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babylonsister

babylonsister's Journal
babylonsister's Journal
April 25, 2020

Coronavirus found in woman's eye after nasal swabs no longer detected it, report says

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/coronavirus/article242271706.html

Coronavirus found in woman’s eye after nasal swabs no longer detected it, report says
By Summer Lin
April 24, 2020 04:33 PM, Updated 4 hours 14 minutes ago


Italy’s first coronavirus patient tested positive for COVID-19 in her eye days after it was undetectable in her nose, according to a new report.

The 65-year-old woman arrived in Italy from Wuhan on Jan. 23 and was admitted to the hospital a week later with a cough, stuffy nose, sore throat and pink eye, the report said.

Doctors took swabs from her eyes and found she had coronavirus in her eye, the report said. They continued to collect swabs and her pink eye cleared up by the 20th day. There were traces of the virus in her eye until her 21st day at the hospital, and it showed up again on the 27th day, after it had already been undetectable in her nasal swabs.

“We found that ocular fluids from SARS-CoV-2-infected patients may contain infectious virus, and hence may be a potential source of infection,” the authors of the report wrote. “These findings highlight the importance of control measures, such as avoiding touching the nose, mouth, and eyes and frequent hand washing.”


April 25, 2020

Singapore Contained the Coronavirus for Months. Now It Has One of the Worst Outbreaks in Asia.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/singapore-coronavirus-outbreak-migrant-workers.html


Singapore Contained the Coronavirus for Months. Now It Has One of the Worst Outbreaks in Asia.
By Chloe Hadavas
April 24, 20205:21 PM


Just last month, some East and Southeast Asian countries were held up as models for their coronavirus responses—especially Singapore and Taiwan, which had largely contained the outbreak despite close economic, geographic, and cultural ties to China, the pandemic’s original epicenter. Some have continued to fare well. Taiwan, with only 428 confirmed cases, has managed to avoid a lockdown. Even South Korea, despite an alarming rate of infection in early March, has flattened its curve. But Singapore now has the largest recorded outbreak in Southeast Asia. Between its first case on Jan. 23 and March 23, Singapore reported fewer than 510 known cases of COVID-19. Now, it has more than 11,000.

Despite Singapore’s early vigilance in addressing the pandemic—including extensive contact tracing—the government’s response had a blind spot. The key to what happened lies in how Singapore, a country of 5.8 million people, has treated its 1 million migrant workers.

Singapore relies on foreign labor to build and maintain its gleaming infrastructure. But many of the low-wage migrant workers, mostly from South Asia, live in dense dormitories on the outskirts of the island nation. Rights groups and activists worried early on about the government’s negligence of the migrant population. In March, Transient Workers Count Too, or TWC2, a Singaporean nonprofit dedicated to improving conditions for migrant workers, warned of a potential cluster outbreak in the dorms, where it’s impossible to socially distance. Migrants often sleep 12 to 20 per room, in bunk beds, and they’re packed into the back of trucks on their commute to work each day. Some told the Guardian the shared bathrooms often don’t have soap or enough water for showers or toilets. The group also noted that employer policies often discourage workers from admitting they’re ill or seeking medical help. “The risk of a new cluster among this group remains undeniable,” TWC2 wrote.

Over the past few weeks, as COVID-19 has traveled through the dorms, Singapore has quickly lost control of its outbreak. (While the country was initially worried about a second wave from Singaporeans returning home from overseas, those cases have been largely controlled.) The Ministry of Health said that 982 of the 1,037 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday were migrant workers. About 80 percent of all cases in the country can now be traced to the dorms.

“This reflects the deliberate invisibilization of the foreign worker; the whole machinery of state operates as though they don’t exist,” Alex Au, vice president of TWC2, told the Washington Post.

Singapore has responded to the outbreak by introducing a partial lockdown in the country, which has shuttered most workplaces and staggered the days individuals can go to supermarkets, until at least June 1. The government has moved 7,000 workers, mostly in essential jobs, out of the dorms, the Guardian reported, but about 293,000 remain. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong wrote in a Facebook post last week that the government is building up its health care and isolation infrastructure to reduce the “chain of transmission” in migrant housing. On Tuesday, the government announced a quarantine for the dorms and said that it is setting up medical facilities and triage clinics there to ensure workers get adequate care. “It will take some time to show results, so we must expect to see more dorm cases for a while longer,” Lee wrote in the Facebook post.

Singapore’s outbreak serves as a cautionary tale for neglecting marginalized communities during a pandemic. It’s hard not to see parallels between Singapore’s migrant workers and the U.S.’s underclass of essential workers who labor without the necessary safety protections, or our undocumented farmworkers who are somehow considered both “essential” and “illegal” (and are even being detained on the job). Singapore’s preparedness for COVID-19 is something other countries have only aspired to: It’s implemented aggressive contact tracing and widespread testing and is home to a robust health care system and an efficient government that can enforce strict home quarantines. And yet it has shown us that, without looking after society’s more vulnerable members, those measures won’t be enough.

April 24, 2020

Trump plans to cut daily coronavirus briefings

https://www.axios.com/trump-daily-coronavirus-briefings-809becf3-9913-4b71-9f92-1930ad1d29b0.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic&utm_content=1100&fbclid=IwAR2aYGXVuOADAXYBIBoiwUKmSGaIb2ivLxFU0WSGGwAJy73pfssxYsH2R-Q



9 mins ago - Politics & Policy
Trump plans to cut daily coronavirus briefings
Jonathan Swan


President Trump plans to pare back his coronavirus press conferences, according to four sources familiar with the internal deliberations. As soon as next week, he may stop appearing daily and make shorter appearances when he does, the sources said.

Why this matters: Trump's daily press conferences — televised to a largely homebound population — have dominated the public discourse about the coronavirus.

Behind the scenes: A number of Trump's most trusted advisers — both inside and outside the White House — have urged him to stop doing marathon televised briefings.

They've told him he's overexposed and these appearances are part of the reason polls aren't looking good for him right now against Joe Biden.
"I told him it's not helping him," said one adviser to the president. "Seniors are scared. And the spectacle of him fighting with the press isn't what people want to see."


But Trump has defended the practice, telling critics that the briefings get good ratings.


One source cautioned that decisions like this one are never final until they're final.
A senior administration official involved in the discussions said: "He should keep everyone guessing as to whether he appears day by day. And leave the technical briefings to others. Be there to announce victories."


Another source close to the deliberations said there simply isn't enough new material to justify Trump appearing before the press every day. "I mean, you wonder how we got to the point where you're talking about injecting disinfectant?" the source wondered aloud.

These conversations were underway before Trump suggested that researchers investigate whether doctors could cure coronavirus by injecting people with disinfectant. But a source said it finally seems to have dawned on Trump, after this incident, that these briefings aren't helping him. The CDC and other public health officials responded obliquely to the comment by telling people not to drink bleach.
April 24, 2020

The President Is a Few Disinfectants Short of a Cleaning Kit

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a32265866/trump-inject-disinfectants-coronavirus/?fbclid=IwAR0uijfEWfuMf23KOERzF-wOFWjcPmi2k0w5S0oJqg6L6EOGoL5rt4pM9Q4


The President Is a Few Disinfectants Short of a Cleaning Kit
In which the American leader uses his daily briefing during a global pandemic to muse about injecting coronavirus patients with Lysol or bleach.
By Jack Holmes
Apr 24, 2020


We should probably talk more often about how the president is an insane moron. It was enough that we elected a game-show host with a vocabulary of about 200 words, whose skills do not include "reading" or "paying attention to anything that does not mention him by name for more than a few seconds," in the Before Times. But now it's a global pandemic, and 50,000 Americans are dead as our country experiences the worst outbreak of anywhere in the world, and we continue to just sit back and watch this guy's wheels spin right off the axles each evening as he turns a "briefing" nominally meant to update the public on the national response into some sort of rally-slash-therapy-session wherein he talks about how great he is and screams at reporters.

The president is not well, and it does us no good to pretend otherwise. He cannot do the job. He never has been capable of it, and not just because he only considers the roughly 40 percent of people who support him—no matter what he does—to be the only real American citizens. Not just because of his virulent public racism, or the disgusting behavior he continually exhibits towards other human beings who fail to sufficiently praise him. Not just because the shop he runs is almost comically corrupt. At root, beneath the primal nastiness and predatory instinct that has allowed him to survive this long, he simply knows nothing about anything and cares less.
He's the kid in class who didn't do the reading. That's part of why we still don't have sufficient testing, a key factor in reopening the economy, and the process of getting masks and protective equipment to states and hospitals remains the Wild West.

On Thursday night, at the daily I'm in Charge But Anything That Goes Wrong Is Not My Fault Briefing, it was all just too clear.

This guy is crazy. Straight up. He's nuts.

snip//

But he's not going to get better. He's not going to grow into the job or become more "presidential". How many words, realistically, do you really believe he's read about COVID-19? How many pages of briefings? When are we going to demand more than a circus from the people in whom we now have so much of our futures invested, willingly or not? We should be calling for this guy to resign on a daily basis. He should be impeached again for gross incompetence. Mike Pence looks like fucking FDR by comparison. Most of the president's supporters will never hold him to any standard that he might not meet. In fact, they will continually lower the bar to accommodate him, because they have already invested too much of themselves in this to go back. The sunk cost is too high. It's up to everyone else to plainly say that he should not have this job any longer. We hired him, on a temporary basis, to manage the Executive Branch of our government. He should be fired.
April 24, 2020

A coronavirus wake-up call is coming to red America, complicating Trump's push to reopen

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/24/1940066/-A-coronavirus-wake-up-call-is-coming-to-red-America-complicating-Trump-s-push-to-reopen

A coronavirus wake-up call is coming to red America, complicating Trump's push to reopen
Kerry Eleveld
Daily Kos Staff
Friday April 24, 2020 · 1:51 PM EDT


When several Republican governors initially refused to implement social distancing orders, they invoked a sort of red state exceptionalism. "South Dakota is not New York City," Gov. Kristi Noem quipped in early April. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey agreed, asserting: "We are not California."

That sentiment also appears to have trickled down into more conservative-leaning regions of the country, particularly more rural and some suburban areas of the South and Midwest. But a new data analysis shows that areas of the country where the coronavirus was initially slow to spread are now experiencing a notable uptick in cases.

"There is a stereotypical view of the places in America that COVID-19 has affected most: they are broadly urban, comprised predominantly of racial minorities, and strongly vote Democratic," demographer and Brookings Institution senior fellow William Frey writes in a post on his new analysis. But during the first three weeks of April, Frey adds, "new counties showing a high prevalence of COVID-19 cases are more suburban, whiter, and voted more strongly for Donald Trump than counties the virus hit first."


Frey examined the counties with more than 100 confirmed cases per 100,000 residents and found the total number of those counties had increased nearly 12-fold over the last couple weeks, from 59 at the end of March to 717 by mid-April.

Initially, Frey notes, these high-prevalence coronavirus counties were "heavily concentrated" in the Northeast, especially around New York City. But from March 30 to April 5, the high-prevalence counties moved into the Midwest and the South. By April 6 to 12, the virus prevalence increased "dramatically, especially around Miami, Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Memphis and Nashville, Tenn., as well as many smaller metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties." And in the Northeast and Midwest, the virus spread beyond the urban areas into more suburban areas and smaller metropolitan regions.

In essence, the high-prevalence areas are beginning to be spread more evenly between counties that voted for Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016. As of March 29, voters in high-prevalence areas leaned strongly Democratic, with Clinton holding a 62%-34% advantage over Trump. But by April 13-19, voters in high-prevalence counties only favored Clinton over Trump by by 10 points, 52%-42%.

The change in political leanings of constituents in high coronavirus areas could pose political problems for Trump, particularly as he tries to ramp up his "reopening" effort. Frey told Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent that the perception of coronavirus mainly plaguing urban and Democratic areas of the country “underlies a lot of these protests that are going on.” Even though those anti-lockdown agitators represent only a fringe minority of the country, the sentiment they're feeding off of is the notion that "we're not like that," Frey noted.

But that perception could change rather quickly. The coronavirus, Frey said, is “coming to places where these protesters are probably living — far-out suburbs, small metropolitan areas, rural America.”


The darker areas below were show the counties that initially had a high prevalence of confirmed areas. The lighter areas depict the counties that have newly become high-prevalence areas.

April 24, 2020

Donald Trump Is Exploiting the Coronavirus Pandemic to Sell Campaign Swag

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/donald-trump-is-exploiting-the-coronavirus-pandemic-to-sell-campaign-swag/

April 23, 2020
Donald Trump Is Exploiting the Coronavirus Pandemic to Sell Campaign Swag
Classy.
David Corn


Though President Donald Trump has been not big in the empathy department during the coronavirus pandemic—he more often talks about his own TV ratings than the tens of thousands Americans who have died during the crisis—the Trump campaign wants his supporters to know that Trump truly cares about them during this time of tragedy and hardship. As proof of Trump’s deeply felt concern, his campaign is offering to send his devotees a set of Trump-Pence pint glasses. All for just a contribution of $31.

Yes, the Trump campaign is exploiting the coronavirus to sell campaign swag to Trump supporters. And it is claiming this is a beneficent act on the part of Trump himself.

snip//

This sounds like a bad joke. But it’s not. While tens of thousands of Americans are dying, Trump and his campaign decided he could console his supporters and show them he’s on their side by peddling them campaign tchotchkes. And this email—sent out with the subject heading “Cheers”—also requested contributions of $250 and more. What could be more Trumpian? I will recognize this is a difficult period for you and other Americans by offering you the opportunity to help me.

The Trump campaign’s fundraising emails often have the whiff of grift. They frequently tell supporters they can join an exclusive group of donors—become part of the Trump Gold Card Member circle!—and be placed on a list of names that Trump will review personally, as long as they send in a donation immediately. (It can be as small of $35.) This is all bunk and goes above and beyond the usual political sales pitches.

Now the coronavirus pandemic has been seized upon by the Trump campaign as a marketing opportunity. Especially, given that so many Americans are currently self-isolating in their homes. In other recent fundraising solicitations, the campaign has peddled “BRAND NEW Trump-Pence 2020 Playing Cards.” Two decks for “only” $30. And the email for this offer proclaimed this was another special deal, for Trump has “requested that we give you EARLY ACCESS to get these iconic cards before anyone else.” Moreover, the email stated, this is the perfect time to buy playing cards: “We know you’re at home right now, doing your part to Keep America Safe, and there is no better way to keep yourself entertained AND support your President than by purchasing our Official Trump-Pence 2020 Playing Cards.” Another campaign email offered an “Official Trump Puzzle” for $45. This note, too, declared that during a time of social isolation “there is no better way to pass the time with family AND show your support for President Trump than by purchasing a Trump Puzzle.”

Trump glasses, Trump cards, Trump puzzles. They’re part of a long tradition: Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump University. If there’s a chance to sell something, Trump will give it a try. (Another recent email from the campaign promoted Trump-Pence welcome mats.) Blatant commercialism and self-promotion is no surprise for Trump. That is his brand. But this week he and his campaign showed that they can surpass the usual Trumpish crassness by using the horrific coronavirus nightmare to make a buck by selling pint glasses bearing the campaign’s logo. How long can it be before Trump and his campaign attempts to raise money by hawking MAGA face masks?
April 24, 2020

Lysol Manufacturer Warns Trump Is a Dangerous Moron...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/donald-trump-lysol-coronavirus-warning

Coronavirus
Lysol Manufacturer Warns Trump Is a Dangerous Moron, “Under No Circumstance” Should Disinfectant Be Injected in Body
Yes, it has come to this.

By Bess Levin
April 24, 2020


As you’ve probably heard by now, Thursday, April 23, marked an important moment in the history books, as it was the day that Donald Trump went from dangerous circus clown to actual imminent threat to all Americans. Seizing on scientist Bill Bryan’s presentation showing that sunlight, humidity, and disinfectants can sometimes quickly kill the coronavirus on surfaces, the synapses in Trump’s brain caught fire, leading him to conclude that, perhaps, people should start injecting cleaning fluid into their veins. “I see disinfectant, where it knocks [the coronavirus] out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning,” Trump mused on live TV. “Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me.”

As millions of Americans obviously know, this was a horrible suggestion, given that disinfectants like isopropyl alcohol, bleach, and cleaners such as Lysol and Clorox are highly toxic and are not safe for internal use. (In fact, there’s been a recent surge in accidental poisonings, and that’s not among people shooting them up like heroin.) Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who actually listen to the words coming out of the president’s mouth, so when he hypes unproven drugs as a cure for COVID-19—drugs that later turn out to be ineffective at best and deadly at worst—or suggests they try chugging household cleaner, there’s a strong possibility they might actually take him up on it. (According to the Washington Post, Maryland's COVID-19 hotline has received 100 calls re: ingesting disinfectants.) Which led to, on Friday, what we believe is the first known instance of a manufacturer of a product that carries a poison label on the side of the bottle having to put out a statement effectively saying, “Please don’t listen to the president of the United States when he tells you to drink this.”

On Friday morning, the maker of Lysol and Dettol, Reckitt Benckiser Plc, issued a statement that “under no circumstance” should its disinfectant products be administered into the human body, through injection, ingestion or any other route. The company said it was issuing the guidance after it was asked whether internal administration of disinfectants “may be appropriate for investigation or use as a treatment for coronavirus,” amid recent speculation and social media activity.


The White House, of course, has tried to spin the incident as another example of the “FAKE NEWS MEDIA” trying to take Trump down, with new press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claiming the president’s comments were taken out of context, and that even though he quite clearly suggested maybe injecting disinfectant would cure coronavirus, he also “said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment.” (For his part, Trump angrily snapped at Washington Post reporter Phillip Rucker for having the audacity to point out that pushing unproven treatments is dangerous, telling Rucker “I’m the president, and you’re fake news.” On Friday, he claimed he was totally just being sarcastic when he said ingesting disinfectant could be a cure.)

And in a totally unrelated report from the New York Times that certainly shouldn’t be viewed as some kind of critique of Trump’s process:

Mr. Trump rarely attends the task force meetings that precede the briefings, and he typically does not prepare before he steps in front of the cameras. He is often seeing the final version of the day’s main talking points that aides have prepared for him for the first time although aides said he makes tweaks with a Sharpie just before he reads them live.


Anyway, stay tuned for next week when Trump wonders aloud if there would be any merit to freebasing rat poison when it comes to killing the virus, adding, of course, that one should consult with their doctor before doing so.
April 24, 2020

Alicia Keys performs her new song, "Good Job."

&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2u4DUss1g0MvMs73-LmCFpyd20vgxlyk7beKx00TQw6J8xORoPxNPvINE
April 24, 2020

Trauma On The Pandemic's Front Line Leaves Health Workers Reeling

Trauma On The Pandemic's Front Line Leaves Health Workers Reeling

April 23, 20201:06 PM ET
Yuki Noguchi


The scene at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx is unlike anything psychiatrist Bruce Schwartz has seen. Everyone, even interns and nurses in training, have been tapped to tend to the flood of COVID-19 patients, who are crashing and dying at rates comparable to the front line of a battlefield.

His hospital treats a highly vulnerable minority population — where rates of obesity and diabetes also run high — meaning infected patients face an especially high risk of death.

"We're very much in the center of the epidemic," Schwartz says. Overworked and burned out, hospital staff are all coping with horrific tragedies playing out multiple times on a single, 12-hour shift. "It is really a very horrendous experience that no one could possibly be prepared for," Schwartz says.


Hospital workers around the world face similar, sustained trauma, and it's taking an emotional toll. A recent study underscored the severity of those risks: Half of Chinese health care workers studied who treated COVID-19 patients earlier this year now suffer from depression. Nearly as many — 44.6% — have anxiety, and a third have insomnia.

Schwartz, who is also president of the American Psychiatric Association, says hospitals like his are offering teletherapy for their own staff. But he expects the need to only grow: "After this epidemic lets up, we're going to see a great deal of post-traumatic stress."

Medical professionals, in other words, will be the patients of tomorrow. And Harvard psychiatrist Roy Perlis worries health care workers will be reluctant to seek care.

snip//

And there's lots of other drama playing out around them: Not every patient gets a lifesaving ventilator, for example. And the medical staff can't clean patients of the tears and saliva that build up on their faces. On his hourlong commute home every day, Villareal is haunted by the constant stream of desperate calls from loved ones. A patient's family members aren't permitted to visit, and Villareal has no time to comfort them.

"We've been so inundated with phone calls, it's hard to talk about the death process with very concerned family members," Villareal says. "Again, these are things that really take you away from feeling like you were a good nurse that day."


Psychologists have a name for that kind of feeling: "Moral injury."


more...

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/23/840986735/trauma-on-the-pandemics-front-line-leaves-health-workers-reeling?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_term=nprnews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&fbclid=IwAR30wthiNNeQZLFpi_kSRfznP_VM25WONxOc_ztJhkW_DthNXZ0qKFR9pYQ
April 24, 2020

Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them

Letter from Trump’s Washington
Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them
By Susan Glasser
April 23, 2020
Healthcare workers wheel deceased people to a refrigerated trailer.

To the extent that President Trump discusses those who have died, he does so in self-justifying terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been worse without him.Photograph by Michael Nagle / Redux


In just the past few days, President Trump has blamed immigrants, China, the “fake news” and, of course, “the invisible enemy” of the coronavirus for America’s present troubles. He has opined extemporaneously about his plans to hold a grand Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall and has announced that he planted a tree on the White House lawn in honor of Earth Day. He has offered his opinion on matters small and large, bragged about himself as “the king of ventilators,” and spent much time lamenting the pandemic-inflicted passing of what he invariably (and inaccurately) calls “the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

Despite the flood of words, though, what has struck me the most this week is what Trump does not talk about: the mounting toll of those who have died in this crisis. So voluble that he regularly talks well past dinnertime at his nightly briefings, the President somehow never seems to find time to pay tribute to those who have been lost, aside from reading an occasional scripted line or two at the start of his lengthy press conferences, or a brief mention of a friend in New York who died of the disease soon after calling him at the White House. “He said, ‘I tested positive.’ Four days later he was dead,” the President recounted. “So this is a tough deal.” It was not exactly the prayerful, if often politically expedient, mournfulness Americans generally expect of their elected leaders. Trump, for the most part, dispenses even with the ritualistic clichés that other politicians, regardless of party or creed, have always offered in times of crisis.

But the numbers are the numbers, and, notwithstanding Trump’s relentless happy talk, the coronavirus epidemic has, as of this week, already produced some fifty thousand American dead.
This is not, needless to say, a best-case scenario, or anything close to it. Just a few weeks ago, a survey of scientific experts predicted forty-seven thousand U.S. dead by the beginning of May, according to the Web site FiveThirtyEight. Instead, forty-seven thousand deaths were recorded by this Wednesday, April 22nd, well before the experts had anticipated. On April 8th, a leading model at the University of Washington had revised its projections downward to forecast a total of sixty thousand American deaths by the beginning of August. But the nation now looks to hit that number by May 1st, meaning that, just a few days from now, more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than the entire toll from the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Trump talks of reopening the country, and of the “tremendous strides against this invisible enemy.”

You would think that no amount of Trumpian misdirection could disguise the awful fact that America has more confirmed coronavirus deaths than any country in the world, and that many of them might have been prevented by earlier, more decisive government action when the President was denying that the coronavirus even presented a threat to the United States. But Trump is trying his hardest to ignore the COVID-19 deaths. To the extent that he discusses those who have died, he tends to do so largely in self-justifying, explicitly political terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been much, much worse without him. Earlier this deadly spring, Trump was briefly scared into a more sombre public presentation by projections that showed hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. deaths if no preventative actions were taken. Now he cites the absence of those worst-case scenarios as proof of his own brilliant handling of the crisis. The numbers of dead citizens he throws about, meanwhile, seem to be abstractions to a President who believes that even the subject of mass death is all about him. “If we didn’t do the moves that we made, you would have had a million, a million and a half, two million people dead,” he said on Monday. “You would have had ten to twenty to twenty-five times more people dead than all of the people that we’ve been watching. That’s not acceptable. The fifty thousand is not acceptable. It’s so horrible. But can you imagine multiplying that out by twenty or more? It’s not acceptable.” Trump did not pause to offer any sort of regret or sorrow, and instead claimed that the entire death toll in the United States would end up around fifty or sixty thousand as a result of his heroic moves. Of course, this was not true; that is, essentially, how many have already passed away.

Honoring the dead has long been one of the tests of American Presidential leadership. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was, after all, not just another political speech but a remembrance of those who were killed in the bloodiest single battle of the Civil War, in which some fifty thousand Americans became casualties and about eight thousand died. Twenty-five years ago this week, Bill Clinton’s lip-bitingly empathetic response to the Oklahoma City bombing, in which a white supremacist blew up a federal building and killed a hundred and sixty-eight people, was seen as a key moment of his tenure. He was dubbed the “mourner-in-chief,” at a time when he was languishing politically. That speech is often said to have saved his Presidency. More recently, Barack Obama wept from the White House lectern in speaking about the deaths of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, and gave arguably the speech of his lifetime in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, singing “Amazing Grace” as he mourned at a funeral service for nine African-Americans killed by a white supremacist at a church massacre. Even those Presidents who aren’t particularly good at speechifying—think of the two George Bushes—have considered public commiseration amid national tragedy part of the job description. Have we ever had a President just take a pass on human empathy, even of the manufactured, politically clichéd kind?

more...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/fifty-thousand-americans-dead-in-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-a-president-who-refuses-to-mourn-them?utm_source=facebook&utm_social-type=owned&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_facebook&utm_brand=tny&fbclid=IwAR0TGMWk7K6VQxKGQ-1r5gFP6JlKoLo5bDCPIgkExwDJgleFXWK1B1JRejI&fbclid=IwAR3F7jPF01GNornNjYXc-Es24MuaB7WuelmaBoeR8Dcy2lSSm099r3JfYIw

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