Governor Cuomo Holding Mask Sent to Him by a Kansas Farmer

Dear Commons Community,

Those of us who watched Governor Andrew Cuomo’s press briefing yesterday had to be touched by his story of the Kansas farmer who sent a single mask to help New York’s battle with the coronavirus pandemic. While help has poured into New York from many places throughout the country but the most humble of gifts — a single N-95 mask — brought a mist to the eyes of the state’s governor.

A retired farmer in Kansas mailed the mask to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, saying the couple hoped it could be used by a doctor or nurse.

Cuomo read the entire letter at his daily briefing as an example of courage and generosity in dark times.

“I am a retired farmer hunkered down in N.E. Kansas with my wife who has but one lung and occasional problems with her remaining lung,” read the hand-written letter from Dennis Ruhnke, also signed by his wife, Sharon. “We are in our 70s now and frankly I am afraid for her.”

Nevertheless, Ruhnke wrote, the couple had five masks and wished to give one to help New York’s battle against the virus.

“Enclosed find a solitary N-95 mask left over from my farming days. It has never been used” the letter said. “If you could, could you please give this mask to a nurse or a doctor in your city.”

Cuomo’s eyes misted as he brandished the mask at his daily briefing.

“You want to talk about a snapshot of humanity,” Cuomo said. “You have five masks, what do you do? Do you keep all five? Do you hide the five masks, do you keep them for yourself or others? No, you send one mask. You send one mask to New York for a doctor or nurse. How beautiful is that? How selfless is that? How giving is that?”

“It’s that love, that courage, that generosity of spirit that makes this country so beautiful,” Cuomo said. “And it’s that generosity for me makes up for all the ugliness that you see. Take one mask, I’ll keep four.”

Reached by telephone, Dennis Ruhnke said he was surprised at the public attention.

“Simply watching the news, and day after day after day the death was rising. And they were pushing the N-95 thing so much. I thought I had some masks somewhere. I went back to the farm, dug around in some masks and lo and behold they were there,” he said, adding that he looked up the governor’s address online to send the letter.

Ruhnke said he would like to know who ultimately receives the mask.

“I would have felt terrible if I threw it away, but it made me feel pretty good to send it on to somebody who might be able to use it,” he said. “They sounded almost desperate for masks. So I thought, it was just one little gesture. But maybe if you get enough of these little gestures, it will all come out for the better in the end.”

God bless Mr. Ruhnke and his wife, Sharon!

Tony

Keisha Bottoms

Dear Commons Community,

Keisha Bottoms, the Mayor of Atlanta, is urging her constituents to stay at home to contain the coronavirus through social distancing and ignore  Governor Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen Georgia’s economy.   On April 20th, less than three weeks into his stay-home order, Kemp announced shelter-in-place would end and businesses all over the state, including gyms, nail salons, and bowling alleys, would reopen as soon as April 27. 

“Stay home. Listen to the scientists,” Bottoms told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News’ “Good Morning America” on Friday. “There is nothing essential about going to a bowling alley or getting a manicure in the middle of a pandemic.” 

Bottoms told Stephanopoulos that Kemp had not explained to her how his decision was guided by science or experts, and the mayor said Georgia doesn’t have its infection rate under control. Kemp has a history of ignoring science, claiming he only realized the virus could be transmitted by asymptomatic people in early April — weeks after this crucial fact was widely known. 

“I’m looking at data that shows that our numbers are not going down,” Bottoms said. “Our death rate is continuing to go up … To make an assumption that we are out of the woods is not based on anything other than a desire to open up businesses.” 

She added, “There are some who are willing to sacrifice lives for the sake of the economy and that is unacceptable to me.” 

The mayor said her city is attempting to financially support workers and businesses most severely impacted by the economic shutdown, including beauty salons and barber shops. 

The lift of Georgia’s lockdown was met with backlash and health experts have warned that reopening too quickly without sufficient testing and contact tracing could mean a second, potentially more devastating wave of infections.

Trump initially supported Kemp’s move, but later reversed his position and said he told Kemp he “strongly” disagreed with the reopening. 

Congratulations to Mayor Bottoms!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There are all types of absurdities  in Donald Trump’s comments and statements.  Democrats lambast him for them while Republicans will say well that is Trump being Trump.  Yesterday he made a comment  suggesting that we test whether injecting disinfectants into our bodies will stave off the coronavirus.  This is not only absurd but patently dangerous. 

In response, Lysol and Dettol maker Reckitt Benckiser  warned people against using disinfectants to treat the coronavirus. 

“Under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route),” the company said.

Trump said researchers should try to apply their findings to coronavirus patients by inserting light or disinfectant into their bodies.

“Is there a way we can do something like that by injection, inside, or almost a cleaning?” he said. “It would be interesting to check that.”

Reckitt said due to recent speculation and social media activity, it had been asked whether internal usage of disinfectants may be appropriate for investigation or use as a treatment for coronavirus.

The Environmental Protection Agency also reminded people to only use disinfectant on surfaces.

In a statement issued several hours before Trump spoke, the EPA said, “Never apply the product to yourself or others. Do not ingest disinfectant products.”

Medical professionals were also quick to dispute Trump’s claims as “irresponsible” and “dangerous.”

“This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible and it’s dangerous,” said Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist, global health policy expert and an NBC News and MSNBC contributor.

“It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves,” Gupta added.

God help America.  Please!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, the Labor Department reported that another 4.4 million people filed initial unemployment claims last week, bringing the five-week total to more than 26 million. Nearly one in six American workers or about 16 percent of the workforce has lost a job in recent weeks. To put this in perspective, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the unemployment rate varied from 15 to 25 percent. 

As reported by The New York Times:  “At all levels, these are eye-watering numbers,” Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, said. Delays in delivering benefits, though, are as troubling as the sheer magnitude of the figures, he said. Such problems not only create immediate hardships, but also affect the shape of the recovery when the pandemic eases.

Laid-off workers need money quickly so that they can continue to pay rent and credit card bills and buy groceries. If they can’t, Mr. Slok said, the hole that the larger economy has fallen into “gets deeper and deeper, and more difficult to crawl out of.”

Hours after the Labor Department report, the House passed a $484 billion coronavirus relief package to replenish a depleted small-business loan program and fund hospitals and testing. The Senate approved the bill earlier this week.

Even as Congress continues to provide aid, distribution has remained challenging. According to the Labor Department, only 10 states have started making payments under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which extends coverage to freelancers, self-employed workers and part-timers. Most states have not even completed the system needed to start the process.”

There are few signs that the coronavirus pandemic situation is getting appreciably better.

Tony

A protest against Michigan’s stay-at-home order outside the State Capitol last week. (Reuters)

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday I received an email from Joel Spring, a colleague from Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, expressing amazement that “a stream of honking cars passed in front of our house flying ‘We Love Trump’ and ‘Open New York’ banners.”  Joel lives in Southern Westchester, New York, and is quite close to the coronavirus “hot-spot” that is New York City.  We have seen these protests through various parts of the country and it is obvious that they are planned, staged, and financed.  Lisa Graves, the executive director of True North Research and curator of KochDocs, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times tracing the roots of these protests to conservative moneyed interest groups that have as a goal to open up the economy and to hell with the health and welfare of people.  In her op-ed, we see connections to the names of Koch, Mercer, DeVos, Meckler and others.  The entire op-ed is below. Read it and weep for our country and the tens of thousands of people who have died and will die as a result of the coronavirus.

Tony

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New York Times

Who’s Behind the ‘Reopen’ Protests?

By Lisa Graves

April 22, 2020

I first became aware of the political influence of Charles and David Koch in 2009 when I started looking into who was behind the protests at health care town halls.

The Tea Party, formed after America elected its first black president, used a series of health care town halls to spur angry Republicans to oppose the Affordable Care Act as a socialist takeover of American medicine. Little matter that it was modeled on a plan devised by Mitt Romney, a Republican, when he was the governor of Massachusetts.

Such false claims about the act have not aged well, as millions of Americans now depend on the law for health care coverage as the coronavirus contagion sweeps across the nation. And yet a Tea Party co-founder, Mark Meckler, is using the same tactics and same phony claims to stir his followers to protest against governors seeking to mitigate the Covid-19 death toll by closing businesses and banning public gatherings.

That public anger is both real and manufactured. The same was true in 2009, when the Koch fortune fueled the Tea Party’s attacks on the Obama administration’s health care law.

Still, the legend that the Tea Party was a spontaneous uprising took hold and continues to be peddled. As we face Tea Party 2.0, let’s not be fooled again.

The protests playing out now have the same feel as the Tea Party protests aided by Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity and others a decade ago — and with good reason: Early evidence suggests they are not organic but a brush fire being stoked by some of the same people and money that built the Tea Party.

Look no further than the first protest organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund — whose chairman manages the vast financial investments of Dick and Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary — to see that the campaign to “open” America flows from the superrich and their front groups.

Stephen Moore — a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Koch ally and a Trump adviser — admitted as much in a video I obtained comparing these new protesters to Rosa Parks, as first reported in The Times.

Mr. Moore, who is now leading an enterprise to end the virus precautions called Save Our Country, which includes the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council, boasted that he has been working behind the scenes with a conservative donor who agreed to cover bail and legal fees for demonstrators who get arrested for defying Wisconsin’s virus protective measures.

Others are providing legal assistance as well. The Times reports that a private Facebook group called Reopen NC has retained the legal services of Michael Best & Friedrich, a Wisconsin law firm whose clients include President Trump. The firm is well known for its work with dark-money groups that fought the recall of the Koch ally Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and waged war on unions.

Then there’s the Convention of States, established in 2015 with a big contribution from the conservative hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. The group recruits activists at gun shows to support a balanced-budget amendment and is promoting the protests online via “Open the States.” COS is an offshoot of Citizens for Self-Governance, which Mr. Meckler co-founded with a longtime Koch operative, Eric O’Keefe.

To give you a flavor of what’s unfolding to help orchestrate these events, this week one of Mr. Meckler’s organizers told supporters via Facebook that “optics are everything” and that they should be sure to wear a mask to the protests and stand six feet apart — because it will make the crowds look bigger.

COS and a Koch-financed public relations firm, In Pursuit Of, are also purchasing domain names tied to protests to open the states, suggesting they are investing for a long battle — even as the death toll rises.

The consequences are already starting. One week after a Kentucky protest, the state experienced its largest spike in coronavirus cases. Other states may soon see similar spikes.

Those fanning these flames, including President Trump and Fox News hosts, are unlikely to get burned by infection themselves, though they may be goading their followers to risk their health by attending mass demonstrations.

America is now facing three calamities: a deadly contagion, a capricious president and a well-funded right-wing infrastructure willing to devalue human life in pursuit of its political agenda. Some very rich men and women are making this medical disaster worse through their reckless bellows, inflaming people to demand that states open now no matter how many lives that costs.

Michael Bloomberg

Dear Commons Community,

During his daily press briefing yesterday, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced that Michael Bloomberg has volunteered to help lead a massive regional effort to test and trace the contacts of people infected with the coronavirus in the tri-state region of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.  The plan announced by Cuomo on Wednesday will be done across city, county and state lines around New York.  As reported by NBC News.

“I thank him for taking this on with us,” Cuomo said in a tweet of the former New York City mayor and recent Democratic presidential contender. “It will be expensive, challenging & require an army of tracers. But it must be done.”

Tracing the contacts of people found to be infected with the coronavirus virus is a public health strategy that’s been widely credited for limiting its spread in South Korea.

“Michael Bloomberg will design the program, design the training. He’s going to make a financial contribution also and put together an organization that can help hire the people,” Cuomo said.

“You have weeks to have this up and running, (it’s a) super-ambitious undertaking. And Mayor Bloomberg will help coordinate the entire effort,” Cuomo said. “He’ll be working with the state, I’m working with the city and Nassau and Suffolk (Counties) and Jersey and Connecticut.”

The region, hardest hit by the pandemic in the U.S., has no choice but to try following those who test positive, Cuomo said.

“This entire operation has never been done before, so it’s intimidating. You’ve never heard the words testing, tracing, isolate before,” Cuomo said. “But I say, ‘So what? Who cares that you’ve never done it?’ That’s really irrelevant. It’s what we have to do now.”

A handful of protests, which appear to have the endorsement of President Donald Trump, have popped up around the nation, with activists venting about the economic fallout connected to shelter-in-place orders in various states.

Bloomberg said he’s sympathetic to calls for economic re-launch, but insisted testing and tracing is the only way it can happen.

“We’re all eager to begin loosening restrictions on our daily lives and our economy. But in order to do that as safely as possible, we first have to put in place systems to identify people who may have been exposed to the virus and support them as they isolate,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

Testing and tracing “will help us drive the virus into a corner — saving lives and allowing more people to begin getting back to work.”

The governor acknowledged that it’s an “impossible task” to trace the contacts of every single coronavirus-infected person in the three states.

“You will trace as many positives as you can, and as the testing number goes up, that number of possible people to be traced is going up,” he said. “That’s why it’s an extraordinarily impossible task, and you do the best you can.”

Bloomberg, who served three terms as New York City mayor and had a short run as a candidate in the Democratic Party primaries, is one of America’s richest men, worth about $53.4 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

The former mayor is expected to spend at least $10 million on the effort, a top aide to Cuomo said Wednesday.

On the campaign trail in February, Bloomberg spoke about the need to take coronavirus seriously, hitting President Trump’s lack of action.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg’s philanthropic operation announced a $40 million pledge to support efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 in low- and middle-income nations.”

Thank you Mr. Bloomberg!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This year is the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day.  We should do what we can to help our planet even though most of us are at home protecting ourselves and others from the coronavirus. 

Best of everything for our dear and fragile planet!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

After months of investigation and deliberations, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee released yesterday has backed the US intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help then-candidate Donald Trump.

The committee’s findings are a sharp rebuke to Trump’s frequent claims of a “hoax” that Russia was trying to help him win and the President’s attacks on the intelligence community. The panel concluded that the Obama administration’s assessment on Russian election interference was crafted without political bias, undercutting the President’s claims that officials like former CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were using the intelligence community to attack him.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said in a statement that the assessment reflected “strong tradecraft” and “sound analytical reasoning.”

“The Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions,” the North Carolina Republican said. Here is an excerpt from an article that appeared on the CNN website.

“The committee has previously summarized its finding that the intelligence assessment was supported, but the 156-page report included new details — and a lot of redactions — on how the committee reached that conclusion. The report pushed back against the findings of House Intelligence Committee Republicans, who raised issues in 2018 with how the intelligence assessment was reached that Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to help Trump.

The committee’s bipartisan investigation into Russian election interference began more than three years ago. The committee has released four volumes and is finishing work on the final chapter, which will include the committee’s investigation into contacts between members of Trump’s team and Russian officials.

That volume is in its final editing stages, according to a source familiar with the matter, and is currently around 950 pages, including footnotes but not appendices.

Trump has distrusted the intelligence community since he took office, and the intelligence community assessment released days before he was sworn in is a major factor.

But the committee defended the intelligence community’s work. It warned Russia was likely to try to interfere again in 2020, saying that the ICA provided an important conclusion that “Russia’s aggressive interference efforts should be considered ‘the new normal.'”

“There is certainly no reason to doubt that the Russians’ success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020, and we must not be caught unprepared,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel’s top Democrat, said in a statement.

The committee also addressed the allegations contained in the opposition research dossier written by ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, which Republicans have pointed to in an effort to discredit the FBI and special counsel investigations into Trump and Russia. The panel found that the “information provided by Christopher Steele to FBI was not used in the body of the intelligence community assessment or to support any of its analytic judgments.”

The report explains there was a debate over what to do with the Steele material, which the FBI had been provided. The decision was made to include a two-page annex to the classified version of the assessment, which was briefed to the President-elect by FBI Director James Comey in January 2017.

The committee interviewed senior officials in the Obama administration involved with the assessment, as well as the officials who helped put it together. Every witness interviewed, the committee said, saw “no attempts or pressure to politicize the findings.”

The same day that the report was released, Attorney General William Barr said on a conservative radio show that he’s been “very troubled” by findings presented to him so far by John Durham, the federal prosecutor who is investigating the origins of the Russia investigation.

Barr’s tone about the FBI’s Russia investigation, which helped inform the intelligence assessment, contrasted what the committee had released.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘shocked,’ ” Barr told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview Tuesday. “I’m very troubled by it, but you know, I think the reason that we have this investigation is because there are a lot of things that are unexplained. And I think we’re getting deeply into the situation, and we’ll be able to sort out exactly what happened.”

Barr said that any public presentation of Durham’s findings was not “imminent” and that the timeline of the investigation was not restricted by unofficial Justice Department guidelines around the release of certain information ahead of an election.

The Intelligence Committee report itself, meanwhile, was heavily redacted, with entire sections remaining classified, including much of the detailing of the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia was trying to help Trump.

In the section on Putin ordering the campaign to influence the US election, a single line is unredacted: “The Committee found that reporting from multiple intelligence disciplines was used as evidence to support this analytic line, and that the analytic tradecraft was transparent.”

The Intelligence Committee report explains there was a difference in confidence levels on that assessment between the CIA and FBI, which had “high confidence,” and the National Security Agency, which had “moderate confidence.”

“The Committee finds that the analytic disagreement was reasonable, transparent, and openly debated among the agencies and analysts, with analysts, managers, and agency heads on both sides of the confidence level reasonably justifying their positions,” the report says.

Congratulations to this committee!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A major question most colleges and universities are facing is how to offer their academic programs in Fall 2020 in light of the coronavirus.  Practically all of higher education has moved to remote learning operations and will likely do so through this summer.  However, the fall is in question and most colleges and universities have not made a decision yet.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning that presents the thinking of several college administrations.  Of course, the final decision will likely rest with the condition of the different sections of the country in their fight with the coronavirus pandemic. Below is the entire article.

Tony

NOTE:  After I made this posting, my colleague, Fred Lane alerted me to Beloit College’s “modular strategy” for conducting its Fall 2020 semester.  See:  http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2020/04/03/college-announces-two-class-modules-for-fall-2020-and-plans-for-covid-19-disruptions/

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The Chronicle of Higher Education

2 Campuses Give Early Answers to Higher Ed’s Biggest Question: What Happens This Fall?

By Lindsay Ellis

April 21, 2020

Few college leaders have taken on the most pressing question many campuses face: whether Covid-19 will prohibit them from resuming normal operations in the fall. But early this week, two institutions announced their intentions — and they differed markedly.

Pamella Oliver, provost of California State University at Fullerton, said on Monday that the university planned to start the fall semester online and, should governmental and health authorities allow, gradually move back to on-campus operations. 

As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.

On Tuesday, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., president of Purdue University, said that his university intended to bring students back to campus in August. He wrote in an email that Purdue was “determined not to surrender helplessly” to the difficulties of the virus.

Shutting down campus, he wrote, “has come at extraordinary costs, as much human as economic, and at some point, clearly before next fall, those will begin to vastly outweigh the benefits of its continuance.”

Universities have largely been mum about what to expect when August rolls around. Increasingly, however, constituents are seeking answers. The stakes are high. Students wonder whether to pay high-dollar tuition for online courses. Faculty members wonder when they can return to their labs and when their tenure clocks will resume. Troves of furloughed staff members wonder when their next paycheck will hit. And in-person operations depend on revenue streams — like room-and-board fees, auxiliary expenses like ticket sales, and money from contracting out campus space for outside events — that can’t exist virtually.

A Purdue spokesman did not immediately respond to a Chronicle request for comment on why the campus decided to outline these policies now. Ellen Treanor, a spokeswoman for Fullerton, offered a simple rationale: Everyone was asking. Neither statement promised that its stated plan would be final. Treanor told The Chronicle that a final decision was unlikely before the end of the spring semester.

Major unknowns are challenging colleges’ abilities to say definitively what will come in the fall. Fullerton and Purdue officials both nodded to some of these factors. Stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders may leave college leaders with no choice but to remain virtual. If the disease flares up once more, risk levels change. And the ability to test for the disease widely seems to be a key factor for universities considering returns to campus.

That was the case for Daniels’s preliminary plan, which appears to rely on the capacity for aggressive testing and contact tracing, as well as near-complete knowledge of the health of Purdue’s over 40,000 students. (He said in his message that the examples he stated would most likely be replaced with “better ideas” as they are vetted.)

Pretesting of students and staff before they come to campus could help Purdue know “as much as possible” about the health of the community, and the university could also pursue a “robust” testing system using its own labs to keep that information current. Those showing symptoms will be quarantined in reserved space, and Daniels wrote that the university expects it could trace the contacts of those who test positive.

This strategy, he wrote, could be coupled with other extensive measures, like minimizing contact between those under 35 — with potentially lower risk of death from the virus — and those who are older. Some staff may be required to work remotely, and classes could be spread out or, in some cases, moved online. Other new policies could include a prohibition of large events, limitations on travel, and required face coverings.

“Whatever its eventual components, a return-to-operations strategy is undergirded by a fundamental conviction that even a phenomenon as menacing as Covid-19 is one of the inevitable risks of life,” Daniels wrote. “It is unclear what course other schools will choose, but Purdue will employ every measure we can adopt or devise to manage this challenge with maximum safety for every member of the Boilermaker family, while proceeding with the noble and essential mission for which our institution stands.”

Douglas Shackelford, dean of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s business school, said on Tuesday that the decision to reopen campuses must be made slowly and cautiously. Unlike Main Street, he said on a call with reporters, campuses are dense and bring together vulnerable populations. He wondered if students would come back, even if they had the opportunity, and if a residential campus could operate before the existence of a vaccine.

The costs to remaining closed, however, are steep. Already, universities have furloughed hundreds of employees and announced revenue hits of more than $100 million. Small campuses “may never recover from the financial challenges of Covid-19,” he said.