Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see thunderstorms with a high of fifty-two.  Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 7:17 PM, for 12h 36m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand two hundred thirty-sixth day.

On this day in 1862, in the Battle of Glorieta Pass, Union forces stop the Confederate invasion of the New Mexico Territory.

Recommended for reading in full —

Conservative Jonathan V. Last writes COVID-19 Is Not a Black Swan. Trump Is the Black Swan (‘The problem isn’t that America couldn’t plan for a pandemic. It’s that we couldn’t plan for a president so incompetent that he failed to follow the most basic protocols for fighting a pandemic’): 

See this section from the Atlantic’s big piece on what the COVID-19 endgame is going to look like:

As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases.

The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases. None of that happened.

Let me read the key part to you again:

“I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan.

People have been saying that you can’t plan for a once-in-a-century pandemic—there is no playbook for that kind of disaster.

This is not true. There is literally a playbook for pandemics.

What you can’t plan for is the possibility of a government seeing the pandemic coming and refusing to follow basic protocols for managing the crisis.

The black swan here isn’t COVID-19.

It’s Trump.

(Emphasis in original.)

Hannah Natansan reports After uproar, USDA says parents can pick up school meals without kids present:

The federal government is waiving a policy that required students to come in-person to pick up free meals during school closures, after legislators and advocates said the rule was imperiling the health and safety of children with compromised immune systems.

New guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, issued this week, allows school districts to distribute meals “to a parent or guardian to take home to their children,” according to a copy of the guidance obtained by The Washington Post.

Therapy Dog Visits Quarantined Senior Citizens Through Safety of Windows:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-three with occasional afternoon showers.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 33m 32s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 8.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand two hundred thirty-fifth day.

On this day in 1886, Apache warrior Geronimo surrenders to the U.S. Army, ending the main phase of the Apache Wars.

Recommended for reading in full —

Devi Shastri reports UW System estimates campuses will refund $78 million in housing, dining expenses:

The University of Wisconsin System is estimating its campuses will pay back nearly $80 million to students who left campuses as the coronavirus took hold in the state.

System leaders announced last week they would ensure students received prorated refunds for the spring 2020 semester’s housing and food payments.

Every campus in the school system has moved courses online or to a remote format through the end of the semester, with some going into the summer semester. Many have made the decision to delay or cancel commencement ceremonies as well.

Schools are still calculating the exact costs of the payback, but the UW System estimate as of Thursday was about $78 million.

The Associated Press reports Wisconsin National Guard Col. James V. Locke stripped of command duties:

The Wisconsin National Guard’s new commander has stripped a colonel of his duties.

The Guard announced Thursday that Maj. Gen. Paul Knapp relieved Col. James V. Locke of command of the 128th Air Refueling Wing in Milwaukee.

The Guard said in a statement that Knapp had lost confidence in Locke, based on command climate, poor judgment and alleged misconduct. An investigation is underway.

“A decision like this is never easy to make, but it is the right thing to do and is in the best interest of the organization,” Knapp said.

A spokesman for the Guard declined to comment Thursday, citing the open investigation.

The Guard is still trying to recover after federal investigators last year revealed they had found multiple problems with how the Guard handles sexual harassment and sexual assault complaints. Most notably, the review found commanders had been opening their own internal investigations into complaints rather than referring them to Army or Air Force criminal investigators as required by federal law and Department of Defense policy.

Koalas Return Home After Surviving Australia’s Fires:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 7:15 PM, for 12h 30m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand two hundred thirty-fourth day.

On this day in 1945, Battle of Iwo Jima ends in an American victory.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jennifer Steinhauer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs report Job Vacancies and Inexperience Mar Federal Response to Coronavirus:

Of the 75 senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security, 20 are either vacant or filled by acting officials, including Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary who recently was unable to tell a Senate committee how many respirators and protective face masks were available in the United States.

The National Park Service, which like many federal agencies is full of vacancies in key posts, tried this week to fill the job of a director for the national capital region after hordes of visitors flocked to see the cherry blossoms near the National Mall, creating a potential public health hazard as the coronavirus continues to spread.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, workers are scrambling to order medical supplies on Amazon after its leaders, lacking experience in disaster responses, failed to prepare for the onslaught of patients at its medical centers.

Empty slots and high turnover have left parts of the federal government unprepared and ill equipped for what may be the largest public health crisis in a century, said numerous former and current federal officials and disaster experts.

Corrinne Hess and Alana Watson report Wisconsin Businesses Pivot To Help Health Care Providers During Pandemic:

While many Wisconsin businesses have closed to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, some companies have shifted gears to help hospitals and health care workers.

Health care providers across the country have reported ongoing and dire shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) including hospital gowns, face shields and respiratory N95 face masks.

Last week, the Wisconsin Hospital Association reached out to the construction trades through the state Department of Workforce Development and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce asking them to donate any unused N95 masks to their local hospital.

Dozens of smaller businesses have stepped up, too.

Family-owned company Canopies, a Milwaukee-based event rental company, would normally be booked with spring weddings and parties. But the COVID-19 pandemic halted business until owner David Hudak contacted Advocate Aurora Health.

The health care provider, which has hospitals in Illinois and throughout eastern Wisconsin, is now contracting with Canopies to provide tents to its hospitals in both states.

The tents are being used as a triage area before patients are taken into emergency rooms, Hudak said.

Educators in Arkansas Provide Meals for Kids in Need During COVID-19:

(The Whitewater Unified School District plans to update its own children’s meal program.)

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-six.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 7:14 PM, for 12h 27m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand two hundred thirty-third day.

On this day in 1655, Huygens discovers Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Recommended for reading in full —

David E. Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Ana Swanson report Slow Response to the Coronavirus Measured in Lost Opportunity:

When Ford’s chief executive, Jim Hackett, announced on Tuesday that the carmaker would team up with General Electric to build ventilators, he tempered the good news with a note of caution: “We’re talking about early June.”

That was just one of several examples that underscored the price of the Trump administration’s slow response to evidence as early as January that the coronavirus was headed to the United States.

For the first time, it is now possible to quantify the cost of the lost weeks, as President Trump was claiming as recently as February that in a “couple of days” the number of cases in the United States “is going to be down to close to zero.”

Ford’s timeline suggested that if the administration had reacted to the acute shortage of ventilators in February, the joint effort between Ford and General Electric might have produced lifesaving equipment sometime in mid- to late April.

Tory Newmyer writes Wall Street to Trump: Don’t restart economy before stopping coronavirus spread:

President Trump is considering whether to bring the economy out of its government-induced coma in the next week or two, insisting the pain of the restrictions should not outweigh that from the coronavirus itself.

But investors, portfolio managers and economists with a front-row seat to the ongoing carnage on Wall Street and beyond aren’t so sure that scaling back social distancing is the right move. Many say the economy — and still-sliding stock market along with it — won’t begin to recover until the United States definitively turns the tide against the disease. 

“You may get a [market] bounce on the headline,” Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial Inc., tells me…Above all else it will be the empirical data that suggests the virus is receding.” 

(Emphasis in original.)

David A. Fahrenthold, Joshua Partlow, and Jonathan O’Connell report Before Trump called for reevaluating lockdowns, they [states’ orders] shuttered six of his top-earning clubs and resorts:

President Trump’s private business has shut down six of its top seven revenue-producing clubs and hotels because of restrictions meant to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, potentially depriving Trump’s company of millions of dollars in revenue.

Those closures come as Trump is considering easing restrictions on movement sooner than federal public health experts recommend, in the name of reducing the virus’s economic damage.

In a tweet late Sunday, Trump said the measures could be lifted as soon as March 30. “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” he wrote on Twitter.

….

Three of Trump’s hotels — in Doral, Chicago and Washington — have outstanding loans from Deutsche Bank that originally totaled more than $300 million. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, all three reported lagging behind their peers in occupancy and revenue, struggles that the company’s representatives blamed, in one way or another, on Trump’s political rise.

(Emphasis added.)

Should We Turn Chickens into Dinosaurs?: