Good morning to everyone and we are going to start off with a couple of pieces about...elections.
In this country, we do elections in times of war and, as Dionne Searcy, writing for the New York Times reminds us, in times of pandemics.
In 1918, midterm elections were playing out during a flu pandemic — and during World War I, adding extra heft to decisions that voters would make at the polls. Some incumbents were criticized for leaving Washington to campaign when important decisions were being made, so they communicated with voters remotely, by writing letters and issuing news releases.
One candidate campaigned by car, stopping the vehicle and having an aide play a cornet to draw a crowd, until public gatherings were banned. At the polls, workers in some places wore masks and voters spaced themselves as they queued up.
Quarantines were in place in many areas, but the levels of social distancing varied among communities. Trades were made between campaigns and local government officials who opened polling places in exchange for, say, allowing a play to be performed in front of a crowd, said Dr. Watkins, the public health historian who studied pandemics.
Individual states already have a variety of options to choose from in conducting their elections and Gabrielle Gurley of the American Prospect reports that even the March 17th primaries were conducted carefully...but by and large sucessfully.
With the question raging as to whether to go forward with the elections at all, Joe Biden’s victories were almost an afterthought. As the states next up on the primary calendar debate whether to postpone or proceed with elections, these three states delivered important clues that can guide election officials and voters alike. In broad strokes, in-person early voting and vote-by-mail boosted turnout, while on Election Day itself, many voters stayed away and other problems arose.
Voting by mail and early voting, in particular, proved to be electoral winners in Arizona and Florida, reducing the number of people who felt the need to show up in person on Election Day. They clearly mitigated the very real threat to exercising the franchise that the coronavirus pandemic has thrust on American voters in the midst of the most consequential election season in modern American history.
Before polls opened Tuesday, in Arizona, more than 480,000 Democratic mail-in ballots had been cast, compared to 317,000 in 2016. Overall, nearly 585,000 voters cast ballots in the party’s 2020 primary; in 2016, about 410,000 people voted. Sheoran, who is the Arizona League of Women Voters’ advocacy chair, was encouraged by the official response in her area, noting that county officials provided good information about social distancing, and provided gloves, cleaning supplies, and masks for people who wanted them at her location.
All of those spring breakers that we saw in those videos this past week? They are on their way home now and, according to a reporting team at Politico, they could become “super-spreaders.”
For much of this week, revelers continued to cram four and five to a hotel room, swarm beaches over hundreds of miles of coastline, and then gather shoulder-to-shoulder in bars and clubs – almost a model process for spreading contagious diseases.
Now, with their campuses likely shuttered, most spring breakers will return to hometowns across the country where any exposure to coronavirus could set off a contagion, public-health experts warned. They called for greater vigilance in those communities and sharply criticized Florida authorities for their slowness in closing beaches and nightspots.
“What is happening in Florida with spring break partying-on by students oblivious to the epidemiological implications of their actions is nothing short of tragic,” wrote Gregg Gonsalves, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, in an email. “While many of us have been hunkering down to try to break the chains of infection in our communities, these young people have decided the pleasures of the moment are worth bringing back the coronavirus to their friends and family.”
Stop the broadcasting of the press conferences, says Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post.
Trump is doing harm and spreading misinformation while working for his own partisan political benefit — a naked attempt to portray himself as a wartime president bravely leading the nation through a tumultuous time, the FDR of the 21st century.
The press — if it defines its purpose as getting truthful, useful, non-harmful information to the public, as opposed to merely juicing its own ratings and profits — must recognize what is happening and adjust accordingly. (And that, granted, is a very big “if.”)
Business as usual simply doesn’t cut it. Minor accommodations, like fact-checking the president’s statements afterward, don’t go nearly far enough to counter the serious damage this man is doing to the public’s well-being.
Radical change is necessary: The cable networks and other news organizations that are taking the president’s briefings as live feeds should stop doing so.
Should they cover the news that’s produced in them? Of course. Thoroughly and relentlessly — with context and fact-checking built in to every step and at every stage.
The recession is already here, says Emily Stewart at Vox.
You don’t need to be told there’s something deeply wrong in the economy right now.
The coronavirus crisis has sent the economy into a tailspin in the United States and around the globe. The restaurant industry has ground to a halt. So have air travel, auto manufacturing, hotels, gyms, and cruise lines. The stock market has posted enormous losses and wild daily swings, to the point that trading has sometimes been paused altogether, and the price of oil has plummeted. Layoffs across the country are taking place in waves. We’re producing less, spending less, and consuming less.
After more than a decade of expansion, the next recession is here.
“The reality is that even without the data, this is the one time where we can look around and say, well, first of all, everybody is at home,” said Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan and former Obama administration official. “We won’t know for a long time what the full magnitudes of the decline are.”
For Jennifer Schaffer at the Guatdian, the gap between the rich and famous and the rest of us as it pertains to who and who does not get tested for the coronavirus is disturbing.
So far, that seems to be a lesson of this virus: it shows us who and what gets protected, as the ship sinks. On the Titanic, it was women and children. With Covid-19, it’s the wealthy and powerful. Testing is just one part of the class story unfolding: everyday workers are being laid off en masse while the wealthiest industries begin batting their eyelashes at trillion-dollar bailouts. Researchers race to develop treatments and a vaccine for Covid-19 while billion-dollar firms fight to monetize their findings in advance. Low-paid “key workers” – nurses, orderlies, delivery drivers, teachers, grocery store attendants and social caregivers – put themselves at greater risk of contracting the virus in order to keep society running, while generously paid employees in less-essential industries work from home. Mortgage holidays are set in place without a mention of rent relief. Contract workers, gig economy workers and service industry workers face complete financial devastation while unseen parasitic financiers (and, in a few instances, millionaire politicians) play the market like Monopoly, round and round, collecting big as they pass Go.
Finally, today, while I tend to shy away from the more scientific and medical aspects, Sharon Begley for STATNews says that the experiences of doctors handling the coronavirus crisis in Italy might prove to be a catalyst for changes in the way we do medical care.
A dozen physicians at the epicenter of Italy’s Covid-19 outbreak issued a plea to the rest of the world on Saturday, going beyond the heartbreaking reports of overwhelmed health care workers there and a seemingly uncontrollable death toll to warn that medical practice during a pandemic may need to be turned on its head — with care delivered to many patients at home.
“Western health care systems have been built around the concept of patient-centered care,” physicians Mirco Nacoti, Luca Longhi, and their colleagues at Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo urge in a paper published on Saturday in NEJM Catalyst, a new peer-reviewed journal from the New England Journal of Medicine. But a pandemic requires “community-centered care.”
The experience of the Bergamo doctors is crucial for U.S. physicians to understand “because some of the mistakes that happened in Italy can happen here,” said Maurizo Cereda, co-director of the surgical ICU at Penn Medicine and a co-author of the paper. The U.S. medical system is centralized, hospital-focused, and patient-centered, as in most western countries, “and the virus exploits this,” he told STAT.
Everyone have a good morning!