A new "don't ask don't tell" policy?

A long distance friend and I were comparing notes about living in lockdown today and realized that we share a difference from many of our acquaintances. She lived in lower Manhattan and I lived in San Francisco in the early 1980s. We've lived through the early phase of a terrible epidemic all around us before -- a new affliction whose origin and transmission was barely understood; a potent stew of information and misinformation that roused fears and irrational hopes ; and too many deaths. That was AIDS/HIV for a subset of the U.S. population.

And our institutions failed that crisis badly for years. We've seen that before too.

So when I run across a crazy story along these lines, it fits in an existing mental file:

Coronavirus survivors banned from joining the military A past COVID-19 diagnosis is a no-go for processing, according to a recently released MEPCOM memo circulating on Twitter.

“During the medical history interview or examination, a history of COVID-19, confirmed by either a laboratory test or a clinician diagnosis, is permanently disqualifying ...” the memo reads.

Military Times

One day later, a confusing update seemed to step back from setting a blanket policy. Only recruits who had been hospitalized (no clear definition) with a COVID-19 diagnosis were to be excluded.

Adam Weinstein observes that this bit of biased fancy footwork is guaranteed to produce further harm to people looking for a job in the military.

the military is providing volunteers with a powerful incentive not to get tested for exposure to the coronavirus. According to the guidance, if an enlistee shows up at MEPS with Covid-19 symptoms, “but without confirmation by either a laboratory test or a clinician diagnosis,” they “will be allowed to return to the MEPS to continue processing” after a 14-day quarantine. ...

Just before its coronavirus-ban memo came to light, in fact, the military proudly unveiled its first Space Force recruiting commercial. “Some people look to the stars and ask: ‘What if?’” the ad’s narrator says. “Our job is to have an answer.” For now, if you’ve tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the answer is “No.”

I'm no fan of anyone joining the military, but given that young people are entering the workforce in a time of unparalleled unemployment, the notion that the military would set up an entrance hurdle which has no basis but prejudice seems grossly unfair. And stupid. And self-defeating. Anyone who has seen how poorly the U.S. government has treated its own in this emergency is likely to think twice about signing on for more. They might even know what happened to Navy Captain Crozier and his infected aircraft carrier crew.

Way to go San Francisco

Went out Walking San Francisco this afternoon in a neighborhood plastered with these notices about free testing for the coronavirus. Erudite Partner reports that these were also all over Valencia Street and Noe Valley. But the flyers I saw were probably more usefully placed: they were all over Silver Terrace on the edge of the Bayview, as working class a neighborhood as we still have in this glittering city. Good work, whoever organized the distribution.

Campaign tactic from a basement office

Joe Biden was not who I had in mind for a Democratic presidential candidate. Far from it. But he (or his campaign) in doing a pretty good job of truth telling via Twitter in this situation when he's reduced to campaigning like Calvin Coolidge -- locked up in his home. Twitter is only one medium, but Biden's contributions are pithy. I encourage following @Joe Biden

Real presidents lead. Reality TV presidents don’t. pic.twitter.com/2lMwnRXLcG

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 7, 2020

The virus comes for California Pacific Islanders

The Mission district mass COVID-19 tests I wrote about yesterday turned up that 5 percent among the infected slice of my neighbors are "Asian or Pacific Islander." I'm always curious what actual ethnic or country origins are hidden under that sweeping but uninformative label.

Reporting by CalMatters presents one possible answer. The arrival of coronavirus has shown that, within the omnibus category, too many Pacific Islanders in California reside in a "public health blind spot."

As of Sunday, the novel coronavirus had infected Pacific Islanders at a rate more than twice that of the state as a whole — and killed them at a rate 2.6 times higher, the highest rates of any racial or ethnic group.

While the numbers are still small — California reported 416 known cases and 20 deaths among Pacific Islanders — they reveal a growing threat in a community that suffers disproportionately high rates of chronic illness, accustomed to living in multigenerational households and work higher-risk jobs such as food service, transportation and health care that can’t be done from home.

Activist leaders have been asking for better counting and more educational focus on this small community for a long time -- without notable success.

“Given the spread like fire of this pandemic, the urgency has been magnified,” [Natalie] Ah Soon [of the Regional Pacific Islander Task Force] said.

Statewide, only a handful of counties disaggregate Pacific Islander data. Many don’t report race or ethnicity at all. For example, Santa Clara combines data for Pacific Islanders with Asians. In Sacramento County, Pacific Islanders are counted as “Other.”

“We are not currently tailoring any outreach to this community because of the very small percentage it makes up of the population and impact,” said Sacramento spokeswoman Janna Haynes. Pacific Islanders comprise 1.7% of the county population.

These days, the community has a champion who has been there himself. Dr. Raynald Samoa is an endocrinologist at a cancer research hospital in Los Angeles. In late March, he fell ill with COVID19. Having recovered, he is seeking to educate his community, especially traditionalists for whom social distancing violates habits and customs.

"Jesus sent me to medical school to tell you to stay home."

Let's pitch in for 1800 hand washing stations in rural Nicaragua

For thirty years, El Porvenir has been helping Nicaraguans help themselves dig communal wells, build sustainable latrines, and teach sanitation and health in schools. Who might be better placed to provide the materials and support for home hand washing facilities in the midst of the pandemic?

We've all learned that frequent hand washing can help keep us safe. Let's aid Nicaraguan families with the buckets and soap they need to do the same. This is cheap, easy, and a little goes a long way.

We've partnered with One Days Wages to match some of the costs. You can contribute at that link -- or directly through El Porvenir.

Close to home ... I try to grasp what the data means

Parts of the Mission neighborhood, my home, have just become one of the more thoroughly coronavirus-tested spots in the country. The full results aren't published yet, but UC San Francisco has summarized initial results from two days work to test a little over 4000 residents. The Chron has the story here. Mission Local has what I find the clearest account.

Of the people tested, 1.8 percent (73 individuals) showed the markers of a current infection with the virus; over half of those, 53 percent, had no symptoms of disease -- and very likely didn't know they had it and might be spreading it. Ninety-five percent of those with the infection were Latinx, though Latinx people were only 44 percent of the tested population. No whites or Blacks tested positive though these groups together amounted to 40 percent of the sample. The remaining 5 percent of positive cases are called "Asian" -- perhaps Filipinos?

Starkly, seventy-five percent of those currently infected were male.

It seems pretty clear: at present in San Francisco, those getting COVID-19 are men going out of necessity every day to earn a living. The Mission has many old multi-flat buildings within which rooms are rented out to single laborers, sometimes several guys jammed together. These rooms come with padlocks for each door and shared bathrooms, minimal kitchen facilities. These facilities are just a small step above living on the street; they house people who do the dirtiest work of the city. And these folks are getting infected.

What about families? Are less women currently infected because they've been needed to stop work outside the home to care for children no longer in school, leaving the bread-winning to the men? I don't know.

At the moment, San Francisco seems a largely safe harbor from the virus if you don't have to go out to encounter significant numbers of other residents every day.

There's so much we don't know yet about the patterns of life that underlie the infection data. We may learn more later this month when the information derived from blood taken in the testing has been analyzed. Maybe even more significant numbers of Mission residents will show antibodies that reveal they were infected six weeks ago and have passed through and out of the infection storm. Not terribly likely, but possible. That's what shelter-in-place is all about.

And someday, soon-ish, more people will start going out again. We aren't going to stay away from each other forever. We just won't. Trump's protesting goons are fools tempting Darwinian retribution, but a broader community life will resume. And then there will be more opportunities for everyone who emerges from sheltering to encounter the virus. In history, societies have restored themselves after plagues when most people had developed some immunity the hard way. I sure hope we get a vaccine, and soon. But it is sinking in that this is just one phase and we have a long way, and very likely a lot more sickness, to go.

For the record: there's mourning in America

The Lincoln Project is a bunch of Republican campaign consultants funded by a few big money former GOPers who don't think the country can survive four more years of Donald Trump. They certainly are doing a good job of making their point. If you haven't seen this, do run the one-minute ad.

It's an historical truism that when societies are falling to fascist rule, disunity among the opponents of the thugs makes the success of the bad guys more likely. People who neither like nor trust each other have to work together to save a semi-decent, quasi-democratic polity.

A couple of years ago, I laid out some bottom lines for who I could imagine working alongside against the Trump regime. I think they have held up pretty well:

• Allies in the struggle both have to be able to say that white supremacy, white entitlement, Eurocentric racism has been a defining reality throughout the history of this country. We needn't agree on exactly how that works, and what we must do about it, but we have to allow the premise and live from there.

• Allies have to be able to say that an unregulated free market is a prescription for individual and planetary death. Again, we don't have to agree on exactly what curbs are needed, but we both have to acknowledge some are.

The work of the Lincoln Project seems to me to meet that criteria.

All together now: let's kick the GOPer clowns into the dustbin of history in November.

Wuhan is not a virus

"Instead of only remembering my hometown as the 'the place where COVID originated', I want people to respect Wuhan as a city with beautiful history, culture, and people."

San Francisco artist Laura Gao

That sure looks tasty. Yum.

Prescient? Wishful thinking?

Observed on the windows of an apparently unoccupied office tower on a deserted street in this moment of sheltering in place.

For the record: We're Number One!

“Our death totals,” Trump said Thursday, “our numbers, per million people, are really very, very strong. We’re very proud of the job we’ve done.”

Not to be forgotten.

It turns out that East Africa may be a coronavirus success story!

This was not what I expected to discover when I indulged my curiosity about how the pandemic was playing out in Africa. Though at opposite ends of the continent, Egypt and South Africa have major outbreaks of COVID-19, some of the countries in between are succeeding in keeping the pandemic under control.

Edward Carpenter and Charli Carpenter suggest in the Washington Post that East Africa might have "a few things to teach the United States." Yes, much of this area suffers from wide-spread poverty, few medical resources, civil wars, and weak governments -- but also, these societies been here before, struggling to contain cholera, Ebola, and HIV. They know what to do when the enemy is disease.

These writers (a U.S. military officer and a U. Mass-Amherst political scientist) lay out several strands in East Africa's successful pandemic preparedness. Governments took advantage of the warning time watching Chinese, European, and U.S. stumbles, implementing science-based planning, and putting out popularly intelligible explanations of what needed to be done.

[T]heir governments took early preventive measures. ... the presidents of South Sudan, Kenya and Uganda issued detailed proclamations and decreed strong measures to delay the arrival of it and suppress its spread — in most cases before any cases had been detected.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was particularly eloquent and detail-oriented, explaining what the virus was, how it was transmitted and who was at risk, before laying out a plan to systematically close schools, churches and borders, to begin social distancing, and to put a hold on weddings and funerals. ... Notably, all of these measures were rolled out in a controlled manner without political posturing, and with reasonable time built in to set the guidelines in motion. ...

Closed borders, cessation of international air traffic, and shutting down big public gatherings destroyed the tourist trade, but governments successfully made the case that health was more to be prized than the economies.

According to the two Carpenters, past experience with pandemics sunk in deeply.

The United States has also had its share of pandemics: yellow fever, the 1918 flu, HIV-AIDS and SARS. The difference may be a willingness to put lessons learned into action. ...

In this country, we've shown ourselves all too willing to forget, underfund, and rush on to the next new thing.

One of the lessons learned in East Africa from past pandemics has been that international cooperation matters.

These countries make up the membership of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). The organization met March 30 by video-teleconference and resolved to jointly formulate a regional response, establish an emergency fund and mobilize support from the global community and from IGAD medical professionals in the diaspora.

The crisis has even caused some prominent local leaders to double down on a global approach to economic policy, with Museveni saying: “I have warned our people to stop talking like the selfish foreigners by trying to stop the little we have being exported to other African countries. We can keep a bit for ourselves, but we shall share with the others whatever we have.”

Whether all this preparedness will continue to moderate the impact of COVID-19 remains to be seen.

A friend who lives in the region very much concurs with this picture of the impact. She sees a government which has plenty of problems nonetheless doing what has to be done.

The outreach is very widespread re masks etc. and there are loudspeakers on vehicles going up and down the streets lecturing people about distancing. I think they are using a Cuban-designed house to house method in the urban areas with clusters. They also have special hospitals set up. I think Ebola preparedness has made a difference.

These are emerging nations which can still get things done, even amid very difficult pre-existing challenges.

It does seem worth asking, how did the U.S. lose that get-up-and-go capacity? The answers, and there are certainly many, pre-date Trump though he's very good at making the bad much worse. Might this be what happens as empire decays? So it seems.

Campaign mechanics: how candidates got it done without public appearances

Watching Joe Biden cooped up in his basement studio this campaign season has been demoralizing -- but it did remind me that aspirants running for president didn't always trot around the country tooting their horns. The modern campaign with its rallies and "press availabilities" is a 20th century invention. For the previous 120 some years of the United States, aspiring presidents were expected to hole up and hope their party was doing the work of turning out the vote for them. That was being "presidential."

Happily, Dr. Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has written How to Run for President in the Middle of a Pandemic which vividly describes the evolution that got us to today. It's informative and fun. He points out that until national sanitation conditions improved considerably after 1900, wading into crowds to shake hands was dangerous. Interacting with constituents, or anyone, could be lethal:

Every chief executive elected in the 1840s most likely died of a communicable disease within that decade: William Henry Harrison from typhoid in 1841, James K. Polk from cholera in 1849, Zachary Taylor from viral gastroenteritis in 1850.

Yet candidates did seek elective office and they counted on mobilized citizens to win for them.

The fundamental question of campaigning is who performs the labor. In the 19th century, ordinary citizens did incredible amounts of work for their parties, while nominees sat idle. ...

As it happens, I'm well aware of this because I have a couple of artifacts from 19th century campaigns that exemplify the story. Two of my great grandfathers (unrelated to each other) were early enthusiasts of the new anti-slavery, pro-industrial development Republican Party in the 1850s. And both were ardent boosters of Abraham Lincoln's 1860 campaign for the presidency. What did that mean? It meant they worked to bring out his vote in their own cities, speaking and writing and lining up support from voters. And what was Lincoln doing, the summer and fall of 1860? Writing hundreds of letters to his supporters all around the country, helping them with messages, suggesting how to consolidate support, and thanking them for their efforts.

Two of these missives have come down in the family. One (not pictured) concerns how to describe the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) in 1787 accurately in advocacy speeches. In the copy of a letter pictured here, written to a Buffalo businessman who later was elected to Congress, Lincoln approves the recipient's efforts to consolidate support within a fractious party. This apparently required some shoring up.

The more conditions change, the more some campaign fundamentals remain the same.

Here we go again, inflating enemies

If this NY Times headline gives you the shivers, it just proves you were a conscious human in the run up in 2002-3 to the Iraq war. Our "leaders" are at it again, ginning up enemies for fun and profit -- then to try to grab the oil; now to try to save Trump's sorry ass from the whupping that voters aggrieved about dead grandmothers and lost paychecks are going to give him in November.

And as in 2003, too many Democrats are suckers for making China the designated enemy of the day. Come on Joe Biden -- you fell for non-existent weapons of mass destruction last time. This time, can you just recognize that natural disasters happen, that animal bugs sometimes jump to humans?

Sure, China did a lousy job controlling the epidemic at first -- but neither Europe nor the USA has anything to brag about. China is often a bad actor in the world, oppressing its Muslim minority and repressing its ethnic citizens. But picking a dumb fight will only make bad worse -- there and here. And again, we've got nothing to crow about as Trump dumps international agreements on nukes and climate that he obviously neither read nor understood.

This image seems to fit Trump's apparent decision to declare the COVID-19 emergency over:

Another sort of medical hero

In a news clip about how U.S. doctors and nurses are having compensation cut by hospitals whose business model depends on procedures currently cancelled or postponed because of COVID-19, an aghast British Broadcasting gave Dr. Jane Jenab the last word.

"It's criminal that these people are having their hours and their pay slashed at a time when they are risking their lives, when it's the most dangerous time of our careers to be coming in to work every day and when really they should be receiving something like hazard pay," says Dr Jane Jenab.

Dr Jenab is a physician in emergency medicine in Denver, Colorado. To her, the problem has become clear.

"One of the biggest issues in US medicine today is that it has become a business. In the past, that was not the case," says Dr Jenab.

"They tend to run very lean with these hospitals, with these large corporate medical groups because honestly they are much more concerned about profit than their patients," she says, clearly impassioned.

Dr Jenab says she feels the abrupt loss of income suffered by medical staff is just one systemic problem in US private healthcare that has been thrown into sharp relief by the coronavirus crisis.

"One of the primary conversations that we're having at the moment [as doctors in the US] is when this is all over, how do we make real and lasting change for our profession?" she says.

"It's hard not to realize how drastically we need to return the focus of medicine away from business and back to caring for our patients."

She's right, of course. It takes guts to speak out against the system that provides your livelihood. She's got guts.

Jane is one of my longtime comrades on the Clydesdale Virtual Racing [Running, Jogging, Stumbling] Team. We've been doing this virtual thing, sharing our joys and struggles, for decades. So proud to know her.

So I started wondering about Africa ...

It's hard to stop raging and mourning the 60,000 or so excess deaths this country has seen in the pandemic, so many more than might have happened if our political system had generated leaders who would heed scientists.

And then I find myself thinking of the many places in the world even less equipped than we are to respond to a novel lethal virus. Big thinker Ezra Klein interviewed Bill Gates, the Microsoft engineering brainiac and now capitalist health philanthropist, and he's having the same thought, equipped with a lot more information. The entire interview is worth listening to.

So I dug around a bit. The Mail & Guardian from South Africa reports that the developing situation might have been worse.

At the World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) African headquarters in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, staff members have been quietly impressed with how most African countries have responded to the pandemic. Although resources are scarce, the majority of leaders have taken difficult, proactive decisions to contain the spread of Covid-19, and are listening carefully to scientists and public health experts.

Most, but not all.

There is a short list of countries that the WHO is worried about. Insiders say this list includes Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Eritrea. Madagascar, South Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe are also countries of concern. The list is topped by Tanzania.

Since I have a good friend in Tanzania, I inquired about what she is seeing. Her family is holed up in a rural area; they are fine and feeling reasonably secure. But also, she retired from the public health field and what she's seen of the local response has been encouraging. Schools are closed; people are sheltering insofar as they can. She sees the danger in crowded cities like Dar es Salaam. She pointed me to African Arguments, an English language publication which offers a variety of perspectives on the continent.

And there I came upon this:
One size fits all? Why lockdowns might not be Africa’s best bet.

Many governments in Africa have also imposed lockdowns to deal with the pandemic. Yet these countries have radically different age demographics to those in Asia and Europe. Take two extremes. In Japan, 40% of people are over 55, and 28% are over 65. In Uganda, the equivalent figures are 5% and 2%. In Japan, 13% of the population is made of up children under 14. In Uganda, this figure is 48%.

These different age demographics are very important. Mortality rates for coronavirus start to increase for people aged 55 and higher. Meanwhile, young people are statistically highly unlikely to suffer severe symptoms. This means that in countries with a lower proportion of old people, the relative benefits of lockdown are more limited and are more likely to be outweighed by the downsides. ...

I'm not qualified to opine on this thesis, but I'm sure a lot of better informed people are thinking about it.

Wondering about Africa led me to a paper and thread of comments about the prevalence of COVID-19 infection among people living with HIV, a vast percentage of the population in parts of the continent including particularly South Africa. Dr. Josep M. Llibre reported from Spain at the 2020 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. Contrary to the fears and expectations of so many of us ...

In Spain, we have sadly surpassed 100,000 cases of COVID-19 at the time of this writing (April 1, 2020), with a mortality rate of 8.9% among those diagnosed. Quite unexpectedly, we have seen that PLWH [People Living With HIV] are not at increased risk of acquiring COVID-19 or of progressing to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) once infected, across the 3 risk classes defined above. For reasons that are as yet unknown, it appears that their risk may even be lower than that of the general population.

The doctor answers questions from international medical colleagues making similar observations in the comments. The whole is absolutely worth reading.

It's easy to go down an internet rabbit hole during this lockdown -- but this one felt worth the time.

I'm going shopping this morning ...

so I thought I'd throw up this. It's extremely clear about how the grocery supply chain is disrupted by the coronavirus and our shutdown. The food system isn't designed to function in these conditions.

Neither are we.

We acquired some of those #10 cans of tomatoes from Costco. Turns out everything is going to be tomato soup for awhile.

"The essential and life-sustaining purpose of front-line workers ..."

Here's Fred Clark's story of working in a Big Box warehouse -- a "home improvement center" -- located in an east coast exurb where COVID-19 is all around -- but not (yet) within his immediate home.

First, in February, long before the virus was known to have arrived in the USA, masks and other protective equipment flew out the door. Then, the cleaning supply section which he is responsible for stocking was stripped of anything containing bleach. Next all the toilet paper was gone.

And then, in March, it was here. Most businesses and restaurants were closed. Many of the contractors who provide the backbone of our business were suddenly idled. But we were deemed an “essential” and “life-sustaining” business, and so we were staying open.

That first week was really disturbing. The place was packed. We’re in a relatively affluent area and it seemed like all of the people who suddenly found they didn’t have to go to the office decided to go shopping instead, heading out to the only stores that were still open. We had little paper badges we pinned on our aprons, politely asking customers to respect a 6-foot social distancing from us and from one another, but in that first week almost nobody was respecting that. (We asked if we’d be allowed to wear badges that instead read “Step the #@$% back.” But no.)

We sold out of paint that first week. It seemed that people suddenly stuck at home staring at their walls decided it’d be the perfect time to change the color of those walls, and so our paint desk and our paint associates got mobbed. They built a kind of fort or buffer zone out of those famous five-gallon plastic buckets we sell — four high and three deep all the way around the counter where customers pressed up against one another, leaning in over each other over the buckets. It was bonkers. Like something out of a George Romero zombie movie.

Gradually, management cooperated with workers to better control the flow of potential infection. Hours were shortened; masks of a sort provided; plastic shields held back clamoring customers at the checkstands. Much of the store's business transitioned to curb side pick up of online orders assembled by staff. Workers are probably less endangered, though not necessarily more respected, than they were when all this started.

With me living here, going to and from the Big Box where everybody from everywhere is still rubbing shoulders every day, I feel like I’m endangering the people I live with. That’s not cool. We’re getting a small (and fiercely conditional) hazard-pay bonus, and they’ve upped OT pay, but that doesn’t erase the anxiety we’re all feeling about our families and our co-workers.

Like Nancy, for instance. She’s my plant lady. She looks exactly like the retired librarian that she is and she knows more about the flowers and herbs and vegetables we have for sale than the folks from the nursery that supplies them. Or Frank, the 80-something guy who’s worked in the electrical department forever, shrugged off cancer and a stroke, and still packs down more stock than most people half his age. I’m very fond of both of them, and very worried every time I see them in the building.

Or think of any of the other grizzled old semi-retirees we’ve got working in our store. Many of them are Fox-addled old right-wingers convinced by their non-news news diets that this is all just an over-hyped flu being blown out of proportion to make their favorite president look bad, but that doesn’t keep me from being horribly worried about all of them. (Workers 65-and-up are getting a small additional bonus, but that feels a bit like one of those Colonial Penn policies to cover funeral expenses.)

Not surprisingly, Clark wonders why his store is considered "essential." So do I, though I find that freedom to browse a hardware store or even a Lowe's or Home Depot is something I yearn for if we ever get out of this. I don't expect that to be soon for me; I expect older people will still be told to stay in even if some others can resume more "normal" activity.

Here's how Clark has come to understand why his work might be thought essential:

Just like the supermarkets are still open not just for milk, but for chocolate milk too, why shouldn’t we continue selling unnecessary, discretionary things like mulch and grass seed? And doesn’t it make it easier to maintain this isolation, make it more likely that people will mostly stay home, if they’re at least able to buy what they need to tackle those projects around the house they’ve suddenly got time to do? Maybe that new patio furniture set I sold yesterday will be the thing that makes quarantine bearable for the folks who bought it and therefore the thing that keeps them at home where they need to be during the weeks or months ahead?

The least those of us who can stay home can do is thank these workers -- and have their backs if they ever organize to take on the retail behemoths.

Enjoy it all.

For the record: The office of the president is vacant

This was written before Toddler Trump suggested we inject ourselves with bleach. And it's still accurate. It's Kevin Drum's summary of what he concluded from a month of Trump's raging press conferences:

Let’s review our president’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic:

• He has no plan for mass testing.

• He has already let everyone know he’s unenthusiastic about masks.

• He wants to “liberate” states from stay-at-home orders.

• He wants to open up non-essential businesses as soon as possible.

• He appears to have no particular opinion about social distancing, school closings, or large gatherings.

In other words, he literally has no concrete response to the pandemic at all, aside from closing our borders and passing along damaging fictions about vaccines and folk remedies. ...

David Von Drehle summarizes our plight:

We are launched on a great experiment. Can this union of states, this republic of shopkeepers, this democratic experiment, this mecca of individual initiative, meet this crisis as one people when our leader is out to lunch?

... The captain and his barmy crew have put us to sea in a lifeboat. We have no choice but to reach shore without them. Let’s keep paddling.

On our current trajectory, we're one of the largest and richest failed states in human history. Or not, if we decide we can do better starting in November.

Unforgettable

And it's up to us to make sure it stays unforgettable. It's a question of survival.

Friday cat blogging

Morty is no more.

Over the last couple of weeks, his multiple infirmities seemed to compound and he withered away. When he could no longer walk nor eat, we accepted it was time to let him go. He lived eight good, affectionate, years with us -- and we reciprocated.

Thanks to the SPCA for their kindness to us in this necessary passage. We are heart-broken.

Friday cat blogging will be on hiatus for awhile.