download my app in the app store mistermix

New Jersey and Connecticut (a couple of the only states that aren’t fire engine red in David’s post below) have announced that they will be having school in the Fall. On yesterday’s “Chuck Todd Asks Dumb Questions” show, Cuomo held back, saying, essentially, that if the country’s still on fire in a couple of months, who knows what will happen.

Apparently, in their rush to re-open bars and beaches, the moron yahoo Trump guvs didn’t think about the consequences of schools staying closed. If you want to make sure the economy sucks for a very long time, make sure all of the double income with school-aged children couples have to homeschool and provide daycare for their kids. I already see it on calls — it’s pretty easy to tell the workers who are double income with small kids, they’re the ones who put on 20 COVID stress pounds and have rings under their eyes. And those are the lucky white-collar workers. I just don’t know how double income essential worker families do it.

“The Economy” isn’t getting a drink at a bar or going to a beach. In fact, if I had to bet, I’d bet that New York closes bars in a couple of weeks after a few hotspots emerge and I wouldn’t expect anything but “yeah, they weren’t being careful enough” comments from New Yorkers. I’m certainly not stepping foot inside a bar for the duration — I’ll drink outside at a restaurant if they’re clearly being very careful, but that’s it.

School’s Out ForeverPost + Comments (93)

I’ve been wondering what’s going on with California’s COVID response. This Guardian piece has some plausible explanations — it’s the suburbs and the rural wingnuts:

In Imperial county, which borders Mexico and Arizona, defiance of a statewide mandate to wear face masks and lax social distancing appears to have exacerbated a crisis both within and across state and national borders. “Whether people here brought infections to Yuma, Arizona and Mexicali, or whether they brought it back from those places is kind of immaterial at this point,” said Dr Thomas Henderson, director of the Imperial County Medical Society. “What we’re seeing here is craziness.”

The crisis has overwhelmed local hospitals, he said. “It’s just a horrible time to be a physician” he added, because doctors have found themselves pleading with the community to wear masks and stay safe, “but it’s all become so political”.

More from SFGate:

Four suburban Southern California counties are among those primarily responsible for a dangerous rise in California’s coronavirus hospitalizations, according to a Los Angeles Times data analysis. The four counties have seen significant upticks in hospitalized COVID-19 patients in recent weeks.

Increases in Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties have contributed to an overall rise in hospitalizations recorded statewide that began after Memorial Day, just as officials were rapidly reopening the economy.

I guess the free wind blowing through your hair keeps you from wearing a mask.

California is a much bigger state than New York, but we’re plenty big, and we have plenty of gun-toting, confederate-flag-waving wingnuts, and they made noise at the start of this mess. One of the (many) smart things the Cuomo administration did was to split our reopening into regions, most of which have a large city coupled with a few rural counties. Part of the reason for this was that upstate wasn’t as hard hit as New York City, and there was no reason to keep us locked down while NYC recovered. Another reason was to put a locus of regional reopening power into a regional entity so some dumbfuck wingnut county exec couldn’t make a name for him or her self by defying the lockdown. It looks like California managed their re-opening on a statewide basis, but some counties getting “variances”.

Maybe it would have been smarter to bundle the suburbs with the cities. Or, maybe not enough people died in a big city near the suburbs to make people afraid enough to be cautious during re-opening. I’m not from California, so I’m not sure, but maybe some of our Cali readers have some theories.

By the Time the First Bombs Fell, We Were Already BoredPost + Comments (243)

This is an excellent ad. From what I’ve read this morning, it looks like even a few Republicans (useless Marco Rubio being one of them) are now thinking that maybe softly hinting around about masks is a good idea, now that the hospitals are almost full and they’re a couple weeks from people dying in the streets.

Open thread.

Save a LifePost + Comments (59)

I’m trying to find “the one site” that will give me a snapshot of COVID in the US. Here’s my take on three popular sites:

Rt.live has good information, but retransmission is just part of the picture.

Covidexitstrategy.org seems to bounce around a bit, probably because their three-category classification (green/yellow/red) is too simplistic. But they do take hospital capacity and testing into account.

My current favorite is CovidActNow.org, which uses four colors to code states, (though the two intermediate colors are a little hard to discern). They’re certainly not overly optimistic (only 3 states are on track to contain COVID today) and they also track tracing capacity, which is very important and lacking right now. They also allow drill-in to states to see county-by-county status.

If you have a site that you like better, please let us know in the comments.

In other COVID news, Trump’s super-spreader event in a Phoenix church with a capacity of 3,000 was overshadowed by the 3,591 cases reported in Arizona yesterday. CovidActNow tells me that Arizona’s ICUs are basically full, too. One would think that it’s about time to take off the rainbow shades.

Update: Germy mentioned this site and the top article explains why air purifiers can’t stop COVID in mass gatherings. The megachurch grifters hosting Trump’s rally claimed that their new air purifiers would keep everyone safe.

Three Ways of Looking at a ShitstormPost + Comments (135)

Andrew Cuomo stopped doing daily briefings last Friday, because New York is on the other side of the mountain, as he calls our curve, and the daily briefings were a lot of work. He and his staff did them for a little over 100 days, and during that time we went through hell. His next-to-last briefing on Thursday was a classic:

He’s addressing the the Trumpy governors who are currently screwing the pooch in Florida, Arizona, Texas and elsewhere. The difference between them and Cuomo is that his administration just didn’t have briefings. They marshaled resources and did unpopular things, like having prisoners make “NYS Clean” hand sanitizer, moving heaven and earth to boost our testing capacity to almost 70,000 per day, increasing and consolidating hospital resources, and creating a cautious re-opening plan that has, so far, kept our positive rate under 1%. At Thursday’s conference he announced an executive order that would let the state liquor commission immediately suspend licenses of bars and restaurants that weren’t enforcing masking and distancing.

This is grossly obvious, but it seems to escape Trump & Company: It isn’t just talk. Part of the reason New York’s economy is going to recover (slowly) is that people have confidence that if something goes wrong, the Cuomo administration will clamp down and do the hard work necessary to fix it.

It isn’t just Cuomo. Jacinda Ardern and her government have done an amazing job keeping COVID out of the general population in New Zealand by instituting a mandatory, supervised two-week quarantine for anyone entering the country. Again, this is hard work, and last week two women who were in quarantine were given compassionate leave to see a dying relative, and later tested positive. Those women had contact with other New Zealanders on their trip home. Ardern cracked down, putting the military in charge of the quarantine hotels, and suspending compassionate exemptions. Her announcement of the new measures features a stone face and clear anger:

What she’s done, like a lot of what Cuomo’s done, is unpopular (here’s a good round-up of the impact on migrant workers). But her government’s hard work saved lives.

One of the core characteristics of Trump and Trumpism is a fundamental laziness, both intellectual and physical. The MAGA promise is that a red hat and hating the right people is all it takes to make America great. Turns out that work is required, and no more evidence is needed than the abject failure on display in states run on Trumpist principles.

Leading is Hard WorkPost + Comments (221)