Just 3 states meet these basic criteria to reopen and stay safe

Most states still need to reduce coronavirus cases and build up their testing capacity.

By German Lopez

All 50 states are moving to reopen their economies, at least partially, after shutting down businesses and gatherings in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

But a Vox analysis suggests that most states haven’t made the preparations needed to contain future waves of the pandemic — putting themselves at risk for a rise in Covid-19 cases and deaths should they continue to reopen.

Experts told me states need three things to be ready to reopen. State leaders, from the governor to the legislature to health departments, need to ensure the SARS-CoV-2 virus is no longer spreading unabated. They need the testing capacity to track and isolate the sick and their contacts. And they need the hospital capacity to handle a potential surge in Covid-19 cases.

More specifically, states should meet at least five basic criteria. They should see a two-week drop in coronavirus cases, indicating that the virus is actually abating. They should have fewer than four daily new cases per 100,000 people per day — to show that cases aren’t just dropping, but also below dangerous levels. They need at least 150 new tests per 100,000 people per day, letting them quickly track and contain outbreaks. They need an overall positive rate for tests below 5 percent — another critical indicator for testing capacity. And states should have more than 40 percent of their ICU beds free to actually treat an influx of people stricken with Covid-19 should it be necessary.

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They Are Giving You Death and Calling It Liberty

The reckless Republicans opening America up to a deadly pandemic want us to risk sacrificing our lives for their power
By Jamil Smith
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The Republican rush to “reopen” is projecting a simulacrum of the American “normal” that existed before the pandemic. The genuine article needed improvement, seeing as the pandemic has revealed the fragility of our systems in health care, education, tech, criminal justice, and throughout our federal government supply infrastructure, just to name a few. And rather than noting how it has sought to unbalance and defund many of the very systems that have proven deficient during this crisis, the GOP has kept behaving as if the coronavirus’ calamities are part of some divine plan. As such, before they ever “reopened” a single state, Republicans were demanding that we willingly embrace a lesser life before we bow out early.

Many cultish movements have deadly culminations, so it only seems natural that some of Trump’s most avid fans might be willing not merely to use the fiction of what they understand as freedom, risking their health for Dear Leader. But whether or not that is true, Republicans offer this fraudulent version of liberty because their true goal, plutocracy, is the diametrical opposite of freedom. It is a life lived to spite other lives, and often take advantage of them. They have profited from the vulnerable, whose literal freedoms are limited in various ways that, at times, overlap: communities of color, incarcerated populations, service workers, the homeless, disabled people, and others for whom liberals regularly advocate.

The right has built a thin veneer that looks like independence and freedom, but the pandemic has stripped away that myth in a matter of weeks. We can love our country enough to want to build it stronger than it was before, not paint some shoddy lacquer over top of it and call it brand new again. Why should we lay our lives down for a system this fragile and rotten, and for people this desperate?

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I’m A Doctor. The U.S. Response To Coronavirus Has Been Nothing Short Of Criminal.

“With every crucial delay, with every blunder and misstep, the toll is going to be measured in lives lost.”

Dipti S. Barot

I am a doctor. And I am immunocompromised. I am safe at home screening patients over the phone for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, while my colleagues are marching into war with plastic water guns and papier-mâché bombs, lambs to the COVID-19 slaughter.

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“Unconscionable” is a feather-light word to use for the response to this pandemic by those in charge. After weeks of inaction, of downplaying the pandemic, of calling it a hoax, President Donald Trump had no choice but to shift tone once this crisis was undeniable. He then stood shoulder to shoulder at press conferences, shaking hands while declaring a national emergency that his own experts said only social distancing would quell. He has failed our nation.

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Each day we get more reports of health care workers infected, hospitalized, and dying all over the world. This week we lost the brilliant Dr. Steven Schwartz to COVID-19 in Seattle. Others will follow. They will continue to die because of the inaction of their leaders. Their lives will end because factories were not taken over by their governments to manufacture test kits and personal protective equipment in time. They will die because they are putting their limp, used masks in little brown paper bags after their 12-hour shift, to be used again tomorrow; they are wiping down their lone allotted face shields with disinfectant, or wrapping them in saran wrap, and cutting plastic Coke bottles to make new ones. They will inadvertently infect their patients because they are reusing disposable gowns, and MacGyver-ing equipment to make do with what they have to serve as many they can. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is issuing guidance about how to use bandanas and scarves to deal with the dearth.

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I want to tell you about a few people in my life, that I know or have worked with, who are forced to risk their lives because of the dysfunction of our government leaders, because of the utter failure of a health care system that is based on profit and not people. I want to plead on their behalf the way people on TV will implore the shooter brandishing a gun in their face to have mercy because they have two small children and a mom with Alzheimer’s, hoping that if the shooter sees them as a real person, maybe they’ll survive. I want you to see them not as faceless health care workers but as humans behind their reused masks. They are the ones who will pay the price of terms like “Democratic hoax.”

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