Just retire them

The COVID epidemic is wearing us all out. This morning's headline reads: Nearly 1,500 U.S. coronavirus deaths mark deadliest day of summer. We are still cursed with a president and his regime flailing about, thinking denial can somehow offer him a route to re-election.

What follows is an edited excerpt from a Twitter thread by Andy Slavitt, the Obama-era tech guru and health policy wonk, on the progress of the pandemic and our descent into hell. He's mad and he's right to be. Let's stay mad.

COVID Update August 13: It's long past time our government stopped learning on the job.

We’re 7 months and a lot of learnings into how COVID works & in so many places, every lesson must be relearned. May, June, and July were months spent training southern governors on things they should have learned from April from NY. Confident & ignorant are a bad combination. ...

The governor of TX at first didn’t think masks were needed. Was sure businesses could open. Wouldn’t take input. Then he learned on the job. It took a while so Abbott started to pull back a bit. Things flattened out a little.

But he stopped enforcing mask orders. Ignored the border. Bragged about how well businesses are doing. Now, TX has over 500,000 cases, 1400 deaths this week & almost 10,000 overall, high positive tests, high hospitalizations. Limited access to tests.

Yet he’s gung-ho to open the schools. Why? Because he’s studied the data. Oh I make myself laugh.

Ah, no. Because he’s literal. And he hasn’t seen a problem in a schools yet.

Georgia school districts that opened under order are already closing. 100,000 kids were infected the last weeks of July & studies now show that asymptomatic people shed the virus equally. [Texas Governor] Abbott has to learn himself. ...
 
Yet in the White House and a number of states eager for quick fixes, they are talking not so quietly about why people don’t need to worry about strong NPIs [nonpharmaceutical interventions] like masks.

Because of this thing they don’t actually understand. ... Policymakers don’t get hired to gamble with our lives. ... The cost of being wrong is high. The benefit is being right is almost none (unless you count bragging on Twitter which is no small thing) ...

People who run for office do it with a variety of motivations. Not enough of them thought through whether they would like to manage a global pandemic on their sure stepping stone to the presidency. Turns out not all can.
 
Politicians who don’t believe in government are a particular joy in a crisis. ... A belief that government can’t do anything right is #CancelGovernment. Cancel regulations, cut taxes, stop enforcing consumer protections, invest in nothing.

It’s quite a premise to run for office on. But what if you actually have to do something. ... When there’s a situation like a global pandemic and so many aren’t up for the job, I propose letting these leaders out of their jobs. At the first sign of insufficient attention to human life. Or inability to muster a basic response. Maybe when we vote in the future, we’ll put competency, accountability, decency & a commitment to making government work higher on the list.

Working around some of these people is getting old. Retiring them will be better.

There are just 82 days until the election -- and however many anxious days after it will require to enforce the popular repudiation these Republican ghouls are bringing down on themselves. I bet on the sanity of the people. Let's make sure we are heard.