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solarbirdMy state, Oregon, several others vote entirely by mail. Trump wants to shutter the post office - a constitutionally required function of the Federal government - partly to loot, and largely to stop us and those like us from voting.
They're also still trying to figure out how to force people back to normality without everybody noticing the virus resurgence that will inevitably follow.
Oh, and the GOP are going to spend about US$1m on a gaslighting campaign. That's fun.
Fuck Donkeyballs Donald, fuck him and everybody who supports him forever.
----- 1 -----
As feds play ‘backup,’ states take unorthodox steps to compete in cutthroat global market for coronavirus supplies
By Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Chelsea Janes
April 11, 2020 at 1:49 p.m. PDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-feds-play-backup-states-take-unorthodox-steps-to-compete-in-cutthroat-global-market-for-coronavirus-supplies/2020/04/11/609b5d84-7a70-11ea-a130-df573469f094_story.html
Rushing to stave off a shortage of medical-grade protective gear to combat the spread of the coronavirus, Minnesota officials leaned on a local company’s global connections to airlift a cache of N95 masks from a Chinese factory back to the state for delivery this week.
Washington state purchased 750,000 cotton swabs for coronavirus tests, taking a risk because the product located by officials has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The state is also betting that a Seattle-based outdoor gear company, known for its backpacks and parkas, can reconfigure its operations to produce N95 respirators.
And California, acting as a “nation state” in the words of the governor, began buying 200 million masks per month to shore up supplies in that state and, potentially, across the country.
Elsewhere, some governors and lawmakers have watched in disbelief as they have sought to close deals on precious supplies, only to have the federal government swoop in to preempt the arrangements.
Officials in one state are so worried about this possibility that they are considering dispatching local police or even the National Guard to greet two chartered FedEx planes scheduled to arrive in the next week with millions of masks from China, according to people familiar with the planning. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, asked that their state not be identified to avoid flagging federal officials to their shipment.
...
“If I was going to draw a model, I think that our national response should look a lot more like a national response to World War II and less like the Balkans,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), whose state saw the initial outbreak.
----- 2 -----
He could have seen what was coming: Behind Trump’s failure on the coronavirus
April 11, 2020, Updated April 12, 2020
By DAVID E. SANGER, Eric Lipton, MARK MAZZETTI, Julian E. Barnes, Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman
The New York Times
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/he-could-have-seen-what-was-coming-behind-trumps-failure-on-the-virus/
WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Donald Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”
His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the Cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen.
Even after Trump took his first concrete action at the end of January — limiting travel from China — public health often had to compete with economic and political considerations in internal debates, slowing the path toward belated decisions to seek more money from Congress, obtain necessary supplies, address shortfalls in testing and ultimately move to keep much of the nation at home.
Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the midst of his Senate trial, Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.
----- 3 -----
Media Matters
twitter.com/mmfa
9 April 2020
https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1248305161757437953
Six different polls show how Fox’s coronavirus coverage endangered its viewers
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/six-different-polls-show-how-foxs-coronavirus-coverage-endangered-its-viewers
----- 4 -----
Trump leaves trail of unmet promises in coronavirus response
By CALVIN WOODWARD
April 11, 2020
https://apnews.com/1b92ce21f8ddf7eefb634b92fee38fed
WASHINGTON (AP) — For several months, President Donald Trump and his officials have cast a fog of promises meant to reassure a country in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump and his team haven’t delivered on critical ones.
They talk numbers. Bewildering numbers about masks on the way. About tests being taken. About ships sailing to the rescue, breathing machines being built and shipped, field hospitals popping up, aircraft laden with supplies from abroad, dollars flowing to crippled businesses.
----- 5 -----
A plan to defeat coronavirus finally emerges, but it’s not from the White House
April 10, 2020
By William Wan, Lena H. Sun and Yasmeen Abutaleb
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/a-plan-to-defeat-coronavirus-finally-emerges-but-its-not-from-the-white-house/
A national plan to fight the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and return Americans to jobs and classrooms is emerging — but not from the White House.
Instead, a collection of governors, former government officials, disease specialists and nonprofits are pursuing a strategy that relies on the three pillars of disease control: ramp up testing to identify people who are infected. Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before. And focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.
But there is no evidence yet the White House will pursue such a strategy.
Instead, the president and his top advisers have fixated almost exclusively on plans to reopen the U.S. economy by the end of the month, though they haven’t detailed how they will do so without triggering another outbreak. President Donald Trump has been especially focused on creating a second coronavirus task force aimed at combating the economic ramifications of the virus.
----- 6 -----
WaPo: Trump allegedly asked Fauci if officials could let coronavirus 'wash over' US
By Marina Pitofsky - 04/11/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/492390-wapo-trump-allegedly-asked-fauci-if-officials-could-let-coronavirus
President Trump reportedly asked Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and a key member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, whether U.S. officials could allow the coronavirus pandemic to “wash over” the country, The Washington Post reported.
During a coronavirus task force meeting in the Situation Room last month, on the same day Trump ordered travel to be suspended from the United Kingdom and Ireland in an effort to stem the spread of the virus, Trump reportedly asked Fauci, “Why don’t we let this wash over the country?”
Two anonymous sources familiar with the president’s comments confirmed the question to the newspaper.
Trump was reportedly also seeking to understand why “herd immunity” to the coronavirus had been rejected. Herd immunity occurs when a large amount of the population becomes immune either through infection and recovery or inoculation.
“Mr. President, many people would die,” Fauci reportedly responded to the president’s question.
The Washington Post reported that Fauci initially did not understand what the president meant by “wash over” but was then reportedly alarmed.
----- 7 -----
Florida Gov. DeSantis mulls reopening schools: Coronavirus 'doesn't seem to threaten' kids
By Marty Johnson - 04/10/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/492152-florida-gov-desantis-says-coronavirus-doesnt-seem-to-threaten-kids-mulls
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday signaled that there was still a possibility that Florida schools could reopen in May after being closed since March due to the coronavirus outbreak.
“We’re going to look at the evidence and make a decision," DeSantis said of the possibility of children returning to schools in the state, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
"If it’s safe, we want kids to be in school. ... Even if it’s for a couple of weeks, we think there would be value in that," he continued.
CNN reported that DeSantis added that he didn't think anyone under 25 had died of the virus.
"This particular pandemic is one where, I don't think nationwide there's been a single fatality under 25. For whatever reason it just doesn't seem to threaten, you know, kids," DeSantis said.
"And we lose in Florida between five and 10 kids a year for the flu. This one, for whatever reason, much more dangerous if you're 65 and plus than the flu, no doubt about that. If you're younger, it just hasn't had an impact, so that should factor into how we're viewing this. I think the data on that has been 100 percent consistent," he continued. "I've not seen any deviation on that."
The governor's comments came close to the end of a 75-minute education roundtable Thursday that featured teachers, parents and government officials.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, four people between the ages of 15 and 24 and one person younger than 5 has died from the virus.
----- 8 -----
GOP lawmakers: Fauci may be doing more harm than good
By J. Edward Moreno - 04/11/20
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/492359-gop-lawmakers-fauci-may-be-doing-more-harm-than-good
Republican Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and Ken Buck (Colo.) criticized Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, for the impact of his social distancing recommendations, claiming that the stay-at-home policies informed by those recommendations have forced businesses, workers and corporations into economic turmoil.
“For Fauci, is it merely a societal or economic inconvenience that about 17 million workers are unemployed because of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with many more to come in the weeks and months ahead? The economic calamity lies largely with the origination of policies resulting from Fauci's recommendations,” the lawmakers wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Examiner published Saturday.
Biggs and Buck, both members of the conservative Freedom Caucus and staunch allies of President Trump, join others on the right in criticizing public health officials on the administration’s coronavirus task force. On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson, a conservative commentator on Fox News, said that Fauci “shouldn’t be making economic decisions.”
----- 9 -----
Why are some people so much more infectious than others?
April 12, 2020
By GINA KOLATA
The New York Times
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/why-are-some-people-so-much-more-infectious-than-others/
As the coronavirus tears through the country, scientists are asking: Are some people more infectious than others? Are there superspreaders, people who seem to just spew out virus, making them especially likely to infect others?
It seems that the answer is yes. There do seem to be superspreaders, a loosely defined term for people who infect a disproportionate number of others, whether as a consequence of genetics, social habits or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But those virus carriers at the heart of what are being called superspreading events can drive and have driven epidemics, researchers say, making it crucial to figure out ways to identify spreading events or to prevent situations, like crowded rooms, where superspreading can occur.
Just as important are those at the other end of the spectrum: people who are infected but unlikely to spread the infection.
Distinguishing between those who are more infectious and those less infectious could make an enormous difference in the ease and speed with which an outbreak is contained, said Jon Zelner, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. If the infected person is a superspreader, contact tracing is especially important. But if the infected person is the opposite of a superspreader, someone who for whatever reason does not transmit the virus, contact tracing can be a wasted effort.
“The tricky part is that we don’t necessarily know who those people are,” Zelner said.
----- 10 -----
Trump to U.S. Postal Service: Drop Dead
The president made it clear that he would veto the coronavirus relief bill if it included any emergency funding for the agency
By Peter Wade
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-postal-service-drop-dead-982458/
“We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [funding for the Postal Service] was in it,” an official from President Trump’s administration told the Washington Post when discussing the $2 trillion Coronavirus Relief Aid that passed weeks ago.
Trump made it clear that he would veto the bill if it included any emergency funding for the agency that is already on unsteady ground, a situation that has been worsened by the coronavirus pandemic. The Post’s source added, “I don’t know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that.”
According to the report, the president is using a false claim that higher internet shipping rates imposed on companies like Amazon, FedEx and UPS would increase the USPS’s budget and help its 600,000 plus workers.
But the director of physical infrastructure at the Government Accountability Office told the Post that rate hikes would likely lead to shipping businesses looking elsewhere or even creating their own delivery methods, thus offsetting USPS revenue gains created by a rate increase.
----- 11 -----
AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s false hits on watchdogs, voting fraud
By HOPE YEN and CALVIN WOODWARD
12 April 2020
https://apnews.com/e45b0fd875cd2bf8be2b92330f37300f
WASHINGTON (AP) — Man bites watchdog.
In firing one inspector general, sidelining another and assailing a third, President Donald Trump in recent days has put his aversion to agents of federal accountability on stark display in a country consumed by the coronavirus.
Clearly displeased when inspectors general come to independent conclusions that don’t fit the stories he tells, Trump employs a tactic to mar their credibility. If public servants worked for the government in the Obama era, they are subject to being painted as Obama loyalists out to get him.
And they’re not insulated if they worked for Republican presidents, too, as the three targeted IGs found out.
With concerns raised about the safety of voting in a pandemic including the November general election, Trump spread falsehoods about the extent of mail-in voting fraud.
A look at the president’s recent distortions on key elements of the pandemic response and a few other political subjects:
----- 12 -----
GOP to spend more than $1 million on ads praising Trump's coronavirus response
By Max Greenwood - 04/10/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/492172-gop-to-spend-more-than-1-million-on-ads-praising-trumps-coronavirus
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is spending more than $1 million on a digital ad campaign lauding President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The RNC’s ad blitz is set to launch on Monday and will continue through May 4. The goal is to target independent voters and moderate Democrats in more than a dozen battleground states who the RNC has identified as swing voters.
The seven-figure investment comes as Trump has faced an onslaught of criticism over his handling of the outbreak from liberal groups, which have dropped millions of dollars on ads targeting the president.
The largest Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA, last month launched a $6 million ad blitz in four critical swing states — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — hitting the president over his early response to the coronavirus outbreak and praising former Vice President Joe Biden as “better prepared” to take on such a challenge as president.
They're also still trying to figure out how to force people back to normality without everybody noticing the virus resurgence that will inevitably follow.
Oh, and the GOP are going to spend about US$1m on a gaslighting campaign. That's fun.
Fuck Donkeyballs Donald, fuck him and everybody who supports him forever.
- As feds play ‘backup,’ states take unorthodox steps to compete in cutthroat global market for coronavirus supplies
- He could have seen what was coming: Behind Trump’s failure on the coronavirus
- Six different polls show how Fox’s coronavirus coverage endangered its viewers
- Trump leaves trail of unmet promises in coronavirus response
- A plan to defeat coronavirus finally emerges, but it’s not from the White House
- WaPo: Trump allegedly asked Fauci if officials could let coronavirus 'wash over' US
- Florida Gov. DeSantis mulls reopening schools: Coronavirus 'doesn't seem to threaten' kids
- GOP lawmakers: Fauci may be doing more harm than good
- Why are some people so much more infectious than others?
- Trump to U.S. Postal Service: Drop Dead
- GOP to spend more than $1 million on ads praising Trump's coronavirus response
----- 1 -----
As feds play ‘backup,’ states take unorthodox steps to compete in cutthroat global market for coronavirus supplies
By Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Chelsea Janes
April 11, 2020 at 1:49 p.m. PDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-feds-play-backup-states-take-unorthodox-steps-to-compete-in-cutthroat-global-market-for-coronavirus-supplies/2020/04/11/609b5d84-7a70-11ea-a130-df573469f094_story.html
Rushing to stave off a shortage of medical-grade protective gear to combat the spread of the coronavirus, Minnesota officials leaned on a local company’s global connections to airlift a cache of N95 masks from a Chinese factory back to the state for delivery this week.
Washington state purchased 750,000 cotton swabs for coronavirus tests, taking a risk because the product located by officials has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The state is also betting that a Seattle-based outdoor gear company, known for its backpacks and parkas, can reconfigure its operations to produce N95 respirators.
And California, acting as a “nation state” in the words of the governor, began buying 200 million masks per month to shore up supplies in that state and, potentially, across the country.
Elsewhere, some governors and lawmakers have watched in disbelief as they have sought to close deals on precious supplies, only to have the federal government swoop in to preempt the arrangements.
Officials in one state are so worried about this possibility that they are considering dispatching local police or even the National Guard to greet two chartered FedEx planes scheduled to arrive in the next week with millions of masks from China, according to people familiar with the planning. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, asked that their state not be identified to avoid flagging federal officials to their shipment.
...
“If I was going to draw a model, I think that our national response should look a lot more like a national response to World War II and less like the Balkans,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), whose state saw the initial outbreak.
----- 2 -----
He could have seen what was coming: Behind Trump’s failure on the coronavirus
April 11, 2020, Updated April 12, 2020
By DAVID E. SANGER, Eric Lipton, MARK MAZZETTI, Julian E. Barnes, Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman
The New York Times
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/he-could-have-seen-what-was-coming-behind-trumps-failure-on-the-virus/
WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Donald Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”
His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the Cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen.
Even after Trump took his first concrete action at the end of January — limiting travel from China — public health often had to compete with economic and political considerations in internal debates, slowing the path toward belated decisions to seek more money from Congress, obtain necessary supplies, address shortfalls in testing and ultimately move to keep much of the nation at home.
Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the midst of his Senate trial, Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.
----- 3 -----
Media Matters
twitter.com/mmfa
9 April 2020
https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1248305161757437953
Six different polls show how Fox’s coronavirus coverage endangered its viewers
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/six-different-polls-show-how-foxs-coronavirus-coverage-endangered-its-viewers
----- 4 -----
Trump leaves trail of unmet promises in coronavirus response
By CALVIN WOODWARD
April 11, 2020
https://apnews.com/1b92ce21f8ddf7eefb634b92fee38fed
WASHINGTON (AP) — For several months, President Donald Trump and his officials have cast a fog of promises meant to reassure a country in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump and his team haven’t delivered on critical ones.
They talk numbers. Bewildering numbers about masks on the way. About tests being taken. About ships sailing to the rescue, breathing machines being built and shipped, field hospitals popping up, aircraft laden with supplies from abroad, dollars flowing to crippled businesses.
----- 5 -----
A plan to defeat coronavirus finally emerges, but it’s not from the White House
April 10, 2020
By William Wan, Lena H. Sun and Yasmeen Abutaleb
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/a-plan-to-defeat-coronavirus-finally-emerges-but-its-not-from-the-white-house/
A national plan to fight the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and return Americans to jobs and classrooms is emerging — but not from the White House.
Instead, a collection of governors, former government officials, disease specialists and nonprofits are pursuing a strategy that relies on the three pillars of disease control: ramp up testing to identify people who are infected. Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before. And focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.
But there is no evidence yet the White House will pursue such a strategy.
Instead, the president and his top advisers have fixated almost exclusively on plans to reopen the U.S. economy by the end of the month, though they haven’t detailed how they will do so without triggering another outbreak. President Donald Trump has been especially focused on creating a second coronavirus task force aimed at combating the economic ramifications of the virus.
----- 6 -----
WaPo: Trump allegedly asked Fauci if officials could let coronavirus 'wash over' US
By Marina Pitofsky - 04/11/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/492390-wapo-trump-allegedly-asked-fauci-if-officials-could-let-coronavirus
President Trump reportedly asked Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and a key member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, whether U.S. officials could allow the coronavirus pandemic to “wash over” the country, The Washington Post reported.
During a coronavirus task force meeting in the Situation Room last month, on the same day Trump ordered travel to be suspended from the United Kingdom and Ireland in an effort to stem the spread of the virus, Trump reportedly asked Fauci, “Why don’t we let this wash over the country?”
Two anonymous sources familiar with the president’s comments confirmed the question to the newspaper.
Trump was reportedly also seeking to understand why “herd immunity” to the coronavirus had been rejected. Herd immunity occurs when a large amount of the population becomes immune either through infection and recovery or inoculation.
“Mr. President, many people would die,” Fauci reportedly responded to the president’s question.
The Washington Post reported that Fauci initially did not understand what the president meant by “wash over” but was then reportedly alarmed.
----- 7 -----
Florida Gov. DeSantis mulls reopening schools: Coronavirus 'doesn't seem to threaten' kids
By Marty Johnson - 04/10/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/492152-florida-gov-desantis-says-coronavirus-doesnt-seem-to-threaten-kids-mulls
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday signaled that there was still a possibility that Florida schools could reopen in May after being closed since March due to the coronavirus outbreak.
“We’re going to look at the evidence and make a decision," DeSantis said of the possibility of children returning to schools in the state, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
"If it’s safe, we want kids to be in school. ... Even if it’s for a couple of weeks, we think there would be value in that," he continued.
CNN reported that DeSantis added that he didn't think anyone under 25 had died of the virus.
"This particular pandemic is one where, I don't think nationwide there's been a single fatality under 25. For whatever reason it just doesn't seem to threaten, you know, kids," DeSantis said.
"And we lose in Florida between five and 10 kids a year for the flu. This one, for whatever reason, much more dangerous if you're 65 and plus than the flu, no doubt about that. If you're younger, it just hasn't had an impact, so that should factor into how we're viewing this. I think the data on that has been 100 percent consistent," he continued. "I've not seen any deviation on that."
The governor's comments came close to the end of a 75-minute education roundtable Thursday that featured teachers, parents and government officials.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, four people between the ages of 15 and 24 and one person younger than 5 has died from the virus.
----- 8 -----
GOP lawmakers: Fauci may be doing more harm than good
By J. Edward Moreno - 04/11/20
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/492359-gop-lawmakers-fauci-may-be-doing-more-harm-than-good
Republican Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and Ken Buck (Colo.) criticized Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, for the impact of his social distancing recommendations, claiming that the stay-at-home policies informed by those recommendations have forced businesses, workers and corporations into economic turmoil.
“For Fauci, is it merely a societal or economic inconvenience that about 17 million workers are unemployed because of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with many more to come in the weeks and months ahead? The economic calamity lies largely with the origination of policies resulting from Fauci's recommendations,” the lawmakers wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Examiner published Saturday.
Biggs and Buck, both members of the conservative Freedom Caucus and staunch allies of President Trump, join others on the right in criticizing public health officials on the administration’s coronavirus task force. On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson, a conservative commentator on Fox News, said that Fauci “shouldn’t be making economic decisions.”
----- 9 -----
Why are some people so much more infectious than others?
April 12, 2020
By GINA KOLATA
The New York Times
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/why-are-some-people-so-much-more-infectious-than-others/
As the coronavirus tears through the country, scientists are asking: Are some people more infectious than others? Are there superspreaders, people who seem to just spew out virus, making them especially likely to infect others?
It seems that the answer is yes. There do seem to be superspreaders, a loosely defined term for people who infect a disproportionate number of others, whether as a consequence of genetics, social habits or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But those virus carriers at the heart of what are being called superspreading events can drive and have driven epidemics, researchers say, making it crucial to figure out ways to identify spreading events or to prevent situations, like crowded rooms, where superspreading can occur.
Just as important are those at the other end of the spectrum: people who are infected but unlikely to spread the infection.
Distinguishing between those who are more infectious and those less infectious could make an enormous difference in the ease and speed with which an outbreak is contained, said Jon Zelner, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. If the infected person is a superspreader, contact tracing is especially important. But if the infected person is the opposite of a superspreader, someone who for whatever reason does not transmit the virus, contact tracing can be a wasted effort.
“The tricky part is that we don’t necessarily know who those people are,” Zelner said.
----- 10 -----
Trump to U.S. Postal Service: Drop Dead
The president made it clear that he would veto the coronavirus relief bill if it included any emergency funding for the agency
By Peter Wade
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-postal-service-drop-dead-982458/
“We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [funding for the Postal Service] was in it,” an official from President Trump’s administration told the Washington Post when discussing the $2 trillion Coronavirus Relief Aid that passed weeks ago.
Trump made it clear that he would veto the bill if it included any emergency funding for the agency that is already on unsteady ground, a situation that has been worsened by the coronavirus pandemic. The Post’s source added, “I don’t know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that.”
According to the report, the president is using a false claim that higher internet shipping rates imposed on companies like Amazon, FedEx and UPS would increase the USPS’s budget and help its 600,000 plus workers.
But the director of physical infrastructure at the Government Accountability Office told the Post that rate hikes would likely lead to shipping businesses looking elsewhere or even creating their own delivery methods, thus offsetting USPS revenue gains created by a rate increase.
----- 11 -----
AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s false hits on watchdogs, voting fraud
By HOPE YEN and CALVIN WOODWARD
12 April 2020
https://apnews.com/e45b0fd875cd2bf8be2b92330f37300f
WASHINGTON (AP) — Man bites watchdog.
In firing one inspector general, sidelining another and assailing a third, President Donald Trump in recent days has put his aversion to agents of federal accountability on stark display in a country consumed by the coronavirus.
Clearly displeased when inspectors general come to independent conclusions that don’t fit the stories he tells, Trump employs a tactic to mar their credibility. If public servants worked for the government in the Obama era, they are subject to being painted as Obama loyalists out to get him.
And they’re not insulated if they worked for Republican presidents, too, as the three targeted IGs found out.
With concerns raised about the safety of voting in a pandemic including the November general election, Trump spread falsehoods about the extent of mail-in voting fraud.
A look at the president’s recent distortions on key elements of the pandemic response and a few other political subjects:
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GOP to spend more than $1 million on ads praising Trump's coronavirus response
By Max Greenwood - 04/10/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/492172-gop-to-spend-more-than-1-million-on-ads-praising-trumps-coronavirus
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is spending more than $1 million on a digital ad campaign lauding President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The RNC’s ad blitz is set to launch on Monday and will continue through May 4. The goal is to target independent voters and moderate Democrats in more than a dozen battleground states who the RNC has identified as swing voters.
The seven-figure investment comes as Trump has faced an onslaught of criticism over his handling of the outbreak from liberal groups, which have dropped millions of dollars on ads targeting the president.
The largest Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA, last month launched a $6 million ad blitz in four critical swing states — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — hitting the president over his early response to the coronavirus outbreak and praising former Vice President Joe Biden as “better prepared” to take on such a challenge as president.
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Date: 2020-04-13 01:20 pm (UTC)