Oh and by the way – also famine.

The world is at risk of widespread famines “of biblical proportions” caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the UN has warned.

David Beasley, head of the World Food Programme (WFP), said urgent action was needed to avoid a catastrophe.

A report estimates that the number suffering from hunger could go from 135 million to more than 250 million.

Those most at risk are in 10 countries affected by conflict, economic crisis and climate change, the WFP says.

The fourth annual Global Report on Food Crises highlights Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Nigeria and Haiti.

The East African countries are already faced with the … Read the rest

Trump’s alternative world:

More than 1,500 people in the US died from the coronavirus on Monday, bringing America’s death toll to nearly 43,000, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at President Donald Trump’s tweets Tuesday morning.

In a string of posts that began a bit after 6 am Eastern time, Trump lambasted MSNBC in particular, and the “Lamestream Media” in general, ghoulishly bragged about his “great ‘ratings’” during daily press briefings ostensibly about a pandemic, fudged polling numbers to inflate his popularity, and promised to bail out the US energy industry. To close out the morning, he retweeted posts from someone with the handle @SexCounseling.

It’s interesting that he doesn’t … Read the rest

Via Bloomberg:

The Justice Department will consider taking legal action against governors who continue to impose stringent rules for dealing with the coronavirus that infringe on constitutional rights once the crisis subsides in their states, Attorney General William Barr said.

…

“We have to give businesses more freedom to operate in a way that’s reasonably safe,” Barr said. “To the extent that governors don’t and impinge on either civil rights or on the national commerce — our common market that we have here — then we’ll have to address that.”

…

Trump tweeted over the weekend that his supporters should “liberate” Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia — three states with Democratic governors and strict stay-at-home orders.

And now here’s Barr … Read the rest

There’s a pandemic raging, and what is the president of the US thinking about? Himself. Himself, his glory, his fame, his awesomeitude, his adoring fans who adore him.

Watched the first 5 minutes of poorly rated Morning Psycho on MSDNC just to see if he is as “nuts” as people are saying. He’s worse. Such hatred and contempt! I used to do his show all the time before the 2016 election, then cut him off. Wasn’t worth the effort, his mind is shot!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 21, 2020

Such hatred and contempt, shouts Donald Trump, who spits hatred and contempt at everyone who doesn’t grovel to him, including the person he just called Morning Psycho. His mind … Read the rest

Neither rain nor sleet nor a pandemic stays these tweeters from their venomous attacks on insubordinate women.

He doesn’t know who they are, yet he knows they are sinister. How does that work?

Note that he’s not just an MP, he’s also a journalist. Is that how journalists operate? Call people sinister and then say you don’t know who they are?

Also “fear of intimidation” forsooth – what about the intimidation of an MP calling you “sinister” on Twitter? Who is the intimidator and who is the intimidated here?… Read the rest

Charles Blow says stop running the press briefings.

Around this time four years ago, the media world was all abuzz over an analysis by mediaQuant, a company that tracks what is known as “earned media” coverage of political candidates. Earned media is free media.

The firm computed that Donald Trump had “earned” a whopping $2 billion of coverage, dwarfing the value earned by all other candidates, Republican and Democrat, even as he had only purchased about $10 million of paid advertising.

How does he do it? By being so grotesque we can’t ignore him. He’s “newsworthy” in that sense…so, he gets free advertising that less grotesque candidates don’t get. I think there’s a bit of a downside to this.… Read the rest

This is Trump’s unfathomable narcissism captured in 48 seconds – in fact not even the full 48, he says it in the first 25. It’s not that we hear about ventilators a lot because people die without them, it’s not that we hear about testing a lot because without it we don’t know if the curve is flattening or rising; none of this is about the pandemic and survival and mass casualties, it’s all about unfairly criticizing Trump for not being able to find his own ass in a brightly lit prison cell.

Trump suggests that demands for more testing, just like requests for ventilators, are part of a political conspiracy meant to take him down — not necessary measures

George Packer also says the US is a failed state. (“Also” because I say that too…though not every ten minutes, as I would like to.)

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

Not all Americans, it didn’t. Trump’s reign of terror has done wonders in that direction. A country that can elect a Donald … Read the rest

Ok that’s enough of this pesky social distancing shit, time to get back to the gym!

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced Monday that certain businesses in the state would be able to reopen this week in a “small step forward” out of the social distancing measures meant to mitigate the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Kemp, a Republican, said specifically that fitness centers, bowling alleys, body art studios, barbers, hair and nail salons, and massage therapy businesses can reopen as early Friday, April 24.

Because gyms and bowling and hair/nail salons are such vital industries.

Notably, no local ordinance can restrict the openings, which will be implemented statewide.

Goodness, yes, that is notable. It means those pesky big-city liberals in Atlanta can’t … Read the rest

In case you’re keeping track of the pattern of men calling women various words suggesting infestation/contamination – here’s one from NZ:

Men have been starved for the joy of calling women germs, viruses, insects, plagues, for decades, so naturally they greeted the advent of Trans Activism with sobs of joy and relief. At last at last it’s ok again to call women garbage and a virus in one sentence.… Read the rest

I’m impressed by that. She’s not dropping in to play Lady Benevolent and then go away again, she’s doing scut work with no trace of glamour to it.

Princess Ivanka? Not so much.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Rob on A table.

There is ample evidence (and in some quarters acknowledgement) that the US is undercounting deaths in retirement homes, amongst the homeless and especially just deaths at home. NYC acknowledged they simply stopped counting those because they were not testing bodies, yet the home death rate went from around 25 per day to 250 per day. Do the maths on that one.

So far NZ has had 12 fatalities. One at home, 10 in hospital of which I think 9 were associated with rest home clusters (7 from a dementia care facility in my city), which just shows how awful the disease is when it hits such places.

We have been very … Read the rest

The “protests” are being orchestrated.

Conservative activists are demanding governors lift orders designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, despite the recommendations of public health officials. Trump, who has clashed with Democratic governors over how soon to reopen the US economy, tweeted his support on Friday, in an unprecedented endorsement of civil disobedience by a sitting president.

Civil disobedience and violence. Unprecedented indeed.

Yet while organisers claim the protests are grassroots- and people-driven, a closer look reveals a movement driven by traditional rightwing groups, including one funded by the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

The rallies have drawn comparisons to the Tea Party movement, which sprang into life in 2009 following the election of Barack Obama

What governors have to do to keep the president from stealing supplies they need to deal with a pandemic:

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker organized secret flights bringing millions of masks and gloves to the state from China on charter jets in an effort to bypass potential Trump administration efforts to seize the products, The Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Trump not only doesn’t help governors (Democratic governors at least) get needed PPE, he actually steals it from them after they’ve procured it.

The Sun-Times cited a source familiar with the purchases, who said the details were kept secret “because we’ve heard reports of Trump trying to take PPE in China and when it gets to the United States.”

…

“The supply

The football must go on.

On March 6, at 2:43 p.m., the health officer for Public Health — Seattle & King County, the hardest-hit region in the first state to be slammed by COVID-19, sent an email to a half-dozen colleagues, saying, “I want to cancel large group gatherings now.”

The county’s numbers — 10 known deaths and nearly 60 confirmed cases as of late morning — were bad and getting worse. Many local events had already been called off for fear of spreading the coronavirus. Oyster Fest. The Puget Sound Puppetry Festival. A Women’s Day speaker series at the Gates Foundation. King County had ordered a stop to in-person government meetings unless they were considered essential.

Duchin had … Read the rest

I’ve been meaning for days to find a source for per capita stats as well as totals, and a certain annoying drive-by commenter gave me the prod to do it. Here’s one that gives deaths per 1 million people as of now:

Spain 440

Italy 391

France 302

Germany 55

UK 237

US 122

On the other hand it gives China 3, which doesn’t seem very plausible.

Anyway…per capita we seem on the low side, which is worth knowing but not something to give Trump credit for.

I read somewhere the other day that Sweden went for the “herd immunity” approach and that’s why its numbers are twice Norway’s.… Read the rest

Trump has been screeching that the WHO failed to warn us, but the reality is that there were US health people at the WHO who did warn us. The Post reports:

More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.

A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years.

Not unexpectedly, the #COVID19 #ReopenAmerica deniers are now uniting with antivaxxers ands even appropriating their language (“I do not consent”/“I do not comply”). Add to that conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, and it’s truly a toxic alliance, a death cult. https://t.co/i0UEE7YTj8

— David Gorski, MD, PhD (@gorskon) April 19, 2020

And many informed people think it’s very likely that Putin is doing his bit to fan the flames.… Read the rest

Brazen grifter orders people to give him their emergency money.… Read the rest