He is risen!

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump’s ignorance was on full display yesterday when he came up with an unusual greeting  to those commemorating the day Christ was nailed to a cross: “HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY TO ALL!”

He later wished everyone a “great” Good Friday at his press briefing.

The jarring greeting referred to the most somber day of the Christian calendar. It marks the torture of Jesus and his death upon a cross. The “good” in Good Friday refers to the day being “holy.”

Trump’s wish was particularly jolting given that the nation’s death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed 18,000 and continues to surge.

What an embarrassment!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It appears that there might be a faint light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel for several parts of the country, namely New York and California

The United States’ confirmed case count is approaching half a million — more than triple any other country’s. The U.S. will soon lead the world in COVID-19 deaths as well. Roughly 95 percent of Americans are living under lockdown orders. No one seems to have any real sense of how or when this will end.

To discern a faint light at the end of the tunnel,  Nate Silver has suggested that  the number of positive tests reported in any given city, state or country is highly dependent on the number of tests conducted there — which differs wildly from place to place over time. Death tolls are more useful for comparing how the epidemic is evolving in different locales. But because it typically takes weeks for someone with COVID-19 to die, they’re also lagging indicators that tell you less about where on its epidemic trajectory the virus is now than where it was back then. And the number you really want to focus on is hospitalizations. And if it’s good news you’re after, pay particular attention to what’s happening in two key states: New York and California.  Here is an excerpt from an article that appeared in Yahoo News and the Associated Press.

“Until very recently, nationwide data about how many COVID-19 patients are currently receiving treatment in hospitals was hard to come by. It’s still incomplete and inconsistent. But on April 7, researchers at the University of Minnesota launched the U.S. COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, which is just what it sounds like: the first effort to capture, track, visualize and compare daily data on the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations from the 37 state Departments of Health that are reporting this information (so far).

The reason this information is so valuable is simple. Because hospitalization typically occurs a week or so after infection, it’s less of a lagging indicator than the death count (which trails by two to two and a half weeks) and more directly tied to the trajectory of the epidemic than the testing-dependent case count.  It’s also a measure of the most pressing public-health concern of all: how close we are to exceeding the capacity of our hospital system, which can make COVID-19 much deadlier than it would otherwise be.

Which brings us to New York and California. Chart each states’ hospitalization data over the seven days or so, and two different narratives emerge.

Both are encouraging.

Each day this week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has delivered a cautiously optimistic message at his morning briefing.

“We are reaching a plateau in the total number of hospitalizations,” Cuomo said Tuesday. “You can see the growth and you see it’s starting to flatten.”

“All of this data suggests we are flattening the curve so far,” he added Thursday. “So far our efforts are working. They’re working better than anyone projected they would work.”

The hospitalization numbers tell the tale. On Thursday, New York’s daily death count hit an all-time high: 799. But that reflects infections from weeks ago, before the state’s lockdown started. The number of people testing positive stayed relatively flat.

Meanwhile, there were fewer new hospitalizations — just 200 — than on any day since March 18.

It wasn’t a blip. The amount of new daily hospitalizations has been declining since last Thursday: from 1,427 on April 2 to 1,095 on April 3 to 656 on April 6 to 200 on April 8. (There are some questions about inconsistencies between the data from New York State and New York City, but the trendline is the same.) Previously, the total current number of coronavirus patients in New York hospitals had been increasing by at least 20 percent a day for weeks. Now the overall number of hospitalizations is barely increasing at all.

On Friday, new hospitalizations ticked up slightly, but not enough to alter the curve — which, as Cuomo noted, “is much, much lower than any of [the models] projected.”

That’s what Cuomo meant by a “plateau.” If current trends continue — and given how conscientious New Yorkers have been about staying home, there’s no reason to think they won’t — total current hospitalizations should hover right around 18,000 to 20,000 for a while, well under the state’s expanded, 90,000-bed hospital capacity. Then, as new cases start to taper off, the number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals should decline. Hopefully, today’s plateau will become tomorrow’s peak.   

Assuming that happens, New York’s hospitalization numbers will have been an early sign that the hardest-hit state in America is turning the corner and getting its coronavirus outbreak under control.

The story in California is different, but also heartening. The Golden State’s hospitalization curve is not changing drastically like New York’s. In fact, it’s not changing much at all.

But that’s the good news.

On March 16, the Bay Area stunned the nation when health officers in six counties jointly ordered residents to stay indoors. Eleven other California counties soon joined the order, and on March 19 it was expanded statewide by Gov. Gavin Newsom — the first statewide lockdown in the U.S. By that time, the virus had already spread widely in New York, the nation’s largest, most densely populated city. A lockdown there three days later came too late to slow its exponential growth.

California caught the coronavirus earlier in its trajectory. That fact is reflected in the case count (20,000 to New York’s 150,000) and the death count (550 to New York’s 7,000). But the hospitalization rate may be the most telling metric. Since the state began reporting hospitalization data at the end of march, total confirmed COVID-19 admissions — they currently stand at 2,825, with another 2,803 suspected cases — have been rising by only one to four percent per day. That’s the roughly the same slow and steady rate of increase Cuomo is now touting in New York as a plateau. 

Except so far, California has been all plateau. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the number of COVID-19 patients requiring intensive care dropped — by 1.9 percent, to 1,132 — for the first time since California began tracking them.

“It’s one point of data, but nonetheless it’s encouraging,” Newsom said. “It again reinforces the wonderful work we are all doing. The curve has bent in the state, but it continues to be stretched.”

This idea of “stretching” the curve is key. The good news in New York that the state might be peaking now. The good news in California is that the state might not peak for a long time — but its path to that peak will be so incremental, its curve so flat, that coronavirus patients will never come close to overwhelming the hospital system.

Of course, this is only happening because both states have been in lockdown for weeks, at great cost to their economies. Both Newsom and Cuomo warn every day against what the latter recently described as “slacking off”; as soon as residents start to ease up on social distancing, the virus will have another opportunity to spread. For this reason, transitioning back into something that resembles normal life will be enormously complicated.

But nonetheless, the hospitalization numbers suggest — tentatively but hopefully — that is the direction both New York and California are heading in.”

We hope and pray that this analysis is correct.

Tony

US Department of Labor (April 9, 2020)

Dear Commons Community,

The latest Labor Department figures indicate that another 6.6 million filed for unemployment last week bringing the total number of claims over 16 million for the past three weeks. Two years of job losses from the last recession of 2008 produced barely half that total.

Many economists say the actual job losses are almost certainly greater, and there is wide agreement that they will continue to mount.

It’s as if “the economy as a whole has fallen into some sudden black hole,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist at Oxford Economics.

The Federal Reserve redoubled its effort to break that fall on Thursday with an ambitious plan to help companies and state and local governments gain access to funding. The Fed said its new and expanded programs could pump $2.3 trillion into the economy.

The central bank’s intervention was welcomed in financial markets, with the S&P 500 stock index ending the day with a gain of almost 1.5 percent.

But additional relief from Washington hit a Senate roadblock over what to include. Republicans have proposed $250 billion to replenish a loan program for distressed small businesses, while Democrats want $250 billion more to assist hospitals and state and local governments dealing with coronavirus-related expenses and revenue shortfalls.

What it will take to stabilize the economy is no more than guesswork, many analysts say. The purposeful and sudden halt in economic activity has no precedent, and no one knows when the restrictions on movement and commerce enacted to slow infections will be lifted.

Several economists expect that by the end of the month, more than 20 million people will have been thrown out of work, pushing the unemployment rate toward 15 percent. In February, it was 3.5 percent, a result of 113 straight months of job growth.

Washington we have a problem!

Tony

Reuters/Ipsos Poll (April 8, 2020)

Dear Commons Community,

NBC News is reporting that President Donald Trump’s job approval has taken a definite negative turn as a growing number of Americans harbor doubts about his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

After seeing a late-March spike as the pandemic ravaged the United States, his approval ratings have fallen back to the mid-40 percent range, where they were before the death toll and jobless claims exploded. The figure dovetails surveys showing the president narrowly trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, who this week became the apparent Democratic nominee to face him in November.

The latest numbers suggest the surge in job approval ratings that presidents tend to enjoy during a crisis was modest and short-lived for Trump. New polls this week by Quinnipiac, Reuters and CNN all find disapproval of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus rising to a majority of Americans.

It’s a reversal of fortune for a president who benefits from a committed minority of supporters but has never quite managed to win over a majority of the country. And it comes after his spike in approval had significantly lagged U.S. governors and world leaders, as well as previous American presidents during a crisis or a war.

After rising to his highest-ever 47.4 percent rating on April 1, Trump’s approval began to fall and stood at 45.2 percent as of Thursday — the same level as early February — in the RealClearPolitics average of polls.

Trump’s messaging strategy has been to portray himself as a wartime president leading the country to victory.

The president has led televised briefings on the pandemic almost every day, flanked by medical specialists and top officials at the White House podium. But he has tended to veer off-topic into a rally-like atmosphere with a mixture of self-congratulation, derisive nicknames to mock political rivals, blaming his predecessor for recent failures in COVID-19 testing, picking fights with reporters, and issuing a stream of dubious or false assertions. In a piece titled “Trump’s wasted briefings,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote that “sometime in the last three weeks Mr. Trump seems to have concluded that the briefings could be a showcase for him. Perhaps they substitute in his mind for the campaign rallies he can no longer hold because of the risks. ”While this kind of criticism of Trump’s coronavirus briefings has been commonplace from commentators and hosts on CNN and MSNBC, it is notable from the Journal’s editorial page, which took aim at the president for fusing a public health crisis with political point scoring.

“The President’s outbursts against his political critics are also notably off key at this moment. This isn’t impeachment, and Covid-19 isn’t shifty Schiff. It’s a once-a-century threat to American life and livelihood,” the paper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, wrote.

Democrats have run TV ads pummeling Trump for ignoring the early warnings and downplaying the outbreak until mid-March after he initially compared it to the flu and assured the country the virus would “disappear.” Biden has faulted his rival’s handling of the pandemic, saying Wednesday: “The coronavirus is not Donald Trump’s fault, but the slow and chaotic response to it is.”

A Monmouth University poll out yesterday said Trump’s favorable rating had dipped by 4 points to 42 percent since March. His unfavorable rating was 50 percent, with 43 percent of those surveyed registering a “very unfavorable” view of the president.

Biden’s rating was 41 percent favorable to 42 percent unfavorable, with 17 percent registering no opinion.

Trump trails Biden 44 percent to 48 percent in a trial heat, a margin statistically unchanged from last month’s Monmouth poll. Other surveys have shown Trump trailing his Democratic rival by wider margins.

But with the election still seven months away in a deeply divided country that sent Trump to the White House even as he lost the popular vote in 2016, the outcome is far from certain.

“The static nature of these results suggests the president’s response to the pandemic is certainly not helping his re-election prospects,” Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said.

Trump’s advisors should put a muzzle on his mouth and let the experts like Fauci and Birx conduct the daily coronavirus briefings.  He would do the country a big favor.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The coronavirus is taking an unusual high number of victims in the black community in the United States.  Data (see above) collected by the Associated Press shows that black Americans are dying from coronavirus at a much higher rate than their representation in the population.  This is especially true in the large urban areas of the country.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“Democratic lawmakers and community leaders in cities hard-hit by the pandemic have been sounding the alarm over what they see as a disturbing trend of the virus killing African Americans at a higher rate, along with a lack of overall information about the race of victims as the nation’s death toll mounts.

Among the cities where black residents have been hard-hit: New York, Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago and Milwaukee.

“Everywhere we look, the coronavirus is devastating our communities,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP.

Of the victims whose demographic data was publicly shared by officials — nearly 3,300 of the nation’s 13,000 deaths thus far — about 42% were black, according to an Associated Press analysis. African Americans account for roughly 21% of the total population in the areas covered by the analysis.

The AP’s analysis is one of the first attempts to examine the racial disparities of COVID-19 cases and deaths nationwide. It involved examining more than 4,450 deaths and 52,000 COVID-19 cases from across the country, relying on the handful of state and local governments that have released victims’ race.

A history of systemic racism and inequity in access to health care and economic opportunity has made many African Americans far more vulnerable to the virus. Black adults suffer from higher rates of obesity, diabetes and asthma, which make them more susceptible, and also are more likely to be uninsured. They also often report that medical professionals take their ailments less seriously when they seek treatment.

“The rate at which black people are dying, compared to whites, is really just astounding,” said Courtney Cogburn, an associate professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work. “There are patterns at this intersection of race and socioeconomic status that make it very clear this is just not a story about poverty.”

President Donald Trump and the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged the higher death rate among African Americans during Tuesday’s White House briefing. The president called it a “tremendous challenge,” and suggested that federal health officials could release national racial and ethnic COVID-19 data within days.

For its analysis, the AP made requests of COVID-19 racial breakdowns in states, cities and counties nationwide, ultimately gathering data from eight states, six major U.S. cities, including New York City and the District of Columbia, and six of Florida’s largest counties.

The data collected ranges from New York to Illinois to Alabama to San Diego, and covers an area that represents 82 million Americans, nearly 43% of whom are nonwhite. Other minority groups’ cases and deaths are fairly in line with their demographics, although those among Hispanic individuals in some hot spots are still high.

The data came mostly from large, racially diverse cities and states, but even in states where nonwhite populations are large, the impact of COVID-19 was outsized, particularly on the black community. The effect was so large that even if the 1,200 death cases that the AP excluded from its analysis because they were recorded as “race unknown” turned out to be white patients, blacks still would be overrepresented in the share of cases — and even more so in the share of deaths.

For instance, Louisiana tracked demographic data in 512 deaths and found 70% of victims were black, despite African Americans comprising just 32% of the state’s population. In Michigan, more than half of the deaths where race data was collected were black residents; the state’s population is 14% black.

Illinois’ population is 17% Hispanic and 14% black yet, as of Monday, 63% of its caseload of more than 9,000 COVID cases with racial data recorded were nonwhite residents, and at least 40% of the state’s 307 victims were black.

ZIP code data in New York City released last week showed that black, brown and immigrant communities are disproportionately represented among the diagnosed virus cases and deaths. On Wednesday, the city’s Department of Health released racial data showing 27.5% of the victims whose race is known are black, although blacks are only about 22% of the population.

“It’s sick. It’s troubling. It’s wrong,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “and we are going to fight back with everything we’ve got.”

The scattered release of data comes as the Centers for Disease Protection and Control is under increasing pressure to be more transparent about the toll of the virus on communities of color.

The agency has not publicly reported racial or ethnic demographic data for COVID-19 tests performed across the country, though its own standardized form required for reporting COVID-19 tests and cases includes a section for indicating the race or ethnicity of those tested. On Wednesday, the CDC did release racial data for March hospitalizations in 14 states that showed a third of patients were black.

Of the entities that released racial data to the AP, much of it remained sorely lacking. Overall, more than a third of the caseload records did not include race and, in some places, such as Virginia and parts of Florida, that number was more than a half.

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the AP it would be “indefensible” if the federal government was concealing any testing and treatment data. The committee, along with hundreds of medical professionals, sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Monday urging him to ensure his agency will “collect, monitor, and disseminate racial data” for the coronavirus.

African Americans and members of some ethnicities share an additional vulnerability: They are overrepresented among workers like nurse aides, grocery store clerks, emergency dispatchers and public transportation employees who cannot telecommute. That forces them out into the general public at a time when others are under strict stay-at-home orders.

“All one has to do is stand on a platform and you’ll see that the trains are filled with black and brown and low-income people going into communities to service those who are able to telecommute,” said Eric Adams, president of New York City’s Brooklyn borough.

Milwaukee community organizer Sylvester Jackson, who was recently diagnosed with COVID-19, lives on the city’s predominantly black north side, home to a concentration of cases. “It is unbelievable that people on one side of this city are dying like this,” he said.

Each loss leaves a ripple, forever altering families and communities.

The pastor of a black church in Baton Rouge was one of Louisiana’s first confirmed coronavirus deaths, followed days later by the loss of a Shreveport clergyman known for his street ministries. The virus claimed one of the state’s most revered musicians, Ellis Marsalis, along with a popular New Orleans DJ who was a leading figure in the city’s bounce music scene.

In Detroit, the deaths include Gloria Smith, a fixture at the city’s African World Festival, who died within a week of her husband, and educator and playwright Brenda Perryman.

Marsha Battle Philpot, a writer and cultural historian known as Marsha Music, said a Facebook memorial page is flooded daily with stories of loss among black people in Detroit.

“I think this is going to be a collective loss that is going to reverberate through generations,” she said.”

What a scourge on the black American population!

Tony

Bill O’Reilly

Dear Commons Community,

Disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly came out of his hole yesteday to share his thoughts on the wave of deaths due to the coronavirus pandemic.

And he doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for the victims, who tend to be older and are more likely to have other health problems. 

“Many people who are dying, both here and around the world, were on their last legs anyway,” he said on Sean Hannity’s radio show, according to audio posted online by Media Matters. “I don’t want to sound callous about that.”

Hannity interjected: “You’re gonna get hammered for that.” 

“I don’t care,” O’Reilly said. “A simple man tells the truth.”

The infection has killed more than 14,000 Americans since Feb. 28, the date of the first reported coronavirus fatality in the United States, and the toll continues to grow. 

On Wednesday, 779 people died in New York alone. 

O’Reilly paid at least $45 million to settle sexual harassment allegations, including $32 million to a former Fox News analyst in a scandal that eventually cost him his job on Fox News.

O’Reilly is nothing but a heartless cretan.  Thank God he is off the air!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

 A few minutes ago, Senator Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he was ending his bid for the White House, effectively handing the Democratic nomination to former Vice President Joe Biden and ending hopes that a progressive challenger would take on President Donald Trump in November.  As reported by various media.

“Sanders had long been seen as a front-runner in the Democratic race, surging to the top of the polls before a series of poor showings on Super Tuesday and subsequent primaries.

Biden locked in deep support among Black voters throughout the South, nabbing prizes like South Carolina and Texas, and earning healthy leads in states, like Michigan, that Sanders’ campaign had hoped were competitive.

Biden also had easy victories in Florida, Illinois and Arizona on Tuesday, putting his delegate total at 1,153 versus Sanders’ 861. Ohio’s primary, originally scheduled for Tuesday, has been postponed to June.

Sanders didn’t deliver a primary night speech following Tuesday’s losses, and a Sanders campaign manager on Wednesday morning said his team would be reassessing his White House pursuit in conversations with his supporters.

Many leading Democrats and onetime candidates had thrown their weight behind the former vice president after ending their own bids, including former mayor Pete Buttigieg; Senators Kamala Harris (Calif.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Cory Booker (N.J.); and billionaire Mike Bloomberg.  The quick turnaround of support for his competitor left the Sanders campaign reeling with limited options to secure enough delegates going into the Democratic National Convention in July.

Biden had pitched himself as the most electable candidate, and polls showed that Democrats were, indeed, primarily interested in finding a candidate who could take out Trump ― even if they didn’t agree with that person on every issue. 

Good luck to Mr. Biden!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Tomorrow at 3:30 pm, I will be a member of a panel discussing Using Technology to Support Postsecondary Student Learning.  Sponsored by the USDOE Institute of Education Sciences and Abt Associates, this webinar will review recommendations of a report published last year that is part of IES’s What Works Clearinghouse Project.  A lot of our discussion will center on emergency remote teaching as well as longer term planning. Here is the promotional description:

This WWC webinar will focus on strategies for applying the evidence-based recommendations from the Using Technology to Support Postsecondary Student Learning Practice Guide to support remote postsecondary teaching and learning during the current global health crisis. Participants will hear from three expert panelists: Dr. Nada Dabbagh, Professor and Director of the Division of Learning Technologies in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University; Dr. MJ Bishop, Associate Vice Chancellor and Director of the William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation at University System of Maryland; and Dr. Anthony Picciano, Professor of Urban Education, Education Leadership, and Interactive Pedagogy and Technology at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center.

This webinar is designed for instructors, administrators, and advisors at 2- and 4-year colleges and universities seeking ways to support instructional practices and student learning with technology. The strategies shared by the expert panelists will also be useful for technology developers, instructional designers, and staff who normally work at campus-based teaching and learning centers.

Registration is required.

Hope you can attend.

Tony