We talked yesterday about the benchmarks that need to be met in order to begin re-opening the economy: A clear understanding of the infected population and rate of transmission; the healthcare system at a steady-state; a rigorous and basically unlimited ability to test and process cases on-site.
But what does “re-opening” the economy look like after those goals are met?
I’ll tell you what it doesn’t look like: Millions of people who may or may not be carrying viral loads crammed on top of each other in churches on a Sunday morning just to make a rhetorical point.
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If you move through the re-opening gradually, at each step making sure the virus isn’t breaking out again, then you build confidence as you go. Because if you think things are bad now, imagine what it will look like if we open up everything again and then have to shut it down because we lose control over the management of the virus.
The idea that America is just going to throw the doors open on a Sunday morning two weeks from now and declare “We’re Open for Business” is yet another one of Trump’s dangerous fantasies and it is irresponsible of him to have planted it in the public’s mind.
One reads that APG, the out-of-state newspaper chain that purchased two local family papers (Janesville Gazette, Daily Jefferson County Union) is slashing the salaries of those papers’ employees.
A few remarks —
I’m not a newspaperman, and have never aspired to be one. Bloggers are modern-day pamphleteers, reviving a tradition that was robust during our founding era. Rather, I’m from a family of newspaper readers. From as far back as I can remember, there were always newspapers (and books, magazines) all over the house. Many Americans of my generation grew up respecting serious journalism – reading, pondering, and critiquing what we read.
The pandemic has hit smaller papers hard, notably alt-weeklies (the Isthmus in Madison has gone dark, and the Shepherd Express has stopped printing and is now online only. (Alternative papers rely significantly on restaurant and entertainment advertising, and those industries are disproportionately affected by the need for social distancing.) For more on the plight of alternative papers see“Total annihilation”: Coronavirus may just be the end for many alt-weeklies. What’s happening to these alternative weeklies – commendable, feisty publications – is heartbreaking.
There’s a different problem with the dailies in this part of the world. Newspapers in the area from which I write – southeastern Wisconsin – have never been especially strong. They grew worse over time – after the Great Recession, they offered weak-tea reporting. The bias to act as press agents for government was, with fewer exceptions each year, strong. Indeed, the importance of journalistic independence from government didn’t merely vanish, but came to be seen as an offense in the eyes of local notables.
The editors of two local dailies – the DailyUnion and the Gazette – accelerated their own papers’ demise with happy-talk boosterism. They ran their papers into the ground. They inured others to a lesser standard. See from 3.23.20 A Newspaper’s Boosterism During a Pandemic.
In a city like Whitewater, this problem of boosterism became so acute that a city councilman (who had been on the school board for years prior, and is on the school board again) published his own ersatz online newspaper. Even while he served in office, he published countless pro-government stories, and covered his own candidacy to return to the school board.
Such men might say – as one has heard others in Whitewater say – that they are committing no conflicts of interest because they wear different hats when acting in their respective roles. It’s a laughable claim – those different hats sit on the same heads.
The failure of local newspapers to hold these officials to account has encouraged this ilk.
Now comes APG, picking at the sagging flesh of this area’s daily papers. APG likely would have done so in time – the pandemic has simply accelerated these plans. Blaming APG is like blaming a vulture for needing a meal. It’s the men and women who weakened the animal, and left it vulnerable to predation, who are truly responsible for this sad fate.
One can – rightly – despise the Chinese government as a dictatorship without – wrongly – blaming the Chinese people for a pandemic. Trump, however, is a crude bigot, and so he delights in ridiculing those of races other than his own.
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.
On this day in 1655, Huygens discovers Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
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.
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.”
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.
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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.
In the first 10 days of March, some of the commentators on Fox News and Fox Business played down the threat of what would soon be recognized as a pandemic.
Many of the networks’ elderly, pro-Trump viewers responded to the coverage and the president’s public statements by taking the virus less seriously than others.
But one elderly Fox News viewer, a crucial supporter of President Trump, took the threat seriously: The channel’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, who was to celebrate his 89th birthday on March 11.
On March 8, as the virus was spreading, the Murdoch family called off a planned party out of concern for the patriarch’s health, according to a person familiar with the cancellation. There were about 20 people on the guest list.
Fox News consistently reports lies and reports unverified information as fact. Their “coverage” of Covid19 has revealed just how low they are willing to go to remain in Trump’s good graces.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 7:13 PM, for 12h 24m 47s of daytime. The moon is new with nearly none of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1874, Harry Houdini, who lived during part of his childhood in Appleton, is born.
The U.S. has all but exhausted its supplies of two anti-malarial drugs that are being used by some doctors in the U.S. and China to treat the coronavirus, but which lack definitive evidence as effective treatment or approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Hopes that the decades-old drugs could be effective against the coronavirus were also boosted by President Trump, who told a White House press briefing last week that the compounds were “a game-changer” and have shown “very, very encouraging results.” He made similar remarks Friday and tweeted the recommendation again on Saturday morning, saying he hoped the medicines will “be put in use IMMEDIATELY.”
The sudden shortages of the two drugs could come at a serious cost for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients who depend on them to alleviate symptoms of inflammation, including preventing organ damage in lupus patients.
It is obvious that Donald Trump thinks he can score political points with the coronavirus. There is no other reason for him to show up at a news conference every day and spew one lie after another.
He stands there with an approving look on his face, seemingly stalking speakers at the podium to make sure they give him sole credit for everything the many smart, brave and committed health professionals and government workers are doing on the front lines to combat the virus.
Though most people on the stage have much more useful — and accurate — information to offer than Trump, they are forced to cede the platform to him while he babbles on for an hour. The nation is held captive while he verbally attacks reporters, recreates history and makes up stuff as if we are too dumb to know it.
Festivals are canceling and postponing all over the world because of the coronavirus pandemic.
For Summerfest in Milwaukee, the show will go on — in September.
Officials with parent company Milwaukee World Festival Inc. announced that the annual 11-day festival — originally set this year for June 24 to 28 and June 30 to July 5 — will now run nine days in 2020, taking place on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays across the first three weeks in September.
The new dates: Sept. 3 to 5, Sept. 10 to 12 and Sept. 17 to 19. Festival officials Monday did not reveal if any of the 32 acts already announced for 2020 will be available in September.
A worthy person – a man or woman committed to reason, honesty, and seriousness of purpose – would have little respect for the Janesville Gazette. This critical view is not a new one, truly: the paper’s work has been inferior during the Great Recession, during an opioid crisis, during cheerleading for countless state and local corporate welfare schemes, and continues this way even during a pandemic.
Boosterism – accentuating the positive no matter real conditions – plagues and degrades communities wherever it is found. It’s a doctrine – and after a time, an addiction – of mendacity.
Look no farther than the Gazette’s already-stale series of stories published this weekend under the “Progress 2020” tag. They’re from a special standalone section of boosterism’s greatest hits:
From the editor: Momentum grows in our communities “Part of the job of a local newspaper is to report on the challenges faced by area communities, and we take that responsibility seriously. But it’s a change of pace for our journalists to seek out and dive into stories about what’s going right in our communities.
That’s what this section is about.
We hope you enjoy reading about local Progress and are encouraged by the momentum in southern Wisconsin.
If the editor of this newspaper – Sid Schwartz – took his job seriously, then he would not publish out-of-date, repackaged stories about economic conditions that most certainly will not appertain to 2020.
Schwartz is like a man who predicts sunny weather ahead as a hurricane approaches. A worthy man, by contrast, would help others take shelter and prepare for the advancing storm.
Does Schwartz think that the stories in his “special section” describe conditions that will yet come to pass in 2020? If he does, then he’s a dunce. If he does not think that they’ll come to pass, then he’s a liar who deliberately publishes erroneous forecasts.
Everyone connected with this broadside of boosterism – every last person who has allowed his or her name to be connected with the Gazette’s work – should rethink his or her ethical obligations to the truth.
Communities benefit from accurate descriptions, and practical advice, grounded always in realism.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 7:11 PM, for 12h 21m 52s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Association meets in a closed session conference call at 5 PM, and the Whitewater school board meets in a closed session video conference at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1968, NASA launches Gemini 3, the United States’ first two-man space flight.
President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic sparked uproar and alarm among governors and mayors on Sunday as Trump and his administration’s top advisers continued to make confusing statements about the federal government’s scramble to confront the crisis, including whether he will force private industry to mass produce needed medical items.
As deaths climbed and ahead of a potentially dire week, Trump — who has sought to cast himself as a wartime leader — reacted to criticism that his administration has blundered with a torrent of soaring boasts and searing grievances. He tweeted that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) and others “shouldn’t be blaming the Federal Government for their own shortcomings. We are there to back you up should you fail, and always will be!”
(Emphasis added. Note well: Trump doesn’t grasp that the federal role is to prevent states from failing during a national emergency.)
China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.
Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world.
In interviews with a dozen of the world’s leading experts on fighting epidemics, there was wide agreement on the steps that must be taken immediately.
Those experts included international public health officials who have fought AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, flu and Ebola; scientists and epidemiologists; and former health officials who led major American global health programs in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home. Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.
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The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps, as happened again on Friday.
