Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see a bit of rain or snow with a high of thirty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:12 AM and sunset 7:37 PM, for 13h 24m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 54.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, Pres. Lincoln is shot in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth; Lincoln passes away the next day.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Jonathan V. Last writes How High Is the Real COVID-19 Death Toll?:

Most localities seem to be ascribing deaths to COVID-19 only in the presence of a positive test. And since we’ve had a persistent shortage of tests, many patients in serious condition are admitted without being tested, since they are presumed positive cases and the test can be better used on someone else.

Also we have home-deaths, in which case no testing is performed.

This problem is not unique to America, and has been observed in other poorly-governed countries which were unprepared for the disease, such as Italy.

We’re now starting to get a sense of just how big this group of uncounted COVID-19 deaths might be.
….

Since 2000, the annual monthly variance in deaths [in New York City] has stayed within a very small and relatively stable band: within a few hundred, plus or minus, the monthly average. There’s one big outlier, of course, for September 2001.

Now look at the 30-day period ending on April 4, 2020: 5,330 more deaths than the monthly average. And of those, only 3,350 have been officially ascribed to COVID-19.

So what about those other 1,980 dead New Yorkers?

There are a few theoretical possibilities:

(1) As we saw in Bergamo, the official numbers undercount the real COVID-19 toll by a very large percentage: In this case, it’s a 60 percent increase over the official number.

(2) A large number of non-COVID-19 deaths occurred among people who suffered other medical events—strokes, overdoses, undiagnosed aggressive cancers—because they could not get access to healthcare because the virus has overwhelmed hospitals.

(3) New York just happened to have the unluckiest month in modern history at the exact same time that a pandemic was ravaging the city.

Like I said, anything is possible. But if I was going to bet $100, I’d put it on (1).

(Emphasis added.)

William J. Broad reports Putin’s Long War Against American Science (‘A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses’):

On Feb. 3, soon after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be a global health emergency, an obscure Twitter account in Moscow began retweeting an American blog. It said the pathogen was a germ weapon designed to incapacitate and kill. The headline called the evidence “irrefutable” even though top scientists had already debunked that claim and declared the novel virus to be natural.

As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information — an “infodemic,” according to the World Health Organization.Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.

Idris Elba reads ‘Don’t Quit’:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-two.  Sunrise is 6:13 AM and sunset 7:36 PM, for 13h 22m 07s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 65.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1960, the United States launches Transit 1-B, the world’s first satellite navigation system.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Devi Shastri reports Coronavirus has cost UW System $168 million in lost revenue and added expenses as of April 10:

The University of Wisconsin System released initial estimates on the cost of the coronavirus pandemic Sunday: $168 million across the state’s 13 campuses as of April 10.

Robert Cramer, UW System’s vice president for administration, called the estimate short-term and conservative. It is a combination of lost revenue and added expenses.

Nearly half the figure comes from the refunds made to students for room and board fees for what was left of the spring semester, which the system initially put at $78 million statewide.

It also includes parking refunds, forgone athletic revenue, technology investments and income-continuation payments for students.

Cramer said an estimated $47 million stimulus from the federal government will help the system remain solvent. The UW System also asked the state government in late March for $59 million in emergency aid. That request has not been acted on.

….

The cost breakdowns across the UW System are:

• UW-Eau Claire: $7.1 million
• UW-Green Bay: $2.5 million
• UW-La Crosse: $5.4 million
• UW-Madison: $100 million
• UW-Milwaukee: $9.2 million
• UW-Oshkosh: $8 million
• UW-Parkside: $2.3 million
• UW-Platteville: $7.3 million
• UW-River Falls: $6.3 million
• UW-Stevens Point: $5 million
• UW-Stout: $5.8 million
• UW-Superior: $1.3 million
• UW-Whitewater: $7.9 million

Rudy Ruitenberg and Robert Williams report France Reports Heart Incidents Linked to Drug Promoted by Trump:

France reported 43 cases of heart incidents linked to treating coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential “game changer.”

As the U.S. stockpiles as many as 29 million doses of the drug, which is also used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the data on adverse reactions from France’s drug safety agency highlights the risk of using unproven treatments to stem a pandemic that’s killed more than 100,000 people worldwide.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday visited a clinic in Marseille, southern France, where reports of uncontrolled studies have recently propelled the 65-year-old drug to fame. Macron’s advisers said the trip wasn’t an endorsement.

(Read more: Nigeria Has Chloroquine Poisonings After Trump Praised Drug)

France has recorded about 100 health incidents and four deaths linked to experimental drugs for coronavirus patients since March 27, the national drug-safety agency ANSM said in a statement on Friday. Three other patients had to be revived.

Some 82 incidents were deemed “serious.” Most of those were split between hydroxychloroquine and HIV antivirals lopinavir-ritonavir, according to the agency.

 Dogfish Head Brewery Is Fighting Coronavirus. Here’s How:

Good morning.

Easter Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon showers with a high of fifty-three.  Sunrise is 6:15 AM and sunset 7:34 PM, for 13h 19m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 75% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1981, the first launch of a Space Shuttle (Columbia) takes place: The STS-1 mission.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti, and Julian E. Barnes report He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus:

But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:

• The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.

• Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

• The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.

• Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.

• By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.

When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.

Living Through Coronavirus Around the World:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see afternoon showers with a high of fifty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:17 AM and sunset 7:33 PM, for 13h 16m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, troops of the U.S. 9th Armored Infantry Battalion liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Susan Glasser writes The Coronavirus and How the U.S. Ended Up with Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags:

On Saturday, March 21st, while Donald Trump was tweeting about the “Chinese virus” and circulating praise for the “great job we’ve done,” Eric Ries received a phone call from another Silicon Valley C.E.O. His friend Jeff Lawson, of the firm Twilio, told Ries that, to deal with the rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis, the White House was recruiting tech executives to help. Ries—the founder and C.E.O. of a new company, the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and the author of a best-selling book, “The Lean Startup,” which had made him a well-known figure in the Valley—was an obvious choice for someone looking to stand up a high-tech solution to the disaster quickly.

….

America was watching, shocked, as doctors and nurses pleaded for protective gear and medical equipment such as ventilators. Ries was asked to help start a Web site that would match hospitals and suppliers. Sure, Ries said, he could have something up and running by Monday. What followed over the next two weeks was an inside glimpse of the dysfunction emanating from Trump’s Washington in the midst of the pandemic, a crash course in the breakdown that has led to nurses in one of the wealthiest countries in the world wearing garbage bags to protect themselves from a virus whose outbreak the President downplayed until it was too late to prepare for its consequences.

 Stephanie Mencimer writes Peter Navarro Is the Worst Possible Person to Be in Charge of Pandemic Supplies:

Dubbed “Trump’s looniest economic adviser” by the Wall Street–focused Dealbreaker, Navarro is an academic who famously made up a fake expert to quote in his books. A five-time failed political candidate in San Diego, Navarro is widely known there “as a nut,” says one veteran California GOP political consultant. Navarro’s views on trade are considered so fringy that, for years, reporters covering him have been trying unsuccessfully to find a credible source who may agree with him. Nonetheless, since 2016, Navarro has been advising Trump on trade policy, first on the campaign trail and then in the White House as the director of the newly created Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. And on March 27, Trump appointed Navarro to enforce the DPA, the Korean War–era law that allows the administration to force a company to prioritize government orders in production.

The new job gives Navarro immense power to order supplies like ventilators and masks, block exports, and even commandeer products made overseas by US companies to ensure delivery to American hospitals. It’s a massive logistical undertaking involving federal central planning, production, and distribution, and one urgently needed to combat shortages and prevent states and hospitals from competing for scarce supplies. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told Trump in a letter last week that Navarro was “woefully unqualified for this task.”

Creative Ventilator Designs:

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: