Virus thread, the political one.

[Chik]

The UK taxman wants to tax healthcare workers for regular Covid-19 tests as benefit in kind.

Workers forced to pay more than PS3, a year in tax for their own coronavirus tests

Really, WTF...

[ides1056]

"The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us."

Artists and Writers Warn of an ‘Intolerant Climate.’ Reaction Is Swift. - The New York Times

[ldamelio]

Pulling out of the WHO, threatening to cut funds from schools that open all while the American south is the Covid epicenter of the PLANET. Please rouse every breathing adult human you know to vote in November.

[vertical_doug]

Pulling out of the WHO, threatening to cut funds from schools that open all while the American south is the Covid epicenter of the PLANET. Please rouse every breathing adult human you know to vote in November.

The sad part is Dr. Birx gave a quite thorough interview on Bloomberg yesterday about the process of opening schools and all the areas that have to be considered. It was well thought out and showed the real world complexities that need to be considered.

For K-12, a big consideration is although the children may be okay if they contract coronavirus, many lower income children live in extended families where they may have regular exposure to older grandparents etc. If a asymptomatic child brings the virus home, it can have devastating consequences for the family. How do you deal with this?

Instead of having interactions with the entire student body, they are considering ways to limit students to a specific subgroup of students, that way the monitoring needs to conducted on just that group and if someone tests, if may be possible to only quarantine that group and have other groups still attend class. Since you have subgroups, you can day at school, day online rotate the groups to free up the space needed to socially distance. etc etc

For universities, Dr Birx thought it may be easier since many Universities have hospitals associated with them and have huge testing potential. She thought a 10% surveillance testing of the student population segregated by living conditions (10% of a given dorm tested) you can keep a handle on spread of virus. You still have to figure out how to work with off-campus housing etc.

But you could at least understand in the interview the thought process on how you try to keep a student population safe.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fast forward to today

Trump tweets- Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other schools are open with no problems. blah blah

I don't agree with CDC on their guidelines for schools.....
blah blah

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This really boggles the mind. Yes schools in other countries are open but if you look at the details (details matter) these countries are all centrally funded by the government and have taken some extreme measures (impractical as Trump would say if he bothered to look).

Many of the schools at regularly administering Covid19 tests on the student population. They have spread desks and shifted classes to socially distance. Children in Taipei can be seen eating their lunch alone at their desks with three sides screened from all other children. I've seen junior high students in Germany self administering their tests. Face masks.. etc

He really doesn't give a sh!t about anything but optics.


The whole issue about busing and other matters are not worked out yet.

[ldamelio]

Pulling out of the WHO, threatening to cut funds from schools that open all while the American south is the Covid epicenter of the PLANET. Please rouse every breathing adult human you know to vote in November.

That should have been schools that don't open...........

[Sbti]

I'm really enjoying this summer. No one has been sick lately. All the plays, classical and rock concerts we've attended have been great. Packed restaurants. Visiting my kids in their full summer school classrooms and taking them on field trips to the amusement parks. All the group rides and charity rides have been well attended. My sports teams have been doing well in front of packed stadiums with all of us fans cheering them on.

Then I woke up. This dream was in New Zealand.

[Bob Ross]

For universities, Dr Birx thought it may be easier since many Universities have hospitals associated with them and have huge testing potential.

As the graduate of two music schools, ^^^this comment pisses me off enormously.

[vertical_doug]

As the graduate of two music schools, ^^^this comment pisses me off enormously.

It shouldn't. Let's say Julliard needs testing. As part of the US Gov coordinated testing approach, why wouldn't US Gov help underwrite the testing the students required at NY-Pres (Columbia), or NYU-Langone (NYU) just to name two. They already will be requesting aid for their own college students. or you could use the brand new Cornell-Weill facilities... a lot of capacity in NYC...

Oh wait, silly me, the US doesn't have a coordinated policy of testing for schools and President is threatening to cut funding if they don't open. I guess another example of cart before the horse.
If you have a leader who doesn't believe in process or details, and manages by decree on twitter, this whole coordination thing is kind of tough.

[Sbti]

Well, Shucky Ducky. Who could have foreseen this?
Trump rally ‘likely’ source of virus surge.

Health official: Trump rally '''likely''' source of virus surge

[thollandpe]

It just gets sicker and sicker. Pressuring schools to open by threatening to cut off funding. For schools that are already underfunded, and desperate.

This is how a government, presently controlled by a bunch of small-government and/or anti-government zealots, proves that their fundamentalist beliefs are correct. By completely fucking up the government's response. A response to a threat that requires a centralized response. But they imagine that a public/private partnership, driven by the innovation and capitalization of the private sector, will save the day.

Our schools, especially the K-12 schools, do not have the resources to prepare for this and they no longer have the time. They -- we -- can't even afford to marshal the planning and design resources to meet this challenge, nevermind the personnel and materials that it will take to implement the necessary changes. It's as if the plan is to simply lurch into yet another disaster. Or the next stage of the disaster.

Our knowledge of the virus tells us that indoor airborne transmission is a huge problem. Some of the things we'll have to do are:

• Testing to identify, track, and contain outbreaks
• Plan for physical distancing: reprogram spaces, set and enforce traffic patterns
• Radically increase cleaning practices both during and after occupancy (and hire more staff to do it)
• Provide proper PPE to school employees and students who can't or don't bring their own (this thrown on top of an existing shortage of PPE)
• Upgrade air filters in systems that recirculate air (and make sure your systems can handle the upgraded filters)
• Check for proper ventilation, and repair systems that aren't functioning properly
• Schedule systems so that they run for pre-occupancy periods to flush out the air

That list is nowhere near comprehensive. Just think of looking at things from a school nurse's perspective. Or a janitor's.

These schools need a cookbook, a recipe. It shouldn't be up to every school to develop, implement, and adjust these plans on their own. I've spent months just figuring out how to apply the guidelines on ventilation, air filtration, air cleaning, and humidity control but I learn something new every damn day. I'm only doing this with teams in higher ed, and cannot imagine trying to do this across a K-12 school system over the next 6-8 weeks. It's critical to ensure the safety of teachers, staff, students, and parents. We cannot afford to screw this up.

Old Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down.

[guido]

Because we all know blackmail is the only way to make america great again...

[vertical_doug]

It just gets sicker and sicker. Pressuring schools to open by threatening to cut off funding. For schools that are already underfunded, and desperate.

This is how a government, presently controlled by a bunch of small-government and/or anti-government zealots, proves that their fundamentalist beliefs are correct. By completely fucking up the government's response. A response to a threat that requires a centralized response. But they imagine that a public/private partnership, driven by the innovation and capitalization of the private sector, will save the day.

Our schools, especially the K-12 schools, do not have the resources to prepare for this and they no longer have the time. They -- we -- can't even afford to marshal the planning and design resources to meet this challenge, nevermind the personnel and materials that it will take to implement the necessary changes. It's as if the plan is to simply lurch into yet another disaster. Or the next stage of the disaster.

Our knowledge of the virus tells us that indoor airborne transmission is a huge problem. Some of the things we'll have to do are:

• Testing to identify, track, and contain outbreaks
• Plan for physical distancing: reprogram spaces, set and enforce traffic patterns
• Radically increase cleaning practices both during and after occupancy (and hire more staff to do it)
• Provide proper PPE to school employees and students who can't or don't bring their own (this thrown on top of an existing shortage of PPE)
• Upgrade air filters in systems that recirculate air (and make sure your systems can handle the upgraded filters)
• Check for proper ventilation, and repair systems that aren't functioning properly
• Schedule systems so that they run for pre-occupancy periods to flush out the air

That list is nowhere near comprehensive. Just think of looking at things from a school nurse's perspective. Or a janitor's.

These schools need a cookbook, a recipe. It shouldn't be up to every school to develop, implement, and adjust these plans on their own. I've spent months just figuring out how to apply the guidelines on ventilation, air filtration, air cleaning, and humidity control but I learn something new every damn day. I'm only doing this with teams in higher ed, and cannot imagine trying to do this across a K-12 school system over the next 6-8 weeks. It's critical to ensure the safety of teachers, staff, students, and parents. We cannot afford to screw this up.

Old Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down.

This sounds hard, impractical and expensive. I'm hearing very good things about Operation Warp Speed.
(Operation Warp Speed is the ultimate bezzle In Economics, What Is “The Bezzle?” – moneyFYI)

[thollandpe]

Cash for cleaners.

Sign up as a custodian and you get $20 an hour plus benefits. Training and PPE provided.

Ideas like that are coming out of the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute faster than the WSJ can print them, right?

[guido]

Opinion | Donald Trump's Deadly Coronavirus Delusions - The New York Times

"I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling more and more as if we’re all trapped on the Titanic — except that this time around the captain is a madman who insists on steering straight for the iceberg. And his crew is too cowardly to contradict him, let alone mutiny to save the passengers.

A month ago it was still possible to hope that the push by Donald Trump and the Trumpist governors of Sunbelt states to relax social distancing and reopen businesses like restaurants and bars — even though we met none of the criteria for doing so safely — wouldn’t have completely catastrophic results.

At this point, however, it’s clear that everything the experts warned was likely to happen, is happening. Daily new cases of Covid-19 are running two and a half times as high as in early June, and rising fast. Hospitals in early-reopening states are under terrible pressure. National death totals are still declining thanks to falling fatalities in the Northeast, but they’re rising in the Sunbelt, and the worst is surely yet to come.

A normal president and a normal political party would be horrified by this turn of events. They would realize that they made a bad call and that it was time for a major course correction; they would start taking warnings from health experts seriously.

But Trump, who began his presidency with a lurid, fact-challenged rant about “American carnage,” seems completely untroubled by the toll from a pandemic that seems certain to kill more Americans than were murdered over the whole of the past decade. And he’s doubling down on his rejection of expertise, this week demanding full reopening of schools in defiance of existing guidelines."

[guido]

Donald Trump, President Winning-by-Losing, Is, in Fact, Losing | The New Yorker

"Soon after the Supreme Court ruled, on Thursday morning, against Donald Trump’s effort to stop a Manhattan prosecutor from obtaining his tax returns, the President lamented how unjust the decision was. “Courts in the past have given ‘broad deference,’ ” he tweeted. “BUT NOT ME!” He elaborated: “This is all a political prosecution,” he said. “Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!” POTUS is, as ever, a whiny loser.

His whinging, though, should not obscure the fact that Trump, yet again, has escaped to fight another day. In a 7–2 ruling, the Justices, including two Trump appointees, reaffirmed the principle that no one, not even the President, is above the law. But the decision allowed Trump to continue fighting in lower courts over the terms under which he must comply, a ruling that makes it all but certain that he will not have to turn over his tax returns before this fall’s Presidential election. He may lament “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT,” but Trump seems to have once more managed to avoid having to produce information about his sketchy finances before facing voters. Losing just might be a form of winning after all. Sure enough, that was exactly what Trump’s advisers took to claiming. “This was a win for the President,” the Administration’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, declared from the White House lectern. Asked about Trump’s angry tweets, McEnany simply dismissed them as “general” comments. “It is a big win,” she added, before also saying, confusingly, that the President agreed with the dissenters in the case. “I would underscore the victory here.”

This is classic Trump Administration doublespeak. Reality is whatever the Trumpians say it is. The Supreme Court decision can be both terribly unfair and a great win. And why not? Trump has made a career of turning bad news into good, of rewriting bankruptcies and divorces and unfulfilled promises into spectacular accomplishments. After his Republican Party lost the House of Representatives, in 2018, Trump called the midterm-election results a “Big Victory.” After the special counsel Robert Mueller submitted a report, in 2019, documenting ten instances in which the President engaged in obstruction of justice, Trump called the report “complete and total Vindication.” But his problems now seem to be piling up, and I am not just referring to the question of when and how he will finally have to turn over his tax returns. As the coronavirus surges once again across America, polls show Trump losing more support by the day. This week, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report issued its July Electoral College ratings and determined that, as of right now, the Presidential election looks like a “Democratic tsunami.” Even the reliably pro-Trump polling agency Rasmussen registered the President at the lowest approval level of his tenure, with just thirty-nine-per-cent support. No wonder Trump is whining. He is always about “ME!” The question of the moment is this: With Americans suffering so deeply from the pandemic and the attendant economic crisis, and with a national election to decide his fate only a hundred and seventeen days away, can Trump pull off his most epic act of winning by losing yet?

In her scorching new book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” Trump’s niece Mary Trump portrays her Uncle Donald as an abusive narcissist with a rampant and undiagnosed “antisocial personality disorder,” and she blames many of his evident character flaws on his father, Fred, a “sociopath” who withheld love from his son when he needed it most—as a small child. It might seem contradictory—beyond even Trump’s standards—to claim in the course of a few hours that the Supreme Court had been wildly unfair to him and had also handed him a significant victory. But his niece, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, shows that this has long been Trump’s way. In the early nineteen-nineties, she notes, when his business was in “increasingly serious trouble” and banks were refusing to extend him any more credit, Trump found a long list of others to blame. “Nothing was ever fair to him,” she writes. At the same time, Trump had to please his father by continuing to portray himself as a wild success. The future President’s demanding patriarch would not accept anything less. In the book’s particularly to-the-point conclusion, Mary Trump describes the “toxic positivity” that she says is his family legacy. The President, in other words, is simply incapable of accepting a harsh or unpleasant reality. He has no choice but to deny it. Losing is winning for him. It has to be."

[ides1056]

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

[guido]

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

Brilliant! Thanks for this.

[mzilliox]

so is there any truth to this rumor he will just drop out of the race? what are the odds? when we find out whats in his taxes (or whats not in them) then what? do people still like the guy?
Ive been out of the news cycle lately, trying to catch up, but sheesh, it looks like people might actually be coming around to the idea that the guy is an undeniable fraud? do republicans and conservatives finally see they have been made fools of, that the president is neither of these things and just a grifter on an "I told you so" journey of narcissistic self therapy?

[vertical_doug]

so is there any truth to this rumor he will just drop out of the race? what are the odds? when we find out whats in his taxes (or whats not in them) then what? do people still like the guy?
Ive been out of the news cycle lately, trying to catch up, but sheesh, it looks like people might actually be coming around to the idea that the guy is an undeniable fraud? do republicans and conservatives finally see they have been made fools of, that the president is neither of these things and just a grifter on an "I told you so" journey of narcissistic self therapy?

I think his odds of winning are much higher than the media reports. So zero chance he quits.

The mail-in voter fraud of 20% tweets are there to serve a purpose.

[Sbti]

I think his odds of winning are much higher than the media reports. So zero chance he quits.

The mail-in voter fraud of 20% tweets are there to serve a purpose.

Quits? There is ZERO chance he loses! Remember Nancy Pelosi tore up a copy of the State of the Union address on LIVE nationwide television!! That was the death knell for any candidate of the Democrat party right then and there. End of story! And Joe is.. um...sleepy or something. Also, BREAKING NEWS! The 'resident says he has just aced a cognitive test at Walter Reed in front of doctors and they said it was an unbelievable thing.