"The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff"

This article is the fairest explanation I’ve read on why the US is in its current mess—testing so few people, taking extreme measures to quarantine ourselves.

Trump’s cult of loyalty is the most immediate cause of the problem, but that’s only a result of the corruption that has grown for decades as the rich have gotten richer and bent the system in their favor. We need to revolutionize the way we govern ourselves, democratizing decision-making at every level.

Anne Applebaum, in the Atlantic:

…We don’t know all the details yet, but one element of the situation cannot be denied: The president himself did not want the disease talked of too widely, did not want knowledge of it to spread, and, above all, did not want the numbers of those infected to appear too high. He said so himself, while explaining why he didn’t want a cruise ship full of infected Americans to dock in California. “I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Donald Trump, just like the officials in Wuhan, was concerned about the numbers—the optics of how a pandemic looks. And everybody around him knew it. There are some indications that Alex Azar, the former pharmaceutical-industry executive and lobbyist who heads the Department of Health and Human Services, was not keen on telling the president things he did not want to hear…

Once again: Nobody threatened Azar. But fear of offending the president may have led him to hesitate to push for aggressive testing nevertheless.

Without the threats and violence of the Chinese system, in other words, we have the same results: scientists not allowed to do their job; public-health officials not pushing for aggressive testing; preparedness delayed, all because too many people feared that it might damage the political prospects of the leader…

…

All of this happens on top of all the other familiar pathologies: the profound polarization; the merger of politics and entertainment; the loss of faith in democratic institutions; the blind eyes turned to corruption, white-collar crime, and money laundering; the growth of inequality; the conversion of social media and a part of the news media into for-profit vectors of disinformation. These are all part of the deep background to this crisis too.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/...

Denmark's a good example of how to handle potential job losses in a crisis

Denmark is one of the most democratic countries in the world, so it’s no surprise they’re handling the coronavirus crisis reasonably well. Because workers are nearly equal to owners, even though their economy is still market-oriented, they have figured out a way to mitigate the looming job losses:

Continued on Thread Reader:

The deal covers companies who'd have to lay off at least 30% of staff, or 50 staff or more. 

In return, companies commit to not lay off any staff for economic reason while they're receiving state compensation. 

Incredibly what can be done when the political will is there 

…

Covering 75% of wages for a period may seem like a bad deal for the state. It isn't: Lost jobs = lost tax income and increased benifits payments. This is a better way to lose that money, as it helps avoid a downturn in econ. activity and fallout from nonpayments of rents,mortages 

The condition of the deal is a strong trade union movement. But as usual, the Danish model is weaker when it comes to protecting the self-employed, people on zero-hour contracts, etc.. Many have already lost their jobs - what will be done for them remains to be seen. 

Also, the deal is short-term, lasting until June 9th. 
Some employers who expect a longer-term recession already say they won't take the deal, prefer sacking over paying 25% of salaries. 

So longer term questions remain. Would the state keeping employment going for longer if necessary? What about jobs that are actively harmful to the environment - so-called #batshitjobs - will they be sustained or will the crisis be used for a just green transition? 

While most countries dither and delay, Denmark has moved swiftly to help workers impacted by the economic fallout from coronavirus – securing a deal between unions and employers to protect wages and prevent layoffs.

tribunemag.co.uk/2020/03/denmarks-answer-to-the-coronavirus-recession

☝️ my piece on Denmark's answer to the Coronavirus recession…

Source: https://twitter.com/buerubner/status/12391...

Please practice "social distancing" and good hygiene

It is really hard to fathom just how bad it would be if everyone in the US was infected with the new coronavirus. Very few here have much experience with other highly infectious and/or lethal outbreaks, so it’s hard to understand the risk to society as a whole. This tweet gives us an idea of what would happen if everyone was infected, and the current ~3% death rate holds:

If you’re not older or already have health issues, you may feel like a very low chance of getting infected is worth going out or being around a lot of other seemingly health people. But spread that small chance across a large population, and the numbers start to add up. YOU may not die or suffer long term harm, but others will. Do the wise, ethical thing, and stay home and practice as good hygiene as much as possible.

"The Coronavirus Shows It is Time to Remove the For-Profit Infection from U.S. Health Care"

Healthcare is a human right. Yet in our system, 60,000 people die every year because they can’t afford it. Everyone should be guaranteed access to quality medicine and care, both because it’s the morally right thing to do, and because every person’s health affects everyone else’s, both directly (as during outbreaks of infectious diseases like the current coronavirus), and indirectly (as their ability to contribute to society is impaired). What’s stopping us are the entrenched interests, which drains an enormous amount of resources—money, time, etc.—from the rest of us, which could be put to better use. Detailed studies from think tanks ranging the political spectrum all show that singlepayer Medicare for All would save us a massive amount of money over time. We must demand it, now.

Fran Quiqley, addressing the horror and stupidity of our system at Common Dreams:

Last week, I listened as several Indiana workers in the hospitality industry gathered in southeastern Indiana to talk about their health. A cook in her 60s shared how she had gone months without her asthma inhalers because she couldn’t afford them. During that period, she was taken to the hospital by ambulance twice. A restaurant server talked about not being able to pay for tests her doctor recommended for potentially cancerous breast tissue. Another has seven prescriptions. She tearfully described her perpetual calculation about which to fill, because she can’t come close to affording them all.

Each story was greeted by sad, knowing nods. Several workers spoke about skipping doctor visits, reluctant to add to the stack of unpaid medical bills already piling up on their kitchen tables. 

Beyond their inability to get the care they need, they all had another thing in common: They all had health insurance.

At least, they had what often passes for health insurance in the United States. Unique among other nations, we prioritize the interests of corporations making billions of dollars in health care profits over the goal of ensuring access to care. While 27 million Americans have no health insurance at all, four in ten working Americans have a high-deductible plan that forces them to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket before they get any benefit from the premiums taken out of their paychecks each week.

Reams of academic medical studies confirm what the workers in Indiana tell us: Price tag barriers to accessing health care deter people from seeking the care they need. As recently as last month, most Americans may have seen this as a problem solely for the worker who could not afford to see a doctor about her high blood pressure or diabetes. This month, we know it is a problem for everyone.

That same worker is unlikely to seek testing and treatment for the coronavirus, which means they may unknowingly spread it.

…

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03...

COVID-19 isn't the flu; we didn't test and quarantine when it started, so now we need to "flatten the curve"

I’ve seen several people compare COVID-19 to the flu, often accompanied with bad information, mostly downplaying the severity of this crisis, and brushing off the absolute necessity of dramatically reducing our contact with each other.

Unlike the flu, noone has resistance or immunity to any strain of COVID-19 yet, which is one reason it’s spreading very fast. It’s also several times deadlier than the flu. The flu kills about 0.1% of those it infects. The best estimates, so far, of the rate of death for COVID-19 are between 0.7% and 3.5%. The flu kills tens of thousands in the US each year, in spite of widespread resistance. Without aggressively and preemptively quarantining ourselves, COVID-19 is expected to infect half the population. Given the average rate people die from this disease, if left to infect half the US or more, over a million people could die from it in the next year. The flu is no joke. COVID-19 is even worse, and therefore needs to be taken very seriously. The faster we respond, the fewer people will be infected and die, and the better care those who are infected will get from hospitals, since there are a finite amount of resources available at any hospital.

Italy’s a worst case scenario for hospital overload, given how fast COVID-19 was allowed to spread. They didn’t contain it quickly enough, so now their health system is severely overloaded. The World Health Organization rated their health system as the second most capable in the world, yet now in many places there are more than twice the number of critically-ill people than hospital beds available. Only a fraction of those infected are receiving the care they need. Containment and quarantine procedures have been even slower here in the US, and the WHO ranks our health system as 37th. We are grossly unprepared for an Italy-level outbreak.

If we had begun testing and quarantining when we should have, we might not have to resort to so many closures, cancelations, and quarantines. As a best case example, even though it’s literally a city (meaning there are a lot of people in a relatively small amount of space), Hong Kong did everything as well as possible, so very few people have been infected so far, and their hospitals aren’t strained. As soon as the virus was announced, and it was known to have originated from a particular province in China, they began testing and quarantining everyone who had recently traveled in from Hubei province, and tried locating everyone who had come into contact with them, and quarantined them as well. The people of Hong Kong began self-quarantining immediately, too, and the Hong Kong government eventually issued strict quarantine rules. Because of that, there are still fewer than 150 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections in the country, and infections of all communicable diseases have dropped. Very few people will die from this disease there, even though cities are one of the places most at risk for mass infection. Here, instead, the White House refused to do more than contain the spread, for weeks after a containment strategy was useful, and even refused to test and quarantine dozens of infected or likely-infected people traveling in from known infected areas, so now the infection is likely everywhere in the country, and we need to take extreme measures to contain the spread.

There are several actions we, communally, can take right now to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The most important one is simply reducing how much we’re around other people, especially large groups of people. And when we do need to go out (as most of us have to for work—at least until Congress is able to pass a bill guaranteeing paid sick leave, if not also rent relief), we should wear a mask (obtain one if you don’t have any yet), use appropriate hand sanitizer after touching things, and wash our hands very well whenever possible.

Doing these will “flatten the curve” from a sharp and large spike of infections, to a longer but smoother hill of infections, ultimately:

  • reducing the total number of people who get infected, and therefore are subject to lasting harm (there are reports of permanent lung damage), or death

  • giving hospitals a better chance to respond adequately, by having to deal with fewer patients at a time

  • giving labs more time to develop a vaccine or cure, further reducing transmission, harm, and death

We’re all in this together.

"How the Senate Paved the Way for Coronavirus Profiteering, And How Congress Could Undo It"

Poignantly relevant to the current presidential primary…

Ryan Grim and Aída Chávez reporting in The Intercept:

…The public puts in the money, and private companies keep whatever profits they can command. But it wasn’t always that way. Before 1995, drug companies were required to sell drugs funded with public money at a reasonable price. Under the Clinton administration, that changed.

In the 1994 midterms, the Republican Revolution, built largely around a reaction to Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform the health care system, swept Democrats out of Congress. On its heels, in April 1995, the Clinton administration capitulated to pharmaceutical industry pressure and rescinded the longstanding “reasonable pricing” rule.

…

The move was controversial, and a House member from Vermont, independent Bernie Sanders, offered an amendment to reinstate the rule. It failed on a largely party-line vote, 242-180.

Then in 2000, Sanders authored and passed a bipartisan amendment in the House to reimpose the “reasonable pricing” rule. In the Senate, a similar measure was pushed by the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.

“Many in Congress find it hard to argue with Sanders’ line that ‘Americans must pay twice for life-saving drugs, first as taxpayers to develop the drug and then as consumers to pad pharmaceutical profits,’” Nature wrote at the time.

Then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware voted to table Wellstone’s amendment, and it was defeated 56-39.

Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/02/corona...

Medicare for All will create jobs, reduce our taxes, and save us trillions in tax $

Jason Lemon, writing about a couple recent studies in Newsweek:

A new analysis of the economic impact of a Medicare for All health care reform, like the signature policy proposal of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, suggests that such a plan would not only increase wages for workers but also create additional jobs.

…

"The grain of truth in some of the claims is that, like any productivity improvement, the adoption of a reform like M4A would require the redeployment of workers from one sector (the health insurance and medical billing complex) to other sectors (mostly the delivery of health care)," he wrote. "But there is little in the M4A-induced redeployment of workers that would greatly stress the American labor market over and above the uncertainty and churn that characterizes this labor market every year."

…

…a study by researchers at Yale University, the University of Florida and the University of Maryland published in mid-February found that universal health care would actually save about $450 billion per year in health care costs. Additionally, it projected that a Medicare for All system would prevent at least 60,000 unnecessary deaths every year, as tens of millions of uninsured Americans would receive full health coverage under the system.

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-me...

Medicare for All is a necessity, and the clearest moral choice

Healthcare is a human right, and we should pay for it through progressive taxation, and make it free at point of service. By forcing people to pay at multiple points in the system, no matter how poor they may be, we doom emergency response.

@peterkrupa thinking out loud on Twitter about being tested for COVID-19:

Continued, via ThreadReader:

even if the cost of the covid-19 test is covered, what about related care? the first thing they do is test you for flu to rule it out. boom, that'll be $700, for nothing, because i don't care if i have flu or not. 

and then if i get the covid-19 test... what? oh good job, i've spent hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars of my own money to add a single data point to the body of public knowledge on this epidemic? fuck off, that's what i pay taxes for, i'm not doing this. 

to say nothing of the stigma so many workers with mild symptoms will face... the pressure to skip work and lose a paycheck, etc., which they won't do, because they have to pay rent. 

all the incentives in the US healthcare system are lined up AGAINST people voluntarily contributing to the public knowledge of what's going on with this outbreak. it's a disaster.