Dear Commons Community,

California Governor Gavin Newsom will order all beaches and state parks to close tomorrow according to a memo sent yesterday evening to police chiefs around the state. Last weekend, tens of thousands of people went to the seashore during a heat wave despite the Governor’s stay-at-home order.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“Gov. Gavin Newsom will order all beaches and state parks closed Friday. Eric Nuñez, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, said the order was sent to give chiefs time to plan ahead of Newsom’s expected announcement today.

Tens of thousands of people flocked to the seashore last weekend during a heatwave despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order.

Newsom this week targeted beachgoers in Orange and Ventura counties, calling them an example of “what not to do” if the state wants to continue its progress fighting the coronavirus. While many beaches and trails throughout the state have been closed for weeks, others have remained open with warnings for visitors to practice social distancing and more have reopened.

In Newport Beach, some 80,000 visitors hit the beach over the weekend, although lifeguards said most people exercised social distancing. With criticism swirling, the Newport Beach City Council met Tuesday and rejected a proposal to close the beaches for the next three weekends.

Nearby Laguna Beach approved a limited reopening. Beaches across San Diego County reopened Monday, with a few exceptions.

The governor’s order is sure to draw fire as pressure is building to ease restrictions and slowly reopen the state.

Six San Francisco Bay Area counties that imposed the first broad stay-at-home orders in California because of the coronavirus loosened them — slightly — for the first time Wednesday, joining a growing list of local governments that are cracking the door to a less-restrictive life.

The announcement was part of a dizzying list of modified orders making it difficult to keep up with what is allowed and what is not. Tennis will be OK in Sacramento starting Friday, but not in San Francisco, where public health officials say it’s still not safe for people to share a ball.

Compounding the confusion: Some elements of the revised orders won’t take effect because they conflict with the statewide stay-at-home order, which is still in place.

“I want to remind everyone that we must all abide by all the local health orders and the state health orders. That means whichever is stricter, in some cases that is the state order,” Santa Clara County legal counsel James Williams said. “It is important that we adhere to the stricter of both.”

The Bay Area order allows for landscaping, construction and other outdoor businesses, such as flea markets and nurseries, so long as social distancing is maintained. And in what could be a critical addition for many parents, it specifies that summer camps are allowed, but only for children of people allowed to work under the state order. The children must remain in groups of 12 or fewer and with the same supervisor and may not mingle with kids outside their group.

It’s not clear if that element complies with the state order. When asked about it Wednesday, Newsom said it was “a point of clarification” his administration will be discussing with local officials.

The changes in local orders reflect the growing unrest among some residents and government officials over Newsom’s order and his plan for a slow and methodical reopening of the nation’s most populous state even as other states such as Florida move much more quickly.

With much of the economy closed, more than 3.7 million Californians have filed for unemployment benefits since March 12. In Auburn, northeast of Sacramento, salon owner Tisha Fernhoff said she has started taking an occasional client to help pay her rent and meet other expenses. She’s among a smattering of owners across the state who have dodged public health orders that closed their businesses because they are considered nonessential.

Newsom reiterated Wednesday it would be weeks before he makes the first significant modification to the state order, urging people to remain at home to prevent unintended outbreaks among the state’s most high-risk populations, including nursing homes.

“It won’t be on the basis of pressure, it won’t be on the basis of what we want, but what we need to do,” Newsom said. “And what we need to do from my humble perspective is listen to the public health experts.”

But each of the state’s 58 counties have their own public health experts, and many are starting to ask Newsom to open up the state. On Monday, six rural Northern California counties sent a letter to the governor asking him to let them reopen, noting they only had 69 confirmed virus cases among a combined population of 500,000 people.

Santa Clara County Health Director Dr. Sara Cody said local officials have come up with their own metrics to measure infection rates, hospitalizations and testing to ensure that infections don’t start rising again. If that happens, she said, stricter rules will be back.

But she acknowledged there may be other health effects from forcing people to stay home, as well as the burgeoning unemployment the pandemic restrictions have caused.

“I wish I could give you a set timeline for when this was going to end. My family asks me, my friends ask me — we don’t have a date,” she said, noting that there still is no vaccine, so “we are going to need to have protections in place for a very, very long time.”

Governor Newsom is making the right decision and taking the cautious path!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump is feeling the heat of fighting the coronavirus and running for re-election as he erupted at his top advisers yesterday when they showed him polling data indicating eroding support in key states due to his bungled pandemic response.  “I am not f—-ing losing to Joe Biden,” he repeated in a series of heated conference calls with his top campaign officials, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“President Donald Trump erupted at his top political advisers last week when they presented him with worrisome polling data that showed his support eroding in a series of battleground states as his response to the coronavirus comes under criticism.

As the virus takes its deadly toll and much of the nation’s economy remains shuttered, new surveys by the Republican National Committee and Trump’s campaign pointed to a harrowing picture for the president as he faces reelection.

While Trump saw some of the best approval ratings of his presidency during the early weeks of the crisis, aides highlighted the growing political cost of the crisis and the unforced errors by Trump in his freewheeling press briefings.

Trump reacted with defiance, incredulous that he could be losing to someone he viewed as a weak candidate.

“I am not f—-ing losing to Joe Biden,” he repeated in a series of heated conference calls with his top campaign officials, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.

The message to the president was sobering: Trump was trailing the former Democratic vice president in many key battleground states, he was told, and would have lost the Electoral College if the election had been held earlier this month.

On the line from the White House, Trump snapped at the state of his polling during a series of calls with campaign manager Brad Parscale, who called in from Florida; RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, on the line from her home in Michigan; senior adviser Jared Kushner; and other aides.

Echoing a number of White House aides and outside advisers, the political team urged Trump to curtail his daily coronavirus briefings, arguing that the combative sessions were costing him in the polls, particularly among seniors. Trump initially pushed back, pointing to high television ratings. But, at least temporarily, he agreed to scale back the briefings after drawing sharp criticism for raising the idea that Americans might get virus protection by injecting disinfectants.

Trump aides encouraged the president to stay out of medical issues and direct his focus toward more familiar and politically important ground: the economy.

Even as Trump preaches optimism, the president has expressed frustration and even powerlessness as the dire economic statistics pile up. It’s been a whiplash-inducing moment for the president, who just two months ago planned to run for reelection on the strength of an economy that was experiencing unprecedented employment levels. Now, as the records mount in the opposite direction, Trump is feeling the pressure.

“We built the greatest economy in the world,” Trump has said publicly. “I’ll do it a second time.”

Trump’s political team warned that the president’s path to reelection depends on how quickly he can bring about a recovery.

“I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again,” Kushner told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. But other aides, business leaders and economists predict a far longer road toward recovery.

Representatives for the RNC and the Trump campaign did not comment on the polling or last week’s phone calls.

According to people familiar with the incident, Trump vented much of his frustration at Parscale, who served as the bearer of bad news.

Trump has long distrusted negative poll numbers — telling aides for years that his gut was right about the 2016 race, when he insisted that he was ahead in the Midwest and Florida. At the same time, Parscale and other Trump aides are talking up the sophistication of their data and voter outreach capabilities this time.

The president and some aides have had simmering frustrations with Parscale for a while, believing the campaign manager — a close Kushner ally — has enriched himself from his association with Trump and sought personal publicity. Trump had previously been angered when Parscale was the subject of magazine profiles. This latest episode flared before the campaign manager was featured in a New York Times Magazine profile this week.

Aides have grown particularly worried about Michigan — which some advisers have all but written off — as well as Florida, Wisconsin and Arizona.

Trump announced Wednesday that he will visit Arizona next week — his first trip outside Washington in a month — as he looks to declare that much of the nation is ready to begin reopening after the virus.

The president has mocked Biden, his presumptive general election rival, for being “stuck in his basement” in his Delaware home during the pandemic.

Trump said Wednesday that he hopes to soon visit Ohio, a battleground state that Trump carried handily in 2016 but that aides see as growing slightly competitive in recent weeks.

Aides acknowledged that the president’s signature rallies would not be returning anytime soon. Some have privately offered doubts that he would be able to hold any in his familiar format of jam-packed arenas before Election Day, Nov. 3.”

Trump has no one to blame but himself!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Felicity Huffman’s daughter Sophia Macy has been accepted into Carnegie Mellon University’s drama program.  It appears she has landed on her feet and has put the college admissions scandal behind her.  The teen shared her college decision publicly in her Instagram bio (“CMU Drama ‘24”) and Yahoo Entertainment has since confirmed it.  As reported by Yahoo News.

“Felicity is so proud and grateful that Sophia has kept her chin up over the last year,” a source close to the family tells Yahoo. “It was a painful, challenging time and she pulled through it with strength and grace.”

According to the New York Post, the 19-year-old — who was thrust into the spotlight when her mom was indicted for paying to “fix” her SAT test results — retook the SAT.

Sophia will begin the drama program in Pittsburgh this fall, if the coronavirus allows, the same time her younger sister, Georgia Macy, 18, starts at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Sophia, who attended Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, was unaware that her Desperate Housewives star mom paid college admissions expert William “Rick” Singer $15,000 to have a proctor improve her SAT scores after she turned in the exam. Huffman was arrested in March 2019 as part of the wide-spread scam. She quickly pleaded guilty — saying she cheated the system in “desperation to be a good mother” and to help Sophia, who she said has an unspecified learning disability — and served 11 days in prison last fall.

In a letter to Huffman’s judge written by William H. Macy — Huffman’s husband and Sophia’s dad — the Shameless actor said “Sophia has certainly paid the dearest price” for Huffman’s involvement in the scheme. She had been accepted to multiple colleges, but her heart was set on one, “which, ironically, didn’t require SAT scores.” However, on her way to a final audition for the unspecified school’s drama program two days after Huffman’s arrest, the school withdrew the invitation. “She called us from the airport in hysterics,” he recalled.  

When Huffman was sentenced in September, she said, “One of the hardest things I’ve had to face after my arrest is when my daughter found out what I had done and she said to me, ‘I don’t know who you are anymore, Mom. And then she broke down and asked, ‘Why didn’t you believe in me? Why didn’t you think I could do it on my own?’ I had no adequate answer for her then. I have no adequate answer for her now. I can only say, I am so sorry, Sophia. I was frightened, I was stupid, and I was so wrong.”

Sophia took a gap year after graduating last June — and it proved to be a wise decision. She was cast in the second season of Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot earlier this year. The 19-year-old will appear in the episode titled “Among the Untrodden” with Abbie Hern — before she even starts college.”

We wish Sophia well.  We should also respect Felicity Huffman and William Macy for admitting what they did was wrong.  They should go on with their lives and put this episode behind them.

Tony

Dr. Lorna Breen

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Lorna Breen, 49, the medical director of New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital’s emergency department, committed suicide in Charlottesville, a spokesman for the local police department told The New York Daily News.  Dr. Breen was on the front lines of the coronavirus fight and had treated a staggering number of coronavirus patients before killing herself.  As reported by The Daily News.

“Spokesman Tyler Hawn said police responded to a call Sunday seeking medical help, and Breen was rushed to UVA Health System University Hospital but succumbed to self-inflicted injuries.

“She gave what she had, and she’s a casualty of the war in the trenches, as far as I’m concerned,” her father, Dr. Philip Breen, told The News. “She’s a true hero.”

Breen’s father said the crush of coronavirus cases his daughter handled was overwhelming, and that she herself became ill with COVID-19, though she went back to work after a week and a half. She had no history of depression, he said.

“She was a very outgoing, very energetic person who, I don’t know what snapped, but something blew up in her, and so she ended up taking her own life,” he said. “She just ran out of emotional gas.”

He said his daughter traveled to Charlottesville to stay with her sister after the hospital sent her home a second time.

“She stayed home about a week and a half, but I think she felt guilty about not being at work,” her father said. “The last time I talked to her was before she went in for her 12-hour shift that she couldn’t finish.”

“Just before she went back, she said that the ambulance had been waiting outside the building for over three hours with sick people. They couldn’t even get the people out of the ambulances in there,” he added.

On Monday, Columbia University Irving Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian hailed her tireless devotion to her work.

“Dr. Breen is a hero who brought the highest ideals of medicine to the challenging front lines of the emergency department,” the statement said. “Words cannot convey the sense of loss we feel today.”

The statement added the hospital would focus on providing “support to her family, friends, and colleagues as they cope with this news during what is already an extraordinarily difficult time.”

The Charlottesville Police Department also extended its condolences.

“Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) can reduce the likelihood of being infected, but what they cannot protect heroes like Dr. Lorna Breen or our first responders against is the emotional and mental devastation caused by this disease,” Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney said.

Breen, a devout Christian who was one of four siblings, traveled the world to give lectures on emergency medicine, and to hike and snowboard, her grieving father recalled.

“She was a salsa dancer and she played the cello,” he said. “She was working on her master’s degree in business administration also.”

Breen loved New York City, he said. “I sort of hope that when this is over, there may be a wall of heroes in New York someplace. She should have her plaque on there . She gave it all for her city.”

A hero indeed.  May she rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today, Tuesday, April 28, is Workers’ Memorial Day and a day to remember workers who have died or were injured on the job.  The theme for the day, “Protect our rights. Speak up for safe jobs,” has a deeper resonance during the coronavirus pandemic when even the commute to work is a health threat and some political and business interests are pushing for a premature end to social distancing.  You  will have an opportunity to express publicly your thanks for the workers who are working to provide healthcare, food, protection and essential services during the pandemic.

CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC) has sent a notice to its members that the vigils and gatherings that usually mark Workers’ Memorial Day here in New York are impossible this year, so the PSC will join the New York Central Labor Council (CLC) and its 300 affiliated unions for a city-wide online observance.

Throughout the day Tuesday the CLC will publish the names of deceased workers, who have died during the COVID-19 pandemic. New York’s  affiliated unions and their members are invited to share images of solidarity and appreciation for essential workers. 

Take a moment to share a statement or a photo expressing solidarity and thanks to other workers? It can be a photo of a handwritten note, a short selfie video, a sign drawn by homeschooling children, or just a few typed words of thanks. Social media users should post the images and messages today on their platforms of choice.  If you are not on social media, but wish to participate, email your message or image to fclark@pscmail.org, and the PSC will share it for you.

Yes, let’s remember our workers especially those who are risking their own lives and those of their families during this terrible pandemic.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For the adults at home, trying to do their own jobs while helping children with class work has become one of the most trying aspects of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.  The New York Times has a featured article this morning entitled, ‘It Was Just Too Much’: How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents.”  Here is an excerpt:

“Parental engagement has long been seen as critical to student achievement, as much as class size, curriculum and teacher quality. That has never been more true than now, and all across the country, moms and dads pressed into emergency service are finding it one of the most exasperating parts of the pandemic.

With teachers relegated to computer screens, parents have to play teacher’s aide, hall monitor, counselor and cafeteria worker — all while trying to do their own jobs under extraordinary circumstances. Essential workers are in perhaps the toughest spot, especially if they are away from home during school hours, leaving just one parent, or no one at all, at home when students need them most.

Kindergartners need help logging into Zoom. Seventh-graders need help with algebra, last used by dad circa 1992. “School” often ends by lunchtime, leaving parents from Long Island to Dallas to Los Angeles asking themselves the same question: How bad am I if my child plays Fortnite for the next eight hours?

Yarlin Matos of the Bronx, whose husband still goes to work as a manager at a McDonald’s, has seven children, ages 3 to 13, to keep on track. She spent part of her stimulus check on five Amazon Fire tablets because the devices promised by the city’s Education Department had not arrived.

Ms. Matos, a psychology major at Bronx Community College, said she must stay up late, sometimes until 3 a.m., trying to get her own work done.

“I had a breaking moment where I had to lock myself in the bathroom and cry,” she said. “It was just too much.”

Laura Landgreen, a teacher in Denver, always thought it strange that she sent her two sons, Callam Hugo, 4, and Landon Hugo, 7, off to school rather than home schooling them herself.

She doesn’t find it strange anymore. “My first grader — we would kill each other,” she said. “He’s fine at school, but here he has a meltdown every three seconds.”

“I need to teach other children,” she said.

There is widespread concern that even with remote learning in place, many students will return to school behind where they would have been if they’d been in the classroom. (President Trump said on Monday that governors should consider reopening schools before the end of the school year.) Teachers had little time to prepare for remote learning, and many children had inadequate or no computer access.

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For students without close parental guidance, the outcome could turn out even worse.

Ronda McIntyre, a fifth-grade teacher in Columbus, Ohio, said that of her 25 students, only six were participating consistently, generally the ones whose parents were already in regular communication with their teacher.

Other families have reached out to Ms. McIntyre to say that they are too overwhelmed with their own work to help with the lessons at home. And some have told her they are trying, but that their children won’t cooperate.

“She gets frustrated every time we start,” one mother emailed her last week, “and then I get irritated and she gets irritated and it usually ends in me saying we should take a break and then the cycle repeats. One or both of us typically ends up in tears by the time it’s all said and done and no work is completed.”

Even parents who describe running tight ships at home say they are anxious about what months away from classrooms will mean for their children. They are also finding it hard to accept that 25-minute Zoom classes or lessons sent by email is what school has been reduced to…

… Education experts advise that making a schedule can help children treat the current setup more like school, as can being clear about when it’s work time and when it’s play time, using a timer, for example, to delineate when they are in “school.” Creating a dedicated space for them to work can also be helpful.

And parents should take it easy on themselves on days when things don’t go as planned.”

And as we all know, things do not always go as planned.

Tony

Christina Paxson

Dear Commons Community,

Brown University President Christina Paxson has an op-ed in today’s New York Times making the case that colleges and universities must reopen in the Fall for  education and economic reasons. She is very much on target that many students but especially those with low-incomes will suffer without it.  Here is an excerpt:

“..another crisis looms for students, higher education and the economy if colleges and universities cannot reopen their campuses in the fall.

As amazing as videoconferencing technology has become, students face financial, practical and psychological barriers as they try to learn remotely. This is especially true for lower-income students who may not have reliable internet access or private spaces in which to study. If they can’t come back to campus, some students may choose — or be forced by circumstances — to forgo starting college or delay completing their degrees.”

I believe what President Paxson describes in her last sentence above is a real possibility. If higher education remains a remote learning activity, many students will forego the fall semester thereby delaying educations and wreaking havoc on those colleges that are tuition-dependent.  I wish I could be optimistic that most colleges will reopen for students to come back to campuses and classrooms but I am not.  There is a very good chance that coronavirus will not be gone by September and as Dr. Anthony Fauci has indicated we will likely experience a second wave of the virus in the Fall. 

President Paxson’s entire op-ed is below.

Tony

 —————————————————————————————————-

College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It.

It won’t be easy, but there’s a path to get students back on track. Higher education will crumble without it.

By Christina Paxson

April 26, 2020

Across the country, college campuses have become ghost towns. Students and professors are hunkered down inside, teaching and learning online. University administrators are tabulating the financial costs of the Covid-19 pandemic, which already exceed the CARES Act’s support for higher education.

The toll of this pandemic is high and will continue to rise. But another crisis looms for students, higher education and the economy if colleges and universities cannot reopen their campuses in the fall.

As amazing as videoconferencing technology has become, students face financial, practical and psychological barriers as they try to learn remotely. This is especially true for lower-income students who may not have reliable internet access or private spaces in which to study. If they can’t come back to campus, some students may choose — or be forced by circumstances — to forgo starting college or delay completing their degrees.

The extent of the crisis in higher education will become evident in September. The basic business model for most colleges and universities is simple — tuition comes due twice a year at the beginning of each semester. Most colleges and universities are tuition dependent. Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue.

This loss, only a part of which might be recouped through online courses, would be catastrophic, especially for the many institutions that were in precarious financial positions before the pandemic. It’s not a question of whether institutions will be forced to permanently close, it’s how many.

Higher education is also important to the U.S. economy. The sector employs about three million people and as recently as the 2017-18 school year pumped more than $600 billion of spending into the national gross domestic product. Colleges and universities are some of the most stable employers in municipalities and states. Our missions of education and research drive innovation, advance technology and support economic development. The spread of education, including college and graduate education, enables upward mobility and is an essential contributor to the upward march of living standards in the United States and around the world.

The reopening of college and university campuses in the fall should be a national priority. Institutions should develop public health plans now that build on three basic elements of controlling the spread of infection: test, trace and separate.

These plans must be based on the reality that there will be upticks or resurgences in infection until a vaccine is developed, even after we succeed in flattening the curve. We can’t simply send students home and shift to remote learning every time this happens. Colleges and universities must be able to safely handle the possibility of infection on campus while maintaining the continuity of their core academic functions.

They must also be sensitive to the particular challenge of controlling the spread of disease on a college campus. A typical dormitory has shared living and study spaces. A traditional lecture hall is not conducive to social distancing. Neither are college parties, to say the least. We must take particular care to prevent and control infection in this environment.

Although a vast majority of residential college students will experience only mild symptoms if they contract the coronavirus, students regularly interact with individuals on and off campus who are at high risk of severe illness, or worse. Administrators should be concerned not only for the students in their charge, but also for the broader community they interact with.

I am cautiously optimistic that campuses can reopen in the fall, but only if careful planning is done now. Fortunately, evidence-based public health protocols for the control of infectious disease have been known for decades. They can be applied to college campuses provided the right resources are in place and administrators are willing to make bold changes to how they manage their campuses.

Testing is an absolute prerequisite. All campuses must be able to conduct rapid testing for the coronavirus for all students, when they first arrive on campus and at regular intervals throughout the year. Testing only those with symptoms will not be sufficient. We now know that many people who have the disease are asymptomatic. Regular testing is the only way to prevent the disease from spreading silently through dormitories and classrooms.

Traditional contact tracing is not sufficient on a college campus, where students may not know who they sat next to in a lecture or attended a party with. Digital technology can help. Several states are working to adapt mobile apps created by private companies to trace the spread of disease, and colleges and universities can play a role by collaborating with their state health departments and rolling out tracing technology on their campuses.

Testing and tracing will be useful only if students who are ill or who have been exposed to the virus can be separated from others. Traditional dormitories with shared bedrooms and bathrooms are not adequate. Setting aside appropriate spaces for isolation and quarantine (e.g. hotel rooms) may be costly, but necessary. It will also be necessary to ensure that students abide by the rigorous requirements of isolation and quarantine.

Aggressive testing, technology-enabled contact tracing and requirements for isolation and quarantine are likely to raise concerns about threats to civil liberty, an ideal that is rightly prized on college campuses. Administrators, faculty and students will have to grapple with whether the benefits of a heavy-handed approach to public health are worth it. In my view, if this is what it takes to safely reopen our campuses, and provided that students’ privacy is scrupulously protected, it is worthwhile.

Our students will have to understand that until a vaccine is developed, campus life will be different. Students and employees may have to wear masks on campus. Large lecture classes may remain online even after campuses open. Traditional aspects of collegiate life — athletic competitions, concerts and yes, parties — may occur, but in much different fashions. Imagine athletics events taking place in empty stadiums, recital halls with patrons spaced rows apart and virtual social activities replacing parties.

But students will still benefit from all that makes in-person education so valuable: the fierce intellectual debates that just aren’t the same on Zoom, the research opportunities in university laboratories and libraries and the personal interactions among students with different perspectives and life experiences.

Taking these necessary steps will be difficult and costly, and it will force institutions to innovate as we have never done before. But colleges and universities are up to the challenge. Campuses were among the first to shutter during the Covid-19 pandemic. The rapid response that occurred across the country stemmed from our concern for the health of our students and communities, and our recognition that college campuses pose special challenges for addressing infectious disease.

Our duty now is to marshal the resources and expertise to make it possible to reopen our campuses, safely, as soon as possible. Our students, and our local economies, depend on it.

Christina Paxson is the president and a professor of economics and public policy at Brown University, deputy chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s board of directors and vice chair of the Association of American Universities.

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg in her column yesterday had a dire warning  that President Trump’s personality is no match for a pandemic and that he is bringing our country down.  Here is an excerpt (the full column is below).

“Over the last three and a half years, Americans have had to accustom themselves to a relentless, numbing barrage of lies from the federal government. In one sector after another, we’ve seen experts systemically purged and replaced with toadying apparatchiks. The few professionals who’ve kept their jobs have often had to engage in degrading acts of public obeisance more common to autocracies. Public policy has zigzagged according to presidential whim. Empirical reality has been subsumed to Trump’s cult of personality.

But as long as the economy was decent and many of the crises Trump created were far away, the immediate costs of Trump’s narcissistic governance have been, for most citizens, more psychic than material. That changed with the coronavirus. Today the lies are no longer about the size of the audience at Trump’s inauguration, the fruits of sucking up to North Korea or the findings of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation. Now the bill for a president with a tyrant’s contempt for truth and competence has come due.

This week brought a barrage of new evidence of how Trump’s assault on nonpartisan expertise has undermined America’s fight against coronavirus…

….Chernobyl is now widely seen as a signal event on the road to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Coronavirus may someday be seen as a similar inflection point in the story of American decline. A country that could be brought to its knees this quickly was sick well before the virus arrived.”

Much of what Goldberg says is  true. Let’s hope it is not too late!

Tony

—————————————————————————-——

New York Times

Coronavirus and the Price of Trump’s Delusions

By Michelle Goldberg

April 26, 2020

In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that a second wave of coronavirus infections this coming winter “will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” because it will coincide with flu season. He also called the protests against stay-at-home orders “not helpful.”

Donald Trump was apparently not pleased, tweeting that Redfield was “totally misquoted by Fake News @CNN.” On Wednesday evening, after another rant about fake news, Trump brought Redfield onstage at his daily press briefing, where Redfield had the unenviable task of trying to explain his remarks, which he acknowledged were quoted accurately, without contradicting the president. The fall and winter might be “more difficult and potentially more complicated” due to the confluence of coronavirus and influenza, Redfield said, but that didn’t mean the second wave would be “worse.”

Trump, meanwhile, spoke of the crisis in the past tense, as something America is now emerging from, suggesting that all the country will face in the future is “some embers of corona.” The day before, the country had recorded around 2,200 deaths, making it one of the deadliest days of the pandemic in the United States.

Over the last three and a half years, Americans have had to accustom themselves to a relentless, numbing barrage of lies from the federal government. In one sector after another, we’ve seen experts systemically purged and replaced with toadying apparatchiks. The few professionals who’ve kept their jobs have often had to engage in degrading acts of public obeisance more common to autocracies. Public policy has zigzagged according to presidential whim. Empirical reality has been subsumed to Trump’s cult of personality.

But as long as the economy was decent and many of the crises Trump created were far away, the immediate costs of Trump’s narcissistic governance have been, for most citizens, more psychic than material. That changed with the coronavirus. Today the lies are no longer about the size of the audience at Trump’s inauguration, the fruits of sucking up to North Korea or the findings of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation. Now the bill for a president with a tyrant’s contempt for truth and competence has come due.

This week brought a barrage of new evidence of how Trump’s assault on nonpartisan expertise has undermined America’s fight against coronavirus. On Wednesday, The Times broke a story about Dr. Rick Bright, the official who led the federal agency working toward a coronavirus vaccine. Bright claims he was reassigned because he “resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.”

Specifically, Bright says he was cautious about the use of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, touted as a coronavirus “game changer” by some Fox News personalities. One recent study showed no benefit from the drug in Covid-19 patients, and on Friday the F.D.A. warned of “reports of serious heart rhythm problems in patients with Covid-19 treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine.”

Also on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump wanted to fire Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a C.D.C. expert on respiratory diseases, when she warned, on Feb. 25, that community spread of the coronavirus was likely in the U.S. and that everyday life could be severely disrupted. Reuters reported that Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, assigned his department’s day-to-day responsibility for coronavirus to an aide with little public health experience whose previous job was running a Labradoodle-breeding business.

Today our country, with a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, has almost 32 percent of the world’s coronavirus cases. Some countries in Europe have had more deaths per capita, but America had the opportunity to learn from their example, and squandered it.

Further, the federal government still has no discernible plan for instituting the sort of mass testing and tracing regime that, according to most experts, we’ll need to return to some semblance of normal life. Hospitals have been reduced to cloak-and-dagger schemes to source coveted protective equipment from private brokers. “The cavalry does not appear to be coming,” a Massachusetts doctor told The Associated Press.

Instead, Trump has repeatedly denied the need for more testing and set arbitrary dates for lifting lockdown orders. He’s tweeted support for demonstrators, some armed, defying social distancing guidelines. According to The A.P., Trump initially told Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia that he approved of the state’s plan to allow businesses like gyms, tattoo parlors and movie theaters to start operating, before publicly changing his mind when aides convinced him the scheme was too risky. Even now, thanks to industry lobbyists, gyms are on the administration’s list of businesses that should be among the first to reopen, despite surely being easy places for disease to spread.

America was once the technological envy of the world. Now doctors have to warn the public that, contrary to the president’s musings in the briefing room, it is neither safe nor effective to inject disinfectant.

“If you look at why America rose so much after 1945, it was because America attracted the best scientists in the world,” Klaus Scharioth, Germany’s ambassador to America from 2006 to 2011, told me. “America attracted expertise. You had the feeling that all governments, be they Republicans or Democrats, they cherished expertise.” Like many Americanophiles abroad, Scharioth has watched our country’s devolution with great sadness: “I would not have imagined that in my lifetime I would see that.”

Recently Adam Higginbotham, author of the acclaimed book “Midnight in Chernobyl” (and the husband of my book editor), told me he felt a shiver of recognition when he read about Trump, in January, reportedly calling Azar’s concern about the coronavirus “alarmist.” A senior Soviet apparatchik used the same word to brush off a call for evacuation after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

As the coronavirus crisis has unfolded in America, Higginbotham has noticed other parallels. “The response that I see has followed a very similar trajectory: initial public denials or reluctance to publicly admit that anything was wrong, then attempts to minimize the severity of what was happening, rooted in an institutional inability to acknowledge failure,” he said. “The initial response was hampered by a lack of equipment and a breakdown in communication that revealed that despite years of planning, the state was hopelessly ill prepared for such a catastrophe.”

Yet one crucial difference also stands out to him. Soviet officials lied about Chernobyl and tried to shift blame but accepted that remediation was the state’s responsibility. “There was a lot of disinformation and cover-up, but as far as I know nobody in the Politburo was on the phone to the party leaders in Kyiv and Minsk saying, ‘You’re on your own — sort it out yourselves,’ ” said Higginbotham.

Chernobyl is now widely seen as a signal event on the road to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Coronavirus may someday be seen as a similar inflection point in the story of American decline. A country that could be brought to its knees this quickly was sick well before the virus arrived.

Dear Commons Community,

Dear Commons Comunity,

The conservative Republicans for the Rule of Law have a minute-long video ad of President Trump musing during Thursday’s task force briefing about injecting disinfectant to combat the virus.  The look on Deborah Birx’s face says it all.  Trump claimed Friday he was being sarcastic.

“50,000 people have died. This is our president,” read the text at the start of the clip. It ended with the words: “Unfit. Unwell. Unacceptable.”

See the ad above.

Tony