By the way, for those that haven't read it, yesterday's New York Times deep dive into the Trump admin's handling of this outbreak should put too rest any notion that they've done "okay." It's deeply sourced, and illustrates how the admin pushed back against anybody internally that urged for severe steps, and made messaging their sole response.

The NSC had intelligence in early January and within weeks began floating suggestions about closing things down.

Peter Navarro, one of his trade advisors who was at the time leading the White House's Covid task force, published a memo on January 29th that Trump was briefed on that warned hundreds of thousands of deaths and economic calamity if steps weren't taken. Trump was upset Navarro had put that in writing.

Alex Azar warned him on 1/30. Trump told him he was being alarmist.

The top disaster response official at the Dept of Health and Human services began insisting on 2/21 that things would have to be shut down.

The task force was scheduled to present those findings to the President on 2/26, but when Nancy Messonnier, the Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, have a press conference warning of the severity, and it led to a stock market crash, Trump called Azar and insisted his task force had unnecessarily scared people and Trump cancelled the meeting where his own task force was going to advocate to him a stance of social distancing. That night, Trump held a Press Conference where he gave control of the Task force to Pence, effectively firing Azar. An additional 3 weeks passed before Trump would publicly acknowledge the need for social distancing. This approach -- based on the agenda and data created for the meeting that never happened -- would eventually be implemented three weeks later.

For a full month, the Administration did nothing. No preparation for testing, no preparation for procuring necessary supplies. In fact, exports of supplies increased during that time. The risk was downplayed publicly as policy. All because of concerns over how the stock market would impact his re-election odds.

This was a failure of epic proportions. The fallout from this was going to be bad, regardless of who was in charge. But because the man in charge is a man who has actively eschewed expertise in favor of his own instinct, things turned out much, much worse.

The GOP shouldn't even renominate him, this failure has been so catastrophic. But instead they're going to do everything in their power between now and November to make it harder for people to vote, because they know lower turnout is the only way they win. Trump has already started railing against mail ballots, and the GOP is going to use Wisconsin as their playbook. They'll use anti-Demicratic means to ensure a failed President is reelected.

I fear the American experiment is reaching it's conclusion. If this pandemic is still active, or reemerges in November, the issue of voter eligibility will rear it's head in a way that I suspect will officially stamp out what was left of the appearance of Democracy in the US. One party will have decided that to maintain power, they need to legislate a means for a minority of Americans to determine who governs us, and they will do so on the back of blatantly false propaganda about voter fraud. What's left of America once you strip out democracy?

Anyhow, that's the end of my rant. Here's the link to the Times piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronaviru...

Dark times, I'm afraid.

In other news, one business that is considered essential is food processing. Unfortunately, it is being hit hard with COVID19. Smithfield just closed a huge meat processing plant in South Dakota because 293 of the 3700 people at that plant have tested positive. That accounts for nearly half of the 730 people in South Dakota who have tested positive. Similarly, the bump in cases in Nebraska in the Grand Island/Hastings area was almost all from people working at food processing facilities.

The reason this is concerning is because we all need food processors to be able to stay open. The SD plant, for example, produces 18 million servings of food per day. If the food processors are shut down, the country could follow the Covid19 crisis with a food shortage.

Most government screw ups happen at the level of career employees. Since they aren't accountable for their actions, and essentially can't be terminated regardless of whether they do a bad job, or no job at all, why would you expect a change at the top to affect anything? It's kind of like changing the head of the VA and expecting them to be able to have any impact on the quality of care; it is impossible unless you make it possible to fire people who aren't doing their job.

In other good news, the death rate appears to have peaked everywhere except New York and Michigan. Death rate in those two states combined rose from 4.9% to 5.1% from Saturday to Sunday. In the remaining states, a few were slightly up, and a few were slightly down, but overall, if you exclude New York and Michigan, the death rate remained constant at 3.2% in the remainder of the US. That's a good sign that as doctors gain experience with this, and become familiar with treatment options, care is improving.

Having death rates "remain constant" is a bigger improvement than you might think, at first glance. Why? Because if you suddenly stopped getting new cases today, some of the people who are already sick would continue to die, so you would have rising deaths and constant cases, meaning the CFR would rise. Thus, having it remain constant in the face of declining numbers of new cases shows a significant improvement in care. Hopefully Michigan and New York will peak, and see improvements, too, soon.

I took it that way, which was why I included the example of the head of the VA.

I actually think that the unemployment offices are doing pretty well, considering that they are getting about 30x their normal workload. How would any office deal with such an unprecedented load? Not well. The same for the stimulus checks and the SBA loans. The bill was only passed a couple weeks ago, so there hasn't been any time to build an infrastructure to handle it.

Getting back to the original topic, here's a comparison of New York's response to Califonia's response:
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/7/21205890/coronavirus-covid-1...

Being an amateur meteorologist, I can tell you that when the Hurricane Center uses highly complex models (GFS and the European) and they bust causing a city or state's tourist industry to shut down for a weekend or longer during the summer, there is political hell to pay. I can't even begin to imagine the blow back that will occur from this debacle. Imperial College and the University of Washington predicted over 200,000 deaths with strong mitigation and warned Sweden that if they didn't lock down (which they have not) they could face a significant portion of their populace in the hospital, with many dead. Well there is no hospital bed shortage in Stockholm, and the beers and shots continue to be poured in their bars as well. They are on track for their usual number of deaths in a typical flu season. Now these self professed experts have dropped their death count to well below 50,000 for the US, the usual flu deaths for this country.

Once again the so called expert class got it wrong. Even one of their own, former New York Times writer Alex Berenson has faced their wrath because he used data showing the coming debacle weeks ago. The repercussions of this are going to felt for a very long time to come.
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7...

If the President said he was going to keep the Lock Down in effect past April 30 with no adjustments, his base would hold him accountable. I believe this is why he has said for sometime that we have to open up the country again, sooner rather than later. My sense is he feels used by the experts that said a death spiral would emerge if he didn't lock down the country. Lately, Dr. Fauci has said he doesn't want to anger his corona virus modeling friends, but models are just that models, and they have been wrong.

When you cry wolf and shut down the country and people lose their life long dreams and hard earned businesses, they will never listen again. The self described expert class has got to realize that have opened up Pandora's box. For conservatives the long held fear that the government could take away your guns, shut down your businesses, lock up churches etc. seems a little closer to reality. If the Governor of Kentucky can send the State Police to write down the license plate numbers of someone in a church parking lot in rural Kentucky, and the Governor of Michigan can have someone in rural Michigan arrested for buying gardening supplies, anything in possible.

Bobcat Love's Sense of Shame, that's a very interesting answer. I mentioned my amateur weather background. I can tell that as long as I remember when there is a hurricane forecast that is a bust, and it causes people to lose money from vacation rentals, food and beverage business etc. They never blame the state's governor, no matter the political party, they blame the Hurricane Center and their models.

Governor Cuomo who is a pale comparison of the political pro is father was, at least as some of his father's political DNA to want to open the schools, government, and the city's businesses. He's never taken a swipe at the President like Comrade DeBlasio has. Governor Cuomo has gone out of his way to praise the President. I don't care how smart you claim to be if you are the Democrat Governor of Kentucky and you think harassing churchgoers on Easter Sunday is a good thing, you haven't a clue. The same goes for the Democrat Governor of Michigan who won't allow garden shops to open so rural folks can do some outside work, yet she never lifted a finger while prosecutor to do anything about the Opioid epidemic in her area. I mean these two governors as Lyndon Johnson would say, don't have the political skills to successfully carry out the duties of being the county dog catcher.

We could go on forever about this. However, I will make this point and move on. I will agree with you that we would be hopelessly lost as a country if there weren't repercussions. I can tell you this from the working class/shopkeeper folks I know who are seething with anger about the losses they are incurring, and believe me they aren't blaming President Trump.

I have a couple of friends in the medical profession (a nurse and a surgeon.) She (the nurse) is so angry about folks she knows, whose hours are being cut because outside of hot spots areas; in her words, many hospitals are ghost towns with few people to help because they have told their procedures will have to be done later.

My friend who is a surgeon tells me many patients have had their elective surgeries postponed, even though an overwhelming majority of hospitals have few if any Covid patients and his patients need the help. He also believes that herd immunity (sheltering the vulnerable) and taking precautions besides a shutdown would have helped get the virus through quicker. Hiding before a vaccine can be found and harming so many other aspects of the medical profession through shutdowns, delayed surgeries, not to mention people's psyche and yes the economy is not the best way to deal with this problem.

It seems the mainstream media is having a heart attack at President Trumps's assertions that he can do extraordinary things if he wishes. In an national emergency the president has extraordinary powers. President Lincoln, who is the GOP President liberals seem to love, suspended Habeas Corpus, arrested scores of people without a trial, and threatened the arrest of the Supreme Court's Chief Justice. He even ordered several units of the Indiana infantry back home in the fall of 1864 so they could vote in the Presidential Election, presumably to vote for him. This is a far cry of President Trump belief that he can reopen the government that closed under a national emergency.

For clarification purposes let me stipulate between liberal and the Left. Liberals are people like the late Mario Cuomo and current Senator Amy Klobuchar. The Left is represented by those elected officials, donors and benefactors who openly admitted they wanted to destroy Brett Kavanagh and future Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett because of their religious beliefs, those who admitted they want to force Catholic nuns to pay for abortions via Obamacare, those who want religious institutions to administer marriages they believe are not biblical.

The idea of shutting down the economy for the Green New Deal is the dream of the Left. The idea to confiscate guns is a dream of the Left, the idea to shutter churches and houses of worship is the ultimate fantasy of people who take their cue from their mentor who said; Religion is the opiate of the people and whose adherents did just that in many countries behind the Iron Curtain and many who weren't. How many people know that's what the Left did to the Mexican people, the Portuguese in 1917 etc? (ironically during the Fatima Apparitions.) Have you ever heard of the Cristero War 1926-29 to destroy the Catholic Church in of all places Mexico? Have you ever heard of Miguel Pro, now Saint Miguel Pro? If they could do that in Mexico and Portugal, what could they do here?

My guess would be if the Left ever tried to pull that off and the Leftist President had a news conference to explain it, that president would receive far less push back from the mainstream media than this one. Something to ponder, this pandemic has opened Pandora's Box on the abuses possible by the self proclaimed Expert Class. I hope to God we never see this used as a template should somebody of the Left ever get into the Oval Office.

Again, your straw man arguments are something to behold. When am I going to stop supporting Trump you say. What kind of a question is that?

You imply that conservatives see phantom enemies who will take away their rights. Remember even President Obama who is the most liberal president we have ever had was attacked by many supporters of not just Senator Sanders, but by a variety of other candidates supporters as well for not being Leftist enough. The same President Obama who said he favored abortion because he wouldn't want his daughters to be punished with a child they didn't want? A child a punishment? God help us. The same President Obama who thought his conversation with wealthy San Francisco Bay Area donors wasn't being recorded, referred to rural Americans as people who cling to their guns and religion. If you can't cling to your faith, to what will you cling?

So if these Leftists thought President Obama wasn't Leftist enough, is there any wonder why conservatives might be a little bit concerned about what might befall them if someone who thought President Obama wasn't leftist enough came to power? State Police in Kentucky tracking down people on Easter Sunday, rural Michiganders threatened for arrest for buying vegetable seeds for their garden? People being hauled off Philadelphia city buses by the police for not wearing a mask, while criminals in Philly jails are being released? You can't make this stuff up and yet you wonder why some people might be a little scared. Not everyone bows in homage at the the altar of the State and the self appointed Expert Class.
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7...

Bobcatsquared, I have said my piece on this thread. I am going to bed. Good night all!

I don't wonder at all why you're a little scared. That part makes perfect sense to anybody who has been paying attention.

No worries when this is over, the president will claim that he knew it was a hoax and he actually never shut the government down. He will dissolve himself from his own social distancing orders and people actually believe that he never did that. And all of his worshipers Ohio him as a hero because he had no part in shutting things down in the first place