Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Given the track record of 90% of the Trump administration, I wouldn't have blamed him.

 

Probably the single biggest reason that the hard hit Euro countries mashed the spread down was that when they shut down, they shut down 95% of businesses and outright forbid people to be out of their homes. Our shutdown called 50% of businesses "essential". We half-assed it, and even then we opened too early because our politicians were too gutless to make it stick.

The result is that the U.S. is now suffering a death a minute due to Covid.

 

And that's entirely fair.

 

The 2020 TrumpWorld PPE Kickback Tour

 

In April Inky's dad had symptoms and thought he may have it. He could not get tested.

Today he could.

That means something.

 

Yup. Most likely Jared had no money of his own at risk. He just steered contracts to people who paid him a kickback.

 

Easier to do all that with Universal Health Care and really robust social safety nets, too.

 

Baker's tweet there, that's the kind of shit that drives me crazy. OK, so last week Spain was averaging two deaths a day. How many per day was Spain averaging in early April? Around 860. An equivalent rate in the U.S. would be north of 6,000 per day.

 

We've got a long way to go before we see how many of these European re-openings hold, too.

 

Instead of passing out hundreds of millions to the corporations and adding an unemployment benefit, most of the Euros simply guaranteed that people's existing paychecks would continue to come to them. I strongly suspect that was a far cheaper alternative as well.

 

There are also lots of programs in place to help businesses stay solvent. Even landlords.

 

Normalized to the U.S. population, at their peaks France and Italy were experiencing, respectively, an average of 4,800 and 4,200 deaths per day.