There Is Only One Safe Place In America Right Now: Home

We are eight months into 2020 and we are still coping with a Coronavirus pandemic that shows no sign of slowing, all because our national political leadership remains unfocused on fighting it to the point where trump and his handlers behave like it's still not real.

The scary thing is we are closing in on the traditional start of our national education system returning from summer breaks, where classrooms open in August through December for Christmas/New Years holidays. trump is insisting the schools open. Coronavirus is telling us differently (via Adrianne LeFrance at The Atlantic):

“This push to open schools is guaranteed to fail,” says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and molecular virologist, and the dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. I’ve been corresponding with Hotez, and with several epidemiologists, over the course of the pandemic, and have noticed a starkness in their views in recent weeks. “The social-distancing expectations and mask requirements for the lower grades are unrealistic,” Hotez told me. “In communities with high transmission, it’s inevitable that COVID-19 will enter the schools. Within two weeks of opening schools in communities with high virus transmission, teachers will become ill. All it will take is for a single teacher to become hospitalized with COVID and everything will shut down.”

Hotez has good reason to be pessimistic. There were 68,605 new cases in the United States yesterday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The seven-day average has stayed above 60,000 new cases per day since July 13. Reaching 100,000 cases per day, once seen as an apocalyptic, worst-case-scenario warning from Anthony Fauci, is no longer difficult to imagine. Indeed, my conversations with epidemiologists in recent days were all strikingly dark. They agreed: Schools should not risk reopening, probably not even for the youngest children, in the coming weeks. “We can’t pretend like everything’s fine,” said Gary Simon, the director of the infectious diseases division at George Washington University. “If I had a school-age kid, I wouldn’t want to send him to school.”

The evidence is all around us. There is the summer camp in Georgia where hundreds of kids and counselors—nearly half the camp—got infected after only a few days together. Then there’s the school in Indiana where, just hours after reopening last week, a student tested positive for the coronavirus. (“We knew it was a when, not if,” the superintendent told The New York Times, but officials were “very shocked it was on Day 1.”)

We had months to prepare, ever since the official shutdown in March. We needed extensive testing in place, enough labs to generate results in days so we could quarantine fast enough. We needed more hospital beds and supplies, overflow facilities to handle the waves of infected we're still trying to heal. We needed to plan for home child care, providing workplaces the means to redirect work from office to home so parents could keep an eye on their families. We needed the funding to set up virtual schooling, mobile WiFi hotspots to families in rural areas, free Internet to suburbs and cities, and loaner laptops so that kids could get classes and submit work to and from home, where they'd be safe.

None of that happened. The scope and size of such endeavors can't be done state by state. It had to be done at the federal level. Yet trump and his Republican allies in the Senate are DOING NOTHING except give orders to the states and to school systems that can't even begin to solve the problems they're being told to fix. Back to LeFrance:

“The problem is the White House and the task force could never organize themselves to lead a federal response and bring virus transmission down to containment levels,” said Hotez, who has argued for the necessity of a federal containment plan that, if executed effectively, might allow the nation to reopen comprehensively as soon as October. “Instead they took a lazy and careless route, claiming schools are important, as we all know, and the teachers and principals need to figure it out. What they did was deliberately set up the teachers, staff, and parents to fail. It’s one of the most careless, incompetent, and heartless actions I’ve ever seen promoted by the executive branch of the federal government.”

All of this disaster gets laid at the feet of the trump family. Like every other crisis, trump handed this off to his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who proceeded like all his previous endeavors to mismanage the situation to where we're screwed now. As pointed out in this article in Vanity Fair by Katherine Eban:

Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control...

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science—or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. It would be complete chaos.”

The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. Some of those who worked on the plan were told that it would be presented to President Trump and likely announced in the Rose Garden in early April. “I was beyond optimistic,” said one participant. “My understanding was that the final document would make its way to the president over that weekend” and would result in a “significant announcement.”

But no nationally coordinated testing strategy was ever announced. The plan, according to the participant, “just went poof into thin air.”

In a statement, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “The premise of this article is completely false...”

By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.

But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said...
On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states...

We saw the results of that: A number of Republican-controlled states - Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Arizona above all - decided to push for quick re-openings, acting as though COVID was under control when it was merely waiting for super-spreader events to cause a second wave. Those Red states - no longer the Blue states (save California) - are now the hot spots threatening our citizenry to the detriment of REPUBLICAN governors who are now the ones to blame.

The means to track and isolate carriers through testing fell apart: Not enough funding and help from the federal level where it had usually been. We're at a point where people are waiting more than 7 days for results... during which time they're infecting everyone else as asymptomatic victims of the Coronavirus.

In the meanwhile, trump's Far Right fan base and media allies pushed against EVERY tool of combating the pandemic as though the fight itself offended their "freedoms", especially waging a war against mask-wearing in public places even though months of evidence demonstrated here and elsewhere that masks reduce the spread of COVID. Unless trump himself comes out and repudiates his earlier stances, we are not going to see an end to that fearmongering over masks (it may already be too late if trump tries).

There are no good solutions except the hard choice of going back to Shut Down like we did in March. The hard choice for the U.S. Senate - which is FAILING to pass much-needed extensions of financial aid to the unemployed and renters in dire need of paychecks - to continue federal support that most conservatives despise. These hard choices may be unpalatable to the Far Right... but without those decisions, we are facing both an expansion of a lethal pandemic killing more Americans and a worsening economic situation that can't repair itself without yet another massive bailout.

First things first, Americans.

Keep our kids and families safe as possible. Keep them home. Give them the tools to study in safe places and learn as best they can without the exposure to death they'll be facing in the close quarters of classrooms.

Stay At Home, America.

Stay Safe.