Category: Off topic

Elaine Godfrey for The Atlantic:

Iowa’s problem is not that residents don’t want to do the right thing, or that they have some kind of unique disregard for the health of their neighbors. Instead, they looked to elected leaders they trust to tell them how to navigate this crisis, and those leaders, including Trump and Reynolds, told them they didn’t need to do much at all. (Although some residents have certainly deliberately ignored the advice of public-health experts.)

We have mishandled the pandemic, but I have a quibble with the headline. It should be “How Iowa is Mishandling the Pandemic” because, first, we are very much in it and, second and most frustratingly, we have all the tools we need right now to prevent this death and suffering.

We are left with bad choices, but there are different magnitudes of bad. As one Iowa City healthcare provider put it:

The endgame of uncontrolled spread is a choice between massive death and suffering and overflowing hospitals, or shutting things down. This is the equivalent [of] choosing between death or amputation—when you could have had an earlier surgery, which would have been painful but would have prevented this scenario from developing in the first place.

Matt Taibbi:

In State of Iowa v. Jane Doe, a woman charged in 2009 with domestic abuse had her case dropped, for the sensible reason that she was actually the one being abused.

Upon dismissal, Jane Doe was sent a bill for “unpaid court costs” of $718.38, again involving counsel fees. Nearly a decade later, she tried to get her case expunged (a 2016 law had made this easier), but a district court ruled she could not. Why? She still owed court costs she had never been able to pay in the first place.

In Iowa, it seems, those who see their charges dropped can be subjected to more costs and fines than if they’d been convicted.

Dee Gill on more ambitious testing than anything the United States has tried yet as we await widespread vaccination:

A nationwide COVID-19 screening program that includes quick verification of positive test results would provide economic benefits far beyond its considerable costs, according to new research out of UCLA and Harvard. A two-test protocol could spur economic recovery by greatly reducing the number of people and businesses sidelined by COVID-19–related fears and unnecessary quarantines, as well as lowering actual sickness and death rates.

The study analyzes three hypothetical protocols for federally funded screening programs that test large swaths of the mostly asymptomatic population every 4, 7, 14 or 30 days. Any one of the scenarios would induce GDP growth that generates more than enough additional tax revenue to pay for the testing costs, according to findings detailed in a working paper by UCLA’s Andrew Atkeson and Harvard’s Michael C. Droste, Michael Mina and James H. Stock.

The idea is to pair a cheaper rapid test with a more expensive, more accurate test to shorten quarantines, keep schools open and ease fears.

As the study points out, while there’s good news on the vaccination front, but we still don’t have one approved or in mass production.

Marshall Allen and Meg Marco, reporting for ProPublica:

[Psychologist, writer and champion poker player Maria] Konnikova’s psychology expertise tells her that most people have a hard time thinking through the uncertainty and probabilities posed by the pandemic. People tend to learn through experience, and we’ve never lived through anything like COVID-19. Every day, people face unpleasant and uncertain risks associated with their behavior, and that ambiguity goes against how we tend to think. “The brain likes certainty,” she said. “The brain likes black and white. It wants clear answers and wants clear cause and effect. It doesn’t like living in a world of ambiguities and gray zones.” […]

Good public health communication requires testing messages to make sure they are interpreted correctly by a wide range of people, [Carnegie Mellon University psychologist studying risk and decision-making Baruch] Fischhoff said. “Our official communicators have dropped the ball, and they have been undermined by people who don’t have the public’s interest at heart,” he said.

It’s easy to lose sight of just how poorly our government has handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tucked away in this piece by Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs about Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, is some perspective which offers biting criticism:

O’Brien’s trip to Asia came at a delicate moment in the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. outbreak is again surging, with the country recording more than 140,000 new cases a day the week of his departure.

Vietnam, by comparison, has reported just over 1,300 cases since the pandemic began. Some Trump advisers remarked that there may have been more cases just in the president’s orbit — including the president himself, and most recently, his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr.

Vietnam’s total cases are just 1 percent of the United States’ daily cases.

And so the Americans were treated like “human Petri dishes” with precautions such as meals left outside hotel room doors, tests performed by officials in head-to-toe protective gear, restricting the guests to a single hotel floor and not allowing the Air Force flight crew to stay in Vietnam while the delegation conducted its business.

All of these seem like wise precautions, since at least three members of the flight crew developed symptoms and tested positive while on the trip.

I put this down as a marker ahead of Nov. 3: like every free and fair election, this election is not over until we have counted every vote.

We hold ourselves up a democracy, so we will count every vote. 

It doesn’t matter if it was cast by a lifelong Republican or a former felon with restored rights. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Libertarian’s mailed ballot postmarked Nov. 2 and arriving Nov. 4 or an independent’s ballot voted in-person at 8:59 p.m. on Nov. 3. We count them. 

We count every vote, and we haven’t decided a winner until they’ve all been counted.

Every vote in Iowa. Every vote in Texas. Every vote in Alabama. And in Pennsylvania. In Ohio and in Florida. We count every last vote. 

We will count every vote because we’re a democracy, and this is how we, the people, decide our leaders. 

Voters, not candidates, decide winners. Voters, not judges or even justices of the United States Supreme Court, decide winners. To declare a winner but not count every vote is authoritarianism. To declare yourself a winner without counting every vote is a coup.

Because democracy means counting every vote.

A complete count can take us days or weeks, but we will count every vote, and then, not a moment earlier, we will have elected our leaders.