Before whistles started blowing, and back when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis could still get away with reporting insanely low numbers of COVID cases in his state, he issued a foolish executive order mandating visitors to Florida from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut self-isolate for 14 days before enjoying all that a Florida spring has to offer. Now the tri-state area is healing, while Florida is becoming one of the worst-hit states in the country. On Thursday, New York reported 803 new cases, New Jersey 430 and Connecticut just 81. Meanwhile, Florida reported a record-breaking 3,207 new cases (4,001 cases per million-- worse than Italy's 3,939!). Yesterday, Florida reported another record-breaking day: 3,822 new cases, bring their cases per million to 4,179. Texas' Greg Abbott did the same thing-- a 14 day quarantine for New York traveller to Texas. And now Texas is another state where the pandemic is ravaging the population-- 3,357 new cases Thursday and a rapidly increasing cases per million number, 3,541 on Thursday.In fact, Florida and Texas are such messes that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, almost as much an asshole as DeSantis and Abbott, mused that he's considering quarantining people coming from Florida and other states where the pandemic is out of control."If you went to Florida, you had to quarantine for two weeks because they were afraid that New Yorkers were bringing the virus to their state. Fast forward a 100 days, now we’re afraid they’re bringing the virus to our state," said Cuomo. "The number of people who are getting infected and getting sick and walking into a hospital is going up in these states. Undeniably. And you can go state by state. It’s Arizona. It’s Texas. It’s Florida... It’s 20 states on the increase." Cuomo's a dickhead who was largely responsible for New York's catastrophe by moving too slow as it began ramping up. In the mass media, he loves to play the hero but a look at the New York States timeline shows Cuomo as a villain in every way except in comparison to Trump and his ideologue governors and the low bar they've set.Meanwhile, leaders of countries around the world are looking at America's spiking new cases and shuddering. The cases per day in the U.S. have been rising. Wednesday it was 26,228 new cases and 6,756 cases per million. Thursday it was +27,924 and 6,840 cases per million, as the U.S. regained the number one slot in new cases from Brazil. Yesterday, Washington Post reporter Rick Noack wrote that the rest of the world is dumbfound by the disastrous American response to the pandemic. "As coronavirus cases surge in states across the South and West of the United States," he wrote, "health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored."
China’s actions over the past week stand in stark contrast to those of the United States. In the wake of a new cluster of more than 150 new cases that emerged in Beijing, authorities sealed off neighborhoods, launched a mass testing campaign and imposed travel restrictions.Meanwhile, President Trump maintains that the United States will not shut down a second time, although a surge in cases has convinced governors in some states, including Arizona, to walk back their opposition to mandatory face coverings in public.Commentators and experts in Europe, where cases have continued to decline, voiced concerns over the state of the U.S. response. A headline on the website of Germany’s public broadcaster read: “Has the U.S. given up its fight against coronavirus?” Switzerland’s conservative Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper concluded, “U.S. increasingly accepts rising covid-19 numbers.”
And this isn't just about states with backwards Republican governors like Texas, Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Georgia and Iowa. California Governor Gavin Newsom-- a junior version of Cuomo-- is doing miserable job as well and California's pandemic is now spinning out of control and badly as Texas' and Florida's. I see it in my own neighborhood, where mandates about wearing masks are not enforced at all and where half the people don't bother. California had the most new cases on Thursday (3,787) and the cases per million shot up to 4,227 per million.Bay Area counties still benefit from early closings before Newsom understood or developed the backbone to take action and while San Francisco (+38) Santa Clara (+75), Alameda (+105), San Mateo (+25), Contra Costa (+40) and Marin (+18) are all working diligently and successfully to keep the pandemic under control, the Southland is increasingly a disaster-zone. Los Angeles County reported 1,038 new cases Thursday, Riverside 516, San Diego 238 and San Bernardino 238. Noack wrote that Thomas Gerlinger, a professor of health sciences at the University of Bielefeld in Germany explained that "Many scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on [in the United States], but this didn’t translate into a political action plan." It took the U.S. much longer than other countries to ramp up testing capacity. Ostrich-like, Trump and Pence are extremely hostile to testing and blame it on America's "bad ratings." The U.S. is far behind other countries in testing, even though Trump deceitfully claims he's built the greatest testing apparatus in the universe. Leaving out postage-stamp-sized countries here are the tests per million:
• Denmark- 151,314• Russia- 111,846• U.K.- 109,513• Spain- 103,232• Portugal-102,682• Belgium- 93,836• Israel- 87,495• Belarus- 86,978• U.S.- 80,799• Italy- 79,908
He noted that "Whereas the U.S. response to the crisis has at times appeared disconnected from American scientists’ publicly available findings, U.S. researchers’ conclusions informed the actions of foreign governments. 'A large portion of [Germany’s] measures that proved effective was based on studies by leading U.S. research institutes,' said Karl Lauterbach, a Harvard-educated epidemiologist who is a member of the German parliament for the Social Democrats, who are part of the coalition government. Lauterbach advised the German parliament and the government during the pandemic. Despite its far older population, Germany has confirmed fewer than 9,000 coronavirus-linked deaths, compared to almost 120,000 in the United States. (Germany has about one-fourth of the United States’ population.)... Regarding the effectiveness of face masks, Lauterbach added, “we almost entirely relied on U.S. studies.” Germany was among the first major European countries to make face masks mandatory on public transport and in supermarkets."
After consulting U.S. research and German studies, for instance, German leaders agreed to make reopening dependent on case numbers, meaning restrictions snap back or reopening gets put on hold if the case numbers in a given region exceed a certain threshold.Meanwhile, several U.S. states have reopened despite rising case numbers.“I don’t understand that logic,” said Reinhard Busse, a health management professor a the Technical University of Berlin....[W]hile most Germans disapproved of Trump before the pandemic, even his staunchest critics in Germany were surprised by how even respected U.S. institutions including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) struggled to respond to the crisis.The CDC, for instance, initially botched the rollout of test kits in the early stages of the outbreak.“Like many other aspects of our country, the CDC’s ability to function well is being severely handicapped by the interference coming from the White House,” said Harvard epidemiologist Lipsitch. “All of us in public health very much hope that this is not a permanent condition of the CDC.”Some observers fear the damage will be difficult to reverse. “I’ve always thought of the CDC as a reliable and trusted source of information, said Wiles, the New Zealand specialist. “Not anymore.”
Separately, a team of Post reporters wrote that "Fears of a new wave of coronavirus infections are spurring officials in many states, such as California, to require that people wear face coverings outside the home. But mandatory mask-wearing continues to be controversial, particularly among conservatives. The sheriff of Orange County, California, says he won’t enforce the statewide mandate, while Nebraska’s Republican governor has threatened to withhold funding from any communities that require masks to be worn in official buildings. Several studies this month support wearing masks to curb coronavirus transmission, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends their use as a protective measure."And Trump's Death Cult Rally tonight is expected to be a catastrophe for Oklahoma, even though early data is showing no uptick in COVID transmission from the Black Lives Matters protests. "'“Bad idea' doesn’t begin to capture how reckless and vicious it is to pack an arena on a steamy night with thousands of rambunctious hotheads in the midst of a coronavirus outbreak," wrote Virginia Heffernan for the L.A. Times. "The disease, which has killed some 120,000 Americans so far, rips through populations fastest when people are crowded indoors and shouting for extended periods. Check, check, check, check. The Tulsa rally has it all. Except masks and social distancing. This week, a Tulsa lawsuit sought to make safety measures mandatory at the rally. 'If ASM Global'-- which runs the rally arena-- 'moves forward with the event without adequate review, planning, training, protective equipment, and safeguards, cases of COVID-19-- and the unavoidable attendant deaths — will rise,' the lawsuit said. A Tulsa judge denied the request; it’s now at the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the campaign has required ticketholders to swear they won’t sue if they do get sick. And rallygoers will be issued hand sanitizer and masks, but nothing is mandatory. Given that Trump is still shaking hands and refusing to mask up, even health-conscious attendees are likely to pack themselves in and go mask-free, if only as a sign of respect for their devil-may-care hero. This rally is really shaping up to be a teeming petri dish inside a wrecking ball inside a juggernaut."On Thursday, Oklahoma confirmed 450 new cases and 2,364 cases per million.
