Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Mission Accomplished!

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

False Scribes! False Scribes!

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

The revolution will be supervised.

The house always wins.

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Reality always wins in the end.

Lighten up, Francis.

Wetsuit optional.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

This is a big f—–g deal.

Good luck with your asparagus.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Han shot first.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Wednesday/Thursday, April 8/9

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Wednesday/Thursday, April 8/9

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Major League Baseball remains… optimistic. Or perhaps the word should be “desperate”…

“Misteaks were made… “

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55Comments

  1. 1.

    OzarkHillbilly

    I’ve been awake since 1:42. Ain’t insomnia great? A couple of interesting to me CoVid story links for y’all:

    ‘When it gets your hospital, it becomes real’: inside a hospital in one of the hardest hit US counties

    The folding chairs outside the windows appeared late last month, after the maintenance staff at St James parish hospital labeled each window with patient numbers so families and friends could at least see their loved ones battling Covid-19.

    Yet even this small solace the Louisiana rural hospital can offer is tainted for Leslie Fisher, a clinical nurse educator. She has to remind the family members to take shifts to properly physically distance from each other – even when their loved ones could quite possibly be in their final moments.

    The difficult conversations feel unceasingly cruel, she said, but she feels she has an obligation to protect these people, too. All she can do is look them in the eyes and say: “I’m so, so sorry.”

    This is the new normal for St James parish hospital, a 25-bed rural hospital located about 45 minutes from New Orleans, a pandemic hotspot. Its county – or parish, as they call them in Louisiana – of 22,000 residents already has confirmed more than 175 cases and six deaths as of Tuesday. That earns it the horror of being one of the hardest-hit counties nationwide for cases per capita, placing its rural hospital that sits just blocks off the east bank of the Mississippi River on to the frontlines with a continuous swell of patients.

    NYT: Coronavirus Turns Urban Life’s Roar to Whisper on World’s Seismographs

    Seismometers may be built to detect earthquakes, but their mechanical ears hear so much more: hurricanes thundering hundreds of miles away and meteoroids exploding in the skies on the other side of the planet. Even the everyday hum of humanity — people moving about on cars, trains and planes — has a seismically detectable heartbeat.

    But coronavirus has upended our lives. Hoping to curtail the pandemic’s spread, nations have closed their borders, cities have been shut down and billions of people have been instructed to stay home. Today, in cities large and small, the thumping pulse of civilization is now barely detectable on many seismograms.

    “It did make the scale of the shutdowns a bit more real to me,” said Celeste Labedz, a graduate student in geophysics at the California Institute of Technology.

    In person, you can see only your neighborhood’s dedication to remaining home. With seismometers, Ms. Labedz said, you can see the collective willingness of millions of the world’s urban dwellers to hunker down. As a result, the planet’s natural quavering is being recorded with remarkable clarity.

  3. 3.

    WereBear

    Yesterday, outside, with ten feet of distance, I had a chat with our downstairs neighbor. He and wife are heading for their Camp in a few weeks, a patch of land with no amenities on a distant lake, reachable only by boat. Which is part of their normal routine, mind you.

    He asked me when I thought we’d open up, and I said, “We’re going to lose the entire summer season. And even then, it’s with serious testing and working with the rest of the Northeast. And that’s if we can hold off the hordes from the states where they will never get their act together.”

    I don’t think he was quite prepared for such a doomsday scenario. But then, they will be about as remote as one can get. I didn’t want their trips to town to be a total surprise.

  4. 4.

    NotMax

    Rising to the occasion.

    A local airlines [sic] is helping the residents of Molokai get groceries after the temporary closure of the island’s main grocery store.

    Mokulele Airlines is offering free shipping of up to two bags of groceries per customer on any scheduled flights from either Kahului or Honolulu. This applies to flights to Molokai and Kalaupapa during April.
    source

  5. 5.

    MagdaInBlack

    By this time next week I will be “layed off.” Big Giant Collision Repair group has no collisions to repair. Our shops ( and everyones elses) are empty.

    Part of me is thankful I’ll no longer be meeting and greeting all day, the rest of me will feel a whole lot better when that unemployment application comes back approved.

  6. 6.

    WereBear

    From FNYT article about rural spread (and it’s hard to believe it’s the same paper that features Douchehat):

    “South Dakota is not New York City,” Ms. Noem said at a news conference last week.

    And this is what I’ve been hearing constantly these last few weeks. “We won’t get the blue state cooties” and it just infuriates me with the complacent stupidity of it all.

    Join the 21st Century. It’s not waiting around for you.

  8. 8.

    NotMax

    Mom in Long Island reports my step-sister and hubby insisted on making a detour to drop off a large care package of brisket and assorted fixins (but not come in to visit) while they were making a trip from where they have decamped at his mother’s place upstate from the city in order to pick up mail at and and check on their own domicile in Brooklyn.

  9. 9.

    Betty Cracker

    @rikyrah: You’re right. We need to be able to test people quickly to find out who has the virus so they can get care and stay in isolation until they recover and are no longer contagious. We also need to know who has had the virus and is now immune.

    My worry is that Trump will scuttle any efforts to understand how pervasive the virus has been in the US because it will underscore his failure to contain it. He’d rather half-ass a reopening of the country and risk another outbreak.

  10. 10.

    WereBear

    @OzarkHillbilly: Oh, I know. My mother insisted we get the heck out of the tiny town I was born in, moved to a larger town in the Ozarks, wound up in small town Florida. Which was an improvement in that moving/changing the culture I lived in was not scary to me.

    Also, and even more important, it made us rootless. She broke the generational chain that trapped everyone in their ancestor’s lives. Still in Florida, I went to college and moved to one of the biggest towns: but the stupid was still there, surrounding me.

    I could not see how I could make a life that way, with all my life decisions being some form of compromise. I was the one making sense, but everyone scorned me for being so.

    The amazing thing is how, after I left: things got worse.

  11. 11.

    Amir Khalid

    Why on earth is Trump ending community-testing support? Does he still think that low testing = low new-case numbers = good PR?

    Why does The NYT still publish that always-wrong and always-wrongheaded poltroon Ross Douthat?

    Once again I am shocked that US federal agents are seizing critical medical equipment bought and paid for by states.

  12. 12.

    WereBear

    @Betty Cracker:

    My worry is that Trump will scuttle any efforts to understand how pervasive the virus has been in the US because it will underscore his failure to contain it. He’d rather half-ass a reopening of the country and risk another outbreak.

     
    It’s not my worry. It’s my certainty.

    It will further widen the gap between how different states handle this. And it will be another disaster, but as we have seen:

    Republicans don’t care.

  13. 13.

    WereBear

    @Amir Khalid: I’m with you, Amir. The “hidden planet” in this equation is Fox News.

    tRump watches it, and parrots it to the “reprogrammable meatbags” (h/t Driftglass) who also watch it, and then, as pResident, he repeats it and acts on it, and the FoxBots all say, “At last! One of our own!”

    They are going to find out propaganda and money means nothing to Virus. Virus don’t care.

  14. 14.

    mapaghimagsik

    @WereBear: 
    But neither do the meatbags, who are already floating ideas to convince people its a Democrat hoax because the numbers are supposedly inflated.

    Hooray insomnia. I really thought trying to learn programming language would try and help me fall asleep. Fail.

  15. 15.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @WereBear:The amazing thing is how, after I left: things got worse.

    Makes perfect sense to me. Those with options and the intelligence to take advantage of them get out while the getting is good, leaving behind the reactionary. Both my sons left before the ink was dry on their diplomas.

    It’s kind of ironic. I moved here for them and as soon as they were able they bolted for the big city leaving me out here. I could have moved back but time has a way of setting one’s life on a path and after a certain age it just gets harder and harder to change it.

    Besides, we have our little 12.5 acres. It’s peaceful, beautiful, and neither my wife nor I are beset by loneliness.

  16. 16.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Amir Khalid: Why on earth is Trump ending community-testing support? Does he still think that low testing = low new-case numbers = good PR?
    Dealing with the Virus is hard work, so Trump dumped into on to Kushner and Trump is now busy rage tweeting or preening before the camera to care about the virus anymore. Meanwhile Kushner is in way over his head and running the government’s effort as profit center like the slumlord he is.

  18. 18.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @WereBear: The amazing thing is how, after I left: things got worse.

    The Pennsylvania mill town my parents bailed on in the ’60s turned into a white slum so broken down the bridges over the creek in the middle of town broke and it wasn’t until two generations had died, new people moved in looking for cheep housing did it turn around.

  19. 19.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @JPL: Their actions speak to how little they value their own lives. It’s all about their Lord and Savior Mammon.

  20. 20.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @JPL: I don’t think they even value their own lives now. It’s all about their purity as hard right conservatives now.

  21. 21.

    debbie

    I apologize if this has already been explained, but does anyone know why the Johns Hopkins map doesn’t list a death toll for the entire United States?

  23. 23.

    debbie

    @Betty Cracker:

    It’ll also underscore his lack of valuing people’s lives and putting money and the economy over everything else. Quite the legacy for our most Christian president (and his vociferous Christian supporters). //

  24. 24.

    WereBear

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: I don’t think they even value their own lives now. It’s all about their purity as hard right conservatives now.

     
    I know that’s what they say, now. But let’s see what they say in a month.

    Fox News filled their head with imaginary fears; reflected in the rise of preppers and ammo fondlers. When they are actually threatened by something which can only be solved by pointy headed liberal science: some of them will jump ship.

    I just don’t know how many.

  25. 25.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @debbie: click on the united states under cases by country and it will show the death toll over in the right bar.

  26. 26.

    OzarkHillbilly

    According to the complaint filed in court, Mostad had advised his tenants, a family of three with a four-year-old daughter, that their lease was ending on 1 April, but as the date approached, they had trouble finding a new place because of the coronavirus pandemic and the state’s “stay-at-home” order.

    Mostad then allegedly showed up at their door on 2 April, and asked to be let in so he could show the property to a potential buyer. The family refused, saying they feared letting new people into their home, as their daughter has a pre-existing medical condition making her more vulnerable to the virus. Mostad responded by forcing his way in and then removing circuit breakers in the boiler room, leaving the family without electricity, heat or hot water, the complaint says.

    In Misery, even during normal times that action alone would have had his ass in a sling. I suspect it is the same in MN.

    When reached by the Guardian, Mostad, 77, said that the family was not behind on rent, but that he had been planning to sell his farm, including the home where they lived, as business had been tough for several years.

    In an interview, he lashed out against undocumented immigrants, refugees and Black Lives Matter activists, and what he sees as government overreach in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

    “What’s happening with the coronavirus shutdown is a communist takeover,” he said.

    Just a real peach of a guy.

  27. 27.

    Booger

    @WereBear: No, South Dakota is a rural wasteland bereft of medical infrastructure, with large areas of Tribal Lands which are even worse off. So it has that going for it!

    WSF.

  28. 28.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @WereBear: Fox News filled their head with imaginary fears; reflected in the rise of preppers and ammo fondlers. When they are actually threatened by something which can only be solved by pointy headed liberal science: some of them will jump ship.

    I rather doubt that many will stay in the uncertain waters of knowledge for very long before they clamber back aboard the good ship Deranged. It’s much more comfortable being told what to think.

  30. 30.

    WereBear

    @Booger: Exactly. That’s why I’ve been saying it’s like a Bond Villain virus: it will target the stupidest people in the stupidest states, and the neglected in those areas will get a double whammy from already imposed vulnerability.

    But for once, the bigotry is hitting them directly. Those Fox News weeks of “only the flu/Democratic hoax/look how bad it is in blue states” is going to mow down their own viewers.

    Which suggests the stupid really does go all the way to the top.

  31. 31.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @WereBear: I know that’s what they say, now. But let’s see what they say in a month.

    Likely longer than a month, the virus is going to move slow in the rural counties and the numbers will be small due to low population density.  I think the bigger deal with be will their own Conservative Purity Pony Governors blocking any virus relief as dangerous socialism.  End of summer is when I think reality will sink end to those who didn’t die.

  33. 33.

    WereBear

    @MagdaInBlack:

    Part of me is thankful I’ll no longer be meeting and greeting all day, the rest of me will feel a whole lot better when that unemployment application comes back approved.

     
    I hear you. In NY it took me two straight hours and multiple tries. I got faster and faster though :) Drew up a cheat sheet, switched browsers, and finally got an email confirmation.

    Still no money…

  36. 36.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @MagdaInBlack: @WereBear: My youngest and his wife were lucky. The restaurant they worked at decided to get ahead of the curve and were among the first to close. They are getting their UI. They have friends who are still trying to file.

  37. 37.

    WereBear

    @OzarkHillbilly: I’m glad to hear. I ran across an article in a Kansas paper where people were interviewed about the excruciating dilemmas people were going through because their employers were refusing to close.

    Making them play “your money or your loved one’s life” for all of them who had medical conditions already.

  38. 38.

    MagdaInBlack

    @WereBear:

    I think it takes 2 weeks here (Illinois) for the $$ to arrive. Several friends have seen theirs arrive in about that time from…including the $600.

    Hang in there, Im thinking of you.

    *Our Gov. Pritzker gives an update every day, usually with some sly shots at trump.

  40. 40.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @WereBear: My wife is at home now, but not working nor is she unemployed. She is going to stay home for the 3 weeks of statewide shutdown at full pay. If the shutdown goes beyond the 24th she will still have 2 weeks of vacay she can take plus the company has a 3/4 pay program for iirc 10 weeks.

    I find it hard to believe she is working for a corporation in America.

  41. 41.

    MagdaInBlack

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Well, ya know, we are “essential.”  Much ado was made about doing our civic duty. ..by the folks working from home.  Cynical? Me? Ya, a wee bit 😊

  43. 43.

    debbie

    @WereBear:

    I feel the same way about Gov. DeWine. Most of his policies piss the hell out of me, but he’s been great on COVID-19. Turns out he’s a genuine pro-life supporter, unlike his fellow Rethuglicans in Ohio and in D.C.

  45. 45.

    WereBear

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I find it hard to believe she is working for a corporation in America.

     
    I am both glad and astonished to hear.

    My company, a non-profit, lost all funding sources. I was furloughed, so right now I still have my health insurance and my job. But since it’s tourism, all coins are still in the air and I don’t know where they will land.

    Governor Cuomo did extend the unemployment span, so really, I’m so grateful I’m in NY.

    And not FL. That’s a deliberate nightmare.

  46. 46.

    TS (the original)

    @Amir Khalid:

    Why on earth is Trump ending community-testing support?

    Because President Obama said testing is needed.  That is what drives trump decisions.

  47. 47.

    Kristine

    @MagdaInBlack

    Thank you. Illinois seems to be handling this well. Thank god we got rid of Rauner. Dear lord, can you imagine 😱

    I think that every day. I wasn’t excited about Illinois remaining in the Billionaire Guv Club, but Pritzker seems to be handling things. .

  48. 48.

    zzyzx

    @rikyrah: 

    We are testing like South Korea and Germany in some states.

    According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/, South Korea is testing 9,310 people for every million people in their population. That rate would put them in 6th place out of US states. Germany tests 1 out of every 15k people, a rate that would put them in 3rd place.

    It’s not like this is some completely different universe where those countries are testing everyone and we’re testing no one.

  49. 49.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @WereBear: Slower spread, but since they lack much medical infrastructure, it won’t take much to reach the place where NYC is now.

    Some places are already there now like Dougherty county in SW Georgia with 62 deaths. Just the numbers will look like nothing next to the thousands that will die in the cities, even though the dozens that will die in the rural counties will have a bigger impact on those communities, so there wouldn’t be the breathless reporting on it.

  50. 50.

    zzyzx

    @rikyrah: somehow I didn’t actually post the earlier time, but I looked up the stats and I was surprised.

    According to worldometers, Germany is running 15,730 tests per million people. South Korea’s rate is 9310/million.

    Those aren’t ratios out of line with a lot of US states. Yes, Georgia and Texas are way behind, but Germany would have the 3rd highest rate if it were a state (behind NY and Louisiana) and South Korea would be 6th (also behind NJ, MA, and WA).

    I know we’re all looking for an easy solution and trying to reverse engineer approaches, but it’s not like South Korea is testing at a rate 10 or 20 times as high. 9310/million v 6655/million (for the US as a whole) doesn’t seem like enough to explain the difference.

  51. 51.

    satby

    @Kristine: FDR and the Kennedy family were rich too. Good policies and government can come from any politician who has empathy and a desire to serve the public.

  53. 53.

    Chris Johnson

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: People have these things called trucks and churches, not just guns and bitterness…

    ‘low population density’ is an absolute crock, because human-to-human contact is how the virus works. Yes, if an area is SO HEAVILY TRAFFICKED that droplets are persistently hanging in the air like the medieval miasma theory, that’s dangerous, but the virus doesn’t primarily propagate by miasma theory (even if it seems to have made that be a thing after all!)

    It works through human-to-human contact and physical distance makes NO difference to a contagion propagated through social contacts, especially when the practice of religion involves massive centralized gathering. The ONLY solution is quarantine and the South is more prone to refusing to do that due to politics (and religion).

    ‘low population density’ is an absolute crock, a misreading of how all this works. Red states are going to get god damned flattened.

  54. 54.

    leeleeFL

    Not sure if any of you saw this, so:  according to No Shit Bill O’Reilly the people who have died of Covid19 were on their last legs anyway.  I am going back to organizing my domicile and ignoring things in the news for a few hours.  I am convinced I will not die of Covid.  These fucking assholes are gonna kill me with a stroke.  the hatred I feel for them is incandescent.

  55. 55.

    MoCA Ace

    @OzarkHillbilly: Those with options and the intelligence to take advantage of them get out while the getting is good, leaving behind the reactionary.

    Exactly.  I was talking to my daughter recently and none of her high school friends live here in the hinterlands.  Most went to college and even the ones who didn’t eventually moved to the larger cities.

    Every single one of my sons high school friends went to college.  The only ones left are working the farms and low-pay manufacturing jobs.  He said four years after high school he can hardly believe how so many of the “left behind” have become part of the brainwashed right.

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