April MO2 News 4-Change
Dear Friends,
Like many of you, we are hunkered down in our homes, getting to know our families way more than we might have wanted to, and finding creative ways to get the things we need. While deliveries are slower than normal, many of us are ordering groceries and other necessities online (via Instacart, Amazon, etc.)
When you tire of Netflix, watching movies, and YouTube videos, try St. Louis County Library for information on the virtual library (ebooks,etc). Information is also available for Jefferson County Libraries and St. Charles County Libraries.
If you hear information about COVID-19 and aren’t sure of its veracity, The Center for Disease Control and Preventionhas information about symptoms and some guidelines.
While Missouri’s governor has stubbornly refused to issue a stay-at-home order, St. Louis County and City have wisely done so. For more information and updates, you can go to St. Louis County’s Dept. of Health COVID 19 web page. For city residents, you can find information on St. Louis City’s Health Department COVID 19 page.
Johns Hopkins University & Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center is a good link for accurate national and world wide information on the disease.
Until we can meet again in person, we wish you all good health. Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter (see links at the bottom of this newsletter) so we can stay in touch until this crisis eases. We really are all in this together.
#StayHome/StopTheSpread/SaveLives
Wendy Hollis Nishi, President
MO2 News 4-Change: April 2020
(Note: the headline is the link to the full article)
From Jill Schupp’s Facebook Page:
BIG NEWS! The nonpartisan Cook Political Report just upgraded our race rating: #MO02 is now Lean R (just one step away from Toss-up)!
Check out the full report here ➡️ Cook Political Report
Municipal Elections Postponed Until June 2
Parson, Ashcroft Announce April 7 Municipal Elections Postponed Until June 2 in Response to COVID-19
Jefferson City, Mo. — Pursuant to Governor Mike Parson’s Executive Order 20–02 declaring a state of emergency in response to COVID-19 and a request from Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, Governor Parson today signed Executive Order 20–03 ordering all Missouri municipal elections previously scheduled for April 7, 2020, to be postponed to June 2, 2020.
The Executive Order declares that ballots already printed for the April 7 election may be used at the postponed date of June 2. Voters who have attained the age of 18 by April 7 will be allowed to cast a ballot.
See MO Secretary of State website for more information on voting, voter registration and absentee ballots.
How Covid-19 immunity testing can help people get back to work
We need to find out who has the antibodies to the virus.
From Vox: Testing to see who has the Covid-19 coronavirus has become one of the most crucial elements of slowing the global pandemic. And it may also hold the key to a return to normal.
“Everyone staying home is just a very blunt measure. That’s what you say when you’ve got really nothing else,” Emily Gurley, an associate scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told NPR. “Being able to test folks is really the linchpin in getting beyond what we’re doing now.”
In particular, serological tests, also known as “immunity tests,” for antibodies to the virus could reveal the true extent of the pandemic and help scientists answer basic questions about Covid-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2: How many people have been infected with the virus? Who may have spread it without knowing it? Why do some people have mild illness while others become gravely ill? How deadly is the disease? What tactics are actually working to slow its spread?
Serological tests could also potentially allow people who have immunity to return to work. That could be a huge boost to front-line health workers who may have been exposed to the virus but are desperately needed back in action.
Countries are now racing to acquire more of these tests. The United Kingdom ordered 3.5 million serological tests. Germany is considering using these tests to issue immunity certificates to people who have survived Covid-19. Companies and labs are jostling to develop robust serological tests in the US as well; one company, Henry Schein, says several hundred thousand of its tests will be available March 30.
Barack Obama Tweeted this article with the following message: Here’s a useful overview of the likely scenarios that the world will be facing in the coming months while managing this pandemic. So much depends on our ability to make good decisions going forward along with our ability to remain resilient.
From The Atlantic: The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.
Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.
A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security war-gamed what might happen if a new coronavirus swept the globe. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”
The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life
From The Guardian Mar. 28: The president was aware of the danger from the coronavirus — but a lack of leadership has created an emergency of epic proportions.
When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
On the very same day, 5,000 miles away in Asia, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in South Korea. The confluence was striking, but there the similarities ended.
In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”
In Konyndyk’s analysis, the White House had all the information it needed by the end of January to act decisively. Instead, Trump repeatedly played down the severity of the threat, blaming China for what he called the “Chinese virus” and insisting falsely that his partial travel bans on China and Europe were all it would take to contain the crisis.
‘The CDC was caught flat-footed’
If Trump’s travel ban did nothing else, it staved off to some degree the advent of the virus in the US, buying a little time. Which makes the lack of decisive action all the more curious.
“We didn’t use that time optimally, especially in the case of testing,” said William Schaffner, an infectious diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University medical center. “We have been playing reluctant catch-up throughout.”
As Schaffner sees it, the stuttering provision of mass testing “put us behind the eight-ball” right at the start. “It did not permit us, and still doesn’t permit us, to define the extent of the virus in this country.”
The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.
In 2018 the pandemic unit in the national security council — which was tasked to prepare for health emergencies precisely like the current one — was disbanded. “Eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Beth Cameron, senior director of the office at the time it was broken up, wrote in the Washington Post.
We didn’t use that time optimally, especially in the case of testing.
We have been playing reluctant catch-up.
Disbanding the unit exacerbated a trend that was already prevalent after two years of Trump — an exodus of skilled and experienced officials who knew what they were doing. “There’s been an erosion of expertise, of competent leadership, at important levels of government,” a former senior government official told the Guardian.
“Over time there was a lot of paranoia and people left and they had a hard time attracting good replacements,” the official said. “Nobody wanted to work there.”
The U.S. needs to know what went wrong
From Washington Post: When America has recovered from the coronavirus crisis and people are back to work, Rep. Adam B. Schiff thinks Congress should consider a 9/11-style independent commission to examine why the nation was so unprepared for the pandemic.
Schiff, a California Democrat, told me in an interview Monday that his staff has already started working on a discussion draft modeled after the 9/11 Commission, and that he would be talking about the possibility with others in Congress. And he said the House Intelligence Committee, which he chairs, has begun reviewing the committee’s intelligence materials on the pandemic.
“We will need to delay the work of the commission until the crisis has abated to ensure that it does not interfere with the agencies that are leading the response,” Schiff explained in an email. “But that should not prevent us from beginning to identify where we got it wrong and how we can be prepared for the next pandemic.”
A review of the Trump administration’s performance would find many negatives but also some pluses. President Trump’s public statements appeared to minimize the virus and its impact until recently. But the National Security Council staff, led by deputy Matthew Pottinger, a Chinese-speaking former Wall Street Journal correspondent in Beijing, was aggressive. The first interagency meeting on the Wuhan outbreak took place Jan. 14, and the first NSC deputies committee meeting on Jan. 27, according to a senior administration official.
What accounts for the failure to translate this concern into action? One explosive issue in any inquiry would be whether Trump discounted intelligence warnings because of concerns about the impact of the virus on his reelection campaign. Indeed, the question implicates a broader set of concerns among Schiff and other critics about what they see as the politicization of intelligence, in particular Trump’s firing in February of Joseph Maguire and Andrew P. Hallman, the acting director of national intelligence and his deputy, respectively, and then the replacement of the top two officials at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).
Career officials fear that Richard Grenell, the acting DNI, is trying to shape intelligence that might challenge or embarrass Trump. “Grenell is a professional press spokesman,” said one senior retired intelligence officer, referring to Grenell’s stint as U.S. press spokesman at the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration. “Over the next six months, Trump wants someone [as DNI] who has his back.”
