Two more Beatles anniversaries today: “Love Me Do” hit number one in 1964 …
… four years before the Beatles started work on their only double album. Perhaps that work was so hard that they couldn’t think of a more original title than: “The Beatles.” You may know it better, however, as “the White Album”:
Vince Vitrano of WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee:
“I think we would not feel confident saying that on the 2-week anniversary we are attributing increases to the lifting of safer at home.”
Wisconsin Department of Health Services Secretary Designee Andrea Palm 5/27/2020
Palm said it. I was (virtually) there.
Let’s get into it.
DHS recorded a record number of new, confirmed cases of COVID-19 at 599 on Wednesday. A primary driver for that record number was that it is part of a record number of tests conducted, which for the first time topped 10,000 Wednesday. The percent of positive tests in the sample was 5.8%. That’s up from 3.6% the previous day, but it’s down.
It’s down from 8.3% on May 16th, just three days after the overturn of safer at home. It’s down from 6.3% on May 13th, the day the State Supreme Court overturned safer at home. It’s down from nearly 13% on May 1st, when we were still under safer at home. Thursday’s numbers were down to 512 new cases, and a still falling percentage at 4.8%
There is no upward trend reflected in this data in the percentage of positive tests since safer at home was overturned. https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/covid-19/data.htm
One qualifier that I’ve identified here before…. while the percentage is an apples to apples comparison… it’s like comparing a granny smith to a honey crisp. For weeks we were testing only very sick people. We have now expanded testing dramatically to include even those with no symptoms. Widening the parameters would naturally invite a lower percentage of positives to appear.
There is an uptick in hospitalizations. The number of people hospitalized across the State of Wisconsin was, at the time of this post, 408. That is starting to tick back down a bit from the day before, but the number hit a weeks-long high on May 26th at 422. You’d have to go back to April 14th to find a day with higher hospitalizations at 441, down from a peak April 9th of 446. https://www.wha.org/Covid-19Update
You can argue the hospitalization numbers are still relatively low given they’re for the entire state, and given dire predictions of hospitals being overrun. You can’t argue there isn’t an overall increasing trend from the first week of May. That is real.
So a mixed report on what the data is showing us in regard to spread of the disease… but no clear indication that the end of safer at home has, of yet, produced devastating effects on public health.
Secretary Designee Palm and the State’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Ryan Westergaard both comment in greater detail about this in their last DHS briefing. They comment at about 47 minutes in… and then again at about 52 minutes in to the link I provide here, if you’d like to listen to their comments in full context.
Another thing to take away. While stopping short of saying the lifting of safer at home definitively produced an upward trend in cases, they do both continue to urge caution and suggest the likelihood that more people have coronavirus now in Wisconsin than did a couple of weeks ago.
They also stress we’re now at greater risk of coming into contact with those people. Here’s Westergaard on that, “I think we really need to think, not in terms of did this cause the cases to go up, did this cause the cases to go up? But to undertand that it’s complex, and we have to do a large number of differnt things in order to respond to keep ourselves safer.”
Also Wednesday, Kenosha County health officials expressed alarm that seven recent COVID-19 positive cases in the County are people who work in bars and restaurants. Health officials will not publicly disclose the establishments involved. Perhaps contact tracing could produce some circumstantial evidence that will be able to tie future cases to that. We can watch for news there.
Word of caution, Dr. Westergaard also suggested even when there’s strong associative evidence in individual outbreaks, “It’s not ever going to be possible to attribute something like a trend, especially on one day, to any one thing.”
Dr. Westergaard’s commentary suggests, like with the election, it will be difficult to know even two to three weeks out… because safer at home was overturned… X happened. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Just like we cannot know how coronavirus would have spread through Wisconsin without the order in the first place, we cannot know how it would have continued to spread if it had been left in place. People divided on the wisdom of the decision hope to find evidence one way or another to back their opinions. That’s natural.
Most of the State is allowed to fully reopen, and now it is up to individual business owners how they plan to care for their employees and their customers. It will be up to us as individuals to let our judgement guide decisions about whether to eat out, whether to hang out, whether to go out. I wish you all good health whichever way you break.
One other thing: Professional Steve asked about municipal swimming pools …
… and got not much response.
In Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything… (1989), Lloyd Dobler sketches out a stumbling, uncertain-but-nevertheless-determined path for his and my generation:
“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” “We’re not sure what we want, but not this,” was a strange but endearing generational rallying cry. Few of us who saw the film in our teens or early twenties failed to laugh with recognition.
Ascribing common traits to an entire generation of tens of millions of disparate Americans is a dubious exercise, even a fool’s errand. So call me a fool, I won’t take it personally.
For instance, assuming everyone in a particular generation has seen a particular movie. Except probably for the original “Star Wars.”
Still, a few characteristics unique to Generation X did become clear as the decades passed. Gen X was notably the first generation to have to deal with the mistakes of the Baby Boomers, and the first in which interracial relationships and homosexuality enjoyed widespread acceptance. Gen X-ers were also more emotionally damaged by divorce than the children of any previous or subsequent generation. There was fragility within us as we faced a joyous historical moment when American ways had indisputably been proven superior to those of the Soviet empire and affluence had become, for the first time, available to a huge proportion of Americans. No previous generation could simply choose wealth, but Gen X discovered that a master’s in business or a law degree was a virtual ticket to the upper class. And this created a conflict, given the anti-materialist shibboleths of the John Lennon-led Boomer culture we’d all inherited: Did access to wealth mean we ought to pursue it? Could we achieve it in some Doblerian way that preserved our sense of self? The natural optimism and excitement of youth were tinged with doubts.
Steeped as we were in Boomer rock music, we sensed it was full of questionable advice. Turning away from, or blowing up, the existing power structures so we could “get ourselves back to the garden,” as Crosby, Stills and Nash sang in Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” was not an option we considered. We were not revolutionaries. The country that awaited us not only didn’t require radical overthrow, it seemed pretty good. Our first votes were likely to be for Reagan (61 percent of the youth vote in 1984) or George H.W. Bush (53 percent in 1988). We advanced into adulthood as cautious idealists, a little hopeful and a little confused.
When I arrived at college in 1985, U2 and Talking Heads were very much the bands of the moment, but there was a palpable sense that Bono and Co. still hadn’t quite fulfilled their promise, that their best days, like ours, were yet to come. Junior year, just as we returned from spring break to a New Haven that flipped overnight from gray slush to Monet efflorescence, U2 delivered its hoped-for masterpiece in The Joshua Tree, instantly and obviously the defining rock album of the decade.
If those who were born in the ’60s and grew up in the ’70s seem a little blasé about COVID-19, maybe MeTV explains why:
If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s, then you know how relaxed everything used to be. Our parents never forced us to wear seatbelts, we pretty much ate whatever we wanted, and were given way more responsibiity than we should have been given. It’s a little sad kids today won’t get to experience half the things we did, but looking back, there’s a good reason why they won’t.
Were these 12 things we did as kids kind of dangerous? Yeah, maybe some of it was.
1. Playing with dangerous toys
Parents were a lot more liberal with what they would let us play with. Forget about choking hazards, we’re talking hot plates, noxious odors and sharp metal objects. It’s a wonder how we made it out of the decade intact.
Not only were there lawn darts in the neighborhood, but we used to have a waterslide (a plastic sheet into which a water hose was plugged in, with holes on the sides squirting out water) that supposedly caused paralysis when someone hit a dry spot, or something.
2. No seatbelts
We never had to buckle up back in the day, which meant we could sit wherever. That includes stretching out across the seats, lying against the back windshield, or, if your parents had a station wagon, rolling around in the cargo area.
What was better than all of that was hitching a ride in a flatbed pickup. No cushioned seats, no roof and nothing but the wind in your hair and sun in your face.
Our first second car was a 1965 Chevrolet Bel Air, whose rear seat had no seat belts. So my brother and I had to share the front-seat lap belt, because the possibility of our faces slamming into the metal dashboard was certainly preferable.
3. No helmets
Just like seat belts, people didn’t really see the value in this piece of life saving gear. Kids popped wheelies and raced each other without helmets, let alone knee and elbow pads. Falling was an art form too because you had to land without splitting your head open or breaking any bones.
At one point we set up a bike ramp on the sidewalk. Heading into a jump our dog started to walk out in front of my bike. I hit the brakes hard and suddenly found myself looking up at the sky, having flipped the bike. No helmet. No concussion … I think.
4. Running after DDT trucks
This one is probably the biggest “what were we thinking” moments of the ’60s and ’70s. We would run after these suckers when they rolled into our neighborhood and sprayed the air with a chemical fog. If your street had some traffic, it was just the risk you had to take to have a little fun.
I don’t remember this, though I’ve read about it, possibly in Monona but not in Madison.
5. Unsafe playgrounds
Anyone remember swinging so hard that one part of the swing set would come off the ground? Or what about the burns we suffered sliding down scorching metal slides during the summer? And there wasn’t a cushy rubber foundation back then, just asphalt.
The grade school playground and the neighborhood park playground all had metal equipment on asphalt and dirt, respectively. Over at school, a kid running in fog soundly connected with an iron basketball hoop post, resulting in a concussion.
6. Latchkey kids
If your mom or dad worked late, then chances are they gave you the keys to the house so you could let yourself in after school. For those couple hours, you might as well have been a full-fledged adult.
Sure, your parents expected you to do homework while you were alone, but you secretly watched an episode or two of The Brady Bunch before they got home.
7. Leaving 12-year-olds in charge
If you had a younger sibling, then you best bet you would be watching after them at some point during the day (especially if you were a latchkey kid).
You didn’t need any certifications to babysit either. If you were at least 12 and able to dial 9-1-1, then you got some pretty sweet babysitting gigs. It was perfectly acceptable too.
I started babysitting in middle school. It was next door, for the princely sum of $1 an hour.
8. Diets
There was no such thing as “health foods” like kale and quinoa back when we were kids. If it was sold at the store, then it went in our stomachs. Plus, the less preparation that went into a school lunch, the better. Shout out to the Wonder Bread sandwiches, chips and Twinkies that probably stunted our growth as kids.
I’m 6-foot-4. I thought my growth was being stunted by the coffee I started drinking when I was 4.
9. Sitting in the front seat
The lack of seatbelts meant you could sit wherever you wanted, and no seat was more coveted than the middle seat in the front, back when front seats were benches. If there were six people in your family, then you fought your siblings for that position. If you sat there, you got to control which radio station the family listened to, and got the extra protection of your mother’s arm when your father stopped too hard.
10. Secondhand smoke
There was no escaping the haze of cigarette smoke in the 1970s. From airplanes to automobiles, we probably inhaled more secondhand smoke as children than some people do in a lifetime today. Looking back, we’re happy to leave this one in the ’70s.
I had a few relatives, and more coworkers, who smoked at work. I don’t think it caused (cough, cough) any problems.
11. Explosive cars
It’s basically a fact that cars were death traps back in the ’70s, and the Ford Pinto is the prime example. Not only did we not wear seatbelts and sit wherever we pleased, we were driving in cars that could explode because the fuel tank wasn’t designed properly. Luckily, the cars were discontinued in 1980, but only after we had risked our lives riding in them.
Our Boy Scouts carpool included a Pinto. It didn’t kill us, but the back seat required flexibility to get in and out. (Particularly because the rear-seat cushions were like falling into a toilet when the seat wasn’t up.)
12. Summer
Come to think of it, the three months between the school year were the most dangerous times growing up. We would leave the house for hours at a time, run around without shoes, and come home with more scrapes and bruises than we could count.
There was no structured playtime and no cell phones, just long days of sunshine and absolute fun. Yeah, being a kid in the ’60s and ’70s wasn’t all that bad.
This is more a pop than rock anniversary: One of the two funniest songs Johnny Cash performed, “One Piece at a Time,” hit number 29 today in 1976:
Birthdays start with Gary Brooker of Procol Harum:
Over the past year there have been predictive election models based on economic numbers that predicted a Donald Trump win in November.
Then came the coronavirus, and with unemployment now at double digits models are predicting a Joe Biden win.
(Which makes you wonder (1) what Biden and the feds would be doing differently if president now and (2) how the economy would be better if Biden were president and all the liberal wish list things like higher taxes, eliminated student debt, higher taxes, more government spending, higher taxes, the climate freakout, higher taxes, single-payer health care and higher taxes were reality.)
So Politico reports:
In early April, Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration and now a professor at Harvard, was speaking via Zoom to a large bipartisan group of top officials from both parties. The economy had just been shut down, unemployment was spiking and some policymakers were predicting an era worse than the Great Depression. The economic carnage seemed likely to doom President Donald Trump’s chances at reelection.
Furman, tapped to give the opening presentation, looked into his screen of poorly lit boxes of frightened wonks and made a startling claim.
“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” he said.
The former Cabinet secretaries and Federal Reserve chairs in the Zoom boxes were confused, though some of the Republicans may have been newly relieved and some of the Democrats suddenly concerned.
“Everyone looked puzzled and thought I had misspoken,” Furman said in an interview. Instead of forecasting a prolonged Depression-level economic catastrophe, Furman laid out a detailed case for why the months preceding the November election could offer Trump the chance to brag — truthfully — about the most explosive monthly employment numbers and gross domestic product growth ever.
Since the Zoom call, Furman has been making the same case to anyone who will listen, especially the close-knit network of Democratic wonks who have traversed the Clinton and Obama administrations together, including top members of the Biden campaign.
Furman’s counterintuitive pitch has caused some Democrats, especially Obama alumni, around Washington to panic. “This is my big worry,” said a former Obama White House official who is still close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said, “It’s high — high, high, high, high.”
Furman’s case begins with the premise that the 2020 pandemic-triggered economic collapse is categorically different than the Great Depression or the Great Recession, which both had slow, grinding recoveries.
Instead, he believes, the way to think about the current economic drop-off, at least in the first two phases, is more like what happens to a thriving economy during and after a natural disaster: a quick and steep decline in economic activity followed by a quick and steep rebound.
The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide decline in consumption and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15, when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a hurricane or industrywide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Furman’s argument is not that different from the one made by White House economic advisers and Trump, who have predicted an explosive third quarter, and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who said in late April that “the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.” White House officials were thrilled to hear that some of their views have been endorsed by prominent Democrats.
“I totally agree,” Larry Kudlow, head of the White House National Economic Council, replied in a text message when asked about Furman’s analysis. “Q3 may be the single best GDP quarter since regular data. 2nd half super big growth, transitioning to 4% or more in 2021.” He called Furman, whom he said he knows well, “usually a straight shooter. Hats off to him.”
“I have been saying that on TV as well,” said Kevin Hassett, a top Trump economic adviser, who pointed to a Congressional Budget Office analysis predicting a 21.5 percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter. “If CBO is correct we will see the strongest quarter in history after the weakest in Q2.”
Peter Navarro, a Trump trade and manufacturing adviser who’s a Harvard-educated economist, called the high unemployment America is currently facing “manufactured unemployment, which is to say that Americans are out of work not because of any underlying economic weaknesses but to save American lives. It is this observation that gives us the best chance and hope for a relatively rapid recovery as the economy reopens.”
(Asked about his new fans in the White House, Furman responded, “They get the rebound part, but they don’t get the partial part.”)
A rebound won’t mean that Trump has solved many underlying problems. Since the crisis started, many employers have gone bankrupt. Others have used the pandemic to downsize. Consumption and travel will likely remain lower. Millions of people in industries like hospitality and tourism will need to find new jobs in new industries.
The scenario would be a major long-term problem for any president. But before that reality sets in, Trump could be poised to benefit from the dramatic numbers produced during the partial rebound phase that is likely to coincide with the four months before November.
That realization has many Democrats spooked.
“In absolute terms, the economy will look historically terrible come November,” said Kenneth Baer, a Democratic strategist who worked in a senior role at the Office of Management and Budget under Obama. “But relative to the depths of April, it will be on an upswing — 12 percent unemployment, for example, is better than 20, but historically terrible. On Election Day, we Democrats need voters to ask themselves, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ Republicans need voters to ask themselves, ‘Are you better off than you were four months ago?’”
One progressive Democratic operative pointed out that recent polling, taken during the nadir of the crisis, shows Joe Biden is struggling to best Trump on who is more trusted to handle the economy. “Trump beats Biden on the economy even right now!” he said. “This is going to be extremely difficult no matter what. It’s existential that we figure it out. In any of these economic scenarios Democrats are going to have to win the argument that our public health and economy are much worse off because of Donald Trump’s failure of leadership.”
The former Obama White House official said, “Even today when we are at over 20 million unemployed Trump gets high marks on the economy, so I can’t imagine what it looks like when things go in the other direction. I don’t think this is a challenge for the Biden campaign. This is the challenge for the Biden campaign. If they can’t figure this out they should all just go home.”
The Biden campaign seems to recognize the challenge. “The way that Biden talks about the economy is not just tied to the Covid crisis, it’s also about the things that Donald Trump has done to undermine working people since the day he took office,” said Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager. “But secondly, it’s also highly likely that under any economic circumstances in the fall, Trump is likely going to be the first modern president to preside over net job loss.”
Between now and Election Day, there will be five monthly jobs reports, which are released on the first Friday of every month. The June report, covering May, is likely to show another increase in unemployment. But after that, Furman predicts, if reopening continues apace, the next four reports could be blockbusters. “You could easily have 1 to 2 million jobs created a month in those four reports before November,” he said.
He added, “And then toward the end of October, we will get GDP growth for the third quarter, at an annualized rate, and it could be double-digit positive economic growth. So these will be the best jobs and growth numbers ever.”
Furman noted that there is one major obvious caveat: “If there’s a second wave of the virus and a really serious set of lockdowns, I wouldn’t expect to see this. But I think the most likely case is the one I just laid out.”
When Obama ran for reelection in 2012, during the recovery from the Great Recession, he was able to point out that the unemployment rate was dropping about 1 point every year. But in a V-shaped recovery it would be much faster. “The Trump argument will be he’s producing the fastest job growth and fastest economic growth in history. If he has any ability to do nuance he would say, ‘We are not there yet, reelect me to finish the job,’” Furman said. “The Biden argument will be the unemployment rate is still 12 percent and even with those millions of jobs we are still down 15 million jobs and the only way for this to be fixed is new economic policies.”
Austan Goolsbee, a predecessor to Furman as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama White House, said the recovery would be more like a reverse check mark, rather than a V, and that Biden and Democrats would need to point out that the explosive numbers predicted for the late summer and fall will not erase all of the damage.
“I view it as Trump left the door open and five rats came into the kitchen and you’re going to brag, ‘Look I got two of the rats out?’” Goolsbee said. “There’s a high risk you look completely out of touch if you still have double-digit unemployment rates.”
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who is close to Biden, said he’s been studying numerous economic forecasts and isn’t convinced a V-shaped rebound is certain. “It seems pretty unlikely to me that we’re going to have a really robust recovery in the next few months,” he said. “Of course, we all hope there will be. Frankly, no matter what the recovery looks like, I expect President Trump to either take credit for things he had nothing to do with or to avoid blame for things he helped cause.”
Furman is an economist, but he had some strategic advice for the Biden campaign. “Don’t make predictions that could be falsified. There are enough terrible things to say you don’t need to make exaggerated predictions,” he said. “The argument that we are in another Great Depression will look like it was overstated. Trump can say, ‘Two million deaths didn’t happen, Great Depression didn’t happen, we are making a lot of progress.’”
Last week, four Republican senators co-sponsored legislation “to let states approve and distribute diagnostic tests when the state or federal government has declared a public health emergency” because—in the words of their press release—“our federal bureaucracy simply has not moved fast enough during this crisis.” It was an explicit rebuke to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for botching COVID-19 testing and for standing in the way of state governments, universities, and private labs that were willing and able to do the job.
Implicitly, it was a shot from the president’s own party at the Trump administration’s incompetent handling of the pandemic. The senators could easily have broadened the targets of their bill; this year has seen the president, governors, and government officials of all types go out of the way to turn a health crisis into a larger catastrophe through bungling, malice, and overreach.
That the CDC dropped the ball is no secret. Early testing kits produced by the agency were contaminated by bad procedures and then bureaucratic delays hampered efforts to fix the problem. Amidst ample evidence of in-house incompetence, the feds then tried to make sure nobody else could show them up.
“Agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services not only failed to make early use of the hundreds of labs across the United States, they enforced regulatory roadblocks that prevented non-government labs from assisting,” CNN notedlast month.
Was the CDC’s incompetence and obstructionism a result of inadequate resources? Nope. “The CDC’s budget has ballooned from $590 million in 1987 to more than $8 billion last year. If the agency had grown with inflation since 1987, it would have a budget of about $1.3 billion today,” Reason‘s Eric Boehm reported. The agency has all the money it needs for good or ill—and it’s done ill in spades.
Perhaps inspired by the CDC’s example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also done its best to impede pandemic response by stealing medical supplies before they can reach hospitals and clinics. FEMA “is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic,” the Los Angeles Times reported back in April. Desperate state officials and medical providers turned to smuggling shipments to avoid federal hijacking.
The blustering, authoritarian, and confused tone set by the man in the White House may explain the problem. Trump uses much of his time in pandemic-related news briefings to snipe at political rivals—an analysis by Britain’s The Independent found he spent 27 times longer attacking enemies than expressing sympathy for victims of the virus. Trump also touts dubious miracle cures for COVID-19, going so far as to apparently self-medicate himself with hydroxychloroquine (a drug useful for treating malaria and other ailments, but with serious side effects and offering no proven benefit in the treatment of COVID-19).
The vast, powerful, and incredibly intrusive federal bureaucracy is headed by Trump, who also petulantly invokes the Defense Production Act to forcibly reshape the production and distribution of goods in ways that are already underway, or else that make no sense and threaten to do more harm than good. No wonder lower-ranking federal officials feel obliged to get in everybody else’s way. Federal seat-warmer see, federal seat-warmer do.
In an understandable search for a more-competent counterpart to the president, journalists and pundits have, less understandably, turned to state governors. In particular, they developed something of a shared crush on Andrew Cuomo. The New York governor and Democrat has become “the appointed darling to step into the ring and serve as pugilist against Trump in this crisis,” as DePauw University communications professor Jeffrey McCall put it. CNN even indulges cringe-worthy “interviews” of the governor by his brother that would be considered clumsy even at Pravda-style media operations.
But while many journalists may prefer Cuomo’s political affiliation and semi-coherent presentations over those of Trump, the governor has his own significant failings. To applaud Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic is to praise his personal approach to snatching medical supplies and his proven ability at killing granny.
When COVID-19 settled in, Cuomo threatened to strip ventilators and personal protective equipment from upstate hospitals and ship them to hard-hit New York City. Presented as an example of tough decision-making, the move—put off when upstaters pushed back hard—is better viewed as the governor taking care of city residents who vote for him at the expense of those in northern and western counties who don’t.
New Yorkers who won’t ever again vote for anybody include nursing home residents who died of COVID-19 as a result of the state’s arrogance-fueled venture into inadvertent biological warfare. “More than 4,500 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York’s already vulnerable nursing homes under a controversial state directive that was ultimately scrapped amid criticisms it was accelerating the nation’s deadliest outbreaks,” the AP reported last week.
That revelation prompted the governor to back off his earlier vow to investigate nursing home conduct and penalize those that had put the elderly at risk. After all, the investigation threatened to implicate its instigators—especially since nursing home operators had warned that his policy was deadly.
“Multiple states are considering adopting an order similar to what was issued in New York that requires every nursing home to admit hospital patients who have not been tested for COVID-19 and to admit patients who have tested positive,” cautioned the American Health Care Association on March 28. “This approach will introduce the highly contagious virus into more nursing homes. There will be more hospitalizations for nursing home residents who need ventilator care and ultimately, a higher number of deaths.”
Sure enough, as of May 23, close to 6,000 people in New York nursing homes were confirmed or presumed dead due to Covid-19, according to state figures—about one-fifth of the state’s total dead from the pandemic.
If Trump is a walking, talking disaster as executive leaders of crisis responses go, and if Cuomo offers only a more crowd-pleasing brand of bungling, where do we look for competence? As is often the case when leaders seem determined to guide their followers over a cliff, wisdom can best be found among those who reject such leadership and set out to do things on their own, in voluntary cooperation with others.
Helen Chu, director of the Seattle Flu Study, ignored federal rules to identify the presence of the novel coronavirus in Washington state.
Businesses and hobbyists donated personal protective equipment to medical providers to make up the shortfall (my son’s school used its otherwise idled 3D printers to produce hundreds of face shields for medical providers).
Individuals started social-distancing well before any government officials told them to do so—and then eased back into regular patterns of life according to their own judgment, ahead of official permission.
Companies, such as Apple and Google, raced to develop contact-tracing technology that couldn’t be used by governments for surveillance.
Parents and students explored learning at home when schools shut down—and many decided they like it and might continue in the future.
And so much more …
Throughout this pandemic, competent and responsible responses have come not from presidents and governors, but from people and organizations taking the initiative to help each other and themselves. Absent political officials to boss us around and lead us down blind alleys, it turns out that we do pretty well. We might do even better if presidents, governors, and other officials would stay out of the way.
Tuccille didn’t mention Wisconsin, which still has upwards of 700,000 Wisconsinites whose unemployment claims have still not been filled, despite various excuses from state government. (In the private sector, employees would have been immediately deployed into areas where a big jump in work is needed.) Wisconsin also has a governor who is 0 for 3 with the state and U.S. Supreme Court over the Safer at Home order and belated attempts to reschedule elections, perhaps in part because he’s getting bad legal advice.
Paul McCartney must like releasing albums in May. Today in 1971, he released his second post-Beatles album, “Ram,” which included his first post-Beatles number one single:
Birthdays today include Papa John Creech of the Jefferson Airplane:
Gladys Knight:
Two weeks ago today, Wisconsin signed its own death warrant. If the hysterical shrieking from both the Evers Administration and its allies in the media was to be believed, four conservative justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court effectively ended life as we know it in the state.
“We’re the Wild West,” Evers told MSNBC just hours after the Supreme Court struck down his “Safer at Home” order on May 13th and people flocked to the few bars that immediately reopened. “There is nothing that’s compelling people to do anything other than having chaos here.”
“This turns the state to chaos,” Evers said in a conference call with local reporters that same evening. “People will get sick. And the Republicans own the chaos.”
“Chaos it was,” The Washington Post dutifully echoed. “It’s a situation unlike any in the United States as the pandemic rages on. But most of all, Evers feared that the court’s order would cause the one thing he was trying to prevent: more death.”
More death, Wisconsin was repeatedly assured, was an absolute certainty.
“This action will inevitably lead to more sickness and more death,” insisted longtime Democratic attorney Michael Maistelman, who has occasionally represented Evers. “The court will have blood on their hands and the people of Wisconsin will not forget.”
“This is dangerous madness,” tweeted Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler. “No matter where you live, the nightmare Republicans inflict here may soon arrive at your door.”
So despondent was The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel over the devastation that the ruling was sure to cause that it wrote a rare editorial literally begging its readers to save us all.
“It’s up to us,” the paper wrote on May 14th, the day after the decision was published. “We can’t count on our elected representatives to work together for the public good in Wisconsin. They have proven themselves utterly incapable of compromising even in an emergency to come up with a sensible plan to protect the health of our most vulnerable friends, neighbors and family members.”
Unfortunately, without the protection of a lockdown order, Governor Evers predicted that there was simply nothing anyone could do.
“We’re going to have more cases,” he said. “We’re going to have more deaths. And it’s a sad occasion for the state. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am.”
Two weeks to the day after he spoke those words, none of the doomsday predictions have come true. Not a single one. Wisconsin hasn’t seen a sudden spike in cases, hospitalizations, intensive care visits, or deaths. Two weeks to the day after the Supreme Court reopened the state, Wisconsin is…perfectly fine.
Governor Evers might want to call it the Mild West.
On May 13th, the day of the Supreme Court ruling, Wisconsin saw 291 new cases of Coronavirus out of 4,363 tests for a positive test rate of 6.3%. Since the virus has an incubation period of between three and 14 days (with an average incubation of five days), the state would expect a massive spike in both positive tests and the positive test rate by today—two weeks after the state reopened—if the reopening was indeed responsible for such a spike.
There hasn’t been a spike in either. Five days after the court’s ruling on the 13th, the state saw just 144 positive tests even though there were far more total tests (4,828) done than on the 13th for a positive rate of 2.9% on May 18th.
Eight days later, on May 26th, the positive test rate was 3.6% (279 positive tests out of 7,495 total). Just twice has the positive rate hit or topped 8% since the Supreme Court’s ruling. By contrast, in April the positive test rate routinely hit 10% per day. Two weeks to the day after Wisconsin reopened, neither the number of new cases per day nor the percentage of positive tests has even come close to spiking.
Neither has the number of hospitalizations or ICU visits. In none of the state’s seven regions has there been even a tiny bump per day. Instead, the numbers have been remarkably consistent throughout the outbreak, suggesting that the reopening has had little to no effect at all on the hospitalization rate and thus the severity of the disease’s impact.
As if that wasn’t enough to disprove the hysterical predictions of death and destruction made just two weeks ago, the virus has somehow become less deadly since Wisconsin started to reopen.
In the 13 days since the Supreme Court’s ruling, there have been 96 Coronavirus deaths for an average of 7.3 per day. In the 13 days immediately preceding the Court’s ruling, there were 105 Coronavirus deaths for an average of 8.07 per day.
If Wisconsin signed its own death warrant when the Supreme Court struck down “Safer at Home,” then the signature must have been forged. In no way has the state become a more dangerous place since it reopened. The “chaos” that Evers repeatedly predicted has been proven to be as nonsensical a forecast as the death and destruction the Governor and his fellow Democrats insisted would result from an in-person election on April 7th.
“Tomorrow in Wisconsin, thousands will wake up and have to choose between exercising their right to vote and staying healthy and safe,” Evers said the day before the vote.
“This thing in Wisconsin was one of the most awful things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Democratic strategist James Carville said on Election Night. “Just the extent they’ll go to to hold on to power. It was all about one Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. They will kill people to stay in power, literally.”
They literally didn’t, and the numbers proved it. Two weeks after the election, the infection, hospitalization, and death numbers were nearly identical to the two weeks that preceded the in-person vote.
Two weeks after Wisconsin reopened, the numbers tell the same story: The hysterical predictions were just that. The Supreme Court didn’t infect the state; Wisconsinites didn’t die en masse because the government could no longer keep them locked in their homes.
And now they’re going to start wondering why they should ever be fooled by hysterical predictions of death and destruction again.
We’ll see what happens around June 8, when according to pandemic paranoia we should be inundated with COVID-19 cases from the lack-of-social-distancing Memorial Day weekend.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet argued for keeping Governor Evers’ “Safer at Home” order in place, but spent Memorial Day Weekend boating with friends in what would have been a violation of that order.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritkzer said he and his family have been spending time on their horse farm in Wisconsin, saying they’re doing an essential function.
According to the Chicago Tribune, some have called the travel a violation of his own stay-at-home order.
“I just will say we have a working farm. They’re there now. There are animals on that farm, that is an essential function to take care of animals at a farm, so that’s what they’re doing,” Pritzker said.
A spokesperson for the governor’s office said Pritzker and his family have been living in Chicago but have visited the farm in Racine.
The Governor said his wife and daughter were originally in Florida when the shelter-in-place order was issued there.
One wonders if Pritzker told Gov. Tony Evers he was planning on violating his home state’s lockdown to visit Wisconsin.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 