Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Stephen Engelberg at Pro-Publica writes—America Is About to Lose Its 200,000th Life to Coronavirus. How Many More Have to Die?
[...] At ProPublica, it was Andrea Wise, a story producer working for us on contract, who in early May asked: What are we planning for the 100,000th confirmed COVID-19 death? The result was a story we published on May 27 by Caroline Chen that looked back at how we got here and forward to how we might avoid reaching another grim milestone. As we wrote at the time: “The full tragedy of the pandemic hinges on one question: How do we stop the next 100,000?”
The sad, infuriating answer for the country that spends more per capita on health care than any other in the world: We couldn’t.
That makes this a moment worthy of some reflection. The United States will record the 200,000th COVID-19 death in days, just four months after the toll hit 100,000. Caroline pointed out in May that the best way to slow the spread of the virus would be to deploy “the oldest mitigation tactics in the public health arsenal.” That would have meant widespread testing to identify those who had caught the virus, quarantining and tracing the contacts of both symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers who could spread the disease to the most vulnerable.
“Being slow to act comes with a terrible cost,” she wrote.
Caroline and I had pulled together a list of many of the steps to slow down the virus in a road map we addressed to the nation’s governors back in April. Our advice was drawn from interviews with health authorities and experts in countries that were successfully battling the pandemic.
Hardly any states followed the practices that had worked well elsewhere. [...]
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“To set foot on the soil of the asteroids, to lift by hand a rock from the Moon, to observe Mars from a distance of several tens of kilometers, to land on its satellite or even on its surface, what can be more fantastic? From the moment of using rocket devices a new great era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament. “ ~~Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1896)
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—High school textbooks shortchange kids by excluding labor history:
A new report by the Albert Shanker Institute and the American Labor Studies Center argues that history textbooks exclude labor from the history that American schoolchildren learn. Their review of four leading high school history textbooks finds that the books:
- often implicitly (and, at times, explicitly) represent labor organizing and labor disputes as inherently violent;
- virtually ignore the vital role of organized labor in winning broad social protections, such as child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency;
- ignore the important role that organized labor played in the civil rights movement; and
- pay scant attention to unionism after the 1950s, thus completely ignoring the rise of public sector unionization, which brought generations of Americans into the middle class and gave new rights to public employees.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin has some interesting new issue polling. Horse race, though? Steady. Trump pits himself squarely against scientists on the vaccine. The mechanics of "What if Trump won't leave?" Oh, and there’s another Trump sex assault accusation.
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