MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of Elizabeth Warren: Generally favorable 59% / Generally unfavorable 33% / Unsure 9% (Suffolk U./7News, LV, 5/4-7)
— @pollreport via web
MASSACHUSETTS U.S. Senate: Edward Markey (D) 52% / Gabriel Gomez (R) 35% / Other, unsure 13% (Suffolk U./7News, LV, 5/4-7)
— @pollreport via web
MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of Gabriel Gomez: Generally favorable 38% / Generally unfavorable 23% / Unsure 40% (Suffolk U./7News, LV, 5/4-7)
— @pollreport via web
Back to politics in a minute, but anyone remember SARS from ten years ago? I have two people for you to read if you don't:
Helen Branswell has a refresher she wrote in March.
Ten years on, the six-month outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome — a name chosen deliberately for its acronym, SARS — is as etched in the memories of the people who lived through the crisis as it is in the annals of medical history. An incredible saga, SARS ended lives and decimated some afflicted families. It made some careers and destroyed others.
"Every day feels like it happened yesterday. Every moment of the day feels like it happened yesterday. You have the constant reminders — the pain, the shortness of breath," says [Lena] Stewart, a former nurse who remains on disability leave.
Another SARS reminder comes from Maryn McKenna, with parts
I and
II of this:
How The New Coronavirus Might Be Like SARS: Hospital Spread
When SARS broke out of southern China in early 2003, I was in the midst of a year-long project shadowing members of the disease-detective corps of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, known as the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Some of the most explosive outbreaks they were sent to investigate were in hospitals, and front-line health care workers were some of the earliest victims.
I thought it would be worth remembering what the early days of SARS were like, while we wait to see what this new virus does next. So over the next few days, I’m going to run a couple of excerpts from a book I wrote in 2004 about the EIS, Beating Back the Devil. In this one, a hospital swamped by SARS locks its doors, with its sick personnel inside. In the second excerpt, a doctor who worked in that hospital — and alerted the world to the threat — loses his life to the disease.
Meanwhile, this is current data from
WHO on a novel coronavirus:
As of 8 May 2013, 30 laboratory-confirmed cases of human infection with novel coronavirus (nCoV) have been reported to WHO: two from Jordan, two from Qatar, 23 cases from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Kingdom (UK), and one from the United Arab Emirates. Most patients are male (79.3%; 23 of 29 cases with sex reported) and range in age from 24 to 94 years (median 56 years). The first cases had onset of illness in late March or early April 2012; the most recent cases reported had onset on 1 May 2013 (13 cases with onset 14 April - 1 May 2013). Most patients presented with severe acute respiratory disease requiring hospitalization and eventually required mechanical ventilation or other advanced respiratory support. Eighteen patients have died.
Several cases have occurred in clusters, including in a health care setting in Jordan in April 2012 (of 2 confirmed and 11 probable cases, 10 were health care workers) and in the UK among family members of an infected patient who had recently arrived from Saudi Arabia. The Jordanian outbreak illustrated the potential of this virus to spread through health care facilities and the UK outbreak confirmed the potential of the virus to transmit between humans with close contact. In neither instance did transmission appear to go beyond the immediate outbreak into the community.
Should this get more serious—or if it's
H7N9, the bird flu in China—you at least had a heads up.
.@SharylAttkisson, who's fueled anti-vaccine movement w/incorrect fear-mongering for @CBSNews, is a Benghazi truther:
http://t.co/...
— @sethmnookin via web
More politics and policy below the fold.
EJ Dionne:
Jesse Ferguson, the spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was quick to note that there are 119 Republican incumbents in districts more Democratic than South Carolina’s 1st. Sanford’s win, he insisted, does not tell us much about the 2014 midterm elections.
That’s probably right. But it does say a great deal about America in 2013. God may well have moved Sanford to turn his life around and to run a scrappy campaign without any assistance from the big honchos in Washington. But his resurrection was a phenomenon not of the next world but of this one — of a country so torn by party dogma that an imaginary walk along the Appalachian Trail counts for little when compared with the chance to beat the other guys, even when they’re made out of cardboard.
Greg Sargent:
In today’s exercise in Fiscal Fraudulence, Republicans are making it clear they’ve decided they don’t want to enter into budget negotiations with Democrats until the debt ceiling deadline gets a good deal closer. ”The debt limit is the backstop,” Paul Ryan says. “I’d like to go through regular order and get something done sooner rather than later. But we need to get a down payment on the debt. We need entitlement reform.”
In other words, Republicans know they don’t have the leverage to force spending cuts or tax reform right now — in standard budget negotiations – without agreeing to the increased revenues from the rich Obama and Democrats will insist on as conditions for any deficit reduction deal. So they would rather do nothing and wait until they can use the threat of default to game the process in their favor.
This is the GOP strategy, explicitly and openly
David A Graham:
Think gun control failed in the Senate because of gun-clutching extremists? Or because of fanatical radicals who want to abolish the Second Amendment? Senator Joe Manchin, who's been at the heart of the effort, says it's nothing of the sort. In fact, the central problem really has nothing to do with firearms at all -- it's about trust.
When he speaks to gun owners, "they're scared this is the first step" in a massive government overreach, said Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat. He made the remarks during an interview with Margaret Carlson at New York Ideas, a daylong conference sponsored by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute.