The Coronavirus War – Trump Against Everyone Else

Posted on March 27, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 27, 2020

The most remarkable aspect of the coronavirus crisis is President Trump’s refusal to accept the reality of the pandemic. We’ve seen his character and leadership flaws since the day he took office. We’ve shaken our heads over his narcissism and lack of compassion, his self-absorption to the detriment of the welfare of the American people.

We probably shouldn’t be surprised. This is the president who twisted the arms of senators in his own party to pass a health care bill that would have deprived twenty-five million low income Americans of insurance coverage. He is the president who labeled poverty-stricken central American refugees seeking a safe haven for their families murders and drug dealers, and then directed his Border Patrol Agents to incarcerate their children in cages.

When good things happen, Trump is the first to claim credit, even when he had little or nothing to do with them. When something terrible happens, rather than showing compassion and support for those who are negatively impacted he deflects responsibility and looks for others to blame, lest his image be tarnished. He disdains science and ignores the expert advice of people in his administration, preferring is own ignorant opinions, on every subject from climate change to environmental health to foreign policy.

All that was disturbing and potentially dangerous each time it happened, but until now it hasn’t represented an imminent existential threat to millions of people. When Trump was elected, we all hoped and many prayed that he would grow into the job. He hasn’t. He is as petty and vicious, as ego driven and lustful for power, as lacking in decency and morality as those of us who followed his career for decades knew he was.

For three years, we sucked it up and counted the days until the Trump nightmare was over. But now, the unthinkable has happened. The world and our nation face a crisis that could kill millions and forever change the fabric of our society. For the first time since he was elected the physical and economic health of the entire nation require Trump to show leadership and put aside his self-interest. To date he has failed utterly at both.

On virtually every important issue, we’ve seen Trump misrepresent and lie about everything that displeases him. He goes back and forth, bending with whichever wind batters him most strongly, contradicting himself and changing positions daily. Thus it has been since the first day of the coronavirus pandemic.

For months, he refused to take it seriously. First it was China’s problem. Regardless of the fact that people like Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx recognized the threat immediately, Trump simply couldn’t tolerate the universe daring to upset his plans for re-election. Rather than accept the reality that bombarded him from every knowledgeable, competent adviser, he gambled on his hunch that it would all blow over.

Most of us now know that measures like quarantine, isolation, and social distancing could have slowed the virus to a manageable level if they had been initiated in time. The fact that China dropped the ball initially enabled the virus to spread beyond its borders, but there was still time. Epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists knew in January that a full court press was needed to avoid death and suffering for millions; every day wasted getting started would cost lives. But declaring an emergency might have panicked both the general population and the financial markets, and either might have doomed Trump’s re-election.

Instead of acting, Trump and his minions fostered the notion that the pandemic was a media hoax. The American media must be damn powerful to influence the World Health Organization and the overwhelming mass of medical professionals throughout the world. Even with evidence from China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Italy before him, Trump failed to act, and now there are more confirmed cases in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

Trump accepts no responsibility for that. He tells us every day that his administration is doing a perfect job. As death counts rise in Washington State and New York, and the exponential growth curve of infection and death follow the same pattern in New Jersey, California, Florida, Louisiana, and Michigan, Trump now blames their governors for failing to prepare.

Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York, Jay Inslee of Washington, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan relied on health professionals and proven mathematical models to anticipate the need for masks, protective gear, ventilators, and hospital beds. But the Great Oracle Trump knows better. Today he accused them of grossly exaggerating their needs, because the numbers he pulls out of his ass say they’re wrong.

I wonder who he’ll blame when our death toll reaches one million.

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A Tale of Two Governors

Posted on March 26, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 26, 2020

Do events create heroes or are heroes always with us, emerging as leaders when circumstances require them? Self-proclaimed hero, Donald Trump, believes he is uniquely qualified to lead our country in all things. But as we have repeatedly seen during his administration, declaring oneself a leader is a far cry from being one.

The coronavirus pandemic shined a blinding light on this basic truth. At a time when our nation is desperate for effective leadership, Trump continues to focus primarily on what is good for Donald Trump. He cares about minimizing the effects of the pandemic not in terms of saving lives and reducing the suffering of individuals and families, but by limiting the damage to his re-election campaign.

White House leadership in attacking the pandemic lagged for months because honesty and transparency about the likely spread of the virus would have had an inconvenient effect on financial markets, which Trump relies on to keep his base happy. Even after wasted weeks which could have been used to ramp up the nation’s preparedness and blunt the rate of infection, Trump dispenses confusion and misinformation on a daily basis. Every time he briefs us about the effects of the virus, the nation’s preeminent expert on infectious disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci has to correct and contradict him to prevent him from undermining the efforts of the medical community.

We owe a huge debt to the state Governors who have been on top of this crisis since Day One, who eschew self-praise and simply inform, support, and inspire confidence in their citizens.  Several have stepped up and filled the breach, but I’d like to focus on Andrew Cuomo of New York and Andy Beshear of Kentucky.

Cuomo is one of those heroes who has been with us for decades who rose to the challenge as soon as the threat of the virus was realized. Partly as a result of circumstances, as New York State’s cases are spiking ahead of other states’, Americans have watched Cuomo talking to New Yorkers every morning. He focuses on providing information, explaining why his directives are necessary to protect the health and lives. He speaks directly to the people, easily, casually, openly, honestly. There is no ego, no self-aggrandizement, no confusion – in a word no bullshit. He never disparages the president, but he underlines Trump’s inadequacy as a leader every day just by being himself.

Many people in New York now refer to their governor as “President Cuomo,” because he calms them and demonstrates an unwavering focus the needs of his people, while they see exactly the opposite from Trump. And it’s not just New Yorkers. I watch him every morning inspired by his self-effacing truth and courage. At a time of anxiety and insecurity, confronting perhaps the most serious threat our country has ever faced, he convinces me every day that some politicians can rise above petty self-interest and partisanship. His constituents love him with good reason.

A year ago, if you didn’t live in Kentucky, you probably never heard of Andy Beshear. Running for governor in the reddest of states that voted for Trump by nearly two to one in 2016, he was given little chance of defeating incumbent Matt Bevin, an ardent Trump supporter,  which in Kentucky, should have assured his re-election. But his Trump-like attitudes and his repeated attacks on teachers and other state workers, made him vulnerable, should a true leader of the people emerge.

That leader was Andy Beshear, another latent hero who rose to the challenge, who while Kentucky Secretary of State, went to court to prevent Bevins from wrecking the teachers’ retirement system. In doing so he inspired teachers and parents who valued education, without whom he couldn’t have won.  His victory over Bevin stunned the Kentucky Republican establishment.

Beshear is the best kind of populist. His message is unity over divisiveness, concern for people over politics. His daily briefings on the coronavirus don’t receive the national exposure that Cuomo’s do, but his message is the same: honest, caring, inspirational. “There is no ego in any of this…no Democrat or Republican…only us as Americans versus the Coronavirus.” He is revered by red-state Kentuckians, receiving praise from all over the political spectrum and recognized as the kind of natural leader we need in times of crisis.

Memes depicting offers from other states wanting to swap their local treasures for him are going viral all over the internet. My own state, Maryland, offered Pimlico, Cal Ripken, and a bushel of Maryland crabs, the very soul of our state in exchange for Beshear, and we already have an effective governor in Larry Hogan.

Thank God for governors like Cuomo and Beshear. At a time, even before the coronavirus pandemic, when our political system seems in jeopardy of self-destructing from partisanship and divisiveness, they give us hope for the future.

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The Price of a Grandparent’s Life

Posted on March 24, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 24, 2020

Partisan politics is always suspended during a national emergency, isn’t it? We didn’t hear much partisan bickering on December 8, 1941 or September 12, 2001. Our nation had been attacked, and the vast majority of Americans put aside their differences. Nothing unifies us like surprise attacks that kill thousands of Americans. Until now, apparently.

The Trump administration has raised partisanship and divisiveness to an art form. It is so deeply ingrained in its DNA that it can’t be turned off even as it becomes clear that more than a million lives may lie in the balance. That’s because they see everything through the lens of preserving the wealth of billionaires and the corporations that sustain them. To be sure, there are exceptions, but all of the most divisive issues of the past three years – taxes, universal health care, immigration, to name a few – have a single common denominator: avoiding a massive transfer of wealth from the haves to the have nots.

If you wonder whether this battle knows any limits, I refer you to yesterday’s Fox News interview with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. The interview occurred minutes after President Trump first publicly floated the idea of “loosening” social distancing restrictions so people can go back to work. The looks of horror on the faces of the health care professionals who stand behind him at the podium when he says these things tell us all we need to know. I was shocked, but only for a few seconds, before a light went on.

The elitist extremist faction among Trump’s advisers haven’t let up at all. For days we’d already seen the Senate locked in a partisan impasse over a two trillion dollar bailout bill. The divide was clear. Democrats wanted the bulk of the money to go directly to displaced workers and their families during the coronavirus crisis, and to assure that everyone afflicted by the virus received treatment free of charge. Republicans argued that saving employers was a higher priority because without them there would be no jobs. We’ve heard that argument repeatedly since Reagan was president.

The battle in the Senate was familiar. We’d seen it play out dozens of times since partisanship rose to its current level with the election of Barrack Obama. But Trump elevated it to an unprecedented level, one that is completely lacking in compassion and moral value. Trump is proposing to triage the lives of Americans, primarily those who are elderly or already compromised, against what he calls “saving the economy.” That is as bald-faced a lie as anything Trump has ever said.

It’s not about saving the economy. It’s about preserving the wealth of what Bernie Sanders refers to as the ruling class. This isn’t about some self-named Socialists stealing their money. It’s about whether that ruling class is willing to sacrifice millions of American lives to preserve their wealth. Trump is proposing to triage the lives of Americans against the disruptions to our economy caused by the need to stop the spread of the virus.

Trump believes human lives can be measured in how many billions of dollars of wealth can be preserved per death. That’s what the Fox interview with Dan Patrick was about. Fox News had been primed for the shift in tone from the White House. Within minutes they, through Lt. Governor Patrick, were pitching the idea that grandparents ought to be willing to sacrifice their lives to preserve the economy for their grandchildren! As if it were a binary choice.

The Great Depression didn’t destroy our economy. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t worry about whether the economy would fall apart when millions of Americans were hopeless and starving. Our economy is not the stock market. It’s farms and factories and trucks and human labor. Trump trying to convince his base that taking steps that could increase the number of virus-related deaths by millions is a fair price to pay so that corporations don’t lose money is criminal malfeasance, as vile as the holocaust in its own way.

Fox News asked Patrick what he thought of Trump’s idea. Patrick said, “if that’s the exchange, I’m all in. I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me.” Really? He thinks millions of grandparents are willing to volunteer to die of the virus, or that their families would be willing to sacrifice them?

Even without compassion, the truth is that millions of dead Americans would be far more devastating to our economy than crashing financial markets. Another truth is that Trump knows his incompetent response to the virus since January has placed his re-election in jeopardy. He has no other priority.

By the way – Trump is a grandparent, too.

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A Doctor’s Admonition for Surviving the Coronavirus

Posted on March 15, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 15, 2020

Today, instead of rephrasing other people’s views, I am re-publishing something posted on Facebook by Caroline Chang, a nationally recognized physician practicing in Rhode Island. I’ll let Dr. Chang speak for herself, except to comment that the case numbers shown in the table are those that have been officially reported. As Mike DeWine, the Governor of Ohio said this morning, the actual number of cases could be up to one hundred times those that have been officially reported. That means you can tack two zeroes (00) onto the bottom line numbers recorded in the table and be a lot closer to the truth.

*************

Honestly the medical community is in disbelief at the number of Americans continuing to socialize and live life and even travel as usual. We MUST all do our part or else we will be where Italy is, likely in a week. Yes this means no playgrounds, birthday parties, play dates (yes even with “healthy” families and sanitizing), no gym, no restaurants, minimize store trips. Minimize all non-essential outings period. Denial will only make a very scary situation much, much worse.

VIRUS20200314

For all those who insist on going out and “living your best life”- we are on the fast track to a complete lockdown if you don’t stop going out and socializing. We are about 6 days away from when Italy ordered a complete lockdown which means not leaving your house except for essential items, businesses closed, no contact with anyone except those in your immediate household for WEEKS.

If you want to help small businesses – buy a gift card online or by phone to use later.

#flattenthecurve #publichealth #dontbeselfish #forthegreatergood

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Crisis Management

Posted on March 14, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 14, 2020

In recent years, whenever our leaders debated foreign policy, borders, women’s rights, climate change mitigation, the nation cringed watching partisanship, special interest money, and individual self-interest derail attempts at reasonable resolution. We got angry, we poked fun at them, we argued among ourselves about what to do about it. Very little got done, but for most people life went on as long as there was food on the table, our families were healthy, and we could divert ourselves with what was really important: football playoffs, March Madness, taking the kids to Disneyland.

We watched our government fail to act or to act wrongheadedly time and again, but the consequences always seemed far down the road. When we were assured that it was all part of a grand plan to make America great again, the majority of Americans called Bullshit, but as long as money was pouring into their investment accounts, our Congress and our Executive Branch were content with stalemate. If America was losing greatness, it was because we were too busy enjoying life or struggling to survive; we opted out of our responsibilities and lost sight of the world we were leaving our children.

Early in the Trump administration it was clear that he disdained science and preferred his own uninformed opinions to those of experts. He knew what was best. He didn’t need advice from generals or diplomats. His advisors were unqualified family members and extremists bent on preserving their wealth and retaining the white majority on which their power depended. We limped along, losing allies, diminishing our influence on world events, sensing that democracy was being attacked, but disaster wasn’t imminent, so with the exception of a reversal in the 2018 election, we let it all happen.

When the president decided that pandemic preparedness wasn’t a strategic need, and he removed that function from our national security apparatus and slashed its budget, most Americans ignored the warning cries from medical professionals who said we wouldn’t be able to react in time to protect our population if another disease took hold. It wasn’t as if the probability of that happening was low – unlike the one in a billion chance of an extinction event caused by an asteroid collision, we face potential pandemic threats every few years – but we let that happen too, and we’ll pay a heavy for our malfeasance.

Faced with a crisis, some leaders drop the ball, some act in good faith but fail anyway, and some act effectively through preparedness and focusing on the right priorities to avert disaster. The Trump administration, which has pushed an isolationist, go-it-alone philosophy from the start, had it wrong from the beginning. It’s been ten weeks since the world media first reported on the COVID-19 virus, but desperate to prevent anything that hurt his re-election chances, Trump resorted to restricting travel from China as if that could protect us.

Our disease prevention experts knew it wouldn’t. They knew that in today’s world, a disease that is highly contagious that can go undetected for weeks is unstoppable. When Dr. Anthony Fauci explained, last week, that our best defense against the COVID-19 virus is flattening the curve of the rate of infection, he made it clear that we can’t prevent it from spreading. The best we can do is slow the spread so our medical resources aren’t overwhelmed.

Fauci admitted that our national approach to this pandemic was a failure, but in the interest of making the best of a horrifying situation, he left out the rest of the truth. We lost ten weeks of preparation that might have spared the nation much of the suffering it’s about to experience. The need for preparedness to slow the spread of the virus feels new to most of us, but it was common knowledge to the professionals tasked with protecting us. They knew we were unprepared in January.  They watched in frustration as China, South Korea, and Japan ramped up emergency actions, knowing we needed to do the same things.

Yesterday, Donald Trump refused to accept responsibility for the present crisis, when in fact, his calculated refusal to act will result in pain, suffering, financial ruin, and death for countless Americans that could have been avoided. Compare South Korea, which was able to keep its own COVID-19 fatality rate under one percent, with Italy, where an inability to identify the spread of the virus in time resulted in a reported fatality rate of fourteen percent.

Trump could have declared a national emergency in January and suspended all regulations that slowed down our preparedness by executive order. He could have freed states, university researchers, and the private sector to develop their own resources so we could take preventive measures when they mattered most. But he didn’t, because he knew the financial markets would crash as they did over the past two weeks, and that would threaten his re-election.

Pandering to racists, caving in to the NRA, attacking our courts and vilifying the press were bad enough. But now, Trump is going to have blood on his hands. He could have protected Americans the way South Korea protected its citizens with a few strokes of his pen, but he chose not to until it was too late.

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Leadership, Trump Style

Posted on March 12, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 12, 2020

Donald Trump’s leadership style has always been to bully people into getting what he wants. That often works in business when you’re bigger than your adversary and you can afford to outspend him in litigation. And when it fails, you pay a fine and move on. But that style has shown itself to be a dismal failure since Trump has been president. Not only has his leadership been lacking here at home, the notion that the United States was the leader of the free world is now only a distant memory.

Trump’s North Korea policy has been a total failure. He got nothing from his summit meetings with Kim Jong Un, except to damage our relationship with South Korea. And North Korea continues to test missiles and work toward having an arsenal of nuclear warheads with impunity.

Withdrawing from the Paris Accords on Climate Control and the Iran Nuclear Deal have also achieved nothing positive for our country. Our allies refused to support either action, and the result is that we are diplomatically isolated and Iran, like North Korea, is working rapidly toward developing nuclear weapons. 

The promised Middle East deal, which Trump delegated to his son-in-law Jared Kushner, eschewing the advice of professional diplomats with decades of relevant knowledge and expertise, has been a total failure. And his Stephen Miller-inspired immigration policy has achieved only confusion and suffering for thousands of people. We are no closer to a comprehensive immigration policy that can pass the test of constitutionality than we were when Trump took office. Throughout the thirty-eight months of his presidency the only thing he accomplished was signing a tax law that rewarded the wealthiest Americans while saddling everyone else with a skyrocketing national debt.

Trump faced serious challenges, and in every case he has either made the situation worse or kicked the can down the road for the next generation to deal with. All that was unfortunate, but none of it represented an imminent catastrophe – until now. Nothing calls out for leadership and re-assurance like a pandemic, and to date, Trump has failed to provide either.

When he slashed the budget for the division of the Centers for Disease Control responsible for containment and prevention of diseases like the COVID-19 virus, he justified the action by claiming they spent huge amounts of money planning for things that were never going to happen. Medical professionals warned that that was a very dangerous decision, but the then Republican-controlled Congress went along with it.

As a result we now have an emergency prevention system at the federal level that Dr. Anthony Fauci described today as a failure. Fauci noted that European and Asian countries have been able to mobilize plans of action to test for and control the virus because their public health systems were designed to enable central administration and distribution of needed medical supplies and personnel. In a word, he said, ours is not, and as a result we have squandered valuable time that might have allowed us to at least partially contain the epidemic.

It is clear from the draconian actions of the Chinese government in locking down millions of people, that they understood the nature of the COVID-19 virus immediately. They may not have been truthful in the statistics they released, but we know from their actions that they were terrified of a pandemic that would engulf the world. If they understood it, so did all of the medical professionals responsible for protecting Americans from disease. But our president, who has always shown his disdain for science and acted as if he knew better than doctors, clinicians, generals, and diplomats chose to ignore them.

The COVID-19 virus is going to infect virtually every part of the United States. The fourteen day asymptomatic incubation period made it impossible to fully contain, but the debacle of not having either adequate testing or a viable plan to combat the virus has assured that we will be facing the worst case scenario instead of a partially contained epidemic. That is unconscionable, a complete failure of leadership.

How did we get here? It’s simple. Trump gambled on minimizing the outbreak because he feared a collapse in the financial markets. The eleven-year-old bull market was the only thing his re-election campaign could hang its hat on, and winning re-election was his only priority. It will become clear in the coming months that while countries like China and South Korea were able to limit the spread, the delay in our government’s response will have worsened the impact of the virus here.

The world has known about the Wuhan virus for more than three months. But Trump’s wrong-headed priorities and lack of leadership prevented our medical establishment from mobilizing in time to do anything but treat people who become seriously ill and hope they can prevent millions from dying once they’ve been infected. Last week, when he threw a tantrum and tried to bully the researchers he pointedly ignored until now to come up with “something big” long after the cow was out of the barn, he merely underlined his failure as a manager.

It’s too late to change that, but not to assure that he never gets to do it again.

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The Biden-Sanders Debate

Posted on March 11, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 11, 2020

If you believe in things like trends and momentum, it’s easy to conclude that Joe Biden’s campaign is on an unstoppable run, similar the wholly illogical, self-sustaining tsunamis of mass sentiment that cause bull markets to rise and fall. Ask any gambler who has had an unlikely winning streak at the craps table, or any Washington Nationals fan who believed the team would come back from the dead to win the World Series last year.

The media express Biden’s wave in terms of numbers. So far, Bernie Sanders has received 42% of the primary and caucus votes. To overcome Biden’s delegate lead, he would have to win the remaining primaries with an average of 55% of the vote in states where he was never expected to do well. The pundits (those people who were so wrong about everything in 2016) say Sanders has only miniscule chance of pulling that off.

The issue, then, is at what point Sanders jumps on the Biden bandwagon. It’s clear from the recent primaries, that Sanders’ base isn’t as solid as it was when he was competing with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the reasons for that are easy to discern. First, his base of largely young voters was angry last time, because they believed the establishment was rigging the primaries for Clinton. This time around, DNC chairman Tom Perez has bent over backwards to avoid the appearance that the DNC’s fingers were tipping the scale.

Some of Sanders’ supporters still believe the Democratic Party establishment is pulling out the stops to derail his campaign. But it’s pretty clear that the primary rivals who’ve suspended their own campaigns and endorsed Biden made up their own minds based on one simple conclusion. Democratic voters have been crystal clear that they care more about defeating Donald Trump than whether the party’s platform matches their personal agendas. Biden is simply riding a wave of confidence on the part of most Democrats that he is best positioned to oust Trump.

Many progressive voters are also coming to believe that the price tag for Sanders’ Medicare For All program could wreck our economy, and they’re starting to realize that the word “Revolution” shouldn’t be taken lightly. We’re not fighting to escape the despotic yoke of King George. The Progressive Movement is just trying to provide decent affordable health care for all Americans and level the playing field so wealth doesn’t dominate every aspect of American life.

Biden wants the same things, but he wants to achieve them without blowing up the system. He knows better than anyone that Obamacare was hamstrung from the start because Mitch McConnell was able to kill the government payer option when the Affordable Car Act was passed. That was why the highly unpopular and largely unsuccessful Individual Mandate provision didn’t work out. With a workable Congress willing to find a bipartisan solution, Biden would restore that option, which would make premiums more competitive and enable millions more Americans to be covered.

It’s not Medicare For All, but it would achieve a large percentage of what Sanders is after, and it would do so without breaking the bank, which is even more now, critical given the likely economic cost of the COVID-19 virus. Additionally, gradually lowering the eligibility age for Medicare would bring the goal of universal health care closer without causing a financial catastrophe. The point is that despite the rhetoric, Biden and Sanders aren’t that far apart in their vision for America, and they both know it. They’ve said their primary goal is defeating Trump and each has said repeatedly that if the other won the nomination he would support him.

If all that is true, they can demonstrate it in Sunday’s upcoming debate in Arizona. (If it’s going to be held without an audience, why are they flying to Arizona, anyway?) Instead of attacking each other’s perceived vulnerabilities and risking unhealable divisions in the Party, they could turn the debate into a brainstorming session, moderating their positions and emphasizing common ground. In a perfect world, given the odds against Bernie in the remaining primaries and the disaster of 2016 when many of his angry supporters sat out the election, the debate would end on a note of unity.

As career politicians go, Biden and Sanders are both honorable men who in the end should be willing to place country above personal ambition. Call me a dreamer, But I’d love to see the debate end  (after thorough sanitization) with the two men in a heartfelt hug pledging to work together to end the Trump nightmare.

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Coronavirus Fact and Fiction

Posted on March 8, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 8, 2020

If you read only one paragraph, it should be this one. The only place to find accurate information about the novel coronavirus COVID-19 is https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/summary.html.

Amid all the information and misinformation in the media, there are only two important questions for the average person: how contagious is COVID-19 and how likely is it to kill me if I catch it? It goes without saying that those questions should be answered only by competent scientists and medical professionals, but we live in Trump’s America.

We know COVID-19 is highly contagious based from physical contact. We also know that infected persons can be asymptomatic for up to fourteen days. The Chinese government understood that almost immediately, which explains the draconian measures they enacted to attempt to contain it. But anyone with a rudimentary sense of statistics knew instantly that containment was a fantasy.

Can you list all the people you touched, kissed, hugged, or were intimate with in the last fourteen days? An infected person who traveled by plane, train, bus, or ship would have touched seats, tables, restroom surfaces, trays, doors, and perhaps any number of other passengers. What if you were relaxing in a spa next to an infected person on your luxury cruise? If that went on for fourteen days before it occurred to anyone that all those surfaces needed to be sterilized and the infected people quarantined, the transmission vectors would have multiplied geometrically. For the lay person, that means growing faster than anyone could track until it was far too late.

It’s clear now that unless you live in a bubble, you’re likely to come in contact with someone who has COVID-19. Which means there’s a fair chance you’ll catch it. What you really care about is how sick you might get and how likely you are to recover. No one knows, but based on reported data, the older you are and the more compromised your body is by other health problems, the more likely you are to become very sick and/or die. Ignore that at your peril.

Data reported by the Chinese government suggest that on average, COVID-19 kills about two percent (one in fifty) of the people it infects, but it’s worth repeating that the younger and healthier you are, the less likely you are to be in that two percent.

Let’s talk about that two percent estimate. It’s a very simple number to compute – just divide the number of reported deaths by the number of reported infected people. But the result has been problematic from the start for several reasons.

Since Beijing is notorious for misreporting unfavorable data, we don’t really know if what they reported was accurate. Early on, there were questions about whether China was cooking the data to make the fatality rate look low to avoid repercussions from other nations and the World Health Organization.

As of today, there have been 3,500 reported deaths among the 105,000 reported COVID-19 cases, worldwide. You can plug those results into your calculator. The result is a fatality rate of 3.33 percent, or one in thirty. That’s scary, but it’s probably not correct either.

It’s absolutely irresponsible for our president to tell people to disregard either number because he has a hunch that the fatality rate is really only a fraction of one percent. On the other hand, it’s easy to make a rational argument that he might be right. We can probably count the number of COVID-19 deaths accurately. But how accurate is our count of the number of people infected? If it turns out that the great majority of those people develop only minor symptoms and fully recover, there could be thousands, even millions of people who were infected who were neither reported nor tested. The more of those people that exist, the more we over-estimate the fatality rate.

The only way to know for sure is to test everyone. Since the CDC protocol requires at least three negative tests over a two-week period to confirm that someone is virus-free, that would require over one billion test kits just to evaluate Americans. As we’ve seen, our leaders can’t even tell us when a million test kits will be available. If you don’t remember your high school math, a billion is a thousand millions.

What Americans, what everyone in every country needs right now is effective leadership and transparent information from reliable sources. We have not gotten that. Both our president and vice president have to be contradicted and corrected every time they address the subject. Neither of them is qualified to speak unless he is reading a press release from CDC Director Robert Redfield or Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Let’s all be smart and stay safe.

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Super Tuesday Voters Got It Right

Posted on March 4, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 4, 2020

Donald Trump is terrified of Joe Biden. That’s why he tried to undermine his candidacy from the start. Trump believes Bernie Sanders would be easy pickings in the General Election. If Sanders were the candidate we’d be hearing Socialism and Communism until they were coming out of our ears. Utter nonsense, of course, but when did that ever stop Trump from speaking?

On the other hand, Sanders has gone out of his way to set himself up for those attacks. He revels in the self-proclaimed label of Democratic Socialist. He speaks loudly about the semantic difference, but the truth is that Sanders is a lifetime true-believer in his revolution. He’s so caught up in it that winning isn’t enough for him. He needs to rub Capitalism’s face in it. He wants to bring down what he calls the billionaire class and then dance on its corpse.

Sanders’ revolution requires a massive transfer of wealth from the one percent at the top to everyone else, and that’s quite different from proposing Medicare for All as a philosophy. Most Americans believe health care is an inalienable right. I certainly do. But Elizabeth Warren, who also believes that, isn’t willing to blow up our economy to achieve it. She calls herself a socially responsible capitalist. If Bernie were serious about social justice without having to vent his decades-long anger on the one percent, he’d call himself that too.

Bernie’s been practicing for his revolution for more than fifty years, and he’s become quite adept at arousing his base. He shares that skill with Trump, which is why many observers noted the similarities in their campaign styles in 2016. It’s also why many Democrats thought he had a better chance of defeating Trump than Hillary Clinton did. Much of their bases overlapped – the underemployed, people who felt victimized by banks and large corporations, and those who thought (incorrectly) that immigrants, legal or illegal, threatened their livelihood.

Trump won by expanding his base to include every hate-monger and racist he could pander to, with lies and outrageous hyperbole, and by slandering everyone who disagreed with him. He knows that won’t work this time, though. The 2018 Congressional election and yesterday’s primaries showed that Trump’s and Sanders’ bases have both shrunk since 2016. Trump’s ego may not let him see it clearly, but his advisers and strategists understand that many people who voted for him in 2016 or simply stayed home on Election Day are disgusted by his tweets, his lack of moral character, and by his general demeanor. They won’t make that mistake again.

Contrast that with Joe Biden, about whom Trump lapdog Lindsey Graham once said, “No finer human being was ever born.” We love to poke fun at Biden’s gaffes and call him on twenty- or thirty-year-old mistakes, but underneath, we know what’s in Joe’s heart. We also know that there’s no one better equipped to heal this country after the damage Trump has done.

Biden is respected by our allies and adversaries alike. They know they can’t bully him or manipulate him with visions of billion dollar sugar plums and they can’t bribe him with prostitutes. Perhaps more important, no one is better equipped than Joe Biden to erase the putrid stench that Trump has brought to governing. Just as Gerald Ford was the antidote to Richard Nixon in 1974, Biden is the perfect remedy for Trump.

Trump tramples the English language every time he opens his mouth. He’s more inarticulate than any president in our history, often misspeaking and having to walk statements back, especially his comments about Vladimir Putin. It’s embarrassing to most of us, and we’ve seen foreign leaders repeatedly mock him.

Biden stumbles over an occasional word when he speaks too fast and sometimes (like everyone else his age) misremembers details from decades-old events. But everyone knows he’s about love, equality and inclusion, an example of the best aspects of his Catholic upbringing. America may not have been ready for him when he ran for president in the past, but politics is as much about timing as anything else. We’re not only ready for him now, we desperately need him.

Sanders’ weakness as a candidate and his shrunken base were surprisingly exposed on Super Tuesday. At the same time, Biden became larger than himself as his former rivals coalesced around him proclaiming him the best person to end Trumpism and restore decency and respect for American values. With Michael Bloomberg funding his campaign, and the best strategists and organizers the Democrats can hire managing it, I believe there’s no stopping him. I haven’t breathed this easy since November of 2016.

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Joe-mentum

Posted on March 3, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 3, 2020

It was only eight days ago that Thomas Friedman published an op-ed in the New York Times that outlined a strategy to assure a Democratic landslide in November. Friedman suggested that whoever the presumptive Democratic nominee for president was after Super Tuesday should immediately announce who he or she would invite to join his administration.

Friedman proposed a collection of former rivals and centrists who could break the partisan logjam that has the country so polarized: Elizabeth Warren as Health and Human Services Secretary, Kamala Harris as Attorney General, Mayor Pete as Homeland Security Secretary, Cory Booker as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Mitt Romney for Secretary of Commerce…you get the idea. Very clever, except that a mere eight days ago, Friedman reasonably assumed the presumptive nominee would be either Bernie Sanders or Mike Bloomberg.

With Joe Biden back in contention, the idea still holds, and we can plug in a few other pieces. Amy Klobuchar as his running mate would bring the ticket I preferred from the start to fruition. How about Mike Bloomberg for Treasury? And if I were Joe, I’d recommend to my new Attorney General that her first act be to hire Andrew McCabe as FBI Director as both a just response to Trump’s shameful treatment of him and a symbol of how things will be after Trump.

I believe Super Tuesday is a day we’ll look back on as a pivotal moment in our nation’s history. It’s clear that the National Democratic Party believes Sanders can’t beat Trump, and they want to assure that he doesn’t lock up the nomination today. I agree with them, but I have to remind myself that they did the same thing in 2016, and look how that turned out.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 was a perfect storm of bad luck, missteps, and unforeseen events, all of which combined to defeat her. But one thing that could not have been foreseen was Sanders’ refusal to live up to his promise to do everything in his power to support her after the convention, and that could be a problem this year, too. Sanders is lauded for having consistent values and principles, as he should be. But when consistency became stubborn inflexibility, he came off looking like a bitter old man.  Had he stumped for Hillary the way Elizabeth Warren did and convinced his supporters to get out and vote for her, it’s difficult to see how Hillary would have lost.

Mike Bloomberg is a major wild card, but today is all about Joe Biden. Today is also about a rapidly growing pandemic that threatens the health and lives of Americans, and the structure of the world’s economy. It’s a day when people are asking themselves who they wish was sitting in the White House right now. Who is most likely to guide us through a crisis with no agenda other than putting what’s best for the country first, and above all, who has demonstrated that he can be effective on Inauguration Day?

I’m sure Mike Bloomberg could handle the task, but Biden would step in immediately with a talented group of people who were old hands at how the government works and eager to support and work with him. Until we see the results of today’s primaries, our future is on Biden’s shoulders. And for that, we must applaud Mayor Pete, Senator Klobuchar, and former Congressman Beto O’Rourke. Trump won the nomination in 2016 because the other Republicans in the race were too involved with their own egos. They all knew Trump would destroy their Party, but they never tried to unify to stop him.

I’m thankful that the Democrats learned from that, and that three former candidates had the class to fall on their swords for the greater good. It only remains to see whether they acted in time to save their Party from Sanders. I wish I knew Barrack Obama’s thoughts today.

Today is also my birthday, and I’m both pleased and dismayed to think that turning 77, I am younger than the three people most likely to be running against Trump in November. Ever optimistic, I wish to thank the people of South Carolina, as well as Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Beto O’Rourke for a wonderful birthday gift. Imagine – an entire day of optimism and hope that this will all turn out well. Will they survive into March 4th and beyond? I don’t know, but today, we opened our checkbook for Joe. The Force seems to be with us.

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