We’ve known since March that the pandemic is dangerous and would spread without drastic action and strong leadership. And we’ve known for 30 years that Trump is a fraud and a weakling. (As a native New Yorker, I can attest to the knowledge.)
So the idea that the floundering Trump campaign will suddenly find its inner competency and leadership is a joke. We know this because they are spending more time trying to figure out a new nickname for Uncle Joe than working on alleviating pain, suffering, and death.
Well, guess what? From the White House perspective, it ain’t gonna work.
The idea that states would “tough it out” is absurd. The virus doesn’t care about politics and isn’t going to cooperate in opening the economy. But it apparently does matter whether or not you believe in science.
NY Times:
Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.
The virus has infiltrated Sunday services, church meetings and youth camps. More than 650 cases have been linked to reopened religious facilities.
No one could have predicted this. Okay, okay, everyone predicted this.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump is in deep trouble. His own allies are privately admitting why.
CNN reports that Trump allies and top Republicans are “only now coming to the realization” that mask-wearing will be key to containing the coronavirus’s resurgence. With cases rampaging once again, White House officials are “discussing taking a more active role in encouraging masks.”
Now gaze upon this, and try not to slam your head violently into the nearest wall:
The bungled response has caused grave damage to the President’s political outlook — with his reluctance on masks only deepening the impression that Trump is not taking the pandemic seriously. Many of Trump’s closest allies now say in private that wearing a mask in public could help him appear more attuned to the crisis.
They fear his failure to do so — and to encourage his supporters to follow suit — could threaten the economic recovery Trump is counting on to fuel his reelection, because further outbreaks could roll back the reopenings he desperately needs to have a chance in November.
This is not just an admission that Trump’s depraved refusal to take the coronavirus seriously continues undermining his reelection hopes. It’s also an admission that the story Trump has been telling about our current moment has it entirely backward.
In short, Trump’s allies are admitting what numerous experts have said for months: That in order to seriously get back on track to economic recovery, we have to tame the virus first. And they’re admitting that this is a key reason he’s in trouble.
Also, I remember when being an open racist disqualified you from running for office, at least where I live. I am even old enough to remember when it didn't.
WaPo:
States mandate masks, begin to shut down again as coronavirus cases soar and hospitalizations rise
The pandemic map of the United States burned bright red Monday, with the number of new coronavirus infections during the first six days of July nearing 300,000 as more states and cities moved to reimpose shutdown orders.
After an Independence Day weekend that attracted large crowds to fireworks displays and produced scenes of Americans drinking and partying without masks, health officials warned of hospitals running out of space and infection spreading rampantly. The United States is “still knee deep in the first wave” of the pandemic, Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday….
Despite President Trump’s claim that 99 percent of coronavirus cases are “harmless,” Arizona and Nevada have reported their highest numbers of coronavirus-related hospitalizations in recent days. The seven-day averages in 12 states hit new highs, with the biggest increases in West Virginia, Tennessee and Montana. The country’s rolling seven-day average of daily new cases hit a record high Monday — the 28th record-setting day in a row.
In Arizona, 89 percent of the state’s intensive care unit beds were full Monday morning, the state’s Department of Health announced, as the recently hard-hit state surpassed 100,000 cases.
In Miami-Dade County, authorities reversed course on a reopening plan, issuing an emergency order that shut down gyms, party venues and restaurants, with exceptions for takeout and delivery. That order will go into effect Wednesday. Florida has seen its caseload soar past 10,000 per day and 200,000 overall.
Nicholas Grossman/Bulwark:
Trump’s Presidency Is About to Enter Chapter 11
As the walls close in on him, what will Trump do?
Because states run elections, voter suppression isn’t something the president can do by himself, so he’s working to encourage it. There are the usual techniques of purging voter rolls, shrinking voting times, and closing polling places in more urban, less white, more Democratic areas.
But Trump is fixated on vote by mail.
The pandemic created more challenges for voting. Mail-in ballots offer a straightforward solution, but solving it is clearly not the president’s goal…
But Trump’s problem is that these sort of electoral shenanigans only pay off at the margins. Maybe they can swing a closely-divided state, but they can’t overcome the kind of 5- and 7-point deficits Trump is seeing in most battleground state polls.
Which means he’d need to do something next-level, like changing vote totals, suspending the election, or refusing to leave after a certified loss. And those would be extremely difficult.
Dylan Scott/Vox:
Covid-19 cases are rising, but deaths are falling. What’s going on?
By the time coronavirus deaths start rising again, it’s already too late
The contradiction between these two curves — case numbers sloping upward, death counts downward — is the primary reason some people are agitating to accelerate, not slow down, reopening in the face of these new coronavirus spikes.
The most important thing to understand is that this is actually to be expected. There is a long lag — as long as six weeks, experts told me — between when a person gets infected and when their death would be reported in the official tally.
“Why aren’t today’s deaths trending in the same way today’s cases are trending? That’s completely not the way to think about it,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. “Today’s cases represent infections that probably happened a week or two ago. Today’s deaths represent cases that were diagnosed possibly up to a month ago, so infections that were up to six weeks ago or more.”
“Some people do get infected and die quickly, but the majority of people who die, it takes a while,” Murray continued. “It’s not a matter of a one-week lag between cases and deaths. We expect something more on the order of a four-, five-, six-week lag.”
As Whet Moser wrote for the Covid Tracking Project last week, the recent spikes in case counts really took off around June 18 and 19. So we would not expect them to show up in the death data yet.
Explained in the thread, it means early detection that doesn’t change the outcome will lengthen time to an observed event. So with increased testing, milder cases, etc., you have to wait longer to see what number of deaths come from it.
Tim Miller/Rolling Stone:
What 9 GOP Campaign Consultants Really Think About Republicans’ Chances in November
The mood in MAGA-land: “Every shred of evidence points to a likely ass kicking”
What I found in their answers was one part Stockholm Syndrome, one part survival instinct. They all may not love the president, but most share his loathing for his enemies on the left, in the media, and the apostate Never Trump Republicans with a passion that engenders an alliance with the president, if not a kinship. And even among those who don’t share the tribalistic hatreds, they perceive a political reality driven by base voters and the president’s shitposting that simply does not allow for dissent.
As one put it: “There are two options, you can be on this hell ship or you can be in the water drowning.”
So I give you the view from the U.S.S Hellship, first the political state of play, and then the psychological.
The above is a must read.
Dave A Hopkins/Honest Graft:
Were Democratic Voters Right About Biden's Electability?
There are still four months to go in the campaign, which is still plenty of time for the prevailing dynamic to change. Republicans have become concerned that Biden's status as a elderly white man who isn't a socialist means that the familiar playbook of accusing Democrats of supporting left-wing extremism or revolutionary social change won't work as well against him as it would have against other potential nominees. But Biden's to-be-announced running mate will be a woman, probably a woman of color, and quite possibly a woman of color with a more liberal record than his. It's likely that she will wind up serving as the target of these attacks, with Biden himself portrayed by the Trump campaign as too hapless and mentally impaired to prevent her from imposing her "radical" agenda on the nation if elected. Just because Biden won the Democratic nomination by promising to transcend divisions of race, gender, and ideology doesn't mean that the fall campaign won't once again be dominated by these highly-charged subjects.
Juliette Kayyem/Atlantic
Reopening Schools Was Just an Afterthought
Americans found out the hard way that education is essential infrastructure.
Schools do not have a simple on-off switch. To reopen schools will not just take a lot of money. Classroom layouts, buildings, policies, schedules, extracurricular activities, teacher and staff assignments, and even curricula must all be altered to minimize the risk of coronavirus transmission. Stakeholders—including teachers’ unions, scared parents, and the colleges and universities that will someday enroll a portion of the 50 million students in the nation’s public K–12 schools—all have interests, some not easily avoided or ignored by a governor. Assigning a young, healthy high-school math teacher to substitute for a second-grade reading teacher with chronic health conditions—or inviting idle recent college graduates to sign on as teaching assistants—might sound easy on paper; in reality, the regulations meant to ensure that adults in classrooms are appropriately trained and vetted to work with children are also impediments to making rapid personnel moves in a crisis. Without clear direction and substantial financial support from the state or federal agencies, the easiest course for school administrators is to say nothing. According to a survey in mid-June, 94 percent of K–12 superintendents weren’t ready to announce when or how their schools would reopen.
Two things need to happen before students can go back to school: First, Americans and their elected representatives must consciously decide that children’s needs are worth accepting some additional risk. Second, states and communities must commit the money and effort necessary to reinvent education under radically changed circumstances. Even in states where case counts have plunged, doing what’s right for children will require a massive civic mobilization.
Sarah Cohodes/Atlantic:
A Better Fall Is Possible
States with low rates of the virus are in a position to reopen their schools this September—but they should do so very carefully, and with a focus on younger kids.
What should these states do now? Massachusetts is moving forward with reopening businesses, and, despite indoor dining having been paused in New York City, northeastern governors’ goals seem to be relentlessly commercially driven. Leaders see economic suffering ahead if the federal government does not reinvigorate support for workers and families as federal pandemic unemployment assistance ends on July 30. By prioritizing reopening businesses, states are wasting an opportunity to ensure a better fall for children and families.
This is the wrong course. Instead of speeding forward with reopening their economies, these states should do everything in their power to make a return to school possible in the fall—especially for younger children. This must be the No. 1 priority, and all other “reopening” plans should flow from that. This means keeping the case counts of the virus as low as possible, via business closures (with unemployment assistance and stimulus to compensate) and required universal mask wearing.
WaPo:
Trump and Biden campaigns shift focus to coronavirus as pandemic surges
The Trump and Biden presidential campaigns now see the coronavirus response as the preeminent force shaping the results of November’s election, prompting both camps to try to refocus their campaigns more heavily on the pandemic, according to officials and advisers of both campaigns.
Advisers to presumptive Democratic nominee
Joe Biden see the covid-19 crisis as perhaps the
clearest way yet to contrast the former vice president with President Trump, using the stumbling response and renewed surge in cases as ways to paint Trump as uninformed, incapable of empathy and concerned only about his own political standing.
Trump’s advisers, by contrast, are seeking ways to reframe his response to the coronavirus — even as the president himself largely seeks to avoid the topic because he views it as a political loser. They are sending health officials to swing states, putting doctors on TV in regional markets where the virus is surging, crafting messages on an economic recovery and writing talking points for allies to deliver to potential voters.
Of course it’s a political loser. That’s why you’re a loser, Donald.
Fun read of the day from Colin Woodard/Portland Press-Herald:
How the geography of the pandemic is determined by centuries-old regional differences
Analysis: Fundamental differences in the balance between individual liberty and the common good are reflected in COVID-19 trends.
Distinct regional cultures make up the United States, cultures originating in the differences between the different Euro-American colonial projects on the eastern and southwestern rims of what is now the United States and the mutually exclusive swaths of the country their descendants first colonized. The cultures – described in my 2011 book, “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America” – don’t respect state or even international boundaries, and their enduring effect on history, social attitudes, elections, and public health can only be seen at the county level.
A detailed analysis of the regional variations in new case trends, using a county-level COVID-19 data set painstakingly assembled, updated and shared with the public by The New York Times, maps precisely to what “American Nations” would predict.
The fundamental philosophical divide between these regional cultures is over the question of how best to organize American society.