Category Archives: Partisanship

Cartoon – Are you Socially Distancing or in Denial?

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Accountability, Cartoon, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Coronavirus, Credibility, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Economic Crisis, Economy Reopening, Expectations, False Claims Act, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Leadership Cares, Leadership Trust, Mortality, National Strategy, Pandemic, Partisanship, Public Health, Public Safety, Social Distancing, Transparency, Trust, Truth, Uncertainty, Undermining, Wishful Thinking • Leave a comment

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Trump faces criticism over lack of national plan on coronavirus

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Accountability, Blame, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Economy, Economy Reopening, Emergency Preparedness, Failure, False Hope, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership Decentralized, Mistake, Mortality, National Strategy, Pandemic, Partisanship, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Scientists, Social Distancing, Supply Chain, Uncertainty, Ventilators, Wishful Thinking • Leave a comment

Trump faces criticism over lack of national plan on coronavirus

COVID-19 National Health Plan – Primary Care – Central Patient ...

The Trump administration is facing intense criticism for the lack of a national plan to handle the coronavirus pandemic as some states begin to reopen.

Public health experts, business leaders and current administration officials say the scattershot approach puts states at risk and leaves the U.S. vulnerable to a potentially open-ended wave of infections this fall.

The White House has in recent days sought to cast itself as in control of the pandemic response, with President Trump touring a distribution center to tout the availability of personal protective equipment and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany detailing for the first time that the administration did have its own pandemic preparedness plan.

Still, the White House lacks a national testing strategy that experts say will be key to preventing future outbreaks and has largely left states to their own devices on how to loosen restrictions meant to slow the spread of the virus. Trump this week even suggested widespread testing may be “overrated” as he encouraged states to reopen businesses.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday night issued long-awaited guidance intended to aid restaurants, bars and workplaces as they allow employees and customers to return, but they appeared watered down compared to previously leaked versions.

Some experts said the lack of clear federal guidance on reopening could hamper the economic recovery. 

“A necessary condition for a healthy economy is a healthy population. This kind of piecemeal reopening with everyone using different criteria for opening, we’re taking a big risk,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

The lack of coherent direction from the White House was driven home this week by damaging testimony by a former top U.S. vaccine official who claims he was ousted from his post improperly.

“We don’t have a single point of leadership right now for this response, and we don’t have a master plan for this response. So those two things are absolutely critical,” said Rick Bright, who led the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority until he was demoted in late April.

The U.S. faces the “darkest winter in modern history” if it does not develop a more coordinated national response, Bright said. “Our window of opportunity is closing.”

From the start, the White House has let states chart their own responses to the pandemic.

The administration did not issue a nationwide stay-at-home order, resulting in a hodgepodge of state orders at different times, with varying levels of restrictions.

Facing a widespread shortage, states were left to procure their own personal protective equipment, ventilators and testing supplies. Trump resisted using federal authority to force companies to manufacture and sell equipment to the U.S. government.

Without clear federal guidance, state officials were competing against each other and the federal government, turning the medical supply chain into a free-for-all as they sought scarce and expensive supplies from private vendors on the commercial market.

“The fact that we had questions about our ability to have enough mechanical ventilators, and you had states basically bidding against each other, trying to secure personal protective equipment …  it shouldn’t be happening during a pandemic,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

Internally, the administration struggled to mount a unified front as various agencies jockeyed for control. Multiple agencies have been providing contradictory instructions.

At first, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar led the White House coronavirus task force.

Roughly a month, later he was replaced by Vice President Pence. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was later tasked with leading the response to get supplies to states, while senior White House adviser Jared Kushner led what has been dubbed a “shadow task force” to engage the private sector. Now, FEMA is reportedly winding down its role, and turning its mission back over to HHS.

The CDC has been largely absent throughout the pandemic. Director Robert Redfield has drawn the ire of President Trump as well as outside experts, and he has been seen infrequently at White House briefings.

“I think seeing the nation’s public health agency hobbled at a time like this and looking over its shoulder at its political bosses is something I hoped I would never see, and I’ve been working with the CDC for over 30 years,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health at Georgetown University.

“I think that people will die because the public health agency has lost its visibility and its credibility and that it’s being politically interfered with,” he added.

The administration recently has taken some steps to improve on the initial response to the pandemic.

Ventilator production has increased, and the U.S. is no longer seeing a shortage of the devices. 

Testing has improved dramatically as well, though experts think the U.S. needs to be testing thousands of more people per day before the country can reopen.

The administration also unveiled plans to expand the Strategic National Stockpile’s supply of gowns, respirators, testing supplies and other equipment, after running out of supplies early in the pandemic.

Adalja said the administration’s positive steps are coming way too late. 

“It’s May 15, we should have been in this position January 15,” he said.

McEnany on Friday for the first time detailed the White House’s preparedness plan that replaced the Obama-era pandemic playbook, an acknowledgement that Trump’s predecessor did leave a road map, despite claims to the contrary from some of the president’s allies.

She did not give many specifics on the previously unknown plan. Instead, McEnany declared the Trump administration’s handling of the virus had been “one of the best responses we’ve seen in our country’s history.”

Yet as states look to reopen businesses and get people back to work, the White House is taking a back seat as governors set their own guidelines for easing stay-at-home orders and restrictions on social activities.

The White House in April issued a three-step plan for states to reopen their economies, but it has largely been ignored by states and by the president.

Dozens of governors have begun easing restrictions on businesses and social activities without meeting the White House guidelines. Trump has been urging them to move even faster, backing anti-lockdown protesters in Michigan, Virginia, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

Even scaled-down guidance from federal agencies is critical for providing a road map for state and local leaders, and for businesses considering how best to resume operations, said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“We need guidance because it helps instill confidence about the right types of approaches to take, but when you begin to move away from guidance and into either regulations or very strict approach, then that’s increasingly going to be unworkable in lots of different locations,” Bradley said.

 

 

 

The pandemic broke America

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Recovery, Economic Stimulus, Economy Reopening, Emergency Preparedness, Employee Benefits, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Essential Businesses, Essential Health Benefits, Essential Workers, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership Decentralized, Mortality, National Strategy, Out of Pocket Expenses, Pandemic, Partisanship, Preexisting Conditions, Public Health, Public Safety, Social Distancing, Underinsured, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance, Uninsured • Leave a comment

https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-america-broken-2baa69e4-60e6-49a5-932a-5d118441ae20.html

The coronavirus pandemic broke America - Axios

Eight weeks into this nation’s greatest crisis since World War II, we seem no closer to a national strategy to reopen the nation, rebuild the economy and defeat the coronavirus.

Why it matters: America’s ongoing cultural wars over everything have weakened our ability to respond to this pandemic. We may be our worst enemy.

  • The response is being hobbled by the same trends that have impacted so much of our lives: growing income inequality, the rise of misinformation, lack of trust in institutions, the rural/urban divide and hyper-partisanship.
  • We’re not even seeing the same threat from the virus. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to be worried about getting seriously ill, while Republicans — including the president — are more likely to think the death counts are too high.

Without even a basic agreement on the danger of the pandemic and its toll, here’s how we see the national response unfold:

  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the crown jewel of the globe’s public health infrastructure, has been sidelined, its recommendations dismissed by the White House.
  • President Trump declares the U.S. has “prevailed on testing” at a time when health experts say we still need far more daily tests before the country can reopen safely.
  • Distribution of the promising coronavirus drug remdesivir was initially botched because of miscommunication between government agencies.
  • More than two thirds of Americans say it’s unlikely they would use a cell phone-based contact tracing program established by the federal government, a key component of a testing regime to control the virus.
  • The second phase of a program to aid small businesses isn’t fully allocated because firms are either concerned about its changing rules, confused about how to access it, or find the structure won’t help them stay in business.
  • With the unemployment rate at a post-Depression record last month, and expected to go higher, there is no meaningful discussion between the parties in Congress on aid to the out-of-work.
  • States and local governments are facing billions in losses without a strategy for assistance.
  • The virus is literally inside the White House. Aides have tested positive for coronavirus, leading to quarantines for some of the nation’s top public health officials and a new daily testing regime for White House staff and reporters who enter the West Wing.
  • The No. 1 book on Amazon for a time was a book by an anti-vaxxer whose conspiracy-minded video about the pandemic spread widely across social media, leading to takedowns by platforms like YouTube and Facebook.

The other side: There’s better news at the state level. “Governors collectively have been winning widespread praise from the public for their handling of the coronavirus outbreak,” the Washington Post reports.

Between the lines: Nationwide, 71% of Americans approve of the job their governor is doing, according to the Post. For Trump, the figure is 43%.

  • And former presidents we often expect to help rally the nation in trying times are scarce.
  • George W. Bush released a video, in which his face barely appeared, calling for unity in the fight against the virus. Barack Obama was recorded in leaked remarks to former staffers calling Trump’s coronavirus response “an absolute chaotic disaster.” Trump attacked both of them on Twitter.

The bottom line: An existential threat — like war or natural disaster — usually brings people together to set a course of action in response. Somehow, we’ve let this one drive us apart.

 

 

 

 

Guns in Michigan Capitol: Defense of liberty or intimidation?

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economy Reopening, Free Speech, Freedom, Gun Control, Gun Violence, Hate, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Pandemic, Partisanship, Protest, Public Debate, Public Discourse, Public Good, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Social Distancing • Leave a comment

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/0504/Guns-in-Michigan-Capitol-Defense-of-liberty-or-intimidation

Guns in coronavirus protests: Defense of liberty or intimidation ...

WHY WE WROTE THIS

Bringing assault weapons to the Michigan Legislature for a protest against coronavirus restrictions? To one group, it’s why the Second Amendment exists. To many others, it’s unfathomable.

It was a first for Michigan state Sen. Sylvia Santana. Before heading to the statehouse in Lansing last Thursday, she slipped into a bulletproof vest.

Ms. Santana’s husband, a sheriff’s deputy, warned her about potential trouble at a rally to protest the decision to extend a coronavirus lockdown.

A group of armed white men entered the Capitol and shouted at lawmakers. To Ms. Santana, some were dressed like they were “going to war.” Several Confederate flags, a swastika, and a misogynistic sign aimed at Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could be seen outside.

“I thought that was very scary,” says Ms. Santana, an African American who represents parts of Detroit and all of neighboring Dearborn. “We’re there to do a job, and it’s not to dodge bullets as we try to do our jobs in a bipartisan fashion to make sure we’re keeping all Michiganders safe.”

Four days on from the protest, her concern lingers. The pandemic has intensified many societal fault lines – from health care inequities to political polarization – and gun control is no exception. Feeling that state officials are overreaching, a tiny minority of protesters are flexing their Second Amendment rights in Michigan and beyond.

But at a time of crisis, their crusade against the perceived tyranny of government is seen by many as tyrannical in its own right – recklessly using their liberties to intimidate others.

The core question is: Where should the line be drawn? For protesters, guns in statehouses is one of the purest expressions of the power the Second Amendment invests in citizens. But no constitutional right is absolute.

“Where do people who see no problem with guns downtown or near a hospital or in the legislature, where do they draw the line?” Sanford Levinson, co-author of “Fault Lines in the Constitution.” “That’s an interesting question both politically and legally, because courts are really receptive to line drawing. I don’t think you’d find any judge who says, ‘Yeah, I welcome guns in my courtroom.’”

In that way, the struggle over whether to allow firearms in legislatures “is part of the culture war,” he adds.

Are hard-line tactics effective?

Today, 21 state capitols allow guns in some form, according to a Wall Street Journal report. But only a few, including Michigan, allow citizens to openly carry under the rotunda. Many Republican-led states balk at open carry in the people’s hall for personal safety reasons, and courts have upheld bans in places like legislatures and polling places, holding that guns can chill other people’s rights.

Elements of race have long played a role. The modern gun control movement is linked to the signing of the Mulford Act in 1967, which banned open carry in California. The bill gained momentum after two dozen Black Panthers legally brought firearms to the state capitol to protest against it. The National Rifle Association backed the bill.

Incidents like the one in Michigan, however, could do more to damage gun rights than advance them. “It’s really now an open question to what extent hard-line pro-gun policies are politically advantageous,” says Mr. Levinson, also a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ms. Santana was certainly not persuaded. “I, as a state lawmaker, want to hear your concerns and your position on the issue. But I don’t feel that bringing assault weapons to the capitol and using symbols of hatred will make me understand your issue better.”

The scenes in Michigan, which has been hit hard by COVID-19, only make it harder to have already difficult conversations, others say. Part of self-defense is respecting the preferences other people have for their own security, which might mean leaving guns at home when overtones of intimidation are possible.

“When your eyes look at these pictures of groups of people … in a public building that is supposed to be a center of democratic exchange and debate, and you see a group of people carrying military weapons, that is not a vision of democracy,” says Hannah Friedman, a staff attorney at Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in San Francisco. “That’s a vision of intimidation by a minority of people.”

Such concerns were heightened further this weekend, when employees at businesses in Stillwater, Oklahoma, faced a threat of violence with a gun while trying to force customers to wear masks, as mandated by the local government.

“I think we were heard”

But Ashley Phibbs has a different view.

Ms. Phibbs, a project manager and mother who helped organize the Michigan rally, acknowledged with regret that many in attendance didn’t abide by social distancing rules. She also confirmed the display of hate symbols. But she insisted those were agitators and not part of her group, Michigan United for Liberty, which has sprung up to oppose what members see as repressive COVID-19 restrictions.

“I know how it can seem to people who aren’t active in rallies and who are looking at it from the outside in, and I try to be very understanding of that,” says Ms. Phibbs. “But … I don’t think that anyone was there to really make anyone fearful. I didn’t see anything that would have really caused fear, aside from loud noises from the people yelling. But a lot of people are also sometimes afraid of guns in general.”

In the end, she says, “I think we were heard. I think overall [the rally] was positive.”

Knowing your audience

Other gun-rights advocates saw problems with the optics.

As he watched news from Michigan Thursday, Caleb Q. Dyer saw some familiar faces. The New Hampshire barista and former state legislator had been a keynote speaker at a Michigan Libertarian Party event last year.

But he worried that his friends in Michigan were sending “mixed messages” by failing to abide by public health rules.

In fact, he usually brings witty protest gear – such as a sign that says “arm the homeless” – to disarm fear. It’s a fine line, he says, between free speech and armed intimidation.

“People aren’t ready to have the discussion that a lot of these gun-carrying protesters want to have, which is that none of these laws are even remotely effective or just,” says Mr. Dyer. “But they’re not going to have that discussion if they cannot carry themselves in such a way that the opposition won’t think … that they’re murderous and violent.”

 

 

 

 

 

Fauci’s warning about reopening may have more influence over Americans than governors

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Clinical Testing, Competency, Consistent, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Credibility, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economy Reopening, Health Policy, Honesty, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Integrity, Leadership Commitment, Leadership Integrity, Leadership Trust, Mortality, Pandemic, Partisanship, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Social Distancing, Trust, Truth • Leave a comment

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/12/faucis-warning-about-reopening-may-have-more-influence-over-americans-than-governors/?fbclid=IwAR0eDoGHpOUI1Ty2RdCoKcxSzwne2NscJfoVGQXnEH8ud2s5MEKIunzXuRA

White House coronavirus expert Dr Anthony Fauci says world may ...

It’s one of those moments that, even as it occurs, seems definitive. The country’s leading infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, offering testimony before a Senate committee about a virus that’s infected more than a million Americans — but doing so remotely, because of his own contact with an infected individual. Speaking from quarantine, Fauci will offer a grim warning: Attempting to return economic activity to normal levels too quickly will “result in needless suffering and death” and itself result in negative effects for the economy.

Fauci’s warning stands in obvious contrast to the assertions of his boss, President Trump. As he has so often over the course of the pandemic, Trump waves away questions about whether states are ready to resume normal economic activity, insisting that many places are ready to gear back up. His White House released a set of recommendations for doing so, recommendations to which Fauci will refer. But even as those recommendations were introduced, Trump undercut them. He quickly embraced anti-social-distancing protests in states with blue governors — states where things were not yet ready to return to normal.

The recommendations espoused by Fauci (and, ostensibly, Trump) set an initial baseline of data that states should meet before taking even introductory steps toward reopening their economies. They’re centered on three categories benchmarks: coronavirus symptoms, actual cases and hospital capacity. The initial presentation from the White House explained how those benchmarks could be met:

For the first two, we have publicly available data that allows us to evaluate how states are doing. In the case of demonstrated symptoms, the data are somewhat old, with the most recent metrics reflecting the week of May 2. What’s more, data on the number of people showing up to emergency rooms with symptoms reflecting possible covid-19 cases (the disease caused by the coronavirus) are compiled only by region. Nonetheless, we can get a sense for how many people in each place are showing symptoms as well as up-to-date information on the number of cases and positive tests in each state.

By now, many states appear to meet the benchmarks on these two conditions. (Again, given the limits on the symptomatic data, it’s tricky to say how each fares in the moment.) A number of states that have already begun to reopen, though, don’t. In Texas, for example, the number of new cases is up and the percent of positive tests is flat. In Georgia, the number of new cases is flat and the rate of positive tests has been variable. Both states are nonetheless reopening.

Georgia’s been in the process of reopening for about three weeks, despite missing the basic benchmarks even when that process began. Gov. Brian Kemp (R) made a blanket determination that things could get back to normal, ignoring the sort of regionalized shifts that Trump himself has advocated.

New York, the state hit hardest by the virus, has implemented a deliberate, region-by-region plan for reopening. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) has outlined seven different criteria in each region of the state before it can resume some normal economic activity (though not all). (Among those? A program sufficient to trace the contacts of individuals with newly confirmed infections.) As of Monday, only three regions met the seven conditions. New York City hit four of the seven.

This is presumably how states are encouraged to reopen to avoid Fauci’s most dire predictions. It’s no guarantee that outbreaks won’t emerge, but New York’s plan is predicated on safety over normalcy while Georgia’s appears to be the opposite.

That’s the important context for Fauci’s testimony. His warnings about moving slowly are not new — though, in the past, they’ve mostly been tempered by the looming physical presence of a president who’s not very interested in diluting his optimistic economic assumptions. Fauci’s language about the ramifications is strong, but the message is consistent.

It also comes a bit too late for states such as Georgia — at least at the official level. One effect of the effort to get the state back to normal is that many Georgians aren’t ready to do so. Economic data shows that, despite businesses being open, they’re often not seeing many customers. The state’s residents are skeptical about getting back to normal. A new Post-Ipsos poll suggests that they are also skeptical of their governor.

Those participating in protests against social distancing are a small minority. Most Americans understand the thrust of Fauci’s concerns and are willing to support continued social distancing measures. While governors are occasionally skipping over the guidelines offered by Fauci and his team, the consumers who can return the economy to normal are still wary — and may be the best audience for Fauci’s warnings.

 

 

 

 

Battling the ‘pandemic of misinformation’

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Consensus, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership Decentralized, Misinformation, Mortality, Pandemic, Partisanship, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Scapegoat, Scientists, Social Distancing, Trust, Truth • Leave a comment

Battling the ‘pandemic of misinformation’

During COVID-19 Pandemic It Isn't Just Fake News But Seriously Bad ...

Ubiquity of social media has made it easier to spread or even create COVID-19 falsehoods, making the work of public health officials harder.

This is part of our Coronavirus Update series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring.

When a disease outbreak grabs the public’s attention, formal recommendations from medical experts are often muffled by a barrage of half-baked advice, sketchy remedies, and misguided theories that circulate as anxious people rush to understand a new health risk.

The current crisis is no exception. The sudden onset of a new, highly contagious coronavirus has unleashed what U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres last week called a “pandemic of misinformation,” a phenomenon that has not gone unnoticed as nearly two-thirds of Americans said they have seen news and information about the disease that seemed completely made up, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

What distinguishes the proliferation of bad information surrounding the current crisis, though, is social media. Kasisomayajula “Vish” Viswanath, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the popularity and ubiquity of the various platforms means the public is no longer merely passively consuming inaccuracies and falsehoods. It’s disseminating and even creating them, which is a “very different” dynamic than what took place during prior pandemics MERS and H1N1.

The sheer volume of COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation online is “crowding out” the accurate public health guidance, “making our work a bit more difficult,” he said.

“Misinformation could be an honest mistake or the intentions are not to blatantly mislead people,” like advising others to eat garlic or gargle with salt water as protection against COVID-19, he said. Disinformation campaigns, usually propagated for political gain by state actors, party operatives, or activists, deliberately spread falsehoods or create fake content, like a video purporting to show the Chinese government executing residents in Wuhan with COVID-19 or “Plandemic,” a film claiming the pandemic is a ruse to coerce mass vaccinations, which most major social media platforms recently banned.

In order to be effective, especially during a crisis, public health communicators have to be seen as credible, transparent, and trustworthy. And there, officials are falling short, said Viswanath.

“People are hungry for information, hungry for certitude, and when there is a lack of consensus-oriented information and when everything is being contested in public, that creates confusion among people,” he said.

“When the president says disinfectants … or anti-malaria drugs are one way to treat COVID-19, and other people say, ‘No, that’s not the case,’ the public is hard-pressed to start wondering, ‘If the authorities cannot agree, cannot make up their minds, why should I trust anybody?’”

Mainstream media coverage has added to the problem, analysts say. At many major news outlets, reporters and editors with no medical or public health training were reassigned to cover the unfolding pandemic and are scrambling to get up to speed with complex scientific terminology, methodologies, and research, and then identify, as well as vet, a roster of credible sources. Because many are not yet knowledgeable enough to report critically and authoritatively on the science, they can sometimes lean too heavily on traditional journalism values like balance, novelty, and conflict. In doing so, they lift up outlier and inaccurate counterarguments and hypotheses, unnecessarily muddying the water.

“That’s a huge challenge,” said Ashish Jha, K.T. Li Professor of Global Health and Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, during an April 24 talk about COVID-19 misinformation hosted by the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.

“People are hungry for information, hungry for certitude, and when there is a lack of consensus-oriented information and when everything is being contested in public, that creates confusion among people.”
— Kasisomayajula Viswanath

“What I have found is a remarkable degree of consensus among people who understand the science of this disease around what the fundamental issues are and then disagreements about trade-offs and policies,” said Jha, who is a frequent commentator on news programs. “The idea of covering the science in a two-sided way on areas where there really isn’t any disagreement has struck me as very, very odd, and it keeps coming up over and over again.”

Then there is the problem of political bias. This has been especially true at right-leaning media outlets, which have largely repeated news angles and viewpoints promoted by the White House and the president on the progress of the pandemic and the efficacy of the administration’s response, boosting unproven COVID-19 treatments and exaggerating the availability of testing and safety equipment and prospects for speedy vaccine development.

Tara Setmayer, a spring 2020 Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics and former Republican Party communications director, said what’s coming from Fox News and other pro-Trump media goes well beyond misinformation. Whether downplaying the views of government experts on COVID-19’s lethality, blaming China or philanthropist Bill Gates for its spread, or cheering shutdown protests funded by Republican political groups, it’s all part of “an active disinformation campaign,” she said, aimed at deflecting the president’s responsibility as he wages a reelection campaign.

But turning around those who buy into false information is not as simple as piercing epistemic bubbles with facts, said Christopher Robichaud, senior lecturer in ethics and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) who teaches the Gen Ed course “Ignorance, Lies, Hogwash and Humbug: The Value of Truth and Knowledge in Democracies.”

Over time, bubble dwellers can become cocooned in a media echo chamber that not only feeds faulty information to audiences, but anticipates criticisms in order to “prebut” potential counterarguments that audience members may encounter from outsiders, much the way cult leaders do.

“It’s not enough to introduce new pieces of evidence. You have to break through their strategies to diminish that counterevidence, and that’s a much harder thing to do than merely exposing people to different perspectives,” he said.

While Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have all recently ramped up efforts to take down COVID-19 misinformation following public outcry, social media platforms “fall short” when it comes to curbing the flow, said Joan Donovan, who leads the Technology and Social Change Project at HKS.

Since the national shift to remote work, many social media firms are relying more heavily on artificial intelligence to patrol misinformation on their platforms, instead of human moderators, who tend to be more effective, said Donovan. So many users suddenly searching and posting about one specific topic can “signal jam search algorithms, which cannot tell the difference usually between truth and lies.”

These firms are reluctant to spark a regulatory backlash by policing their platforms too tightly and angering one or both political parties.

“So they are careful to take action on content that is deemed immediately harmful (like posts that say to drink chemicals), but are reticent to enforce moderation on calls for people to break the stay-at-home orders,” said Donovan.

Viswanath said public health officials cannot, and should not, chase down and debunk every bit of misinformation or conspiracy theory, lest the attention lends them some credence. The public needs to more closely scrutinize and be “much more skeptical” about what they’re reading and hearing, particularly online, and not try to keep up with the very latest COVID-19 research. “You don’t need to know everything,” he said.

Putting the onus entirely on the public, however, is “unfair and it won’t work,” said Viswanath. Institutions, like social media platforms, have to take more responsibility for what’s out there.

Public health organizations should be running effective communication surveillance of social media to monitor which rumors, ideas, and issues most worry the public, what is understood and misunderstood about various diseases and treatments, and what myths are circulating or being actively promoted in the community. And they need to have a strategy in place to counter what they’re picking up. “You cannot control this, but you can at least manage some of this,” Viswanath said.

Though some COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories are outlandish or even dangerously inaccurate, Robichaud said it’s a mistake to dismiss those who believe them as people who don’t care about the truth.

Many cognitive biases get in the way of even the best truth-seeking strategies, so perhaps we could all benefit from a little more intellectual humility in this time of such great uncertainty, he said.

“Most of us are, at best, experts in a tiny, tiny area. But we don’t navigate the world as if that were true. We navigate the world as if we’re experts about a whole bunch of things that we’re not,” he said. “A little intellectual humility can go a long way. And I say that as a professor: It’s true of us, and it’s also true of the public at large.”

 

 

 

Cartoon – Current State of the Union

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Cartoon, Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership Decentralized, Mortality, Pandemic, Partisanship, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Social Distancing, State of the Union, Supply Chain • Leave a comment

This Week's Cartoons: Coronavirus, Social Media, and Social ...

The New Culture War

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American Identity Is The New Culture War - Auburn Seminary

You’re either a liberal snowflake controlled by big government or a greedy conservative willing to sacrifice Grandma for the economy. It took less than two months for Americans to get here.

Wear a mask? You’re a liberal snowflake controlled by big government. Want to reopen restaurants? You’re a greedy conservative willing to sacrifice Grandma for the economy.

It took less than two months for the coronavirus pandemic to become just the latest battle in the culture wars.

With the country still in the firm grip of the coronavirus pandemic, conservatives are on social media and Fox News stoking protests that argue masks, stay-at-home orders and social distancing violate constitutional rights and are causing unacceptable harm to the economy.

Liberals, at the same time, say personal liberties must be sacrificed for public health, even as millions file for unemployment and more than a quarter of the work force is jobless in some states.

Take a look at what two governors — one from a reliably Republican state and another from a reliably Democratic state — said this week.

“We have a public health crisis in this country, there’s no doubt about it,” Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi said in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” “But we also have an economic crisis.”

“We have turned the corner and we are on the decline,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said, citing an article showing that the death rate has fallen by half in New York City, in his daily briefing on Wednesday. “To me, that vindicates what we are doing here in New York, which says: Follow the science, follow the data, put the politics aside and the emotion aside. What we’re doing here shows results.”

The problem with all these politics? Epidemiology.

So far, the virus has hit Democratic states the hardest, with the most cases per capita in five deeply Democratic states — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California and Illinois. Cities have borne the brunt of the caseload. And African-Americans and Latinos — a key part of the Democratic coalition — are getting sick and dying of the virus at higher rates.

But anyone who believes this virus is fading away — or somehow contained to urban areas — is engaging in some serious magical thinking.

At least 25,000 new coronavirus cases are identified almost daily, meaning that the total in the United States — which has the highest number of known cases in the world — is expanding daily by 2 to 4 percent.

A New York Times analysis found that 18 of the states that are reopening had an increase of daily average cases over the last two weeks. Fifteen of those states are led by Republican governors.

Three of the top five states where the virus is spreading the fastest — Texas, Georgia and Ohio — have Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures. All three have moved toward reopening.

In the Midwest and South, smaller towns and more rural areas have suddenly been hit hard as the virus tears through nursing homes, meatpacking plants and prisons.

The nation’s highest per capita infection rate can be found in Trousdale County, Tenn., a rural county where a prison has become a hot spot. Businesses in the county are reopening this week.

In the Trump era, rural counties like Trousdale have represented the backbone of the Republican base. In Trousdale, nearly 67 percent of the county supported President Trump in 2016. Over all, the average margin of victory in rural counties won by Republicans was nearly 47 percent in 2016.

Rural areas tend to be older and have a larger share of the population with pre-existing medical conditions, making them far more vulnerable to the worst health effects of the virus.

Republican governors and conservative activists may think the coronavirus is an urban problem. Or a density problem. Or, quite frankly, a Democratic problem.

They may soon find out that it’s not.

 

 

 

 

The White House said it was following health experts’ advice. Then we learned it isn’t approving a key CDC document.

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Diseases & Conditions | CDC

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany made a point at the start of Wednesday’s news briefing to emphasize that President Trump is following health experts’ advice as we enter what Trump has labeled the “next stage” of the coronavirus response — reopening the economy.

“As you are well aware, President Trump has consistently sided with the experts and always prioritized the health and safety of the American people,” McEnany said.

Several hours later, we got another example of the White House resisting what those health experts are advising.

The Associated Press reported around midnight that the White House had shelved planned guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The document, which was due nearly a week ago, was aimed at providing local authorities with step-by-step guidance on how to reopen:

The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

A coronavirus task force official told The Washington Post that the document has not been completely shelved but was in the process of being revised because it was “overly specific.” The official also indicated that it was felt the document was too broad, as “guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn’t be the same guidance for urban New York City.”

The denial, though, reinforces that the White House is reluctant to submit to the CDC’s more detailed prescriptions for reopening the economy. And it’s difficult to divorce the delay in this document’s publication from Trump’s anxiety to reopen the economy — and the tension that has created with past guidelines.

The administration in mid-April issued phased advice on when areas should start to reopen places such as restaurants and other nonessential businesses. But many states have moved forward with certain elements of reopening without actually satisfying those guidelines. Most notably, they have begun to reopen without meeting the Phase One guideline that they should see a decrease in confirmed coronavirus cases over a 14-day period.

As The Post’s Philip Bump reported, some states that have pushed forward with reopening have also seen an increase in cases — which would prevent them from satisfying the requirement for moving into Phase Two. That requirement is that the decline should continue for another 14 days after Phase One begins.

Issuing a detailed document would seemingly complicate further reopenings, because it would again restrict what states and local authorities are supposed to do.

The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun and Josh Dawsey previewed what the document was set to look like last week. And they also obtained a draft of the document. The new guidelines were to go beyond the initial ones in prescribing specific actions that could be taken in each phase of the reopening. Advocates for reopening have worried that strict guidance could make it difficult for businesses, churches, child-care centers and other facilities to actually function.

Trump, who has long signaled a desire to begin reopening that economy sooner rather than later, has doubled down on that rhetoric in recent days. Despite a steady national death rate that approached previous highs on Tuesday and Wednesday, and even though cases continue to increase outside the major U.S. hotbed of New York City, Trump on Tuesday signaled that we are entering the “next stage” of reopening the economy.

“Thanks to the profound commitment of our citizens, we’ve flattened the curve, and countless American lives have been saved,” Trump said. “Our country is now in the next stage of the battle: a very safe phased and gradual reopening. So, reopening of our country — who would have ever thought we were going to be saying that? A reopening. Reopening.”

Trump has been resistant to the advice of the health officials around him, from the early days of the outbreak when he continuously downplayed the severity of the situation. On several occasions, this tension has boiled over.

We’re also hearing from those officials less and less. The CDC long ago ceased holding briefings on the coronavirus outbreak, and the White House coronavirus task force briefings, which often featured health experts Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx, have now been halted in favor of less-frequent and less-coronavirus-focused briefings from McEnany. Fauci has also been prevented from testifying to the Democratic-controlled House, although he is still slated to testify in the GOP-controlled Senate and has continued doing some interviews. The cumulative effect is that these health experts aren’t on the record as much as the effort to reopen the economy begins in earnest.

In the place of those public comments, the CDC guidelines were to provide firm and detailed advice from those officials for the new stage. But for reasons that seem pretty conspicuous, we still don’t have them.

 

 

 

Home of the Brave

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