“North and South Dakota have taken a laissez-faire approach to dealing with Covid-19 — never instituting stay-at-home orders or mask mandates as other states, including some of their neighbors, did.
South Dakota in particular took a very hands-off approach, with no restrictions even on large gatherings. The strongest action Republican Gov. Kristi Noem took was to push businesses to follow safety guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Otherwise, Noem has boasted about her state’s loose strategy: She argued in an ad that businesses struggling with restrictions in other states should “come grow [their] company” in South Dakota.
“Here in South Dakota, we trust our people,” Noem said. “We respect their rights. We won’t shut them down.”
Noem still defends her approach, arguing in a recent op-ed that she’ll continue to resist stricter measures. “I’m going to continue to trust South Dakotans to make wise and well-informed decisions for themselves and their families,” she wrote.
North Dakota has done a little more. While avoiding statewide restrictions and lockdowns, Republican Gov. Doug Burgum in October called for reduced business capacity in some counties as cases spiked in his state. But these are mere recommendations — it’s hard to know if any businesses are following them — and, even then, he stopped short of recommending closures.
North Dakota also has one of the most expansive testing regimes in the US — consistently reporting one of the highest rates of coronavirus testing in the country. This may partially explain its high case count, although its positivity rate indicates that it still doesn’t have enough testing. And that testing-and-tracing system can only do so much once the virus is completely out of control, which growing hospitalizations and death rates are evidence of.
“Our contact tracers are overwhelmed with a backlog of cases,” Carson said. “We have further heard from many of our contact tracers that they are meeting increasing resistance from people to give up their contacts or abide by quarantine rules. People have become fatigued with the restrictions.”
Similar to South Dakota’s governor, North Dakota’s Burgum has pushed a message of personal responsibility. “It’s not a job for government,” he said. “This is a job for everybody.””
“The Secret Service and Labor Department have been warning states for months that criminal networks are trying to steal billions of dollars in federal pandemic unemployment aid. But the overburdened and antiquated state systems that send out the checks have been unable to stop a lot of the fraud.
Using huge databases of stolen personal information, cybercriminals based everywhere from Nigeria to London have pocketed an estimated $8 billion meant for people forced out of work due to the coronavirus so far, the Labor Department’s inspector general told states last month. The IG predicts that $26 billion in the federal aid programs alone eventually could be lost to fraud.”
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“state workforce agencies, stymied by decades-old IT systems and flooded with applications, have been ill-equipped to find and prevent the fraud, which appears to be far more extensive than the usual attempts to bilk government programs.”
“Few states have a record as unblemished as Vermont.
The odds could have been stacked against the state. The virus arrived in Vermont during the first wave sweeping the country. It shares borders with some of the hardest-hit states and has the third-oldest population in the country.
But Vermont swiftly flattened its initial wave and has since gone weeks at a time without any new confirmed infections. Fewer than 60 people have died, giving the state the second-fewest deaths per capita behind Alaska, which has seen surging caseloads in recent weeks. If the country as a whole had the same per capita death rate as Vermont, the nationwide death toll would be 30,000 instead of more than 215,000.”
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“While health experts say the state has likely benefited from its rural geography, other sparsely populated areas of the country that let their guard down were overwhelmed by the virus this spring and summer. That sense of complacency never took hold in Vermont, where a moderate Republican governor and a Democratic-led Legislature helped defuse partisan tensions that hampered the response elsewhere.
“Any state that’s going to succeed against Covid has got to have the compliance of the population, because every single thing you do is telling people to alter their personal behavior,” Mark Levine, Vermont’s health commissioner, said in an interview.”
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“Vermont reopened slowly. The lockdown it put in place in late March is still gradually being lifted, restaurants and bars are still limited to 50 percent indoor capacity and even outdoor gatherings are still subject to a 150-person limit.”
“Local governments have authority to set their own stricter rules. Burlington, the state’s most populous city, reduced its outdoor gathering limit to 25 in late August when college students began returning to nearby campuses.”
“The state is also strict about visitors, requiring a two-week quarantine for people arriving from places with higher infection rates. And it invested early in testing and contact tracing and implemented a state-wide mask mandate early on.”
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” Vermont’s experience has some similarities to Alaska, another predominantly rural state that until recent weeks kept the virus at bay through one of the country’s most proactive testing regimes and a strictly enforced quarantine requirement for travelers. But unlike Alaska, Vermont is just a few hours’ drive from New York City, the outbreak’s early epicenter, and that makes its performance even more noteworthy.”
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“Washington state shows larger urban centers can mount an effective defense against the virus with rapid coordination and an early focus on vulnerable populations.
“Washington was the tip of the spear,” Riley said. “They were the first and had to make decisions really fast.”
The state in late January reported the nation’s first case of Covid-19, and the pathogen’s tear through a Seattle-area nursing home was the first indication of how thoroughly the facilities would soon be devastated nationwide. But the state quickly got its act together.”
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“The state’s success stems from extensive data sharing, which helped health officials better target their response measures once state restrictions and business closures during the initial lockdown were eased. That meant a better view into where the virus was still lurking and knowing where to direct critical resources like testing, protective equipment and hospital surge capacity.”
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“Washington health authorities understood early the need to protect the elderly, identifying people living in nursing homes and assisted living communities as particularly vulnerable clusters.
When Congress gave states a 6.2 percent bump to their federal Medicaid funds in March, Washington was among a handful of states that largely used the windfall to provide targeted aid to nursing homes, helping them pay for additional staffing, equipment and hazard pay. New York was not.”
“Sadly, as long as demand for air travel remains so deflated, there’s no way to avoid airlines restructuring and slimming down their payroll. Subsidies provided through the cover of payroll programs aren’t necessary to protect an industry that could restructure through bankruptcy. Airline bankruptcies aren’t the equivalent of an airline collapse. They can continue to fly safely during the process where a judge imposes a stay on creditors’ claims and gives the airlines breathing room until consumers are ready to come back.
Importantly, the bankruptcy process is fair. It shifts the cost of this crisis onto those airline investors who make good returns during good times and should shoulder the decreased value of their investments, instead of taxpayers. Without a bailout, airlines won’t just be flying the friendly sky, but the fairer sky—for all taxpayers”
“While Congress or military leaders are involved in any other decision to use of military force, the president can legally order a nuclear strike on his own. “Congress doesn’t have any role in this at the moment,” says Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology. “They’re not expected to be consulted.”
Unitary presidential control of nuclear weapons dates from the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and the practice has been cemented over time. This is partly a product of the general shift toward a stronger executive, and partly just an issue of timing: If the missiles are coming, you can’t call up Congress.”
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“”The system we have is very much a product of the 1940s, with some modifications in the 1950s and the 1960s,” Wellerstein says. “And we don’t live in the 1940s, ’50s, or ’60s. So I think we should feel free to question whether the system we have now is the ideal system for our present day.””
“As of October 20, the seven-day average of coronavirus cases was more than 60,000 — a new peak since the summer surge of Covid-19 abated. That’s up from a recent low in the seven-day average of fewer than 35,000 cases on September 12. The increase doesn’t appear to be driven by a single state or region — although the Dakotas, Montana, and Wisconsin appear to be in particularly bad shape — but rather spikes across much of the country at once, with increases reported across the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. (Some of the spike is also caused by more testing exposing more cases.)”
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“The current surge seems to be a repeat of the summer spike. Cases started to fall in late August, eventually reaching a brief plateau between mid-August and mid-September. But that plateau was still much higher than the peak of Covid-19 cases in the spring (partly, but likely not entirely, due to more testing). Yet states seemingly declared victory and started to reopen anyway — and now cases are rapidly climbing again.
MacDonald is now repeating the same thing she told me in the summer: “We never got to low enough levels [of Covid-19] to start with in most places.”
Of particular interest is indoor dining at restaurants and bars, which are reopening at varying levels across the country. Experts characterize these settings as perhaps the worst imaginable spaces for Covid-19 spread: People are close together for long periods of time; they can’t wear masks as they eat or drink; the air can’t dilute the virus like it can outdoors; and alcohol could lead people to drop their guards further. It was a recognition of all these risks that led many states to scale back and close indoor dining and bars during their summer outbreaks.”
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“None of the ideas to prevent all of this are shocking or new. They’re all things people have heard before: More testing and contact tracing to isolate people who are infected, get their close contacts to quarantine, and deploy broader restrictions as necessary. More masking, including mandates in the 17 states that don’t have one. More careful, phased reopenings. More social distancing.”
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“While experts all agreed that there’s zero political appetite for a lockdown right now, a massive surge in the fall and winter could leave the US with no other option. Israel, for example, shut down in September after seeing a massive increase in cases, and several European countries are now considering or enacting similar measures as their cases rise.”
“When I asked public health experts how the United States had reached 200,000 coronavirus deaths, several of them cited the misinformation coming from the White House and President Donald Trump himself.
The president has questioned the efficacy of masks, hyped unproven treatments, and continues to promise a vaccine before experts and the drug companies themselves believe it will actually be ready. That lack of clear and accurate communication has now extended to Trump’s own Covid-19 diagnosis, with his doctors seemingly obfuscating the details of the president’s condition. They have outright acknowledged downplaying the seriousness of his symptoms, and the treatment Trump is receiving does not entirely comport with the sunny prognosis advanced by the White House.
The effect of all of these communications failures is diffuse and uncertain. But we do know this much, according to new Cornell University research: The president of the United States was the loudest megaphone for Covid-19 misinformation during the first few months of the pandemic.
The researchers examined more than 1.1 million English-language articles published between January 1 and May 26 in traditional media outlets (retrieved through LexisNexis) that included some Covid-19 misinformation. They represented about 3 percent of the 38 million total articles published about the pandemic in that time.
Of those million-plus articles with misinformation, about 38 percent of them featured Donald Trump and some specific kind of misleading claim of which the president is fond, or a general reference to his penchant for spreading false information.
Trump’s influence is not just reflected in the amount of misleading information, but also the content of it — even if he wasn’t directly the source. Of the various types of misinformation identified by the Cornell study, “miracle cures” are by far the most common. The president has touted, without evidence, the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and said he’d taken a course himself.”
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“In an unprecedented health care emergency, Americans needed clear and accurate information from their federal government. Instead, President Trump has sowed discord and doubt and disinformation, making it harder for the country to contain Covid-19.”
“the biggest payoff for Operation Warp Speed could be the rapid deployment of a vaccine once one is approved. The upfront investment for drug companies to produce vaccine doses without knowing whether they will ever be used is the kind of thing the federal government is best positioned to do. Risk-averse pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t ordinarily spend hundreds of millions of dollars in that way otherwise.
“We want to make it worthwhile for these companies to do that under these conditions of uncertainty,” Sachs said.
Warp Speed has become in effect a military operation, with a STAT report on its organizational structure revealing that the military personnel working on the project actually outnumber the civilians. The military has flown equipment and raw materials around the world to manufacturing centers, and it will likely play a central role in vaccine distribution. Even Joe Biden has compared that process to a large-scale military operation.”
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“Not only have Trump’s public comments and this lack of coordination hindered the project, but the administration’s singular focus on Warp Speed has arguably led to other parts of the US pandemic response being undermined.
As Bloomberg reported in late September, the Trump administration has redirected about $6 billion in federal funding meant for the National Strategic Stockpile to Operation Warp Speed, even though protective equipment shortages persist. And about $1 billion in CDC funding, which otherwise would have been sent to state and local health agencies, was also steered to the project, according to Bloomberg.”
“President Donald Trump has been touting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine since March as effective treatments for COVID-19. He even took hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic measure for two weeks in May.
Last week, when the president was hospitalized for a COVID-19 infection, his physicians listed the medications with which he is being treated. Hydroxychloroquine is notable by its absence.
Instead, the president has been aggressively treated with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ polyclonal antibodies. This combination of two monoclonal antibodies aims to block the coronarvirus from infecting cells, providing extra time for patients’ immune systems to ramp up their own natural defenses against the virus. While the treatment is still in clinical trials, preliminary reports suggest that it does substantially help to alleviate COVID-19 symptoms.”