Government Response to Coronavirus 4: The Reality Show From Hell

[Audrey2]

Thank you, @Ozlsn and @clueliss. I have been thinking along the same lines and have written and erased many posts saying I wish we could just isolate areas that want to open so badly and let them know that they're not going to get extra support and must find medical professionals who believe as they do to work in their hospitals and serve the people who get sick, not the medical professionals who know that this is a really big deal and we need to be careful.

They also need to be the ones who work it on the front line stores and I don't think the stores need to offer PPEs to these employees by choice.

Edited April 17, 2020 by Audrey2

[HerNameIsBuffy]

6 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

There is part of me going "look, if you guys want to have pro-covid-19 protests then have at it. It will invalidate your medical insurance though."

I'd agree wholeheartedly, except these assholes will go to the grocery stores at some point and spread it to those working there, and the kids and elderly they have in their homes, not to mention the health care workers and support staff who will die from over flooding of hospitals.  If we could make the covid-19 virus bind to selfishness and idiocy I'd be all for it.

Edited April 17, 2020 by HerNameIsBuffy

[clueliss]

Yup - this totally figures.  #AHHHHHKansas (an old travel & tourism slogan) #kansasasbigotedasyouthink (from a bumper sticker back in the era of Kansas Bigger than you think travel & tourism slogan) - 

 

Quote

The lawsuit was filed by First Baptist Church in Dodge City and Pastor Steve Ormord and Calvary Baptist Church in Junction City and Pastor Aaron Harris. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting read: "My Wild, Totally Surreal Experience Covering a Trump Coronavirus Briefing"

Spoiler

“Your forehead, please,” said the woman in a mask.

She was a medical technician sitting in a tent outside the northwest gate of the White House in the otherwise deserted section of Pennsylvania Avenue that is usually crammed with tourists in April.

Donald Trump’s daily 5 p.m. show — officially described on the White House schedule as a press briefing by Members of the Coronavirus Task Force — was scheduled to start. It is at this surreal moment in American politics the only news event that really matters. The entire country is sitting at home looking for expert guidance. On some days, we get it. Early on when Dr. Anthony Fauci first explained the idea behind social distancing or when Dr. Deborah Birx introduced us all to the concept of bending the curve, the briefings were crucial— perhaps the closest thing in modern times to one of FDR's fireside chats during the Depression and World War II, a news briefing from government officials who your life actually depended on.

But they quickly descended into Trumpian theater. Useful information from the doctors became mixed in with long rants from Trump on peripheral issues. The relationship between Trump and the task force members themselves, especially Fauci, who became a media hero, gradually started to dominate the sessions, as if Trump couldn’t help but turn the crisis into a reality show about himself and his staff and his peculiar obsessions of the moment.

This week, especially Monday’s event, the briefings reached the zenith of showcasing unusual behavior, peripheral issues and petty intrigue. On Monday, Trump played a propaganda video, angrily attacked reporters sitting a few feet away, declared himself to have “total authority,” and pressed officials — some more reluctantly (Fauci) than others (Mike Pence) — to stand before the cameras and deliver obsequious praise while he hovered nearby.

The briefings have sent Trump’s political opponents, particularly Joe Biden, who continues to be quarantined at home in Delaware, scrambling for ways to gain attention. And they have created a crisis in the news media, as networks and online publications struggle with how to cover them and whether it’s appropriate to play the briefings, which are larded with erroneous information and campaign-like speechifying, live.

Watching these events on television doesn’t capture how surreal they really are, so on Monday and Wednesday, I ventured to the White House to see them up close.

It sometimes takes 20-30 minutes to drive the two miles from where I live in Washington to the White House in the late afternoon, but on Monday it took about five. It was the first time I’d been outside my home for a reporting assignment since covering Super Tuesday in California in early March, and it was jarring to stand so close to another human being who wasn’t a member of my quarantine family or the clerk at the local deli, liquor store, and 7-Eleven, three of the only places I’ve been for the past few weeks.

I leaned forward as if I were receiving Communion and she reached out and swiped the soft pad of an electronic thermometer across my forehead. It made a satisfying beep.

“You’re clear.”

“What’s my temperature?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to say.”

There was no line of reporters to enter the White House grounds, as there often is on a day when Trump holds a news conference. Pebble Beach, the row of TV standup locations along the driveway to the West Wing, was eerily quiet. A White House staffer wielding another thermometer greeted me and other reporters as we arrived outside the door to the briefing room.

“How have you been feeling?” she asked. It took me a moment to realize she was asking whether I had any symptoms and not offering a quick therapy session. I passed the second test and another staffer gave me a sticker with the date on it to wear as verification.

The briefing room and the warren of office spaces behind and below it are famously cramped, and reporters who show up there every day to cover this story are clearly at a higher risk for exposure than their colleagues who work safely from home. Recently a photojournalist for one of the networks had shown potential Covid-19 symptoms, so one day last week every reporter who came to the White House received a Coronavirus test. Since tests are still hard to come by in the Washington area, several White House reporters not on the beat that day told me they were disappointed they weren’t among the test-takers.

If you’ve been cooped up at home for weeks, going into a semi-normal working environment is disorienting. Most reporters are still not wearing masks, and it was surprising how casually — and closely — people mingled. As it almost always is, the briefing was delayed and I retreated outside to wait. When an old friend joined me, I awkwardly told him he was standing too close.

There’s an important journalistic debate raging about whether these briefings should be shown live by cable networks and online platforms and whether reporters should attend them at all. As the sessions have become more propagandistic and an outlet for misinformation, the argument, at least for TV networks, for abstaining from live coverage has become stronger. But it would be absurd to boycott the briefings. Before these daily events, the White House briefing room was essentially shuttered. Now there’s daily access to the president and his top aides that’s enormously revealing.

That’s not to say that Trump doesn’t exploit his ability to command the nation’s attention. Of course he does, as Monday’s event made clear.

There are only 14 reporters allowed in the briefing room. They sit in a scattered pattern among the seven rows — not 6 feet apart as recommended, but also not on top of each other as they normally would be seated.

On most days, members of the task force, like Fauci and Birx, are forced to wait silently before the cameras until Trump and Pence appear. When Trump emerged from behind a sliding blue door, he stood in front of the lectern, scanned the room, which was silent, and said, “Thank you very much, everyone.” It was unclear whom he was thanking or what he was thanking them for, unless he wanted viewers at home to believe he had been greeted with applause.

Figuring out what to ask Trump is complicated. There are a few general categories. There are the news-of-the-day questions that tend to dominate briefings and daily White House coverage.

There are broader, more philosophical questions that might elicit more interesting responses but also risk being a waste of time. “My highly unprofessional instinct in those situations is to ask a question from left field that will get him talking, with the purpose of getting access to another part of his ‘mind,’” one nonreporter advised me. “Not a policy question, but something like: Can you talk a bit about what it's like to be president during this horror? Do you share the fear that many Americans feel about their vulnerability? What haunts you the most? Do you think there are emergencies in the history of our country when politics has to take a back seat, and is this one of them?”

Then there are questions that present Trump with something he said previously that contradicts something he is currently saying. But Trump does this so often and he is so casual about simply dismissing his previous remarks, that as journalistically important as it is to point out these reversals, they rarely elicit a noteworthy response from him.

Finally, there are the questions that respond in the moment to what the president is talking about. These are often the most important ones. Reporters can’t really prepare for them but, instead, need to pay close attention and be nimble enough to realize that whatever preplanned questions they might have had need to be abandoned.

Monday’s briefing was dominated by this last category. The previous day, Trump had retweeted someone who used a #firefauci hashtag and so he ushered the doctor to the podium to express his regret about making some comments that suggested the president was at fault for not taking some mitigation steps earlier. Trump, who looks about a foot taller than Fauci, stood close by and scowled as the doctor recanted. In previous White Houses, this kind of palace intrigue only played out in leaked and reconstructed accounts to the press. In the Trump White House, the president brings the inter-personnel drama to Twitter and to his briefings for all to witness.

Trump, who had clearly been stewing all weekend about investigative reports that said he botched the early response to the epidemic, then started the briefing by playing a crude video that mocked reporters and political opponents for not taking the coronavirus seriously enough. He then attacked two reporters and launched into a riff about how he had “total authority” to command governors to act according to his wishes, a position he reversed at Thursday’s briefing.

Trump is a creature of habit and he tends to return to reporters with whom he’s familiar again and again. He has a few obvious moves as he calls on people. If he wants a fiery exchange that will create drama, he’ll pick on someone from CNN or CBS. If he wants to turn the temperature down or if he’s grown weary of difficult questions, he’ll return to one of the wire reporters who prefer less confrontational process questions.

If you’re new to the room, it can take a while to get his attention. A wise colleague recommended that the best way to get called on is to keep your focus on the president when other members of the task force are speaking. Because Trump craves attention, he can find it uncomfortable when the entire room is watching one of his aides instead of him. I kept putting my hand up but was struggling to get called on. Finally, there was a break when one of the doctors spoke. I trained my eyes on Trump instead of the person at the lectern. He scanned the room and noticed, just as I had been advised he would. I made a motion and mouthed something to indicate he should call on me next. He nodded and we seemed to have a deal. Sure enough, he held to it.

At Wednesday’s briefing, I watched an Australian journalist do an even more exaggerated version of the same tactic. He gave Trump a big thumb’s up. It easily secured him the next question.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is so true. "Rural areas think they’re the coronavirus exception. They’re not."

Spoiler

Under fire for her refusal to impose a statewide lockdown order, South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem impatiently told reporters, “South Dakota is not New York City, and our sense of personal responsibility, our resiliency and our already sparse population density put us in a great position to manage this virus.”

It’s a common enough sentiment on the right, and often stated less politely; Sean Davis of the Federalist complained in late March that locking down the country amounted to saying “states and cities that have had no problem stopping the spread must nonetheless be shut down indefinitely because New York City is a filthy, disease-ridden dystopia run by an incompetent communist.”

This attitude engenders understandable resentment among beleaguered New Yorkers. But there is something to the rural exceptionalism story, some reason to believe that covid-19 might spread more slowly in rural areas than it does in dense cities. People who live in large, well-ventilated homes with more than one room per person, shop in airy grocery stores with mile-wide lanes, and drive to work in a private vehicle rather than crowding onto public transit with hundreds of strangers might well have fewer opportunities for exposure than your typical New Yorker does.

That said, a slow-motion disaster is still a disaster. And human beings are geniuses at inventing false reasons to feel secure.

At every stage of this pandemic, people have come up with dozens of plausible reasons that the areas overwhelmed by covid-19 were different from their own, happily still secure neighborhoods: more air pollution or smokers, more mass transit or elevators, more cheek-kissing or multi-generational homes. Then as the virus moved on, they came up with reasons that that new place, too, was full of people who are Not Like Us.

Some of those reasons were no doubt true. They just weren’t true enough. It turns out that as long as you have human lungs, the virus likes your flavor just fine, no matter where you live. And unless we take strenuous measures to stop it, eventually the virus will spread to where you live and do its best to kill you.

While rural areas may not have a mass transit system for the virus to move through, they have plenty of churches, high school football games and Rotary pancake breakfasts. As we have already seen, without lockdowns, those can do the job just fine. South Dakota, Nebraska and Arkansas, three states that had looked relatively immune, are all now dealing with serious outbreaks.

In fact, rural areas have some distinct disadvantages compared with big cities. In the large cities where covid-19 first took hold, it took the handful of initial cases months to double and redouble until the sheer number of infections started to overwhelm hospitals. But in a county of 20,000, a disease that is doubling every three to five days would take less than two months to infect 100 percent of the population. By the time doctors even recognized that the disease had arrived in the area, it might well already be too late to stop the disaster.

Those areas don’t have so many of the professional jobs that allow people to work from home, so once the disease does get going, it will be very hard to stamp out. Smithfield, a major pork processor, just had to shut down its South Dakota plant because the facility had become the center of an outbreak, a shutdown that meaningfully impacted not just the local economy but also the country’s supply of pork.

The hospital systems in rural areas have nothing like the capacity they would need to cope with that sort of outbreak on a wider scale. More than half of all counties in the United States have no intensive care beds. Yet the citizens of those counties tend to be older and sicker than people in urban areas, meaning that if they contract covid-19, they are more likely to need intensive care.

So one can tell a very different story about the nationwide lockdowns, almost the opposite of the one in which less dense areas are being forced to #canceleverything in order to protect New York. In that story, New York’s experience is protecting them by serving as an early warning while they still have time to avoid that city’s fate — or possibly an even worse one — by shutting down now, and then building up the test-trace-quarantine infrastructure that can keep their region covid-free even when restrictions are lifted.

But for this story to have its happy ending, they’ll have to abandon that other narrative and face the unpleasant reality that New Yorkers have belatedly acknowledged: No person or place is really that different from you, and no law of nature will keep this virus in far-off places, killing people you’ve never met.

 

[clueliss]

Indeed - South Dakota is not NYC - and yet they have one of the largest traceable Covid19 clusters in the country.

[GreyhoundFan]

Kayleigh is already spinning away. I'm glad Ted tells it like it is:

 

[Ali]

I saw pictures of minor children at the protest in Michigan that were far to young to understand why they were there. Also, many brought their guns with them. There idiots are not just putting themselves at risk.

[GreyhoundFan]

Every part of this administration is corrupt:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

There is no end to the things the mango moron doesn't know:

 

[fraurosena]

If only there were some leading entity on the federal level that was able to ensure the States have all the items they need to actually do their testing... 

 

I agree. Let's get rid of the covidiots there.

 

Oh dear. Someone forgot to give him his meds today. He's on a real LIBERATING rampage.

 

[fraurosena]

Ermagerd, there's another one! Is he going to do a 'Liberate' tweet for every Dem state?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"FBI charges ex-medical company VP after shipments of masks, gloves and gowns delayed"

Spoiler

Federal authorities allege that a recently fired executive at a Georgia medical device packaging company stalled much-needed shipments of personal protective equipment to health-care providers after he sneaked into his former employer’s computer system and edited records.

Christopher Dobbins, who an online résumé lists as the former vice president of finance at Stradis Healthcare, was charged in federal court in Atlanta this week with making a computer intrusion that authorities allege had significant ramifications in the fight against the coronavirus. The Justice Department announced the charges Thursday.

After Dobbins edited 115,000 records and deleted more than 2,300, the company’s shipments of personal protective equipment — such as gloves, masks and gowns — had to be delayed for between 24 and 72 hours, according to an FBI affidavit. Health-care workers have warned for weeks that such equipment needed in the treatment of people with covid-19, the disease the virus causes, is in short supply, and federal and state governments have scrambled to locate sources of such goods.

“This defendant allegedly disrupted the delivery of personal protective equipment in the middle of a global pandemic,” Atlanta U.S. Attorney Byung J. Pak said in a statement announcing the case. “Scarce medical supplies should go to the healthcare workers and hospitals that need them during the pandemic. The Department of Justice is dedicated to moving quickly on cases like this to bring criminal opportunists to justice and protect the public during these challenging times.”

Dobbins did not return a phone and email message seeking comment Thursday.

According to the FBI affidavit, Stradis Healthcare — which is not named, but is identifiable because the document points to Dobbins’s online résumé — first detected the intrusion March 29, when it had trouble trying to print labels for shipments. The company conducted its own investigation, identifying Dobbins as the suspect, and contacted the FBI earlier this month, according to the affidavit.

Dobbins, according to the affidavit, had been hired in August 2016 and was integral in setting up some of Stradis’s computer systems — even having the responsibility of adding and removing users. But last year, according to the affidavit, Dobbins had conflicts with another department and was disciplined twice.

He was fired March 2 and received his last severance check three days before the intrusion was detected, according to the affidavit. In a news release, the Justice Department said Dobbins’s access to the computer system was cut off when he was fired, but he allegedly used a fake account he had made while he was still employed to log on.

It is unclear how many shipments were affected.

The company said in a news release shipping had “returned to full strength.”

“Of course we are disappointed about a former employee who caused the company immeasurable internal harm and caused some temporary delays in our shipping system but our focus is completely consumed in working to serve the medical community and the public during this critical time,” Stradis CEO and co-founder Jeff Jacobs said in the release.

I wish there was a way to charge him with attempted manslaughter since his actions may have killed people.

[fraurosena]

Ah, so this is apparently why Trump's knickers are in a knot today. 

I wonder if he'll do a 'Liberate' tweet for New York -- if he hasn't already, that is.

[GreyhoundFan]

@fraurosena, this longer clip is even better. He lets loose on Twitler and the Rs for their idiocy.

The WaPo had this to say about it:

Quote

Former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden might want to use the Cuomo monologue in an ad or two. Cuomo nicely encapsulated the problem: Trump’s dereliction led to unnecessary deaths and required a total shutdown of most of the economy; now he does not want to help solve the key problem with reopening — namely the lack of testing. This is a president who speaks loudly and carries a tiny stick.

 

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

These tweets nicely sum up the "open the country up!" dialog.

 

Edited April 17, 2020 by Howl

[Cartmann99]

Texas governor begins easing restrictions to reopen economy

Quote

AUSTIN (AP) — Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday began a slow reopening of Texas with orders that allow retail shops to sell items curbside, lets visitors return to state parks and puts doctors back in operating rooms after they were banned for weeks from performing nonessential surgeries.

The eased restrictions in Texas, which Abbott said will be phased in starting next week, came a day after President Donald Trump gave governors a road map for recovering from the economic pain of the coronavirus pandemic. Abbott said he would announce another phase of reopening on April 27 but did not immediately lay out criteria or what kind of businesses would be allowed to resume.

Universities and schools for more than 5 million Texas public school students, however, won’t reopen before summer, and Abbott said broader stay-at-home orders designed to increase social distancing remain in effect through the end of the month.

“Step by step, we will open up Texas,” Abbott said during a televised announcement from the Texas Capitol.

At least 17,300 people in Texas have tested positive for the virus, and more than 400 have died. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death.

Testing in Texas has lagged near the bottom in the U.S. Abbott said a core component of gradually lifting restrictions would be increased testing but did not commit to a number or threshold, adding that by “late April early May” the state would have additional testing capacity, bolstered by the private sector.

The White House guidelines recommend that states pass checkpoints that look at new cases, testing and surveillance data over the prior 14 days before advancing from one phase to another.

Governors of both parties have made clear they will move at their own pace.

Abbott is facing sharpened political attacks from both sides of the aisle. Conservatives are lining up behind Trump and pressuring Abbott to unleash businesses as Texas, one of the largest economies in the world, is struggling to handle a crush of more than 1 million people who have filed for unemployment since the crisis began. Democrats, who have a shot at retaking the the Texas House in November for the first time in 20 years, are ratcheting up their criticism of Texas’ testing capacity and a stretched supply of protective equipment for medical workers.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who has begun wearing a mask during his daily televised news briefings, is still calling for more testing and said this week that talk of reopening the nation’s fourth-largest city was premature.

“It’s pretty clear from our city that they don’t believe it’s the time to open up businesses, because not enough testing has been done to know who’s vulnerable,” said Democrat state Rep. Garnet Coleman, a Houston lawmaker. “They would prefer that we wait until we have a little more information before the business goes back to where it normally.”

Only recent have some Texas cities rolled out programs for anyone to get tested, regardless of whether they are symptomatic. In Austin, public health officials on Friday announced a plan to boost testing by as much as 2,000 per week with an online application that allows people to bypass a referral from a doctor.

For those playing along at home, the population of Texas is around 30 million, and here's a screenshot of where the Texas stats are as of this morning:

 

 

 

 

Spoiler

 I've decided to stop reading my local newspaper's Facebook page. The commenters there are swinging back and forth between acting like semi-decent human beings on the stories about new cases and deaths in our area and then posting comments about how we should go ahead and open everything back up. For the sake of my mental health, I'll just read the articles on the newspaper's website where nobody comments anymore.

 

[WiseGirl]

Not sure how I missed this whole Dr. Oz idiocy. Nice to know that he's okay with students and staff dying. Sure he "misspoke" 45 appointed him to something. Btw I apologize if it is a duplicate.

https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/dr-oz-misspoke-after-backing-schools-reopening-amid-coronavirus/

[HerNameIsBuffy]

9 minutes ago, WiseGirl said:

Not sure how I missed this whole Dr. Oz idiocy. Nice to know that he's okay with students and staff dying. Sure he "misspoke" 45 appointed him to something. Btw I apologize if it is a duplicate.

https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/dr-oz-misspoke-after-backing-schools-reopening-amid-coronavirus/

I just saw that on Anderson Cooper.  They also discussed how (Dr.) Phil is shouting about how more people die of cigarettes, pools, car accidents, every year and we don't shut down the country for that.   I can't recall if it was he or Oz who compared it to AIDS and how we didn't shut down for that.

They are nothing but lit cigarettes being tossed onto the pile of oily rags that are Trumpers.  

Btw Phil - you're not a doctor.

 

[WiseGirl]

@HerNameIsBuffy thanks for the additional information. He's such a weasel. 

Now on to someone I agree with.

 

 

Edited April 17, 2020 by WiseGirl
Add text

[Ozlsn]

23 minutes ago, WiseGirl said:

@HerNameIsBuffy thanks for the additional information. He's such a weasel. 

Now on to someone I agree with.

Rioting or worse. But he doesn't care as long as everyone is still focused on him.

33 minutes ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

They also discussed how (Dr.) Phil is shouting about how more people die of cigarettes, pools, car accidents, every year and we don't shut down the country for that.   I can't recall if it was he or Oz who compared it to AIDS and how we didn't shut down for that.

So they are basically ignorant as hell. Good to have that confirmed. If it's not an issue they're welcome to volunteer on the covid-19 wards, and, in Dr Phil's case at least, free up some actual medical staff. 

In Australia The Australian newspaper has started gearing up for their gaslighting campaign already with an article claiming that the shut down was an hysterical overreaction to a problem, and that the economy is  now in tatters due to an ideologically motivated response. Which possibly means that Rupert has fallen out with Morrison and is starting the campaign to replace him already.  Honestly, I just can't with this bullshit.

[Smee]

14 minutes ago, Ozlsn said:

In Australia The Australian newspaper has started gearing up for their gaslighting campaign already with an article claiming that the shut down was an hysterical overreaction to a problem, and that the economy is  now in tatters due to an ideologically motivated response. Which possibly means that Rupert has fallen out with Morrison and is starting the campaign to replace him already.  Honestly, I just can't with this bullshit.

Oh FFS. Rupert’s probably pissed he doesn’t qualify for jobkeeper. 

[Ozlsn]

3 minutes ago, Smee said:

Oh FFS. Rupert’s probably pissed he doesn’t qualify for jobkeeper. 

But... his business was struggling so badly it paid almost no tax!! How could he fail to qualify?! /s