Good morning, everyone!
It’s the one year anniversary of me doing pundit round-ups and what happens. I am running very late.
Which means that this is a VERY abbreviated pundit round-p.
FYI: I have to look into what and why the way I can see Twitter posts on my computer has changed, so no round-up of FacesofCOVID and other online memorials for COVID victims this morning.
David Atkins of Washington Monthly says (like a lot of other people) that this baseless charade that ill take place on Jan. 6 will have little effect on the inauguration of President-Elect Joe Biden but is not good for the country.
Technically, the Senators supporting this effort are claiming they are not trying to overturn the election. They say they only want a “10-day audit” of the election results. The problem, of course, is that the results have been checked and double-checked repeatedly. An “audit” (which would not rise even to the level of a full recount) would accomplish nothing that has not already been done. The voting machines have been double- and triple-checked. Mail ballot envelope signatures have been checked and double-checked–and in any case, there is no longer any way to match envelopes to ballots. The Senators involved do know all of this. They just don’t care.
The immediate goal, of course, is to placate Trump and Trump’s base. Some of the Senators supporting this move are presidential hopefuls for 2024. The secondary goal is to blow enough smoke over the issue to justify new voter suppression schemes in future elections, in order to resolve the “doubts about our elections” that they themselves cynically promulgated.
But even more consequentially, it’s the unscrewing of another bolt from American democracy. By taking this step, they’ve set another precedent and crossed another line that had once seemed inviolable. There can be little doubt that the next time the GOP controls the Senate and the House in a presidential election year, they will have little reservation about simply refusing to accept electoral results they don’t like–thereby either handing the presidency to their preferred candidate directly, or doing so indirectly by pushing the decision to gerrymandered statehouses and congressional delegations.
The COVID Tracking Project, which publishes in The Atlantic, says to look at the number of hospitalizations, as that is the steadiest number.
Of our four top-line metrics, only hospitalization counts remain relatively stable through holiday data disruptions. There’s no responsible way to interpret the other major metrics until holiday backlogs have come and gone, so for this final update of the year, we’re focusing on hospitalizations, which show only mild and transient holiday reporting artifacts.
Across US regions, we see sharply differing hospitalization figures. COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to drop across the entire Midwest. In the West, hospitalizations have been declining across the Mountain West since December 24, but rising down the Pacific Coast and in the Southwest. We see a similarly mixed picture in the Northeast, where five states reported small declines in hospitalizations, and four—including New York—reported increases. Hospitalization increases across the South suggest that many southern states are experiencing worsening outbreaks: Fourteen of the 17 states in the region reported more people hospitalized with COVID-19 today than one week ago.
Nearly everyone failed in protecting America from COVID-19, says German Lopez of Vox. Especially Trump and the Republican Party.
So how did America get here?
The primary answer lies in President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress, who have collectively abdicated the federal government’s role in addressing the outbreak or even acknowledging its severity. From Trump’s borderline denialist messaging on Covid-19 to Congress’s inability to pass broader economic relief, the country has been left in a place where states, local governments, and the public have to fend for themselves — and none of them have the resources to deal with the coronavirus on their own.
Trump and his allies have also actively worked to sideline the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, crippling the agency’s ability to provide guidance to states and others that have now been left out on their own.
At the same time, there are serious structural issues that hindered states’ and the public’s ability to act. Experts have long argued that the US’s public health infrastructure is underresourced and ill prepared for a serious crisis, and the pandemic has exposed this many times over: Nearly a year into the pandemic, no state has capacities for testing and contact tracing that most experts would consider adequate.
Health care systems are increasingly overwhelmed caring for the ill; their workforces physically and mentally exhausted. Adding the responsibility of vaccinating the nation may push them to a breaking point.
The pandemic also has revealed the consequences of a chronically underfunded public health infrastructure. While public health leaders know what must be done, their critical work could be supported by a national COVID-19 Vaccine Corps, a volunteer pool to help contact trace, inform, and support the logistics of distributing, administering, and tracking hundreds of millions of vaccine doses.
To be sure, the notion of such a service corps is not unique nor far-fetched. Each Election Day a vast constellation of civic-minded individuals works at polling sites so voters can engage in the democratic process. Now, in a time of national emergency, this distinctly American model could be reimagined to engage undergraduate and graduate students, even recent graduates, as the foundation of a new national COVID-19 Vaccine Corps to support a vaccine distribution campaign that will last upwards of a year. Like poll workers, volunteers could be paid, or other incentives, such as student loan forgiveness and community service credits, could be considered.
Rick Rojas of the New York Times with an overview of Atlanta, Georgia days before the Georgia runoff US Senate elections.
The pandemic has laid bare gaps in access to opportunity and health care, as the virus has hit the African-American community especially hard. It has also galvanized ideological divides between the city and state, as the mayor and governor sparred over adopting strict measures to curb the virus’s spread. Protests forced many to examine the stubbornness of institutional racism. A meltdown during the summer primaries, with long lines and malfunctioning voting machines, stoked concerns over suppression.
Those issues are certainly not Atlanta’s alone. But again and again in recent months, the city emerged as an arena in which those tensions played out in vivid and revelatory ways.
Because of it, said Kurt D. Young, a professor of political science at Clark Atlanta University, “We have an opportunity to grapple with some of the hardheaded realities that have stymied Atlanta for many, many years.”
Atlanta, as the unofficial capital of the South, has always summed up the region’s aspirations and limitations — from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights era, to the good fortune of the Sunbelt boom of the 1980s and 1990s, to the international pageant of the 1996 Olympics, to the diversity and changed racial dynamic of Atlanta today.