Rod Dreher's Blog, page 164

Price Gougers: Public Enemies

In The Plague, Camus’ hero, Dr. Rieux, tells some colleagues in the plague-stricken city of Oran that the only way to get through it is with “common decency.” In that light, somebody needs to go upside the head of creeps like this:

On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.

The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they’d lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer.

Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.

He is even more horrible than it seems:

Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.)

Current price-gouging laws “are not built for today’s day and age,” Mr. Colvin said. “They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane.”

He added, “Just because it cost me $2 in the store doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost me $16 to get it to your door.”

Read it all.

The government should confiscate emergency supplies from price gougers like Matt Colvin and distribute them free to the needy. And when this is over, if there are legal charges to pursue against people like him, I hope the state will do so. This is wicked to do this to people who are trying to protect themselves and their families. Matt Colvin, and people like him — the Times says there are “thousands” across the country — are profiting off the suffering of others. He’s common, as the old folks say, but he ain’t decent.

Matt Colvin apparently has no idea what kind of man he is. He ought to have been ashamed to have appeared in The New York Times, outing himself as a price gouger. It seems like he feels sorry for himself.

UPDATE: A more merciful strategy:

Cities and governors should offer to buy back supplies from hoarders at cost and hand them over to local distributors to restock stores more quickly. Treat it like amnesty: No shame, you're doing your part for the outbreak effort, time to help out now. https://t.co/yrNHfOPsEV

— Ari Schulman (@AriSchulman) March 14, 2020

The post Price Gougers: Public Enemies appeared first on The American Conservative.

Alas, Dear Leader

I have burned up a lot of energy in this space over the past couple of weeks criticizing President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. I am going to try to wind that down, because at this point, after his speech to the nation on Wednesday night, and his press conference today, the die is cast with this man. Nothing I could possibly stay here is more damning than the way he has conducted himself. If you’re still with him, you’re probably going to stay with him till the end; if he’s lost you, then there’s probably nothing that he can do to regain your trust, however grudgingly it was given.

The whole thing has left me shaken, though it’s better to know the truth of things than to live by a pleasing illusion. I’ll explain the shaken part in a second. Though I have never been a Trump enthusiast, and did not vote in the 2016 presidential contest, I have never been a Never Trumper. I have always found Trump’s character repulsive, but at the same time, I agreed that the Washington establishment, particularly in the GOP, needed to be shaken up. I may not have voted for Trump, but I understand why people did, and I was hoping he would succeed. I’m one of those corny people who believes as a general matter that any president’s success is the nation’s success, and vice versa. It is not patriotic to hope for one’s president to fail, nor is it even in one’s self-interest.

Prior to Wednesday night, he had been bad in this crisis, for reasons I have talked about at length in this space. Then he gave his speech to the nation, which was widely and correctly panned, even by conservatives, and which required the White House to issue three corrections — this, based on the president’s delivery of prepared remarks. Pete Wehner writes of that speech, and everything that led up to it:

Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership which stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, short-sighted and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.

The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times.

Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.

Wehner calls this the end of the Trump presidency. Pete Wehner was one of the original Never Trumpers. In January 2016, when, at the start of the GOP primary voting, he announced that he could never vote for Trump, he wrote:

Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe.

It’s impossible to deny that Pete Wehner was right. Though again, I was not a Trump advocate, Wehner saw things more clearly than I did. I admit that now. True, the “national catastrophe” would have landed on the head of anyone who was president when the virus arrived in America; Wehner justly concedes in his essay today that Donald Trump did not cause the coronavirus to come to America, and Wehner praises Trump for shutting off the airspace with China in January. But Trump’s blundering and denial since then has been very bad for the country.

I don’t know if you saw Trump’s White House press conference today. I did, and when it started, I appreciated Trump’s more solemn, even somber, tone, though I couldn’t tell if it is because he was self-disciplined, or sick with the virus. Matthew Walther, the conservative columnist for The Week, has been a skeptic all along about the nation’s alarmed response to coronavirus, but he interpreted Trump’s performance today it as something from which the president cannot recover:

On arguably the biggest stage of his presidency, he not only failed to give the impression that he was in control of the situation, he looked about as ready to handle a crisis as Joe Biden is to speak calmly to elderly voters in Iowa or quote the Declaration of Independence.

Agreeing to take questions following his prepared remarks was almost certainly a mistake. In the coming days and weeks and months, Trump will have virtually unlimited opportunities to attack the legacy of the Obama administration. This was not the occasion for it. In so many other contexts, Trump’s disdain for the press is defensible and even amusing. Friday it made him seem petty. And it is never a good idea for a president in the face of a crisis to tell the country that he takes “no responsibility” for anything (in this case, delays in virus testing). Taking responsibility is what the office is all about.

These impressions will not go away. They will certainly outlast the pandemic. No American will remember the day that President Trump addressed the nation on the subject of the coronavirus pandemic the way they remember Ronald Regan’s response to the Challenger disaster. If we have any lasting impressions they will be of an enervated, verbally infelicitous elderly man attempting to speak to realities that he is only half aware of (“unlike websites of the past”). The best thing he can hope for is that many of us will feel that Trump perfectly captured the national mood of alternating feverish speculation and exhaustion.

The “no responsibility” thing refers to the president’s answer when a reporter asked him if he takes responsibility for the government’s critical failure to have Covid-19 tests ready. The president said he does not take responsibility, then blamed Obama, which is a lie — and even if true, Trump has been president for three years — why didn’t he change the Obama regulations?

Then a reporter asked him about his White House (in the person of then-national security advisor John Bolton) dissolving the team tasked with handling pandemics. Here’s how that went:

Yamiche questions the President on not taking responsibility vs. his decision to disband the White House pandemic team… The President pleads ignorance as a defense pic.twitter.com/LmTZUPc0Y5

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) March 13, 2020

After the press conference, we learned that Trump’s big announcement about Google’s coronavirus site was … not really true:

UPDATE: https://t.co/vBkhjLQL3S

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) March 14, 2020

Once again, the President of the United States demonstrates that in the face of an unprecedented national catastrophe, he cannot be relied on to give accurate information to the American people. He was asked several times why he doesn’t take the advice of his own public health officials and get himself tested for coronavirus, given that he was recently in the presence of people who now have the disease. He wouldn’t give a straight answer. Either he was tested, and he has the disease, or he is afraid to be tested for what it might reveal. In neither case does one have confidence. Moreover, he does not have the moral courage to admit error — if he did, it would strengthen his ability to lead. He takes personal credit for successes, and blames others for failures. It’s so shabby, all of it. And it’s not going to get better, because this is who he is. There will be no redemption here. Character is destiny after all. When you fail at this level, there is no way to hide it.

When the president finally finished, it was a relief. I found myself not so much angry as sad and weary, in an unfamiliar way. We are accustomed to presidents — Republicans and Democrats both — playing the role of Stabilizer-In-Chief in times of national crisis. Whether you liked George H.W. Bush, Clinton, Dubya, or Obama, they all, in their crisis moments, knew what to do — or at least how to appear. Stagecraft is an important element of leadership in the television era. If you are the President of the United States, you need to be able to come across as in charge of the crisis. You also need to be in charge of the crisis, insofar as it is possible, but if you can’t be, you must at least seem. That’s what your country needs from you. At the moment of unprecedented peril for the United States, Donald Trump is choking, and none of Mike Pence’s sycophantic “Dear Leader” encomia can hide that fact.

Here’s why that made me strangely sad, more than angry. I thought: This man is a symbol of America’s shadow side: bloated, vain, rich, incompetent, and impotent. In a word, decadent. 

But that is not all that we are. Somewhere out there in this country, there are men and women who are not this. These are men and women who will show themselves as heroes in this hour, in cities and small towns and rural regions of this country. Some of them are no doubt in senior levels of government right now, working hard to keep things from falling apart despite the vacuum, moral and otherwise, in Oval Office leadership. They’re the ones we have to count on now. One day, we will know their names.

Jonah Goldberg captures why the coronavirus crisis has demolished all illusions around Donald Trump:

Part of Trump’s superpower is his ability to frame how we see reality. This ability makes him very dangerous to fellow Republicans who need the approval of his fans to win primaries. It makes his good favor very desirable to radio and TV hosts who need his fans for ratings. And so they join in the game of constructing a reality that becomes, in a way, self-fulfilling.

As a result, smart people can actually be convinced that the same man who gave the worst nationally televised address since the invention of the television is a victim of bad staffing while simultaneously believing he is a brilliant manager and an even more brilliant communicator (“Stupid stock market! Be more reassured!). When things go well, it’s a direct result of his managerial and policy genius. When they go poorly, it’s because of the Deep State, the media, the globalists, and the rest of the Legion of Doom unfairly undermining him. Tails, Trump wins. Shut up, NeverTrumper.

But here’s the problem: The coronavirus doesn’t give a crap about any of this. The math is the math, the science is the science. And however terrible the New York Times or MSNBC may or may not have been on the issue of the Mueller probe, it doesn’t change the infection rate if we do nothing. Just ask the families of all those dead Italians.

Sometimes the social construction of reality runs head-on into generic reality. I’m reminded how my wife once reviewed a book called The Frailty Myth in which the author argued that female “frailty” was a social construct. If women were raised to value physical strength and athleticism the way men are, they could bench press as much or run as fast as any man. The only problem with this theory was that it wasn’t true, and no matter how passionately you claimed otherwise you couldn’t bend actual reality to some contrived social reality.

The social reality Trump & Co. constructed isn’t powerful enough to paper over the underlying facts this time.

That’s right. This coronavirus crisis is a clarifying time for all of us. So many illusions will be taken down by this thing. Trumpophilia is one. Here’s another: We are about to discover, I think, how the agenda of the Social Justice Warriors is an indulgence that a society under maximal stress from disease cannot afford. Or we won’t, and we will tear ourselves apart. It really does feel like America’s social and moral fabric is like a fishing net that has been allowed to rot, and now suddenly it has caught a thrashing whale. We’ll see.

Anyway. It would have been great to have had a president who could rally the country behind his leadership at a time like this. We do not have that kind of president. Don’t forget, though, that Trump may have failed, but the deep problems that brought Trump to power remain — and they’re not going to be addressed by returning to the status quo under Joe Biden. That too is an illusion that won’t survive this purification. I’m not saying that Biden won’t win, or even that he doesn’t deserve to win in a contest with Trump. I’m just saying that he is yesterday’s idea of a solution.

Maybe Trump will surprise us. I pray for that. But none of us should expect it.

The post Alas, Dear Leader appeared first on The American Conservative.

Coming Together, Staying Apart

The Orthodox Church in America’s Archbishop of the South — Alexander, my ordinary — has ordered all the faithfulto stay home from liturgy. From his letter:

Beloved, along with diocesan administration, I have been closely monitoring the developing status of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the past 48 hours it has become clear that if we do not slow the rate of infection through social distancing (i.e., self-imposed isolation) our healthcare system is likely to be overwhelmed by the number of cases. As we can see from the situation in Italy, this will result in a significantly greater number of deaths, due to lack of treatment, or rather the inability to effectively treat so great a number of those infected. Further, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests COVID-19 is an airborne contagion that cannot be contained simply by the reasonable hygienic measures with which we are all familiar (handwashing, disinfecting of surfaces, and the like).

In light of this, I am asking all parishes and missions in the Diocese of the South, in addition to the

directives from the Statement of the Holy Synod, to respond in the following manner:

• All parish and mission events and activities, including coffee fellowship, church school, and the rest,

and all services other than the Sunday Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, the Vesperal Liturgy of the Great

Feast of Annunciation, and the Presanctified Liturgies, are cancelled through March 29, beginning from

today. At which point we will adjust this as the situation warrants.

• Everyone in the parish or mission, other than the priest (and deacon), a reader, a server, and no more

than two (2) chanters or singers (all of whom are physically strong and at low risk for COVID-19), should

remain at home, even at the time of the Divine Liturgy. The holy body and precious blood of our Lord can

never be a source of disease, it is after all for the healing of soul and body, but the COVID-19 virus can still be passed through the congregation. Out of love for our neighbor, we must do everything we can to protect the vulnerable by slowing the rate of infection not only in our parishes, but in the greater

community, and thereby allowing the hospitals and medical community to more adequately care for those

most at risk. All who are “at risk” – the elderly, those with pre-existing conditions, any who are actively sick or exhibiting signs of illness – should absolutely absent themselves from the services.

He continues:

This is not the season of Great Lent we anticipated, but it is nonetheless a fitting Lenten effort: focus on the greater good of our neighbors, recognizing that this initial response to this pandemic will work for the greater good of our faithful and our neighbors. Use this time of “social distancing” for prayer and to keep vigil “in one’s cell.”

I’m genuinely grateful to Archbishop Alexander for making this call. It cannot have been easy. I was thinking about church coming up on Sunday, knowing I was going to go, feeling guilty about my anxiety, wondering if that was a sign of little faith, and so forth. He has lifted a great burden from us all.

Speaking of burdens — and duties — a reader in New Orleans writes:

I wonder what my obligations are re: coronavirus and community. What is the risk that hunkering down, avoiding restaurants and coffeeshops, will result in the failure of those businesses and the unemployment of the people who are serve me? What if we eat ramen for a few months and emerge to find Costco and Applebee’s have survived, but Zara’s Li’l Giant Supermarket and Ancora Pizzeria are out of business?

My risk of dying of COVID-19 is probably about 1%. TBH, that’s probably comparable to my chance of dying in the next year or two from a heart ailment, cancer, accident, etc.

I don’t want to contribute to an outbreak, and I don’t want to give it to my parents. I’m aware of those risks. If I have a hint of symptoms, I’m staying home for a few weeks. If I’ve been exposed to someone who’s sick, I’ll do the same for 5 or 10 days – whatever the recommendation becomes.

At some point, decisions cost lives. We know a 55 mph speed limit will save x lives compared to 70 mph, but 70 mph provides broad benefits to the economy and the people who don’t die.

And as we shut down the global economy, does anyone have concern that there are whole countries that are the global equivalent of a small business? How many people will die in the developing world as people and countries that have finally edged their way out of extreme poverty find themselves slipping back in?

Last night we walked to a nearby fried-chicken restaurant. As it happens, we ate there the night Hurricane Barry (aka Hurricane Barely) was supposed to hit, when the city was more or less shut down. Last night we saw the waitress who waited on us the night of the hurricane, and she remembered us. It looks like she’s a manager there now. What happens to her if people stop going out?

UPDATE: Now this is a good idea:

Nice idea out there to help local shops /restaurants/services suffering from decreased business due to virus. Go in, ask if you can buy a gift certificate for future use. They get the money when they need it, you will use it down the road. #inthistogether

— Peggy Noonan (@Peggynoonannyc) March 13, 2020

The post Coming Together, Staying Apart appeared first on The American Conservative.

How The Pandemic Will Change Us

Last night my son came home from LSU, which is reorganizing, and will resume classes online in three weeks. Thank God. This morning my other kids’ school announced that it was shutting down for the rest of the semester and moving to online instruction, starting Monday (they have Fridays off). So we’re homebound and social distancing like champs here, for the duration.

Last night, my college son told me that one of his favorite professors mentioned to him his fear that the university administration would seize this opportunity to move most instruction online, even after the crisis passes. It’s cheaper, after all. This would be a pedagogical loss, a terrible loss. But can’t you see it happening? I can, absent meaningful resistance.

This may, in fact, be the event that causes the higher education bubble to pop. I’m very interested in what you academic readers have to say about this.

I’m thinking also about how American churchgoing will be changed by this crisis. Dr. Anthony Fauci said on TV this morning that we could be in this emergency situation for at least two months. I heard this morning that at least one hospital is quietly planning to be on emergency status for six months. As we have all heard, masses in some Catholic dioceses have been cancelled, and many Protestant churches are moving their worship online during the crisis.

Here’s what concerns me. What if people get used to being exiled from their actual house of worship, and come to believe that “virtual church” is good enough?

For Christians who are part of a heavily liturgical, sacramental tradition, that could never happen. There is no substitute for being there to receive the sacraments. The danger there is that people who are nominal, or tending that way, but who go to church out of habit, will simply not resume once the danger has passed.

This may happen to low-church Protestants — Evangelicals and charismatics — too. But it seems to me that they also face a greater danger from congregants deciding that it’s good enough to hear the sermon online, from home. They will have done it for months by the time this is over; maybe they won’t go back.

It seems to me that religious leaders ought to be thinking right now about having to face that challenge down the road, when we come out the other side. This is not a liberal-vs-conservative thing, but something that all churches will deal with, one way or the other.

Can any of you think of ways we can encourage each other to resist the temptation to think of exile from the temple as a normative condition, to be embraced?

What other ways do you foresee this pandemic changing the way we live in a permanent way?

UPDATE: Wow, here is a fantastic piece by Andy Crouch, about being the church in this time of plague. Here is what his long essay is about:

What is happening? An overview of the most important things for Christian leaders, anywhere in the United States, to know about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.

What should we communicate? A list of the most helpful messages others can hear from us — and the most harmful messages as well.

What decisions should we make? Recommendations for decisions about large gatherings, medium-size gatherings for Christian worship, and small groups meeting in households.

What can we hope for? A few reflections on the genuine possibility that our decisions in the next few weeks could reshape the practice of Christian faith in our nation and, God being merciful, lead to a revival of the church of Jesus Christ in America.

More:

At the same time, some people are taking steps, sometimes extreme ones, to protect themselves and their families, often out of terrible anxiety, and this will likely increase in the coming days. This is not a Christian posture. We do not change our behavior out of fear. In a very different context, the Apostle Paul wrote, “I want you to be free of anxieties” so that his community could serve the Lord (1 Cor. 7:32). We prepare for our expected needs, and others’, so that we can be free of anxieties and serve freely when the time comes.

It is entirely possible to prepare, even to prepare urgently, out of love. Rapid decisions to prepare are not panic unless they are accompanied by aggression and anxiety. Christians should be preparing — urgently in some cases — but not panicking.

We should say, “Prepare for trouble.”

This is not the same as saying, “Worry about trouble,” or a violation of Jesus’ command in Matthew 6 not to give thought for tomorrow. Our model here is Jesus, who warned his disciples over and over that their worst case scenario was going to come true. “He began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected . . ., and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly” (Mark 8:31–32). Looking beyond his own fate, he also predicted the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem by Roman forces even as he wept over the city’s refusal to listen to his message of peace (Luke 19:41–43).

On the night before he faced the ultimate tragedy and disaster of Golgotha and the Cross, none of his disciples had any real idea what was coming in the days and years ahead (tradition says that all eleven original apostles died as martyrs). So even as he spoke words of comfort, Jesus made clear that his friends would suffer: “In the world you will have tribulation — but take heart, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

There is no reason to expect COVID-19 to be the “end of the world” in any sense. Instead it falls in the large category of events that Jesus also prepared his disciples for, the “wars and rumors of wars” that would not mean the end of the world (Matthew 24:6).

And:

The Roman world was full of plagues. Epidemics regularly decimated cities and regions. Though ancient people did not understand the germ theory of disease, they knew enough to flee cities, if they had the means to do so.

The first Christians, who saw themselves as the household of God in their cities, did not flee the plagues. They stayed, and they served. In his book The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark develops a statistical argument that this commitment to providing meaningful care to people stricken by the plague was, all by itself, a major contributor to the growth of the church in the first centuries of the common era.

After you had recovered from the plague, after all, where would you want to worship? The pagan temple whose priests and elite benefactors had fled at the first sign of trouble? Or the household of the neighbor who had brought you food and water, care and concern, at great risk to themselves?

When this plague has passed, what will our neighbors remember of us? Will they remember that the Christians took immediate, decisive action to protect the vulnerable, even at great personal and organizational cost? Will they remember that, being prepared and free from panic, the households of their Christian neighbors were able to visit the needy (while protecting them by keeping appropriate social distance!), provide for their needs, and bring hope? Will they remember that, having ensured safety in all the ways we could, we still gathered to worship and praise God together, week after week, celebrating the resurrection — that even as we ceased doing inessential things, we made clear that serving and worshipping God was the greatest and most essential task of our lives?

Read it all. 

The post How The Pandemic Will Change Us appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Coming Coronavirus Storm

You better sit down for this one. The New York Times got its hands on a presentation given at a CDC conference in February that gathered the agency’s senior officials, and top epidemiological experts, together at a meeting to game out how bad the virus outbreak could be in the US. Here’s what they discussed. Excerpts:

The C.D.C.’s scenarios were depicted in terms of percentages of the population. Translated into absolute numbers by independent experts using simple models of how viruses spread, the worst-case figures would be staggering if no actions were taken to slow transmission.

Between 160 million and 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to one projection. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.

And, the calculations based on the C.D.C.’s scenarios suggested, 2.4 million to 21 million people in the U.S. could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. Fewer than a tenth of those are for people who are critically ill.

More:

Even severe flu seasons stress the nation’s hospitals to the point of setting up tents in parking lots and keeping people for days in emergency rooms. Coronavirus is likely to cause five to 10 times that burden of disease, said Dr. James Lawler, an infectious diseases specialist and public health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Hospitals “need to start working now,” he said, “to get prepared to take care of a heck of a lot of people.”

Dr. Lawler recently presented his own “best guess” projections to American hospital and health system executives at a private webinar convened by the American Hospital Association. He estimated that some 96 million people in the U.S. would be infected. Five out of every hundred would need hospitalization, which would mean close to five million hospital admissions, nearly two million of those patients requiring intensive care and about half of those needing the support of ventilators.

Dr. Lawler’s calculations suggested 480,000 deaths, which he said was conservative. By contrast, about 20,000 to 50,000 people have died from flu-related illnesses this season, according to the C.D.C. Unlike with seasonal influenza, the entire population is thought to be susceptible to the new coronavirus.

The good news — if a story like this has any good news — is that we can save a lot of lives if we implement aggressive social distancing and other public health measures at once. But we can’t wait till it gets bad to do so:

“All U.S. cities and states have the natural experiment of the cities that have preceded us, namely the superb response of Singapore and Hong Kong,” said Dr. Michael Callahan, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard. Those countries implemented school closures, eliminated mass gatherings, required work from home, and rigorously decontaminated their public transportation and infrastructure. They also conducted widespread testing.

They were able to “reduce an explosive epidemic to a steady state one,” Dr. Callahan said.

As in the case of an approaching hurricane, Dr. Mecher said, “You’ve got to take potentially very disruptive actions when the sun is shining and the breeze is mild.”

Read it all. 

So, wait: The top CDC officials met last month with the country’s best academic experts to put their heads together and figure out what we’re dealing with here, and President Trump was still doing his Mayor from “Jaws” shtick? From CNN on March 1:

The visit [to the CDC] comes as Trump has fumed in recent days at Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who recently said, “It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen.”

Trump thought officials like Messonnier were causing unnecessary alarm.

The Times story doesn’t say if Dr. Messonnier was in the room for the presentation, but it would be very strange if, as one of the CDC’s senior officials, she had not been. We know that she met with the president, who publicly contradicted her at a February 27 press conference, saying that she was wrong to say the virus’s spread is “inevitable.” You will recall that at that time, Limbaugh and others in Trumpworld were trying to destroy Dr. Messonnier’s credibility by pointing out that she’s the sister of Rod Rosenstein. The Conspirator-in-Chief tweeted at the time:

Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape! @CDCgov…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 26, 2020

So you have to wonder: did Dr. Messonnier or anybody in the CDC tell the president what the agency’s expert panel was projecting? How could they not have done? Well, today’s Times story says:

The C.D.C. declined interview requests about the modeling effort and referred a request for comment to the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for the task force, said that senior health officials had not presented the findings to the group.

I do not believe a word Devin O’Malley says. Well, let me qualify that. I presume that he’s telling the truth as he knows it, and it may be technically true that the task force did not get a briefing by the CDC on this particular conference. But it beggars belief to think that the CDC’s briefings to the White House on what the country faced did not include information from this earlier panel. This administration has no credibility at all. It’s gone. Trump had to have known last month how bad this was going to get, but he lied to the nation about it (the charitable view is that this was because he was lying to himself), and he and his henchmen tried to destroy the credibility of a medical truth-teller.

Notice too that the administration is forcing public health experts to defer comment to the political operation in the White House. And this morning, Trump is in full blame-shifting mode:

Some leader, eh? The thing is, I believe it might well be the case that the CDC’s internal bureaucratic procedures screwed this up. But the fact of the matter is, Trump has been president for three years, and did nothing to fix the problem. What’s more, given that his former National Security advisor John Bolton dismissed the NatSec aides working on global pandemic response, we know for a fact that public health readiness was not a priority for him. His defensive griping rings very hollow.

Yesterday I phoned my mom to check on her. She’s an elderly woman with lung problems, and therefore at prime risk. She had been inside all day watching Fox News, her only source of news. Know what her headline for me was? About how terrible the Democrats are, politicizing this thing to hurt the president. Of course I have no way of knowing what Fox is reporting — I don’t have cable — and to what extent she is watching through the eyes of a Trump voter, with all the confirmation bias that entails. But it concerned me that this is how she sees this issue, based on watching Fox all day long.

With that in mind, look:

Fox is the most watched channel by the highest risk demographic group. They have a special obligation to provide responsible risk information. https://t.co/XQuGWJV9A3

— Jeremy FLATTEN THE CURVE Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) March 13, 2020

When this is over, there is going to be a terrible, terrible reckoning.

Meanwhile, take the information in the Times report about how serious this thing could get, and let it guide your personal decisions about going out in public, and so forth. All of us have a role to play in protecting our families and communities, and indeed the country. Decisions that you and I make regarding our personal conduct could easily make the difference between life and death for a lot of Americans. Yesterday an Italian doctor was quoted as saying that a child with no symptoms, but a carrier of the disease, can go visit his grandparents “and basically kill them.”

This is how we have to start thinking about the crisis, and changing our behavior.

Here’s an interesting tool from Stuart Thompson and Nicholas Kristof, showing how much better or worse the epidemic’s spread can be, based on whether or not we in the population adopt behavioral measures that limit it. Take a look at it, and play with it. It really does bring home how much good we can all do if we act now, and stick to our plans. By the way, the NYT has made all its coronavirus coverage free to non-subscribers. If we do no meaningful interventions, this is how it’s going to look, on current track:

If, however, we start implementing aggressive measures today, this is how it’s going to look:

These are the Worst Case and Best Case scenarios. What we actually do is going to be somewhere in between. The point is, we have it in our power to flatten that curve! Flattening the curve, though, means that we all have to understand that a hurricane is upon us, and that if we’re going to survive it with as few deaths as possible, we all have a part to play. Nobody from the government is going to come in to save us. This is on us, especially if we are a leader of an institution.

 

The post The Coming Coronavirus Storm appeared first on The American Conservative.

Prudence Is Not Panic

As regular readers know, I’ve taken a lot of criticism in these comments threads, especially from Trump supporters, for my alarmism on coronavirus over the past month or so. That’s fine — I’m a big boy. I do wish to point out, though, that the kinds of things we were talking about on this blog weeks ago are things that are now mainstream. If you took me seriously back then, you are much better prepared to weather what is upon us.

A reader wrote me last night:

I’m a regular reader in Baton Rouge and want to thank you for your early coverage of the coronavirus outbreak. Because of you we now have food and supplies for up to a month.

Being 62 years of age with hypertension I am in the high risk category and your information has been invaluable. My 83 year old mother (a recent widow) would not have been aware of the severity of this situation had it not been for you, either. We are now prepared for the “social distancing” phase. My mom will begin staying with us tomorrow and we don’t plan to leave but to visit family who are also socially distancing.

I am horrified by the lack of urgency by our public officials. My husband was to attend a Rotary Club meeting today where our governor was speaker. He decided not to attend because he’s been listening to health officials (and his wife) instead of politicians. The meeting went on and the governor spoke as planned. Later today the governor announced that the number of cases in Louisiana went from six to 13 overnight.

I’m afraid that we are headed down the same road as our Italian friends and the President’s speech tonight did nothing to allay my fears.

Please continue to inform us about this pandemic. I know that you’ve been accused of fear mongering, but I want you to know that you are the reason my mom will have a chance to survive this. God bless you.

I so appreciate that. There have been a couple of comments like that too today. I want to commend to all of you Peggy Noonan’s column today in the Wall Street Journal. She writes, in part:

I wrote in February that I believed the coronavirus will be bad, that it will have a bigger impact on America than we imagine, and that a lot of people will be exposed and a significant number endangered. I was beaten up a bit and fair enough—to make a prophecy is to summon animosity, especially when men are scared and especially when they see everything as political. My assertions were based on a long reading of history and a close reading of what had happened in China, then Italy.

Now it’s time to lose the two most famous phrases of the moment. One is “Don’t panic!” The other is “an abundance of caution.”

“Don’t panic” is what nervous, defensive people say when someone warns of coming trouble. They don’t want to hear it, so their message is “Don’t worry like a coward, be blithely unconcerned like a brave person.”

One way or another we’ve heard it a lot from administration people.

This is how I’ve experienced it:

“Captain, that appears to be an iceberg.” “Don’t panic, officer, full steam ahead.”

“Admiral, concentrating our entire fleet in one port seems tempting fate.” “We don’t need your alarmist fantasies, ensign.”

“We’re picking up increased chatter about an al Qaeda action.” “Your hand-wringing is duly noted.”

“Don’t panic,” in the current atmosphere, is a way of shutting up people who are using their imaginations as a protective tool. It’s an implication of cowardice by cowards.

As for “abundance of caution,” at this point, in a world-wide crisis, the cautions we must take aren’t abundant, they’re reasonable and realistic.

Reason and realism are good.

Read it all. When people make fun of you for having stocked up in preparation, send them this column. When John Bolton took over as Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018, this is what happened:

The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.

The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.

Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.

More:

Collectively, warns Jeremy Konyndyk, who led foreign disaster assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Obama administration, “What this all adds up to is a potentially really concerning rollback of progress on U.S. health security preparedness.”

“It seems to actively unlearn the lessons we learned through very hard experience over the last 15 years,” said Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. “These moves make us materially less safe. It’s inexplicable.”

The day before news of Ziemer’s exit became public, one of the officials on his team, Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the NSC, spoke at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. That event killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.

“The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern,” she told the audience. “Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.”

How does that decision look today? We now know that this White House’s failure of imagination left America vulnerable in the face of this pandemic. That’s a stain that is not coming off.

Don’t let the same kind of partisan-driven magical thinking prevent you from taking action to protect and defend your family. Today I was out getting a few more supplies, and engaged fellow shoppers, and store clerks, in discussion about their level of preparedness. Of those I talked to, only one had done any preparation at all. I didn’t get the impression that these were the kind of arrogant, Rush Limbaugh types who are bluffing their way through the fear. These seemed to be true low-information people who simply had not heard. They were visibly surprised when I told them about what public health officials have been telling us to do to get ready. These are exactly the kind of everyday folks who would likely have been reached had the White House six weeks ago actually “panicked” in the sense Peggy Noonan means.

Alan Jacobs has an interesting post about Rush Limbaugh’s moronic claims this week about how minor coronavirus is.  His reader Samuel James posted this comment:

You know what the most interesting thing is about Limbaugh’s COVID commentary? The fact that he was recently diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. It stands to reason, does it not, that a man who desperately needs the best experts and credentialed information in this season of his (possibly fading) life would see the value of expert testimony? But in my experience, this actually has little effect on people. My family tree is full of people who practically live in the hospital and eat prescriptions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but who are confident that Sean Hannity knows more about anything than any scientist, lawyer, or even theologian. The death of expertise is so nefarious precisely because it’s resistant to cognitive dissonance.

On the other hand, when people do come around, there’s no point in shaming them the way they may have shamed you:

There is a powerful temptation to dunk and shame those still in the “you’re freaking over nothing” camp. I’ve done it. But some people genuinely just are not there yet—but can come around if we talk to them like human beings. Hope, patience, talk one on one to those who need it. https://t.co/WZl5c2B01y

— Ari Schulman (@AriSchulman) March 13, 2020

UPDATE: A British reporter’s dispatch from Italy. Excerpts:

The first identifies herself as Martina, but I believe she is Martina Crivellari, an intensive care cardiac anaesthesiologist at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan.

She said: “There are a lot of young people in our Intensive Care Units (ICUs) – our youngest is a 38-year-old who had had no comorbidities (underlying health problems).

“A lot of patients need help with breathing but there are not enough ventilators.

“They’ve told us that starting from now we’ll have to choose who to intubate – priority will go to the young or those without comorbidities.

“At Niguarda, the other big hospital in Milan, they are not intubating anyone over 60, which is really, really young.”

More:

She added: “This virus is so infectious that the only way to avoid a ‘massacre’ is to have the least number possible getting infected over the longest possible timescale.

“Right now, if we get 10,000 people in Italy in need of ventilators – when we only have 3,000 in the country – 7,000 people will die.

“Rome right now is like where Milan was 10 days ago. In 10 days there has been an incredible escalation.

“Lombardy, which has the best healthcare in the country, is collapsing, so I don’t dare to think what would happen in less efficient regions.

“We’ve had no critical cases among children but with children, viruses are much less aggressive – think chickenpox or measles.

“But the very young are crazy carriers.

“A child with no symptoms will go to visit its grandparents, and basically kill them. So it’s essential to avoid contact between them”.

And:

He added: “You have no idea how many young people are here, I mean even 20-year-olds with no underlying conditions, in need of assisted breathing because of horrible pneumonia.

Italy has the second-best health care system in the world, according to the WHO. The United States is ranked No. 37.

Please, read the whole thing. We need to steel ourselves for what’s ahead.

UPDATE.2: A friend of mine passes this along. It’s from a friend of hers who serves as a missionary in China, and who is trying to warn his friends and family back home about what to expect:

The post Prudence Is Not Panic appeared first on The American Conservative.

Christianity = #MAGA At Prayer?

I interrupt the Covid19 updates to talk about another troubling crisis, this one with much longer repercussions. But there’s a Covid19 angle too, which brought it to mind this afternoon.

First, here is a chart based on the latest data from the Barna Group, the Evangelical polling and data organization:

If you’re reading this on your smartphone, you probably won’t be able to see the fine print. The graph tracks Christian identification from 2000 to 2020. The top line (red) is the percentage of Americans who identify as “practicing Christians”. The teal line is for “non-practicing Christians”; the yellow line is for “non-Christians.”

In its State of the Church project, Barna finds that over the past decade, the number of practicing Christians has declined by 20 percent; the number of non-practicing Christians rose by 8 percent; and the number of non-Christians rose by 12 percent.

I urge you to read this thread by Matthew Sheffield, based on Barna’s research. He points out that churchgoing is down dramatically across all generations. Looking at Barna’s political numbers, Sheffield says:

In essence, as the influence of traditionalist dogma on society declines (see evolution, LGBT, science generally), traditionalist Christians are becoming more engaged to try to prevent it. But their anger is only shrinking their numbers quicker.

There is a strong parallel to ideological Sanders supporters here. Both groups have a solid core but have trouble communicating to outsiders. Sanders fans have better long term prospects but in short term, neither group gets what it wants

I’m not quite sure how he sees their (our; I’m a trad Christian) “anger” shrinking the attractiveness of the message means. Perhaps he’s saying that as trads up their political engagement, they become less attractive to others?

I’m thinking about this in light of Pew’s recent numbers on US Christians and their feelings towards Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, white Evangelicals are by far the strongest supporters of the president, but the numbers aren’t shabby among white non-Evangelical Christians, either.

In light of Trump’s very serious stumbles so far in meeting the coronavirus crisis, I am thinking some pretty dark thoughts about how this might all play out down the road. None of us know yet how bad the effects of this virus are going to be, not only in terms of public health, but also economically, and on the social fabric of the country. One can easily imagine that it’s going to take a while to recover from the economic losses coming our way — and that this would be the case no matter who was in the White House.

That said, Donald Trump is in the White House, not anybody else, and his handling of this crisis has been appalling. His hardcore supporters certainly don’t think so, but when the first polling data come out in the next few days showing what Americans think of how the president has dealt with this crisis, I think they will be awful for the White House. Let’s do a thought experiment: imagine that the effects of the crisis are profound and painful. It is human nature to look for a scapegoat — and it would be natural for any sitting president to take the blame. Assuming Trump’s performance continues to be so bad throughout the crisis, voters are going to hold him responsible in a career-changing way. He will lose the White House, and if voter anger is hot enough, the GOP might lose the Senate. Again, a lot can happen between now and then, but this is a feasible scenario.

What does that have to do with Evangelicals, and other conservative Christians? I believe that white Evangelicals will be scapegoated too, particularly by and through the news media, but also across the cultural elites, and among younger adults. I also think that this ire will not rest only on white Evangelicals, or those Christians who were outspoken Trump supporters, but on all of us. This has nothing to do with fairness or reason. Scapegoaters don’t need a reason. During the Black Death, grieving and frightened European Christians blamed Jews, and took it out on them. The Pope had to issue an edict saying that the Jews were not to blame for the plague. People are irrational, especially if they’ve been traumatized.

My point is that the position of Christians in the United States has been dramatically weakening for the past twenty years. This is not news to me, nor to readers of this blog, or my book The Benedict Option. The sense among the broader US population that the Christian church is #MAGA At Prayer is unfair and inaccurate, but nevertheless potent. If Trump is thrown out by voters this fall in anger over his performance in this extended national crisis, fair or not, conservative Christians are going to go down with him — and not just because liberals and progressives despise us, but also because non-religious Republicans will be looking for a scapegoat too, to distance themselves from the debacle.

I could be wrong about this, and in any case, it’s almost certainly too late to do anything about it now. But I gotta say, this kind of thing from wingnut #MAGA preachers doesn’t help:

One Christian right group is literally telling followers that “there has never been a better time” to come together in large groups pic.twitter.com/m54seIelmI

— Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield) March 12, 2020

Paula White, the headliner speaker is literally a White House adviser to President Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/Wsn03D3gTJ

— Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield) March 12, 2020

The post Christianity = #MAGA At Prayer? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Siena, Unbeaten

This brings tears to my eyes. I have heard this song twice in my life, both in Siena, during the Palio di Siena. You hear people singing it at top of the lungs all over town. I’ve been to the Palio twice, and there developed a deep love of that city and its people. This, friends, is the spirit of Siena, and the spirit of Italy. Viva Siena! Viva Italia!

People of my hometown #Siena sing a popular song from their houses along an empty street to warm their hearts during the Italian #Covid_19 #lockdown.#coronavirusitalia #COVID19 #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/7EKKMIdXov

— valemercurii (@valemercurii) March 12, 2020

UPDATE: I can’t stop watching that. I am thinking about how much I love Italy, and Italians, and how much they are all suffering now. BUT THEY WILL NOT BE BEATEN! God, what a people! What a country!

Here are a couple of shots I took at the Palio di Siena, the first one of the summer of 2017. I imagine this man joining in the singing above:

This is also an admirable Senese (Onda is also my contrada):

The post Siena, Unbeaten appeared first on The American Conservative.

COVID19 & The Legitimacy Of The System

Good afternoon. An hour ago, the stock market was down over eight percent today alone, though it has gained back just over half today’s losses. The amount of wealth being burned away by this virus is staggering. Nothing the president said last night calmed the markets, though to be fair, it’s hard to think of any words from any president that would have settled investors down, given how devastating this virus is. Still, it would have helped had Trump been able to project an air of competence and command. The White House having to come out immediately after he delivered this prepared speech, and correct three significant errors, signaled to the markets: the White House is flailing.

This feels like the day after Lehman failed. People know the world has changed, but they don't quite grasp how much or how long it’s going to change for.

— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) March 12, 2020

Meanwhile, the government has well and truly botched the testing. No wonder Trump didn’t talk about it last night.

Coronavirus testing numbers:

-CDC tested 77 people this week **total** as of Wednesday

-States are testing an average of 50 people per day.

-A single private lab is up and running w. coronavirus tests. The next soonest will be ready to go on 03/16.https://t.co/HwnjMhnD94

— Alexander Nazaryan (@alexnazaryan) March 12, 2020

Key: members were floored as they learned that roughly just 11,000 Coronavirus tests TOTAL have been conducted compared to the fact that in South Korea, 10,000 tests are conducted A DAY. https://t.co/vupSFuFevl

— Lauren Fox (@FoxReports) March 12, 2020

Meanwhile, the Chinese propagandists are now resorting to conspiracy theory to blame the US for starting the plague that began in Wuhan, their country, and grew worse as their government botched the initial response. This tweeter is a senior propaganda minister:

Key: members were floored as they learned that roughly just 11,000 Coronavirus tests TOTAL have been conducted compared to the fact that in South Korea, 10,000 tests are conducted A DAY. https://t.co/vupSFuFevl

— Lauren Fox (@FoxReports) March 12, 2020

Ah, now I see the Dow is back down to a seven percent loss. What a day.

Going back to the wealth issue for a second, I’m wondering what kind of bailouts are being cooked up in DC right now for big industries. I’m not saying that those are necessarily bad things — I would have to know the details of each case — but let us recall how much American politics changed after the federal government bailed out all the banks in 2008. That’s how we got the Tea Party. And that, ultimately, is how we got Donald Trump as president.

This has all the makings of something much worse than 2008, because it’s not only burning up wealth, but killing people, and disrupting daily life around the globe. In 2008, it was a problem of numbers. This is not an abstraction. If you haven’t yet read my short piece on how the Tsarist government’s failure to respond well to the catastrophic 1891-92 famine laid the groundwork for the Bolshevik Revolution, please do. The point there is that the experience of mass suffering, and the inability of the Tsar’s regime to deal with it competently, profoundly shook the faith of the people in the system. It caused a lot of people who had been negative towards Marxism to open themselves to it.

The point for us is not that Bolsheviks are lying in wait to take power. The point is that this COVID19 crisis is hitting hard at a system that has been under strain, and in which levels of trust are not high. If there is widespread economic pain and suffering — on top of the sickness and death — and it is believed that the US Government screwed up its response (which it undoubtedly has till now), then there is bound to be a political backlash. And if that system works to bail out the rich, not the masses — then we are looking at the end of liberalism as we know it. The parties are going to go radical, with socialists and nationalists taking power.

The people are not going to go through another banker bailout. I cannot imagine that. I could be wrong, but I feel pretty confident that what’s at stake here is not just the health of the American people, and the strength of the American economy, but the legitimacy of our system.

We were able to say a couple of months ago that the secretive, controlling nature of the Chinese Communist system aided and abetted the virus’s spread in Wuhan. But it has also become clear that the fact that they live in a police state gave the government the powers it needed to slow, and eventually to stop, the spread of the disease. Well, now we know that the fact that we live in a free and open society did not make the US Government act reasonably back in February, when we knew that coronavirus was going to come here. We forfeited the readiness advantage of living in a free society.

And now that the disease is here, that free society is about to be tested in a way it never has been, at least not in living memory (there is no one alive who remembers the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic). We know that a police state can deal effectively with coronavirus. Can a free state?

If we can’t, what’s coming next?

This is a question not only for the president, and for Congressional leaders to consider, but for each and every one of us. It is clear that we cannot rely on the White House to handle this. The thing is, even if a wise philosopher-king were in the White House, it would still be more important that We the People, a free, self-governing people, take responsibility for acting wisely in the face of this crisis.

Don’t wait for somebody from the government to tell you what to do. If the state or city won’t close the schools, and you can keep your kids at home, do that. Don’t go out in public unless you have to. Practice all forms of social distancing. The government cannot flatten the infection curve by executive order; we the people can do it by social distancing, and self-discipline.

If we are unable to do this now, we may find ourselves in not too many years ruled by a state that has the power to do what Beijing has done — and we may find ourselves welcoming that, as opposed to the alternative. This is not a fantasy.

The post COVID19 & The Legitimacy Of The System appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump’s Coronavirus Speech Reaction

Full speech here:



Good part:

This is a new, more serious tone from him. I sincerely welcome that

Bad parts:

He looked and sounded unwell
I don’t suppose I’m opposed to the European travel restrictions, but it’s much too late for that to do measurable good. They would have made a lot more sense two weeks ago. And exempting Britain from this ban is senseless. It sounded like he’s  trying to frame the virus as an external threat. But it’s already here, and it’s rapidly spreading. This seemed more rhetorical than anything else — Trump trying to reinforce his image as a nationalist looking out for American interests
He spoke much more about economic relief than public health concerns
He spent far too much time and effort trying to defend his administration’s response, and no time speaking more directly to people who — encouraged by him and his media coterie — have spent the last few weeks minimizing the seriousness of all this
He said little or nothing about testing, which we are still not able to do. No real talk about social distancing
He did not declare a state of national emergency, which would have helpful policy and legal effects at the state level
He said nothing about the critical-care crisis facing hospitals. I have found that this is a point that is not widely understood by the general public: that even if only a relatively small number of people are ultimately going to die from this virus, it stands to overwhelm our hospitals. This is why it is so very important for everybody to practice social distancing and the rest: to slow the rate of infection, and give our health care system the chance to cope. It is beyond comprehension why he didn’t make this clear to listeners tonight. I’ve had a number of conversations these past few days with people who aren’t following the story closely, and they are entirely unaware of this fact. The president blew an opportunity to explain that to the nation
Watching him, I realized the cost of a president having pissed away his authority these past three years, with his daily juvenile tweets and schoolyard rhetoric. The country needs a president now who can inspire, galvanize, and lead. Tonight I saw a president who looked tired, afraid, and completely unconvincing. He ended by calling for an end to partisanship, and the nation coming together to fight this threat. That’s what any president should do in his position, in a moment of great national crisis. It is difficult to imagine a president with less credibility to make that ask

Real leadership in this crisis is going to have to come from governors, from public health officials, and from institutional leaders. We saw tonight that even when Trump is trying to be on his best behavior, he just doesn’t have much of a clue about the nature of the crisis, or how it can best be fought.

UPDATE: You have GOT to be kidding me?!

Homeland Security “clarifies” Trump’s Europe announcement. Turns out Trump got it completely wrong

— Frida Ghitis (@FridaGhitis) March 12, 2020

Here’s what he said, from the transcript:

To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days. The new rules will go into effect Friday at midnight. These restrictions will be adjusted subject to conditions on the ground.

There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings, and these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing. These restrictions will also not apply to the United Kingdom.

But now:

White House has clarified that the Europe ban DOES NOT apply to goods and trade reports @justinsink

— Erik Wasson (@elwasson) March 12, 2020

The President of the United States, on live television, reading prepared remarks, told the world that the US was cutting off all trade with Europe for thirty days. But it wasn’t true.

Completely freaking incompetent. No excuse at all. We are in such trouble…

UPDATE.2:

Pres Trump tonight:
– Wrongly told the world trade with Europe was suspended
-apparently wrongly said health insurers are waiving out of pocket for treatment
-exempted UK from travel ban (UK has 460 cases to date) unclear why
-detailed no new domestic public health measures

— Todd Zwillich (@toddzwillich) March 12, 2020

So, to recap—in the most important speech of his presidency, one running just 12 minutes, Trump misled the public twice:

—trade goods flowing between the US & Europe are *not* subject to the ban

—insurers are *not* waiving copayments for coronavirus treatments. Just testing. https://t.co/twQBuIV0DS

— Heath Mayo (@HeathMayo) March 12, 2020

UPDATE.3: So Americans can travel to and from Europe, but not Europeans? We can still go on vacation there? What sense does that make? Who thought this policy up?

This does not apply to American citizens or legal permanent residents or their families. https://t.co/iZ2nrILhMg

— Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli (@HomelandKen) March 12, 2020

The post Trump’s Coronavirus Speech Reaction appeared first on The American Conservative.