> President Trump tweeted Monday that the "decision to open up the states" following shutdown measures taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus lies with him, not governors.
It's wild watching someone who seems to just be a garbage manager be in charge of something as large as the nation. Micromanaging. Manage via publicity. PR instead of content. Agreement instead of actual thought and discussion. I've left jobs over a combination of two of those things, and it seems like we have all of them right now as a nation.
I wish someone who has direct reported to Trump in the past was on this site and could give insights into his actual managerial style.
edit: I'm not trying to talk politics, if that's why I'm being downvoted. My observations are that he is not a good manager. This is what I see in the news and what I read. Both from external media, the white house, and his own tweets. If you disagree, please explain why. I'm looking for hope and don't see any. I would love to.
I'm not the person you're looking for on that, but I have read a number of pieces by people who have been there and experienced it. In those articles, the word "gaslighting" appeared enough to prominenetly stick in my brain.
>> I wish someone who has direct reported to Trump in the past was on this site and could give insights into his actual managerial style.
I've never worked with the man directly, but I work with people who take direction from him. It isn't an act. This is not a mad genius playing the befuddled character at the microphone (Boris J) only to become a cool dictator behind the scenes. The chaos and incoherence you see on TV and twitter is the 24/7 reality.
Ah, and the flipside that many of us are familiar with - all the responsibility, none of the authority to fix it. Great recipe for burning down entire companies and driving away talent.
Yes, he wanted to dodge responsibility for the unpleasant job of shutting things down. Now he wants to enjoy positive publicity for opening things back up.
The Atlantic: "Guiding Trump’s response is a hardheaded nationalism... Critics from WHO and elsewhere have said the bans are unnecessary and could generate a racist backlash against Chinese people."
(https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/02/trump-r...)
A quarantine wouldn't be refusing entry; entry is allowed, but then you must remain isolated for a certain period of time.
> Quarantining is a fancy word for arrest, with zero cause.
I just don't know what to do with statements like these. If you truly believe that there is never any grounds for a health-related quarantine, then I don't think you're going to be able to have a productive discussion on this with most people here; your fundamental beliefs are just too far outside the norm (and outside reality, but that's another issue).
That's not quite right. Quarantine is a kind of civil detention. You have habeus corpus rights but you aren't accused of a crime and the probable cause standard doesn't apply. There's a standard- it's not zilch- but it's not the same as criminal detention.
Under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S. Code § 264), the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States and between states.
CDC’s Role
Under 42 Code of Federal Regulations parts 70 and 71, CDC is authorized to detain, medically examine, and release persons arriving into the United States and traveling between states who are suspected of carrying these communicable diseases.
As part of its federal authority, CDC routinely monitors persons arriving at U.S. land border crossings and passengers and crew arriving at U.S. ports of entry for signs or symptoms of communicable diseases.
When alerted about an ill passenger or crew member by the pilot of a plane or captain of a ship, CDC may detain passengers and crew as necessary to investigate whether the cause of the illness on board is a communicable disease.
State, Local, and Tribal Law
States have police power functions to protect the health, safety, and welfare of persons within their borders. To control the spread of disease within their borders, states have laws to enforce the use of isolation and quarantine. In some states, local health authorities implement state law. In most states, breaking a quarantine order is a criminal misdemeanor.
Can you provide any source for criticism from the left on this decision? I only found this:
> Although Democratic leaders and Democratic presidential candidates have been highly critical of Trump’s response to the coronavirus, we couldn’t find any examples of them directly and clearly criticizing the travel restrictions.
My Twitter timeline was full of people claiming xenophobia and racism for most of February and some of March, some with claims he was distracting from his impeachment.
There was a coordinated effort by some jouralists to smear Trump as xenophobic and racist for what he was trying to do. Today they're saying he didn't do enough. There were many stories that were essentially down playing the virus and dog whistling to readers about Trump being a racist/xenophobic for his early actions.
Edit: added video showing the media downplaying COVID-19 at late as March 3rd [3].
Ya, much of this controversy seems to have been made up by the right. Typical gas lighting, funny thing is I remember none of this actually happening at the time, banning travel china was mostly non-controversial outside of a niche. Maybe twitter?
That is one tiny step in response to a crisis that requires dozens of quick, bold steps. If he gets one point for decisive action and 20 points for delaying, deferring, muddling and contradicting, how much credit has he really earned?
Yeah, the west coast's virus outbreak is primarily traced to European sources, the bigger east coast one probably more so (but idk the data to support that). The China travel ban was not an effective measure of control, and experts knew that it wouldn't be. So either (1) whoever did it didn't listen to their experts or (2) it was intended to punish China, not as an effective measure of control.
> Valid arguments may exist for shutting down the world to travelers originating in China — and shutting down China to the world — as a reasonable public health response. But the World Health Organization explicitly did not advise that any restriction of trade or travel was necessary when it declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern last week, and it still doesn’t. Instead, it has called for exit screening in international airports and domestic hubs in China.
What Trump did get a lot of flack on was travel banning countries like Nigeria at the same time, completely unrelated to the coronavirus:
If you have watched any of the daily Coronavirus Task Force Press Briefings you will no doubt have heard Trump championing "If I didn’t do that, we would’ve had hundreds of thousands more people dying"...
To my understanding the ban only stopped direct flights from China. In other words flights to china were still able to travel everywhere else in the World and then from those layovers the Chinese were still able to fly into the US indirectly.
The virus made its way to US anyway and when it got out of hand the healthcare system was overwhelmed, the economy shutdown, supply chains broke down, we reached essentially 20% unemployment overnight...so I am not sure how his decision saved lives, it seems to me, his travel ban only delayed the virus...so assuming the travel ban wasn't put in place it seems to me the virus would have just been on our radar sooner and we would have done the same poor reactive responses. In other words, from the time of the ban in January to Trumps "15 days to slow the spread" how many test kits were ordered? How many N95 masks were ordered? How many ventilators? How much PPE? What did Trump do to prepare for the virus and save lives beyond travel bans, because it seems our healthcare systems were not prepared/supplied nor was FEMA prepared and mobilized until March.
Can you explain how his ban saved lives as opposed to delayed the virus?
Honest question: did Trump have the legal authority to shutdown the states even if he wanted to? I thought this decision was always up to the governors themselves, and that the federal government didn't have any authority to ask for a shut down within each state.
I think what's probably more relevant is the chaos of trying to get aid from the federal government, combined with Trump and Kushner's declaration that any national stockpile is for the federal government, not the states, even though nobody lives in the federal government, we all live in states or similar entities.
Since Cascadia does not exist, compromise to include northern California is possible. The proposed Pacific State Jefferson would likely join a successful independent Cascadia if only to have easier succession to its own state down the line.
Regardless, this can be seen as a shot in the arm toward Casacadia because it is a demonstration of cross-state regional cooperation that would be necessary to further an independence movement.
Ya but I feel that California, Oregon and Washington are bound but many unique and common cultural ideals. Tech, ecology, etc. I live in Seattle and there is a lot of fun rivalry but if I didn't live here it would be Bay area, Portland, San Diego, LA, etc. The West Coast has a special culture in my view.
While many Pacific NW folks are not familiar with Cascadia as an independence movement, fans of the Portland, Oregon soccer (football) team Portland Timbers often carry or fly the Cascadia independence movement's flag during games. Shown on the right side of this giant tifo:
Yes. I love this from an executive-action standpoint. They are _doing_ something about something, in the face of a lot of fearful messaging. And that gives the rest of us an even better "emotional/energy vector" which is based on a promise of government support and action in support of business.
We are participants in the most creative and powerful world economy of all time. Regardless of geographical location, cultures are generally more unified and geared toward working together than ever. Markets have shown an impressive amount of resilience in the face of unprecedented fear messaging. People are ready to work hard; in fact they're wearing themselves out by working harder than they have before in many cases.
This is exactly the kind of action we need right now.
So you have this information and see only downsides? I'm curious if this is a perception-only exercise for you, or if you are taking steps to execute on that perception in a way that helps you and others prepare and pivot as needed.
Or do you really see literally endless downside, and have thus decided to lock yourself out of actions you can take now to prepare for future upsides?
If so that would suck, because this could line up an epic self-fulfilling prophecy on a personal level. Still, a lot of people do that, and regret it later. They may get a few prophet points here and there, but that's it.
Now is the perfect time to take risks on a wide variety of factors, including those I mentioned above. But if you are only primed to foresee disaster, you probably can't do that. The comment seems to point at a low level of risk tolerance.
If my hypothesis is correct, I have unlimited upside. It's hard being bearish in any market, but now's the best time to be one. Across many asset classes. Probably not stocks, because the Fed will continue to inflate those assets. But in real terms they will drop. GC >= 1800 EOM, CL <=20 EOW, SI >= 16.5 within 2 weeks are my predictions.
I'm a position trader, I don't really look at timestamps of Level II data. I only have to understand the fundamentals of any market I invest in. Day traders and scalpers/algo are the ones you want to talk to about timestamps.
This is great, and it's a big chunk of population, but I keep feeling like we could do better. For example, these three States could do a great job, but there's nothing stopping a bunch of the other States from bungling it (like, say, ignoring health experts and exempting certain groups from mass gathering restrictions). Then those States end up exporting infectious individuals into the States which are doing things right, and creating more clusters.
If only we had some sort of united group of all the States, where the response could be coordinated and centralized for maximum effectiveness.
I imagine it more like 3 people standing in the furthest corner from the person peeing because the lifeguard isn't enforcing any rules except "no one can leave the pool".
Well when our federal government basically screws the pooch it's up to individual states to work together to limit the spread. And since most of the state governments seem to not really care about the health of their citizens, it makes sense that there would be small groups of states that do. Honestly I assumed that if the outbreak got really bad the PNW would eventually secede from the union because the federal government wasn't providing much aid. But this is a lot better than that.
Yours is obviously just an analogy and I'm not making claims as far as the underlying argument, but we did used to have smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants, airplanes, etc. Clearly that was reasonable enough to people to be the way things were done for a few decades. Sometimes an 80% solution that seems almost comically flawed ends up being useful.
Your fears are very valid because we have already seen (prior to this formal coalition) the varying responses of states. Regarding your last sentence: I think there was a united group of all of the states waiting for central command and assistance which never truly materialized and now we have the states working together in the void.
Perhaps it allows them to begin to open borders between each other, but keep borders to other states closed? If those three states' economies are very interlinked it might let them get closer to normality.
Legally, is this possible in the US?
In Australia for example each state has closed or is controlling their borders with each other, and this seems to largely be a decision for each state (I don't think there's a federal law either way). I could imagine some states choosing to open up while others remain closed. Or if two states made big sacrifices but got the issue under control, while the others lagged behind, those two could open borders between themselves while remaining closed outside.
> Under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S. Code § 264), the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States and between states.
Nothing stops them from encouraging states, either. (We did this with speed limits, as an example. Want Federal highway funds? Play ball with the Feds.) Florida's Governor justified not issuing a stay-at-home order based on the White House not having asked him to.
Ok, but what do you do when said authority is hellbent on forcing people back to work and reopening the economy when your local metrics show that would be a really bad idea? While the Federal Government may have the ability to restrict the states, I don't see any avenue where they can legally prohibit local/statewide restrictions that are stronger than Federal rules.
Perhaps through "encouragement" but that still leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
Sorry I got hung up on "there is no plan B". I prefer we have a coordinated response here as well (plan A). That's not happening so the "plan B" is states working together.
Except that in a federal system like the United States each individual state government can mount a real response like we've done in Washington where the epidemiological curve has flattened significantly in the past 3 or 4 weeks versus where it was heading before we began social distancing.
Not too dissimilar from the EU approach. There doesn't appear to be an EU-level coordination. The member states have open borders between them, I.e. the proverbial "peeing sections", and Italy's disastrous outbreak hasn't seemed to spread into Germany, Austria, Denmark, etc.
Centralization requires buy-in, and after at some point it becomes clear that sitting around waiting for other states to play ball can be equally disastrous.
With sufficient testing capabilities, closing the borders might not be necessary. Instead, test at the borders (and airports) and impose a mandatory quarantine on any infected individuals.
I'm fairly certain that Constitutional speaking "interstate commerce" can only be regulated by the federal government. The free movement of people may not be commerce per se, but it is inextricably linked.
In realpolitik terms, I doubt the federal government can stop this. What are they going to do? Send the army to force states to accept potentially infected people? That's basically an order to go kill your countrymen. I'd hope, given such an order, much of the military would defect.
The states also have their own well-equipped militias (National Guard). The U.S. Army can't just roll in and occupy a state if the state does not want it to - they will have to wage a war. Not at all politically acceptable.
Well, this Western States Pact is a result of lack of leadership at the White House and federal level. They feel the US government is not doing enough, so they took the matter into their own hands.
Have you been following the coverage? There are a lot of mixed messages (opening the economy by Easter, no I mean May, no I mean ASAP), lots of misinformation that contradicts the medical consensus (Trump pushing hydroxychloroquine as if he's the drug's spokesperson), a lot of half actions (Trump invokes Defense Production Act, but then refuses to use it), and blatant lies ("anyone who wants a test can get one"), multiple task forces being set up with vague responsibilities (first Pence, then Kushner).
The unwillingness to call for a nationwide lockdown is also a big one that has angered a lot of governors. And just today Trump tweeted that he has the authority to end lockdowns, which is a blatant lie.
Trump actually did use the DPA to order GM to produce medical ventilators. Because a car company will have no problem retooling all of their factories to pump out medical devices. I believe that just taught all the CEOs of companies like GM that they shouldn't offer to do a damn thing publicly before they've already got a program in place.
This is as opposed to ordering one of the several companies in the US who already make medical ventilators to simply make more ventilators.
Early in office, Trump got rid of the department created by Obama to respond to pandemics.
Early in this epidemic, we bungled getting testing out. Got it out in broken form. Had to get it out again. All the while we turned down an effective test advocated by the WHO.
And when testing existed, had rules that tested so little that they missed the existence of community spread until it was well established.
Blocked private labs from developing and conducting tests. (Community spread was demonstrated by one who broke the federal rules. The reaction of the Trump administration was to come down on them for having conducted unauthorized tests.)
Well after it was clear that this was a pandemic that was not under control, Trump was spinning a narrative of this being no big deal.
Failed to declare a federal emergency and social distancing restrictions at a national level. Which caused a patchwork of inconsistent responses at the state level. California was in lockdown while COVID-19 was happily spreading among tourists on crowded Florida beaches.
I could go on. But right now the USA has 1/4 of all deaths worldwide from COVID-19. We are stilly dying faster, and didn't get there by accident.
Wasn't the issues with the initial tests that there weren't accurate and their simply weren't enough to go around?
As far as disbanding the Pandemic team, it's not really true, there was a shuffling of who was in charge of it. It was finally transferred to the Vice President.
As far as I can tell, the FDA approved an emergency policy to Help Expedite the Availability of Diagnostics on Feb 19th.
The US probably has more contact with China due to trade/travel than most other countries. I don't believe the numbers from China, they are sure to be way higher than they report.
I don't think the Federal Government really has the ability to shut down a states beaches that aren't Federally managed.
Wasn't the issues with the initial tests that there weren't accurate and their simply weren't enough to go around?
The USA shipped out tests after other countries, and with a faulty reagent that caused false positives. Causing labs that should have been able to do their own tests to have to ship samples to an overwhelmed CDC. See https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/05/905484/why-the-c... for verification.
The CDC promised new tests, but they took weeks to arrive. In the meantime federal bureaucracy roadblocked the development of independent tests. Finally the Seattle Flu study went and ahead and tested...only to find that COVID-19 had community spread for several weeks in that testing vacuum. You can verify that at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de....
As far as disbanding the Pandemic team, it's not really true, there was a shuffling of who was in charge of it. It was finally transferred to the Vice President.
Long story short, a number of people were let go, what was left was moved around in the bureaucracy, the political leadership left in charge claims that it still works, but the people left and other politicians claim that it was hamstrung.
Given that the US response has been so weak, it it questionable whether it operated at all effectively.
As far as I can tell, the FDA approved an emergency policy to Help Expedite the Availability of Diagnostics on Feb 19th.
Yes, at which point they created a bureaucratic nightmare for the approval process. As the NY Times article outlines, the lab that actually found community spread was NOT able to get through the approval process.
The US probably has more contact with China due to trade/travel than most other countries. I don't believe the numbers from China, they are sure to be way higher than they report.
Yes, the USA has a lot of travel. You are far from alone in not believing China. However there is no reason to believe that they are lying about having effectively shut down the virus. (Even the social distancing we are doing here seems to be working, and China was a lot more extreme.)
I don't think the Federal Government really has the ability to shut down a states beaches that aren't Federally managed.
Never underestimate the reach of the Commerce Clause. The President's ability to declare quarantines and apply them to whomever for whatever reason is extreme.
I don't know the limits for sure. But I doubt that he would have had less ability to act than various governors have had.
1. Ignored the pandemic response playbook. This document was prepared after the SARS outbreak and contained all the lesson s learned.
2. Reckless public statements. Calling the virus "no worse than a flu" and "a hoax" certainly caused people to not take it seriously and helped it to spread. Pushing the hrdroxocloriquine study before the research was conclusive has gotten people killed.
3. Depriving states of essential resources. Massachusetts not only had their request for masks denied, but also paid for their own masks only to have them seized for the "federal stockpile". In the end the governor had to get masks smuggled in on the New England Patriots private jet.
4. When New York projected it would run out of ventilators in 6 days, their request was denied on the grounds that Trump felt 30k ventilators was too big a number.
5. The emergency production act (or whatever it's called) could have been invoked at any time to address the ppe shortage. Afaik it hasn't been.
There was a piece on NPR today looking at the things the President announced they were going to do a month ago when he declared a state of emergency, and where we stand now on those things [1].
This is all 100% political. The only reason they are doing this is to preempt President Trump's announcement tomorrow about the formation of a committee to get this going. Anytime they say it's not political, that is 100% what it is.
> If only we had some sort of united group of all the States, where the response could be coordinated and centralized for maximum effectiveness.
We do! It's called the United States government. I'll be letting the president know you're interested in him taking over and using his own ideas, instead of this one you seem to be particularly fond of.
Or, if that idea is slightly terrifying for you, perhaps it's a better idea that the states are handling this themselves. Your state conglomeration thing can always decide to use the National Guard to prevent outside travelers.
You have no idea how crazy you sound as a European lol, the most straightforward way to put it is you're using an anonymous account on a website to dunk on someone in the comments section for implying they may care about avoiding infection during a pandemic
> You have no idea how crazy you sound as a European
Europe, a group of many independent states, trying different approaches to a common problem, with an over-arching bureaucracy to coordinate between them... and the US approach sounds crazy to you?
You're comparing apples to oranges. Europe is comprised of sovereign states which can and actually have closed their borders. From my understanding, but correct me if I'm wrong, this would be a legal and political nightmare in the US right?
As a European I’d think you’d appreciate the point he’s making. This is analogous to Spain and Portugal deciding on a joint Iberian policy between the two of them instead of trying to go to the EU and haggle it out with Hungary and Sweden.
Well, he'd appreciate your point ever more had the tenant of the WH been someone who can actually read pages with letters instead of watching tv 12 hours a day.
> Your state conglomeration thing can always decide to use the National Guard to prevent outside travelers.
The National Guard serves a dual role. Most of the time, it’s under the control of individual states, with the state governor acting as commander in chief. However, the president can activate the National Guard and place it under federal control. When this occurs, guard units are used to supplement the regular Army, bolstering its forces with additional combat units. [1]
Well, if the federal government blocks you from using the NG to protect your states, then perhaps your state should... I don't know. Form a militia, and protect itself! Perhaps it could even seize the equipment from the National Guard in a mini-revolution!
It's almost like the constitution was written to enable these things to happen, and prevent a corrupt and/or inept leader from forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on the nation!
What do you mean by outside travelers? do you mean people from other states, or from outside the country? If you mean from other states, then they are legally barred from doing that.
States cannot discriminate against people from other states on the sole reason that they are from some other state.
Now... (I believe) they could use the National Guard to do wellness checks to make sure people don't have a fever, and potentially get them to quarantine, but it would have to be applied without regard to what state their license says. Though, the legality of forcing quarantine varies by state.
I may be wrong, but I think you missed OP's point. I took his tongue-in-cheek "If only we had some sort of united group of all the States" comment to mean if only we had a president who exercised his influence to encourage this type of coordinated response versus what he's done up to this point, which is nearly the opposite of coordinated.
It seems like you've essentially given up on the idea of freedom and separation of powers. Perhaps that would yield a better pandemic response (though that depends on the competency of the federal government), but I'm not sure it's worth the cost.
We're talking about forcibly keeping everyone in the country out of church. It's pretty disturbing to give that power to government, even temporarily. How long before it gets applied to other situations after the pandemic dies down?
What's to stop the president in 2030 from saying: "We're facing an epidemic of terrorism by [whoever] so we're keeping them from gathering in public."
Or: "There's an epidemic of [some crime] that uses the internet. We need to control it."
As someone who lives in one of these states, I'm nonplussed at the announcement. It doesn't really seem to say anything concrete that I can tell.
"We've agreed that we will use metrics...we are still deciding what these metrics will be."
I thought the Stay Home, Stay Healthy order (in Washington state) wasn't unreasonable and wasn't just political babble, but I don't really know what to make of this piece. Anyone want to try to explain it like I'm five?
I think you're correct, but the announcement is still welcome. People are gonna be waiting forever for any semblance of federal guidance, so at least these 3 states has decided they'll make calls together.
In this case, I would be vastly more comfortable if the answer were "No, Doreen, you really are as dumb as you think. Their plan is 1... 2.... 3...."
The US governmental system has a long history of injecting bureaucratic nonsense that takes on a life of its own and ends up with outcomes like "teaching to the test" instead of being a net benefit.
I would feel differently if this were an announcement of a joint task force for sharing data to help each state make the best decisions possible. But this sounds to me like it will just make it harder for each state to make a decision on their own and that it probably doesn't really add any value. And that concerns me.
Yeah, this falls far short of what these states should be saying, something like "We're feverishly working on building out the infrastructure for wide-scale population testing and tracing, but we will not lift shelter-in-place until we're confident the infrastructure is in place in all three states to contain any outbreaks".
I have the same beef with Mayor Breed in San Francisco, who has otherwise shown standout leadership. She's publicly worried that people will let their guard done by assuming things are under control. Rather than worry about people's feelings and opinions, she should be setting expectations exactly as I described above.
I was just talking to someone yesterday about impaired vasodilation as a possible explanation for why people are dying at such high rates on ventilators. I'm hopeful that we will soon have some better treatments in place that will make this infection less deadly and thus less of a boogeyman.
It means these states will together decide when to reopen. A task force would provide that bureaucratic waste. What is the advantage of Oregon having more data to decide to reopen a week before California. The value of them standing together gives poltical shielding against a national government. They speak for the entire west coast. I wonder if other regions will do the same. Mountain states, Northern states, the South as a group wouldn't do this which would group them by subtraction.
It almost sounds like we three states are preparing for some kind of federal intervention in our politics if we continue social distancing after Trump orders our states to reopen.
I think this is a polite way of these states saying that they're not going to follow any 'national plan to reopen the economy' put out by the White House.
Exactly right. One of the rules of the game is that you're not allowed to say anything negative about Donald Trump even if (perhaps especially if) it is factually correct. If you do, he will retaliate (by, for example, withholding badly needed aid). So the governors have to speak in code.
Listen to Newsome's news conference today and the answer he gave to a reporter about his reaction to Trump's announcement that the decision to re-open the economy is his (Trump's) alone. It's a masterpiece.
> If you do, he will retaliate (by, for example, withholding badly needed aid)
Has this actually occurred?
I know NY asked for way more ventilators than they got, but as I understood it they were giving them out "just in time" rather than up front in case they were needed more elsewhere.
Yes. Early in the outbreak, several of the western states including Washington asked for full FEMA aid but received nothing except some disaster counseling aid, while Florida received huge shipments of medical supplies. Trump as much as said he was waiting for Governor Jay Inslee of Washington to say something nice about him before opening up aid to Washington, which is unconscionable.
We seem to be doing just fine here without the Federal Government. In fact we've sent 400 ventilators back to the national stockpile and we also returned the Army hospital that was established at Safeco Field back because we didn't need the capacity. Trump did eventually authorize FEMA to pay for the National Guard response here.
I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but this smells real bad to me. The reports of confiscations are coming from democratic states, not republican states. And it seems like republican lobbyists are getting into the game of distributing PPE:
What it seems to me is happening is a coordinated yet amateurish attempt to restrict the PPE flow to/within democratic states, while allowing the free flow of PPE in republican states. This allows some lobbyists to make money off of it, as well as sticking a finger in the eye of dem leaders (and dying people/healthcare workers in dem states).
It isn't only about who it is withheld from, it is who is favored and given to.
Florida, where President Trump moved his residence to and who's governor he enjoys a special relationship with, has had greater success than other states in requesting and receiving allocations from the federal stockpile: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/despe...
Let me be more precise: if you're a Republican politician or a civil servant you are not allowed to say anything negative about Trump and hope to keep your job. If you are a Democratic politician you are not allowed to say anything negative about Trump without risking the loss of federal money and resources that you would otherwise receive.
Anyone else is, of course, free to say whatever they want. (For the time being.)
I don't know for sure, but I wonder if the Republican governor of a state like Massachusetts feels that way. He might get more votes if he spoke against Trump than if he didn't.
He might. Not this year, though - the 2020 Massachusetts primary is history. And four years from now, will Trump care enough to support a primary challenger? Will Republicans care what gubernatorial candidate Trump supports?
I mean, I guess if your ambition is to hold office for decades, then you might be concerned. But the downside seems minimal to me. (But then, I'm neither in politics nor in Massachusetts, so what do I know?)
My ELI5 interpretation: “Since good leadership is probably not going to come from the President, we’re going to create our own “mini-country” and provide good leadership within it.”
Yep, I agree that's a key point. It's easy to confuse big picture language with "nothing concrete" but a lot had to happen behind the scenes before this ever went to press. I'm personally optimistic because of this under-appreciated factor among many others.
Asked whether the collaboration among the states was a rebuke to the President Trump, who has said the decision about businesses reopening was his to make, Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said only that he was focused on making decisions based on facts and science, and he reiterated that an economic recovery was inextricable from a public health recovery.
Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania echoed Mr. Murphy’s comments in responding to a similar question.
“The sequence,” Mr. Wolf said, “is you’ve got to get people healthy first, and then you can reopen the economy.”
Interviewed later on CNN, Mr. Cuomo was more pointed in his remarks on who bears responsibility for restoring life to something like normal.
Trump administration officials, the governor said, could have enacted a nationwide shutdown to stem the spread of the virus.
“They didn’t,” he said. “They said we’re going to leave it to the states. Now all of a sudden when it comes time to open the economy, now it’s back to the federal government’s responsibility?”
He was complaining to me the other day that Oregon's requirement that you are not allowed to pump your own gas is an obvious COVID transmission vector.
To get gas in Oregon, he follows these steps:
1.) pull up to gas station
2.) Roll down window to hand attendant (who isn't wearing a mask, nor is required to) his debit card.
3.) Get card back from attendant.
4.) Sanitize the debit card
5.) Sanitize his hands
6.) Hope that the attendant is washing his hands, and that he didn't breathe COVID onto him through the open window.
Not saying this isn't a great, noble effort.
Just saying that, in some aspects, these states aren't doing a good job on obvious things within their own borders.
Why the hell is Oregon still doing this, and not requiring masks from gas attendants anyway? Maybe it is required, but my brother told me he has yet to have an attendant wearing a mask, so possibly not enforced???
I'm curious: Was that the law before the pandemic? If so, couldn't the pandemic be a good reason to campaign to change the law so Oregonians can pump their own gas?
That law hasn't changed because it's essentially a jobs program. They did retcon equal access for the disabled / elderly in there, but the ADA covers it well enough for every other state.
It's also part of the reason you can't buy liquor at a grocery store in Oregon. If we really need more pointless jobs, I'd rather the state just hire some people to dig holes and fill them back up. At least everybody else wouldn't be inconvenienced that way.
When pumping your own gas, you touch a pump handle and card reader that have been handled by hundreds of other people in the last few hours. Is that any better?
I drove through oregon a while back for the eclipse for the first time ever. I'd already filled my tank a quarter of the way by the time the attendant came out and yelled at me. I was so confused.
Add "not allowed to pump your own gas" to the list of "things that are completely unnecessary and stupid that have been removed because of COVID-19 and never need to come back".
It’s a job creation/protection play, like grocery stores where the union won’t allow self-checkout. No idea if the law is achieving its goals or if it just exists because of historical inertia now, but that’s why it exists.
Where are there checkout clerk unions blocking self-check out? Not saying it's impossible, but I've lived in WA, CA, VA, DC, TX, and NY, plus 1.5 years in Australia, and going on 6 years in Canada and have consistently seen self check-out everywhere.
"Effective immediately, gas stations will be allowed to let drivers pump their own gas if they meet any of the following requirements:
The owner (of the gas station) retains documentation that there are no employees available to work as an attendant, including documentation for absences and employee hiring and retention efforts;
The owner is subject to State Fire Marshal audit and has posted safety signs for how to safely operate a fuel pump; and
The hours of operation under this subsection do not exceed 10 consecutive hours.
“During this unprecedented time of state emergency, we need to ensure that critical supply lines for fuels and other basic services remain uninterrupted,” said State Fire Marshal Jim Walker.
Additionally, active stations must abide by the Fire Marshal’s latest guidelines:
Prepare, implement and enforce social distancing policies consistent with guidance from the Oregon Health Authority,
Require an attendant to be on duty to supervise self-service refueling consistent with the social distancing policies and help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 through sanitization measures, and
Designate an employee at each station to implement and enforce the social distancing policies."
The above doesn't seem like it's actually self-service unless the owner has certain issues. My brother just told me he isn't seeing self-service at his area, and wasn't notified it was an option.
unsure about what to say, think, or do : perplexed
chiefly US : not bothered, surprised, or impressed by something
I'm an American. "Not impressed" is the closest thing I am seeing to what I was trying to convey. Unmoved might be a good substitute word in this case.
I'm an American, too. It's funny that those Merriam-Webster definitions are so mild. I've always "known" nonplussed to indicate a fairly extreme state, like gobsmacked.
I quoted definitions from Google's search snippet.
It's essentially saying that the governors of these three states aren't going to follow what Trump orders them to do unless the medical professionals and the state emergency management teams give the go-ahead.
Trump has been downplaying the seriousness of the disaster since January. He contradicts the statements of his own staff in the same press conference as the staff speaks. He exuberantly proclaims the effectiveness of "treatments" that haven't been studied in any serious way. All this is to say that we can't trust any decision he makes.
Contrast this with the way the Western governors have handled this. Inslee was one of the first governors to announce any kind of Social Distancing rules. And he followed Illinois in issuing a statewide Stay Home order that is probably the most restrictive such order in the states. There's a lot of evidence on the Washington DOH website that this is working and the spread of the disease is under control.
The fact is that Trump's response is mostly to bury the problem and apply wishful thinking when he can't bury the problem. The governors in this union are taking a facts-based approach to solving the problem that has largely been successful. And so it's a really bad idea to do anything that Trump advises the country to do because he has a track record of making really bad decisions throughout this crisis.
I guess it's significant that the three states have agreed in principle that they'll act together rather than each do their own thing. Maybe they can also be more ambitious in terms of testing and contact tracing by collaborating. They might also be able to collaborate in buying PPE and ventilators and so on rather than bidding against each other.
Governor Baker is a Republican and Trump is big on “loyalty” and deference. Since the pact is a way for the Governors to collectively let Trump know who will actually be “restarting” the states I would guess the short delay in Massachusetts joining was so Baker could sort out the politics ahead of time with DC.
Baker (and Hogan, for that matter) are very popular Republican governors in pretty deep blue states. They haven't been big on kissing Trump's ass, both before and during this crisis.
Yes, I’m about as liberal as they come and I voted for Baker in the last election. Being well-liked on both sides of the aisle doesn’t happen by accident. Baker puts in considerable planning and effort to make that happen.
I mentioned the Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois consortium the other day. Theirs was formed to solidify buying power. These are looking analogous to the relationship between cities and and a county.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22835488
If only there was some sort of multi-state organization through which individual states could pull together on issues spanning multiple states. Such a "federal" approach would be very useful. If only someone had thought of this years ago. Of course it would have to be staffed by people selected and respected by all, but surely there is some way of doing that too.
It would be especially good if that kind of organization had limited and agreed-to powers that were written down in some sort of document, and then those constraints were respected and not repeatedly gamed around.
Surely any document is just as smart and wise as the people interpreting it. (Are we back to square one or do we have to go through Internet fueled partisan hyper-polarization and "big data" aided gerrymandering? Oh, yes, we need to vacant a seat on the Council of the Interpreters and mysteriously leave it empty and let the winner of the aforementioned social-media campaign pick the next interpreter!)
I love the United States' flexible decentralized model. Different states have sufficient autonomy to tinker and try different approaches, allowing the best ideas to emerge from the collective. It's one reason why the US is such a dynamic place, similar to Europe but with the additional benefit of unified language, culture (broadly), economy, and high level regulations.
It's not necessarily as flexible as to encompass such sub-federal cooperation: "No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...
I'm curious if these recently announced state pacts will be challenged in court. But legal or illegal, it doesn't excuse the poor job of federal management.
Yes, I'm curious about the way they're intending to handling this legally as well. A bit of searching shows a Supreme Court case Virginia v. Tennessee, 148 U.S. 503 (1893) [1]. This restricts the application of that clause somewhat, but it isn't 100% clear to me that this Pact is a perfect match for the facts in that case.
It also sounds like [2] things are rather flexible in what approval is and when it is obtained. It's plausible that they expect to ask for approval, or rely on it being unlikely that congress explicitly disapproves, or perhaps they expect to obtain approval in the future.
[note: I've linked to a point in the opinion discussing Congressional approval]
Yep, that Supreme Court decision severely limits the need to get congressional consent to form interstate compacts.
It would be wonderful if all the progressive/blue/Democratic states in the country could get together, and form an interstate compact for their mutual benefit and advancement.
However it's possible that a Republican-majority Supreme Court, seeing the benefit that's coming out a Democratic interstate compact, could strike it down, with partisan motives (just like they struck down parts of the BCRA with Citizens United, or the Voting Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder).
Highly unlikely. Republicans are for state's rights, and the current president and administration seems especially in favor of it. He basically told the states to get their acts together and put the feds into a mainly supportive role, which is as it should be.
Republicans might claim to support state's rights, but they certainly aren't principled consistent supporters of it.
Just take a drug legalization. Many Republicans have been vehemently opposed to it. Take a look at the Supreme Court decision Gonzalez v. Raich, where Steve Scalia no less, wrote that the feds could interfere with your growing some plants inside your own home for your own personal use.
Remember that the "states rights" movement started as a response to federal action to end segregation. In my personal opinion, Republicans are just for whatever will push their agenda forward, without regard to the moral or ethical depravity involved in doing so.
Democrats, in contrast, are a bit more principled (in my opinion), especially when it comes to protecting the human rights, civil rights, voting rights, and other rights of the non-dominant groups in this country.
My claim on this issue was mainly due to the current administration's relatively pro-state stance in this regard (COVID). I am not insisting that the GOP is universally pro-state. You are right that they are not when it comes to marijuana legalization and some other things (and shame on them for it).
The current administration's position isn't relatively pro-state here though: Trump is on record insisting he can "reopen" the economy over the heads of state governments.
The position on "closing down" (that it was up to states) doesn't tell us anything about the administration's principle in regard to COVID because the administration is willing to change those "principles" very quickly, as evidenced by their current statements (among other actions taken by Republicans)
It's arguable that the position on closing down was based on the desire of the admin that the country remain "open", but was faced with legal/political difficulties in directly applying their desire to the country as a whole. What ever tactic is taken with respect to this Pact, we should be unsurprised if it ignores any "principles" and instead looks to effect the policy that Trump desires to put into place, or the effect on Trump's perception of his authority.
The current administration is only pro-state inasmuch as it allows Trump to disclaim responsibility for failures while taking credit for successes.
For example, he knew that getting hold of medical supplies and PPE would be difficult, and that the federal government would fail at it, so he put it in the states' hands. He didn't want to be blamed for shutting down the economy and forcing people to isolate themselves, so he allowed the states to decide. But now he wants us to believe that the "heroic" decision to open things back up again will be his, and his alone.
States Rights go back to even before that, to the original Articles of Confederation and Constitution. Until the US Constitution was ratified the behavior of the union was closer to the EU than the current US government, and the bigger, more powerful states (NY, VA) didn't like giving up their sovereignty.
States Rights was dug up before the Civil War as a continuation of that argument, this time in the context of slavery.
Is it? They're each deciding, independently, to handle their electors in a certain fashion. They each have the right to independently change that decision, without any penalty for doing so. It's not a binding agreement with another state in any fashion.
> OTOH, pacts like the popular vote compact signed by some states in the past few years is almost certainly unconstitutional.
Why would that be the case? Electors are not bound by any particular (federal) rules in how they cast their votes. If we look at the popular vote compact as a friendly handshake agreement (to which electors are not legally bound), they are free to fulfill the handshake agreement and vote along with the national popular vote.
Of course, if a signatory decides last-minute to betray that agreement, there perhaps would be no legal remedy.
AFAIU whether the agreement is expressly legally binding is not dispositive. See, e.g., https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec.... Thus even if it's likely to pass muster (and I'm sure it was drafted with that in mind) there still could be colorable arguments that permit a legitimate challenge, especially if politically expedient. But I'm not that familiar with this area of law so I welcome corrections accompanied with citations.
I would imagine this is like the AASHTO or the UCC lobbying groups where the agreements don't force any states to do anything, the states just independently do the same thing together. And in some cases like with the UCC they don't even do that.
In Virgina v Tennessee, in 1893, the Supreme Court allows states to make compacts in all matters reserved to the states and the enforcement of which does not encumber federal rights.
And for the most part, at the consent of Congress, states keep armies and air forces (and many keep navies) as guaranteed by the second amendment.
At this point in time though, who's to say the courts won't just let the commerce clause creep in its scope? It'll be pretty easy to argue that these lockdowns interfere with interstate commerce.
His insistence on calling it the "chinese virus" was a very intentional move to frame it as the work of a foreign power, even if he never explicitly said it was made in a chinese laboratory. Plenty of conspiracy theorists did though (some of them on national TV).
> or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay
It'd be nice to think that the largest pandemic of the last century would allow for this, but given the current supreme court bench I guess I wouldn't really bet on it
These kinds of pacts between States to coordinate on specific issues that are under of the umbrella of their sovereignty are quite common and perfectly legal. The whole point of sovereignty is that they have the freedom to deal with the issue as they wish as long as it doesn't abrogate one of the narrow powers delegated to the Federal government, such as this case. There are even pacts between States to coordinate action directly against Federal policy e.g. the Sagebrush Rebellion.
In other cases where the Federal government does have jurisdiction, such as interstate treaties regarding shared resource rights, the Federal government can delegate the issue to a group of affected States to sort out amongst themselves e.g. the Colorado River Compact of 1922.
Yeah ... it's a great system unless you live in a part of the country that is not trying a smart approach; a place where "best ideas" are routinely dismissed as partisan politics.
Is it, though? Run your states the way you want to. Maybe your comrades in Texas prefer a running economy to lives. This is a good thing that you can make that choice.
I don’t see how not having states would change that.
We have a federal government that has the power to take action. Republicans are stopping that from happening and so some states are choosing to fix it for themselves.
Today it is pandemic resolution. I fear that tomorrow, it might be economic ties, lockstep voting at the federal level, and National Guard drills, deployments, and contingency planning, where the West Coast slowly splits away from the rest of the country, with other states teaming up and following suit.
This isn't the end, and it's the only appropriate response to a federal government that cannot or will not execute on behalf of all states. It is, however, a reflection of the true state of our Union, and a sign of things to come if we don't reconcile our national identity.
I'm saddened, but not surprised, that a step like this was necessary given the circumstances.
The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. The smaller less populous states aren't going to just give up their outsized power voluntarily.
California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime.
Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. In a country with the second most nuclear weapons in the world. With a federal government already looking to adversaries for cooperation.
You're talking nuclear missiles or chemical weapons fired against San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle from land-based silos in the Dakotas, or mutinies aboard our SSBNs, or Russian troops landing en masse in South Carolina to offer foreign assistance. It will mean the Balkanization of the country, where California has to station permanent garrisons in the Sierra Nevada mountains to ward off invasions from Texas or Mexico. You're not talking about a 40% drop in GDP this quarter, you're talking about famine and starvation, and complete international irrelevance after the dust settles. If only tens of millions of Americans die, that probably counts as a win.
"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Maybe they don't want to use troops as an occupying force. Afghanistan / Iraq already proved how difficult it is to occupy territory, it'd be a lot easier without insurgents resisting. A war of attrition would suck up a lot of blood and treasure the government would need to ward off threats to a much-weakened U.S.
Maybe the half life of radioactive isotopes is acceptable enough to relax habitation restrictions in a short enough period of time. People do currently live within the restricted zone of Chernobyl, they just have shortened lifespans, but they are functioning properly. You can probably garrison troops after nuking an area six months after doing so, as long as you cycle them out on a regular basis.
Maybe white-collar service workers are less valuable than blue-collar laborers, especially if they're already demoralized. You can torture a blue-collar worker to create output, albeit slower and lower quality and with Byzantine faults. You can't torture an asset management consultant to give you a high ROI. The brain doesn't work like that. So at that point he or she is just another mouth to feed and you can get rid of him or her. Extrapolate to an entire city.
Maybe it's just pure hatred. Most cities are highly Democratic and liberal, which today apparently labels someone as less than yourself, as someone less than human.
I don't want to get into a big thing, but I take issue with the idea that this was the motivation for support (in the Union government) for the war.
We remember Lincoln as an emancipator, but his words and actions don't support that. He was an advocate of institutional racism and drove away the people who actually wanted to end slavery, whether in peace or by war. He spent much more time discussing and devising his plan to deport and colonize all black people than he ever did working to end slavery.
I believe that our country missed a great opportunity to take an actual abolitionist position, which was being articulately and powerfully communicated by plenty of leaders who worked in better faith than the government ultimately did. I also believe that this missed opportunity is a substantial part of the reason that we still endure slavery today under the guise of a criminal justice system.
The conditions were different in almost every way.
True, we have another egomaniacal, racist, populist President who pretends to understand economics and business. Hopefully history will remember Trump more accurately than Lincoln.
But very little else is similar in these scenarios. Perhaps most importantly, we have the internet now, so the very need for a central government in our daily lives is substantially decreased.
And even if the conditions were similar, it's a sufficiently complex situation that merely noting the similarity isn't enough to suppose that war is likely (let alone inevitable) in such a scenario.
> You're talking nuclear missiles or chemical weapons fired against San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle from land-based silos in the Dakotas.
This is pretty unlikely, if only because the fallout from nuclear weapons launched at the West Coast will blow back over the rest of the country, including over the regions that launch the missiles themselves. There's a reason short-range and battlefield nukes were never used in anger and it has nothing to do with morals.
The rest of your point stands. From a global perspective, a break-up of the U.S. is a very bad thing. Aside from the potential civil war here, it also means open-season on any countries that are basically U.S. protectorates (Taiwan, Japan, Israel, and much of Europe are toast); it hands global leadership over to China; it means financial chaos; and it could result in famines and food instability throughout the world (the U.S. is a major food exporter).
I'm not quite sure. We only have nukes in hundreds of kilotons, which might not be enough to crack steel and concrete and burn all combustibles at once. If there's no firestorm, the nuclear fallout might not make it to the stratosphere and the jet stream because it gets dammed in by the mountains and precipitates out.
Not to mention, hatred is irrational anyways. At this stage, we're talking about an organization that will reduce its own negotiating lever on the world stage in order to subjugate innocent civilians, which we've already seen take place at various points in Syria and the Soviet Union. I would expect political commissars taking over the nuclear command authority to turn the keys, not USAF or USN personnel.
In many ways we've seceded from each other already. I, for one, live in a blue state but find it harder and harder to cope with life here from a cultural and political standpoint.
This is super hyperbolic. Why would Texas or Mexico invade?
Why would the US nuke a people trying to exercise their right to self-determination. It doesn't make any strategic, tactical, or political sense.
Hopefully I'm hyperbolic. I'm not rooting for the collapse of the country I live in, and the country of people who I grew up with and raised me. I just find the truths I trust lie more in laws of nature and laws of power, rather than higher-level societal constructs.
The West Coast is abundant in natural resources, provides good natural port access to the Pacific and Pacific nations, and provides a direct conduit to Alaska and its oil fields. The prospects of invasion depend on a cost benefit analysis.
Maybe cross-border drug traffic increases exponentially without DEA and Border Patrol, and you want to secure a region bent on escalating retaliation. Might also be an opportunity if half the population is too coked out to put up a fight. This was the First Opium War in China and the Century of Humiliation.
Maybe too many Americans are fleeing desperate circumstances into Mexico, and Mexico wants to stop refugee outflows while playing the hero bit. This was Vietnam + Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge.
Maybe global warming causes a chain of collapse towards underfunded and overextended governments in South America, and Mexico is itself invaded from the south and is running north. The collapse of Venezuela is a rehearsal of sorts.
The Federalist Papers contain examples out the wazoo of a "country" turning on itself, as warnings against disunion. Highly encourage reading them.
Quite frankly, it doesn't need to make sense. It needs to be possible.
> California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime.
Someone needs to secede so the rest of us can divest our tens of trillions of national debt.
40 million people is more than enough to be an independent country, why would it be so horrible? Peaceful secession has happened before and can happen again.
> The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States.
This is untrue. We could simply add more Senators by admitting more states into the Union. Kinda like we did with Alaska and Hawaii.
Millions of citizens in DC are without Senatorial representation not to mention Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Guam or many other "protectorates".
It can be done without dissolution of the US. It requires a simple majority vote in the Senate and House and Presidential approval.
Structural unfairness in the Senate is a weak argument for splitting the Union. Once the Union is split, Russia, China and probably other countries start playing one fragment of the former Union against another. The reason the Chinese government is trying so hard to stop China from splitting (beyond the existing mainland-Taiwan split) is to avoid a repeat of the bad old times when Japan and European powers were able to play one Chinese-language-using polity against another.
If the Fed had done the right thing by raising interest rates, and the government didn't interfere in the market with massive spending, USD could have remained the reserve currency for the foreseeable future. But nobody in Washington has the guts to do the right thing. Especially the Fed.
Also, if this "pact" leaves the United States, that is when I'll be leaving the shithole called CA. I'm not paying for the free riders anymore.
It's a bit funny to see capitalist corporations making obscene amounts of money violating laws and ethics and trickling a bit of that ill-gained wealth down to software engineers, who then turn around and say everyone should have wealth like them and not need gov't assistance when their own company is one of the drivers of inequality...
That's due to excessive regulation. Regulations benefit large incumbents, as opposed to smaller competitors/startups. The real driver of inequality is the government. Usually through excessive regulations, bailouts, and inflation. In a truly free market, prices go down, as competition is fierce. Perfect competition and pareto efficiency are concepts everyone on here should have knowledge of, if only at a surface level.
It's not going to happen, if nothing else, because CA is going to be grasping for federal budget bailouts later this year. Lockdown is going to crush state budgets.
CA has a pretty big rainy-day fund. It'll be exhausted eventually, but I'm not sure it will be this year. The most recent sources I've found suggest the state has around $20bn in reserves, which probably is enough to buffer us through a bad year unless tax incomes completely drop to 0.
The budget for the year was $208 billion, so you only need a 10% haircut to need help. And the budget is HEAVILY funded by (1) Silicon Valley IPOs, and (2) Hollywood. Both of those are going to generate $0 near-term.
Not to mention retirement funds which are going to be obliterated, but that's a somewhat separate issue from the budget.
> National Guard drills, deployments, and contingency planning
That seems pretty far-fetched.
Much more likely (and welcome) would be a sort of "legal coup", where the states that still have functioning governments band together in the task of reshaping the federal government through voting and legislative power.
We're certainly approaching a breaking point in the dysfunction of the federal government and its inability to do its job and serve a society; something has got to give. But I still think any kind of civil war scenario remains far, far out of the question.
Maybe. I mean, I would acknowledge that given post-9/11 deployments of National Guard troops to active combat zones, all you would need to do to mess up any planning would be to deploy those troops separately and randomly far away. Then it wouldn't matter if the governor called up the National Guard in self-defense and if they wanted to obey despite being federalized, because they wouldn't be in-theater. You'd have to raise fresh troops and train / arm them and by that point it'll already be far too late. Not to mention the firepower of existing federal garrisons in-state, complete air supremacy by federal air assets, and existing tensions between urban/rural areas preventing a retreat to the hinterlands. Whether these facts will change remains to be seen, but secession today is impractical.
I think the situation we're in right now is pretty much a "legal coup" by a motivated minority. It'll be a slog to get back to representative democracy.
I read "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb recently, and he mentioned how his home country of Lebanon went from diverse paradise to all-out civil war in six weeks, or 1.5 months. About the same time as "just a flu" to today.
For all our sakes, I hope to God I'm wrong and I hope to God you're right.
At the very most we might see Hong Kong-like civil unrest or something. But I see no path for any states to assemble a standing army under the nose of the federal government. Even if they tried to use the national guard; who's to say it would be more loyal to the state than to the fed?
If wonder if Barr will sue, arguing that the pact violates the Interstate Compact Clause, especially considering that Trump has recently tweeted that only he gets to decide when to lift restrictions.
I hope he does, and in the process both increases his ownership of this fiasco and dispels any notions that his party still has any real support for "States' rights".
Since CA has done nothing but cultivate disease for years now, I'm guessing this another one of those Orwellian names like "Patriot Act", or "No Child Left Behind, or whatever, that achieves the opposite of what is claimed.
Stay at home is doing enormous economic damage, which indirectly will cause more deaths through decimated budgets of social and health programs. Especially in CA where high progressive taxation amplifies the impact of recessions.
So there's a lot of pressure to reopen but no political cover to do so. I think the entire point of this pact is to provide that cover.
Even when reopening is clearly the right thing to do nobody will want to personally take the fall. It's the reason the US has a high incarceration rate, nobody wants to be the one to release a ton of people from jail even if it's the right thing to do.
You're saying that cutting (meaning reducing, not zeroing) budgets of social and health programs can kill up to 0.5% of the entire population of a state? Because that's the CFR of the virus.
You're aware that even programs on reduced budgets can offer a reduced set of services, and prioritize the ones with most impact? (i.e. most lifesaving potential). And that their work will be far easier if there are fewer total sick people in the system? Have you balanced the effects of that versus letting the virus run amok so that the tax receipts aren't impacted?
That's why I'm asking for numbers. Otherwise "a bad economy will kill more people" is a fuzzy assertion that sounds "cool" and "contrarian" but has no actual substance.
Here are my numbers btw:
"Our finding that all-cause mortality decreased during the Great Recession is consistent with previous studies. Some categories of cause-specific mortality, notably cardiovascular disease, also follow this pattern, and are more pronounced for certain gender and age groups. Our study also suggests that the recent recession contributed to the growth in deaths from overdoses of prescription drugs in working-age adults in metropolitan areas. Additional research investigating the mechanisms underlying the health consequences of macroeconomic conditions is warranted."[1]
In the last big recession, deaths due to certain causes went up but overall mortality decreased. So what you're saying definitively did not happen in the only other comparable situation.
> You're saying that cutting (meaning reducing, not zeroing) budgets of social and health programs can kill up to 0.5% of the entire population of a state? Because that's the CFR of the virus.
I'm not saying that, but I could have been more clear.
The Great Recession is not a great comparison to a continued lockdown scenario, unemployment peaked at 10% while current reports are putting us already at ~14% and rising. The recession reduced demand but didn't wipe out sectors, nor did it cascade nearly as fast. Heart attacks and traffic fatalities will go down as the studies show.
I don't think I'm being contrarian, these pacts were setup to provide the political cover necessary for those qualified to make the call. My prediction is CA/OR/WA reopen on roughly the same schedule as everyone else, with just slight stricter restrictions. Such as quarantining the sick, isolating the high-risk, and other measures to bring the CFR down.
Regardless of how sad a situation this reflects, I regard it at least as a positive sign of some resilience of our federal structure.
Criticize the state/federal model though you might for how it sometimes dilutes the ability to get things done in a unified way, at least in times of national or federal-level dysfunction, the people who can step in locally to provide some guidance and coordination are able to do so, and not actually be stymied or prevented from doing so by some authoritarian framework.
Imagine instead if we lived in a country with more organized / powerful central control, but was both authoritative and incompetent. We would be really fucked.
Naive question: how is this better than each of these states doing its own thing (even if those things end up looking similar)? What does California gain by teaming up with WA and OR, for example?
Better coordination between the states helps reduce chaos at the borders between the states. If OR opens a week before WA the people living near the border will be in a weird limbo, especially if they need to cross the border for work etc.
Look at the Netherlands and Belgium screaming at each other and threatening to close borders because one felt the other had too little restrictions.
Let’s just say it’s very much bad for your neighborhood of states to have that kind of situation. Closing borders or having diplomatic disasters isn’t worth it. It’s better to reach a common decision.
I'd rather everyone close their borders for now (except for cargo and essential travel, with testing/quarantine) and countries/states/regions respond however they see fit for their own populations. The regions with the best responses can be examples for the others to follow.
They should do a shared healthcare system as well. The future is states working together on their own thing, while letting chudland sink further into poverty.
From article 1, section 10 of the U.S. Constitution:
"No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay."
This scares me a bit. This agreement seems innocuous at first, but the constitution expressly forbids these (and all) kinds of agreements between states for a reason. A small pact like this today could tomorrow become leverage for secessionism or otherwise a power struggle with the federal government.
"State" in that context clearly refers to foreign nations (states) not states as in The United States Of America. Foreign power is distinct because it would refer to things like governments-in-exile or perhaps resistance groups.
> No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
It seems to me that it states “with another State”, as in a capital S State or a member State of the United States. Then explicitly calls out as another option, “or with a foreign power”.
Furthermore, the title of Article I, Section 10 of the US Constitution is “Powers Prohibited of States”.
Of note: "Not all compacts between states require explicit Congressional approval – the 1893 Supreme Court decision in Virginia v. Tennessee affirmed that only those agreements which would increase the power of states at the expense of the federal government required it."
I'm not claiming that this pact is formally one of these "interstate compacts", but your maximalist reading of that article forbidding "all kinds of agreements" seems to be incorrect.
> We need to see a decline in the rate of spread of the virus before large-scale reopening, and we will be working in coordination to identify the best metrics to guide this.
What's the end game here?
If you slow the spread, and then reopen, it'll spread again. Nothing will have changed, you'll just have delayed it a bit.
> Ensuring an ability to care for those who may become sick with COVID-19 and other conditions. This will require adequate hospital surge capacity and supplies of personal protective equipment.
Delaying it is the point, it ensures we have enough hospital capacity and PPE to handle the inevitable burst of cases when reopening. This is what people mean when they say "flatten the curve". If we simply open whenever and aren't prepared we'll have a massive spike in cases that exceeds hospital capacity, vs the current situation where the case growth is slower and hospitals are less burdened.
That assumes no investment in upgrading our hospital capacity and testing & PPE production.
At one end of the spectrum you have (mythically) infinite hospital capacity and staffing, testing capacity, and contact tracing ability. In that world, you reopen everything, and let people go about their lives.
At current capacity, we need to slow things down. If we can increase capacity enough in the coming weeks and months, we'll need to slow things down much less.
Things were quite bad but they've improved rapidly over the past weeks and months.
Hospitals have actually, counter-intuitively, seen a reduction in usage. The number of hospitalizations has been far lower than expected (~20% of IHME's modeled values) and when combined with the fact that non-COVID patients have been avoiding hospitals (even for serious emergencies like heart attacks and strokes!), many are reporting entire wards being completely unused according to reports from medical professionals on Twitter, Facebook, and r/medicine.
Also, 150,000 test results are coming in every day. That's 5x the per-capita testing rate of South Korea (~5,000 tests per day) and while we certainly can and should increase testing dramatically, the US is actually doing pretty well on testing relative to global numbers.
So far they have done 500000 tests, but they got started early, and controlled their outbreak much better. In recent news the US just bought 600000 tests from South Korea.
“The South Korean companies behind the kits are now churning out enough to test at least 135,000 people per day. The stabilizing situation at home has enabled these firms to export more of this extra capacity.”
Yes, I am willing to go about my regular life and risk contracting SARS-CoV-2, and I wouldn't visit any at risk friends or family in person while doing so.
This comment thread is one long chain of "the federal government has failed us", "Trump has failed us", etc.
Can one of you actually provide some rationale for why you think that? Do you just have no context on the State/Fed divide? Do you think that because everybody else is saying that, or because mass media is saying that, but don't actually have any facts to back it up?
Seriously, what do you expect Trump to do? What would you have him do? He didn't sneak into CDC labs and botch the first round of tests. He can't just snap his fingers and will millions of pounds of PPE into existence, he's not even the person actually coordinating any of this stuff and trying to get things done, he's just a figurehead.
If Trump did try to go to any greater lengths, the House would just scream that he was abusing his powers and try to Impeach him again.
Please explain your reasoning, I'm getting so tired of it, I'm convinced it's just partisan-driven mass hysteria combined with mass propaganda at this point. Don't like me to opinion pieces of somebody giving their opinion about how horrible Trump is. Link me to data, and tell me facts about what you would want him to do differently.
> Protecting the general public by ensuring any successful lifting of interventions includes the development of a system for testing, tracking and isolating. The states will work together to share best practices.
If there is a reasonable expectation of that happening in the next couple of weeks, then ok. If this is just "hope", then we should end the lockdown and let the flu run its course, like every year.
The overall mortality rate is about 2%, which may be unavoidable in the US even with social distancing, since I don't see any way for the US to emulate S. Korea's testing and tracing success.
Does anybody have any logical reason for thinking that the US can copy S. Korea?
Does the US have any way to do up to 600 million tests per week and see the result in an hour?
318 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] thread> President Trump tweeted Monday that the "decision to open up the states" following shutdown measures taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus lies with him, not governors.
https://www.axios.com/trump-coronavirus-reopening-governors-...
I wish someone who has direct reported to Trump in the past was on this site and could give insights into his actual managerial style.
edit: I'm not trying to talk politics, if that's why I'm being downvoted. My observations are that he is not a good manager. This is what I see in the news and what I read. Both from external media, the white house, and his own tweets. If you disagree, please explain why. I'm looking for hope and don't see any. I would love to.
I've never worked with the man directly, but I work with people who take direction from him. It isn't an act. This is not a mad genius playing the befuddled character at the microphone (Boris J) only to become a cool dictator behind the scenes. The chaos and incoherence you see on TV and twitter is the 24/7 reality.
https://apnews.com/c90b24e60a4853cebe96ec995b626f9b
CNN: "Experts say travel restrictions the Trump administration put in place to stop the novel coronavirus from spreading could have unintended consequences that undermine that effort." (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-travel-ban...)
The Atlantic: "Guiding Trump’s response is a hardheaded nationalism... Critics from WHO and elsewhere have said the bans are unnecessary and could generate a racist backlash against Chinese people." (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/02/trump-r...)
And finally, thankfully, it is illegal to refuse an American citizen entry to the United States.
> Quarantining is a fancy word for arrest, with zero cause.
I just don't know what to do with statements like these. If you truly believe that there is never any grounds for a health-related quarantine, then I don't think you're going to be able to have a productive discussion on this with most people here; your fundamental beliefs are just too far outside the norm (and outside reality, but that's another issue).
Quarantine in America is not new. https://www.lawfareblog.com/long-history-coercive-health-res...
There is probable cause. You probably have the virus. Spreading it around is negligent manslaughter. This court sentences you to two weeks in a hotel.
Under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S. Code § 264), the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States and between states.
CDC’s Role
Under 42 Code of Federal Regulations parts 70 and 71, CDC is authorized to detain, medically examine, and release persons arriving into the United States and traveling between states who are suspected of carrying these communicable diseases.
As part of its federal authority, CDC routinely monitors persons arriving at U.S. land border crossings and passengers and crew arriving at U.S. ports of entry for signs or symptoms of communicable diseases.
When alerted about an ill passenger or crew member by the pilot of a plane or captain of a ship, CDC may detain passengers and crew as necessary to investigate whether the cause of the illness on board is a communicable disease.
State, Local, and Tribal Law
States have police power functions to protect the health, safety, and welfare of persons within their borders. To control the spread of disease within their borders, states have laws to enforce the use of isolation and quarantine. In some states, local health authorities implement state law. In most states, breaking a quarantine order is a criminal misdemeanor.
> Although Democratic leaders and Democratic presidential candidates have been highly critical of Trump’s response to the coronavirus, we couldn’t find any examples of them directly and clearly criticizing the travel restrictions.
[0]: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...
There was a coordinated effort by some jouralists to smear Trump as xenophobic and racist for what he was trying to do. Today they're saying he didn't do enough. There were many stories that were essentially down playing the virus and dog whistling to readers about Trump being a racist/xenophobic for his early actions.
Edit: added video showing the media downplaying COVID-19 at late as March 3rd [3].
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/31/how-our-br...
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/03/why-we-sho...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/world/europe/coronavirus-...
[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=wVDPVBZF2Xg&...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/opinion/china-travel-coro... (2/5/20)
And even then, the criticism was of the form:
> Valid arguments may exist for shutting down the world to travelers originating in China — and shutting down China to the world — as a reasonable public health response. But the World Health Organization explicitly did not advise that any restriction of trade or travel was necessary when it declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern last week, and it still doesn’t. Instead, it has called for exit screening in international airports and domestic hubs in China.
What Trump did get a lot of flack on was travel banning countries like Nigeria at the same time, completely unrelated to the coronavirus:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/opinion/trump-travel-ban-...
Trump and his supporters have made up much of this narrative on their own without any actual action on the left, e.g. see:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/27/donald-tru...
To my understanding the ban only stopped direct flights from China. In other words flights to china were still able to travel everywhere else in the World and then from those layovers the Chinese were still able to fly into the US indirectly.
The virus made its way to US anyway and when it got out of hand the healthcare system was overwhelmed, the economy shutdown, supply chains broke down, we reached essentially 20% unemployment overnight...so I am not sure how his decision saved lives, it seems to me, his travel ban only delayed the virus...so assuming the travel ban wasn't put in place it seems to me the virus would have just been on our radar sooner and we would have done the same poor reactive responses. In other words, from the time of the ban in January to Trumps "15 days to slow the spread" how many test kits were ordered? How many N95 masks were ordered? How many ventilators? How much PPE? What did Trump do to prepare for the virus and save lives beyond travel bans, because it seems our healthcare systems were not prepared/supplied nor was FEMA prepared and mobilized until March.
Can you explain how his ban saved lives as opposed to delayed the virus?
I think they flipped the fuckit bit.
Regardless, this can be seen as a shot in the arm toward Casacadia because it is a demonstration of cross-state regional cooperation that would be necessary to further an independence movement.
For those unfamiliar, Cascadia is an independence movement around the NW bioregion of the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_(independence_movemen...
Edit to add more info:
While many Pacific NW folks are not familiar with Cascadia as an independence movement, fans of the Portland, Oregon soccer (football) team Portland Timbers often carry or fly the Cascadia independence movement's flag during games. Shown on the right side of this giant tifo:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2012/jun/28/portla...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone
(...sorry)
We are participants in the most creative and powerful world economy of all time. Regardless of geographical location, cultures are generally more unified and geared toward working together than ever. Markets have shown an impressive amount of resilience in the face of unprecedented fear messaging. People are ready to work hard; in fact they're wearing themselves out by working harder than they have before in many cases.
This is exactly the kind of action we need right now.
Or do you really see literally endless downside, and have thus decided to lock yourself out of actions you can take now to prepare for future upsides?
If so that would suck, because this could line up an epic self-fulfilling prophecy on a personal level. Still, a lot of people do that, and regret it later. They may get a few prophet points here and there, but that's it.
Now is the perfect time to take risks on a wide variety of factors, including those I mentioned above. But if you are only primed to foresee disaster, you probably can't do that. The comment seems to point at a low level of risk tolerance.
If only we had some sort of united group of all the States, where the response could be coordinated and centralized for maximum effectiveness.
This is kind of like that, but you could die.
Legally, is this possible in the US?
In Australia for example each state has closed or is controlling their borders with each other, and this seems to largely be a decision for each state (I don't think there's a federal law either way). I could imagine some states choosing to open up while others remain closed. Or if two states made big sacrifices but got the issue under control, while the others lagged behind, those two could open borders between themselves while remaining closed outside.
What in the US is legal has changed radically in the last three years.
Great question.
The Constitution is very clear that ultimate authority about Interstate Commerce belongs to Congress. States cannot bar travel from other states.
HOWEVER there is legislation enabling states to impose quarantines on people coming from other states. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/travel/coronavirus-us-tra... has information about such quarantine rules currently in place.
So stop travel, no. Make it difficult, we're going to see a lot of that.
We do, however by design that body does not have authoritarian control over things like 'shelter at home' regulations.
> Under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S. Code § 264), the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States and between states.
Nothing stops them from encouraging states, either. (We did this with speed limits, as an example. Want Federal highway funds? Play ball with the Feds.) Florida's Governor justified not issuing a stay-at-home order based on the White House not having asked him to.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/03/31/ron-desantis...
Perhaps through "encouragement" but that still leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
If that centralized and coordinated leadership is incompetent and/or corrupt, there is no Plan B.
I'm arguing letting the central federal government handle everything.
Centralization requires buy-in, and after at some point it becomes clear that sitting around waiting for other states to play ball can be equally disastrous.
In realpolitik terms, I doubt the federal government can stop this. What are they going to do? Send the army to force states to accept potentially infected people? That's basically an order to go kill your countrymen. I'd hope, given such an order, much of the military would defect.
The unwillingness to call for a nationwide lockdown is also a big one that has angered a lot of governors. And just today Trump tweeted that he has the authority to end lockdowns, which is a blatant lie.
So yeah, the response hasn't been great.
This is as opposed to ordering one of the several companies in the US who already make medical ventilators to simply make more ventilators.
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/04/coronavirus-colorado-p...
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/08/colorado-coronavirus-v...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/27/trump-ventil...
There is a concrete example of the Federal government seizing PPE, Ventilators ordered by the states. Then only giving them 20% of what they ordered.
Its basically legal theft.
Early in office, Trump got rid of the department created by Obama to respond to pandemics.
Early in this epidemic, we bungled getting testing out. Got it out in broken form. Had to get it out again. All the while we turned down an effective test advocated by the WHO. And when testing existed, had rules that tested so little that they missed the existence of community spread until it was well established.
Blocked private labs from developing and conducting tests. (Community spread was demonstrated by one who broke the federal rules. The reaction of the Trump administration was to come down on them for having conducted unauthorized tests.)
Well after it was clear that this was a pandemic that was not under control, Trump was spinning a narrative of this being no big deal.
Failed to declare a federal emergency and social distancing restrictions at a national level. Which caused a patchwork of inconsistent responses at the state level. California was in lockdown while COVID-19 was happily spreading among tourists on crowded Florida beaches.
I could go on. But right now the USA has 1/4 of all deaths worldwide from COVID-19. We are stilly dying faster, and didn't get there by accident.
The USA shipped out tests after other countries, and with a faulty reagent that caused false positives. Causing labs that should have been able to do their own tests to have to ship samples to an overwhelmed CDC. See https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/05/905484/why-the-c... for verification.
The CDC promised new tests, but they took weeks to arrive. In the meantime federal bureaucracy roadblocked the development of independent tests. Finally the Seattle Flu study went and ahead and tested...only to find that COVID-19 had community spread for several weeks in that testing vacuum. You can verify that at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de....
As far as disbanding the Pandemic team, it's not really true, there was a shuffling of who was in charge of it. It was finally transferred to the Vice President.
Let's go for a fuller version: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-trump-fired-pan...
Long story short, a number of people were let go, what was left was moved around in the bureaucracy, the political leadership left in charge claims that it still works, but the people left and other politicians claim that it was hamstrung.
Given that the US response has been so weak, it it questionable whether it operated at all effectively.
As far as I can tell, the FDA approved an emergency policy to Help Expedite the Availability of Diagnostics on Feb 19th.
Yes, at which point they created a bureaucratic nightmare for the approval process. As the NY Times article outlines, the lab that actually found community spread was NOT able to get through the approval process.
The US probably has more contact with China due to trade/travel than most other countries. I don't believe the numbers from China, they are sure to be way higher than they report.
Yes, the USA has a lot of travel. You are far from alone in not believing China. However there is no reason to believe that they are lying about having effectively shut down the virus. (Even the social distancing we are doing here seems to be working, and China was a lot more extreme.)
I don't think the Federal Government really has the ability to shut down a states beaches that aren't Federally managed.
Never underestimate the reach of the Commerce Clause. The President's ability to declare quarantines and apply them to whomever for whatever reason is extreme.
I don't know the limits for sure. But I doubt that he would have had less ability to act than various governors have had.
1. Ignored the pandemic response playbook. This document was prepared after the SARS outbreak and contained all the lesson s learned.
2. Reckless public statements. Calling the virus "no worse than a flu" and "a hoax" certainly caused people to not take it seriously and helped it to spread. Pushing the hrdroxocloriquine study before the research was conclusive has gotten people killed.
3. Depriving states of essential resources. Massachusetts not only had their request for masks denied, but also paid for their own masks only to have them seized for the "federal stockpile". In the end the governor had to get masks smuggled in on the New England Patriots private jet.
4. When New York projected it would run out of ventilators in 6 days, their request was denied on the grounds that Trump felt 30k ventilators was too big a number.
5. The emergency production act (or whatever it's called) could have been invoked at any time to address the ppe shortage. Afaik it hasn't been.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/13/832797592/a-month-after-emerg...
The US federal government waited until mid-March to order N95 respirators: https://apnews.com/090600c299a8cf07f5b44d92534856bc
Other governments acted much more quickly, for example Australia started doing so on February 7: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
The US government, in particular Trump, is responsible for this delayed response.
May be its posturing or may be its not.
I think the interests of White House and Governors are more in line than not.
Time will tell.
We do! It's called the United States government. I'll be letting the president know you're interested in him taking over and using his own ideas, instead of this one you seem to be particularly fond of.
Or, if that idea is slightly terrifying for you, perhaps it's a better idea that the states are handling this themselves. Your state conglomeration thing can always decide to use the National Guard to prevent outside travelers.
Europe, a group of many independent states, trying different approaches to a common problem, with an over-arching bureaucracy to coordinate between them... and the US approach sounds crazy to you?
Edit: not endorsing parent comment
I enjoy that you are making this point from the username "anoncareer0212"
The National Guard serves a dual role. Most of the time, it’s under the control of individual states, with the state governor acting as commander in chief. However, the president can activate the National Guard and place it under federal control. When this occurs, guard units are used to supplement the regular Army, bolstering its forces with additional combat units. [1]
1. https://science.howstuffworks.com/national-guard.htm
It's almost like the constitution was written to enable these things to happen, and prevent a corrupt and/or inept leader from forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on the nation!
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
States cannot discriminate against people from other states on the sole reason that they are from some other state.
Now... (I believe) they could use the National Guard to do wellness checks to make sure people don't have a fever, and potentially get them to quarantine, but it would have to be applied without regard to what state their license says. Though, the legality of forcing quarantine varies by state.
We're talking about forcibly keeping everyone in the country out of church. It's pretty disturbing to give that power to government, even temporarily. How long before it gets applied to other situations after the pandemic dies down?
What's to stop the president in 2030 from saying: "We're facing an epidemic of terrorism by [whoever] so we're keeping them from gathering in public."
Or: "There's an epidemic of [some crime] that uses the internet. We need to control it."
"We've agreed that we will use metrics...we are still deciding what these metrics will be."
I thought the Stay Home, Stay Healthy order (in Washington state) wasn't unreasonable and wasn't just political babble, but I don't really know what to make of this piece. Anyone want to try to explain it like I'm five?
The US governmental system has a long history of injecting bureaucratic nonsense that takes on a life of its own and ends up with outcomes like "teaching to the test" instead of being a net benefit.
I would feel differently if this were an announcement of a joint task force for sharing data to help each state make the best decisions possible. But this sounds to me like it will just make it harder for each state to make a decision on their own and that it probably doesn't really add any value. And that concerns me.
I have the same beef with Mayor Breed in San Francisco, who has otherwise shown standout leadership. She's publicly worried that people will let their guard done by assuming things are under control. Rather than worry about people's feelings and opinions, she should be setting expectations exactly as I described above.
Listen to Newsome's news conference today and the answer he gave to a reporter about his reaction to Trump's announcement that the decision to re-open the economy is his (Trump's) alone. It's a masterpiece.
Has this actually occurred?
I know NY asked for way more ventilators than they got, but as I understood it they were giving them out "just in time" rather than up front in case they were needed more elsewhere.
https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2020/03/28/aft...
We seem to be doing just fine here without the Federal Government. In fact we've sent 400 ventilators back to the national stockpile and we also returned the Army hospital that was established at Safeco Field back because we didn't need the capacity. Trump did eventually authorize FEMA to pay for the National Guard response here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/us/politics/coronavirus-f...
https://www.firehouse.com/safety-health/ppe/news/21133559/fe...
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/fema-denies-involvement...
I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but this smells real bad to me. The reports of confiscations are coming from democratic states, not republican states. And it seems like republican lobbyists are getting into the game of distributing PPE:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/bob-livingston-group-mike...
What it seems to me is happening is a coordinated yet amateurish attempt to restrict the PPE flow to/within democratic states, while allowing the free flow of PPE in republican states. This allows some lobbyists to make money off of it, as well as sticking a finger in the eye of dem leaders (and dying people/healthcare workers in dem states).
On the other hand, does the fire department for a town of 27,000 people really need 30,000 gowns, or could those be put to better use elsewhere?
Florida, where President Trump moved his residence to and who's governor he enjoys a special relationship with, has had greater success than other states in requesting and receiving allocations from the federal stockpile: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/despe...
Have you used Internet or watched American TV in last five years?
Anyone else is, of course, free to say whatever they want. (For the time being.)
I mean, I guess if your ambition is to hold office for decades, then you might be concerned. But the downside seems minimal to me. (But then, I'm neither in politics nor in Massachusetts, so what do I know?)
Pardon, English being my 2nd language, would it be a confederation or a union?
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/United_States_of_America#Com...
This (along with the NE pact) is probably a big "no, you're not" to Trump.
““”
Asked whether the collaboration among the states was a rebuke to the President Trump, who has said the decision about businesses reopening was his to make, Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said only that he was focused on making decisions based on facts and science, and he reiterated that an economic recovery was inextricable from a public health recovery.
Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania echoed Mr. Murphy’s comments in responding to a similar question.
“The sequence,” Mr. Wolf said, “is you’ve got to get people healthy first, and then you can reopen the economy.”
Interviewed later on CNN, Mr. Cuomo was more pointed in his remarks on who bears responsibility for restoring life to something like normal.
Trump administration officials, the governor said, could have enacted a nationwide shutdown to stem the spread of the virus.
“They didn’t,” he said. “They said we’re going to leave it to the states. Now all of a sudden when it comes time to open the economy, now it’s back to the federal government’s responsibility?”
“””
* Nursing homes, long-term care facilities, etc. will get some priority and focus.
* Socioeconomically-disadvantaged communities are taking indirect impacts from mitigation measures, and they will also get some priority and focus.
* We will not return to anything resembling normal until we have a way to efficiently test, track, and isolate at scale.
He was complaining to me the other day that Oregon's requirement that you are not allowed to pump your own gas is an obvious COVID transmission vector.
To get gas in Oregon, he follows these steps:
1.) pull up to gas station 2.) Roll down window to hand attendant (who isn't wearing a mask, nor is required to) his debit card. 3.) Get card back from attendant. 4.) Sanitize the debit card 5.) Sanitize his hands 6.) Hope that the attendant is washing his hands, and that he didn't breathe COVID onto him through the open window.
Not saying this isn't a great, noble effort.
Just saying that, in some aspects, these states aren't doing a good job on obvious things within their own borders.
Why the hell is Oregon still doing this, and not requiring masks from gas attendants anyway? Maybe it is required, but my brother told me he has yet to have an attendant wearing a mask, so possibly not enforced???
I would say "Definitely yes."
https://katu.com/news/local/initiative-looks-to-limit-number...
https://www.koin.com/oregon-2/oregon-loosens-self-service-re...
Have they further loosened it since late March?
"Effective immediately, gas stations will be allowed to let drivers pump their own gas if they meet any of the following requirements:
The owner (of the gas station) retains documentation that there are no employees available to work as an attendant, including documentation for absences and employee hiring and retention efforts; The owner is subject to State Fire Marshal audit and has posted safety signs for how to safely operate a fuel pump; and The hours of operation under this subsection do not exceed 10 consecutive hours. “During this unprecedented time of state emergency, we need to ensure that critical supply lines for fuels and other basic services remain uninterrupted,” said State Fire Marshal Jim Walker.
Additionally, active stations must abide by the Fire Marshal’s latest guidelines:
Prepare, implement and enforce social distancing policies consistent with guidance from the Oregon Health Authority, Require an attendant to be on duty to supervise self-service refueling consistent with the social distancing policies and help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 through sanitization measures, and Designate an employee at each station to implement and enforce the social distancing policies."
The above doesn't seem like it's actually self-service unless the owner has certain issues. My brother just told me he isn't seeing self-service at his area, and wasn't notified it was an option.
It seems nonplussed has two, almost contradictory definitions:
1. (of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react.
2. (of a person) not disconcerted; unperturbed.
The latter is an "informal" definition. This seems to be the process by which the word awful switched from meaning awe-inspiring to the opposite.
unsure about what to say, think, or do : perplexed
chiefly US : not bothered, surprised, or impressed by something
I'm an American. "Not impressed" is the closest thing I am seeing to what I was trying to convey. Unmoved might be a good substitute word in this case.
I quoted definitions from Google's search snippet.
Trump has been downplaying the seriousness of the disaster since January. He contradicts the statements of his own staff in the same press conference as the staff speaks. He exuberantly proclaims the effectiveness of "treatments" that haven't been studied in any serious way. All this is to say that we can't trust any decision he makes.
Contrast this with the way the Western governors have handled this. Inslee was one of the first governors to announce any kind of Social Distancing rules. And he followed Illinois in issuing a statewide Stay Home order that is probably the most restrictive such order in the states. There's a lot of evidence on the Washington DOH website that this is working and the spread of the disease is under control.
The fact is that Trump's response is mostly to bury the problem and apply wishful thinking when he can't bury the problem. The governors in this union are taking a facts-based approach to solving the problem that has largely been successful. And so it's a really bad idea to do anything that Trump advises the country to do because he has a track record of making really bad decisions throughout this crisis.
Edit: Massachusetts has also joined this pact as well (I thought it was surprising that it hadn't when I first read the news).
You can roughly see where you would expect these to form on this map. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaregions_of_the_United_Stat...
It's truly a great system.
I'm curious if these recently announced state pacts will be challenged in court. But legal or illegal, it doesn't excuse the poor job of federal management.
It also sounds like [2] things are rather flexible in what approval is and when it is obtained. It's plausible that they expect to ask for approval, or rely on it being unlikely that congress explicitly disapproves, or perhaps they expect to obtain approval in the future.
[note: I've linked to a point in the opinion discussing Congressional approval]
1: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=103881997639573...
2: https://www.gsgp.org/media/1313/understanding_interstate_com...
It would be wonderful if all the progressive/blue/Democratic states in the country could get together, and form an interstate compact for their mutual benefit and advancement.
However it's possible that a Republican-majority Supreme Court, seeing the benefit that's coming out a Democratic interstate compact, could strike it down, with partisan motives (just like they struck down parts of the BCRA with Citizens United, or the Voting Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder).
Just take a drug legalization. Many Republicans have been vehemently opposed to it. Take a look at the Supreme Court decision Gonzalez v. Raich, where Steve Scalia no less, wrote that the feds could interfere with your growing some plants inside your own home for your own personal use.
Remember that the "states rights" movement started as a response to federal action to end segregation. In my personal opinion, Republicans are just for whatever will push their agenda forward, without regard to the moral or ethical depravity involved in doing so.
Democrats, in contrast, are a bit more principled (in my opinion), especially when it comes to protecting the human rights, civil rights, voting rights, and other rights of the non-dominant groups in this country.
The position on "closing down" (that it was up to states) doesn't tell us anything about the administration's principle in regard to COVID because the administration is willing to change those "principles" very quickly, as evidenced by their current statements (among other actions taken by Republicans)
It's arguable that the position on closing down was based on the desire of the admin that the country remain "open", but was faced with legal/political difficulties in directly applying their desire to the country as a whole. What ever tactic is taken with respect to this Pact, we should be unsurprised if it ignores any "principles" and instead looks to effect the policy that Trump desires to put into place, or the effect on Trump's perception of his authority.
For example, he knew that getting hold of medical supplies and PPE would be difficult, and that the federal government would fail at it, so he put it in the states' hands. He didn't want to be blamed for shutting down the economy and forcing people to isolate themselves, so he allowed the states to decide. But now he wants us to believe that the "heroic" decision to open things back up again will be his, and his alone.
It's way older and more sinister than that. States' rights was first used to justify the continuation and expansion of the institution of slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_...
States Rights was dug up before the Civil War as a continuation of that argument, this time in the context of slavery.
Ah right, I'd forgotten about that. IIRC "What can the federal government do?" was a key question that divided Jeffersonians and Federalists.
OTOH, pacts like the popular vote compact signed by some states in the past few years is almost certainly unconstitutional.
Why would that be the case? Electors are not bound by any particular (federal) rules in how they cast their votes. If we look at the popular vote compact as a friendly handshake agreement (to which electors are not legally bound), they are free to fulfill the handshake agreement and vote along with the national popular vote.
Of course, if a signatory decides last-minute to betray that agreement, there perhaps would be no legal remedy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_compact
In Virgina v Tennessee, in 1893, the Supreme Court allows states to make compacts in all matters reserved to the states and the enforcement of which does not encumber federal rights.
And for the most part, at the consent of Congress, states keep armies and air forces (and many keep navies) as guaranteed by the second amendment.
I mean, Trump is calling himself a "Wartime President"[1]. And the virus technically is on American soil....
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/us/politics/coronavirus-t...
It'd be nice to think that the largest pandemic of the last century would allow for this, but given the current supreme court bench I guess I wouldn't really bet on it
In other cases where the Federal government does have jurisdiction, such as interstate treaties regarding shared resource rights, the Federal government can delegate the issue to a group of affected States to sort out amongst themselves e.g. the Colorado River Compact of 1922.
We have a federal government that has the power to take action. Republicans are stopping that from happening and so some states are choosing to fix it for themselves.
You get what you vote for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22828354
Today it is pandemic resolution. I fear that tomorrow, it might be economic ties, lockstep voting at the federal level, and National Guard drills, deployments, and contingency planning, where the West Coast slowly splits away from the rest of the country, with other states teaming up and following suit.
This isn't the end, and it's the only appropriate response to a federal government that cannot or will not execute on behalf of all states. It is, however, a reflection of the true state of our Union, and a sign of things to come if we don't reconcile our national identity.
I'm saddened, but not surprised, that a step like this was necessary given the circumstances.
Why fear? This is my dream!
The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. The smaller less populous states aren't going to just give up their outsized power voluntarily.
California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime.
You're talking nuclear missiles or chemical weapons fired against San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle from land-based silos in the Dakotas, or mutinies aboard our SSBNs, or Russian troops landing en masse in South Carolina to offer foreign assistance. It will mean the Balkanization of the country, where California has to station permanent garrisons in the Sierra Nevada mountains to ward off invasions from Texas or Mexico. You're not talking about a 40% drop in GDP this quarter, you're talking about famine and starvation, and complete international irrelevance after the dust settles. If only tens of millions of Americans die, that probably counts as a win.
"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Maybe the half life of radioactive isotopes is acceptable enough to relax habitation restrictions in a short enough period of time. People do currently live within the restricted zone of Chernobyl, they just have shortened lifespans, but they are functioning properly. You can probably garrison troops after nuking an area six months after doing so, as long as you cycle them out on a regular basis.
Maybe white-collar service workers are less valuable than blue-collar laborers, especially if they're already demoralized. You can torture a blue-collar worker to create output, albeit slower and lower quality and with Byzantine faults. You can't torture an asset management consultant to give you a high ROI. The brain doesn't work like that. So at that point he or she is just another mouth to feed and you can get rid of him or her. Extrapolate to an entire city.
Maybe it's just pure hatred. Most cities are highly Democratic and liberal, which today apparently labels someone as less than yourself, as someone less than human.
You begin your comment with this thesis, but without explanation.
I think secession, in my lifetime, is likely. I think civil war is vanishingly unlikely.
We remember Lincoln as an emancipator, but his words and actions don't support that. He was an advocate of institutional racism and drove away the people who actually wanted to end slavery, whether in peace or by war. He spent much more time discussing and devising his plan to deport and colonize all black people than he ever did working to end slavery.
I believe that our country missed a great opportunity to take an actual abolitionist position, which was being articulately and powerfully communicated by plenty of leaders who worked in better faith than the government ultimately did. I also believe that this missed opportunity is a substantial part of the reason that we still endure slavery today under the guise of a criminal justice system.
True, we have another egomaniacal, racist, populist President who pretends to understand economics and business. Hopefully history will remember Trump more accurately than Lincoln.
But very little else is similar in these scenarios. Perhaps most importantly, we have the internet now, so the very need for a central government in our daily lives is substantially decreased.
And even if the conditions were similar, it's a sufficiently complex situation that merely noting the similarity isn't enough to suppose that war is likely (let alone inevitable) in such a scenario.
This is pretty unlikely, if only because the fallout from nuclear weapons launched at the West Coast will blow back over the rest of the country, including over the regions that launch the missiles themselves. There's a reason short-range and battlefield nukes were never used in anger and it has nothing to do with morals.
The rest of your point stands. From a global perspective, a break-up of the U.S. is a very bad thing. Aside from the potential civil war here, it also means open-season on any countries that are basically U.S. protectorates (Taiwan, Japan, Israel, and much of Europe are toast); it hands global leadership over to China; it means financial chaos; and it could result in famines and food instability throughout the world (the U.S. is a major food exporter).
Not to mention, hatred is irrational anyways. At this stage, we're talking about an organization that will reduce its own negotiating lever on the world stage in order to subjugate innocent civilians, which we've already seen take place at various points in Syria and the Soviet Union. I would expect political commissars taking over the nuclear command authority to turn the keys, not USAF or USN personnel.
In many ways we've seceded from each other already. I, for one, live in a blue state but find it harder and harder to cope with life here from a cultural and political standpoint.
Secession may be the only peaceful way forward.
The West Coast is abundant in natural resources, provides good natural port access to the Pacific and Pacific nations, and provides a direct conduit to Alaska and its oil fields. The prospects of invasion depend on a cost benefit analysis.
Maybe cross-border drug traffic increases exponentially without DEA and Border Patrol, and you want to secure a region bent on escalating retaliation. Might also be an opportunity if half the population is too coked out to put up a fight. This was the First Opium War in China and the Century of Humiliation.
Maybe too many Americans are fleeing desperate circumstances into Mexico, and Mexico wants to stop refugee outflows while playing the hero bit. This was Vietnam + Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge.
Maybe global warming causes a chain of collapse towards underfunded and overextended governments in South America, and Mexico is itself invaded from the south and is running north. The collapse of Venezuela is a rehearsal of sorts.
The Federalist Papers contain examples out the wazoo of a "country" turning on itself, as warnings against disunion. Highly encourage reading them.
Quite frankly, it doesn't need to make sense. It needs to be possible.
Someone needs to secede so the rest of us can divest our tens of trillions of national debt.
There are conceivable ways that things can be fixed - constitutional convention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_and_secession_in_Cal...
This is untrue. We could simply add more Senators by admitting more states into the Union. Kinda like we did with Alaska and Hawaii.
Millions of citizens in DC are without Senatorial representation not to mention Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Guam or many other "protectorates".
It can be done without dissolution of the US. It requires a simple majority vote in the Senate and House and Presidential approval.
Also, if this "pact" leaves the United States, that is when I'll be leaving the shithole called CA. I'm not paying for the free riders anymore.
Not to mention retirement funds which are going to be obliterated, but that's a somewhat separate issue from the budget.
That seems pretty far-fetched.
Much more likely (and welcome) would be a sort of "legal coup", where the states that still have functioning governments band together in the task of reshaping the federal government through voting and legislative power.
We're certainly approaching a breaking point in the dysfunction of the federal government and its inability to do its job and serve a society; something has got to give. But I still think any kind of civil war scenario remains far, far out of the question.
I think the situation we're in right now is pretty much a "legal coup" by a motivated minority. It'll be a slog to get back to representative democracy.
I read "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb recently, and he mentioned how his home country of Lebanon went from diverse paradise to all-out civil war in six weeks, or 1.5 months. About the same time as "just a flu" to today.
For all our sakes, I hope to God I'm wrong and I hope to God you're right.
When Trump threaten to "shutdown" travel between the North East States, people had to tell him that he did not have the authority to do that.
And I definitely promise you that my news organization will have no bias or slant, and will only report facts.
So there's a lot of pressure to reopen but no political cover to do so. I think the entire point of this pact is to provide that cover.
Even when reopening is clearly the right thing to do nobody will want to personally take the fall. It's the reason the US has a high incarceration rate, nobody wants to be the one to release a ton of people from jail even if it's the right thing to do.
Do you have any actual data for this?
You're aware that even programs on reduced budgets can offer a reduced set of services, and prioritize the ones with most impact? (i.e. most lifesaving potential). And that their work will be far easier if there are fewer total sick people in the system? Have you balanced the effects of that versus letting the virus run amok so that the tax receipts aren't impacted?
That's why I'm asking for numbers. Otherwise "a bad economy will kill more people" is a fuzzy assertion that sounds "cool" and "contrarian" but has no actual substance.
Here are my numbers btw:
"Our finding that all-cause mortality decreased during the Great Recession is consistent with previous studies. Some categories of cause-specific mortality, notably cardiovascular disease, also follow this pattern, and are more pronounced for certain gender and age groups. Our study also suggests that the recent recession contributed to the growth in deaths from overdoses of prescription drugs in working-age adults in metropolitan areas. Additional research investigating the mechanisms underlying the health consequences of macroeconomic conditions is warranted."[1]
In the last big recession, deaths due to certain causes went up but overall mortality decreased. So what you're saying definitively did not happen in the only other comparable situation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28772108
I'm not saying that, but I could have been more clear.
The Great Recession is not a great comparison to a continued lockdown scenario, unemployment peaked at 10% while current reports are putting us already at ~14% and rising. The recession reduced demand but didn't wipe out sectors, nor did it cascade nearly as fast. Heart attacks and traffic fatalities will go down as the studies show.
I don't think I'm being contrarian, these pacts were setup to provide the political cover necessary for those qualified to make the call. My prediction is CA/OR/WA reopen on roughly the same schedule as everyone else, with just slight stricter restrictions. Such as quarantining the sick, isolating the high-risk, and other measures to bring the CFR down.
Criticize the state/federal model though you might for how it sometimes dilutes the ability to get things done in a unified way, at least in times of national or federal-level dysfunction, the people who can step in locally to provide some guidance and coordination are able to do so, and not actually be stymied or prevented from doing so by some authoritarian framework.
Imagine instead if we lived in a country with more organized / powerful central control, but was both authoritative and incompetent. We would be really fucked.
Let’s just say it’s very much bad for your neighborhood of states to have that kind of situation. Closing borders or having diplomatic disasters isn’t worth it. It’s better to reach a common decision.
"No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay."
This scares me a bit. This agreement seems innocuous at first, but the constitution expressly forbids these (and all) kinds of agreements between states for a reason. A small pact like this today could tomorrow become leverage for secessionism or otherwise a power struggle with the federal government.
It seems to me that it states “with another State”, as in a capital S State or a member State of the United States. Then explicitly calls out as another option, “or with a foreign power”.
Furthermore, the title of Article I, Section 10 of the US Constitution is “Powers Prohibited of States”.
Of note: "Not all compacts between states require explicit Congressional approval – the 1893 Supreme Court decision in Virginia v. Tennessee affirmed that only those agreements which would increase the power of states at the expense of the federal government required it."
I'm not claiming that this pact is formally one of these "interstate compacts", but your maximalist reading of that article forbidding "all kinds of agreements" seems to be incorrect.
What's the end game here?
If you slow the spread, and then reopen, it'll spread again. Nothing will have changed, you'll just have delayed it a bit.
> Ensuring an ability to care for those who may become sick with COVID-19 and other conditions. This will require adequate hospital surge capacity and supplies of personal protective equipment.
Delaying it is the point, it ensures we have enough hospital capacity and PPE to handle the inevitable burst of cases when reopening. This is what people mean when they say "flatten the curve". If we simply open whenever and aren't prepared we'll have a massive spike in cases that exceeds hospital capacity, vs the current situation where the case growth is slower and hospitals are less burdened.
At one end of the spectrum you have (mythically) infinite hospital capacity and staffing, testing capacity, and contact tracing ability. In that world, you reopen everything, and let people go about their lives.
At current capacity, we need to slow things down. If we can increase capacity enough in the coming weeks and months, we'll need to slow things down much less.
Hospitals have actually, counter-intuitively, seen a reduction in usage. The number of hospitalizations has been far lower than expected (~20% of IHME's modeled values) and when combined with the fact that non-COVID patients have been avoiding hospitals (even for serious emergencies like heart attacks and strokes!), many are reporting entire wards being completely unused according to reports from medical professionals on Twitter, Facebook, and r/medicine.
Also, 150,000 test results are coming in every day. That's 5x the per-capita testing rate of South Korea (~5,000 tests per day) and while we certainly can and should increase testing dramatically, the US is actually doing pretty well on testing relative to global numbers.
So far they have done 500000 tests, but they got started early, and controlled their outbreak much better. In recent news the US just bought 600000 tests from South Korea.
“The South Korean companies behind the kits are now churning out enough to test at least 135,000 people per day. The stabilizing situation at home has enabled these firms to export more of this extra capacity.”
Can one of you actually provide some rationale for why you think that? Do you just have no context on the State/Fed divide? Do you think that because everybody else is saying that, or because mass media is saying that, but don't actually have any facts to back it up?
Seriously, what do you expect Trump to do? What would you have him do? He didn't sneak into CDC labs and botch the first round of tests. He can't just snap his fingers and will millions of pounds of PPE into existence, he's not even the person actually coordinating any of this stuff and trying to get things done, he's just a figurehead.
If Trump did try to go to any greater lengths, the House would just scream that he was abusing his powers and try to Impeach him again.
Please explain your reasoning, I'm getting so tired of it, I'm convinced it's just partisan-driven mass hysteria combined with mass propaganda at this point. Don't like me to opinion pieces of somebody giving their opinion about how horrible Trump is. Link me to data, and tell me facts about what you would want him to do differently.
If there is a reasonable expectation of that happening in the next couple of weeks, then ok. If this is just "hope", then we should end the lockdown and let the flu run its course, like every year.
The overall mortality rate is about 2%, which may be unavoidable in the US even with social distancing, since I don't see any way for the US to emulate S. Korea's testing and tracing success.
Does anybody have any logical reason for thinking that the US can copy S. Korea?
Does the US have any way to do up to 600 million tests per week and see the result in an hour?