Portland under the Trumpian Jackboots. Fascism showing it's ugly face.

Nearly One-Third Of Florida Children Tested For COVID-19 Test Positive

Source: The Huffington Post

Nearly one-third of children who have been tested for the coronavirus in Florida have tested positive, according to data from the state’s Department of Health that comes amid ongoing debate and uncertainty over whether schools will reopen this fall.

Of the 54,022 people under the age of 18 who have been tested for COVID-19 in Florida, 16,797 of them, or roughly 31%, have tested positive, data released Friday shows. In comparison, roughly 11% of everyone in the state who has been tested for the virus — roughly 2.8 million people — has tested positive.

Nearly half of the state’s positive cases among children were in the counties of Broward, Dade, Hillsborough and Palm Beach.

Cases throughout the Sunshine State have risen at alarming rates in recent weeks. On Thursday the state set a new one-day coronavirus death record while also reporting nearly 14,000 new cases of COVID-19 ― the second-highest daily total that the state has seen. Its highest total reported last weekend set a national record.

Amid this growth, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has continued to push for schools to reopen this fall, with him on Tuesday telling mayors in south Florida — the state’s hardest-hit area for cases — that doing so is low-risk.

Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/florida-children-test-positive-coronavirus_n_5f105ac8c5b6d14c3363e65f

Will Trump try to self-pardon?

President Donald Trump has used his pardon power sparingly, but overwhelmingly to benefit his friends and to protect his own interests. Former George W. Bush Administration official Jack Goldsmith recently analyzed Trump's pardons for Lawfare and concluded that "no president in American history comes close to matching Trump's systematically self-serving use of the pardon power."

Indeed, as Trump nears the end of his first (and perhaps only) term in office, he has wielded the pardon power more boldly than ever. Even by his own established standards of cronyism, Trump broke new ground last week by commuting the sentence of his longtime political adviser Roger Stone -- for crimes that Stone committed to protect Trump.
...

Now, there's only one remaining line that Trump has not yet crossed. Brace yourself because it might well happen soon: the first-ever presidential self-pardon. Mechanically, Trump would have to issue such a pardon while he still holds office. And the pardon would need to give him coverage for anything he has done in the past. It would be as if Richard Nixon -- rather than resigning and receiving a blanket pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford -- simply tried to pardon himself on his way out of the White House.
Trump has ample incentive to preemptively save his own hide with a pardon (or, at least, to try). Although current Justice Department policy counsels against indicting a sitting president, the memo setting forth the policy notes repeatedly that a president can be indicted after leaving office. Special Counsel Robert Mueller pointedly stated in his report and Congressional testimony that a president can be indicted after leaving office.

Would a presidential self-pardon be lawful? The short answer is we don't know for sure, because no president has ever tried it. The Constitution itself does not specify either way and there is no statute or case law on the issue. But you can already see the battle lines forming.

Trump certainly believes he can pardon himself. He tweeted in June 2018, "As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?" Indeed, some legal scholars believe that the President can issue a self-pardon, pointing to the text of the Constitution itself -- which places no such limit on the pardon power.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/opinions/will-trump-try-to-self-pardon-honig/index.html

I would not put it past him.

Testing Is on the Brink of Paralysis. That's Very Bad News.

As Covid-19 cases surge to their highest levels in dozens of states, the nation’s testing effort is on the brink of paralysis because of widespread delays in getting back results. And that is very bad news, because even if testing is robust, the pandemic cannot be controlled without rapid results.

This is the latest failure in our national response to the worst pandemic in a century. Since the Trump administration has abdicated responsibility, governors must join forces to meet this threat before the cataclysm that Florida is experiencing becomes the reality across the country. Testing should be the governors’ first order of business.

Despite President Trump’s boast early this month that testing “is so massive and so good,” the United States’ two largest commercial testing companies, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, have found themselves overwhelmed and unable to return results promptly. Delays averaging a week or longer for all but top-priority hospital patients and symptomatic health care workers are disastrous for efforts to slow the spread of the virus.

Without rapid results, it is impossible to isolate new infections quickly enough to douse flare-ups before they grow. Slow diagnosis incapacitates contact tracing, which entails not only isolating those who test positive but also alerting the infected person’s contacts quickly so they can quarantine, too, and avoid exposing others to the virus unwittingly.
...
Vice President Mike Pence’s casual invocation of an “extraordinary national success in testing” in a recent call with governors was flatly wrong, as is the president’s similar trumpeting of testing success. These claims contribute to a false sense among the public that testing may have had early stumbles but is ramping up slowly but surely.

The reality is that the spread of the virus has vastly outpaced the expansion of testing capacity. That spread in turn results in more illness and therefore more tests to process, which further slows down turnaround time in a vicious cycle. The dedication and patience of thousands of people waiting in serpentine lines of cars for hours to be tested are wasted when the results aren’t returned quickly enough.

We are at this point because of the absence of a coordinated federal plan, and, indeed, because of a White House that seems actively hostile to producing one. The nation’s governors and state legislators must fill the void.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/opinion/coronavirus-testing-us.html

BREAKING: Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt confirms he has tested positive for COVID-19.

Source: KOCO 5 Television Oklahoma City

https://twitter.com/KOCOZach/status/1283425215859630080

Read more: https://www.koco.com/article/watch-live-gov-stitt-health-commissioner-to-provide-covid-19-update/33323673

Pence: "We don't want CDC guidance to be a reason why people don't reopen their schools."

Guess What Happened After Montana Care Home Refused Free COVID-19 Tests

It was meant to be a last line of defense to protect the most vulnerable as the coronavirus spread across the United States: Montana officials offered free testing in May for staff and residents at assisted living and long-term care facilities.

But not all of them followed through, according to state data, including a facility in Billings, Montana’s largest city, that cares for people with dementia and other memory problems. The virus has infected almost every resident and killed eight, accounting for almost a quarter of Montana’s 34 confirmed deaths. Thirty-six employees also have tested positive at the facility where 59 people lived before the deaths began.

While Montana’s rates of confirmed infections and deaths are much lower than other parts of the country, the outbreak at Canyon Creek Memory Care illustrates that even the most simple and common-sense preventive measures have sometimes gone unused during the pandemic, allowing the virus to sweep through elderly care facilities with devastating results.

“I don’t see that there’s good justification for just not testing. You’re operating in the dark,” said Chris Laxton, executive director of the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, which represents more than 50,000 long-term care workers.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/montana-care-home-coronavirus_n_5f0dfb78c5b648c301f06041

Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains

Source: The Daily Beast

Israel’s unchecked resurgence of COVID-19 was propelled by the abrupt May 17 decision to reopen all schools, medical and public-health officials have told The Daily Beast. The assessment of Israel’s trajectory has direct bearing on the heated debate underway in the United States between President Donald Trump, who is demanding a nationwide reopening of schools for what appear to be largely political reasons, and health authorities who caution it could put the wider population at risk.

Importantly, on May 17 in Israel it appeared the virus not only was under control, but defeated. Israel reported only 10 new cases of COVID-19 in the entire country that day. In the U.S., the debate often is about reopening schools where the disease is not only not in decline, but surging.

On Sunday, for instance, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, “There’s nothing in the data that suggests that kids being in school is in any way dangerous.” But that is not the case in Israel, where the data from June, the last month for which there is a full set of statistics, appear all too clear. The road from anti-coronavirus paradigm to rampant infection in this country of 9 million people followed two months of almost total lockdown. May 17 also was the day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former rival Benny Gantz swore in their “corona emergency government,” whose sole declared purpose is to fight the spread of the virus. Netanyahu’s decree that the nation’s entire school system would reopen was a political flourish to signal everything was under control.
...

On June 3, two weeks after schools opened, more than 244 students and staff were found to test positive for COVID-19. According to the education ministry, 2,026 students, teachers, and staff have contracted COVID-19, and 28,147 are in quarantine due to possible contagion. Just in the first two weeks of July, 393 kindergartens and schools open for summer programs have been shuttered due to cases of COVID-19.

On July 2, Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist at the Federation of American Scientists, tweeted a chart showing Israel’s rate of infection surging past Europe and fast approaching the disastrous rate in the U.S., noting that it was exactly one month since the reopening of Israeli schools.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/israeli-data-show-school-openings-were-a-disaster-that-wiped-out-lockdown-gains

Former CDC Heads: Trump Administration Risking Lives By Politicizing Science

Four former heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s administration is needlessly risking lives by undermining science and public health officials.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, former CDC Directors Tom Frieden, Jeffrey Koplan and David Satcher, as well as former acting CDC Director Richard Besser, excoriated administration officials for taking “political potshots” at scientists during the coronavirus pandemic.

“As America begins the formidable task of getting our kids back to school and all of us back to work safely amid a pandemic that is only getting worse, public health experts face two opponents: covid-19, but also political leaders and others attempting to undermine the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” they wrote.

They continued:

Trump's incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign?

f you’re lucky enough to live in New Zealand, the coronavirus nightmare has been mostly over since June. After more than two weeks with no new cases, the government lifted almost all restrictions that month. The borders are still shut, but inside the country, normal life returned.

It’s coming back elsewhere too. Taiwan, where most days this month no new cases have been reported, just held the Taipei Film Festival, and a recent baseball game drew 10,000 spectators. Italy was once the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak and remains in a state of emergency, but with just a few hundred new cases a day in the whole country, bars are open and tourists have started returning, though of course Americans remain banned. According to The New York Times’s figures, there were 321 new cases in all of Canada last Friday.

And America? We had 68,241. As of last week, the worst per capita outbreak on the planet was in Arizona, followed by Florida. The world is closed to us; American passports were once coveted, but now only a few dozen nations will let us in. Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown, told me he doesn’t expect American life to feel truly normal before summer 2022. Two years of our lives, stolen by Donald Trump.

As our country plunges into a black hole of unchecked illness, death and pariahdom, the administration is waging a PR war on its own top disease expert, Anthony Fauci, trying to convince news outlets that he can’t be trusted. “The move to treat Dr. Fauci as if he were a warring political rival comes as he has grown increasingly vocal in his concerns about the national surge in coronavirus cases,” reported The Times.

Trump has also undercut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, retweeting the conspiratorial ramblings of the former game show host Chuck Woolery: “The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid-19. Everyone is lying. The C.D.C., media, Democrats, our doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust.” There are now so many stories of Trump fans dying after blithely exposing themselves to the virus that they’ve become a macabre cliché.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/opinion/us-coronavirus-trump.html