urge the VA to stop using it and recently, officials there have said they will discontinue the drug’s use in its protocol. In general, antiviral medical cures are pretty few and far between.
If 45 didn’t take hydroxychloroquine for treatment, then it must have been for prophylaxis, like with malaria. A 14 day course sounds like prophylaxis, perhaps for one of the multiple COVID-19 exposures around the president. Again, no studies or data in that setting. There are still other open questions, what was the dose? Who decided on it? Is there any objective evidence that Trump ever swallowed a hydroxychloroquine pill?
As a medical researcher, it’s been fun to speculate on the absurdity of the latest episode in the RealityPresidential show as a comedic break from the reality of sickness and death that surrounds us. Many of us are tucked away in our houses; we can’t see the deaths except on our screens. But in some communities, they are quietly mourning a family member or a friend who died alone. They can’t hug and console each other because they can’t touch from 6 feet away. They can’t gather to share their grief. Instead the Rose Garden Road Show reverberates across their social media and TV and their sorrow has no place among the infomercials for various corporate entities making PPE, equipment, swabs and virus tests. The number of dead are never mentioned.
Keep in mind that the statistics are limited by inadequate reporting of total cases and deaths as well as the racial demographics.
As of May 28, at least 100,369 Americans have died from COVID-19.
At least 1,711,818 cases have been reported.
The mortality rate of indigenous people in Arizona is 5X that of other groups; the mortality rate of indigenous people in New Mexico is more than 7X that of other groups.
The Navajo nation has an infection rate of 2.34% compared with New York’s very high rate of 2.28%, compared with the rest of the country.
50.3 per 100,000 or 1 in 2000 African Americans have died compared with 1 in 4700 or 20.7 per 100,000 whites.
The overall mortality rate for Black Americans is 2.4 times higher than whites and 2.2 times higher than the rate for Asians and Latinx.
This is no accident; the intentionality should be abundantly clear.
Today I heard someone suggest that if the country didn’t shut down the economy for the H3N2 flu epidemic of 1968-9, why do it now? H3N2 killed about 100,000 people in the US during two waves in the fall of 1968 and 1969. One obvious answer is that we’re trying to save lives here. But the other is that the world is today a very different place than in the late 60s.
But let’s start with the viruses. The Hong Kong Flu spread a global pandemic that began in China in July 1968 and continued into 1970, killing 1 to 4 million people worldwide, a mere trifle to the 50 million in the 1918-9 flu. Then, the racist designation was politically correct as it remains for some today. Seems the intervening Civil Rights movement touched only some hearts. The virus, H3N2 was an antigenic variant of H2N2, but because it retained the N2 antigen, the global population had retained some immunity from the H2N2 flu pandemic of 1957 which provided some protection. The 100,000 death toll is about the same as what is fast approaching now in the US.
H3N2 spread from Hong Kong to southeast Asia and then through the Panama Canal to California and quickly throughout the US, courtesy of troops returning from Vietnam. From here it spread to Europe and ultimately to the rest of the globe. The majority of deaths were among the very young and the elderly, which at least by today’s emerging standards seem to be considered dispensable. The first wave in 1968/69 was more severe than the second in 1969/70 in the US, but in Europe and Asia, the opposite was true where the second wave struck with 2-5 times higher force.
H3N2 remains in circulation today, one of the strains responsible for seasonal flu. The virus has crossed into pigs, where it now causes a type of swine flu. This demonstrates a critical fact of life in 2020, viruses are clever “bugs” that hop species at any opportunity. Cross species infection is further facilitated by the growth in the world’s human population which infringes more and more on natural animal habitats and the consumption of a broader range of animals, reservoirs for numerous viral species. These circumstances presage future global pandemics at increasingly shorter intervals. This is the threat that can not be ignored when COVID-19 recedes.
Despite rumors to the contrary, COVID-19 is a coronavirus (CoV) structurally different from the flu virus. COVID-19 is also called SARS2, related to the first SARS and MERS another CoV. There are two others that cause mild respiratory disease in humans. Other CoV strains cause disease in the domesticated animals cats, dogs and pigs that are in close contact with humans. Both SARS and MERS cause significantly higher mortality than the flu virus. The mortality rate of COVID19 appears to also be higher, although the lack of testing has made it virtually impossible to determine the total number of cases that include all asymptomatic infections, the denominator for calculating mortality rate. A prolonged period of viral shedding before symptoms appear and possibly after recovery is another difference with the flu which is complicating our defense.
H3N2 virus caused 100,000 US deaths over 18 months only to remain in seasonal circulation as part of the flu season for 50 years. It didn’t disappear.
While total COVID-19 deaths in the US may end up being higher than the 100,000 in the H3N2 flu pandemic, the time interval is a mere 6 months rather than 18 and that is without a potential second wave in the winter. Remember that H3N2 has not disappeared after 5 decades and MERS, a different CoV continues to have periodic outbreaks due to its reservoir in camels. H3N2 peaked near the winter school holidays which helped limit the spread while COVID-19 appeared during the middle of the school year. Still, the epidemic did cause school closings during its course.
COVID-19 has spread rapidly around the globe simply because the world has changed radically since 1969. A quick recap includes the end of the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into several emergent new nations. The growth of the Chinese economy and the movement of international corporations to Asian markets were lynch pins in globalizing the economy that abandoned warehousing inventory to just-in-time orders with rapid delivery. The logistics of just-in-time ordering exponentially expanded air freight and the rail and trucking industries. Chinese manufacturing now dominates the market and the country has a global political footprint. The US economy, having lost much of its manufacturing and brick-and-mortar retail, is now primarily based on consumption of services and foreign imports which account for two-thirds of GDP. Almost 70% of US economic activity is driven by consumer purchases. Few large US corporations remain; in their place are multinational corporations focused on maximizing profits for shareholders. The international leisure travel industry has become a significant part of many national economies as well, bringing with it many unwelcome invasive species, including viruses.
The world’s population has more than doubled since 1969, from 3.6 billion to 7.8 billion. More people demands more space. Forests have given way to agricultural acreage greedily consuming water and then polluting it with fertilizers, excrement and soil washing off the cleared fields. Millions of people have risen from poverty, meaning a better fed population adopting diets with animal protein and living longer lives. As mortality rates have fallen, the rate of population increase has accelerated.
The world’s landscape has been reconfigured, compressing flora and fauna into smaller spaces where they bump more frequently into humans. The quest for more meat has led to the consumption of animals not traditionally eaten, setting up the conditions for viruses to jump between those species to humans. That ease of passage forecasts the increasing frequency of novel viral epidemics. There are already a couple of CoV viruses in humans which cause primarily respiratory illnesses, part of the retinue of “colds”. That increases the chances that COVID-19 will return in the winter (if it is even tempered) and will continue to circulate in the population once epidemic proportions recede into isolated cases as herd immunity evolves. In other words, it is very unlikely that COVID-19 will “magically” disappear as the RealityTVPresident continues to insist at every opportunity.
Changes in the medical system have been no less seismic. In 1969, a significant portion of medical care was performed in the hospital. Patients stayed for weeks after surgeries performed through large incisions. Women, having given birth by cesarean, settled in for 2 week stays free from the care of their other children at home. Patients were hospitalized the day before surgery to be prepped. The whole system was driven by the imperative to fill hospital beds, of which there was a yawning excess. Hospitals often operated at less than 50% capacity.
Fast forward to 2020, where medical care has largely shifted to outpatient settings. Most procedures are performed the same day; insurance companies refuse to pay for stays longer than 2 or 3 days, requiring daily justifications in the hospital medical record for additional days. A new position, the hospital utilization specialist, now roams the halls to review charts to insure that patients are discharged according to insurance directives. Hospitals responded to these threats because the punishment was often nonpayment for the whole stay and even any surgery included during the hospitalization. As the inpatient population fell, hospital rooms were transformed into specialized spaces like larger ICUs and outpatient surgical suites, infusion centers, endoscopy and MRI/radiology suites, cardiac cath labs and monitoring units as well as robotics ORs.
Hospitals were hanging on by a thread as the rise of HMOs slashed reimbursements and established gateway agreements with certain hospitals while rejecting others. In the 2000s, the largest generator of hospital revenue was financial investments with patient care lagging far behind. In response, they consolidated into larger hospital systems, trying to enhance their bargaining power against insurers and take advantage of economies of scale. The healthcare system overestimated its capacity to respond quickly to a crisis, buoyed by a confidence in their just in time supply chains that has now been shown to be misplaced. They never envisioned a worldwide pandemic that would shut down production and logistics almost completely. As mass casualty events have proliferated, larger hospitals have regular trauma response drills, but they don’t have pandemic drills. Only national security agencies in the federal government had those.
The economy globalized, just in time delivery evolved, leisure international travel became routine and hospitals shed beds for outpatient procedure suites and intense monitoring units
So when COVID-19 slammed into the country, the strategic plan was focused on the use of tried and true public health measures, i.e. social distancing to slow the spread, tracking of contacts and quarantining of those affected for the period of active disease transmission. These tools are designed to slow the spread of disease as the healthcare system ramps up its capacity to provide medical care and to space out the influx of the sick or “flattening the curve”. But the high rate of asymptomatic viral shedding and the virtual absence of extensive testing regimes in the US threw a wrench into this strategy.
After the early federal pandemic warning system misfired and the administration piddled away the time meant to ramp up facilities, supplies, and a viral test, the explosion of cases signalled the failure of “flattening the curve” in several cities that were hit first. The state of Washington exemplified a good approach, easing into social isolation by using the voluntary actions of Microsoft and Amazon to have employees work from home to condition the public to the larger stay at home campaign and business shutdowns that followed. Washington, now reporting few new cases, is reopening slowly using public health benchmarks, without the “backlash movement” financed by conservative organizations in other states.
The state of New York, the hardest hit to date, is a poster boy for what not to do. Both Governor Cuomo and NYC Mayor De Blasio diminished the importance of the virus initially and refused to shut down schools and businesses. They also failed to anticipate construction of ancillary mobile hospital facilities until well into a disastrous deluge over the state’s healthcare infrastructure causing thousands of deaths. That is the price for a delayed rather than immediate public health response driven by the unhealthy skepticism toward expertise that has gripped the country. Good scientific evidence must be at the forefront of public policy decisions. A new study from Columbia University found that if the same kind of social distancing had been in place seven days earlier than March 15 when many locations started it, the United States could have prevented 36,000 deaths or about 40 percent of fatalities through early May. Two weeks earlier, the number would be 54,000.
A different virus in a new environment demands a different response pretty much sums it up. The novel COVID-19 virus with prolonged asymptomatic shedding, spread more rapidly across an integrated global economy to healthcare systems that had been made lean without excess capacity, quite different from the H3N2 pandemic in 1968-70. The variables of hospital and ventilator capacity were not a factor back then, limiting the need to extend the number of cases over a longer interval. Protective medical gear was made from cloth and laundered on hospital premises for reuse. But with COVID-19, the scarcity of PPE converted hospitals into disseminators of the disease, particularly to their medical staff and other personnel. Similarly, senior care homes, their numbers greatly expanded since 1969, have quickly spread the disease to residents, staff and staff families. These differences have dictated a broader more intense strategy today, particularly in countries that were slow to respond with appropriate public health policies.
The President has sworn that he will never be seen in one of these
The partisan politicization of the very existence of a deadly virus combined with the lost sense of community which should trigger a pull to band together to save the country has exacerbated the disorderliness of this pandemic response. The rise of “alternative facts”, a general skepticism toward scientific expertise and a loss of trust in government have tempered compliance with public health measures. The public is at a loss to discern the physical world, the one with melting icebergs, rising sea levels and temperatures from the fantasy world of Trump/FoxTVNews and conspiracy theorists. The public health message has been confused, seized by politicians rather than knowledgeable experts who have always been the primary deliverers of information about disease spread.
The White House, using its hallmark approach to all matters, has systematically hired private firms to do what public health and emergency response agencies have usually done, setting up parallel networks that can be politically controlled. The flow of information about the usual metrics for programmatic planning has likewise been disrupted. Statistical information about infection rates has been fragmented and in some cases withheld, with a partisan eye toward minimizing the number of cases to camouflage the gravity of the infection. This is no accident but a part of the intentional veil of obfuscation, another hallmark of the Trump administration. For example, the early distribution of testing capacity to commercial labs which depended on private providers to complete requisitions is the major reason for the lack of damning racial information that has revealed people of color have borne the brunt of COVID-19 mortality and a heavy burden of cases.
Efforts to rally Americans to battle a national threat never witnessed before have not materialized. Instead the president encouraged a politically divisive response, first by refusing to play the traditional role of the federal government in national defense and instead, farming the response out to individual states. Somehow, the president thinks that makes him less culpable. In place of a mobilized national response, the Wartime President told the states to create their own armies, equip and supply them with weapons to develop their own battle plans without the expertise of the country’s military command armed with advanced weaponry.
Imagine Abe Lincoln deploying the Union’s locally recruited regiments to preserve the union using their own individual battle plans. The idea was simply unthinkable. He struggled to find the winning combination of generals, settling on Ulysses Grant as the field commander who ultimately forced Lee to surrender. Today, each individual state was left to falter through its own response, often competing with other bidders, including the national government itself, for rapidly shrinking supplies.
Individual state responses are further confusing people with a bewildering array of directives and restrictions and public health messaging. The public is just tuning it all out and anxious enough about their daily lives to have lost their common sense. Party partisans are making political statements by their behavior. Doubting Trumpophants emulate their leader by refusing to wear masks and rejecting social distancing as a political statement. Everyone else, fearing for their lives, is desperately trying to protect themselves and their families by staying at home as much as feasible. We’re a long way from 1969.
On May 23, 1796 President George Washington offered a $10 reward for the capture of Oney Judge enslaved on his property. The woman ran away after learning that Mrs Washington planned to give her away as a wedding present.
45 came into the White House riding the birtherism wave, so it is only fitting that he try to remain there through another innuendo campaign, Obamagate. He was hard pressed to define it in a recent news briefing, largely because he hasn’t got the full details from his Trump/FoxTVNews advisors yet. But soon enough, the groundbreaking work by Bill Barr will plant the seeds for Qanon, Limbaugh, Alex, etc to tee up in their echo chambers. Apparently, the intelligence agencies have added tidbits to the manhunt as Rick Grenell disclosed agency personnel who unmasked Flynn to the DOJ…to be leaked to Trump/FoxTVNews in the blink of an eye. The cauldron is still bubbling, not yet ready to serve up the poison, but it’s brewing.
The details don’t matter to the RealityTVPresident. Certainly, 45 is trying to distract from the bad COVID-19 news, but more than that, he’s about out of viable campaign themes to nibble around the edges. Despite the PiedPiperPresident’s attempts to rewrite his script, the incompetence demonstrated in his anemic, nonurgent states’ based pandemic response, rising number of deaths and the worst unemployment since the Great Depression hasn’t produced a good plot.
For instance, the organization Blacks for Trump will have a hard time expanding outside their business base to people afflicted with COVID-19 and struggling to keep their livelihoods. In fact, some of their number may have businesses tittering on the edge. Of course, the campaign had little interest in African American votes anyway; it was aiming for a few crumbs to boost that 8% number from 2016. The Obamagate strategy is likely to seal that coffin.
With a booming economy off the table, Trump’s other go-tos have disappeared as well. He’s shut down immigration, leaving him without the caravan card. Apparently, only 2 immigrants have been admitted since the beginning of the year. He can still reverberate his message to disparage people of color and Muslims through the Wall as he tried to do recently at a White House briefing where he touted the lie that a lot of the structure has continued to be built. He’s got forthcoming peace in Afghanistan, also exaggerated and the relative quiet in North Korea, both weak issues with a base that cares little about international issues. There are still US military deaths in the Middle East and the military families know it, even if Trump/FoxTVNews isn’t covering it.
Beyond that, he’s got his war on China, which has shifted away from the issue of trade which has almost ceased, to scapegoating China and the WHO for his disastrous nonresponse to COVID-19. Even if the Chinese didn’t manufacture the virus, he blames them for letting it spread all over the world. Of course, we’ve seen that the virus controls its own course and it had probably already spread to Asia and Europe before the Chinese or Europeans understood that, given the 2 week period of asymptomatic shedding. Those countries were equally unaware of its presence in the very early days. But, as Rudy Giuliani once quipped, if people believe it’s true then it’s the truth. The facts don’t matter in a PiedPiperPresident universe. The argument is building now, but it’s still too far ahead of November to assess its impact.
His victimhood is his next best play. The Mueller investigation and impeachment are his best pitch to supporters for essentially a pity vote. Trump always wants to appear to be omnipotent, and yet he spends an inordinate amount of time whining about his victimization by the press and the Democrats. But he’s reserved a special place for Obama, whom Trump must believe left him under a voodoo spell. It was that curse that blinded the RealityTVPresident to the approaching pandemic, not his own intentional dismantling of the pandemic alert and preparedness response system in the NSC. Even almost four years after leaving office, the Obama curse left 45 paralyzed to maintain national stockpile resources, although the cancellation of maintenance contracts for equipment and supplies or the sales of PPE to foreign countries through middlemen contracted by FEMA are probably more germane.
Whenever the ArtfulDodgerPresident is unsettled by a probing question from the press, his mind skips to Obama. There was the blame for not having tests for a virus that was unknown in humans 4 years ago and for regulations that prevented the development of new tests. Three years should be adequate time to revise regulations, a top priority when the Trump administration assumed office. One initiative tasked each agency to create a list of regulations that required deletion or amendment. In the naivete of the early days, they did not understand that there is a process to amend regulations which requires review and public comment. And that would seem to take precedent over golf and TV viewing; perhaps 45 put Jared in charge.
That brings us full circle to Obamagate, a deep state conspiracy to destroy the Donald and his movement of dispossessed white people. Trump couldn’t run against him in 2012, so he’s resurrected him, hoping that brown face will galvanize his minority’s white rage scattered over just the right places to nail an electoral college win. Obama brings back the fury of the culture wars, a reminder of the tipping point when the white majority will become a minority, superseded by a new non-white majority. Obama is a gateway to the triumph of Brett Cavanaugh and the infusion of religious freedom and anti-abortion/contraception into current administration policies. It’s the MAWA victory train.
Obama is also a sledgehammer to pound Joe Biden. Who needs Giuliani’s dream woven tales of corruption in Ukraine when Biden has latched onto the only African American president’s coattails. The Ukraine fiasco was an attempt to use the VP’s role as an enforcer of an international edict for the country to reform its legacy of rampant corruption from Soviet regimes to impune Biden’s integrity with a charge of personal corruption. Trump cronies were projecting their own behaviors, as they often do, onto others, unable to image basic honesty and integrity. Biden’s name is among those listed in the Grenell “unmasking” hit list.
Still, it’s a little bizarre that Trumpophants continue to accept their fearless leader as a victim of the government of which HE IS IN CHARGE. Either he is the big dog that he says he is or he’s ineffectual. He’s had almost 4 years to take control, and yet according to the Artful DodgerPresident, he’s still losing. How long are they going to give him to prove his might? In any case, this subterfuge has allowed him to retain support for a series of anti-democratic maneuvers that will ultimately destroy American democracy as we know it. He has started down the paths of Duterte in the Philippines or Erdogan in Turkey, mobilizing the judicial system to retaliate against perceived political enemies. He has unleashed his bulldog, Bill Barr, on a manhunt to prosecute a former president and his executive officers, another historic first.
At the same time, the Trump defense in the SCOTUS case to obtain his financial records is that the president is immune from investigation, let alone prosecution and even civil suit. Apparently the president has enough time to watch Trump/FoxTVNews for the majority of his day, but is too busy dealing with COVID-19 to have to deal with disclosure of documents to Congress. His attorney has called this “temporary” immunity, careful not to create the possibility of a longer term immunity that would include Obama.
Despite the contradictions, a hallmark of the El Trumpe regime, his supporters are all in; they care little about the processes of a government they distrust without understanding that it underpins those freedoms they’re always demonstrating about. They believe in a strong leader that can bulldoze their collective will forward. They believe that their leader knows exactly what they want and need. Right now, it’s to strip the rights that are the prerogative of normal whites from those who are not white or their idea of normal. When they realize that their fabled leader will ultimately come for them as “white” becomes more narrowly defined to exclude Cubans and Jews, for example and then extends to other groups. Along the way, he will single out those who may question the mantra of the day, as he is doing today. Eventually, those who are not wealthy and white will find themselves an underclass, valuable only for their hands and their taxes. The people only began to worry when he came for them. By then it will be too late.
Agent Orange may be a skillful grifter, but he’s only got a limited bag of tricks and we’ve seen them all already.
On May 15, 1970, police shot and killed 2 unarmed Black student protestors at Jackson State College
Leave it to the RealityTVPresident to conjure up his own pandemic disease, COVID-45, a mutated COVID-19 that injects an altered RNA into the victim’s infected cells. As the virus is dispersed through coughs, speech and feces, it spreads a generalized apathy into the body politic, wafting aloft to concentrate in the ethereal realms of the federal and many GOP run state governments. Their 30,000 foot perches, surrounded by intervening clouds, render invisible the individuals who are desperately ill and dying on the ground. COVID-45, like COVID-19, is easily spread by asymptomatic carriers to the most vulnerable, the elderly, those with chronic medical conditions, and essential workers, often people of color, through repeated exposures. It may prove to be more deadly.
45 has literally sucked as much financial benefit as he can from his emergency response and with that, is ready to move on. He’s desperate to resume his campaign for re-election, having watched his main campaign theme, a rip-roaring economy, melt away in a matter of weeks. From his perennial bag of tricks, he’s reconfigured the narrative about his “wartime” leadership into an assertion that “only he” can bring the economy back. Make the Economy Great Again (MEGA)!
The COVID-45 pandemic is over and done for the PiedPiperPresident. Everyone needs to get back to work. Conservatives are onboard with the argument that job creators are far more valuable than the people who both produce the goods and more importantly consume them. Not the mom and pops but the big guys, with multinational corporate ties. Sailing away with the largest share of all the government aid packages, the super wealthy are comfortably protected from the danger of infection with apparent access to whatever testing they need and the wherewithal to isolate themselves from potential exposure to the general public. They and 45 will happily accept a million or more deaths in the bargain as long as their powerful hegemony is maintained.
Trump has been blunt about manipulating numbers; he’s working a scorecard, not individual human beings with names and loved ones. First it was leaving travelers on a cruise ship rather than upset “case numbers”. Now he’s spreading his “instinct” that the fatalities are being overstated among his entourage. Those sycophants have, in turn, created the rationale that will slip loudly into pundit presentations on Trump/FoxNews TV. The deep state conspiracy is that with testing nowhere to be found, public health officials changed their estimates to a presumptive diagnosis of COVID-19, which increased the number of cases. In addition, hospitals are incentivized by the additional 10% reimbursement from Medicare to overreport COVID-19 cases.
45’s Conspiracy Theory: COVID-19 deaths are being over-estimated by hospitals incentivized to misclassify cases for the additional 10% Medicare reimbursement.
And then the cycle begins. The president will call into an interview with this charge which is then amplified by the stories and commentary throughout the day which is then watched by the president who, in his conspiracy addled brain removed from reality outside the White House, believes it’s the truth because he saw it on the news. Not to be outdone, the mainstream media will take up the chorus, through Twitter coverage, without ever bothering to set the record straight. And the repetition will cloud the minds and judgement of the general public. They will want to believe that COVID-19 is over, even as reports come from other locations or unluckily, as their neighbors and friends drop dead around them. They were bamboozled into thinking that COVID-45 is the same as COVID-19, which alas, it is not. COVID-45 is a figment of Trump’s imagination; COVID-19 is a viral infection with at least 1% mortality.
This sequence coincides with the rewriting of his historic emergency non-response to COVID-19 as an heroic success, despite the distraction of the impeachment. If the governors couldn’t safeguard national security, historically the paramount function of the federal government, then the people should hold them accountable at the ballot box in November. Or at least the wartime president will campaign in that vein. He assumes no responsibility for the debacle, but thinks he should be rewarded for the brilliance of his leadership.
After solving the testing problem to his satisfaction, 45 believes testing is overrated, except when it comes to his own entourage, that apparently are tested multiple times a day. Certainly, the presidency should be protected. But who needs masks and social distancing when the risk of infection has passed? That philosophy has infected now several aides and White House staff with COVID-19 because they are discouraged from wearing masks and social distancing. No word on whether Mr and Mrs Stephen Miller are in self isolation after she tested positive. 45 continues to endanger not just staff, including butlers, cooks and private residence servers, but also some governors whom he’s insisted meet him in the White House, without masks and only intermittent social distancing. Adding to that list are their families and friends as well of the wider circle of Congressional staff and civil servants with whom they interact.
This week, by refusing to wear a mask and social distance, he endangered octa- and nonagenarian WWII veterans at a V-E Day celebration, a double indignity to those who have laid their lives on the line from the president who is always talking about “his generals” but has shown no inclination to defend his country. He chickened out of Nam and now, he’s got his sights on Latinx immigrants, Muslims and people of color, the wrong enemy, and ignored the national security threats from pandemics, Russia and China. Adding insult to injury, he gives a good impression of a Manchurian candidate for our Russian foe by spreading KGB propaganda and opposing Congressional attempts to safeguard the electoral system against electronic incursion.
One upside of contact with the president and VP is that it brings the benefit of COVID-19 testing with what must be a rapid test, since people are screened before they can see them. Routine testing turnarounds in the real world vary from 4-7 days, too slow to predict infection free status at the time of the presidential visit.
At first glance it seems that these science skeptics really believe the virus is a hoax. This behavior seems bizarre for an admitted germaphobe like 45, except his narcissistic belief that he is above the law must extend beyond the American legal code to the laws of nature. His deep seated suspicion of science and expertise in any area functions as his own personal protective equipment against expanding his knowledge base and world view. In fact his world view, mired in conspiracy theories and a sense of victimhood, provides a backup second skin for his PPE. One of Agent Orange’s signature characteristics is consistency, in behavior, if not speech. He’s carted around the same bundle of ideas since the 90s, despite significant sequential changes in global circumstances.
As the victim in every scenario, El Trumpe has propagandized the idea that Democrats are using COVID-19 as another hoax, to join Russian collaboration, the Ukrainian campaign to create false information about Joe Biden and impeachment. To be clear, the virus itself, not the bungled response, is the hoax. In Trump speak, the danger of the virus, it’s infectiousness, it’s death rate and it’s reemergence in the fall are all overblown and have been weaponized by Dems to attack little Donnie.
TheBullyPresident was so confident in vanquishing the virus that he announced he would disband the COVID-19 task force, triggering an avalanche of public blowback from those living in the trenches asking for guidance, or at least the illusion of somewhere to go for it. Drs Fauci and Birx have been yanked off center stage, banished to the hinterlands. The CDC report on safe planning to reopen economic activity was buried in a basement archive. No need for that now, they say, the Trump policy is full steam ahead. No state reopening so far met any of the original criteria, what’s the point in putting out more scientific gibberish from the deep state.
The KnowItAllPresident has demonstrated his lack of understanding about viral testing. A test is only as good as the moment it’s taken because any moment after, someone tested may run into a viral shedder who infects them. This is the reason that testing is not a one shot deal, but a commitment to repeated testing of those at risk for exposure. He laments that fact, even as he gets tested several times a day which suggests he understands it. From Trump’s black and white perspective, if something doesn’t go the way he wants, then it’s crap. And thus 45 returns to his baseline that viral testing is overblown and the number of needed tests is far over estimated. There is some truth in that. We can’t test our way out of a pandemic, because COVID-19 is gonna do what it’s gonna do. But we can test our way into a response that will allow the country to resume some economic and social activity, such as reopening schools because children are losing precious learning time. Only then will people feel sensibly safe to resume life in the new normal.
Underlying the disparagement of a testing strategy is 45’s concern with scoreboards. Simply put, the more tests, the more cases. Simple minds think in digits, not rates or proportions, so the impact of % positivity rates as an indicator of the extensiveness of testing, the infection index and the death rate, are all just a muddle in the aging president’s addled brain. What he knows is that the more tests done, the larger the number of cases reported and that Trump can’t have, especially as they are now indicating a rise in cases just as he’s aggressively arguing that the economy must be opened up since the virus is going to disappear. In his mind, the souls sacrificed until it does are balanced against those from suicides, addiction, joblessness and homelessness, albeit without any statistical support. Underlying that calculation is the callousness that values less the lives of the primary victims, people of color, low wage earners, the elderly and urban dwellers than Trumpophants and the wealthy.
The two main tools for fighting the epidemic may no longer be needed for COVID-45, but COVID-19 is still tearing through the population, in suburbs and rural red state country. Trump has returned to the idea that COVID-19 will simply disappear, just like his COVID-45. And he disparages testing as inaccurate, so why do it. In the race to the election, will the carnage and economic wreckage blow over before November. Or will the rush to reopen the economy cause another economic setback, or simply acquiescence to soaring numbers of deaths.
Struggling businesses will fall prey to a frightened public, leading to new waves of closures, shattering lifetime dreams, lengthening unemployment lines and creating a surge of homelessness as many low wage workers, ineligible for unemployment unless the CARES legislation is extended, lose their dwellings. None of those people will have disposable income to spend in our consumer based economy. This is what’s been called the “W” economic response, up, back down and back up. It seems better described as a slithering snake; no sharply sloped increases, just humps up and down.
The graphics shouldn’t distract from the overwhelming misery they represent. These are students who can’t finish that college diploma but will have to start paying back their loans. These are families retrieving their belongings from the curb with no place to take them. These are people who are standing in line at a food bank. These are women who have diabetes without insurance and life saving insulin. These are new mothers with no car to put the carseat in, no room to set up a crib. These are the casualties invisible from 30,000 feet.
On May 11, 1868, convict leasing began in Georgia when the Governor leased 100 Black prisoners to Georgia & Alabama Railroad for $2500/year; 16 prisoners died in the first year alone.
oleblacklady 