This Incompetent Administration's Response to Coronavirus

[Pio1980]

Maybe this will cure this disengaged incompetent narcissistic administration, like a cancer, by politically killing its host.

[donquixote99]

70% infected within two years translate to between 4 and 5 million dead in this country, based on a fatality rate of 2%. This will hurt.

But we should have vaccine after a year. That will cut some layers off the wide part of the infection pyramid.

[BigElCat]

It's the production loss due to sick time in the labor force that's going to get us.

Who the hell has three weeks of sick time annually ?

[Oerets]

Wounder if the anti-vaxxers will be in line to get a shot when available?

[Chicks]

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he was planning to destroy the coronavirus by sending an “incredibly mean tweet” in its direction.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump said that he was already in the process of crafting insults about the virus that would obliterate it once and for all.

In a preview of the mean tweet he is devising, Trump said, “The thing about the virus is it’s incredibly small. It’s smaller than Mike Bloomberg. Once I point that out, the coronavirus won’t know what hit it.”

He added that he was also in the process of coming up with an insulting nickname for the virus.

“It’s going to be something about how small it is,” Trump said. “Something like Lil’ Micro Mini Virus. I’m still working on it, but it’s going to be so mean. You won’t believe how mean it’s going to be.”

Trump was dismissive of the scientists who have raised dire concerns about the virus in recent days. “These so-called experts are the same people who said I needed sunglasses to stare at the eclipse,” he said.

[Ike Bana]

Originally Posted by Oerets

Wounder if the anti-vaxxers will be in line to get a shot when available?

First they have to take themselves and their measles carrying offspring to their own little contagion island where they can live out their lives re-infecting each other instead of the rest of us. And if they want the COVID19 shot the vaccine will be shipped to them after they pay for it.

[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by BigElCat

It's the production loss due to sick time in the labor force that's going to get us.

Who the hell has three weeks of sick time annually ?

Yes, a Corona recession seems likely.

[Chicks]

Heather Cox Richardson
9 hrs ·
February 25, 2020 (Tuesday)

Today has been weirdly unsettled as coronavirus news broke, the stock market tottered, and Trump attacked the Supreme Court and California Democrat Adam Schiff while trying to use the coronavirus crisis as an excuse to cut government further.

But before I get to any of this, let me clarify something: you are hearing a lot now about the coronavirus “pandemic.” There is a HUGE difference between a pandemic and a deadly pandemic. A pandemic just means that an infectious disease has spread across the world. It does NOT mean that we’re all going to die from it (as people keep helpfully shouting on Twitter). So be smart and prepared, but don’t panic.

Today the administration acknowledged that the coronavirus is likely to spread across the nation, even as Trump surrogates tried to argue that it was contained or—as Rush Limbaugh said—just the common cold (four coronaviruses are among the viruses that cause what we call "colds," but this is a new, vastly more dangerous, strain). This turnaround revealed how woefully incompetent administration officers are. In a painful exchange between Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf (another acting secretary, rather than a permanent one), at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Wolf got the statistics for the death rates of coronavirus and influenza wrong (it appears to be around 2% for coronavirus; the death rate from influenza is about 0.1% annually), admitted he had no idea how many hospital beds or masks America has, and generally seemed completely over his head.

It was an interesting exchange, because Kennedy, of course, is a Trump enabler. Him lacerating this inadequate Trump appointee seemed to me simply to show his determination to demonstrate for voters his dominance over the younger man, since Kennedy is part of the cabal that supported seeding the government with these unequipped appointees in the first place.

For his part, Trump did not help. He told reporters that “We’re very close to a vaccine,” and that “we’re really down to probably ten” cases. Researchers say they are 12 to 18 months from a vaccine, forcing the White House to say that Trump was referring to an Ebola vaccine, not a coronavirus vaccine, when he spoke. The CDC has confirmed 57 cases of coronavirus in the U.S., but since the coronavirus test sent out by the CDC earlier this month turned out to be faulty, we have tested only 426 people aside from those evacuated by air from other countries. So how many cases we actually have is unclear.

Also interesting is that the administration is finally admitting we have a problem, over Trump’s objections. He appears deeply concerned that coronavirus worries will hurt the economy. Stock prices continued to slide today for the fourth day in a row, with the market taking another hit as the Dow Jones Industrial average was down 879 points. Trump’s surrogates tried to be reassuring. “We have contained this. We have contained this. I won’t say air-tight, but pretty close to air-tight,” Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow said on CNBC. “The business side, and the economic side, I don’t think it’s going to be an economic tragedy at all … The numbers are saying the U.S. [is] holding up nicely.”

Trump is clearly most concerned about his political standing. In India today, he slashed at two Supreme Court justices he perceives to be his enemies, calling for Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to recuse themselves from any cases involving him, even as news has broken that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife has been delivering suggestions to the White House for "disloyal" employees to fire. (Remember, the Supreme Court next month will take up the question of whether or not his accountant and banks have to respond to subpoenas for Trump’s financial records, as lower courts have insisted.)

He also called for an investigation into House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) alleging without evidence that he leaked classified information about Russian interference in the 2020 election. This, too, seems like deflection, since all evidence suggests that the leaker was Devin Nunes (R-CA), who news reports based on the accounts of several people present say told Trump about the meeting.

With people distracted by news of coronavirus, administration officials are not slowing down their determination to destroy the New Deal government that we have come to rely on. Far from shying away from their destruction of the activist government as it becomes apparent to most of us that slashing funds for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and getting rid of the pandemic spe************************ts on the National Security Council were a colossally bad idea, the administration has used the crisis to continue to downsize government. The administration wants $2.5 billion to pay for the emergency response to the coronavirus, but it only wants $1.25 billion to be newly appropriated emergency money. It wants to transfer the rest from existing programs, including $535 million from money appropriated to containing Ebola. It has also informed Congress that it intends to fund the emergency response to coronavirus by taking $37 million intended to provide heat to almost 750,000 low-income families. If it persists in this demand, it is essentially holding our safety hostage in order to achieve the goal of dismantling the New Deal government. Democrats say they want a clean emergency funding bill.

Today 70 former U.S. Senators indicated their worry about Trump’s increasing power. They wrote an open letter to the Senate noting that it has abdicated its legislative and oversight responsibilities and has given them over to the president. It is not, therefore, fulfilling its constitutional duties. The bipartisan group of senators called on their currently serving colleagues to create “a bipartisan caucus of incumbent senators who would be committed to making the Senate function as the Framers of the Constitution intended.”

So all this should sound terrifying, right? But, curiously, to me the worrying patterns that have been taking shape over the past months seem newly unsettled. None of today’s news is good: a serious disease, a sliding economy, an incompetent administration, an autocratic president. But all of these elements are creating an instability that will shake forces loose. It is times like these that throw all the cards up in the air. While it is scary to experience that chaos, it is also a time of great possibility. We can step back and let autocrats grab all the cards for themselves and consolidate their power. But we don’t have to. This sort of shock gives us the ability to catch the cards ourselves and reorder them on the table in entirely new patterns, ones that can build a different future.

[Chicks]

Fucker Carlson Blames ‘Diversity’ And ‘Wokeness’ For Coronavirus
The Faux "News" host turned to racism as the outbreak continued to spread.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tucke...b65e0f11c64b34

Sadly, though he's arguably more corrupt than even Limblow, there are those right here on these forums dumb enough to follow, and even quote this idiot.

[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by Chicks

Fucker Carlson Blames ‘Diversity’ And ‘Wokeness’ For Coronavirus
The Faux "News" host turned to racism as the outbreak continued to spread.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tucke...b65e0f11c64b34

Sadly, though he's arguably more corrupt than even Limblow, there are those right here on these forums dumb enough to follow, and even quote this idiot.

Dang, anyone not totally screwed-up on race HAS to see this as racist demagoguery.