They sing

I did go out today, long enough to travel 3 miles round trip to get a newspaper, The Detroit Free Press. The headline is “Hospitals may lack adequate bed space.”



Here are some of the little things I didn’t write about in the past week.

First up is an article from last Sunday’s Freep originally from USA Today. A couple days ago I wrote about voters, especially Democratic voters, are to the left of Joe Biden, the presumptive nominee. This article, Bridging the Gap by Paul Davidson (couldn’t find link) talks about areas where Democrat and Republican voters agree.

Most American, regardless of party affiliation, support proposals to upgrade infrastructure; provide tax breaks for job-creating businesses; decrease college costs; and retrain adults for better-paying positions.

There are still differences on issues like raising the minimum wage, protecting labor unions, and easing regulations, though the differences aren’t as big as the rhetoric.

I note that Republican voters appear to be less rigid and extreme than Republican lawmakers who are funded by corporations.

Jan Rivkin, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the problem is more than campaign contributions:

The rewards go not to those that solve problems but to those that rile up their base. Somewhere along the way compromise became a dirty word.

AKALib of the Daily Kos community excerpted a letter from Monica Maggioni, the CEO of RaiCom, a part of Italian Public Television. The letter is about the conditions in Italy dealing with the coronavirus. For the healthy time is suspended. For the afflicted “you die in silence and you’ll be buried in silence” because funerals cannot be held. Doctors are having to make decisions about who can be helped and who is too old or too weak to save because there aren’t enough ventilators.

AKALib ends with a couple videos of one wonderful response Italians have to being confined to their homes. They open their windows or come out on their balconies and they sing, sometimes alone, sometimes together up and down the street. The songs include the national anthem and popular songs. A great example of building community in the face of a threat that isolates.



House Democrats approved a package of measures to help the nation through the epidemic. The nasty guy has said he likes it. The Senate … is on vacation. They say they’ll be back tomorrow.

But these days the Senate is known as McConnell’s graveyard where so many wonderful House bills over the last year have gone to die. Will that happen to this bill? If it dies Sarah Kendzior warns in a tweet:

They cannot do this "Gee we tried but it died in McConnell's graveyard" bullshit anymore with millions of Americans headed for real graveyards. They must stop pretending Trump is reasonable and work around him. At the LEAST coordinate with states and give the public needed info.

There is a lot they can do to educate the public.



One of the provisions in the House bill is for paid sick leave. Great! But it only applies to companies with less than 500 employees. Amazing Maps tweeted a diagram from the New York Times showing the companies with the largest number of employees without paid sick leave. The biggest are McDonalds with 517K without paid sick leave, Walmart with 347K, 189K at Kroger, 180K at Subway, and a large list of others in food and hospitality, retail, and grocery businesses. It looks like all are national chains.



Of course, a Twitter feed named Amazing Maps meant I had to spend a while exploring it. I scrolled through its last two years of entries. All of it fascinating to me. Here’s a link to a few:

*A map of the US with a green circle that covers Washinton to Boston to Buffalo. I’m not sure it includes Cleveland. The description says the circle includes 20% of the population and 50% of the wealth.

* A map of the US counties with thin orange stripes along both oceans and a huge red blob in the middle. The caption says the red and orange areas have equal population.

* A map of the world with ten north to south bands. Each band includes 10% of the world’s population. One band covers the US, most of Canada, and western South America. Four bands cover India and China and the areas north and south of them.

* If one takes a map of North and South America and turns it so that west is down the whole thing looks like … a duck.



Jason Yanowitz tweeted a thread about how the epidemic progressed in Italy. One crucial step in the spread: The virus was ravaging northern Italy and the authorities declared large areas in quarantine. A newspaper published it before they should, which allowed 10,000 people to escape the zone – and carry the virus to the rest of the country.

The progression from first cases to total country lockdown was about two weeks. Which means the same situation could hit America in about two weeks.



Leah McElrath tweeted a segment from The Rachel Maddow Show in which she talks to Donald McNeil of the New York Times about some aspects of how China brought the coronavirus under control (though there are other aspects that were brutal). They had officials who tested for fever everywhere – when one got on the bus, when one entered a building. If one showed signs of fever one was sent to a flu center (which they had built during their last epidemic) and tested, with results in hours. One was not sent to a doctor’s office where one could infect other patients there. One was not allowed home because they found 80% of transmissions happened at home. If the test was positive one was sent to a hospital.



Quote of the day from last Thursday:

Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet. A man lucky enough to receive an effective vaccine against a new viral threat in Los Angeles may be re-exposed a year later to a mutated version of that germ that circulated among unimmunized populations in poor countries, only to slam North America in a second wave. That is what happened with influenza in 1918, which spread across Europe in a mild form, returning months later in its terrifying virulence and killing more than 50 million people (by recently adjusted estimates perhaps 100 million people).
~~Laurie Garrett, 2011