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Several more states will begin phasing out social distancing guidelines this week, without the mass testing capacity or contract tracing measures in place that health experts say are necessary for that not to be a terrible plan.
- Joe Biden and his public-health committee have released a lengthy memo calling on the Trump administration to vastly expand testing. Biden’s proposals include a pandemic-testing board, a public-health jobs corps of 100,000 people to help with testing and contact tracing, and a plan to bring colleges and universities into closer collaboration on their coronavirus research. Dr. Deborah Birx said on Sunday that Americans should expect that social distancing will continue through the summer, but she may wanna say it a little louder for all the Southern Californians who spent the weekend crowding onto beaches.
- The World Health Organization warned that there’s not yet enough clinical evidence that coronavirus antibodies indicate immunity, in response to governments’ proposals to issue “immunity passports” to people who have already fought off the coronavirus. That simply means that no peer-reviewed study has yet established how much protection those antibodies confer, or for how long. A growing number of patients in South Korea and China have tested positive for COVID-19 for a second time after seemingly recovering, which could point to a few things: A second infection (which most experts don’t think is the case), a reactivation of the virus already in the body, or a problem with test sensitivity. Relapsed patients seem to either have no symptoms or mild ones, and there are no reports of transmission from those cases. All that is to say, there’s no hard evidence that coronavirus antibodies don’t confer immunity, either.
- The White House waffled on whether President Trump would hold a briefing today, after he took the weekend off amid Republican concerns that the president telling America it could be wise to inject poisons into human lungs might tank the party’s election chances in November. (Governors from both parties said that since Trump mused about the healing powers of disinfectants, their states’ poison-control hotlines had seen surges in calls from people wondering if it is, indeed, a good idea to mainline bleach). In lieu of a press briefing on Sunday, Trump spent his wife’s birthday in a breathtaking Twitter meltdown during which he confused the Pulitzer Prize for the Nobel Prize, confused the word Nobel for “Noble”, deleted the whole thread, and claimed it was all sarcasm. Also on Sunday, more than 1,000 Americans died from coronavirus.
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The Small Business Administration has begun processing applications for the new round of Payroll Protection Program funding, sort of.
- Less than an hour after the website began taking requests for the additional $310 billion in emergency aid, it was flooded with traffic and promptly crashed. That’s just one in a string of frustrations for small businesses seeking loans: While the government isn’t disclosing which companies received aid in the first round of the program, a New York Times investigation found that at least a dozen publicly traded companies had bragged about their financial security before applying for and receiving loans, and at least seven large companies with pre-existing financial problems, or recent run-ins with federal law, received millions of dollars.
- Both chambers of Congress are set to return on Monday, May 4 to advance the next coronavirus relief bill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that Democrats will push for safe voting provisions, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he’ll insist on liability protections for business owners who drag their employees back to work before it’s safe, and Trump has taken up Mitch McConnell’s “blue state bailout” rhetoric, signaling he and congressional Republicans will oppose making states and cities whose budgets have been upended by pandemic relief whole, or that they will seek concessions from Democrats in return for aid to states.
As Joe Biden wrote in his memo, “we are now several months into this crisis, and this administration refuses to own up to the original sin of its failed response –- the failure to test.” The need for restrictive lockdowns and the corresponding economic damage all stem from that initial failure, and as Trump kicks up a dust storm of confusion with his briefings and tweets, remember the simple question he’s trying very hard not to answer: Where are the tests?
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Big news! Crooked has a new podcast! We teamed up with Pineapple Street Studios and Spotify to bring you Wind of Change—an original series hosted by investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe.
The show starts with Patrick hearing a rumor from someone inside the CIA, claiming that “Wind of Change”—the power ballad by the Scorpions, and a symbol for the end of the Cold War—was actually written by the CIA.
This is Patrick's journey to find the truth—told through interviews with former CIA officers, reporting in four different countries and a 10 year investigation that traces the history of our government's meddling into pop music
The trailer is out now. Follow Wind of Change on Spotify to binge all eight episodes on May 11, or subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts →
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The Agriculture Department has allowed millions of pounds of produce to rot in the fields, while food banks see demand surge. USDA took over a month to respond to repeated pleas to buy up surplus fruits and vegetables, with disastrous consequences on two fronts: Farmers lost billions of dollars in revenue, while food banks struggled to feed millions of newly unemployed Americans. As lockdowns across the country shut down restaurants and other food-service businesses in March, several produce groups wrote to USDA with an urgent request to buy up perishable food; they received no response, and many growers had no choice but to trash their excess crops on a staggering scale. A handful of states tried to match surplus food with local food banks, but the high volumes needed national distribution to make a meaningful dent. The department has announced a new aid package to buy up products, but many growers say it’s too little, too late.
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- There are a few new developments in Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden. A 1993 video appears to show Reade’s mother calling into Larry King Live and talking about “problems” Reade had while working for “a prominent senator,” and Reade’s former neighbor has said Reade told her about the alleged assault in detail, in 1995 or 1996. Biden will host a “Women’s Town Hall” tomorrow, which seems like an ideal forum for him to address the allegation directly.
- New York officials have taken the unprecedented step of effectively canceling the state’s June 23 presidential primary by removing Bernie Sanders from the ballot, a move opposed by Sanders’s former campaign. The state’s down-ballot elections will still go forward.
- The U.S. recorded an estimated 15,400 excess deaths in the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, almost twice as many as were officially attributed to COVID-19 at the time. A similar analysis of data across 14 countries shows that the global coronavirus death toll could be almost 60 percent higher than reported.
- Tysons Foods warned that the food supply chain is breaking, as plant shutdowns cause “millions of pounds of meat” to disappear from stores.
- South Korea’s unification minister said the rumors that Kim Jong-un is gravely ill are baseless. International speculation about Kim’s health has continued unabated, as weeks have passed since his last public appearance, without any response from the North Korean regime to rumors about his health. TMZ thinks he’s dead, for whatever that’s worth.
- President Trump has been pushing his military and national security advisors to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, reportedly complaining almost daily that those troops are now vulnerable to coronavirus. (Which would apparently be ok with him if they were aboard a large Navy ship instead?)
- The Supreme Court ruled that the federal government owes billions to health insurers who racked up financial losses in the early years of the Affordable Care Act. That preservation of the law’s “risk corridor program” is a blow to Republican efforts to dismantle the ACA piece by piece.
- The Supreme Court said it won’t issue a ruling in a case over a withdrawn New York gun regulation, the first Second Amendment case to reach the court in almost a decade. Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other conservative justices made it clear they’re itching to take up another one soon.
- Dr. Kelli Ward, the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, urged anti-quarantine protestors to dress up as health-care workers. Last week Ward accused health-care workers counter-protesting of being “actors playing parts,” so sort of a self-fulfilling lunacy, there.
- In a more charming instance of people pretending to be doctors, Dr. Anthony Fauci got that Brad Pitt SNL portrayal he wanted.
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A New Yorker reporter spent a month investigating why Seattle and New York City faced such different coronavirus outbreaks, and the result is well worth a read. Charles Duhigg found that Seattle’s response closely followed the longtime guidelines of a CDC program called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), while New York’s did not. The two outbreaks emerged at roughly the same time, but by the second week of April, Washington state had roughly one recorded death per 14,000 residents, while New York's fatality rate was almost six times higher. The fundamental difference was that Seattle’s leaders moved quickly to turn communications over to scientists, and persuade people to follow scientists’ advice. New York leaders allowed political voices to take center stage, resulting in muddier messaging as politicians squabbled, and a slower implementation of social-distancing restrictions.
The CDC was following the same EIS protocols while the virus raged overseas, but those communications principles were tossed aside at the federal level when the White House took over. New York and Seattle are a case study in just how much damage the resulting confusion can do, and now it’s being done on a nationwide scale.
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New York City will distribute 500,000 free halal meals to Muslims during Ramadan.
Los Angeles County will also soon be able to decontaminate more than 30,000 N95 masks per day, and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) said California is weeks away, not months away, from meaningful changes to its stay-at-home order (as long as doofuses quit frolicking on the beach).
The cast of Parks and Recreation will reunite for a half-hour special on April 30, to benefit Feeding America.
New Zealand says it has successfully eliminated community spread of the coronavirus, and will continue some social distancing measures to keep it that way. Imagine!
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