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Bot Sentinel conducted an analysis and found bots and trolls are using hashtags like #ReopenAmericaNow and #StopTheMadness to spread disinformation.
Of course it’s not just astroturfed protests. It’s also astroturfed social media.
“Bots and trolls are using hashtags like #ReOpenNC, #ReopenAmericaNow, #StopTheMadness, #ENDTHESHUTDOWN, and #OperationGridlock to spread disinformation. ... the bots and trolls are spreading conspiracy theories about Democrats wanting to hurt the economy to make Trump look bad, Democrats trying to take away people’s civil liberties, and Democrats trying to prevent people from voting. The accounts are also using false data to underplay the threat of the coronavirus. ...
“‘Inauthentic accounts are amplifying disinformation and inaccurate statistics and sharing false information as a reason to reopen the country. Many of these accounts are also spreading bizarre conspiracy theories about Democrats using COVID-19 as a way to take away American freedoms and prevent Americans from voting.’ ...
“It’s likely foreign actors that are looking to foment chaos in the United States are contributing to the spread of disinformation and the promotion of anti-quarantine protests, similar to gatherings and protests that were organized and stoked by Russian actors during the 2016 election. ... the disinformation is being spread by trolls and bots but also by ‘useful idiots.’ ‘Empowering violent extremists is a very old method for collapsing unstable states. This is the end result of weaponized disinformation.’ ...
“It’s not clear who’s behind this disinformation campaign that’s contributing to anti-quarantine efforts, but it seems likely those behind it do not have the United States’ health interests at heart.”
I decided to look up the reopen nc hashtag cuz I have family that lives there and I'm worried.....and then I saw this
Okay a dude is threatening to shoot cops because his right to protest the closing of dave n busters has been infringed upon. I'm disappointed but not surprised....... but then I decided to look at his account
So this guy is pro-life but he wants to kill people for telling him to go home during a pandemic, and then he wants to kill more people because reopening the state would cause a deadly virus to spread. So this guy is just like
ReOpen’s gullibility could get people killed.
At 6:41 a.m. on Tuesday, an ornery Donald Trump hopped on Twitter to hate on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and beat his chest about how much Republicans love him and how that proved how well he was handling the coronavirus pandemic, how he got great ratings on Monday Night Football and The Bachelor, and, most of all, how mean journalists are to him.
“It is amazing that I became President of the United States with such a totally corrupt and dishonest Lamestream Media going after me all day, and all night,” he whined, as if 50,000 Americans hadn’t died in six weeks.
I will grant him this: It does, in fact, amaze me that Donald Trump became president, even three and a half years after it happened. It amazes me that someone so small holds the same title as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama — hell, as Benjamin Harrison and Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon.
It amazes me that a man who will soon rack up a body count that exceeds the whole of the Vietnam War and an unemployment rate that tops the Great Depression has the gall to boast about his news conference ratings. (For that matter, it amazes me that thumb-sucking news executives broadcast these self-serving shit shows.)
It amazes me that an imbecile who managed to bankrupt casinos will, despite evidence of his own failures, demand that governors reopen their states even if doing so endangers their citizens; if they refuse, he’ll sic his lackey attorney general on them.
And it amazes me that, nearly 1,200 days into this cesspool of corruption — did you know the Trump Organization’s looking for bailouts from the Trump administration? — Democrats are still so risibly feckless.
An example: On Tuesday night, the Senate passed a $484 billion package that funnels $310 billion into the exhausted Paycheck Protection Program. It also provides billions for hospitals and a federal plan for COVID-19 testing — things that, astoundingly, Democrats won as concessions.
What’s not in the bill? Money to help states and cities whose budgets have been wrecked by the economic slowdown. Unlike the feds, state and local governments generally can’t run deficits, so without federal help, they’ll face huge tax hikes and/or sweeping service cuts that invariably harm the poor — things that turn bad economic situations into human misery.
Democrats wanted $150 billion in aid. Republicans blocked it. Democrats, who control the House of Representatives and could have forced the issue, rolled over like cowering puppies when Republicans pinky-swore that they’d take up local aid in the next relief package.
Then, as soon as the Senate passed the bill, Mitch McConnell got that old-time fiscal responsibility religion. Maybe we can’t afford more relief packages, he said. Womp, womp.
It’s not like Republicans hadn’t telegraphed the play. Look no further than the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, that direct conduit to the Italian-suited plutocrat crowd that runs GOP fiscal policy: “But the White House and Trump administration have been holding out because, in part, they believe if Congress keeps cutting checks for state and local governments, they will be disincentivized to open up their economies,” it opined on Friday.
Recall that the central tenet of the Trump presidency is the buck stops elsewhere. He gets credit for everything that goes right; someone else gets blamed for anything that goes wrong.
By pushing them to reopen now — before there’s anything like the expanded testing, contact tracing, and isolation regime experts say we need — Trump can claim credit for regrowing an economy that shed 26 million jobs in a month. If governors resist and their economies founder, that’s on them. If they reopen and there’s an outbreak, that’s on them, too.
It’s not Trump’s fault they weren’t prepared. He told them testing was their responsibility.
That brings us to the ostensibly grassroots ReOpen movement, which, let’s be real, is about as grassroots as the Tea Party was a decade ago. As with the Tea Party, the long tentacles of the libertarian svengali Koch network are present here, too, through an initiative called the Convention of States, funded by billionaire Robert Mercer and managed by a longtime Koch associate. And as with the Tea Party, the goal is to further the interests of wealthy elites by fomenting outrage and passing off organized stupidity as a populist rebellion.
It’s like we haven’t seen this play before.
It amazes me to see reporters mainstreaming fringe characters alongside epidemiologists and economists without contextualizing how fringe they actually are. Only 12 percent of Americans think stay-at-home orders are too restrictive; fewer than a third are worried they’ll be kept in place too long. Just because a belligerent freak show offers a colorful break from the quotidian drudgery of coronavirus reporting, that doesn’t mean we should pretend a molehill is a mountain.
More than anything, it amazes me that we’re not calling out the ReOpen movement for what it obviously is: This isn’t about the best practices for reopening schools and businesses or even defending our First Amendment right to spread infectious diseases in the name of Jesus Christ and Almighty Capitalism.
This is a political campaign. This is about getting your base pissed and turning the other guy into an enemy. This is how the game is played now.
It’s no coincidence these efforts popped up in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, swing states with Democratic governors who are all much more popular than Donald Trump. They emerged elsewhere, too, of course: Ohio, Minnesota, Kentucky, New York, Texas. Regardless, the goal is to galvanize right-wing factions — religious fundamentalists, gun rights enthusiasts, anti-government types — with a common purpose and a common foe headed into the election.
North Carolina offers a good case study. Governor Roy Cooper is crushing Republican Dan Forest, a corporeal dunce cap who’s gone all-in on ReOpenNC as his last best hope to become relevant again.
ReOpenNC held its second weekly rally in downtown Raleigh on Tuesday. A thousand people showed up. Few had masks. Fewer bothered with social distancing.
The political overtones were unmistakable. There were Trump flags and Dan Forest T-shirts. There was lieutenant governor candidate (and homophobic conspiracy theorist) Mark Keith Robinson maskless and ungloved, shaking hands. There was Congressman Dan Bishop, who — now that Mark Meadows has become Trump’s chief of staff — is vying to become the state delegation’s biggest embarrassment, carrying a Constitution he said he was going to deliver to Cooper “because he’s forgotten what it’s about.” There were posters equating social distancing with tyranny and signs denouncing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert. There were anti-vaxxers and 5G paranoids and QAnon basement-dwellers. There were proud displays of scientific and economic illiteracy. There was palpable anger.
And there were very, very few people of color.
Not coincidentally, COVID-19 has disproportionately killed African Americans both in North Carolina and across the country. Perhaps it’s easy to be indifferent to consequences that predominantly fall on someone else.
Two days later, Cooper obliged Republicans’ increasingly vehement demands for more details about how he envisioned reopening the state, laying out a cautious three-part plan that stretches into June (at the earliest) while extending his stay-at-home order at least a week, through May 8.
The words had barely left his mouth before the emails poured in: “One-size-fits-all policy does not work for North Carolina,” the influential Civitas Institute proclaimed.
“The people of North Carolina will suffer needless health and economic harm if the State continues to treat its diverse population with a one-size-fits-all approach,” the Republican commissioners of the rural Union County wrote in a letter.
“Gov. Cooper’s one-size-fits-all approach for reopening is not necessary for a state as large as North Carolina,” Dan Forest said in a statement.
Weird how they all used that phrase.
Only 16 percent of North Carolina voters think the state should relax social distancing guidelines, so they know they’re not going to make headway with a frontal assault. Instead, they’re playing into the state’s rural (often white, generally Republican)-urban (diverse, Democratic) divide, to make Cooper appear unreasonable and indifferent to rural voters’ needs while he protects, you know, other people.
On the surface, it makes sense that, say, Transylvania County, with just two reported coronavirus cases, or Avery County, which has none, shouldn’t be bound by the same restrictions as the rest of the state. But Transylvania County borders Henderson County, which has 123 cases as of April 23, and Avery County borders Burke County, which has 74. Viruses don’t know borders, and, well, cars exist.
It’s true that viruses spread more easily in dense population centers, but people in small towns and rural communities still gather together in churches and restaurants. It only takes one infected person to start an outbreak, and hospitals might not be equipped to handle it.
Then there’s this: “Epidemic or pandemic control in the world very much depends on the weak links,” Olga Jones, a senior fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Vox. “The whole system is as good as its weakest links.”
Mark McClellan was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration during the SARS outbreak in 2003. Like COVID-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, was caused by a then-novel coronavirus. Unlike COVID-19, however, it could only be transmitted by the very sick. You could easily identify the people who had it, quarantine them, then trace where they got it from. Consequently, the global outbreak, which started in February 2003, was contained by July. About 8,000 people were infected, and fewer than 800 died. The U.S. had about two dozen confirmed and probable cases and no deaths.
“Here, that’s not necessarily the case,” says McClellan, now director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy.
A new study indicates that a large proportion of COVID-19 infections — as much as 43 percent — are asymptomatic, meaning the carriers have no idea they’re sick. On the other hand, if this bears out, it would seem like welcome news. The initial fatality and hospitalization rates for the disease would have been wildly overblown. COVID-19 is much less dangerous than we thought.
Not really, though.
As Andy Slavitt, the former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, explains: “The picture of a large number of asymptomatic hosts is a chilling one. One asymptomatic spreader can spread Covid-19 to 9,537 patients in 40 days. … If 40 percent of those people have no symptoms, the impetus for them to continue to stay home is lower.”
Forty percent have no symptoms, but the other 60 percent do. And for whatever reason — maybe age or underlying conditions, maybe bad luck — some of them become critically ill, some die. Meanwhile, the 40 percent without symptoms are passing along the virus to a new generation, and the cycle repeats.
“This is a fundamental feature we need to address in doing containment from here on out,” McClellan says. That’s why it’s “very important for people even with mild symptoms to stay home and get tested and to be able to initiate the contact tracing.”
Asymptomatic transmission also underlines the need for strict monitoring and rigid enforcement of basic precautions like sanitation and hygiene, as well as ramping up testing and contact tracing. Right now, the U.S. is conducting about a million coronavirus tests a week. That’s an improvement from a month ago, McClellan says, and while the U.S. is well behind where it needs to be, it’s catching up.
“I think we can get there with the testing capacity that will be there in the next few weeks,” McClellan says.
The White House wants to double the number of tests per week to 2 million. Health experts say that, without a vaccine, keeping the country open will require between 4 million and 30 million tests per week. Even then, there would be logistical hurdles to overcome, including billions of dollars of lab equipment to buy and wide-scale national coordination.
The latter has never been the administration’s strong suit.
These two statements are true: 1) The Great Lockdown has been devastating, and we can’t wait a year for a vaccine — or even six weeks — to reopen the economy. 2) Reopening too quickly and carelessly will get people killed.
Reconciling them will require making difficult tradeoffs with life-and-death ramifications. They should be approached cautiously, with the best available information, listening to people who know what they’re talking about — and not, say, a certain Very Stable Genius who thinks chugging Clorox might cure what ails you.
It amazes me that needs to be said.
In Georgia, hell-for-leather Governor Brian Kemp wants almost everything up and running by Monday, though his state has three times as many cases and four times as many deaths as the go-it-slower North Carolina. Even Trump distanced himself from that harebrained notion.
That’s not to say that Trump’s been a model of dispassioned sobriety. After all, he spent last weekend egging on extremists, tweeting at them to LIBERATE their states from oppressive governors.
Trump’s tweetstorm took place after a Fox News segment about an obscure Facebook event called Liberate Minnesota, which is the way this stuff works. These protests were small affairs until Fox News personalities and other Trump-friendly pundits — and then the president himself — elevated them.
Trump’s defaults are politics by agitation and confident assertions utterly detached from reality, so leaning into a faux-populist revolt that imagines it can disappear a pandemic by throwing a temper tantrum is pretty much par for the course. Besides, a slow-and-steady restart doesn’t suit his agenda. His case for reelection was rooted in a robust economy. And come hell or high water, he needs to get things rolling again.
If need be, your life is a risk he’s willing to take.
Over the last decade, a wide body of research has shown that right-wing populists are motivated by fear, making them susceptible to demagoguery and conspiracy theories. This is Trump’s base. He speaks their language fluently. And his foremost political skill has been convincing the gullible not to see what’s in front of their eyes.
The people marching on state capitols, the ones waving Gadsden flags and screaming about tyranny and denouncing scientists — they have, in effect, become pawns in a game they don’t realize is being played.
That’s not to say they don’t believe that businesses should reopen or that the government shouldn’t be allowed to dictate when and for what reason they leave their homes. But that doesn’t mean they’re not being manipulated.
And their ignorance doesn’t make them less dangerous.
Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at [email protected].
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It’s Thursday, April 23. There are:
5 days until the General Assembly returns for its short session.
6 days until the state’s stay-at-home order expires.
8 days until local stay-at-home orders expire.
25 days until kids (might) go back to school.
0 days until Governor Cooper releases his plan to reopen the state.
196 days until the November election.
Best of the Triangle voting is underway. Votes for your favorites here.
Please share this newsletter with your friends and ask them to join us.
PRIMER is made possible by the INDY Press Club. Your contributions are helping us keep local independent journalism alive in the Triangle. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be saying thanks. Watch this space — or pick up next week’s newspaper — for details.
—Jeffrey C. Billman, INDY editor. Follow me on Twitter @jeffreybillman.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY [2020-04-23]
Above the Fold
→ WHAT TO MAKE OF THE MAGA DEATH CULT.
A confession: Yesterday morning, I began writing a quick post about Tuesday’s ReOpenNC rally that I assumed would take me an hour. It morphed into a column that I assumed might take me two or three. Before I knew it, by about 10 o’clock last evening — 12 hours, four rewrites, and 1,500 words later — I had a mostly-but-not-yet-finished essay on my hands, but not much time to write Primer. Here, I’ll run through some of the essay’s threads, a few hours before anyone else gets to see them. Fair warning: The rest of this newsletter might be on the thin side.
TUESDAY, 6:41 A.M.: Donald Trump tweeted the following: “It is amazing that I became President of the United States with such a totally corrupt and dishonest Lamestream Media going after me all day, and all night.”
Putting aside the extraordinary smallness of whining about media coverage during a pandemic that has claimed 45,000 American lives and counting, it does, in fact, amaze me, even after three and a half years, that he did become president.
It amazes me, too, that after all this time, congressional Democrats are still so risibly feckless and gullible. On Tuesday night, the Senate passed a $484 billion package that funnels more money into the exhausted Paycheck Protection Program and provides billions for hospitals and a federal plan for COVID-19 testing — things that, astoundingly, Democrats had to win as concessions.
What’s not in the bill? $150 billion to help states and cities whose budgets have been wrecked by the economic slowdown. Republicans blocked it, pinky-swearing that they’d take up local aid in the next relief package. Then, as soon as the Senate passed the bill, Mitch McConnell got that old-time fiscal responsibility religion and declared there might not be any more relief packages.
Why? As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page so helpfully explains: “If Congress keeps cutting checks for state and local governments, they will be disincentivized to open up their economies.”
WHAT TRUMP WANTS: Trump’s goal is always — always — to take credit for anything that goes right and lay blame for anything that goes wrong. Remember, the central tenet of the Trump presidency is that the buck stops elsewhere.
By forcing states to reopen now — before there’s anything like the expanded testing, contact tracing, and isolation regime experts say we need — Trump can claim credit for a regrowing economy.
If governors resist and their economies collapse, that’s on them. If they reopen without sufficient public health measures in place and there’s an outbreak, that’s on them, too.
And if a deadly second wave coincides with flu season this winter — as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield believes is likely — well, it’s not Trump’s fault if they weren’t prepared.
THE REOPEN MOVEMENT: There are, I think, three things we should keep in mind when considering these “spontaneous,” “grass-roots” initiatives that suddenly popped up in swing states with Democratic governors just as Trump’s approval numbers started declining.
Number 1: They’re about as grass-roots as the Koch-funded Tea Party was a decade ago — in other words, not very. The long tentacles of the Koch network are present here, too, through an initiative called the Convention of States, funded by billionaire Robert Mercer and managed by a Koch associate. As with the Tea Party, the goal is to further the interests of wealthy elites under the guise of populist angst.
Number 2: Too many reporters will nonetheless treat these charades like something more than performative exercises in ginned-up outrage and organized stupidity, credulously mainstreaming fringe characters and giving them a platform alongside epidemiologists and economists without contextualizing how fringe they actually are. Only 12 percent of Americans think stay-at-home orders are too restrictive. Fewer than a third are worried that they’ll be kept in place too long. Just because this story offers a break from the monthlong drudgery of new coronavirus cases and new coronavirus deaths, that doesn’t mean we should pretend this molehill is a mountain.
Number 3: This isn’t about policy. It’s about politics. Do you think it’s a coincidence these movements popped up in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, critical swing states with increasingly popular Democratic governors?
CASE STUDY: NORTH CAROLINA: ReOpenNC held its second weekly rally Tuesday. About a thousand people showed up. Few had masks. Fewer bothered with social distancing. (What could go wrong?)
The political overtones were unmistakable. There were Trump flags. There were Dan Forest T-shirts. There was lieutenant governor candidate/conspiracy theorist Mark Keith Robinson maskless and shaking ungloved hands. There was U.S. Representative Dan Bishop, who — now that Mark Meadows has become Trump’s chief of staff — is vying to become the state delegation’s biggest embarrassment, carrying a Constitution he said he was going to delivery to Cooper “because he’s forgotten what it’s about.” There were posters equating social distancing with tyranny. There were signs denouncing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert. There were anti-vaxxers and 5G paranoids and QAnon basement-dwellers. There was palpable anger. And there were very, very few people of color.
Roy Cooper is crushing Forest, who’s gone all-in on ReOpenNC, seeing it as his best chance to bring down the gov’s poll numbers. Republican lawmakers and aligned business interests, meanwhile, are pushing Cooper to follow the devil-may-care example of Georgia and demanding that he detail when and how he’ll lift social distancing restrictions.
Cooper has said for weeks that he wants to take a cautious, data-driven approach to reopening. He’ll announce a formal plan this afternoon.
THE CON AND THE MARKS: The economic collapse has been devastating — no denying that. And we can’t wait a year or more for a vaccine to reopen the economy. There will be difficult tradeoffs and hard decisions. From a public health perspective, it would be better to phase in sectors of the economy throughout the summer as we dramatically scale up testing and contact tracing, something at which the Trump administration has failed miserably so far. But that doesn’t suit the president’s political needs.
Come hell or high water, Trump needs to get the economy going again. Your life is a risk he’s willing to take.
Whether they realize it or not, the people flocking to ReOpen Facebook pages and marching on state capitols are the marks in a con, pawns who don’t know they’re pawns — who don’t even understand the game being played — serving financial and political interests that capitalize on the populist right’s susceptibility to demagoguery and conspiracy theories.
If we allow policy to be shaped by this manufactured outrage, or by the politicians and corporate interests manufacturing it, this gullibility could get a lot of people killed.
State & Local
→ FIRST STATE PRISON INMATE DIES OF COVID-19.
An inmate of the Pender Correctional Institution died of COVID-19, making him the first state prisoner to do so, the Division of Prisons announced.
“Pender is one of a dozen state prisons currently reporting outbreaks of the virus, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. Outbreaks have also been reported in Bertie, Caswell, Durham, Granville, Greene, Halifax, Hertford, Johnston, Pasquotank, Wake, and Wayne.”
“Including federal prisons and local jails, more than 650 inmates have tested positive for the virus in North Carolina and five have died.”
The state hasn't released details about the deceased beyond saying that he was in his late 50s and had underlying conditions.
RELATED: Six Durham County Sheriff’s employees have tested positive for the novel coronavirus. They all work at the jail; the DCSO says no detainees have tested positive so far.
→ DURHAM NURSING HOME HAS 90 CORONAVIRUS CASES.
The Durham Nursing Home & Rehabilitation Center has reported that 90 residents have tested positive for the virus, according to Mayor Steve Schewel. The mayor could not confirm if any of the center’s patients have been hospitalized.
The South Lasalle Street center provides short-term and long-term care while offering a range of services, including respiratory care, physical therapy, dietary services, and hospice care, according to its website. The website does not mention a coronavirus outbreak at the facility. The center’s administrators were not available for comment Tuesday night. On Wednesday, the center told the INDY it would send out a press statement soon.
→ WHO IN NORTH CAROLINA IS STAYING AT HOME?
A new dataset from a company called SafeGraph, which analyzed GPS data from 45 million cell phones, purports to give us an answer. Unlike previous analyses, which measured how far people went from their house as an assessment of adherence to social distancing guidelines — a measurement that inherently favors metro over rural areas — Safegraph says its system simply looks to see how often people are going out.
SafeGraph: “We think this is a useful metric because one does not need to travel long distances to undermine social-distancing and enable viral transmission. It also enables better comparisons between rural, suburban, and urban areas, even though the former generally travel greater distances for essential activities like grocery shopping.”
Results, please: Major metros like Charlotte and Raleigh show the highest percentage of homebodies, with 43 and 45 percent of residents not leaving the house. Rural pockets like Duplin, Bladen, and Robeson Counties had fewer than 30 percent of residents staying home.
Check out the dataset here.
→ WEATHER: ☁️☁️⛈ (High of 62)
Nation & World
→ TRUMP SIGNS ORDER PAUSING (SOME) IMMIGRATION FOR 60 DAYS.
The executive order the president promised via late-night tweet is here, though it’s less sweeping than it originally seemed.
“The order, which takes effect Thursday, will not apply to immigrants who already are living and working in the United States and are seeking to become legal permanent residents. Medical professionals, farmworkers and others who enter on temporary ‘nonimmigrant’ visas are unaffected, and the suspension also exempts the spouses and underage children of U.S. citizens, among other carve-outs.”
So what does it do? “It will put a halt on employment-based immigration visas as well as the family-based categories for parents and siblings, which the president has often derided as ‘chain migration.’ The measure also freezes the Diversity Visa Lottery, another frequent Trump target, which issues about 50,000 green cards annually. Legal permanent residents who are trying to bring their spouses and children into the country also will be unable to do so.”
“The order characterized the move almost entirely in economic terms, with the president facing a difficult reelection contest this November amid the pandemic crisis. ‘President Trump’s efforts will ensure we continue to put American workers first as we begin to reopen our economy,’ the White House said in a statement.”
Be real: This is a Stephen Miler grabbag with the coronavirus as an excuse. Hey, when all else fails, blame the immigrants.
→ ASYMPTOMATIC COVID-19 CARRIERS ARE CONTAGIOUS.
File this under reasons to be cautious about relaxing social distancing. A new study suggests that there is a lot of asymptomatic carriers, and they can still spread the disease, writes Andy Slavitt, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“The picture of a large number of asymptomatic hosts is a chilling one. One asymptomatic spreader can spread Covid-19 to 9,537 patients in 40 days. (Using 10 generations & r0 of 2.5). If 40% of those people have no symptoms, the impetus for them to continue to stay home is lower.”
“With more asymptomatic people, some would argue that means it’s less deadly since the case fatality rates (CFR) is lower. I would argue that feature makes it more deadly. Cognitively when we come in to contact with asymptomatic people, we feel less reason to worry.”
→ OIL PRICES STABILIZE, STOCKS REBOUND.
Good news: You can stop feeling sorry for those poor, poor oil barons. West Texas crude oil, which was selling for less than $0 earlier this week — as in, you had to pay someone to take it off your hands — was back up to $14 a barrel, which made the markets happy.
“The market surge is partly a response to states such as Georgia and Florida announcing plans to reopen their economies in the coming days. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is beginning to outline the early stages of how New York, the state hit hardest by the virus, will start to loosen restrictions.”
→ COVID, SCHMOVID. TRUMP WANTS TO GET OUT THERE, MAN.
The president needs to get out of Washington, it seems.
“As his own health officials continue to warn against nonessential travel, Trump has privately urged aides over the past week to start adding official events back to his schedule, including photo ops and site visits that would allow him to ditch Washington for a few hours.”
“His itch to get away from Washington comes as his administration pressures governors to begin loosening restrictions on interstate travel, business operations and public gatherings — part of a three-phase plan the federal government released last week to reopen the U.S. economy after a near-total shutdown due to Covid-19. The road map has been criticized by some state officials who say they lack the testing capacity needed to safely reopen communities in accordance with the president’s timeline.”
“Other officials from 2020 battleground states said they would hesitate to permit events that do not comply with the federal government’s guidelines. Trump is almost always accompanied by an entourage of advisers and U.S. Secret Service personnel during official and political trips, making it difficult to practice social distancing guidelines in line with the administration's current recommendations.”
Primer is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Join today and support independent local journalism. If you’d like to advertise your business to Primer’s 25,000 subscribers, please contact me at [email protected] or John Hurld at [email protected]. If you have suggestions for improving this newsletter, please contact me at [email protected].
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“We no longer have a first amendment right of peaceable assembly. This is why we have a second amendment.”
Last week, Mike S. Adams, a professor of criminology and sociology at UNC-Wilmington, tweeted what appears to be a call for activists to use the Second Amendment against Raleigh police for enforcing Wake County’s stay-at-home order during a #ReopenNC.
Adams did not respond to the INDY’s request to clarify his tweet.
In addition to being a professor at UNC-Wilmington — for which he’s paid $89,132 a year — Adams is an anti-abortion rights activist, the author of the book Letters to a Young Progressive, and a columnist at the right-wing website Townhall.com, where he writes such trenchant pieces as “Three Essential Firearms for Civil Unrest” and “Three More Essential Firearms” and “Three Essential Firearms.”
Last Tuesday, Raleigh police — declaring the protest a “non-essential activity” — arrested a woman at a #ReopenNC rally outside of the state legislature building in downtown Raleigh for violating Wake County’s emergency order, which prohibits gatherings of any kind. Under the state’s less-draconian order, the rally would appear to be permissible so long as the protesters maintained six feet of distance.
The roughly 100 protesters demanded that Governor Cooper allow businesses to reopen, despite the threat epidemiologists say such a move would pose to public health. Cooper appears resistant to a “wholesale” reopening, though he has indicated that some businesses could reopen in phases throughout May, depending on COVID-19 trends and the availability of testing and contact tracing.
This protest was part of a larger resistance that has emerged in some Democratic-led states over the last week, including Michigan, fueled by business interests and conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation. Interestingly, the website reopennc.com was registered in Florida.
Despite having relatively small numbers, the protests have gotten outsize media attention, particularly after President Trump sent a series of tweets encouraging protesters to “LIBERATE” their states on Saturday. Trump’s allies have also signaled their support, including economic adviser Stephen Moore, who compared protesters to Rosa Parks.
#ReopenNC is planning another demonstration this Tuesday — and will apparently bus in protesters for eight cities.
Bob Luddy, a major Republican donor and Raleigh businessman, has emerged as a leading backer of the #ReopenNC effort. Last week, he sent an open letter telling Governor Cooper: “You created this tragedy. … This may be a solution for your medical advisers, but the results are now devastating nearly every facet of our society. You have also effectively denied religious freedom, a God-given and constitutional right. Now you are in the process of stripping all our freedoms, purportedly to protect us from ourselves.”
In a subsequent tweet, Adams encouraged North Carolina business owners to defy Cooper’s order, which is set to expire on April 29, as he believes the governor will not allow them to reopen, and the state GOP is feckless.
This is not the first time Adams has courted controversy. A few years ago, UNCW students petitioned to get Adams fired for “a history of spewing misogynistic, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, racist rhetoric.”
In 2015, he tweeted: “I’ll agree to limit my magazines to ten when the government limits Muslim immigration to ten.” In 2016: “When someone kills a cop you know his last words were probably either ‘Allahu Akbar’ or ‘Black Lives Matter.’”
In 2007, Adams filed a lawsuit after UNC-Wilmington denied him a promotion to a full professor, alleging that he’d been rejected because of his religion and his conservative writing. In 2014, a federal jury ruled in his favor, awarding him the promotion and $50,000 in back pay.
Polls show little support for ending stay-at-home orders. By about a two-to-one margin, Americans are more worried that the government will end the shutdown too soon rather than too late. Public health officials, meanwhile, say that lifting the shutdowns too soon could “nullify” all of the measures taken over the last month to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at [email protected].
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Many gyms have already opened allowing people who need exercise as medical treatment.
Gyms, museums, bowling alleys, and aquariums will be allowed to reopen Friday, Gov. Roy Cooper announced Tuesday [2020-09-01].
Museums and aquariums will be allowed to open at half capacity, and gyms will be able to open at 30% capacity, Cooper said in a press conference. The changes take effect Friday at 5 p.m. Playgrounds will also be allowed to open.
Children five years and older must wear masks in public, under the new order. The age limit was lowered from 11 years old.
The news of loosened restrictions on businesses, which Cooper called Phase 2.5, comes a week ahead of schedule. Cooper said on Aug. 5 that existing regulations would be in place until at least Sept. 11.
“We’ve continued to see our statewide numbers stabilize,” Cooper said Tuesday. “We’re encouraged but cautious.”
The N.C. Museum of Art, the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences and other attractions have been closed for months. Museums and aquariums must adhere to mass gathering restrictions for each room.
Earlier Tuesday, the state Department of Health and Human Services reported the highest daily total of new COVID-19 cases in four weeks.
Dr. Mandy Cohen, head of the state health agency, said that cases, hospitalizations, and other metrics are stabilizing.
“As we are going to take some steps forward today, it’s important to remember that moving forward does not mean letting up,” she said during Tuesday’s press conference.
Gyms, museums, bowling alleys have been closed since March
Cohen said that just because restrictions are easing on gyms, it doesn’t mean that going to them is the right choice for everyone. People should use their own best judgment, she said.
On Monday, Cooper extended the curfew on restaurant alcohol sales to Oct. 2. Restaurants and other establishments that serve drinks for on-site consumption are prohibited from selling them between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Gyms, bowling alleys, theaters and other entertainment venues were ordered to close in March, along with other businesses deemed non-essential in the pandemic. Retail stores, restaurant dining rooms, barbershops, salons and other establishments were later allowed to reopen with occupancy restrictions.
The new order allows boxing clubs, skating rinks, yoga and dance studios and other facilities to open at 30% capacity.
Many gyms have already been open to people who say exercise is part of a medical treatment plan. The Planet Fitness chain told customers they were starting to reopen Tuesday for people who use exercise for medical treatment.
Cooper said Tuesday that gyms that have already opened must comply with the executive order guidelines. They include requirements for employees and customers to wear masks, except during strenuous exercise.
Bars still closed, skilled nursing home visitations change
Bars remain closed.
“We know that some businesses are closed and people are hurting,” Cooper said. The way to get all businesses open is for everyone to do all they can to slow the spread of the virus, he said.
The GOP-run legislature made several attempts this year to allow gyms and other businesses to open. Cooper vetoed those bills.
Some gym owners said Cooper’s decision to keep gyms closed was not fair, because the administration never identified a case of the virus transmitted in a gym.
Cohen issued a separate order allowing people who live in skilled nursing facilities to meet visitors outdoors. Outdoor visitation is already allowed at other long-term care facilities. Skilled nursing facilities are home to some of the state’s most medically frail residents, Cohen said, people who are at risk of developing severe COVID-19 symptoms.
“We’ve been trying to find this balance of protection but also recognizing that this visitation is part of leading a full and complete life,” she said.
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