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Coronavirus testing increasing, but still not good enough
The good news is that the number of daily coronavirus tests is going up again. The bad news is that it’s still not nearly enough for the country to safely reopen.
Why it matters: If we don’t know who has the virus, we can’t stop it from spreading without resorting to stringent social distancing measures.
This is the best piece you haven‘t read yet:
Charles Duhigg/New Yorker:
Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not
The initial coronavirus outbreaks on the East and West Coasts emerged at roughly the same time. But the danger was communicated very differently.
The next day, the man with all the family visitors died. It was America’s first known covid-19 death. Riedo called his wife. “I told her I didn’t know when I would be coming home,” he said to me. “And then I started e-mailing everyone I knew to say we were past containment. It had already escaped.” ….
The spokesperson should have a “Single Overriding Health Communication Objective, or sohco (pronounced sock-O),” which should be repeated at the beginning and the end of any communication with the public. After the opening sohco, the spokesperson should “acknowledge concerns and express understanding of how those affected by the illnesses or injuries are probably feeling.” Such a gesture of empathy establishes common ground with scared and dubious citizens—who, because of their mistrust, can be at the highest risk for transmission. The spokesperson should make special efforts to explain both what is known and what is unknown. Transparency is essential, the field manual says, and officials must “not over-reassure or overpromise.”
Evie Cai and Howard P. Forman/Hartford Courant:
Coronavirus can’t be compared to the flu or car crashes; here’s why
COVID-19 is unique in that adverse effects on others are not captured and are exponentially greater — influenza isn’t nearly as infectious and has an individual opportunity for protection through vaccination. In the case of coronavirus, an asymptomatic person who may not ever show symptoms can single-handedly spread the virus to an entire community by simply engaging in daily activities. “Superspreaders” may not come close to hospitalization themselves, but visiting a nursing home (or even being in close contact with someone who will) could have devastating effects, leading them to “cause” dozens of deaths.
Jay Rosen/Pressthink, who has advocated for no live press conferences during the pandemic:
Why don’t they just walk out?
During his daily briefings journalists are abused by a president who misinforms the nation. Here’s 13 reasons they stick around for that.
So why do newsrooms keep sending their people to the briefings? Here is my list of factors, which, again, is a long way from an explanation. I’m not defending these propositions. But I am proposing that the answer to the question is some combination of items 1-13 here.
Nervous Republicans See Trump Sinking, and Taking Senate With Him
The election is still six months away, but a rash of ominous new polls and the president’s erratic briefings have the G.O.P. worried about a Democratic takeover.
Glen Bolger, a longtime Republican pollster, said the landscape for his party had become far grimmer compared with the pre-virus plan to run almost singularly around the country’s prosperity.
“With the economy in free-fall, Republicans face a very challenging environment and it’s a total shift from where we were a few months ago,” Mr. Bolger said. “Democrats are angry, and now we have the foundation of the campaign yanked out from underneath us.”
Mr. Trump’s advisers and allies have often blamed external events for his most self-destructive acts, such as his repeated outbursts during the two-year investigation into his campaign’s dealings with Russia. Now, there is no such explanation — and, so far, there have been exceedingly few successful interventions regarding Mr. Trump’s behavior at the podium.
How Trump Wasted the Best Tool He Had to Fight Coronavirus
An interview with the man Bill Clinton tasked to create the Strategic National Stockpile.
One president who exemplified this foresight was Bill Clinton, who created the Strategic National Stockpile in his second term. For more insight into this, I spoke with Richard Clarke, Clinton’s chief counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council and the man the president tasked with building the stockpile.
The following Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What led to the creation of the national stockpile? It’s been reported that President Clinton came up with the idea after reading a bioterrorism thriller. Is that true?
There were a lot of novels out. Richard Preston wrote one. The president was a great reader of everything. He stayed up late every night reading. He went through several books a week. I recall getting a couple bounced over to me, with questions like, “Could this really happen?”
David Frum/The Atlantic:
Why Mitch McConnell Wants States to Go Bankrupt
The Senate majority leader is prioritizing the Republican Party rather than the American people during this crisis.
To understand why Republicans want state bankruptcy, it’s necessary to understand what bankruptcy is—and what it is not.
A bankruptcy is not a default. States have defaulted on their debts before; that is not new. Arkansas defaulted in the depression year of 1933. Eight states defaulted on canal and railway debt within a single year, 1841. The Fourteenth Amendment required former Confederate states to repudiate their Civil War debts.
A default is a sovereign act. A defaulting sovereign can decide for itself which—if any—debts to pay in full, which to repay in part, which debts to not pay at all.
Bankruptcy, by contrast, is a legal process in which a judge decides which debts will be paid, in what order, and in what amount. Under the Constitution, bankruptcy is a power entirely reserved to the federal government. An American bankruptcy is overseen in federal court, by a federal judge, according to federal law. That’s why federal law can allow U.S. cities to go bankrupt, as many have done over the years. That’s why the financial restructuring of Puerto Rico can be overseen by a federal control board. Cities and territories are not sovereigns. Under the U.S. Constitution, U.S. states are.
Understand that, and you begin to understand the appeal of state bankruptcy to Republican legislators in the post-2010 era.
Trump’s Disinfectant Remark Raises a Question About the ‘Very Stable Genius’
The president has often said he is exceptionally smart. His recent suggestion about injecting disinfectants was not.
The president can register as more time-bending than Teflon. Plenty sticks to him; it just tends to be buried quickly enough by the next stack of outrages, limiting the exposure of any single one.
But if most Trump admirers have long since made up their minds about him, recent polling on his handling of the crisis does suggest some measure of electoral risk. Governors and public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci are viewed as far more trustworthy on the pandemic, according to surveys….
Even some of the president’s reliable cheerleaders at Fox News have not tried to defend him. And recent visitors to the Drudge Report — the powerful conservative news aggregation site whose proprietor, Matt Drudge, has increasingly ridiculed Mr. Trump of late — were greeted with a doctored image of “Clorox Chewables.” “Trump Recommended,” the tagline read. “Don’t Die Maybe!”
For Mr. Trump, such mockery tends to singe. Since long before his 2016 campaign, few subjects have been as meaningful to him as appraisals of his intellect.
It is a source of perpetual obsession and manifest insecurity, former aides say, so much so that Mr. Trump has felt the need to allude to his brainpower regularly: tales of his academic credentials at the University of Pennsylvania; his “natural ability” in complicated disciplines; his connection to a “super genius” uncle, an engineer who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
