Good:
During Monday’s press briefing, Governor Jim Justice said he is making face masks and coverings mandatory in indoor public places.
“What I am mandating today is I am signing an executive order that requires all West Virginians to wear a face covering in all confined indoor spaces where social distancing cannot be maintained,” Justice said.
The order will go into effect at midnight Tuesday.
As I noted yesterday, things are about to go sideways in WV.
Steve supports this decision:
He is so sound asleep his whiskers are twitching from his dream.
Baud
It’s almost as if the virus doesn’t care about your politics or point of view.
WhatsMyNym
You aren’t even listed on Reuter’s list of states where case increased the most last week (states with 5,000 total cases minimum).
Here’s link.
ETA: and you’re cranking out the tests in WV, you make your neighbors look like slackers.
dmsilev
Good to hear. Stay safe.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
The key thing is that governors know they will be judged on their performance; they are specifically accountable for what happens in their states in a way legislators aren’t. That means they eventually have to come to terms with reality. IMO, this is a big reason you see relatively moderate GOP governors in a way you just don’t see with legislators, especially when they manage to get elected in blue or purple states.
Yutsano
Papa Stevedore Hemingway is looking magnificent as always.
Washington came way late to the game, but there is a mandatory mask order here finally. You don’t have ti wear them everywhere, but at least businesses are empowered to enforce the rule. Although many businesses were enforcing this in the first place.
Roger Moore
@WhatsMyNym:
That’s why. West Virginia hasn’t reached 5000 cases.
WhatsMyNym
@Roger Moore: duh
Nicole
I’m glad the order came down, and I’m hopeful that, since no place has the density of NYC, that it will still be in time.
On the less hopeful side, mask compliance in my NYC neighborhood has dropped enormously. I took an hour walk last night and maybe 20% of the people I saw out on the street. I’m not concerned about picking up the virus from people I’m briefly passing, but it still depresses me. It’s just not that big an ask.
One of the residents in our building is blithely ignoring the masked when indoors requirement in our building, but then he’s also not big on keeping his dog leashed in the building, either, so big shock there. Some folks just really don’t give a f*ck about anyone else.
Cameron
There still isn’t any coherent state-wide response that I can see here in FL Testing is sorta kinda available in Manatee County, though the centers are only open each day until tests run out and there’s no guarantee of when you’ll get results. Better than nothing, but I really hope one (or more) of the vaccines in the works pans out by the end of the year.
prostratedragon
Ya-a-y!
And where would we all be without the stalwart efforts of Steve to keep our noses to the grindstone?
Mike in NC
I don’t think it’s been mandated, but pretty much every business we’ve set foot in for the past couple of weeks has had a sign on the door: “Face Covering Must Be Worn”
Geminid
@Roger Moore: Also, you can’t gerrymander a governor’s race. One consequence of the skillful gerrymandering the republicans effected after the 2010 census was the enabling of tea party cranks and political preachers to dominate in deep red districts. In Virginia the chamber of commerce type office holders and powerbrokers who used to call the shots in the party have been edged out. Eric Cantor(Va-7) was primaried in 2014. Robert Hurt(Va-5) and Scott Rigell(Va-2) retired in 2016. Both won election in 2010 and were relatively young. The remaining traditional republicans are hunkered down as the radicals wreck the party. If Virginia Democrats deliver good governance, and I think they will, the republican party may never win another statewide race. At least, not this decade.
Don K
Compliance is good here in a well-to-do enclave of Oakland County, but this morning as I was loading my purchases into my car at Kroger an angry oldish (older than I am, at least) guy stopped his car next to me, rolled down his window, and shouted, “How much longer do we have to wear these things? How long?”, as he took off his mask. I just shrugged my shoulders. I guess he thought I looked old enough to be another angry old guy. I chose not to engage because life is too short already, and because it’s too fucking hot and humid out, and I wanted to get home quickly.
cmorenc
It’s going to be formidably difficult for Trump to attempt to normalize, numb, or distract from the COVID crisis when the entire county is daily experiencing an episode from the “Twilight Zone” with everyone in grocery stores and banks walking around in masks. Even over on Faux News, they don’t have enough squirrels or bright-enough shiny objects to distract people from this basic daily bizarre reality.
Matt McIrvin
Here in suburban Massachusetts, people are still pretty consistently wearing masks inside of businesses, but almost nobody wears them outside–except for delivery people on the job, who generally do.
Our situation, which is of course greatly improved from the spring, isn’t significantly worsening but it’s not getting better at a great rate either; I think people have let down their guard a little now that it seems somewhat under control in this part of the country. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the second wave sloshed over on us sooner or later.
Leto
Not sure if this was reported on downstairs, but it’s pretty fucking horrifying:
Florida teen dies after conspiracy theorist mom takes her to church ‘COVID party’ and tries to treat her with Trump-approved drug: report
As The Hoarse Whisperer stated, another TRD (Trumpov Related Death).
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
You don’t necessarily even need gerrymandering to produce cranks. Legislative districts are often small enough that you’ll get a bunch of crazies just because they congregate. California has a non-partisan redistricting committee, but we still have Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy and some people at least as nutty in the State Legislature.
Barbara
@Geminid: The Republican Party in Virginia has not even gotten to the bargaining stage of grief. Many haven’t even gone from denial to anger. Hence, putting up nominees like Cory Stewart and Ken Cuccinelli for statewide races. I read a Wa Po interview with a Republican voter after the primary that gave Stewart the nomination, who gave as his reason for voting for Stewart that he was “tired of losing.” I guess he was aiming for a candidate who was sure to lose so he wouldn’t be so exhausted trying to get over his thwarted expectations of winning.
L85NJGT
If the south is gonna rise again, it will do so without Charlie Daniels.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Looks like he’s trying to take this seriously. Good for him, though I hope he loses this fall. Not really thinking it’s that likely to happen, but still…
Martin
@Leto: TFW you discover your mom loves Trump more than you.
mali muso
@Leto: Just saw that on Hoarse Whisperer’s Twitter feed. Utterly horrifying. There really are no words.
Ohio Mom
The City of Cincinnati has mandated masks starting July 9th — which I of course applaud — but if you look at the map the County Board of Health has on its website, all the hotspots are in the suburbs.
The small cities and villages that border the beltway are where the action is, and I have trouble imagining any of them will mandate masks. Including my little inner-loop city.
Whatever it would take to get DeWine to issue a statewide order is too horrible to contemplate.
Leto
@Martin: Your mom, your church, your friends… she needs to be brought up on manslaughter charges. None of this, she learned her lesson bullshit. And the church. JFC, fucking insanity.
WaterGirl
@Martin: TFW?
bemused senior
@Nicole: my daughter’s fiancee tested positive for c19 and is a fanatic strict mask wearer. His fellow officers weren’t careful when in the office. His sergeant sent him email saying “I guess I should thank you for being so strict about wearing your mask.” So far my daughter is negative but it is likely just a matter of time. ☹️
dmsilev
@Martin: Look on the bright side. When Trump finally does shuffle off this mortal coil, legions of his fanatics will volunteer to be interred with him so they can be together for all eternity.
(and to forestall the obvious objection, he’s far too lazy to make a good mummy.)
kindness
I always wear my mask inside anywhere but take it off when I’m outside and not around anyone. Mask wearing has gotten better since last week when Newsome made wearing one the law again.
Martin
@WaterGirl: That Feeling When
Brachiator
This is good news.
Barbara
@Leto: These people are insane. And what makes this even worse is that she probably calls herself pro-life and is almost certainly not going to be prosecuted for reckless endangerment or worse. This is one situation where I hope social media turns her life into living hell, kind of like the family that ended up having to cancel their dad’s facebook funeral. I mean, she killed her child.
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
I wouldn’t expect them to get there for a good long time. A lot of the Republicans here in California haven’t gotten past denial, and they’ve had trouble electing anyone to statewide office through normal elections for a couple of decades. I think the individual Republicans who were well enough connected to reality to get past anger have decided to leave the party.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: And you have “jungles” primaries in Cali.. But gerrymandering tends to exaggerate radical tendencies. When in 2017 Virginia Democrats picked up 15 House of Delegate seats on a map drawn by republicans, demographic changes certainly played a part. But another factor was the way the republicans followed ideology over pragmatism on issues like Medicaid expansion and gun safety. They may have just handed my Va. 5th district to the Democrats by picking self-described “Biblical conservative” Bob Good to replace the incumbent republican congressman. Just like when South Carolina republicans lost Mark Sanford’s district in 2018 when a tea party lady primaried him. And that district had been republican for decades.
Martin
@Leto: Agreed.
And I don’t know what her denomination is, but the entire evangelical community seems to have turned into a death cult around Trump. It’s really astonishing just how committed they are.
Leto
Granted it’s the FTFNYT but:
The county I live in, as well as the surrounding counties, are all dark red/yellow (black/latino). Might explain what I’m seeing from some white people (lackadaisical attitudes).
Ken
Sadly, these have the same response: Exponential growth is not our friend.
catclub
@WaterGirl: dyslexic WTF
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I know this is off topic, but y’know that NFAC black militia that marched through Stone Mountain State Park in Georgia? It turns out the leader might not be a good person…
Jinchi
@WhatsMyNym: West Virginia is doing better per capita than most US states, but the data in that link are now a week old. The weekly average rate has gone from 9 per million per day three weeks ago to 24 per million per day on the date of that report to 34 per million per day, now. That’s a 40% increase in the last week.
Best to get on top of the problem now.
Brachiator
@Leto:
It’s just plain sad that people will hurt themselves and their loved ones by trying to prove Trump right. This is the ultimate no-win situation.
And this is where the GOP and every right-wing pundit should clearly and loudly say that Trump is wrong.
Cowards.
Ken
Maybe I play too many games, or maybe I’m still eight at heart, but I’m imagining all sorts of ways rules lawyers will be parsing those words. “We can maintain social distancing in this bar, so the rule doesn’t apply” is horribly plausible.
different-church-lady
A mere three months too late.
Leto
@Martin: Yup. A twice divorced, multiple affair committing, grifter/cheat… everything they espouse they’re against, but they drop those “values” because he definitely blows that racist whistle as loud as he can. They’ll continue to say that “God’s working through him” even as he personally delivers them to the gates of hell. And then they’ll thank him for it. Then he, and their pastors/religious leaders, will skip off, laughing at the rubes while counting the money.
Yutsano
@Leto: Fuck that. She fucking murdered her own daughter. At least Murder 2.
catclub
1) she is white, so of course not. She has suffered enough.
2) actually Covid19 killed her child, she just helped.
Martin
@dmsilev: My daughter is fascinated with music exported from North Korea. I’m tempted to take the translated lyrics and put them out as a new song from a devoted Trump follower. The lyrics are right on point.
Kim Jung Ils theme song, very lightly altered.
Jinchi
This is the most disturbing part of that report. The mom basically killed her daughter and now wants to pretend she’s a martyr.
Martin
@Ken: Everyone looks 6 feet away through beer goggles.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
This shouldn’t be a big surprise. The only change is uniting on Trump as the center of their death cult instead of each church having its own local cult leader.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Is that a food bowl by Steve’s head? His, I assume.
Leto
@Barbara: Yeah, there’s not much sympathy from me. Like you said, she intentionally killed her kid. Yet another clear cut case where we need to increase funding for mental health services in this country.
@Brachiator: agreed. Even if they maybe wanted to try to dislodge themselves from the crazy, they can’t. This is what they’ve created. Unfortunately it’s just going to get more people killed.
WaterGirl
@Ken: I had a similar thought. When I was in college, there was a book called “Sex doesn’t count when…”
When someone has one foot on the floor, etc. I’m sure there are people making jokes about that as we speak.
Sorry, but if you’re inside a bar or a restaurant and you are 6′ away, the AC blowing air around is not your friend.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
It turns out that NFAC leader might not be a good person…
Kay
@Ken:
So few people were doing the social distancing. I think there has to be a recognition that if they WILL do masks that may be the best we’ll get. 70/80 is much better than 0. This is a country where half the people won’t even get a flu shot and it’s almost or completely free and widely available. They just aren’t going to stay 6 feet apart for a year.
Martin
@catclub: Ah yes, the ‘I didn’t kill him, the bullet from the gun I was holding did’ defense. Very effective for white defendants.
marv
Had to go 30 miles to a medical center for a routine check and decided to go to Wal-Mart to return cans. This is a northern rural Michigan story – very few places still to redeem cans for a dime apiece. Either wait in line at Wal-Mart or build an addition on the garage. Half-hour plus, temperature over 90, but I did make good use of part of the time – exactly 70% of in-going customers were masked (sample-size: 50). Like a lot of places in the upper midwest, we have a lot walking visual comorbidities just by weight and age. Really hits home one man’s vanity about wearing a mask shaped a nation’s behavior.
Brachiator
@Leto:
This will become more complicated as the virus is allowed to spread.
Ken
@Martin: Is there any real data on covid in North Korea?
It’s sounding a lot like NK in World War Z, where they all retreated to underground bunkers and ten years later no one had heard anything. Nor, for obvious reasons, was anyone going to open the doors to see what was down there…
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Never met a white person open carrying that I thought was a good person either.
Barbara
@catclub: I am old enough to remember people being prosecuted for attempted murder because they exposed others to HIV. Oh sure, Covid-19 killed her child but she knew she was high risk and intentionally exposed her to the disease. Reckless endangerment or even reckless homicide would both be appropriate charges IMO.
If I even unintentionally exposed my kids to something that killed them I am not sure I could go on living.
Leto
@Martin: So here’s your challenge. How many “thought leaders”, grifters, and GOP elected officials can you get to re-tweet/share this? I feel like this should be a BJ challenge. Maybe get the blog master to use his top 10k blog powers to get one of his fancy followers to help propagate this.
@Jinchi: Yeah, the end of the article where they let the mom speak… just fucking demented.
Martin
@Ken: Pretty much. There are reports it’s spreading. There are reports they’re executing anyone who has it. There are reports they’ve avoided it entirely.
Nobody seems curious enough with everything else going on to really investigate. For a change everyone is quite pleased with their normal tendency to socially distance from other nations.
LuciaMia
Well, if Steve endorses it…
Leto
@Ken: that was such a good book. Not sure you could get me to crack it right now.
Barbara
@Brachiator: But this is a key reason why Trump stopped caring. He thought it was mostly affecting people who were unlikely to vote for him. His perception that white people won’t be affected is wrong. The reality is that white people have been less likely to be affected so far because they are much more likely to be in a position to better protect themselves via social distancing. Take that away and white people will get sick. They will still be disproportionately better off — more likely to have insurance, less likely to have confounding medical conditions and so on, but they will get sick. They are fucking ghouls.
Jinchi
People also take the 6-foot rule a bit too literally. If you’re 6 feet away from one person, you’re good. If you’re six feet away from 6 people, in a closed room with 100 others, you probably should be getting nervous.
Martin
@Leto: I think you need to build up a history of Trump fluffing to get it to take off, so it would take some work and some time. If I were to bet on anyone pulling it off, it’s DougJ. We’ve got a few others around here who also troll for sport.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Leto: I find her much like the idiot anti-vaxxers (some of them, ironically very well educated) who take their kids to chicken pox parties and who think the months their kids spent recovering from whooping cough “strengthened their immune systems” in a better way than just getting the vaccine. I consider it malpractice of parenting and felony neglect/abuse. The woman took her immune-compromised child, who had survived cancer at age 2, to a COVID-19 party and then treated her with hydroxychloroquine when her daughter became ill. Then REFUSED putting her on a ventilator at the hospital until it was way too late to help her child.
Martin
@Barbara: Yep. Oh, people in WA, CA, and NY are dying. Checks electoral college map. We’re good people. Open Florida the fuck up.
Jinchi
“Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as example) and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help?” (4/27/2020)
Kay
The Trump employees only make things worse, never better.
We would literally be better off if everyone he hired simply stopped coming to work. I will pay them to stay home. They make everything they touch worse. Golf, paint the living room, putter around in the garden, pen some more racist screeds for Facebook….. Just please stop working.
Death Panel Truck
@Yutsano: Inslee was heckled off the stage last week at CBC in Pasco by a bunch of anti-mask idiots who make me ashamed to be a Tri-Citian. They keep this shit up and I’ll be lucky to leave my house by 2022.
Barbara
@Martin: Or you have to be a comedic genius like Sacha Baron Cohen.
Source
zhena gogolia
@Kay:
I HATE THEM!!!!!!!
Steeplejack
Newest COVID-related thread, so I’ll drop my rant here.
For the last three months I have been giving a friend rides to and from work, because Metro rail closings (in NoVA) took her commute from an easy 15 minutes to 60-90 minutes on the greatly reduced bus schedule. I didn’t realize it would go on this long when we started, but, hey, live and learn. Tedious but bearable in the grand scheme of things. My little bit for the cause.
Now it turns out that friend’s mother, sister and niece are (almost certainly) coming from New Jersey for a visit this coming weekend. WTF? My friend is mid-40s, so her mother is probably late 60s, recently retired from an unspecified job. Niece is 25 and works at Target. Dunno about the sister. But I do know that friend’s brother, a corrections officer in his 40s, had the coronavirus back in April and apparently recovered completely. But, now that his mother is retired, he regularly brings his eight-year-old son over for her to babysit during the day.
Mother, sister and niece will not be staying with my friend but at a nearby hotel. But obviously they will be socializing through the weekend. What this means to me is that my potential coronavirus exposure is going way up. I will not see them, but I am with my friend for 15 minutes or so twice a day, five days a week. So any exposure that she has is potential exposure for me.
I guess I’ll tighten up the masking regimen when we’re in the car—I haven’t been requiring my friend to wear one all the time, and, to be honest, I haven’t worn one all the time either—but I guess my bigger concern is the apparent “What, me worry?” attitude among her relatives. Traveling right now just seems crazy, unless it’s absolutely necessary, and this is not. On last Friday’s ride my friend was talking about trying to think of things that they could do “downtown,” and I was eye-rolling so hard I almost lost control of the doughty Kia.
No conclusion at this point, just needed to vent. Thanks.
hueyplong
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Ashamed that I thought of Maximilian Schell’s cross examination scene in Judgment at Nuremberg when I read your post.
Inventor
I think the governor should change his name from James to Buford T.
If he then went on TV and promised to “barbeque yo ass if ya don’t wear a mask!” I think there would be 90+% compliance.
It might even work nationally.
Jinchi
I don’t think ICE gets to make that call. If they’ve got a visa it should state explicitly the criteria that let them stay here.
ICE is pretty notorious for lying to get people to comply with their orders. My guess is they’re making this one up so that people will “self-deport”.
Of course, now that countries across the world have declared us a plague nation, they might not be able to leave, even if they wanted to.
mali muso
@Kay: Yeah, this was not wholly unexpected but still total crap. Not to mention that new incoming international students still don’t know if they will be allowed in the country (all those “Travel Bans” issued in March are still in effect.) What a way to run things. Other countries with functional governments actually try to recruit international talent and make the way smoother not impossible. sigh.
Nicole
@bemused senior: Ugh; I’m sorry. I do not, do not understand the objections to wearing masks indoors. I don’t like the non- compliance I see outdoors, but I really don’t understand the indoor objections.
I was thinking about how the actor Nick Cordero, who just passed away from Covid complications yesterday, had no prior health issues, and lingered for three months, probably because his body was young enough and strong enough to fight for that long. On a ventilator is not how any of us should have to spend our last 90 days.
I’m so depressed and frustrated at human behavior. (Obviously Cordero wasn’t being reckless; he got infected very early in the course of the outbreak.)
Barbara
@Steeplejack: Tell her that you will need to self-quarantine from her for 14 days after the visit before you will transport her again. You don’t have to be judgmental, just tell her that you hope she understands, but that you are vulnerable and cannot risk exposure to someone who has been in contact with so many people so recently in a hot zone. She has other ways to get to work. Don’t risk it.
Ken
@Leto: Tell me about it. I’d never seen the Kingsmen movies, and they were on some channel the other day. The first one was fun in a way, but the second has a villain spreading a deadly disease, and I had to turn it off.
Not going to be playing Pandemic for a while either.
Martin
@Kay: This will force a lot of schools to open prematurely. We can’t run our undergraduate programs remotely without our foreign grad students, and we can’t run them if they all have to leave the country, so we are now forced to at least run our graduate programs in person.
That was already about 75% likely to happen for us, but now it’s 100%.
Brachiator
@Barbara:
Trump never cared in the first place. He doesn’t do political calculation. He is a profoundly stupid man who does not understand science and who clearly believes that you just have to eat a hamburger and pop a pill and that will cure anything.
He has barely shifted his position on the virus even as cases increase in red states. He just wants it all to go away so that people will love him again.
The lockdown and social distancing affected who was exposed to the virus. Younger people are now getting affected more and hitting the hospitals. People with underlying conditions are still more at risk, even if they have good insurance.
Trump is gambling with people’s lives even as he does everything he can to protect himself.
Jinchi
It’s not out of line, or even impolite for you to say that you can’t drive her anymore because of the increased risk. You’ve been more than kind, and she should appreciate all you’ve done for her.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: You could tell your friend that you won’t be driving her while the family is here or for 14 days afterwards.
Then you can resume your driving duties
edit: I see that I am not the first person to have this thought!
mali muso
@Jinchi: I work with international students. The visa is just permission to show up at the border and ask to come in. Once you’re here, you have to maintain your student eligibility (lots of rules involved). In the pre-COVID times, international students weren’t allowed to take more than 1 class during a semester online as part of the reporting requirements for physical presence. When COVID hit, obviously that became not feasible, so they were allowed to do fully online and stay put. What they’re saying now is that if your school is going to be fully online in the fall, you’re no longer eligible to stay in the USA. Consider this as one more thing that colleges will have to add to their decision matrix if considering going fully online. Particularly if they are financially dependent upon international student enrollments. :(
Barbara
@Brachiator: I don’t think he cares about anybody dying in particular. But what we see as barely shifting probably seems monumental to him — whoa, Pence wore a mask! And I disagree that he has no political calculus. At this point, it is all he has. He thought, stupidly, that AZ, FL and TX were “immune” the way he once thought the US was “immune.” He is an idiot but he knows which states he cannot lose.
dmsilev
@Kay: Oh for fucks sake.
Won’t have much practical effect, since I imagine most international students won’t _want_ to come back until both in-person classes have resumed and the contagion environment is safe. So, this is ICE being a bunch of assholes primarily for the sake of being assholes.
Martin
Speculation is that the Mazars Trump tax case will drop tomorrow and it’s bad news for Trump. Apparently Kavanaugh has been ensuring the WH knows the case rulings ahead of time.
dmsilev
@Martin: How many schools were going to be 100% online only? Most seem to be aiming for a hybrid, with half or a quarter or whatever in-person and the rest remote.
Brachiator
@Martin:
I posted this in an earlier thread, but am curious about the status of your efforts to help your institution prepare, and what you think about efforts overall.
And this obviously overlaps with what state government needs to be doing.
It is hard to see that universities will be able to successfully open and function, but we will see what happens and how their plans are carried out.
I wonder how colleges will identify and protect students, faculty and staff who may have underlying conditions?
And what procedures they will have to test, trace and isolate any people on campus who become infected with the virus.
Fraternities should be treated like prisons, nursing homes or military vessels, with specific provisions to limit community spread of the virus.
I have no idea how colleges can carry out social and athletic activities.
I also hope these places have disaster plans in place should they have to shut down and send everybody home.
And K-12 schools? No idea how they will be able to function if they insist on re-opening.
Dread
@dmsilev:
ICE: You can’t stay in our shithole country unless you go to class in person.
Everyone outside of America: Yeah… we’re good…
Leto
@Jinchi: Agreed with this. You’ve been really generous, but it has limits. And you’ve just found them.
Calouste
@Kay: Apparently ICE is unaware of the concept of time zones. It’s not easy to follow online instruction if it happens in the middle of the night.
Kay
@dmsilev:
Democrats should have been all over this weeks ago. It is ALL parents talk about and it is precisely in the D’s wheelhouse. They even have a ready made loathed figure in Betsy DeVos.
Granted, Trump will do a horrible job and just insult and alienate people but for God’s sake- pay attention to your people! Talk to them! 55 million K-12 students and who knows how many college and graduate students. Speak to their anxiety about this! Tell them something. It’s really political malpractice to let Trump go first.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Martin:
I’ve seen that rumor about the case, and wondered how leak-proof the court is. Would it have to be one of the nine who passed the word on? would clerks or other staff have access to the rulings? I wouldn’t put anything past any of the Roberts Five, frankly, and I’ll be surprised if Roberts himself will go against trump on this question. I’ll be thrilled to be proved wrong
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@dmsilev: I can picture Mar a Largo entombed in concrete like the Chernobyl reactor, with hotel silent hotel room after total room of skeletons, each with faded MAGA hat on and an empty gold plated vial of poison next them. Trump’s remains sit in main dinning with bowl of what was once two scopes of ice cream a in front of him as The Gorilla Channel plays on loop on the slowly fading wide scream in front of him.
Brachiator
@Barbara:
Oh, Trump does political calculation, all right, I just don’t think it’s deeply thought out. He uses simple arithmetic and all his fingers. He knows he needs AZ and FL, but he is trying hard to alienate voters there, especially the older ones.
“Vote for me if you don’t die” is not a strong message.
Martin
@dmsilev: Most international students are graduate level, and for some disciplines, most of them are doing 100% of their work in a lab. At the very least we would need to create the pretense of an in-person instructional setting for those students, while having a completely different instructional model for other students.
It’s tremendously problematic to put yet another variable in our reopening plans.
I assume this also opens us up to being challenged by the feds when they see we’re validating these F1 students while also declaring that instruction is online.
Wyatt Salamanca
OT
h/t https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/83781-amid-legal-battle-s-s-pushes-up-pub-date-for-trump-niece-s-memoir.html
Fuck Trump!
Barbara
@Martin: Just curious, what is the source for the speculation?
catclub
Why does Kevin Drum think that when the SC rules that electoral delegates
leads to: this?
The ruling is that the electors have to vote for the winner of that states popular vote. So maybe the ruling is that the State law can determine whom they cast the electoral votes for. But it sure does not say that.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Steeplejack:
Oh crap, Steep. What a pain. I think Barbara has it right at #80. It’s hard because even though driving her is tedious, it feels good to help someone.
Martin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ve heard Kavanaugh is having one of his clerks do it. Sounded definitive enough that reporters could name the clerk if they were so inclined. A clerk wouldn’t do it without permission – that’s too important a gig and I would imagine career ending. Well, should be, but we have Kavanaugh, so perhaps not any longer.
eclare
@Barbara: Very good advice!
catclub
If so, Trump and Barr will file an appeal.
Another Scott
@Geminid:
Agreed that Governors generally need to produce state-wide results in a way that a legislator doesn’t.
But.
Not to argue semantics, but effectively the GOP does just that by restricting polling places, restricting absentee voting, restricting early voting, requiring particular IDs, etc. They’re picking their voters and preventing others from voting just as much as if they drew gerrymandered boundaries.
It’s gerrymandering by another name.
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@Barbara: Court reporters. They’ve noted the WH is getting responses to court cases out faster than they respond to other things, suggesting they’ve had more time. Then it becomes a PI case to figure out who is doing it.
Barbara
@Brachiator: I am sure they find it confounding that the thing that kills off voters least likely to vote for him is also killing off voters most likely to vote for him, and by being so cavalier about it, risks alienating all of those voters as well as many others. This is why, in a situation like this, doing the right thing is usually the most expedient thing you can do for yourself as well.
Steeplejack
@Barbara, @Jinchi, @WaterGirl:
Thanks, this is a good idea. I don’t want to be a dick, but I think my friend doesn’t see the big picture. I know she struggles with depression, and part of that can be a fatalistic, “What can I do?” approach to life. Maybe the “threat” of two weeks of Uber (or whatever) will help her push back against her relatives, who seem like the really clueless ones. Might bring this up in the ride today.
patroclus
@Martin: There are 2 cases: Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Vance. The Mazars case is the House subpoena, which really is seeking extensive financial information, possibly including tax returns as would be determined by the lower court. The Vance case is the NY case and it clearly includes the tax returns but a victory would only mean that Vance and a small set of investigators (and the grand jury) would get to see them unless there are leaks. I’ve seen speculation both ways – that Trump is going to lost both and that Trump may win Mazars but lose on Vance. Virtually everyone agrees that tomorrow will be the day.
In my view, no one is above the law and Trump should lose both unanimously, but I’m sure Kavanaugh, Alito and Thomas feel differently. I’m not sure about Roberts and Gorsusch.
catclub
norms and traditions. I doubt there is a law that SC rulings are to remain secret until formal release, with penalties for violations.
see also, consideration of a president’s SC nominations. by the Senate.
West of the Rockies
@Death Panel Truck:
My oldest sister lived in Pasco for a time in the early 80s. It seemed sort of conservative then, too.
Martin
@catclub: No, the ruling is that the state can pass laws forcing how the electors must vote. Yes, it will likely be narrowly interpreted to only applying to the expected situation, but the court affirmed that the state can pass laws regulating how an elector votes.
West of the Rockies
@Steeplejack:
Keep your windows open some or have the AC on fresh. Good luck!
Kay
LMFAO
They must be so ashamed taking that handout. Hey, fake libertarians have to eat too!
Patricia Kayden
catclub
You are more optimistic than I am. I am sure there is an unwritten dignitude of the states rule about inconveniencing a sitting GOP president.
jeffreyw
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I will pre-order your next novel.
Baud
@Another Scott:
Gerrymandering is bad. Voter suppression is bad. But they are two different bad things. I don’t think the distinction is merely semantic.
Steeplejack
@West of the Rockies:
I have always had the windows open or the A.C. on fresh, which is why I was a little slack on the masking. And it’s a short exposure time. But this ups the stakes.
greenergood
The thing that I find so alarming about reading reports from the US is that there just doesn’t really seem any focus on children – maybe I’m missing a lot, but all the news focus is on Trumper vs anti-Trumpers, maskers vs no maskers, but so little about children – it’s heartbreaking – US childcare is already abysmal (not that UK’s is much better) but now it will be worse, and children’s suffering will be heartbreaking. Repubs wail about about abortion, and don’t give a flying F— about real, live children. And the virus will kill parents, guardians, grandparents – and the US health ‘care’ system will just shrug their shoulders and say it’s time to get back to elective surgeries cause that’s where we make our money, so you COVID people just really need to die and get it over with …
Kropacetic
Someone posted a video yesterday about all the pandemic-related measures Senate Republicans are blocking. I’m pretty sure something about opening schools was among them. The problem is the lack of coverage and the giant soapbox Trump has.
You can lead the media to policy, but you can’t make them think.
zhena gogolia
@Barbara:
Great idea.
dmsilev
@Kay: Rand herself wasn’t above taking government handouts, so they’re just following in her footsteps.
Baud
@catclub: “We hold that the subpoenas don’t fall within the Bill Clinton exception to the President’s Article II prerogatives. Case dismissed.”
Barbara
@Martin: That makes sense. Once the opinion has been written keeping it secret doesn’t compromise the Court’s process, but many decisions go right down to the wire. The Supreme Court is more formal and probably takes longer to get from final opinion to published opinion, so within that time frame someone might think it’s okay to leak the result. Depending on the type of case, it could still be very compromising, e.g., if it involves a publicly traded company. In general, courts keep these things under wraps for the additional reason that parties often negotiate a resolution that moots the need to render a decision, though that would be less likely when a case has made it to the Supreme Court.
It is the kind of thing that would likely piss off Roberts.
Matt McIrvin
@Mike in NC: There’s a YouTuber I follow in South Carolina who fixes old video games and pinball machines for a living. In the comments of one video people were talking about businesses being shut down and he said something like “it’s so weird to hear about places still being shut down, around here I see a few people wearing masks but otherwise things are just completely back to normal.”
While the case numbers were skyrocketing, of course. I noticed they just passed NC in total cases. Might be just about to pass MA in daily deaths per capita.
Kay
@Kropacetic:
I would accept that in a non-Presidential year but Joe Biden’s spouse taught high school! That’s what she did before the community college. She was a high school teacher. This issue should be OURS, in the same way health care is OURS. We are RICH with Democrats who care about public education and know a lot about it and the public education system that 55 million kids depend on is collapsing. Make it a priority. It’s an emergency.
Elizabelle
@Kay: I think universities will sue on the ICE rule; do you? Kick it up through a few federal courts and to the Supreme Court, if need be.
The students on visas may not have standing, but the universities and colleges who are not planning to open classrooms this fall (at this juncture) — and would thus lose a lot of revenue under the ICE plan — sure do.
germy
They’re already making plans.
Ladyraxterinok
@Martin:
Read somewhere she’s some variety of Assembly of God.
In recent years have learned there are several different AoG denominations.
Have impression many churches that call themselves ‘non-denominational’ are really AoG.
Although have read that more and more SoBaptist churches are calling themselves non-denominational—not publically identifying themselves as SBC!
Elizabelle
@germy: …. in countries without extradition treaties.
Cuz they may have to flee.
narya
I went out early for my morning run (before 6 am), partly to get in front of the heat and partly because the contractors show up at 7:30. The good news is that I saw or passed fewer people than I do even a half hour later, but the bad news is that almost no one was wearing a mask. I mean, I know it’s outside and everything, but at least have one handy. Oddly enough, the people most likely to be wearing something are fellow runners (protocol has evolved such that even if one is not wearing it when no one else is in sight, one pulls it up when approaching another person–and, often, there’s a little wave of acknowledgement between masked folks, which is entertaining).
mitzimuffin
I’m w/Steve; who, by the way is just adorable.
Geminid
@Barbara: re Va republicans: there is a very bitter power struggle going on now from the state level down to the county, between what I’d call the traditionalists and an alliance of tea party radicals plus Christian Dominionists. The radicals will probably win the party fight, but they will control a hollowed out party and will win conventions and primaries but lose elections. And some of the Dominionists probably won’t mind losing as long as they are on the right side of their narrow minded version of the deity. They expect that they will be raptured soon anyway. As a Democrat I have no problem with this. The traditionals made their bed when they threw in with Gingrich and his crowd in the 90’s, and tried to harness tea party “energy” this past decade. Now they get to lie in that bed, and get pushed around and be called “Rinos” by people who basically disdain the republican party.
Spanky
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
“In death as in life, here lies Donald Trump”
Martin
@Brachiator: Been watching various solutions. Iowa State (maybe UofI – I’d have to check my notes) is doing some similar things. The calendar is similar – end at Thx so students don’t go home and then just come back infected. But they’re doing freshmen classes monday, sophomore tues, etc. I don’t quite understand how they’re implementing that yet – our student mix is such that’s generally not possible even with my ML magic. Have some emails out to them to clarify.
From my work, all of those plans help, but don’t help enough. I don’t see protections for faculty. I don’t see accommodations for various other populations. We’ve gone through a ton of options that of course all revolve around low-hanging fruit, and none of them work well enough, even taken together.
Fundamentally, I believe you need to do fairly radical rethinking of how you administer the institution to make this work, and the administrators just aren’t putting in the effort needed. They’re trying, but it’s band-aids on a severed limb because all they know how to do is band-aids.
And somehow you need to steer the culture of the student body. That’s both really hard, and too nebulous for a lot of administrators to grasp. It is the national problem writ large – you behave according to the norms for your setting. Bar behavior is different from church behavior and red state behavior is different from blue state behavior. You need to uproot college behavior, at least temporarily and replace it with something else, which means articulating what that expectation is, reminding them of it constantly, getting buy-in from the students themselves to help self-police it (culture is peer maintained), and make sure every layer of the institution is sending the same message. If faculty are breaking those rules, you have to be ready to land on them. Undermining public health is not a privilege of tenure.
My fear is that these schools are opening up without doing the pre-planning that they could to contact trace. If you ask pretty much any university to get you a list of which students Joe shared a class with, they’d have to run off and try and find someone who could figure that out. Figure it out now. Have those reports ready to go now. Can you cross-reference that with student housing? Can you get lists of roommates from students in off-campus housing. Are you plugged into student health and your county so that if infections start rising among students, you know those numbers and can make changes immediately.
Willing to bet almost none have done this. Almost none that I’ve talked to have. When I describe what we’re setting up, it’s like they’ve never even considered those things.
Fraternities can be a problem. We don’t have a traditional fraternity structure, and most live on campus so we already have staff that can work with them. Their housing situation is not much different from the general population. And our frats tend to be very academically oriented, so they’re among the groups we can probably rely on to help enforce a change in culture on campus. But that’s not the norm.
Sports are just fucked. Performance programs are as well. A lot of university program reopenings were really tied to NCAA rules, and a lot of those have badly backfired. You gotta be willing to tell the NCAA to fuck off on this.
Generally, if the faculty are upset, then the administration is getting it wrong. They would much rather be in the classroom, but they aren’t going to risk their health and the student’s health to get there. You have to convince them you have a good plan, and in a lot of cases unis aren’t even trying.
I think some schools will get this right. I hope ours can be one of them, but I think they’ll be the exception.
West of the Rockies
@germy:
Oh, yeah, China is going to be super eager to play nicey-nice with Clump.//
Danielx
@catclub:
To whom would they appeal? No court higher than the Supremes.
Roger Moore
@mali muso:
One thing a university could do is to create a class that mandates physical attendance and then auto-enroll all their international students in it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Leto:
Why hasn’t that mother been arrested yet?!
Another Scott
@Steeplejack: I always wear a mask when I leave the house, unless I’m just cutting the grass and don’t leave the yard. Walk the dog for 15, 30, 60 minutes? Wear a mask. Drive to pickup groceries? Wear a mask. Go to work in my empty lab for a couple of hours? Wear a mask.
Always.
It’s too dangerous otherwise. There’s no treatment, there’s no cure, there’s no vaccine.
Wednesday I go to the dentist for a cleaning. I’ll be wearing a mask every instant I can (obviously not when they’ve got their hands in my mouth)…
Good luck, and be careful.
Cheers,
Scott.
Barbara
@Ladyraxterinok: “Southern Baptist” churches are identified by whether they belong to the Southern Baptist Convention. The convention has lost many churches. So even if not much else changes, technically, it is no longer Southern Baptist.
Ken
You forget the court of public opinion! Imagine a sea of MAGA-hat patriots carrying their semi-automatics and surrounding the Supreme Court, baying for the blood of Roberts, the traitor who ruled against Trump. Remember, banana republic is not just a clothing store.
Uncle Cosmo
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Based on that tweet…I dunno what to think. Joke or serious??
But let me take this opportunity remind the peanut gallery here that what a person believes &/or espouses has in general fuck-all to do with whether s/he is a decent human being.
For example, in his 1988 tome Intellectuals, British author and Anglo-Catholic RWNJ Paul Johnson (still with us at age 91) strove mightily to demonstrate that a whole passle of the leftist brains trust were really shitty people. IOW these people were shit & therefore everything they believed or espoused is shit as well.
Classic ad hominem screed. Don’t let anyone get away with this sort of crap on your watch.
(FWIW, I have a copy of this book on my shelf, & I’ve read it cover to cover. Not a mistake I will make again.)
stinger
@Steeplejack: I remember an earlier comment from you that you were helping your friend in this way. You’d be perfectly justified to ask her to take that 60-minute commute for 2 weeks after her family leaves, in lieu of self-quarantining, before you invite her back into your car. You have saved her a ton of time and money; that would be a small return on her part.
ETA: I see Barbara, Jinchi, WaterGirl, and probably others are saying the same thing.
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
It shows just how bad they are. One of the rules of external crises like this is that any leader who makes a sincere attempt to get on top of it will get a big popularity boost. Even if they make serious mistakes, they still get credit just for putting in the effort. Somehow Trump has managed to do the only thing that will make the pandemic a net negative, yet people are still trying to explain how it’s all a sign of his political genius. He’s really just a lazy SOB who couldn’t even be bothered to look like he cares.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Ohio Mom:
It’s hilarious looking back how DeWimp got all of those accolades early on for doing the right things and then slowly caved. He reversed himself on the mandatory mask order because some people complained and were “offended”.
If it had been mandated I guarantee that there would be higher rates of compliance. Would be taken a lot more seriously than just a mere recommendation. The vast majority of people go along to get along
Uncle Cosmo
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Signora Borgia needs to be cuffed, frogmarched into the waiting police cruiser & fitted for an orange jumpsuit. And once she’s pled down to, I dunno, manslaughter or reckless endangerment or jaywalking or something, part of the plea bargain ought to be that she hits every social media platform & every fundie church within 2 hours’ drive & tells how sometimes The Lord speaks to humanity by means of science & she caused her daughter’s death because she wasn’t listening. Tells with feeling.
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I’ll take White AF for $200, Alex.
Martin
As a full service blog, we need a daily morning post reporting on whether Ghislaine Maxwell is still alive.
Current Condition: Alive
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Uncle Cosmo:
I mean, look, just don’t say anything that had anything to with fucking Hitler of all people. It’s obviously a fake quote anyway, but the dude shared it.
Roger Moore
@Uncle Cosmo:
I’m not sure I would agree with that. Some ideologies are sufficiently despicable that it’s almost impossible for someone to believe them and still be a decent person. They may be decent to some people- maybe even all the people they know personally- but that doesn’t make them good.
Now the flip side is the fallacious argument you want to watch out for. An OK ideology doesn’t become suspect just because someone who is terrible in other aspects of their life espouses them. To use the classic example, Hitler being a vegetarian doesn’t mean everyone should eat meat.
JMG
The prevailing mask etiquette here on the Cape seems to be that people don’t always have their masks on if they’re outdoors (except in the town center where it’s mandatory and there’s a $300 fine), but almost always have them at the ready around their necks. No place of business will admit you without them.
catclub
@Baud: unconstituionally faulty kerning
catclub
@Danielx: it was kind of a joke. Forgot the sarcasm tag.
Won’t be sarcastic when it happens, though.
artem1s
@Geminid:
I thought the same thing after Taft wrecked Ohio. the right wing bedbugs know how to hide for long periods of time. Be diligent.
Ruckus
@dmsilev:
Isn’t that their sole rational for existing?
Dan B
@Barbara: It’s tough emotionally to protect yourself when it may be more than necessary. It’s a reminder of all the pain that we experienced during AIDS. Many friends who had been “found family” split over things like being exposed casually when it was clear that was not possible. The unknowns are impossible to face rationally and with compassion.
We have neighbors, a three generation black family, who never wear masks. And a couple other black neighbors had Fourth of July parties with no masks. I feel terrible because they either don’t know they are three times as likely as whites to get sick and nine times as likely to die. Do I write a letter that would likely be viewed as demeaning or hope for good luck. The one year old is the cutest kid and the bond between dad and son is dazzling. It’s heartbreaking.
WaterGirl
@dmsilev: I saw something recently, but I can’t recall which university, that was going to have in-person classes once a week.
It seemed perfectly obvious to me that the decision had to do with making sure students returned to town for school so the housing market didn’t turn completely to shit.
Nicole
@Steeplejack: Add me to the “tell your friend she has to quarantine for 14 days after the visit before you can drive her again” contingent.
And it’s not a punishment; I get why she wants to see her family, and I TOTALLY get why it makes you nervous. This is just one of the trade-offs we all have to accept we must make in the era of Covid-19. Seeing one’s family may mean a 2 week period of inconvenience afterward, but so it goes. We have to learn how to live in this time of heightened risk, and some of it will mean letting go of what was easy before.
You’re not being bad or rude, and she’s not being bad or rude. She needs to see her family; you need to minimize your exposure risk. At the moment, those things are in conflict and she’ll have to deal with the inconvenience. So it goes.
(And for you, enjoy 2 weeks of solitude and guilt-free freedom-from-masks while you are driving yourself solo in your car. :) We have to find the pleasure perks where we can, too.)
WaterGirl
@Nicole: She may be being slightly oblivious, though. She apparently didn’t think to say to Steep:
“My family will be here for x amount of time, so if that makes you less comfortable or uncomfortable about driving me during that time and for 14 days afterwards, I totally understand. Just say the word and I’ll make other arrangements.”
Dan B
@WaterGirl:
@WaterGirl: Many people are clueless about sciency stuff like viral transmission. She may be clueless. She knows her family so feels comfortable with them in addition to being excited to see them. She doesn’t comprehend that Steep doesn’t have that level of comfort and also knows that the greater number of people we have contact with in our networks, not just trips to the store and the office, the odds go up exponentially. There are a lot of people who believe you are only contagious when you have symptoms.
I’m reminded of the ads in the 50’s and 60’s where little Jimmy had to be careful of the nice man who would bring him treats, or Suzy who was offered a marijuana / opium cigarette for fun and then….. It’s hard to get people to respond to the invisible threats unless it’s spelled out repeatedly.
Geminid
I just shopped the Ruckersville Walmart. Was sorry to see that only ~85% of people wore masks, down from near 100% two weeks ago. Greene County is red. Although I think a lot of the country people are just apolitical, think it’s all irrelevant. The store staff all wore masks.
WaterGirl
@Dan B: Yeah, I’m not saying she’s a bad person, just a bit oblivious.
Steeplejack
Thanks, all, for the good feedback. I will tell my friend that if her family comes we will be going into a two-week quarantine. I didn’t bring it up in the ride to work a while ago because I remembered that I hated it when one former girlfriend used to bring up Big Issues at the most inopportune, “can’t address it right now” moments. Drove me nuts. But I’ll tell my friend on the way home tonight, when she’ll have time to “process” it afterwards.
I did pick up some more information. Friend said her mom would be calling Wednesday to let her know if they were coming this weekend or next weekend (or maybe if they were coming at all?—that wasn’t clear). And, yes, it seems to be a case of cabin fever, road-trip-itis and “we haven’t all been together in a year.” And they want to do it now before the niece goes to visit some friends in Ohio. ? Fuck that.
Maybe looking at the cost of Uber for two weeks will throw cold water on the plan. I don’t see how my friend could get by with the bus service, especially now that Trader Joe’s has gone back to regular hours and she gets off work at 10:00 p.m.
Steeplejack
@Nicole:
Oh, hell, yes, I would love two weeks off the job! We just had a two-day weekend because the store was closed Saturday—her usual off days are Sunday and Thursday—and I was surprised at how great that felt.
Gvg
@WaterGirl: but if she uses public transportation for 14 days, won’t that mean she is more exposed than even just her careless family? I don’t see how this can work unless she isolates at home for 2weeks. Realistically I think steep may have to stop giving rides.
i am unclear on what her job is, but if she is a store clerk or something still seeing the public, she may have been a somewhat risky passenger anyway.
Nicole
@WaterGirl: I’m not criticizing her even for not thinking to say that to Steep; I’m just saying Steep shouldn’t feel bad in the least for telling her they can’t drive her for 2 weeks after the visit AND that she shouldn’t see it as a punishment. This is a new reality and it’ll take time for a lot of us to adjust to the fact that things just can’t be as easy as they were before. But definitely we shouldn’t feel pressured to be polite and pretend things are the same. Not when it’s a virus.
I was thinking last night, that younger Baby Boomers and Gen Xers are the first generation to not have had to deal with a long-term threat to life, over which we had little control. Older Baby Boomers were kids in a pre-polio vaccine time and also the men were at risk of being drafted in Vietnam (earlier generations faced many a contagious illness and the draft every generation). We’ve faced economic depressions, but the closest comparison I can think of is the first few years of the AIDS crisis, when we didn’t know how it was transmitted, but even that didn’t have a death toll like we’ve seen from Covid 19- it was 1990 by the time the death toll from AIDS hit what we’ve lost in the USA to Covid-19 in just 7 months.
So yeah, for a lot of us, we have no framework for how to deal with this emotionally, and so we’re making a ton of bad choices.
J R in WV
@Steeplejack:
If your “friend” is willing to expose herself like this, perhaps you should tell her you will no longer be able to help her with travel in that case.
Perhaps she can tell her family that they won’t be able to visit with her, perhaps she will be willing to commute on her own, not your responsibility in either case. “Better than dying” as one of the Cuomo brothers says.
I don’t know what I would do in your case… but this is my first reaction.
J R in WV
@catclub:
Sarcasm? ‘Cause you can’t appeal a Supreme Court ruling, that’s why they’re the Supremes!!
White & Gold Purgatorian
Yay for West Virginia! I wish our governor here in Alabama would rise to the occasion and do the same. I believe our numbers — cases, R0, hospitalizations— are as bad or worse than West Virginia’s. On the bright side, our county has just announced mandatory masks in public places effective tomorrow. There are some weasel words, but it is definitely a step in the right direction. In defending this step, the mayor of Huntsville noted that COVID hospitalizations in the county are up 660% since June 16. Past time for any adults in the room to take action.
Geminid
@Steeplejack: You have been a good friend to this person, and that is admirable. But you can’t be much help if you catch Covid-19. I hope she can understand that.
Steeplejack
@Gvg:
My friend works at a Trader Joe’s store in the trendy Clarendon section of Arlington, VA. All of the workers wear masks, they let only a certain number of customers into the store at a time, and they have plastic shields, etc., at the registers. (She works a lot of areas, not just the register.) They had two employees who tested positive in the early going (March), none since then.
My exposure to her is 10-15 minutes at a time in the car. We talk, but not “at” each other (face to face). No singing or overt spraying of saliva. Both of us have worn masks at one time or another, but not regularly.
If she decides to take the bus during the two-week quarantine, that’s a separate issue I’ll have to deal with. My presumption is that, because the bus service is so minimal now, she will end up taking Uber (or maybe getting rides from other friends). Even in the before times, ten o’clock on a weeknight was getting toward the end of bus service in Arlington and Falls Church. Whereas the store is very close to the Clarendon Metro station (reopened a week ago), and she lives close to the East Falls Church station (still closed for “summer construction”).
From what I have seen while driving around, the (few) buses are sparsely populated. I think Metro has a social-distancing policy in place, and I also think that fewer people are riding, either because they are not working or because they have given up on the curtailed service. But I don’t know what the risk level is with taking the bus.
Steeplejack
@Nicole:
Occasionally I am amazed when I realize how people have forgotten the existential threat of dying in a nuclear war, which was a big concern when I was a kid (born in 1952). Seems almost quaint now.
Steeplejack
@Geminid:
Thanks. Up to now, I have weighed the risks and deemed them acceptable. But this is a big change.
Nicole
@Steeplejack: Yeah- I remember that fear as a kid (born in the 1970s), though we were past the Duck and Cover drill eras. But nothing like this- the dread of “catching” something that can kill you, and respiratory contagion is really frightening. Some of my friends in their upper 70s recall being forbidden to swim in the public pools in summer because their parents were very frightened of polio- it’s the closest I can imagine, but I never understood it on a visceral level. I think a lot of people are not dealing with the fear.
Steeplejack
@Nicole:
And, to be honest, a lot of people are not feeling the fear yet. They don’t see bodies stacked in the streets, and most likely they don’t even know anyone who has died from coronavirus. Hell, the only person that I know of even secondhand who had the virus is my friend’s brother in New Jersey.
J R in WV
@Baud:
I agree completely — how unusual ~!!~ ;-)
J R in WV
@Steeplejack:
Cuban missile crisis. I was 10 or 11, and tried to dig a shelter in the crawl space under the house. Unfortunately, about 18 inches down there was a cap rock that created the ridge our house was on, and it was way harder than a little kid could shatter with a pick-ax. I got a pretty good little excavation, though.
Many years later dad had a plumbing company come in and excavate enough to put in a furnace & water heater. They took out a little more than I did, but it was adults with a compressor and a jack hammer. So I felt like I did pretty well for a 11 year old kid with hand tools.
Still, if they had let the missiles fly, we would have been toast. You youngsters need to remember, it wasn’t just polio, it was nuclear holocaust as well that JFK and LBJ had to deal with. NIxon not so much, he didn’t give a damm about global death.
Nicole
@Steeplejack: Yeah, that’s true. I have friends who have had it, and I lost a friend to it, but plenty of people I know are still pretty untouched by it.
Another Scott
@Nicole: It’s still early in this pandemic.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
glc
@Steeplejack:
So far she’s being irresponsible. If you keep driving her, you’re being irresponsible.
(Sorry to be the bad cop but I see there are enough good cops here … . I’d write you a note if I could. )
Steeplejack
@glc:
Noted.
Sab
@Steeplejack: She is abusing your trust and your friendship. You need to stop this. Masks are helpful but they aren’t magic.