Originally a comment by Rob on A table.

There is ample evidence (and in some quarters acknowledgement) that the US is undercounting deaths in retirement homes, amongst the homeless and especially just deaths at home. NYC acknowledged they simply stopped counting those because they were not testing bodies, yet the home death rate went from around 25 per day to 250 per day. Do the maths on that one.

So far NZ has had 12 fatalities. One at home, 10 in hospital of which I think 9 were associated with rest home clusters (7 from a dementia care facility in my city), which just shows how awful the disease is when it hits such places.

We have been very fortunate in that NZ was well set up to observe what was happening overseas and we have an early defended border for quarantine purposes. More to the point we have had political leaders that were united in their decision to rely on scientific and medical advice and the clarity and effectiveness of communication has been nothing short of brilliant. We’ve also done something like 85K tests (17k per million of population). Considering our health systems and government have nothing like the resources and wealth of the US or many other western nations — and that we were on an Italy-like trajectory — that decision making and communication from our politicians is what has made the difference between a health disaster and economic disruption.

That said, we have had at least two deaths resulting from non-covid harm that can be attributed to the pandemic. One was an elderly man who was physically well but suffered severe anxiety as a result of the lockdown and the inability to see friends and loved ones. I understand the anti-anxiety drugs killed him. The other was a young man who disappeared the day the Lockdown was announced. Again prone to depression and anxiety.

All tragic. Where do you begin and end counting victims. In Japan hospitals are turning away people suffering from strokes and heart attacks because they are overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases.

The “protests” are being orchestrated.

Conservative activists are demanding governors lift orders designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, despite the recommendations of public health officials. Trump, who has clashed with Democratic governors over how soon to reopen the US economy, tweeted his support on Friday, in an unprecedented endorsement of civil disobedience by a sitting president.

Civil disobedience and violence. Unprecedented indeed.

Yet while organisers claim the protests are grassroots- and people-driven, a closer look reveals a movement driven by traditional rightwing groups, including one funded by the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

The rallies have drawn comparisons to the Tea Party movement, which sprang into life in 2009 following the election of Barack Obama and was driven in part by Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by rightwing donors Charles and David Koch.

Wouldn’t you think we’re already right-wing enough for them? Wouldn’t you think they already get a big enough portion of the national wealth without needing even more? Wouldn’t you, even, think they would prefer to live in a country of people who don’t live in terror of a medical bill that puts them on the street?

Fox News ran favorable coverage of the Michigan rally and hosts including Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro endorsed the protest.

“Fox gave the Tea Party a phenomenal amount of attention and promotion,” Gertz said. “It really sort of boot-strapped it to another level, and made it a political force, and we see something similar happening with these anti-stay-at-home order movements.”

Because…yay pandemic? I guess? Right-wingers are big fans of mass die-offs?

What governors have to do to keep the president from stealing supplies they need to deal with a pandemic:

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker organized secret flights bringing millions of masks and gloves to the state from China on charter jets in an effort to bypass potential Trump administration efforts to seize the products, The Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Trump not only doesn’t help governors (Democratic governors at least) get needed PPE, he actually steals it from them after they’ve procured it.

The Sun-Times cited a source familiar with the purchases, who said the details were kept secret “because we’ve heard reports of Trump trying to take PPE in China and when it gets to the United States.”

…

“The supply chain has been likened to the Wild West, and once you have purchased supplies, ensuring they get to the state is another herculean feat,” press secretary Jordan Abudayyeh told the Sun-Times. “These flights are carrying millions of masks and gloves our workers need. They’re scheduled to land in Illinois in the coming weeks and the state is working to ensure these much-needed supplies are protected and ready for distribution around the state.”

A number of reports have documented federal efforts to seize ventilators, masks, and other PPE for the national stockpile, even intercepting and diverting orders without explanation.

In other words stealing it.

The football must go on.

On March 6, at 2:43 p.m., the health officer for Public Health — Seattle & King County, the hardest-hit region in the first state to be slammed by COVID-19, sent an email to a half-dozen colleagues, saying, “I want to cancel large group gatherings now.”

The county’s numbers — 10 known deaths and nearly 60 confirmed cases as of late morning — were bad and getting worse. Many local events had already been called off for fear of spreading the coronavirus. Oyster Fest. The Puget Sound Puppetry Festival. A Women’s Day speaker series at the Gates Foundation. King County had ordered a stop to in-person government meetings unless they were considered essential.

Duchin had the authority under state law to make it an order.

But.

Duchin sent his email 28 hours before the Seattle Sounders, defending MLS champions and one of the league’s biggest draws, were to host a match at CenturyLink Field. No event in the coming days would generate a gathering to compare. The game would draw people from across the Puget Sound area, and maybe beyond.

In the end, the match went on. Two days after the public health department wrote on Facebook, “We are making a recommendation to postpone or cancel events greater than 10-50 people,” officials in King County allowed a soccer match to be held with 33,000 fans, squeezed together.

I live in that county. I wish officials hadn’t done that.

How that happened is captured in hundreds of pages of emails exchanged among federal, state and local officials, as well as executives from the Sounders, Seahawks, Mariners and XFL Dragons. Those records, obtained by ProPublica and The Seattle Times, show how one meeting would beget another, one email would beget a dozen more, all while the virus was taking rapid hold.

“Which side should we err on? Public health and safety, or a football match?”

A vendor at CenturyLink Field had tested positive. A Sounders executive wrote that once the public knew that, the Sounders execs would need every “positive talking point” they could get.

The records show how county officials struggled to send the public a clear, consistent message. They also reflect the extolling of sport, even in a time of contagion. In one email sent to the county officials after the match, a Sounders executive lauded the power of Sounders matches to provide “catharsis and community.”

Which is totally worth spreading disease and death, closing all the schools, putting thousands of people out of work. Yay catharsis and community!

Reporters made interview requests for this story to five Sounders executives and two Seahawks officials who also work with the company that operates CenturyLink Field. All seven either didn’t respond or declined to be interviewed.

Imagine our surprise.

In Italy, a Feb. 19 soccer match, later dubbed “Game Zero” and described by a respiratory specialist as a “biological bomb,” has been cited as a possible reason that one province became an epicenter of the pandemic.

But that match was played before the country’s first confirmed case of locally transmitted COVID-19. In Washington, community spread had been recognized at least a week before the Sounders match. The governor declared a state of emergency on Feb. 29, the King County executive on March 1.

It was that Kirkland outbreak. (Kirkland is a suburb across Lake Washington from Seattle.) I remember it all too well. It’s pretty stunning that they chose a football match over public health after that.

On the evening of March 7, a Saturday, hundreds gathered in Occidental Park for their traditional March to the Match. They stood shoulder to shoulder and marched three blocks down Occidental Avenue to CenturyLink Field.

Fans, tens of thousands of them, streamed into the stadium, using, if they wished, extra hand-sanitizing stations scattered about the concourses. The fans waved scarves, as they always do. The lower bowl stood for most of the match, as it always does. The crowd, in blue and green, chanted and cheered. In the 12th minute, they sang Woody Guthrie’s “Roll on Columbia.” Everyone was mere inches apart.

Some forms of catharsis and community can, shall we say, have a dark side.

Saturday night, after the match, Sounders general manager Garth Lagerwey said at a news conference, “We were really, really grateful to have the support of our fans.” He described various precautions the team had taken: “The kids didn’t walk out with the players today. We didn’t do a ceremonial handshake.”

Peter Tomozawa, the president of business operations and a former partner at Goldman Sachs, said the crowd was bigger than he had expected, adding, “Seattle turns out.” He described walking around before the match, talking with fans: “A really cool comment that was made to me was: ‘Thank you for hosting this event tonight. It gave us and our city something to cheer about.’”

Yes, spreading the virus around; definitely something to cheer about. Rah.

On March 15, the Sounders announced that a member of the club’s support staff had tested positive for COVID-19. The staff member had worked the March 7 match but “did not have access to the general public,” the announcement said. The individual fell ill four days after the match but was now recovering and “in good spirits,” the announcement said.

King County now has more than 4,800 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and at least 320 deaths, according to its data dashboard on the virus’ spread.

There’s your community; I’m not so sure about the catharsis.

I’ve been meaning for days to find a source for per capita stats as well as totals, and a certain annoying drive-by commenter gave me the prod to do it. Here’s one that gives deaths per 1 million people as of now:

Spain 440

Italy 391

France 302

Germany 55

UK 237

US 122

On the other hand it gives China 3, which doesn’t seem very plausible.

Anyway…per capita we seem on the low side, which is worth knowing but not something to give Trump credit for.

I read somewhere the other day that Sweden went for the “herd immunity” approach and that’s why its numbers are twice Norway’s.

Trump has been screeching that the WHO failed to warn us, but the reality is that there were US health people at the WHO who did warn us. The Post reports:

More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.

A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.

So all that “the WHO covered it up!!” nonsense is nonsense.

And many informed people think it’s very likely that Putin is doing his bit to fan the flames.

Brazen grifter orders people to give him their emergency money.

From the New England Journal of Medicine yesterday:

As a chief physician executive, I rarely get involved in my health system’s supply-chain activities. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed that. Protecting our caregivers is essential so that these talented professionals can safely provide compassionate care to our patients. Yet we continue to be stymied by a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and the cavalry does not appear to be coming.

Our supply-chain group has worked around the clock to secure gowns, gloves, face masks, goggles, face shields, and N95 respirators. These employees have adapted to a new normal, exploring every lead, no matter how unusual. 

They put together a very convoluted deal to get a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. They put together the funds to buy it, at 5 times the normal rate. They sent a team of three to check the shipment.

I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.

They got there, they opened some boxes to check and hoped they were representative.

Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure.

This is what a fabulous job Trump is doing of managing the pandemic.

Did I foresee, as a health-system leader working in a rich, highly developed country with state-of-the-art science and technology and incredible talent, that my organization would ever be faced with such a set of circumstances? Of course not. Yet when encountering the severe constraints that attend this pandemic, we must leave no stone unturned to give our health care teams and our patients a fighting chance. This is the unfortunate reality we face in the time of Covid-19.

Because we’re a failed state.

Crazier every day.

The clip starts in medias res with “…real information, and responsible and thoughtful dialogue from their elected leaders n from [he lifts his head from the page he’s been reading and exclaims] the media!” And with that he abandons the script and repeats his moth-eaten rant about the media, which reminds him of his moth-eaten obsession with Haberman, and away he goes. It’s loony tunes.

I don’t mean loony tunes in any hyperbolic sense, I mean loony tunes. Out of his fucking mind.

It would be nice if everyone could grasp this point.

It’s the truth. I can’t experience life in a lizard body or an eagle body or an elephant body (and neither can any other human). We can try to imagine what it’s like, but that’s the limit of what we can do.

People who are not born X can’t experience what it’s like to have been born X. Of course they can’t, by definition: not being born X=not having the experience of having been born X.

The idea is that there’s such a thing as “feeling like” a woman and thus sharing the lived experience of being female, but the idea is wrong. You can experience your own idea of what it’s like, but you can’t share an experience you’ve never had and by definition can never have. You can try to imagine it, empathize with it, and the like, but you can’t literally have it.

But there’s always someone who doesn’t get it.

Because being presumed to be female is not the same thing as being female. At all.

It’s possible to have experiences that are like experiences that women have, but that is not the same as experiencing what it’s like to exist as a female, because of the whole not being one thing I just mentioned. You can imagine, guess, fantasize, pretend, but that’s all you can do.

Anyway, sooner or later the contempt and entitlement elbows everything else aside.

The pink flowers don’t cancel out the male entitlement.

Baby Don is having another Twitter tantrum.

Donald Trump calling other people RUDE and NASTY. You couldn’t make it up.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Soz nomination canceled.

Lumping race and religion/”faith” together is exactly the kind of thing that causes problems for women within Muslim families who disagree with the conservative tenets of the faith, who need support, and who are too-often ignored by UK “progressives” who are far too concerned about “Islamophobia” to listen too closely to the issues raised by liberal Muslims and Brits with Pakistani/Indian heritage.

Subsuming women’s rights entirely into the category “gender” is such blatant sexist bullshit, it’s clear these “awards” are a joke.

And indeed, of course class isn’t mentioned. I’m sure these are comfortably well-off young people, the kind of people I’ve had to work and live alongside my whole adult life: who like to think they count as working-class because they take low-paying jobs in the city and live in the city, but they still call their parents’ house in the suburbs “home” and still have a bedroom to go “home” to for the holidays, who have no idea the constant anxiety, the fear that wakes you up in the middle of the night in sweats, of living paycheque to paycheque with absolutely no safety net, no parents or relatives to fall back on. People who don’t understand that your “place” in the city isn’t your fun-times adventure-pad; it’s your real home — the only shelter you’ve got, and if you lose it, the consequences are far more than an awkward phone call to Mum and Dad: it’s selling your mattress for $40, stuffing as many clothes you can into a duffel bag and registering at a bedbug-infested shelter. A lot of young people (and not-so-young people too) have a hard time understanding that for many of us it feels like every day we’re clinging by our nails to the ridge of a volcano’s caldera, just trying not to fall into the fire.

And frankly I’m not one to talk, because I don’t have dependents. Even stuffing a duffel bag and moving into a shelter for a while isn’t so bad compared to what impoverished parents have to go through to support their kids.

I wonder if the COVID crisis will bring class, income inequality and the social safety-net back to the forefront of the left’s priorities, where frankly it has always belonged…

I call these people the modern-day Hitler – they are protesting against democracy and the common good.

Rosa Parks was not protesting some generic “injustice and loss of liberties”; she was protesting Jim Crow laws that kept slavery in place in all but name for almost a century. The segregation of public transportation was insulting and racist, yes, but it was also part of a larger system that kept African-Americans captive despite the official end of slavery, just as mass incarceration does now. None of that has anything to do with petulant selfish people who want to spread the virus because they need to go to Walmart.

More of this kind of crap:

On Tuesday 21st February 2020, we were surprised and delighted to find that Woman’s Place UK had been nominated for something called the National Diversity Awards.

Congratulations! You have just been nominated for the Community Organisation (Gender) award at the National Diversity Awards!

Woman’s Place UK felt honoured by the nomination.

We were invited to accept the nomination and to create a profile page.

In the meantime, why not create a profile page so others wishing to nominate you can find you! Please click the link below to confirm you accept this nomination.

They clicked on the link below but it didn’t work. The password they’d been issued was rejected. They tried again on a different computer, and got the same result. They emailed the National Diversity Awards to report the problem. There was no response.

On Tuesday 4th March, we tried to log in again, unsuccessfully, and decided to register a ‘forgotten password’ to see if that would elicit a response.

It did, it elicited a “no recognize password” response and advice to contact them for help, so they tried that again. This time a response arrived.

Many thanks for your email and apologies for any inconvenience.

Unfortunately, upon confirming your nomination, we received a number of complaints which are currently being investigated by our advisory panel. During the nomination process, it is our obligation to review any issues raised and we are committed to ensuring our nominees values align with the inclusive ethos of The National Diversity Awards.

Inclusive of what? Inclusive of men who say they are women and not of women who say that men are not women? Is that the kind of inclusivity we get to have? The only kind?

They said they’d “be in touch” once they’d “completed” their “investigation.”

Given that we had not completed our public profile page, we wondered where “a number of complaints” could have originated from.

We were also astonished that the National Diversity Awards had only informed us that our nomination had been rescinded when we approached them for an explanation.

The National Diversity Awards gave us no information on the complaints nor did they offer us any opportunity to make representation to the “advisory panel”.

Naturally. Women who refuse to obey orders to call men “women” are so evil that we don’t deserve basic courtesy.

WPUK replied asking for more information, and were rudely ignored. See above: no courtesy for you evil women who don’t “include” men in the category “women.”

WPUK has heard noting more to this day.

The National Diversity Awards lists the following categories as being eligible for recognition:

Age | Disability | Gender | LGBT | Race, Religion & Faith

Quite a mess, isn’t it. “Gender” should be “sex,” and “Race” should not be in the same category as “Religion” on account of how they’re not the same thing at all. But perhaps not quite so obvious…where the hell is class? Where is diversity of money-having? Where is the category for people who have to go on showing up for work during a pandemic to get their small paychecks while people who make big paychecks can mostly work from home? Where is the difference between poverty and wealth?

Never mind. That’s not interesting any more. It’s too of the earth earthy. The real heroes of our time are men who have intense fantasies of being women.

Mary McCord on Trump’s call for insurrection:

Just a day after issuing guidance for re-opening America that clearly deferred decision-making to state officials — as it must under our Constitutional order — the president undercut his own guidance by calling for criminal acts against the governors for not opening fast enough.

Trump tweeted, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” followed immediately by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” This follows Wednesday’s demonstration in Michigan, in which armed protestors surrounded the state capitol building in Lansing chanting “Lock her up!” in reference to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and “We will not comply,” in reference to her extension of the state’s coronavirus-related stay-at-home order. Much smaller and less-armed groups had on Thursday protested on the state capitol grounds in Richmond, Va., and outside the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, Minn.

“Liberate” — particularly when it’s declared by the chief executive of our republic — isn’t some sort of cheeky throwaway. Its definition is “to set at liberty,” specifically “to free (something, such as a country) from domination by a foreign power.” We historically associate it with the armed defeat of hostile forces during war, such as the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi Germany’s control during World War II. Just over a year ago, Trump himself announced that “the United States has liberated all ISIS-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq.”

So what does “liberate” mean in this context? It means overthrow the people in power…the ones who were elected. It means nullify the elections with guns.

In that context, it’s not at all unreasonable to consider Trump’s tweets about “liberation” as at least tacit encouragement to citizens to take up arms against duly elected state officials of the party opposite his own, in response to sometimes unpopular but legally issued stay-at-home orders.

Legally issued stay home orders during a pandemic. It’s encouragement to overthrow the government in order to spread the pandemic among the population. Spreading the pandemic isn’t the goal, but it is the inevitable result. I don’t think the beefy guys with assault rifles know more about contagion than the CDC does.

Oh NPR. Do better.

“Critics say” Trump is inciting violence and civil war, and they’re right to say so.

No, these are people expressing their views, I see where they are, I see the way they’re working [flapping hands back and forth to illustrate the way they’re working], they [shrug] seem to be very responsible people to me, but it’s uh, y’know they’ve been treated a little bit rough, yes go ahead.

This isn’t a 3-year-old sleepy after a nap, this is a guy who decided he should be president of the US.

Ok so Trump is sticking to it. Let’s have a civil war, so that Trump can add that to his scrapbook.