Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for July 9, 2020

The United States is a Second Rate Power-And That's the Good News
The bad news would be if we fail to fix it.

 

Food aid is distributed to needy residents in Apopka, Florida. (Paul
Hennessy/SOPA Images/Sipa via AP Images)

First Response

**I try to tune out**the latest Trump outrage but the latest one
apparently involves reopening the schools

in the fall. Someone obviously told Trump that no in-person schools
means no way for parents to go back to the office, and a breakdown in
the economy, and we can't have such things. So he's demanded that
the CDC change their guidelines (they won't
)
and threatened to cut off funding for schools that don't reopen, even
though he has no mechanism for doing that

but it hasn't stopped him before.

If nothing else-and nothing else-Trump at least started a debate
over schools, which is depressingly focused on how parents can get the
little rugrats out of their hair than the impact of lost schooling on
the entire lives of the children. But this seems like the ultimate
first-world problem right now, and we are not a first-world country.

Other countries reopened schools without threatening further outbreaks
because they

**suppressed the virus**. We've done no such thing. Cases are at a new
record high
.
Deaths continue to be well below levels from April and essentially flat
week over week, but more people are dying at home

in Houston; as I've said consistently that the numbers are at best
suggestive.

Hospitals in surge areas are nearing capacity
,
and even triage levels. My home county, Los Angeles, is scaling back
testing to only those showing symptoms, meaning we will know less about
infections soon.

And we're talking about reopening the schools? We should be
hermetically sealed at home and have all necessities delivered by drones
through chimneys or open windows!

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We don't get to talk about schools opening. We don't get to talk
about sports coming back either. "Sports are like the reward of a
functioning society," said Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle
.
"We just opened back up for Memorial Day. We decided we're done with
it."

These things are not going to happen because we live in a second-rate
power. We have a complete idiot running the executive branch like a mob
capo, we have nobody of conviction around him and precious few in
positions of authority. Half the country is in a death cult

that sees any imposition on their essential selfishness as something to
take up arms against.

As a result we're going to flip the odometer

on deaths to "hundreds of thousands" rather than "hundred thousand," and
those are just the ones we're willing to concede to. The economy will
suffer far more from the stops and starts

than from taking the time to actually suppress the virus. First-time
unemployment claims were never above 1 million in history and now
they've been for 16 straight weeks
.
The Household Pulse survey, which David Silberman described for us

at the

**Prospect** as a true measure of family strain, is flashing red
.
We're going to have 1 million-plus jobs

**lost** in next month's report. We're about to prematurely stop the
unemployment insurance boost that the economy is subsisting on, and the
eviction moratorium keeping people from sleeping in their cars
.

The one thing America had on the world was a university infrastructure
that attracted foreign talent and kept our knowledge base high. So of
course we're engaging in a xenophobic action to kick foreign students
out of the country

and permanently end that one piece of comparative advantage. We produce
nothing

and know we won't think of things to produce, either.

We are second-rate. This is our second system failure in twelve years.
We came into this crisis as a Potemkin village, a series of movie
backdrops pretending to stand in for a society. And the virus just
pushed them over like a mild wind, revealing all the cracks, all the
faults that we preferred not to see while tuning into game shows and
superhero reboots.

But this is the good news, actually. These faults are exposed, and
everyone sees them. The political leadership is on track to be wiped out
in the elections in the most humiliating way possible. And nobody can
deny the level of catastrophic failure.

Read through the Unity Task Force Recommendations

between the Biden and Sanders campaigns. Pick a page, and read it. Focus
on the problems it describes in clear language: the burning planet, the
economic deprivation for the broad middle and below, the affordable
housing crisis, the childcare crisis, the mass incarceration crisis, the
racism crisis, the social mobility crisis, the corporate power crisis,
the worker's rights crisis, the infrastructure crisis. We aren't
exceptional and we now know it. And once that's internalized, work can
be done to fix it. That's the promise of another wave that has the
desire for real change behind it.

The only peril would be to squander the opportunity. Joe Biden is giving
a speech on the economy today which will apparently counsel a go-slow
approach
.
(on criminal justice, even the aspirational task force report is muted
.)
That would be a terrible mistake. The pillars of the
plan-manufacturing, clean energy, care work, and racial
equity-aren't even that bad. It's the fetish of moderation, of
incrementalism, against the backdrop of severe need, that's completely
misplaced.

Abdul El-Sayed was right yesterday

about progress over regress. But you don't get many moments as a
second-rate power to elevate. We have to make this one count.

Support Independent, Fact-Checked Journalism

Watch Me

I was on Rising with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti talking about Nancy
Pelosi and the crisis. Watch here
.

I was on Rising Up (seeing a pattern?) with Sonali Kolhatkar talking
about the PPP. Watch here
.

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104
.

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Today I Learned

* Bed Bath and Beyond closing 200 stores
;
United warning 36,000 employees

they could lose their jobs. (CNBC)

* Nathan Tankus

on the catastrophe that would be cutting unemployment insurance. (Notes
on the Crises)

* There's a backstory not in this piece

about syringe manufacturers that puts a very different spin on this
news. I covered it back in 2015
. (

**Los Angeles Times**)

* The mayor of Houston managed to cancel a Republican convention

that could have spread the city's dire problem statewide. (TPM)

* PetSmart, a private equity-owned firm, not giving workers proper
protective gear
,
workers say. (

**Wall Street Journal**)

* Josh Barro on the commercial real estate market
.
(

**New York Magazine**)

* Treasury claims

the mistakes on the PPP spreadsheet are the lenders' fault. (Axios)

* Another lending program being run through indifferent banks, having
trouble
. (

**Washington Post**)

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