Good morning.

Good Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:18 AM and sunset 7:32 PM, for 13h 10m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1866, Henry Bergh founds the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in New York City.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Sherrilyn Ifill writes Never Forget Wisconsin:

We must never forget the images we saw in Wisconsin this week. Thousands of mask-wearing Americans standing in staggered lines extended over city blocks as they waited to vote amid the most dangerous pandemic this country has faced in a century. None of them could be certain they would avoid taking the deadly coronavirus home with them after they cast their ballots. And, yet, they waited for hours—keeping as much distance as reasonable from fellow voters waiting in line—to exercise the fundamental right that the Supreme Court described 134 years ago as “preservative of all rights.”

These images of determined, masked voters waiting in lengthy lines—some using canes or in wheelchairs—are a macabre snapshot of American failure. Failure of leadership, politics, and our democracy. Without question, the bulk of the blame falls on the state Legislature, which refused to postpone the election even after Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers issued a stay-at-home order. The governor’s subsequent effort to unilaterally postpone the election by executive order was rejected in a 4–2 vote by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday. That left it to the U.S. Supreme Court to determine whether to leave in place the order of a federal district court judge extending deadlines to allow tens of thousands of voters who requested absentee ballots as a result of the pandemic—but hadn’t received them due to a crush of such requests—additional time to mail in their ballots.

 Adam Rawnsley reports Russian Trolls Hype Coronavirus and Giuliani Conspiracies:

Suspected Russian government trolls are trying to pin the COVID-19 pandemic on the Pentagon; hyping Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theories about collusion between Democrats and Ukraine; and trying to meddle in European elections, an investigation by The Daily Beast reveals.

Working with researchers from the disinformation-tracking firm Graphika, The Daily Beast found at least 20 fake news articles pushed by over 40 suspected Kremlin-backed personas across dozens of social media networks like Facebook, Reddit, Medium, and smaller web forums.

“This looks like a Russian disinformation operation we call ‘Secondary Infektion’ that’s been running for years,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, who has been investigating the operation since Facebook exposed a first set of accounts in May 2019. “It uses blogging platforms as the soft underbelly of the internet, planting false stories based on forged documents or leaks that never happened. The fakes mostly appear designed to trigger tensions between European countries, or between Europe and the United States, but they were generally too clumsy to be believed.”

 Camp Randall honors dispatchers and healthcare workers:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see showers of rain and snow with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 10m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Margaret Sullivan writes New Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany could do the impossible: Make us miss Sean Spicer:

Kayleigh McEnany got the job Tuesday. She got it despite her appalling Twitter joke in 2012 about President Barack Obama’s brother having never left his Kenyan hut and smears centered on “birtherism” conspiracy theories — unfounded questions about whether Trump’s predecessor was born in the United States — to stoke racism.

She got it despite confidently stating that President Trump doesn’t lie (everybody knows he does, a lot) and that in 2002 “President Obama” (actually a state senator then) went golfing after journalist Daniel Pearl was abducted and killed.

And perhaps worst of all, Trump’s former 2020 campaign spokeswoman got the job after spouting rose-tinted hype about the president’s supposed victories over the coronavirus. That included this beauty, uttered Feb. 25 on the since-canceled Fox Business show hosted by Trish Regan: “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.” Five weeks later, 13,000 have died of the disease in the United States and hundreds of thousands more are infected.

 David Frum writes This Is Trump’s Fault:

That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.

The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities.

 How astronauts exercise on the International Space Station:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see an afternoon rain with a high of sixty-five.  Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:30 PM, for 13h 08m 04s of daytime.  The moon is nearly full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1911, Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity.

Recommended for reading in full —

Juliet Eilperin, Laurie McGinley, Steven Mufson, and Josh Dawsey report In the absence of a national testing strategy, states go their own way:

Three months into the coronavirus epidemic, the Trump administration has yet to devise a national strategy to test Americans for the deadly disease — something experts say is key to blunting the outbreak and resuming daily life.

In the absence of a national plan, several states are developing their own testing systems, but the emerging picture varies widely. States with more money and robust medical sectors have devised comprehensive plans, while others lag far behind.

The White House, meanwhile, is still debating which types of tests should be sent to which regions and how much to focus on testing Americans to see who may have developed immunity to the disease.

“Unfortunately, states really are on their own,” said Partners in Health medical director Joia Mukherjee, whose group is working with Massachusetts to develop the country’s most extensive contact tracing network to track infected patients’ interactions with others. “It’s problematic at best and egregious at worst, because some states have more resources than others; some states have more leadership than others.”

Liz Essley Whyte reports Disabled? 25 States Where You’re Likely Last In Line for Ventilators:

The Center for Public Integrity analyzed policies and guidelines from 30 states meant to direct how hospitals should ration ventilators if they don’t have enough. All but five had provisions of the sort advocates fear will send people with disabilities to the back of the line for life-saving treatment.

These policies take into account — in ways that disability advocates say are inappropriate — patients’ expected lifespan; need for resources, such as home oxygen; or specific diagnoses, such as dementia. Some even permit hospitals to take ventilators away from patients who use them as breathing aids in everyday life and give them to other patients.

The remaining 20 states either have not established rationing policies or did not release them.

Doctors and medical ethics experts say these states need to have policies in place now, before coronavirus cases peak, and should not cloak them in secrecy.

Expecting doctors to make heart-rending decisions on who lives and who dies, experts say, runs the risk that they will lean on personal biases and stereotypes, even unwittingly.

“There is a long history of people with disabilities being devalued by the medical system. That’s why we have civil rights laws,” said disability-rights activist Ari Ne’eman. “We don’t have an exception in our country’s civil rights laws for clinical judgment. We don’t take it on trust.”

(The contention here isn’t that a ventilator is a sure-fire aid; the contention is that what might be an effective aid could be wrongfully denied.)

Hydroxychloroquine Considered:

The drug is used to treat certain diseases like lupus and malaria. But Dr. Fauci confirms there is no substantial data suggesting it’s a coronavirus treatment. Health experts warn it may have dangerous side effects. But Trump continues to hype up the drug, leading to a prescription rush and a shortage for patients who actually need these pills to stay alive.

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see an afternoon thunderstorm with a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:29 PM, for 13h 05m 13s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s School Board meets in closed session again today via videoconference at 5:45 PM to conduct to conduct district administrator screening interviews.

On this day in 1970, the Milwaukee Brewers play their first game.

Recommended for reading in full —

Philip Rotner writes America Is Hostage to the Stories Trump Wants to Tell About Himself:

Trump’s narrative at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis was that by acting before anyone else to ban travel from China, when “everybody said, it’s too early, it’s too soon,” he had reduced U.S. COVID-19 cases to “a very small number.”

But every single thing about this narrative was false.

• There was never a travel ban, only restrictions with gaping exceptions that included Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and every American returning home from China.
• Trump did not act before everybody else.
• His travel restrictions were effective as of February 2. Dozens of countries, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, also issued travel restrictions in the first week of February, many of which were effective before February 2.
• Trump did not act contrary to the advice of government health care professionals. According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, the restrictions were “the uniform recommendations of the career public health officials.”
• And Trump’s limited China travel restriction didn’t hold U.S. COVID-19 cases to a very small number. At most, it bought a little time, which Trump promptly squandered by inaction, resulting in more COVID-19 cases in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. (Though of course it’s possible that China has more cases and is lying about their numbers—justy as they’ve lied about nearly everything else concerning the pandemic they allowed to fester.)

But forget—just for a moment—about the dishonesty of Trump’s narrative and what it says about Trump’s character.

The real problem is that his false narrative shaped the actual, real-world action—or, more accurately, inaction—of the government in response to the crisis. And not just the federal government. Republican governors across the nation—not all of them, but enough to cost many, many lives—adopted Trump’s narrative and acted accordingly.

 Alison Dirr reports Milwaukee has just 5 polling places for Tuesday’s election:

The City of Milwaukee on Friday announced five in-person voting centers for Tuesday’s election – just a fraction of the 180 polling sites that are usually open on election day.

Officials had said previously that they expected to have 10 to 12 voting sites, or possibly fewer, open for in-person voting citywide.

A severe shortage of poll workers has forced the city to decrease the number of polling locations. According to a statement from the city Friday, only 350 poll workers are scheduled to work the election, down from about 1,400 the city normally has.

 The nightly ovation for hospital workers may be New York’s greatest performance:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a passing shower this afternoon, and a high of fifty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:28 PM, for 13h 02m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s School Board meets in closed session via videoconference at 5:45 PM to conduct to conduct district administrator screening interviews.

On this day in 1865,  the Union Army is victorious at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek.

Recommended for reading in full —

Sarah Kliff and Julie Bosman report Official Counts Understate the U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll:

A coroner in Indiana wanted to know if the coronavirus had killed a man in early March, but said that her health department denied a test. Paramedics in New York City say that many patients who died at home were never tested for the coronavirus, even if they showed telltale signs of infection.

In Virginia, a funeral director prepared the remains of three people after health workers cautioned her that they each had tested positive for the coronavirus. But only one of the three had the virus noted on the death certificate.

Across the United States, even as coronavirus deaths are being recorded in terrifying numbers — many hundreds each day — the true death toll is likely much higher.

More than 9,400 people with the coronavirus have been reported to have died in this country as of this weekend, but hospital officials, doctors, public health experts and medical examiners say that official counts have failed to capture the true number of Americans dying in this pandemic. The undercount is a result of inconsistent protocols, limited resources and a patchwork of decision-making from one state or county to the next.

 Charles Bethea reports What the Coronavirus Is Doing to Rural Georgia (‘Pandemic hits a region that was already struggling to address its medical needs’):

The hospital network’s [Phoebe Putney Health System’s] C.E.O., Scott Steiner, is monitoring supplies in real time. “Surgical gowns, we are three days from running out,” he told me on Tuesday. “N95s, we’re seven days. Surgical masks, the thinner ones, we’re at about six days. Face shields, we’re in good shape. Hand gel—we’ve been going through an incredible amount, but we think we have about ten days on hand.” He went on, “We’re constantly sourcing new products. New sources. Our traditional sources no longer have anything available and haven’t for two weeks.”

Hospital employees have begun sewing their own masks, “MacGyvering things up,” as Steiner put it. “We rolled that out yesterday morning,” he said. “That’s helped extend the life of our N95 masks. Had we not done that, we’d be out of N95 masks now.” (“I’ve almost likened it back to the war effort back in the day, when family members would help with munitions or whatever it took,” Black told me.) Since Tuesday, the hospital has produced twenty thousand fabric masks, allowing them to further stretch their supply of N95s and surgical masks, which Steiner expects will now last about two and three weeks, respectively. They’re down to six days of hand sanitizer and two days of face shields, he said in a follow-up call.“It’s impossible to predict what we’re going to get here and when,” Steiner explained. “Sometimes it comes on a skid from the state stockpile. We’re also sourcing items individually from certain vendors.”

 Tonight’s Sky for April: