I think Obama just reset the Democratic Party for the future.
His call to end the filibuster to attack voter suppression goes farther than that. He saw what the filibuster did to his admin, and while the Rep takeover of the House in 2011 meant the end of any serious legislation, a lot of damage was done to the country by the filibuster.
If the Dems win the trifecta in November, there is no doubt in my mind that the filibuster will become history. Combine that with statehood for DC and Puerto Rico and this country can move away from racist interference.
I doubt even Manchin would vote against removing the filibuster, as the Dem response would be severe. Throw him out of all committees, throw him out of the caucus, pledge to finance and endorse a primary challenger the first chance. He might as well be a Republican at that point anyway.
For several years, it has been the stuff of his opponents’ nightmares: that President Trump, facing the prospect of defeat in the 2020 election, would declare by presidential edict that the vote had been delayed or canceled.
Never mind that no president has that power, that the timing of federal elections has been fixed since the 19th century and that the Constitution sets an immovable expiration date on the president’s term. Given Trump’s contempt for the legal limits on his office and his oft-expressed admiration for foreign dictators, it hardly seemed far-fetched to imagine he would at least attempt the gambit.
But when the moment came Thursday, with Trump suggesting for the first time that the election could be delayed, his proposal appeared as impotent as it was predictable — less a stunning assertion of his authority than yet another lament that his political prospects have dimmed amid a global public health crisis. Indeed, his comments on Twitter came shortly after the Commerce Department reported that US economic output contracted last quarter at the fastest rate in recorded history, underscoring one of Trump’s most severe vulnerabilities as he pursues a second term.
“It will be a great embarrassment to the USA,” Trump tweeted of the election, asserting without evidence that mail-in voting would lead to fraud. “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
The most powerful leaders in Congress immediately shot down the idea of moving the election, including the top figures in Trump’s own party.
President Trump, lagging in the polls, floats idea of delaying election
“Never in the history of the country — through wars, depressions and the Civil War — have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said in an interview with WNKY television in Kentucky. “We’ll cope with whatever the situation is and have the election on Nov. 3 as already scheduled.”
Trump’s tweet about delaying the election put a self-pitying exclamation mark on a phase of his presidency defined not by the accumulation of executive power but by an abdication of presidential leadership on a national emergency.
Faced with the kind of economic wreckage besieging millions of Americans, any other president would be shoulder-deep in the process of marshaling his top lieutenants and leaders in Congress to form a robust government response. Instead, Trump has been absent this week from economic relief talks, even as a crucial unemployment benefit is poised to expire and the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, warned publicly that the country’s recovery is lagging.
And any other president confronted with a virulent viral outbreak across huge regions of the country would be at least trying to deliver a clear and consistent message about public safety. Instead, Trump has continued to promote a drug with no proven efficacy, hydroxychloroquine, as a potential miracle cure and demand that schools and businesses reopen quickly — even as he has also claimed that it might be impossible to hold a safe election. …
Trump has attacked the legitimacy of US elections before. Even after winning the Electoral College in 2016, Trump cast doubt on the popular vote and postulated baselessly that Hillary Clinton’s substantial lead in that metric had been tainted by illegal voting.
With that as precedent, there has never been much doubt — certainly among his opponents — that Trump would attempt to undercut the election if it appeared likely he would lose it. While Trump does not have the power to shift the date of the election, there is ample concern among Democrats that his appointees in Washington or his allies in state governments could make a large-scale effort to snarl the process of voting.
Opposition leaders expressed outrage, but most agreed, in public and private, that Trump’s outburst should be treated as a distress call rather than a real statement of his governing intentions.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in government, replied to Trump’s tweet simply by posting on Twitter the language from the Constitution stating that Congress, not the president, sets the date of national elections.
Some Republicans were blunt in their rejection of Trump’s position.
“Make no mistake: the election will happen in New Hampshire on November 3rd. End of story,” Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican who is up for reelection, said on Twitter.
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said on Capitol Hill, “Since 1845, we’ve had an election on the first Tuesday after November 1, and we’re going to have one again this year.”
Even Trump’s campaign declined to turn his tweet into a rallying cry, instead playing down the notion that it might have been a policy prescription. Hogan Gidley, a spokesman for the campaign, said Trump was “just raising a question about the chaos Democrats have created with their insistence on all mail-in voting” — an obviously false paraphrase of the president’s tweet, one that minimized the gravity of what Trump had said.
The timing of Trump’s tweet, as much as the content, highlighted the extent to which he has become a loud but isolated figure in government and in the public life of the country. In addition to failing to devise a credible national response to the coronavirus pandemic, he has made no attempt to play the traditional presidential role of calming the country in moments of fear and soothing it in moments of grief.
Never was that more apparent than Thursday, when Trump spent the morning posting a combination of incendiary and pedestrian tweets, while his three immediate predecessors — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton — gathered in Atlanta for the funeral of John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights hero.
As mourners assembled at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Trump had other matters on his mind, like hypothetical election fraud and, as it happened, Italian food.
“Support Patio Pizza and its wonderful owner, Guy Caligiuri, in St. James, Long Island (N.Y.),” the president tweeted, referring to a restaurateur who said he faced backlash for supporting Trump. “Great Pizza!!!”
President Donald Trump devolved into self-pity during a White House coronavirus briefing Tuesday, lamenting that his approval ratings were lower than those of two top government medical experts.
Just over a week after he began a rebooted effort, driven by rising infection rates and sinking poll numbers, to talk about the virus in terms more in line with medical consensus, Trump was again making unfounded claims and defending discredited medical experts. It was the sort of eccentric, science-deficient performance that many of his aides believe unnerved the public during the spring and has come to gravely threaten his reelection prospects.
Noting that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, his administration’s top coronavirus coordinator, have high approval ratings even as his own have sagged, Trump added: “And yet, they’re highly thought of — but nobody likes me.”
“It can only be my personality,” he concluded.
When the president restarted his coronavirus briefings last week after shutting them down in April, he largely hewed to a script, urging Americans to wear masks and practice social distancing.
But on Tuesday, he resumed his freelancing and wandering into politically and medically problematic alleyways. When reporters pressed him on a viral video he had retweeted Monday night that included doctors falsely claiming that hydroxychloroquine was a “cure” for the virus and that masks were unnecessary, Trump responded: “They’re very respected doctors. There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it, and she’s had tremendous success with it.’’
When a reporter noted that the physician who spoke of “a cure,” Dr. Stella Immanuel of Houston, also “made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens,” Trump responded, “I know nothing about her,” and abruptly ended the briefing moments later.
Twitter and Facebook have since removed that video, calling it misleading.
Fauci is among several top medical experts, as well as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, to say repeatedly that hydroxychloroquine has no proven effect against the coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration last month revoked an authorization it had issued for emergency use of hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus patients, saying it acted “based on recent results from a large, randomized clinical trial in hospitalized patients that found these medicines showed no benefit for decreasing the likelihood of death or speeding recovery.”
But Trump was insistent. “Many doctors think it is extremely successful,” he said of the drug, although he acknowledged that “some people don’t.” Trump also noted that he had taken a roughly 10-day course of the drug in May, after a White House valet tested positive for the virus.
While advisers have pressed Trump to more fully acknowledge the severity of the virus’ spread, he again offered a dissonantly upbeat assessment.
Trump declared “large portions of our country” to be “corona-free,” even though no region in the United States is actually free of the virus. While he noted concern over high case levels in California, Arizona, Texas and Florida, he said: “That’s starting to head down in the right direction. And I think you’ll see it rapidly head down very soon.”
However, a new federal report found that the number of states with outbreaks serious enough to place them in the “red zone” has grown to 21. It called for more restrictions on social activity. Those states include the ones named by Trump, along with Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin. All had more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people in the past week.
The findings in the new report were sent to state officials by the White House’s coronavirus task force and obtained by The New York Times.
Trump reiterated that he had a “very good relationship” with Fauci while repeating his now-routine complaint that Fauci had opposed his ban in January on most air travel from China into the United States. (Fauci initially doubted the idea but supported the final decision.)
The president, who said he was invoking the Defense Production Act for the 33rd time since the outbreak of the virus — this time to provide a $765 million loan to Kodak to produce pharmaceuticals, part of a new effort to achieve “American pharmaceutical independence” from China and other nations — insisted that he deserved more credit in relation to Fauci for his administration’s efforts to procure more ventilators and personal protective equipment and to enable more virus testing nationwide.
“He’s got this high approval rating, so why don’t I have a high approval rating with respect — and the administration — with respect to the virus?” Trump asked. “So it sort of is curious.”
The Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue
Trump is the kind of boss who can’t do the job — and won’t go away.
By Paul Krugman
Every worker’s nightmare is the horrible boss — everyone knows at least one — who is utterly incompetent yet refuses to step aside. Such bosses have the reverse Midas touch — everything they handle turns to crud — but they’ll pull out every stop, violate every norm, to stay in that corner office. And they damage, sometimes destroy, the institutions they’re supposed to lead.
Donald Trump is, of course, one of those bosses. Unfortunately, he’s not just a bad business executive. He is, God help us, the president. And the institution he may destroy is the United States of America.
Has any previous president failed his big test as thoroughly as Trump has these past few months? He rejected the advice of health experts and pushed for a rapid economic reopening, hoping for a boom leading into the election. He ridiculed and belittled measures that would have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, turning what should have been common sense into a front in the culture war.
The result has been disaster both epidemiological and economic.
Over the past week the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 averaged more than 1,000 people a day, compared with just four — four! — per day in Germany. Vice President Mike Pence’s mid-June declaration that “There isn’t a coronavirus ‘second wave’” felt like whistling in the dark even at the time; now it feels like a sick joke.
And all those extra deaths don’t seem to have bought us anything in terms of economic performance. America’s economic contraction in the first half of 2020 was almost identical to the contraction in Germany, despite our far higher death toll. And while life in Germany has in many ways returned to normal, a variety of indicators suggest that after two months of rapid job growth, the U.S. recovery is stalling in the face of a resurgent pandemic.
Wait, it gets worse. Trump, his officials and their allies in the Senate have been totally committed to the idea that the U.S. economy will experience a stunningly rapid recovery despite the wave of new infections and deaths. They bought into that view so completely that they seem incapable of taking on board the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t happening.
Just a few days ago Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economist, insisted that a so-called V-shaped recovery was still on track and that “unemployment claims and continuing claims are falling rapidly.” In fact, both are rising.
But because the Trump team insisted that a roaring recovery was coming, and refused to notice that it wasn’t happening, we’ve now stumbled into a completely gratuitous economic crisis.
Thanks to Republican inaction, millions of unemployed workers have seen their last checks from the Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, which was meant to sustain them through a coronavirus-ravaged economy; the virus is still raging, but their life support has been cut off.
So Trump has completely botched his job, bringing unnecessary pain to millions of Americans and unnecessary death to thousands. He may not care, but voters do. So he should be trying to turn things around, if only as a matter of political and personal self-interest.
But here’s the thing: Even if Trump were the kind of guy who could learn from his mistakes, it’s too late. If we had found ourselves in our current situation a year ago, there might still have been time for Trump to get the virus under control and turn the economy around. But the election is just around the corner.
Suppose that the numbers on deaths and jobs were to get somewhat better over the next three months. How much would that improve voters’ views of the denier in chief? How much credence would the public give, even to genuinely good news, after the false dawn this past spring? At this point Trump is simply a failed president, and everyone except his die-hard supporters knows it.
But as I said at the beginning, Trump is one of those nightmare bosses who can’t do the job but won’t step aside.
So of course he’s now talking about delaying the election. This was predictable; indeed, Joe Biden predicted it months ago, amid much mockery from pundits (none of whom, I predict, will apologize).
Now, Trump can’t do that. There will be an election on Nov. 3. But what Trump can do, if he loses, is claim that the election was stolen, that there were millions of fraudulent votes, that the results aren’t legitimate. Hey, he did that after losing the popular vote in 2016, even though he won the Electoral College.
Such antics almost surely wouldn’t let him stay in the White House, although the process of getting him out may be … interesting. But they could produce a lot of chaos and quite possibly some violence across the nation. And anyone who doesn’t think disgruntled Trump supporters would try to sabotage a Biden administration — including its efforts to deal with the pandemic — hasn’t been paying attention.
This is what happens when you put a horrible boss in charge of running the country. And nobody can say when, if ever, the damage will be repaired.
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases of 15.2%, 16.2% and 11.1% for the United Kingdom, France and Mexico respectively.
As for the current spread of coronavirus infections through the United States, the sense is that the spread is so broad and deep that only general social distancing, including in workplaces and schools, and isolation of confirmed cases, including asymptomatic cases, is a viable strategy.
Plunge in Consumption of Services Leads to Record 32.9 Percent Drop in GDP
By DEAN BAKER
The saving rate hit a record 25.7 percent level in the first quarter, indicating that few of the pandemic checks were spent.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shrank at a record 32.9 percent annual rate in the second quarter. While almost all the major categories of GDP fell sharply, a 43.5 percent drop in consumption of services was the largest factor, accounting for 22.9 percentage points of the drop in the quarter. Nonresidential fixed investment also fell sharply, dropping at a 27.0 percent annual rate. Residential investment fell at a 38.7 percent annual rate.
The plunge in service consumption was expected since this was the segment of the economy hardest hit by the shutdowns. Within services, health care, food services and hotels, and recreation were the biggest factors reducing growth by 9.5 percentage points, 5.6 percentage points, and 4.7 percentage points, respectively.
Spending on health care services fell at a 62.7 percent annual rate in the quarter. This was due to people putting off a wide range of medical and dental checkups and procedures, which far more than offset the care needed by coronavirus patients. The annual rate of decline for food and hotel services was 81.2 percent and for recreation services 93.5 percent.
Consumption of nondurable goods fell at a 15.9 percent annual rate. Declines in clothing and gasoline purchases were the biggest factors, taking 1.0 percentage point and 0.9 percentage points off the quarter’s growth, respectively. Demand for durable goods fell at just a 1.4 percent rate, but this followed a decline of 12.5 percent in the first quarter. Interestingly, spending on cars actually rose slightly in the quarter, adding 0.15 percentage points to growth.
Consumption expenditures by nonprofits serving households rose at 182.5 percent annual rate, adding 3.0 percentage points to the quarter’s growth. This reflects the effort by private foundations and charities to ameliorate the hardships being experienced by many households.
Both structure and equipment investment fell sharply in the quarter, declining at 34.9 percent and 37.7 percent annual rates, respectively. The drop in equipment investment is especially striking since it fell at a 15.2 percent rate in the first quarter. Investment in intellectual products fell at a more modest 7.2 percent annual rate. Residential investment fell at a 38.7 percent annual rate, although this followed a jump of 19.0 percent in the first quarter.
Exports and imports both fell sharply, with exports dropping at a 64.1 percent rate and imports falling at a 53.4 percent rate. Because US imports are so much larger than exports, trade actually added 0.7 percentage points to growth in the quarter.
Federal government spending rose at a 17.4 percent annual rate, driven by a 39.7 percent increase in non-defense spending, presumably most of which is pandemic related. State and local spending fell at a 5.6 percent rate, likely reflecting school closings in the quarter.
[Graph]
Prices fell sharply in the quarter, with the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator falling at a 1.9 percent annual rate and the core PCE falling at a 1.1 percent annual rate. These declines reflected sharp drops in the price of items such as gasoline, hotels, and clothes. Many of these declines were already being reversed by the end of the quarter. They will almost certainly not continue into the third quarter.
The savings rate soared to a record 25.7 percent. This reflects the jump in disposable income attributable to the pandemic checks, coupled with the sharp drop in spending. Nominal disposable income rose at a 42.1 percent annual rate. This rise was, of course, uneven, with people who were still getting their regular paychecks or retirees seeing large jumps in income from the pandemic checks, but with many of the unemployed seeing sharp drops.
With the economy mostly reopened, despite serious outbreaks of the pandemic in large parts of the country, we are virtually certain to see strong growth in the third quarter. But even if the economy grows at a 15 or 20 percent annual rate, it would be nowhere close to recovering the losses from the last two quarters.
The shape of the rescue package currently being debated will also be hugely important. In addition to the unemployment insurance supplements that will be necessary for laid-off workers to sustain their consumption, state and local governments will need large amounts of money both to avoid layoffs and to implement programs for the safe reopening of schools, workplaces and businesses. In this context, it is very difficult to see any economic rationale for the $1,200 pandemic checks.
Tucker Carlson described former President Obama as “one of the sleaziest and most dishonest figures in the history of American politics” after his eulogy at the funeral of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) on Thursday. …
One thing I don't think is fully appreciated is the fact that Republicans in general, and Trump a fortiori, have no idea what causes recessions. If they've even heard of Keynes, they imagine his as a left-wing agitator, probably an antifa terrorist 1/ https://t.co/i7C5KCYdod
One thing I don’t think is fully appreciated is the fact that Republicans in general, and Trump a fortiori, have no idea what causes recessions. If they’ve even heard of Keynes, they imagine him as a left-wing agitator, probably an antifa terrorist 1/
Does Trump Want to Save His Economy?
The president is showing little urgency or strategy as the economic recovery stalls ahead of the November election.
8:43 AM · Jul 31, 2020
People are mocking Judy Shelton over her goldbug views, but they forget that Paul Ryan — remember, the celebrated intellectual leader of the party — declared that he learned all his monetary economics from Ayn Rand 2/
What did Ayn Rand teach Paul Ryan about monetary policy?
In 2005, Paul Ryan explained that he often looks to Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” as inspiration for his views on monetary policy. “I always go back to, you know, Francisco d’Anconia’s speech, at Bill Taggart’s wedding, on money when I think about monetary policy,” he said in a speech to the Atlas Society…
During the financial crisis even tenured Chicago professors reinvented old fallacies, such as Say’s Law, and imagined that they were deep insights 3/
Basically the GOP and its pet economists don’t believe it’s even possible for an economy to suffer from inadequate demand; if unemployment is high it must be because we’re taxing the rich too much, or being too nice to the unemployed 4/
So the looming catastrophe as Pandemic Unemployment Compensation expires, sucking purchasing power out of the economy at a $900 billion per year annual rate, just doesn’t register in their worldview 5/
Most enlightening read I have come upon in a while. It is important to understand the historical genesis of certain ideas, and this is a very worthwhile read on that of “outside agitators.” This is especially true in light of a recent study that showed nonviolent mass protests have a much higher success rate than violent ones regardless of regime; however those differences are eliminated if there is a fringe violent element within the nonviolent protests (or the perception of one). When an advanced country visits militaristic intervention upon a lesser power they leave many still active landmines that future generations must navigate perilously. The same is true for violent, militaristic rhetoric domestically.
A taste:
“On Saturday May 30, the day after street protests first got out of control, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter told reporters that “every single person” arrested came from out of state, and “about 80 percent” of rioters had done so. His Twin Cities counterpart, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, pinned the blame on “out-of-state-instigators, and possibly even foreign actors,” who had set out to “destroy and decimate our city and region.” Within hours, the president of the United States repeated Frey’s unsubstantiated claim in a tweet sent to his eighty-three million followers. It was thereafter echoed in press coverage.
The statistic could not stand barest scrutiny. But that didn’t stop other officials around the country from saying the same thing. Marco Rubio claimed that some of those arrested in Miami were outsiders “from as far away as New York and Minnesota.” Why, one might have asked, would New Yorkers travel a thousand miles when they could have stoked flames closer to home? Perhaps to make room for other roving rabble-rousers to descend on Brooklyn and the Bronx, for a top police official there soon passionately complained about all the Californians; meanwhile, three thousand miles away, California officials blamed outsiders, too. An Antifa exchange program, perhaps subsidized by George Soros?
The absurdity reached a nadir in Columbus, Ohio. Police impounded a psychedelically painted school bus and detained its owners on “suspicion of supplying riot equipment to rioters,” including “bats, rocks, meat cleavers, clubs, & other projectiles.” Senator Marco Rubio tweeted vindication: “But I guess still ‘no evidence’ of an organized effort to inject violence & anarchy into the protests, right?” It soon emerged that the bus in Columbus that had authorities trembling—baptized “Buttercup” by its owners, a troupe of traveling circus-style performers—involved an effort by local residents to feed protesters and help with first aid. The “rocks” were fossil specimens; the axes were for chopping firewood; the meat cleavers were for… cleaving meat. Thousands of tweeters nonetheless homed in on the word “MURDER” painted plain as day on Buttercup’s side—ignoring those that preceded it: “STOP LEGAL.”
Everything would have been fine but for the outside agitators: the hoary cliché has been deployed by those in power to insulate themselves from accountability at least since the scribes who wrote the Book of Chronicles described the archangel who came down from the heavens to make mischief: “And Satan stood up against Israel…”
Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
By Valentina O. Puntmann, M. Ludovica Carerj, Imke Wieters, Masia Fahim, Christophe Arendt, Jedrzej Hoffmann, Anastasia Shchendrygina, Felicitas Escher, Mariuca Vasa-Nicotera, Andreas M. Zeiher, Maria Vehreschild and Eike Nagel
Abstract
Importance Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to cause considerable morbidity and mortality worldwide. Case reports of hospitalized patients suggest that COVID-19 prominently affects the cardiovascular system, but the overall impact remains unknown.
Objective To evaluate the presence of myocardial injury in unselected patients recently recovered from COVID-19 illness.
Design, Setting, and Participants In this prospective observational cohort study, 100 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 illness were identified from the University Hospital Frankfurt COVID-19 Registry between April and June 2020.
Exposure Recent recovery from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection, as determined by reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction on swab test of the upper respiratory tract.
Main Outcomes and Measures Demographic characteristics, cardiac blood markers, and cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging were obtained. Comparisons were made with age-matched and sex-matched control groups of healthy volunteers (n = 50) and risk factor–matched patients (n = 57).
Results Of the 100 included patients, 53 (53%) were male, and the median (interquartile range [IQR]) age was 49 (45-53) years. The median (IQR) time interval between COVID-19 diagnosis and CMR was 71 (64-92) days. Of the 100 patients recently recovered from COVID-19, 67 (67%) recovered at home, while 33 (33%) required hospitalization. At the time of CMR, high-sensitivity troponin T (hsTnT) was detectable (3 pg/mL or greater) in 71 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 (71%) and significantly elevated (13.9 pg/mL or greater) in 5 patients (5%). Compared with healthy controls and risk factor–matched controls, patients recently recovered from COVID-19 had lower left ventricular ejection fraction, higher left ventricle volumes, higher left ventricle mass, and raised native T1 and T2. A total of 78 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 (78%) had abnormal CMR findings, including raised myocardial native T1 (n = 73), raised myocardial native T2 (n = 60), myocardial late gadolinium enhancement (n = 32), and pericardial enhancement (n = 22). There was a small but significant difference between patients who recovered at home vs in the hospital for native T1 mapping (median [IQR], 1122 [1113-1132] ms vs 1143 [1131-1156] ms; P = .02) but not for native T2 mapping or hsTnT levels. None of these measures were correlated with time from COVID-19 diagnosis (native T1: r = 0.07; P = .47; native T2: r = 0.14; P = .15; hsTnT: r = −0.07; P = .50). High-sensitivity troponin T was significantly correlated with native T1 mapping (r = 0.35; P < .001) and native T2 mapping (r = 0.22; P = .03). Endomyocardial biopsy in patients with severe findings revealed active lymphocytic inflammation. Native T1 and T2 were the measures with the best discriminatory ability to detect COVID-19–related myocardial pathology.
Conclusions and Relevance In this study of a cohort of German patients recently recovered from COVID-19 infection, CMR revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and time from the original diagnosis. These findings indicate the need for ongoing investigation of the long-term cardiovascular consequences of COVID-19.
[corrected] Hope to see at some point a study how CA has moved from success case (in handling Covid) to a huge disaster. And you cannot put the blame on Trump. Unlike NY that, faced w/ disaster, made a strong effort to improve things, CA just lets deaths take their normal course.
Hope to see at some point a study how CA has moved from success case (in handling Covid) to a huge disaster. And you cannot put the blame on Trump. Unlike NY that, faced w/ disaster, made a strong effort to improve things, CA just lets deaths take their normal course.
Since some folks here asked, total pandemic deaths to date for the European Union have been just over 126,000. The U.S. is over 155,000 an rising at a rate of more than 1,000 a day, compared to 100 a day for the EU, and the EU has 20 percent more people
Since some folks here asked, total pandemic deaths to date for the European Union have been just over 126,000. The U.S. is over 155,000 an rising at a rate of more than 1,000 a day, compared to 100 a day for the EU, and the EU has 20 percent more people
“It’s impossible to say whether Cain contracted the virus at the rally or elsewhere, and aides said he’d been traveling often, but the risk he took in attending the rally seems to exemplify the change in Cain after his entry into politics. Cain was not a stupid man, nor ignorant of science; he was a trained mathematician, after all. But by 2020, Cain—a man who’d joined the Republican Party out of a sense of contrarianism—was ready to risk his life to show his lockstep conformity with party dogma. At one time, Cain seemed like a model of how an individual can live the American dream. Today, he seems like a cautionary tale about how an individual can be destroyed by American politics.”
I do not do much lock stepping in tune to some ideology such as a pseudo-Republicanism of trump’s ilk. Indeed, I make a poor Democrat in the party’s eyes also. In either case, it gives me an opportunity to be an independent Democrat. It is so simple and yet people fight it.
Wear a mask and protect others and social distance to protect yourself. Not doing the former is an attack on my safety and the latter is just foolish behavior which is s threat to myself
I did not read The Atlantic story on Caine. I did read The Atlantic story on Ventilation. It reinforced what I thought already and had read multiple times already. Mr, Caine like so many other foolish Repubs wasted his life tragically and threatened the life of others by his actions.
… Two candidates who received scant attention early in the process are now among the leading contenders: Representative Karen Bass of California and Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser, according to Democratic officials briefed on the selection process. Ms. Bass in particular has moved rapidly toward the top of Mr. Biden’s list amid an intensive lobbying drive by her fellow House Democrats, and has impressed the former vice-president’s search committee. …
With Joseph R. Biden Jr. considering her as his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California on Friday pushed back against criticism that she was too ambitious, a characterization often used as a double standard against women and one that some allies of Mr. Biden have used about her recently.
“There will be a resistance to your ambition,” she said during Black Girls Lead 2020, a virtual conference for young Black women. “There will be people who say to you, ‘You are out of your lane,’ because they are burdened by only having the capacity to see what has always been instead of what can be. But don’t you let that burden you.” ….
Politico reported on Monday that former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a member of Mr. Biden’s search committee, had complained privately that Ms. Harris had not apologized for attacking Mr. Biden in a Democratic primary debate last year. (“She had no remorse,” Mr. Dodd told a Biden supporter, according to Politico.) And CNBC reported on Wednesday that unnamed allies of Mr. Biden considered Ms. Harris “too ambitious” because she ran for president herself and might want to do so again.
This week, a Biden campaign official reached out to The New York Times, unprompted, to say that some of the former vice president’s own staff members did not support her as well.
“Too ambitious” is a common criticism of women in politics, but is rarely levied against men. One study, released by Harvard researchers in 2010, found that voters expressed contempt and anger toward women whom they perceived as “power-seeking,” but saw power-seeking men as stronger and more competent. …
We need to understand that coronavirus infections are serious, with effects tending to be lasting, even for patients who are relatively less ill. Also, we need to understand that the data for the United States show a severe national healthcare system problem.
Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Key Points
Question What are the cardiovascular effects in unselected patients with recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)?
Findings In this cohort study including 100 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 identified from a COVID-19 test center, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), which was independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and the time from the original diagnosis.
Meaning These findings indicate the need for ongoing investigation of the long-term cardiovascular consequences of COVID-19.
The Coronavirus Infected Hundreds at a Georgia Summer Camp
The camp took precautions but did not require campers to wear masks, the C.D.C. reported. Singing and cheering may have helped spread the virus.
By Roni Caryn Rabin
A School Reopens, and the Coronavirus Creeps In
As more schools abandon plans for in-person classes, one that opened in Indiana this week had to quarantine students within hours.
By Eliza Shapiro, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Shawn Hubler
Chinese mainland reports 45 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 45 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, 6 from overseas and 39 domestically transmitted, the National Health Commission said on Saturday.
Of the domestic transmissions, 31 were reported in northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 8 in northeastern Liaoning Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered on Friday, while 15 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Altogether, 78,989 patients had been discharged from hospitals by Friday, the report said, adding that a total of 84,337 COVID-19 cases had been reported on the Chinese mainland since the start of the epidemic, including 4,634 deaths.
Israel had evidently contained and controlled the spread of the coronavirus, but acceding to political pressure opened business and schools early and with little caution. The infection spread now looks to be general.
One of the defining features of the US Covid debacle has been refusal to learn from other countries. Now, as much of the country prepares to open schools, we should — but won't — look at what happened in Israel pic.twitter.com/aOqbr8Pi5E
One of the defining features of the US Covid debacle has been refusal to learn from other countries. Now, as much of the country prepares to open schools, we should — but won’t — look at what happened in Israel
Anecdote but true nonetheless: a very close relative and her husband are just a couple years from retiring from their business. Two young adult children, both living nearby. One married, no kids (yet). So about 3 years ago they decide to buy a lake property and a boat. They don’t use the boat much themselves, but the kids (plus friends) come down most summer weekends. It is perfect…this is exactly what they wanted (except the no grandkids yet). So a couple of weeks ago they notice that the listing real estate agent for their property when they bought it was selling his own, very similar property a couple hundred yards away. His wife had passed a year ago and he was almost completely retired and wanted to be closer to his daughter in Texas. Totally understandable. But then he mentioned to them that they understood how the value of these properties is very closely and inversely tied to the cost of boating? You know that, right? So now this close relative is saying stuff like, well of course the Democrats won’t actually do that crazy Green New Deal. They’ll figure out how to let Republicans block it.
To make sense of the benefits disaster, you have to realize that Republicans don't understand that lack of sufficient demand can cause mass unemployment. I don't mean that they've rejected that view; they don't even know where it comes from 1/ https://t.co/aZJymxozht
To make sense of the benefits disaster, you have to realize that Republicans don’t understand that lack of sufficient demand can cause mass unemployment. I don’t mean that they’ve rejected that view; they don’t even know where it comes from 1/
White House, Democrats trade blame on expiration of jobless benefits
Some 20 million workers are losing $600 in unemployment benefits today, and the White House and Democrats in Congress are blaming each other for it.
9:14 AM · Aug 1, 2020
Larry Kudlow, who is for our sins Trump’s top economist — and long a go-to-guy for the GOP in general — said some revealing things in 2006, with no indication he’s learned anything since 2/
In his view, higher output means lower inflation, because money is chasing more goods. Not a hint that he understood that output might be depressed because of insufficient spending, or even that he understood the concept. “I don’t get it,” he declared; that at least was true 3/
So the whole GOP lives in a mental universe in which the only reason people might be unemployed is because they don’t want to work, or maybe because employers pay too much taxes. The idea that cutting off income for millions will lead to more unemployment isn’t in their minds 4/
And what they don’t know can very much hurt you, and almost everyone else 5/
More reminders that America is the sick man of the advanced world — if we're even part of that world, which seems increasingly doubtful https://t.co/fLipBgSt0I
Despite Historic Plunge, Europe’s Economy Flashes Signs of Recovery
European countries that have better contained the virus are poised for speedier economic recovery than the United States.
The Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP in the western hemisphere since 1971. Nonetheless, Cuba has had markedly better healthcare outcomes even though Cuba has been continually under United States sanctions. The coronavirus experience reflects a profound difference in healthcare systems, a difference reflected in other basic health characteristics of the countries.
My first ever law school class was 10 am criminal law with a former prosecutor who I would take a class with every year. In that lecture he made a few good demonstrations on (a) how easy it is to get arrested if you accept mail that’s not yours and (b) when a crime is committed, any person is capable of anything. I kind of shivered at the thought, because it seems like there is nothing that can be done about it, except just hope the worst occurrences being rare. This article really nails home that it is not rare, yet just as abrupt and inexplicable, and the fact that we (well, I) can’t get close to understanding how and why this happens.
Of course, however, I agree with your prioritization of the PPE, medical, equipment, clerical, viral characteristics and think others should read those instead when pressed for time. I’m lucky to have enough family in the medical field that I can rely on their explanations without relying on my limited scientific literacy.
As a point of caution and to limit my liability, I do not accept mail not addressed to myself or family. Indeed, it goes back into the mailbox with the flag raised up and noted as a “return to sender” and “no such person at this address” (not quite Elvis). The Post Office is a federal agency and not to be trifled with under penalty of federal law. Theft of mail is serious stuff (which I know you know). You remind of a law student at Duke University who assisted the head (Dean maybe? I do not recall) of the Law Department there. When I would call there, he would answer the phone for Erwin.
If a person such as Herman Cain will not take the necessary precautions to protect himself against Covid and protect others from contracting Covid, from himself, by simply wearing a mask, why would others follow safe practices? It is here that they (people of importance) fail those believing in them. It is here, there is such frustration for many of us. What would J.S. Mill say?
After Plummeting, the Virus Soars Back in Parts of U.S.
New coronavirus cases are picking up at a dangerous pace in much of the Midwest, and in cities that thought they had seen the worst.
There is a deepening national sense that the progress made in fighting the pandemic is coming undone and that no patch of America is safe.
[ There was no “plummeting,” just declines that gave way to less general caution when a look to the experiences in other countries would have shown how much caution was necessary. ]
In Ultra-Wealthy Greenwich, Teen Parties Lead to Jump in Virus Cases
Many of those exposed were seniors who had just finished their final year at two elite private schools.
By Mihir Zaveri
Am really keen to know how "liberals" will explain US debacle. Their all-purpose explanation will be Trump. But whoever has lived through this period in the US and looked at people's behavior knows that this is at best a partial explanation. Indifference to death is stunning.
Am really keen to know how “liberals” will explain US debacle. Their all-purpose explanation will be Trump. But whoever has lived through this period in the US and looked at people’s behavior knows that this is at best a partial explanation. Indifference to death is stunning.
Kodak C.E.O. Got Stock Options Day Before News of Loan Sent Stock Soaring
The stock options suddenly were worth about $50 million — the latest instance of extraordinary good timing by corporate executives.
By Jesse Drucker and Ellen Gabler
At the beginning of this week, the Eastman Kodak Company handed its chief executive 1.75 million stock options.
It was the type of compensation decision that generally wouldn’t attract much notice, except for one thing: The day after the stock options were granted, the White House announced that the company would receive a $765 million federal loan to produce ingredients to make pharmaceuticals in the United States.
The news of the deal caused Kodak’s shares to soar more than 1,000 percent. Within 48 hours of the options grants, their value had ballooned, at least on paper, to about $50 million….
Trump Administration Moves to Speed Coronavirus Testing
The Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration are funding private companies that are rushing faster tests to the market.
By Noah Weiland and Katie Thomas
[ That private companies have been unable to provide for enough timely convenient testing all this time is an important matter to study. ]
It seems to me that we need a new concept to discuss the Trump/GOP reaction to the coronavirus disaster. Everyone knows about the Big Lie, which is so outlandish people can't believe it's a lie. What we have now is the Big Fail, so extreme that people can't process it 1/
It seems to me that we need a new concept to discuss the Trump/GOP reaction to the coronavirus disaster. Everyone knows about the Big Lie, which is so outlandish people can’t believe it’s a lie. What we have now is the Big Fail, so extreme that people can’t process it 1/
10:26 AM · Aug 2, 2020
I mean, if you’ve spent three years believing that Trump Made America Great Again, how do you deal with the fact that >1000 Americans are dying of Covid-19 each day, compared with 6 (six) in Italy? 2/
There’s a lot of grasping at straws. I see that Trump is gloating over new outbreaks in some countries, like Australia, that thought they had it beat. And that is a cause for concern. But bear in mind what AU’s outbreak looks like compared to ours 3/
And Australia is imposing a full lockdown in Melbourne to stop this outbreak in its tracks; Florida, which is losing 180 people a day compared with Australia’s 8, won’t even require face masks and is reopening schools 4/
The point is that the contrast between the Trump hagiography and the reality of one of history’s greatest policy failures is too great for the faithful (and of course Trump himself) to process. So they’re becoming increasingly delusional 5/
To be a Trump supporter now is to be constantly at war with reality. And it’s terrifying to think what that will mean if Trump loses the election 6/
If we have lots of people for whom the +$600/week and UI were greater than prior wages then why not have the state IU + whatever portion of the $600 needed not hit the prior wage just go to the employer not to fire the person? Yes, scrubbing the vacant restaurant floor for the 5th time in the day might be boring, but a lot less churn and friction when cusomters start to finally come back.
In Wisconsin we are in day 2 of the governor’s mask mandate. One oddity is that several businesses (retailers, by in large) are urgently reviewing their standards. They had instituted “must wear mask” policies – often many weeks ago – and were operating to those, but now there is a state edict that provides for specific circumstances for which people do not need to wear a mask they are having to look at their policies again. Yesterday my wife shopped at a major store that for the past couple of months had nobody without a mask in the store and yesterday she saw several without masks and was specifically told at the entrance that those with the medical circumstances would be allowed in without masks and that the store would operate on the honor system. I don’t think that it is necessarily a permanent policy but for right now “maskless” shopping in Wisconsin is actually a bit more possible.
A bit more on masks in Wisconsin. My view is that the governor’s mandate will be counterproductive. Wearing masks was gaining ground over the past couple of months. Having a governor who is wildly unpopular with a good portion of the state’s population issue this mandate is not a good tactic to keep it moving to higher levels. He might have thought twice before turning this into even more of a political and cultural identifier. It is easy to say that it ought not be thought of as an identifier, but it has been and Evers knows it but lacked the courage to disappoint the “mask” people. A better leader would recognize that the challenge was to convince those not masking to change and already it is clear that there will be no enforcement of this by the state. The most effective enforcement was by Costco and others and that got slightly undercut by the details of the mandate. My guess is that progress slowed down on July 31 on masks in Wisconsin.
“If we have lots of people for whom the +$600/week and UI were greater than prior wages then why not have the state IU + whatever portion of the $600 needed not hit the prior wage just go to the employer not to fire the person?”
– IZ: Because: (1) businesses are better and more sophisticated at commiting fraud; (2) its the workers already earned money in the account <- do conservatives not get this?; (3) businesses are in superior negotiating positions so workers are often underpaid for the work they've already done; (4) the government represents we the people, not we the corporation;
" Yes, scrubbing the vacant restaurant floor for the 5th time in the day might be boring, but a lot less churn and friction when cusomters start to finally come back."
-IZ: (5) no it doesn't in fact the churn and friction is much greater when customers come back because cleaning/disinfecting and the workers KEEP GETTING PAID THE SAME NO MATTER HOW MUCH THE COMPANY PROFITS FROM THAT WORK.
30 million workers have had their financial lifeline cut off, and talks are stalled. But this isn't because "Congress" is dysfunctional; it's because *Republicans* are wedded to nonsense economics 1/ pic.twitter.com/C6Lu334G4U
30 million workers have had their financial lifeline cut off, and talks are stalled. But this isn’t because “Congress” is dysfunctional; it’s because *Republicans* are wedded to nonsense economics 1/
Coronavirus Live Updates: As Cases Rise, U.S. Officials Are at an Impasse Over Aid
1:34 PM · Aug 2, 2020
I don’t mean that they adhere to doctrines I disagree with; I mean that they have no coherent doctrine at all other than visceral dislike for helping people in distress 2/
The claimed GOP objection to extending aid to the unemployed is the belief that it discourages workers from accepting jobs. In reality, all the evidence suggests that under current conditions that just isn’t happening 3/
Ernie Tedeschi @ernietedeschi
So far I’ve counted 4 analyses by @mioana, @arindube, Altonji et al, & me finding no overall negative labor market effects so far. For the sort of short-term FPUC extensions we’re discussing, that’s the more appropriate standard, rather than whether someone somewhere stays on unemployment insurance.
twitter.com/abcpolitics/st…
But even if it were happening, we have 30 million workers receiving benefits and only 5 million job vacancies. What jobs would workers take if they wanted to work? 4/
More generally, unemployment benefits might raise workers’ reservation wages — the wages they demand to take jobs. But higher wages in the economy as a whole don’t directly reduce employment, as Keynes explained long ago 5/
They only matter if you have a fixed money supply or if the central bank is worried about inflation, neither of which is remotely the case right now 6/
What about GOP opposition to temporary aid to states and cities? You don’t even have to be a Keynesian to see that this is bad economics. It makes no sense to impose severe cuts in government services in the face of a known temporary revenue loss/ cost increase 7/
We should be helping states in a pandemic for the same reason governments pay for wars in part by borrowing: the needs are temporary and it’s inefficient to cover them entirely by slashing nondefense spending and/or raising taxes 8/
In short, there is no economic theory or logic behind the Republican position. It’s all about being mean-spirited and/or cynically exploiting a crisis to force governments to shrink 9/
Birx Says U.S. Epidemic Is in a ‘New Phase’
She and other top health officials in the Trump administration warn states of a deepening spread of the coronavirus, in both rural and urban areas.
By Benedict Carey
I think Obama just reset the Democratic Party for the future.
His call to end the filibuster to attack voter suppression goes farther than that. He saw what the filibuster did to his admin, and while the Rep takeover of the House in 2011 meant the end of any serious legislation, a lot of damage was done to the country by the filibuster.
If the Dems win the trifecta in November, there is no doubt in my mind that the filibuster will become history. Combine that with statehood for DC and Puerto Rico and this country can move away from racist interference.
I doubt even Manchin would vote against removing the filibuster, as the Dem response would be severe. Throw him out of all committees, throw him out of the caucus, pledge to finance and endorse a primary challenger the first chance. He might as well be a Republican at that point anyway.
Trump’s attack on election is about his fear of losing
NY Times via @BostonGlobe – July 30
For several years, it has been the stuff of his opponents’ nightmares: that President Trump, facing the prospect of defeat in the 2020 election, would declare by presidential edict that the vote had been delayed or canceled.
Never mind that no president has that power, that the timing of federal elections has been fixed since the 19th century and that the Constitution sets an immovable expiration date on the president’s term. Given Trump’s contempt for the legal limits on his office and his oft-expressed admiration for foreign dictators, it hardly seemed far-fetched to imagine he would at least attempt the gambit.
But when the moment came Thursday, with Trump suggesting for the first time that the election could be delayed, his proposal appeared as impotent as it was predictable — less a stunning assertion of his authority than yet another lament that his political prospects have dimmed amid a global public health crisis. Indeed, his comments on Twitter came shortly after the Commerce Department reported that US economic output contracted last quarter at the fastest rate in recorded history, underscoring one of Trump’s most severe vulnerabilities as he pursues a second term.
“It will be a great embarrassment to the USA,” Trump tweeted of the election, asserting without evidence that mail-in voting would lead to fraud. “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
The most powerful leaders in Congress immediately shot down the idea of moving the election, including the top figures in Trump’s own party.
President Trump, lagging in the polls, floats idea of delaying election
“Never in the history of the country — through wars, depressions and the Civil War — have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said in an interview with WNKY television in Kentucky. “We’ll cope with whatever the situation is and have the election on Nov. 3 as already scheduled.”
Trump’s tweet about delaying the election put a self-pitying exclamation mark on a phase of his presidency defined not by the accumulation of executive power but by an abdication of presidential leadership on a national emergency.
Faced with the kind of economic wreckage besieging millions of Americans, any other president would be shoulder-deep in the process of marshaling his top lieutenants and leaders in Congress to form a robust government response. Instead, Trump has been absent this week from economic relief talks, even as a crucial unemployment benefit is poised to expire and the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, warned publicly that the country’s recovery is lagging.
And any other president confronted with a virulent viral outbreak across huge regions of the country would be at least trying to deliver a clear and consistent message about public safety. Instead, Trump has continued to promote a drug with no proven efficacy, hydroxychloroquine, as a potential miracle cure and demand that schools and businesses reopen quickly — even as he has also claimed that it might be impossible to hold a safe election. …
Trump has attacked the legitimacy of US elections before. Even after winning the Electoral College in 2016, Trump cast doubt on the popular vote and postulated baselessly that Hillary Clinton’s substantial lead in that metric had been tainted by illegal voting.
With that as precedent, there has never been much doubt — certainly among his opponents — that Trump would attempt to undercut the election if it appeared likely he would lose it. While Trump does not have the power to shift the date of the election, there is ample concern among Democrats that his appointees in Washington or his allies in state governments could make a large-scale effort to snarl the process of voting.
Opposition leaders expressed outrage, but most agreed, in public and private, that Trump’s outburst should be treated as a distress call rather than a real statement of his governing intentions.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in government, replied to Trump’s tweet simply by posting on Twitter the language from the Constitution stating that Congress, not the president, sets the date of national elections.
Some Republicans were blunt in their rejection of Trump’s position.
“Make no mistake: the election will happen in New Hampshire on November 3rd. End of story,” Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican who is up for reelection, said on Twitter.
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said on Capitol Hill, “Since 1845, we’ve had an election on the first Tuesday after November 1, and we’re going to have one again this year.”
Even Trump’s campaign declined to turn his tweet into a rallying cry, instead playing down the notion that it might have been a policy prescription. Hogan Gidley, a spokesman for the campaign, said Trump was “just raising a question about the chaos Democrats have created with their insistence on all mail-in voting” — an obviously false paraphrase of the president’s tweet, one that minimized the gravity of what Trump had said.
The timing of Trump’s tweet, as much as the content, highlighted the extent to which he has become a loud but isolated figure in government and in the public life of the country. In addition to failing to devise a credible national response to the coronavirus pandemic, he has made no attempt to play the traditional presidential role of calming the country in moments of fear and soothing it in moments of grief.
Never was that more apparent than Thursday, when Trump spent the morning posting a combination of incendiary and pedestrian tweets, while his three immediate predecessors — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton — gathered in Atlanta for the funeral of John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights hero.
As mourners assembled at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Trump had other matters on his mind, like hypothetical election fraud and, as it happened, Italian food.
“Support Patio Pizza and its wonderful owner, Guy Caligiuri, in St. James, Long Island (N.Y.),” the president tweeted, referring to a restaurateur who said he faced backlash for supporting Trump. “Great Pizza!!!”
‘Nobody likes me,’ Trump complains, renewing defense of dubious science
NY Times via @BostonGlobe – July 28
President Donald Trump devolved into self-pity during a White House coronavirus briefing Tuesday, lamenting that his approval ratings were lower than those of two top government medical experts.
Just over a week after he began a rebooted effort, driven by rising infection rates and sinking poll numbers, to talk about the virus in terms more in line with medical consensus, Trump was again making unfounded claims and defending discredited medical experts. It was the sort of eccentric, science-deficient performance that many of his aides believe unnerved the public during the spring and has come to gravely threaten his reelection prospects.
Noting that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, his administration’s top coronavirus coordinator, have high approval ratings even as his own have sagged, Trump added: “And yet, they’re highly thought of — but nobody likes me.”
“It can only be my personality,” he concluded.
When the president restarted his coronavirus briefings last week after shutting them down in April, he largely hewed to a script, urging Americans to wear masks and practice social distancing.
But on Tuesday, he resumed his freelancing and wandering into politically and medically problematic alleyways. When reporters pressed him on a viral video he had retweeted Monday night that included doctors falsely claiming that hydroxychloroquine was a “cure” for the virus and that masks were unnecessary, Trump responded: “They’re very respected doctors. There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it, and she’s had tremendous success with it.’’
When a reporter noted that the physician who spoke of “a cure,” Dr. Stella Immanuel of Houston, also “made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens,” Trump responded, “I know nothing about her,” and abruptly ended the briefing moments later.
Twitter and Facebook have since removed that video, calling it misleading.
Fauci is among several top medical experts, as well as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, to say repeatedly that hydroxychloroquine has no proven effect against the coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration last month revoked an authorization it had issued for emergency use of hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus patients, saying it acted “based on recent results from a large, randomized clinical trial in hospitalized patients that found these medicines showed no benefit for decreasing the likelihood of death or speeding recovery.”
But Trump was insistent. “Many doctors think it is extremely successful,” he said of the drug, although he acknowledged that “some people don’t.” Trump also noted that he had taken a roughly 10-day course of the drug in May, after a White House valet tested positive for the virus.
While advisers have pressed Trump to more fully acknowledge the severity of the virus’ spread, he again offered a dissonantly upbeat assessment.
Trump declared “large portions of our country” to be “corona-free,” even though no region in the United States is actually free of the virus. While he noted concern over high case levels in California, Arizona, Texas and Florida, he said: “That’s starting to head down in the right direction. And I think you’ll see it rapidly head down very soon.”
However, a new federal report found that the number of states with outbreaks serious enough to place them in the “red zone” has grown to 21. It called for more restrictions on social activity. Those states include the ones named by Trump, along with Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin. All had more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people in the past week.
The findings in the new report were sent to state officials by the White House’s coronavirus task force and obtained by The New York Times.
Trump reiterated that he had a “very good relationship” with Fauci while repeating his now-routine complaint that Fauci had opposed his ban in January on most air travel from China into the United States. (Fauci initially doubted the idea but supported the final decision.)
The president, who said he was invoking the Defense Production Act for the 33rd time since the outbreak of the virus — this time to provide a $765 million loan to Kodak to produce pharmaceuticals, part of a new effort to achieve “American pharmaceutical independence” from China and other nations — insisted that he deserved more credit in relation to Fauci for his administration’s efforts to procure more ventilators and personal protective equipment and to enable more virus testing nationwide.
“He’s got this high approval rating, so why don’t I have a high approval rating with respect — and the administration — with respect to the virus?” Trump asked. “So it sort of is curious.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/trump-coronavirus-economy.html
July 30, 2020
The Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue
Trump is the kind of boss who can’t do the job — and won’t go away.
By Paul Krugman
Every worker’s nightmare is the horrible boss — everyone knows at least one — who is utterly incompetent yet refuses to step aside. Such bosses have the reverse Midas touch — everything they handle turns to crud — but they’ll pull out every stop, violate every norm, to stay in that corner office. And they damage, sometimes destroy, the institutions they’re supposed to lead.
Donald Trump is, of course, one of those bosses. Unfortunately, he’s not just a bad business executive. He is, God help us, the president. And the institution he may destroy is the United States of America.
Has any previous president failed his big test as thoroughly as Trump has these past few months? He rejected the advice of health experts and pushed for a rapid economic reopening, hoping for a boom leading into the election. He ridiculed and belittled measures that would have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, turning what should have been common sense into a front in the culture war.
The result has been disaster both epidemiological and economic.
Over the past week the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 averaged more than 1,000 people a day, compared with just four — four! — per day in Germany. Vice President Mike Pence’s mid-June declaration that “There isn’t a coronavirus ‘second wave’” felt like whistling in the dark even at the time; now it feels like a sick joke.
And all those extra deaths don’t seem to have bought us anything in terms of economic performance. America’s economic contraction in the first half of 2020 was almost identical to the contraction in Germany, despite our far higher death toll. And while life in Germany has in many ways returned to normal, a variety of indicators suggest that after two months of rapid job growth, the U.S. recovery is stalling in the face of a resurgent pandemic.
Wait, it gets worse. Trump, his officials and their allies in the Senate have been totally committed to the idea that the U.S. economy will experience a stunningly rapid recovery despite the wave of new infections and deaths. They bought into that view so completely that they seem incapable of taking on board the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t happening.
Just a few days ago Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economist, insisted that a so-called V-shaped recovery was still on track and that “unemployment claims and continuing claims are falling rapidly.” In fact, both are rising.
But because the Trump team insisted that a roaring recovery was coming, and refused to notice that it wasn’t happening, we’ve now stumbled into a completely gratuitous economic crisis.
Thanks to Republican inaction, millions of unemployed workers have seen their last checks from the Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, which was meant to sustain them through a coronavirus-ravaged economy; the virus is still raging, but their life support has been cut off.
So Trump has completely botched his job, bringing unnecessary pain to millions of Americans and unnecessary death to thousands. He may not care, but voters do. So he should be trying to turn things around, if only as a matter of political and personal self-interest.
But here’s the thing: Even if Trump were the kind of guy who could learn from his mistakes, it’s too late. If we had found ourselves in our current situation a year ago, there might still have been time for Trump to get the virus under control and turn the economy around. But the election is just around the corner.
Suppose that the numbers on deaths and jobs were to get somewhat better over the next three months. How much would that improve voters’ views of the denier in chief? How much credence would the public give, even to genuinely good news, after the false dawn this past spring? At this point Trump is simply a failed president, and everyone except his die-hard supporters knows it.
But as I said at the beginning, Trump is one of those nightmare bosses who can’t do the job but won’t step aside.
So of course he’s now talking about delaying the election. This was predictable; indeed, Joe Biden predicted it months ago, amid much mockery from pundits (none of whom, I predict, will apologize).
Now, Trump can’t do that. There will be an election on Nov. 3. But what Trump can do, if he loses, is claim that the election was stolen, that there were millions of fraudulent votes, that the results aren’t legitimate. Hey, he did that after losing the popular vote in 2016, even though he won the Electoral College.
Such antics almost surely wouldn’t let him stay in the White House, although the process of getting him out may be … interesting. But they could produce a lot of chaos and quite possibly some violence across the nation. And anyone who doesn’t think disgruntled Trump supporters would try to sabotage a Biden administration — including its efforts to deal with the pandemic — hasn’t been paying attention.
This is what happens when you put a horrible boss in charge of running the country. And nobody can say when, if ever, the damage will be repaired.
July 30, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,634,985)
Deaths ( 155,285)
India
Cases ( 1,639,350)
Deaths ( 35,786)
Mexico
Cases ( 408,449)
Deaths ( 45,361)
UK
Cases ( 302,301)
Deaths ( 45,999)
Germany
Cases ( 209,653)
Deaths ( 9,221)
France
Cases ( 186,573)
Deaths ( 30,254)
Canada
Cases ( 115,799)
Deaths ( 8,929)
China
Cases ( 84,165)
Deaths ( 4,634)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases of 15.2%, 16.2% and 11.1% for the United Kingdom, France and Mexico respectively.
As for the current spread of coronavirus infections through the United States, the sense is that the spread is so broad and deep that only general social distancing, including in workplaces and schools, and isolation of confirmed cases, including asymptomatic cases, is a viable strategy.
“Nobody likes me”.
Took him 43 months to say something true.
https://cepr.net/gdp-2020-07/
July 30, 2020
Plunge in Consumption of Services Leads to Record 32.9 Percent Drop in GDP
By DEAN BAKER
The saving rate hit a record 25.7 percent level in the first quarter, indicating that few of the pandemic checks were spent.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shrank at a record 32.9 percent annual rate in the second quarter. While almost all the major categories of GDP fell sharply, a 43.5 percent drop in consumption of services was the largest factor, accounting for 22.9 percentage points of the drop in the quarter. Nonresidential fixed investment also fell sharply, dropping at a 27.0 percent annual rate. Residential investment fell at a 38.7 percent annual rate.
The plunge in service consumption was expected since this was the segment of the economy hardest hit by the shutdowns. Within services, health care, food services and hotels, and recreation were the biggest factors reducing growth by 9.5 percentage points, 5.6 percentage points, and 4.7 percentage points, respectively.
Spending on health care services fell at a 62.7 percent annual rate in the quarter. This was due to people putting off a wide range of medical and dental checkups and procedures, which far more than offset the care needed by coronavirus patients. The annual rate of decline for food and hotel services was 81.2 percent and for recreation services 93.5 percent.
Consumption of nondurable goods fell at a 15.9 percent annual rate. Declines in clothing and gasoline purchases were the biggest factors, taking 1.0 percentage point and 0.9 percentage points off the quarter’s growth, respectively. Demand for durable goods fell at just a 1.4 percent rate, but this followed a decline of 12.5 percent in the first quarter. Interestingly, spending on cars actually rose slightly in the quarter, adding 0.15 percentage points to growth.
Consumption expenditures by nonprofits serving households rose at 182.5 percent annual rate, adding 3.0 percentage points to the quarter’s growth. This reflects the effort by private foundations and charities to ameliorate the hardships being experienced by many households.
Both structure and equipment investment fell sharply in the quarter, declining at 34.9 percent and 37.7 percent annual rates, respectively. The drop in equipment investment is especially striking since it fell at a 15.2 percent rate in the first quarter. Investment in intellectual products fell at a more modest 7.2 percent annual rate. Residential investment fell at a 38.7 percent annual rate, although this followed a jump of 19.0 percent in the first quarter.
Exports and imports both fell sharply, with exports dropping at a 64.1 percent rate and imports falling at a 53.4 percent rate. Because US imports are so much larger than exports, trade actually added 0.7 percentage points to growth in the quarter.
Federal government spending rose at a 17.4 percent annual rate, driven by a 39.7 percent increase in non-defense spending, presumably most of which is pandemic related. State and local spending fell at a 5.6 percent rate, likely reflecting school closings in the quarter.
[Graph]
Prices fell sharply in the quarter, with the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator falling at a 1.9 percent annual rate and the core PCE falling at a 1.1 percent annual rate. These declines reflected sharp drops in the price of items such as gasoline, hotels, and clothes. Many of these declines were already being reversed by the end of the quarter. They will almost certainly not continue into the third quarter.
The savings rate soared to a record 25.7 percent. This reflects the jump in disposable income attributable to the pandemic checks, coupled with the sharp drop in spending. Nominal disposable income rose at a 42.1 percent annual rate. This rise was, of course, uneven, with people who were still getting their regular paychecks or retirees seeing large jumps in income from the pandemic checks, but with many of the unemployed seeing sharp drops.
With the economy mostly reopened, despite serious outbreaks of the pandemic in large parts of the country, we are virtually certain to see strong growth in the third quarter. But even if the economy grows at a 15 or 20 percent annual rate, it would be nowhere close to recovering the losses from the last two quarters.
The shape of the rescue package currently being debated will also be hugely important. In addition to the unemployment insurance supplements that will be necessary for laid-off workers to sustain their consumption, state and local governments will need large amounts of money both to avoid layoffs and to implement programs for the safe reopening of schools, workplaces and businesses. In this context, it is very difficult to see any economic rationale for the $1,200 pandemic checks.
‘I think Obama just reset the Democratic Party for the future.’
I would agree. Tucker Carlson, however, is aghast.
Tucker Carlson calls Obama ‘one of the sleaziest and most dishonest figures’ in US political history
Tucker Carlson described former President Obama as “one of the sleaziest and most dishonest figures in the history of American politics” after his eulogy at the funeral of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) on Thursday. …
(And Tucker Carlson knows ‘sleazy’.)
Trump would rather we spend our time saying he can’t delay the election than telling his voters that the economy is not doing what Trump wants.
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
One thing I don’t think is fully appreciated is the fact that Republicans in general, and Trump a fortiori, have no idea what causes recessions. If they’ve even heard of Keynes, they imagine him as a left-wing agitator, probably an antifa terrorist 1/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/business/coronavirus-trump-economy.html
Does Trump Want to Save His Economy?
The president is showing little urgency or strategy as the economic recovery stalls ahead of the November election.
8:43 AM · Jul 31, 2020
People are mocking Judy Shelton over her goldbug views, but they forget that Paul Ryan — remember, the celebrated intellectual leader of the party — declared that he learned all his monetary economics from Ayn Rand 2/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/08/13/what-did-ayn-rand-teach-paul-ryan-about-monetary-policy/
What did Ayn Rand teach Paul Ryan about monetary policy?
In 2005, Paul Ryan explained that he often looks to Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” as inspiration for his views on monetary policy. “I always go back to, you know, Francisco d’Anconia’s speech, at Bill Taggart’s wedding, on money when I think about monetary policy,” he said in a speech to the Atlas Society…
During the financial crisis even tenured Chicago professors reinvented old fallacies, such as Say’s Law, and imagined that they were deep insights 3/
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/a-dark-age-of-macroeconomics-wonkish/
A Dark Age of macroeconomics (wonkish)
Basically the GOP and its pet economists don’t believe it’s even possible for an economy to suffer from inadequate demand; if unemployment is high it must be because we’re taxing the rich too much, or being too nice to the unemployed 4/
So the looming catastrophe as Pandemic Unemployment Compensation expires, sucking purchasing power out of the economy at a $900 billion per year annual rate, just doesn’t register in their worldview 5/
July 31, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,662,076)
Deaths ( 155,851)
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/07/27/a-brief-history-of-dangerous-others/
Richard Kreitner and Rick Perlstein
Most enlightening read I have come upon in a while. It is important to understand the historical genesis of certain ideas, and this is a very worthwhile read on that of “outside agitators.” This is especially true in light of a recent study that showed nonviolent mass protests have a much higher success rate than violent ones regardless of regime; however those differences are eliminated if there is a fringe violent element within the nonviolent protests (or the perception of one). When an advanced country visits militaristic intervention upon a lesser power they leave many still active landmines that future generations must navigate perilously. The same is true for violent, militaristic rhetoric domestically.
A taste:
“On Saturday May 30, the day after street protests first got out of control, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter told reporters that “every single person” arrested came from out of state, and “about 80 percent” of rioters had done so. His Twin Cities counterpart, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, pinned the blame on “out-of-state-instigators, and possibly even foreign actors,” who had set out to “destroy and decimate our city and region.” Within hours, the president of the United States repeated Frey’s unsubstantiated claim in a tweet sent to his eighty-three million followers. It was thereafter echoed in press coverage.
The statistic could not stand barest scrutiny. But that didn’t stop other officials around the country from saying the same thing. Marco Rubio claimed that some of those arrested in Miami were outsiders “from as far away as New York and Minnesota.” Why, one might have asked, would New Yorkers travel a thousand miles when they could have stoked flames closer to home? Perhaps to make room for other roving rabble-rousers to descend on Brooklyn and the Bronx, for a top police official there soon passionately complained about all the Californians; meanwhile, three thousand miles away, California officials blamed outsiders, too. An Antifa exchange program, perhaps subsidized by George Soros?
The absurdity reached a nadir in Columbus, Ohio. Police impounded a psychedelically painted school bus and detained its owners on “suspicion of supplying riot equipment to rioters,” including “bats, rocks, meat cleavers, clubs, & other projectiles.” Senator Marco Rubio tweeted vindication: “But I guess still ‘no evidence’ of an organized effort to inject violence & anarchy into the protests, right?” It soon emerged that the bus in Columbus that had authorities trembling—baptized “Buttercup” by its owners, a troupe of traveling circus-style performers—involved an effort by local residents to feed protesters and help with first aid. The “rocks” were fossil specimens; the axes were for chopping firewood; the meat cleavers were for… cleaving meat. Thousands of tweeters nonetheless homed in on the word “MURDER” painted plain as day on Buttercup’s side—ignoring those that preceded it: “STOP LEGAL.”
Everything would have been fine but for the outside agitators: the hoary cliché has been deployed by those in power to insulate themselves from accountability at least since the scribes who wrote the Book of Chronicles described the archangel who came down from the heavens to make mischief: “And Satan stood up against Israel…”
July 31, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,681,388)
Deaths ( 156,180)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916
July 27, 2020
Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
By Valentina O. Puntmann, M. Ludovica Carerj, Imke Wieters, Masia Fahim, Christophe Arendt, Jedrzej Hoffmann, Anastasia Shchendrygina, Felicitas Escher, Mariuca Vasa-Nicotera, Andreas M. Zeiher, Maria Vehreschild and Eike Nagel
Abstract
Importance Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to cause considerable morbidity and mortality worldwide. Case reports of hospitalized patients suggest that COVID-19 prominently affects the cardiovascular system, but the overall impact remains unknown.
Objective To evaluate the presence of myocardial injury in unselected patients recently recovered from COVID-19 illness.
Design, Setting, and Participants In this prospective observational cohort study, 100 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 illness were identified from the University Hospital Frankfurt COVID-19 Registry between April and June 2020.
Exposure Recent recovery from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection, as determined by reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction on swab test of the upper respiratory tract.
Main Outcomes and Measures Demographic characteristics, cardiac blood markers, and cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging were obtained. Comparisons were made with age-matched and sex-matched control groups of healthy volunteers (n = 50) and risk factor–matched patients (n = 57).
Results Of the 100 included patients, 53 (53%) were male, and the median (interquartile range [IQR]) age was 49 (45-53) years. The median (IQR) time interval between COVID-19 diagnosis and CMR was 71 (64-92) days. Of the 100 patients recently recovered from COVID-19, 67 (67%) recovered at home, while 33 (33%) required hospitalization. At the time of CMR, high-sensitivity troponin T (hsTnT) was detectable (3 pg/mL or greater) in 71 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 (71%) and significantly elevated (13.9 pg/mL or greater) in 5 patients (5%). Compared with healthy controls and risk factor–matched controls, patients recently recovered from COVID-19 had lower left ventricular ejection fraction, higher left ventricle volumes, higher left ventricle mass, and raised native T1 and T2. A total of 78 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 (78%) had abnormal CMR findings, including raised myocardial native T1 (n = 73), raised myocardial native T2 (n = 60), myocardial late gadolinium enhancement (n = 32), and pericardial enhancement (n = 22). There was a small but significant difference between patients who recovered at home vs in the hospital for native T1 mapping (median [IQR], 1122 [1113-1132] ms vs 1143 [1131-1156] ms; P = .02) but not for native T2 mapping or hsTnT levels. None of these measures were correlated with time from COVID-19 diagnosis (native T1: r = 0.07; P = .47; native T2: r = 0.14; P = .15; hsTnT: r = −0.07; P = .50). High-sensitivity troponin T was significantly correlated with native T1 mapping (r = 0.35; P < .001) and native T2 mapping (r = 0.22; P = .03). Endomyocardial biopsy in patients with severe findings revealed active lymphocytic inflammation. Native T1 and T2 were the measures with the best discriminatory ability to detect COVID-19–related myocardial pathology.
Conclusions and Relevance In this study of a cohort of German patients recently recovered from COVID-19 infection, CMR revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and time from the original diagnosis. These findings indicate the need for ongoing investigation of the long-term cardiovascular consequences of COVID-19.
July 31, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,694,605)
Deaths ( 156,267)
Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan
Hope to see at some point a study how CA has moved from success case (in handling Covid) to a huge disaster. And you cannot put the blame on Trump. Unlike NY that, faced w/ disaster, made a strong effort to improve things, CA just lets deaths take their normal course.
2:54 PM · Jul 30, 2020
Dean Baker @DeanBaker13
Since some folks here asked, total pandemic deaths to date for the European Union have been just over 126,000. The U.S. is over 155,000 an rising at a rate of more than 1,000 a day, compared to 100 a day for the EU, and the EU has 20 percent more people
8:53 AM · Jul 31, 2020
Interesting article, the summary paragraph below is… a little poignant, a little terrifying.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/tragedy-herman-cain/614785/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20200730&silverid-ref=NjU3MjIyNjkzMjgzS0
THE TRAGEDY OF HERMAN CAIN
July 31, 2020 by David Graham
“It’s impossible to say whether Cain contracted the virus at the rally or elsewhere, and aides said he’d been traveling often, but the risk he took in attending the rally seems to exemplify the change in Cain after his entry into politics. Cain was not a stupid man, nor ignorant of science; he was a trained mathematician, after all. But by 2020, Cain—a man who’d joined the Republican Party out of a sense of contrarianism—was ready to risk his life to show his lockstep conformity with party dogma. At one time, Cain seemed like a model of how an individual can live the American dream. Today, he seems like a cautionary tale about how an individual can be destroyed by American politics.”
Idriss:
I do not do much lock stepping in tune to some ideology such as a pseudo-Republicanism of trump’s ilk. Indeed, I make a poor Democrat in the party’s eyes also. In either case, it gives me an opportunity to be an independent Democrat. It is so simple and yet people fight it.
Wear a mask and protect others and social distance to protect yourself. Not doing the former is an attack on my safety and the latter is just foolish behavior which is s threat to myself
I did not read The Atlantic story on Caine. I did read The Atlantic story on Ventilation. It reinforced what I thought already and had read multiple times already. Mr, Caine like so many other foolish Repubs wasted his life tragically and threatened the life of others by his actions.
We Are Dying Here – Florida and Coronavirus infected scores of children and staff at Georgia sleep-away camp The former discusses masks and the latter “proximity.”
Lobbying Intensifies Among V.P. Candidates as Biden’s Search Nears an End
Two women, Representative Karen Bass and Susan Rice, the former national security adviser, are among the most formidable contenders on Joe Biden’s list.
… Two candidates who received scant attention early in the process are now among the leading contenders: Representative Karen Bass of California and Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser, according to Democratic officials briefed on the selection process. Ms. Bass in particular has moved rapidly toward the top of Mr. Biden’s list amid an intensive lobbying drive by her fellow House Democrats, and has impressed the former vice-president’s search committee. …
Kamala Harris, a top vice-presidential contender, confronts double standards.
With Joseph R. Biden Jr. considering her as his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California on Friday pushed back against criticism that she was too ambitious, a characterization often used as a double standard against women and one that some allies of Mr. Biden have used about her recently.
“There will be a resistance to your ambition,” she said during Black Girls Lead 2020, a virtual conference for young Black women. “There will be people who say to you, ‘You are out of your lane,’ because they are burdened by only having the capacity to see what has always been instead of what can be. But don’t you let that burden you.” ….
Politico reported on Monday that former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a member of Mr. Biden’s search committee, had complained privately that Ms. Harris had not apologized for attacking Mr. Biden in a Democratic primary debate last year. (“She had no remorse,” Mr. Dodd told a Biden supporter, according to Politico.) And CNBC reported on Wednesday that unnamed allies of Mr. Biden considered Ms. Harris “too ambitious” because she ran for president herself and might want to do so again.
This week, a Biden campaign official reached out to The New York Times, unprompted, to say that some of the former vice president’s own staff members did not support her as well.
“Too ambitious” is a common criticism of women in politics, but is rarely levied against men. One study, released by Harvard researchers in 2010, found that voters expressed contempt and anger toward women whom they perceived as “power-seeking,” but saw power-seeking men as stronger and more competent. …
July 31, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,705,889)
Deaths ( 156,747)
India
Cases ( 1,697,054)
Deaths ( 36,551)
Mexico
Cases ( 416,179)
Deaths ( 46,000)
UK
Cases ( 303,181)
Deaths ( 46,119)
Germany
Cases ( 210,665)
Deaths ( 9,224)
France
Cases ( 187,919)
Deaths ( 30,265)
Canada
Cases ( 116,312)
Deaths ( 8,935)
China
Cases ( 84,292)
Deaths ( 4,634)
July 31, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,705,889)
Deaths ( 156,747)
We need to understand that coronavirus infections are serious, with effects tending to be lasting, even for patients who are relatively less ill. Also, we need to understand that the data for the United States show a severe national healthcare system problem.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916
July 27, 2020
Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Key Points
Question What are the cardiovascular effects in unselected patients with recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)?
Findings In this cohort study including 100 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 identified from a COVID-19 test center, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), which was independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and the time from the original diagnosis.
Meaning These findings indicate the need for ongoing investigation of the long-term cardiovascular consequences of COVID-19.
[ Important to read, and posted in full above. ]
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/health/coronavirus-children-camp.html
July 31, 2020
The Coronavirus Infected Hundreds at a Georgia Summer Camp
The camp took precautions but did not require campers to wear masks, the C.D.C. reported. Singing and cheering may have helped spread the virus.
By Roni Caryn Rabin
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/us/schools-reopening-indiana-coronavirus.html
August 1, 2020
A School Reopens, and the Coronavirus Creeps In
As more schools abandon plans for in-person classes, one that opened in Indiana this week had to quarantine students within hours.
By Eliza Shapiro, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Shawn Hubler
July 31, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
Belgium ( 849)
UK ( 679)
Spain ( 608)
Italy ( 581)
Sweden ( 568)
US ( 473)
France ( 464)
Netherlands ( 359)
Ireland ( 357)
Canada ( 237)
Switzerland ( 229)
Luxembourg ( 182)
Portugal ( 170)
Germany ( 110)
Denmark ( 106)
Austria ( 80)
Finland ( 59)
Norway ( 47)
India ( 26)
Greece ( 20)
Australia ( 8)
Japan ( 8)
Korea ( 6)
China ( 3)
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-01/Chinese-mainland-reports-45-new-COVID-19-cases-SAOFIVVkL6/index.html
August 1, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 45 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 45 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, 6 from overseas and 39 domestically transmitted, the National Health Commission said on Saturday.
Of the domestic transmissions, 31 were reported in northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 8 in northeastern Liaoning Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered on Friday, while 15 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Altogether, 78,989 patients had been discharged from hospitals by Friday, the report said, adding that a total of 84,337 COVID-19 cases had been reported on the Chinese mainland since the start of the epidemic, including 4,634 deaths.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-01/Chinese-mainland-reports-45-new-COVID-19-cases-SAOFIVVkL6/img/e150798791ea44428560645500349f66/e150798791ea44428560645500349f66.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-01/Chinese-mainland-reports-45-new-COVID-19-cases-SAOFIVVkL6/img/8d1ac6e4844040efbc7e3e574000387f/8d1ac6e4844040efbc7e3e574000387f.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-01/Chinese-mainland-reports-45-new-COVID-19-cases-SAOFIVVkL6/img/061747af025349e3b7d7d231ff2c8ad6/061747af025349e3b7d7d231ff2c8ad6.jpeg
July 31, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 70,970)
Deaths ( 512)
Deaths per million ( 56)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
Israel had evidently contained and controlled the spread of the coronavirus, but acceding to political pressure opened business and schools early and with little caution. The infection spread now looks to be general.
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
One of the defining features of the US Covid debacle has been refusal to learn from other countries. Now, as much of the country prepares to open schools, we should — but won’t — look at what happened in Israel
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EeVIem-WsAETcio?format=png&name=small
7:01 AM · Aug 1, 2020
Anecdote but true nonetheless: a very close relative and her husband are just a couple years from retiring from their business. Two young adult children, both living nearby. One married, no kids (yet). So about 3 years ago they decide to buy a lake property and a boat. They don’t use the boat much themselves, but the kids (plus friends) come down most summer weekends. It is perfect…this is exactly what they wanted (except the no grandkids yet). So a couple of weeks ago they notice that the listing real estate agent for their property when they bought it was selling his own, very similar property a couple hundred yards away. His wife had passed a year ago and he was almost completely retired and wanted to be closer to his daughter in Texas. Totally understandable. But then he mentioned to them that they understood how the value of these properties is very closely and inversely tied to the cost of boating? You know that, right? So now this close relative is saying stuff like, well of course the Democrats won’t actually do that crazy Green New Deal. They’ll figure out how to let Republicans block it.
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
To make sense of the benefits disaster, you have to realize that Republicans don’t understand that lack of sufficient demand can cause mass unemployment. I don’t mean that they’ve rejected that view; they don’t even know where it comes from 1/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/31/600-dollar-unemployment-benefit/
White House, Democrats trade blame on expiration of jobless benefits
Some 20 million workers are losing $600 in unemployment benefits today, and the White House and Democrats in Congress are blaming each other for it.
9:14 AM · Aug 1, 2020
Larry Kudlow, who is for our sins Trump’s top economist — and long a go-to-guy for the GOP in general — said some revealing things in 2006, with no indication he’s learned anything since 2/
https://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/08/kudlow_needs_he.html…
In his view, higher output means lower inflation, because money is chasing more goods. Not a hint that he understood that output might be depressed because of insufficient spending, or even that he understood the concept. “I don’t get it,” he declared; that at least was true 3/
So the whole GOP lives in a mental universe in which the only reason people might be unemployed is because they don’t want to work, or maybe because employers pay too much taxes. The idea that cutting off income for millions will lead to more unemployment isn’t in their minds 4/
And what they don’t know can very much hurt you, and almost everyone else 5/
August 1, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,719,356)
Deaths ( 157,042)
August 1, 2020
Coronavirus
UK
Cases ( 303,952)
Deaths ( 46,193)
Notice the ratio of deaths to coronavirus cases of 15.2% for the United Kingdom.
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
More reminders that America is the sick man of the advanced world — if we’re even part of that world, which seems increasingly doubtful
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/business/europe-economy-recovery-coronavirus.html
Despite Historic Plunge, Europe’s Economy Flashes Signs of Recovery
European countries that have better contained the virus are poised for speedier economic recovery than the United States.
10:41 AM · Aug 1, 2020
August 1, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,726,113)
Deaths ( 157,160)
July 31, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 69,649)
Deaths ( 1,160)
Deaths per million ( 107)
Cuba
Cases ( 2,608)
Deaths ( 87)
Deaths per million ( 8)
The Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP in the western hemisphere since 1971. Nonetheless, Cuba has had markedly better healthcare outcomes even though Cuba has been continually under United States sanctions. The coronavirus experience reflects a profound difference in healthcare systems, a difference reflected in other basic health characteristics of the countries.
Run,
My first ever law school class was 10 am criminal law with a former prosecutor who I would take a class with every year. In that lecture he made a few good demonstrations on (a) how easy it is to get arrested if you accept mail that’s not yours and (b) when a crime is committed, any person is capable of anything. I kind of shivered at the thought, because it seems like there is nothing that can be done about it, except just hope the worst occurrences being rare. This article really nails home that it is not rare, yet just as abrupt and inexplicable, and the fact that we (well, I) can’t get close to understanding how and why this happens.
Of course, however, I agree with your prioritization of the PPE, medical, equipment, clerical, viral characteristics and think others should read those instead when pressed for time. I’m lucky to have enough family in the medical field that I can rely on their explanations without relying on my limited scientific literacy.
Idriss:
As a point of caution and to limit my liability, I do not accept mail not addressed to myself or family. Indeed, it goes back into the mailbox with the flag raised up and noted as a “return to sender” and “no such person at this address” (not quite Elvis). The Post Office is a federal agency and not to be trifled with under penalty of federal law. Theft of mail is serious stuff (which I know you know). You remind of a law student at Duke University who assisted the head (Dean maybe? I do not recall) of the Law Department there. When I would call there, he would answer the phone for Erwin.
If a person such as Herman Cain will not take the necessary precautions to protect himself against Covid and protect others from contracting Covid, from himself, by simply wearing a mask, why would others follow safe practices? It is here that they (people of importance) fail those believing in them. It is here, there is such frustration for many of us. What would J.S. Mill say?
July 31, 2020
Coronavirus
Massachusetts
Cases ( 117,612)
Deaths ( 8,609)
Deaths per million ( 1,249)
————————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Massachusetts
Cases ( 109,838)
Deaths ( 8,172)
Deaths per million ( 1,186)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/us/coronavirus-midwest-cases-deaths.html
August 1, 2020
After Plummeting, the Virus Soars Back in Parts of U.S.
New coronavirus cases are picking up at a dangerous pace in much of the Midwest, and in cities that thought they had seen the worst.
There is a deepening national sense that the progress made in fighting the pandemic is coming undone and that no patch of America is safe.
[ There was no “plummeting,” just declines that gave way to less general caution when a look to the experiences in other countries would have shown how much caution was necessary. ]
August 1, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,735,239)
Deaths ( 157,265)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/nyregion/greenwich-ct-coronavirus-covid-parties.html
July 31, 2020
In Ultra-Wealthy Greenwich, Teen Parties Lead to Jump in Virus Cases
Many of those exposed were seniors who had just finished their final year at two elite private schools.
By Mihir Zaveri
Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan
Am really keen to know how “liberals” will explain US debacle. Their all-purpose explanation will be Trump. But whoever has lived through this period in the US and looked at people’s behavior knows that this is at best a partial explanation. Indifference to death is stunning.
2:50 AM · Aug 1, 2020
August 1, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,746,948)
Deaths ( 157,393)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/business/kodak-ceo-stock-options.html
July 31, 2020
Kodak C.E.O. Got Stock Options Day Before News of Loan Sent Stock Soaring
The stock options suddenly were worth about $50 million — the latest instance of extraordinary good timing by corporate executives.
By Jesse Drucker and Ellen Gabler
At the beginning of this week, the Eastman Kodak Company handed its chief executive 1.75 million stock options.
It was the type of compensation decision that generally wouldn’t attract much notice, except for one thing: The day after the stock options were granted, the White House announced that the company would receive a $765 million federal loan to produce ingredients to make pharmaceuticals in the United States.
The news of the deal caused Kodak’s shares to soar more than 1,000 percent. Within 48 hours of the options grants, their value had ballooned, at least on paper, to about $50 million….
Remember when he brought Execs of CVS, Walgreens. Quest, … to the briefings? That’s when it began to take so long for the test results to come back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/politics/trump-administration-coronavirus-testing.html
March 13, 2020
Trump Administration Moves to Speed Coronavirus Testing
The Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration are funding private companies that are rushing faster tests to the market.
By Noah Weiland and Katie Thomas
[ That private companies have been unable to provide for enough timely convenient testing all this time is an important matter to study. ]
August 1, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,764,318)
Deaths ( 157,898)
India
Cases ( 1,751,919)
Deaths ( 37,403)
Mexico
Cases ( 424,637)
Deaths ( 46,688)
UK
Cases ( 303,952)
Deaths ( 46,193)
Germany
Cases ( 211,077)
Deaths ( 9,226)
Canada
Cases ( 116,599)
Deaths ( 8,941)
China
Cases ( 84,337)
Deaths ( 4,634)
August 1, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,764,318)
Deaths ( 157,898)
August 1, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 680)
US ( 477)
Canada ( 237)
Germany ( 110)
India ( 27)
China ( 3)
August 1, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 680)
US ( 477)
France ( 464)
Mexico ( 368)
Canada ( 237)
Germany ( 110)
India ( 27)
China ( 3)
The ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 15.2%, 16.1% and 11.0% for the United Kingdom, France and Mexico respectively.
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
It seems to me that we need a new concept to discuss the Trump/GOP reaction to the coronavirus disaster. Everyone knows about the Big Lie, which is so outlandish people can’t believe it’s a lie. What we have now is the Big Fail, so extreme that people can’t process it 1/
10:26 AM · Aug 2, 2020
I mean, if you’ve spent three years believing that Trump Made America Great Again, how do you deal with the fact that >1000 Americans are dying of Covid-19 each day, compared with 6 (six) in Italy? 2/
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EebCYR9WsAAIZ_7?format=png&name=small
There’s a lot of grasping at straws. I see that Trump is gloating over new outbreaks in some countries, like Australia, that thought they had it beat. And that is a cause for concern. But bear in mind what AU’s outbreak looks like compared to ours 3/
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EebC7MFXoAAtoex?format=png&name=small
And Australia is imposing a full lockdown in Melbourne to stop this outbreak in its tracks; Florida, which is losing 180 people a day compared with Australia’s 8, won’t even require face masks and is reopening schools 4/
The point is that the contrast between the Trump hagiography and the reality of one of history’s greatest policy failures is too great for the faithful (and of course Trump himself) to process. So they’re becoming increasingly delusional 5/
To be a Trump supporter now is to be constantly at war with reality. And it’s terrifying to think what that will mean if Trump loses the election 6/
If we have lots of people for whom the +$600/week and UI were greater than prior wages then why not have the state IU + whatever portion of the $600 needed not hit the prior wage just go to the employer not to fire the person? Yes, scrubbing the vacant restaurant floor for the 5th time in the day might be boring, but a lot less churn and friction when cusomters start to finally come back.
In Wisconsin we are in day 2 of the governor’s mask mandate. One oddity is that several businesses (retailers, by in large) are urgently reviewing their standards. They had instituted “must wear mask” policies – often many weeks ago – and were operating to those, but now there is a state edict that provides for specific circumstances for which people do not need to wear a mask they are having to look at their policies again. Yesterday my wife shopped at a major store that for the past couple of months had nobody without a mask in the store and yesterday she saw several without masks and was specifically told at the entrance that those with the medical circumstances would be allowed in without masks and that the store would operate on the honor system. I don’t think that it is necessarily a permanent policy but for right now “maskless” shopping in Wisconsin is actually a bit more possible.
August 2, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,778,150)
Deaths ( 158,039)
A bit more on masks in Wisconsin. My view is that the governor’s mandate will be counterproductive. Wearing masks was gaining ground over the past couple of months. Having a governor who is wildly unpopular with a good portion of the state’s population issue this mandate is not a good tactic to keep it moving to higher levels. He might have thought twice before turning this into even more of a political and cultural identifier. It is easy to say that it ought not be thought of as an identifier, but it has been and Evers knows it but lacked the courage to disappoint the “mask” people. A better leader would recognize that the challenge was to convince those not masking to change and already it is clear that there will be no enforcement of this by the state. The most effective enforcement was by Costco and others and that got slightly undercut by the details of the mandate. My guess is that progress slowed down on July 31 on masks in Wisconsin.
Eric,
“If we have lots of people for whom the +$600/week and UI were greater than prior wages then why not have the state IU + whatever portion of the $600 needed not hit the prior wage just go to the employer not to fire the person?”
– IZ: Because: (1) businesses are better and more sophisticated at commiting fraud; (2) its the workers already earned money in the account <- do conservatives not get this?; (3) businesses are in superior negotiating positions so workers are often underpaid for the work they've already done; (4) the government represents we the people, not we the corporation;
" Yes, scrubbing the vacant restaurant floor for the 5th time in the day might be boring, but a lot less churn and friction when cusomters start to finally come back."
-IZ: (5) no it doesn't in fact the churn and friction is much greater when customers come back because cleaning/disinfecting and the workers KEEP GETTING PAID THE SAME NO MATTER HOW MUCH THE COMPANY PROFITS FROM THAT WORK.
Just put on a mask.
August 2, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,785,224)
Deaths ( 158,108)
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
30 million workers have had their financial lifeline cut off, and talks are stalled. But this isn’t because “Congress” is dysfunctional; it’s because *Republicans* are wedded to nonsense economics 1/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/world/coronavirus-covid-19.html
Coronavirus Live Updates: As Cases Rise, U.S. Officials Are at an Impasse Over Aid
1:34 PM · Aug 2, 2020
I don’t mean that they adhere to doctrines I disagree with; I mean that they have no coherent doctrine at all other than visceral dislike for helping people in distress 2/
The claimed GOP objection to extending aid to the unemployed is the belief that it discourages workers from accepting jobs. In reality, all the evidence suggests that under current conditions that just isn’t happening 3/
Ernie Tedeschi @ernietedeschi
So far I’ve counted 4 analyses by @mioana, @arindube, Altonji et al, & me finding no overall negative labor market effects so far. For the sort of short-term FPUC extensions we’re discussing, that’s the more appropriate standard, rather than whether someone somewhere stays on unemployment insurance.
twitter.com/abcpolitics/st…
But even if it were happening, we have 30 million workers receiving benefits and only 5 million job vacancies. What jobs would workers take if they wanted to work? 4/
More generally, unemployment benefits might raise workers’ reservation wages — the wages they demand to take jobs. But higher wages in the economy as a whole don’t directly reduce employment, as Keynes explained long ago 5/
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300071h/chap19.html…
They only matter if you have a fixed money supply or if the central bank is worried about inflation, neither of which is remotely the case right now 6/
What about GOP opposition to temporary aid to states and cities? You don’t even have to be a Keynesian to see that this is bad economics. It makes no sense to impose severe cuts in government services in the face of a known temporary revenue loss/ cost increase 7/
We should be helping states in a pandemic for the same reason governments pay for wars in part by borrowing: the needs are temporary and it’s inefficient to cover them entirely by slashing nondefense spending and/or raising taxes 8/
In short, there is no economic theory or logic behind the Republican position. It’s all about being mean-spirited and/or cynically exploiting a crisis to force governments to shrink 9/
FPUC = Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation
August 2, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,798,137)
Deaths ( 158,220)
August 2, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,804,099)
Deaths ( 158,244)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/health/dr-birx-coronavirus-phase.html
August 2, 2020
Birx Says U.S. Epidemic Is in a ‘New Phase’
She and other top health officials in the Trump administration warn states of a deepening spread of the coronavirus, in both rural and urban areas.
By Benedict Carey