Government Response to Coronavirus 4: The Reality Show From Hell

[47of74]

As usual our idiot of a governor thinks we can pray to Jeeeeeeeeezus our way out of this crisis

Quote

The governor of Iowa signed a proclamation on Wednesday calling on Iowans to "unite in prayer" during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, according to the governor's office.

Gov. Kim Reynolds designated Thursday, April 9, 2020, as a "Day of Prayer" in response to the spread of COVID-19 in the state. Thursday is the first day of Passover, as well as the Christian holy day of Maundy Thursday.

Connie Ryan, executive director of the Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, issued a statement that said it was inappropriate for the governor's office to issue such a proclamation which only focused on a specific set of religious beliefs and practices.

“While many Iowans are people of faith who do pray as part of living out their faith beliefs, it is never the role of elected officials to promote any particular religion or any religious practice," Ryan said, in the statement. "The Governor should focus on the best practices in public health to ensure the safety and well-being of all Iowans, not the practices of any religion. Promoting religious practices is the role of faith leaders, not elected officials.”

 

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, 47of74 said:

As usual our idiot of a governor thinks we can pray to Jeeeeeeeeezus our way out of this crisis

 

"Hello, you've reached Jesus. I'm kinda busy right now protecting everyone from the 5G towers, so please leave a message. Thanks!"

[feministxtian]

Governor Sislak (D-NV) just issued another order, closing more businesses. We may stay relatively healthy, but we're all going stir crazy. As of right now, we're shut down thru 4/30 but I'm not counting down the days. We haven't peaked yet so I'm thinking this will be extended here in NV until sometime in May. 

[fraurosena]

If anyone needed more evidence of Bill Barr’s perfidy:

 

[Ozlsn]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

If anyone needed more evidence of Bill Barr’s perfidy:

 

WTAF is he trying to say? Adapt?? To what?

[fraurosena]

Update from Europe and around the world:

• Worldwide there are now more than 1.5 million confirmed cases and 87.000 corona-related deaths. There are confirmed cases in 192 countries.
  Most confirmed cases were reported in the US, Spain and Italy, who also report the largest amount of deaths.
• Germany was considering loosening their strict corona-measures after the Easter holidays if the trend of daily decreasing numbers of new confirmed cases continued. However, in the past three days the numbers are increasing again. Yesterday they reported 5000 new confirmed cases, bringing their total up to 108.200. The total number of corona related deaths increased by 246 up to 2100.
• It's expected that Britain's government will decide today that their shutdown should be continued for three more weeks.
  Rishi Sunak, the British Finance Minister has said that Boris Johnson's health is slowly getting better with each passing day. He's sitting up in bed and speaking to his doctors and nurses, according to Sunak.
• Brazilian authorities should confer with drug gangs and militias in the slums on how to contain the spread of the corona virus, according to Health Minister Mandetta. He said the government should be realistic about who controls the slums. "We need to understand that the authorities are absent in these locations and drug lords and militias rule there. We can only be effective and get them to help if we talk to them. They are people too, just like us."
• For a second day in a row the US have reported almost 2000 corona related deaths, bringing their total up to 14.695, passing Spains total number of reported corona deaths (14.555). To date, Italy still has the highest number: 17.669
  Employees in a Californian care home have all ceased working. Because nobody showed up for work for the second day in a row, dozens of residents had to be evacuated from the home, which is hit hard with the corona virus. 34 of the 84 residents and 5 employees tested positive. It's not known why the employees refused to show up.
• As a consequence of the pandemic, half a billion people are threatened with poverty all over the world, according to a new Oxfam Novib report. The fight against global poverty could be set back ten years, in some regions even thirty years. "Especially people in poor countries are being hit disproportionately hard because they mostly work in the informal economy and cannot fall back on social security safety nets," director Michel Servaes says. "Because of the strict lockdowns many people are in danger of losing their income."
• The French government has prolonged France's strict lockdown to April 15.
• There were 542 new corona deaths reported in Italy, down from 604 the day before. For the fifth day in a row the number of corona patients needing ICU care was down.
• The European Commission has proposed prolonging the ban of travel from outside the Union with an extra month. The travel ban does not apply to Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein, who are part of the Schengen-zone, nor does the ban apply to EU-citizens and their families, medical personnel, diplomats, international truckers or border personnel.
• For the first time the number of corona patients in the ICU's in the Netherlands has decreased from 1424 to 1408. This decrease is because there have been less hospitalisations of COVID19 patients.
• Spain is planning to ban foreign tourism this summer. Spaniards will be encouraged to holiday in their own country this year. 
• Indonesia has reported more than 2900 confirmed cases and 240 corona related deaths; half of which in Jarkarta. These numbers are relatively low in comparison to the number of inhabitants in the country. However, all the graveyards in Jakarta are busier than normal. There are two designated burial grounds for corona victims, where circa 20 people are buried each day.
  Even though Indonesia is in the top 5 of highest populations in the world, only 4 in 100.000 people is tested. The authorities are attempting to test more by purchasing new equipment, but it is still slow going. Jakarta's governor has been attempting to instate strict measures for weeks now. Only now has he had permission from the national government to actually maintain the measures: mosques will be closed, public transport will be shut down and people must stay at home as much as possible.
• Even though the total lockdown has been lifted in Wuhan, they are maintaining the emergency COVID19 hospitals in the city as a precautionary measure.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The daily recap from the WaPo: "What we learned from Wednesday’s White House coronavirus briefing"

Quote

The White House held its latest coronavirus task force briefing Wednesday.

Here’s what we learned.

1. Trump will ‘rely very heavily’ on experts before reopening the economy

President Trump has said repeatedly in recent days that we should be able to get past the virus “sooner rather than later” or “sooner than people think.”

“We’ll be sitting down with the professionals,” Trump said. “We’ll be sitting down with many different people and making a determination. And those meetings will start taking place fairly soon.”

But when asked about the process for reopening the economy, he indicated he’ll be deferential to his medical experts.

“I would rely very heavily on them,” he said.

He added: “We don’t want to go down — and then we can start going up if we’re not careful. So we have to be careful as far as distancing, social distancing and other things.”

2. Pompeo: ‘Not a time for retribution’ against China

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has arguably been more forceful than anybody in the administration when it comes to blaming China for the scale of the novel coronavirus outbreak and for a lack of transparency.

But when asked what should be done about it at Wednesday’s briefing, he said now is not the time to discuss that.

“This is not the time for retribution, but it is still the time for clarity and transparency,” Pompeo said. “We’re still working on this problem and there’s still data that these good people need so that they can perform their analysis of how to both develop therapeutics and a vaccine and to understand where this virus is. So every country — China included — every country needs to be transparent about what’s gone on in their country.”

Pompeo was also given a chance to weigh in on what should be done about the World Health Organization, whom Trump attacked extensively Tuesday. Pompeo, who earlier reaffirmed that the United States is “reevaluating” its funding, declined to say whether WHO leadership should change.

“This is not the time to be doing that kind of change,” he said. “There’ll be a lot of time to look back and see how the World Health Organization performed."

Trump continued his broadside against the WHO, noting it criticized his travel restrictions against China and claiming it had said in mid-January that there was no human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus. In fact, though, the WHO said at the time that there was “no clear evidence” yet of human-to-human transmission.

3. Fauci and Birx reject idea that death toll is inflated

Lead task force health experts Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx both rejected an increasingly popular theory on Fox News and elsewhere: that the number of coronavirus deaths are being inflated because people who are infected are actually dying of other things.

The theory has been promoted by Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Brit Hume and was a subject of a panel discussion on the network on Wednesday afternoon.

Birx was clear that if people have an underlying condition, it is exacerbated by the virus that causes the disease covid-19.

“So those individuals will have an underlying condition, but that underlying condition did not cause their acute death when it's related to a covid infection,” she said. “In fact, it's the opposite.”

Fauci then weighed in, warning against such “conspiracy theories.”

“You will always have conspiracy theories when you have a very challenging public health crises. They are nothing but distractions,” he said, adding: “I would just hope we just put those conspiracy stuff — and let somebody write a book about it later on. But not now.”

4. Trump is not sure if he was briefed on Navarro memos

Trump said Tuesday that he hadn’t seen in real time the memos written by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro in January and February offering dire predictions about the coronavirus, as Trump was downplaying the threat.

But he was asked Wednesday whether he was briefed on their contents, and he was less definitive.

“I don’t remember that,” Trump said. “I’ve now seen the memo. I saw it. Peter sends a lot of memos. I didn’t see the memo. … But no, I didn’t see the memo at the time, but I have seen it since.”

5. Pompeo says 50,000 have been repatriated

Pompeo began the briefing by announcing an effort to repatriate Americans from overseas that he said was on a scale “without parallel in our lifetime.” He said the State Department has brought back more than 50,000 people from more than 90 countries since the outbreak began.

Pompeo said there were several thousand people whom the State Department is still working to repatriate. He emphasized many of them were are away from airports, so it wasn’t just a matter of finding flights for them.

“We’re working on it,” Pompeo said. “We chip away at it every day.”

Pompeo emphasized that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to help other countries as well, so we can get the “global economy” back on track.

 

[Becky]

OK, I'm just spitballing here - - last week the administration announced that 100,000 - 200,000 could die just in the USA, even if we do the "social distance" thing perfectly.  That number is astounding, considering there have been fewer than 100,000 deaths worldwide up to this point. 

I suspect they are inflating those numbers, and can then claim that our illustrious leader is the reason we didn't have such an astronomical number of deaths.  I am not taking the virus lightly - this is a horrific public health crisis and the number of sick and dead is truly tragic, but do you think they are serious about the eventual death toll?  Or does anyone else smell a political ploy?  It would be truly terrible if they are inflating those predictions.  

[GreyhoundFan]

No, I would not accept that from a child.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Every time I think I can't be shocked by the crap in this administration, something else happens:

 

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good read: "As Trump’s failures mount, one governor sounds an ominous warning"

Spoiler

With coronavirus deaths in the U.S. rapidly approaching 15,000, we are now learning that the federal government’s national stockpile of medical supplies is almost depleted. Meanwhile, the failure to ramp up testing to the needed degree remains a “signature failure,” as the New York Times puts it.

One person who is well positioned to shed light on what all this means is Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington state. His state was an initial epicenter, but there are signs the curve is flattening, which means Inslee both has extensive experience of how federal failures hampered the response and is already contemplating what comes next.

In an interview, Inslee, a Democrat, shared fresh details on how President Trump’s lack of “urgency” is directly contributing to equipment shortages hobbling response efforts — and hinted at an alarming scenario ahead.

“We could use a stronger voice out of the White House to mobilize this nation,” Inslee told me. “We need a giant leap for mankind now, not just small steps.”

Inslee discussed difficulties in procuring equipment that are inexplicable and infuriating. As dogged reporting has shown, the federal government’s handling of medical supply chains has left states and health-care providers scrambling in a state of confusion and without badly needed supplies.

As many experts have noted — and as Inslee reiterated — this is in part a direct outgrowth of Trump’s failure to fully deploy the Defense Production Act to marshal private sector resources.

The inability to procure needed supplies for testing remains a major problem for Washington state, Inslee noted, but the specifics of why this is the case are notable.

One major problem is that the federal government’s haphazard approach has created a vast mismatch in availability among disparate parts needed to make testing possible.

For instance, Inslee noted, the state has unused testing capacity right now in large part because it lacks one thing: the swabs needed to take samples.

“It seems ridiculous that the United States can’t produce enough swabs to solve this problem,” Inslee told me. “I have 50 or 60 long-term care facilities that have infections in them that we literally have not been able to do the testing we want of remaining residents and staff.”

Inslee said his state might have finally found a supplier to meet this need — for now — but he added that the shortage of another part (such as vials) will surely become a problem in the very near term.

The overarching issue, Inslee told me, is “an inadequate supply chain” that’s “grossly inadequate to the demand.”

A month of lost time

Inslee said this problem is directly traceable to “at least a month” of lost time, because “the president was downplaying this problem and had not engaged the full force of the federal government.”

“We should have been a month ahead on the supply chain compared to where we are,” Inslee said.

In another unsettling example, Inslee noted that he recently asked the CEO of a private company that is manufacturing the transport medium for tests if it could ramp up production with double shifts.

“She said, ‘Well, maybe — we have to find a way to finance that,’” Inslee told me. This surprised him, because it seems like something the federal government should already be communicating with such manufacturers about.

“I would have thought the federal government would have talked to every single manufacturer in the nation who either makes this, or could make this, by this point, and said, ‘Look, we’re going to finance a double shift,’” Inslee told me. “That hasn’t happened.”

These problems appear to flow directly from a kind of schizophrenic approach adopted by the federal government. Trump initially told states they were mostly on their own, which led to a bidding war among states seeking supplies from a range of manufacturers and suppliers. Now the feds have sought to exert control over distribution, but it appears piecemeal and partial.

In Inslee’s telling, this has resulted in a double whammy: a shortage of supplies and a lack of coordination of availability of parts. This could be mitigated by a much more robust and coordinated response via the Defense Production Act.

“We still haven’t had the federal government use all its resources to really mobilize the full force of the manufacturing base of the United States,” Inslee told me.

An ominous warning

Along these lines, Inslee warned of another looming problem.

As coronavirus cases recede in the coming months, if anything, more testing will be required. That’s because when people reassemble, it will be urgent to jump on cases in which people again show symptoms, and test them, to avoid a second wave.

“As we want to reopen our schools, as we want to reopen our industries, the amount of testing we need will actually increase,” Inslee said. “In the second wave, we have to have testing, a resource base, and a contact-tracing base that is so much more scaled up than right now. It’s an enormous challenge.”

Inslee stressed that many federal government officials are working very hard and that in many cases, needed equipment has been delivered, for which he is thankful. But he reiterated his call for Trump to exercise “urgency to really mobilize this whole industrial supply chain.”

“What we need now, what won World War II, was a quartermaster,” Inslee said. “That’s how you win wars. That’s what we need — a quartermaster.”

Recently, Trump was directly confronted with glaring evidence of this. His own administration released a report documenting urgent shortages faced by hospital administrators around the country, who offered constructive suggestions on how the federal government can help save American lives.

In response, Trump lashed out in a rage, and pretended those problems are simply nonexistent.

Needless to say, that’s not the quartermaster we need.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This chaps my hide. Never forget that Pence is just as evil as Twitler:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I think the only people who are going to forget are those idiots who believe in Twitler:

I write that because Twitler's followers are quick to forget all the deaths we have from gun violence.

[fraurosena]

It really and truly is all about the ratings for him, isn't it? He believes it's an indication of how much he is liked. See, people like me. Lots of people really like me! Why aren't you reporting about all those people liking me? They like me better than Football, they like me better than the Bachelor Finale! They like me, they like me, they like me!

What a sad, insecure little man.

 

[Audrey2]

3 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

It really and truly is all about the ratings for him, isn't it? He believes it's an indication of how much he is liked. See, people like me. Lots of people really like me! Why aren't you reporting about all those people liking me? They like me better than Football, they like me better than the Bachelor Finale! They like me, they like me, they like me!

What a sad, insecure little man.

 

Yeah, he's the Jill Rodrigues of US politics, complete with bad hair, over the top make up, expectations that others must blindly follow their whims, and a complete lack of self-awareness.

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus, another investigation to disgustingly suck up to Trump. What a waste of taxpayer money. Money that would be better spent combatting the pandemic.

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

2 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

. Money that would be better spent combatting the pandemic.

To someone with empathy, of course.

To Trump the only legitimate use of money is to feed his ego or his vices.

[WiseGirl]

Connecticut governor just announced all nonessential businesses and schools to remain closed until May 20th (for now). 

[clueliss]

TY for the Connecticut Update because my company's corporate HQ is there.

Governor of Kansas Claps Back - in court.  (reminder - The governor is a dem.  she wants churches closed on Easter Sunday for safety.  The republican KSleg wants them open)

 

[Ali]

Governor Whitmer, aka "that woman from Michigan," extended the stay at home order until April 30th.

She asked people with more than one residence to choose one by tomorrow and stay there for the time being. Right wingers are throwing a fit over her infringing on their rights. It has been spreading to northern Michigan because people are traveling. What is so hard about using common sense to slow the spread?

She also placed limits on store capacity and said nonessentials need to be roped off. This all would not be necessary if people would just use their brains. Right wingers are screaming about socialism and saying she should be impeached.

Michigan is number three for cases and deaths. Clearly something needs to be done. 

https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/michigan-gov-gretchen-whitmer-extends-coronavirus-stay-at-home-order-through-april-30.html

[Howl]

My city has closed off all river fronts, parks, trails and paths starting this evening, and for the duration of the Easter weekend, because people seem to be unable to stop themselves from congregating.  Not a bad thing that the weather has gone from being gorgeous to a forecast  with thunderstorms both Saturday and Sunday, which will help people stay at home! 

Also, to stay in the Easter spirit, The Lincoln Project (disaffected ex GOP Never Trumpers) crucifies Trump in this ad.  Apparently, it's pissing off MAGAts to the Nth degree and getting on their very last nerve: 

 

 

Edited April 9, 2020 by Howl

[Howl]

10 hours ago, Becky said:

I suspect they are inflating those numbers, and can then claim that our illustrious leader is the reason we didn't have such an astronomical number of deaths.  I am not taking the virus lightly - this is a horrific public health crisis and the number of sick and dead is truly tragic, but do you think they are serious about the eventual death toll?  Or does anyone else smell a political ploy?  It would be truly terrible if they are inflating those predictions.  

This is life or death for the GOP & Trump.  There. Is. No. Bottom.  It's all strategy ratfuckery from here on out. 

[JMarie]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

It really and truly is all about the ratings for him, isn't it? He believes it's an indication of how much he is liked. See, people like me. Lots of people really like me! Why aren't you reporting about all those people liking me? They like me better than Football, they like me better than the Bachelor Finale! They like me, they like me, they like me!

What a sad, insecure little man.

 

If only there was someone else who could do those daily press briefings.  Someone whose job it is to interact with the press, like maybe a press secretary.

[clueliss]

The presser has high ratings because of fauci.  
 

also the press secretary I think was shuttled to melania’s staff and they just hired a new (younger, blonder) one