Some Covid-19 thoughts

POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Monday, September 29, 2025 18:59
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BRENDA

Monday, May 18, 2020 9:47 AM

News for Covid-19 is still bad in Indian country. Navajo now have over 3,000 cases. Stricter lockdowns being put in place and curfews being extended. Amongst 5 reservations their population is only 175,000.

Hopi villages are closed to outside traffic and it is estimated that most tribes in New Mexico have covid-19 on them.

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SECOND

Monday, May 18, 2020 5:55 PM

In 2014, after the Ebola epidemic, the Obama administration realized the federal government was unprepared for pandemics, both natural and engineered. And so they built a new team into the National Security Council: the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. Beth Cameron was its first leader, and she explains that it was designed to ensure not just a constant focus on the threat, but a bureaucratic structure, and a set of interagency relationships, that were constantly being exercised so coordination could happen fast when speed was most needed.

“Having that in place is really important,” Cameron says, “because it’s in anticipation of a truly catastrophic or existential threat. It is the ability to detect it early. And then it’s the ability to respond efficiently and to practice that at all levels of government.”

That way, when the crisis does come, the government knows how to react, knows who needs to be in the meetings, knows where the power and authority and expertise lie. It can focus on responding to the threat rather than building the structure needed to respond to the threat.

The Trump administration dissolved that office in 2018 as part of John Bolton’s reorganization of the National Security Council. The leader of the team, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, was pushed out. The decision attracted criticism at the time, but the White House defended the call. “In a world of limited resources, you have to pick and choose,” one administration official told the Washington Post. The administration has never explained how or why it chose to deemphasize pandemic risk, nor which threats it decided to prioritize instead.

So neither Trump nor his administration was focused on Covid-19 in the early days, when it would have mattered most. “I think that it’s possible if we’d taken this threat more seriously in mid- to late January, that we could be in a situation where we are containing coronavirus as opposed to having to suppress it,” Cameron says.

I don’t want to overstate the consequence of that one decision: It is possible to imagine an administration that eliminated the office but remained focused, through other agencies or processes, on pandemic risk. But in this case, the dissolution of the office reflected the interests of the executive, and the evidence is everywhere. The administration responded exactly as you’d expect an administration that had shuttered its pandemic response operation to act — which is to say, it mostly did not act.

More at www.vox.com/2020/5/18/21251370/donald-trump-risk-coronavirus-2020-reel
ection-nuclear-china

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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BRENDA

Wednesday, May 20, 2020 9:11 AM

BC logged a record today. Only 2 new cases.

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SIGNYM

Thursday, May 21, 2020 9:31 AM

Quote:

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COVID Is a Great Scapegoat for the Pre-Existing Collapse of a Rotten Economic 'System'
James Howard Kunstler 15 hours ago | 820 words 696 Comments

Western Civ’s most infamous encounter with pandemic disease, so far, was the big first wave of the Black Death that had a marathon run from 1346 to 1353. That bug was the real deal. It killed folks left and right, every age group, every social station, and it killed them ugly. Few who caught it survived. Up to half the population of Europe perished, along with a lot of their social and economic ways.

The cause of the Black Death was subject to every possible explanation except the actual one, Yersina pestis, a bacterium associated with rats and their insect parasites, fleas and lice, who also enjoyed an association with humans living in the generally squalid conditions of the day ­— the ancient Roman habit of bathing long forgotten. At the top of their list of causes was an angry God, and his wicked erstwhile subordinate, Satan. The “experts” of that time tended to cluster in the church hierarchy, with its drear obsessions and compulsions. The squishy boundary between the supernatural and reality loosed all manner of derangement. The Jews came in for much vilification, leading to massacres in Strasbourg, Mainz, and Cologne. On the whole, the episode represented a terrific humbling of humanity. The allegory of the Dance Macabre summed it up in mankind’s universal antic journey to the Palookaville of death.
A billionaires best friend, Fed Chairman Powell

On the plus side, as modern interpolators might say, the bubonic plague winnowed down Europe’s population to a scale more congenial with its resource base. After that big first wave of the disease, land was cheaper and human labor better rewarded. Eventually, more food got around. Incidentally, the plague provoked nostalgia for the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, especially among the scholars of Florence, launching the extravaganzas of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and eventually our own pageant of techno-supremacist Modernity.

Covid-19 seems rather a punk-ass illness compared to the Black Death. Its victims by far are people already on a fast track to the last roundup. We know exactly what causes it, if not so exactly its origin, and yet the response among our experts has been far more ambiguous than those long-ago bishops of Christendom to the Great Plague. The various scientists, physicians, public health officers, and politicians seem, to the casual observer, about equally divided between those who consider the corona virus a grave threat and those who insist it’s hardly worse than any annual flu. What is one to believe? Or do?

Which brings us to the verge of the Great Opening-up. The current nostalgia for pre-Covid-19 business-as-usual is understandably intense. Gone especially from daily life are all the ceremonies of human togetherness, from gatherings of friends to the casual shoulder-rubbings of urban life to the crowded venues of the lively arts to the great moiling orgies of pro sports. The life of the perpetual jigsaw puzzle, YouTube, and Netflix has proved inadequate to human aspiration. Gone, too, are livelihoods, revenue streams, and rewarding roles in everyday existence. The itch to get out and do, get out and make, get out and be, is overwhelming.

Behind those plain yearnings, though, looms the specter of a system that appeared to be already foundering before Covid-19 entered the scene. There is, at least, considerable agreement that the disease catalyzed the disorders of finance and economy and accelerated the damage ­— just not among the people most responsible for engineering the fragilities that actually crashed things

Jerome Powell, Pope of the Church of the Federal Reserve, went on the 60-Minutes show last night to reassure the nation that things will eventually get back to normal. “I think you’ll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year.”

Yessir, if you say so. Were his fingers crossed? You couldn’t tell because

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