We all die. COVID makes it sooner

We die one at a time. A tragedy and a cause to mourn.

A close look at mortality research and the big picture: "Demographic perspectives on the mortality of COVID-19 and other epidemics."

Age 93. High risk.

On a national scale, COVID just changes the mortality tables a little. Very little.

This post has the potential of offending readers, and not for the usual reasons. Trump-haters tell me they don't like it when I describe Trump's adroit messaging; progressive Biden-haters say they don't like it when I write that Biden did, after all, get lots more votes than Bernie Sanders; Biden-supporters don't like that I give Thad Guyer space to call Biden senile. Lots to hate here.

Today I risk offense because I acknowledge death. Worse, I "normalize" it by putting it into the context of other deaths for other reasons--background mortality--and describe it from the point of view of actuaries and demographic researchers, as statistics, not as human tragedies involving loved ones.

The key factor about COVID is that is that it primarily kills older, unwell people and usually spares the young.

This blog post is drawn from a research paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, a paper written by Joshua Goldstein and Ronald Lee, both from the Department of Demography at University of California, Berkeley. Here is their paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/08/19/2006392117

Demgraphers think big picture. The big picture is that COVID may be shaping up to be approximately equivalent to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the opioid epidemic in its overall affect on Americans' life expectancy generally, but it differs in that those two epidemics have played out over two or more decades, and this one is concentrated in a few months so far. It is not as significant as was the Spanish Flu. The Spanish Flu affected more people in a smaller population, and its effect was primarily on young people entering their most productive years.

Observations and insights from the paper:

1. Risk of death at any age across all developed countries increases by about 10% per year after age 30, compounding from a very low number and growing higher as one ages. The United States is somewhat of an outlier among developed countries, with an increase of 8.6% per year over people younger than 30 because we have an unusually high death rate among young people in America due to underserved populations accessing health care. In the US and elsewhere, however, the 10% increase per year after age 30 settles into an increase of 11% trend, because of COVID.

2. The net effect, if a new wave of infections brought us 1 million COVID deaths in 2020, would be to reduce the life expectancy of Americans by 2.9 years. That is significant but it is not a return to some remote otherworld of misery. That would mean a return to the life expectancies that were in place in 1995. At the current target of 250,000 deaths in 2020, Americans' life expectancy drops 0.84 years.

3. In a population of 330 million Americans, about 3 million of us die every year, a death rate of 9.1 per 1,000. Again, if a million of us were to die this year from COVID, that would increase to 12.1 per thousand. At current rates of about 180,000 COVID deaths so far this year, and 1,000 a day new ones, we might expect 250,000 COVID accelerated deaths, which means the figure increases to 9.9 per 1,000.  

4. About 70% of COVID deaths are from people age 70 and above. The normal percentage of deaths by that group would be 64%. Because COVID deaths are concentrated in the same place that deaths are normally, COVID doesn't really change the pattern of deaths. It just accelerates it. More older people dying than usual.

5. Among deaths of people ages 35-54, more men than women die, at a ratio of 1.44 to 1, but this gender discrepancy erodes to 1.12 to 1 by age 85+

6. A big picture way to think of COVID deaths as "temporary aging." At 1,000,000 deaths in 2020, again, a figure that would imply a major new wave of infections, the temporary age shift is 8.5 years. That means a 30 year old would have the normal risks of dying that year of a 38 year old, and an 80 year old would have the risk of dying that year of an 88 year old. Of course, the risk of dying at both 30 and 38 is absolutely small. Thirty year olds don't dread the mortality risks of being 38.  However, with the compounding of death risks, the absolute risk for an 80 year old are high and the 88 year old much, much higher. That is where the consequences of this virus concentrate. However, we are currently targeted at 250,000 deaths, not a million. At the current rate target of 250,000, the age shift is 2.9 years. Still, more 83 year olds die than do 80 year olds.

7. The Social Security Administration calculates that the American population of 330 million has an average of 45.8 years of life still to live--14.9 billion person-years. If a million people were to die early from COVID in 2020, that number would be reduced by 11.7 million years of life expectancy, i.e. the years taken away early by COVID.  Note that this reduces the overall American life expectancy by only about 1/1000th. 

Why so small? Because the people who do die skew old, and taken as a group only have 11.7 years of life expectancy lost, and there are few in the cohort of the elderly compared to the broader population, and fewer still who die. COVID has huge consequences for people who get sick from it and die, but looked at big picture on its effect on the total overall years of life still to be lived by Americans, it is almost invisible. And, again, these people dying are rarely the parents of young children or people in early or mid career, as was the Spanish Flu. It kills old people, people like me. 

Note: The research paper is dense, but filled with observations and data like these. Worth reading.

Policy implications

Politicians of both parties have called this a war on COVID.

There may be lots more casualties than deaths. We don't know the possible health effects on people who get the virus and stay alive. 

Looked at as a whole nation, and recognizing that people are being born and dying all the time, COVID could be viewed as simply one of the "costs of doing business", unfortunate but inevitable in a large country in the real world. Orchardists expect insect damage, retailers some shrinkage. Donald Trump attempted that attitude early on, abandoned it, then returned to it. The cure is worse than the disease, he said.  A few people die and "it is what it is" he said recently.

Democrats make an issue of the death count. Trump has led GOP voters to treat COVID as a manageable, inevitable problem, like the flu or high blood pressure, something to live with.

"It is what it is" sounded cold and un-empathetic to many Americans, and Democrats have jumped on it. Trump is, in fact, singularly un-empathetic. He was thinking about his popularity and re-election, not the lives of others.  Being coldly rational about people dying is not what a president is supposed to say aloud, but it is the way a general fighting a war needs to think. Commanders told troops landing at Normandy in 1944 that they were heroes and that they expected 2% of them to die, now go in and serve your country. The army ordered a million body bags in preparation for the invasion of Japan in 1945.

Trump's behavior is not irrational, and indeed it may be too rational for the circumstances. Selling you the benefit of your death on behalf of the economy and his re-election may be beyond  even Trump's ability. Still, from a broad, national perspective, the 250,000 deaths don't change the overall years left to live very much.

As Bob Warren wrote here on March 10, to the alarm and angry disapproval of commenters, older people had their turn and might serve everybody by getting out of the way. Click: Time for us old people to get out of the way  No one wants to hear that. I certainly don't.

Seniors aren't volunteering, but COVID may be drafting them. There are a lot of draft resisters, and they vote.

Crazy change in Virus tests

The CDC, under pressure from Trump, just changed its guidance on who gets testing: People exposed to the virus, but without symptoms, aren't to be tested.

It's crazy. It will spread the disease.

Packing Covid test sample to send to lab.

An Up Close observation of virus testing.

Under the new CDC rules, if you don't have symptoms, don't get tested. CNN described the new guidance this way: 

     "In a shift that perplexed some doctors, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has changed its Covid-19 testing guidelines to say some people without symptoms may not need to be tested, even if they've been in close contact with someone known to have the virus." They went on to quote an emergency room physician, a professor at George Washington University, who said "That's exactly who should be tested.'

Last week I had a fever of 102.6 and widespread muscle soreness, two of the symptoms for Covid. I was tested. Negative. I had something else.

If I had tested positive, they would have sent me home to quarantine. I live with my wife and my Covid-sheltering stepson, the now familiar situation of the adult child moved from a city apartment to live, again, in his childhood basement. The tall office building where he normally works is shut down.

Had I tested positive, I would have immediately moved out of the house to quarantine away from them in an isolated place--if they tested negative. There would be a high probability that if I had it, they would have it. We don't social distance from each other. My wife and I share a bed, and all three of us eat meals together. They would have been exposed, but had no symptom of Covid. 

"If people are getting exposed, and they're
 not getting tested, and they're not isolating,
 that's a huge problem."

They would want to be tested promptly. In some areas people can simply show up at a test center, but not here. We are in a low priority area. A patient needing a physician referral may encounter one--or an insurer--who said they were 'following CDC guidelines" and may not approve the prescription, nor would the insurance company. Both my wife and stepson have lives to live and places to go. If they are Covid-positive, but a-symptomatic, each needs to quarantine, but if not, they could carry on with their lives--away from me. To be good citizens and good stewards of their own health, they would need to be tested.


That was my potential situation. More common ones would be co-workers who test positive. Or someone at a meeting. Or people with whom you shared a meal. Or a barber or housekeeper who tested positive. Or the playmate of ones child.

Question: Why in the world wouldn't the CDC, or Health and Human Services, or the Trump administration want asymptomatic people who had been exposed to be tested??

Answer: Trump has been open about this. We should test less so we have fewer known cases. He wants to manage the number. If a co-worker tests positive, and you don't get tested, well, you must be OK and you aren't added to the list of the infected. It is a "sweep the problem under the rug" approach, a short term cosmetic fix, with the result that the virus spreads faster by exposed asymptomatic people.

Does it matter? One percent of people who get it, die from it, and maybe 3 to 5 percent of people age 70 and older. I am 70. This isn't an abstract, theoretical problem. 

A college classmate, Richard L. Holmes, has been publishing a daily update on the Covid virus status, but wrote his final update yesterday.  He is stopping because the data he was using became useless under the CDC guidelines, so there was no value in continuing to share it. The most useful way to monitor and control the virus was abandoned: test lots of people, including the asymtomatic. 

This blog has attempted to recognize the things Donald Trump has done well. He is an extraordinary self promoter and he had far, far better insight than did Democrats into the racial resentments, and fears of White Americans over demographic change. He changed the Republican Party because he understood its voters better than did its Governors and Senators, and it got him elected president. He became famous and popular.

But his gift for self promotion led him to try to manage his popularity, rather than manage the virus, with catastrophic consequences. 

Richard L. Holmes Testing and Positivity

    "Perhaps the single most important pervasive needed government process is testing for infectious people, without which it is not possible to know where outbreaks are occurring in time to curtail spread. This type of testing is "antigen" testing for whether a person currently has the virus, not "antibody" testing to see if they were exposed at some time in the past. Only "antigen" testing is addressed here.

     People who test positive may in fact be "false positives" -- usually caused by cross-reactivity of a similar shaped antigen to Covid-19. Different tests have different false positive rates, although false positives cause more nuisance and inconvenience than harm. People who test negative may be "false negatives" -- usually caused by a test not sensitive enough to detect low levels of the virus. Different tests have different false negative rates (and the infamous 15 minute test of the last few months was reported to have a 15% false negative rate), and false negatives unleash infectious people on future contacts with neither the person nor the contacts knowing spread is happening, so these are very harmful and even can cause deaths.

     To control the pandemic in a population, governments need to test broad swaths of the public -- not just those who are symptomatic and seek care, nor just those who could cause a lot of spread (like bus drivers). Worst of all would be to test only those people who are symptomatic, since most infectious people do not show symptoms. (The change of the CDC guidance to do exactly this mistake is why I had to stop publishing daily updates, because compliance with CDC guidance means there is no longer a method to tell how many cases are in the states that comply with the CDC bad science.)

     The easiest and quickest way to tell if enough testing is being performed is the positivity rate -- the higher the positivity rate, the more inadequate is the level of testing. My suggested guide:

     Over 10% positivity: Too little testing to be useful -- the outbreak could be just big, or enormous and getting bigger.

     8-10%: Borderline adequacy of testing to estimate whether spread is increasing or not by whether daily new cases are increasing or not.

     5-8%: Adequate testing to assess whether the pandemic is getting better or worse, although not sufficient to control the outbreak.

     3-5%: Adequate testing to assess pandemic status and possibly to control the outbreak if exactly the right people are the ones tested.

     Under 3%: Sufficient testing to suppress the virus, assuming it is paired with contact tracing and isolation of cases.

     Those of you who are Americans looking for positivity rates (and weekly trends) of your state can find the state-specific data, updated daily about 3 AM EDT, at: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/tracker/overview

     Those of you who want positivity rates for outside of the USA, although these are only at country level and not all countries can be found, will find them at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/international-comparison"

Why Republicans Vote for Trump

Democrats ask: What could Republicans possibly see in Trump to like?

He is crass, self-aggrandizing, self-serving, disorganized, and dishonest. Most people say the country is on the "wrong track."

Asking a neighbor

It continues. His former aides write books saying he is a lying buffoon. Senior career officials resign in protest over his politicizing official business. He minimized Covid and stymied an effective response, making the US conspicuous among peer nations for how badly we handled it, causing our economy to be lagging behind our peers.

Sounds bad--and yet he has such strong support that he is nearly dead even in the swing states and adding them to his reliable base, he may well once again win the electoral college.

Democrats who watched the Republican Convention with disgust ask themselves: With Trump personally so crass and the country in such an economic and Covid mess, how is it possible that some of the people they know and like--work colleagues, long time friends, relatives--can be blind to Trump's malfeasance. What do otherwise nice, reasonable people see in Trump?? 

Who actually likes him?

1. Republicans like him. Republicans evolved along with Reagan to Bush 42, to Dole, to Bush 43, to Romney, to Trump. There is inertia.

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2. People who are basically anti-tax. Republicans have been, supposedly, the cheap-government party and those voters like the tax cut even if it means higher deficits. They have a strong presumption that tax money is wasted, so waste as little as possible by taxing as little as possible. The 2017 tax cut lowered taxes on most people, at least a little. Worry about deficits later.

3. Anti-abortion people. They consider this a vote of conscience. Is a fetus a real human?  Many people think abortion is a litmus test of humanity with Republicans on the side of care for the vulnerable. Many consider abortion a grave moral error very equivalent to slavery, the issue that created the Republican Party 160 years ago.

4. Trump seems to represent an America that isn’t so polite, isn’t so “international,” isn’t so globalist, and therefore isn’t a patsy.  For example, most Democrats believe that climate change is real and, generally support rules that make a dent on carbon emissions. Meanwhile China and India are building coal plants. A lot of people wonder why America is sacrificing so the 2.5 billion people in Asia can overwhelm with their pollution whatever we do. We are patsies, they think. Same with NAFTA. Same with NATO. Same with the UN. Same with trade generally. America lost jobs so China could take 400 million people out of poverty, which is great for them, but what's in it for the American factory worker who lost his job, they wonder? Trump speaks to these voters.

5. A lot of people don't like Democrats. They see woke, politically correct, anti-racist Democrats as self-righteous elitist prigs. Trump stands up to Democrats.

6. A lot of people are uncomfortable about people of other races and cultures. Hillary was right saying there is a lot of endemic racism in America. A lot of people have some secret judgements and assumptions about the nature of Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Irish, Mexicans, Cubans, Indians, women, gays, whatever. We make assumptions about people based on cues. A 30 year old in a business suit is presumed to be different from a 30 year old in a hoodie. One need not excuse racism or misogyny to recognize it exists. Some liberals call it out to shame it and feel totally righteous in doing so. People don’t like being shamed for who they really are. They consider themselves simply to be normal and realistic. Those people like Trump for being unashamed saying things that come across as racist, things they themselves think.

7. A lot of people think Democrats cannot control "urban violence" which is partially non-racial in meaning and partially racial. Urban is code for Black. The violence going on in cities now is portrayed endlessly on Fox, and discussed endlessly by Trump, for a reason. It is a motivator. White people fear Black violence, and they will vote for leaders who seem to be willing and able to suppress it. Many White people are generally comfortable with White people exercising violence against Blacks, but are anxious when it is the opposite. The 17 year old White boy carried an AR15 to a protest, killed 2 people and was arrested the next day and is called a hero by Fox News hosts.)

8. A lot of people have decided that Trump’s pugnacious self serving narcissism is basically justified by the widespread dislike he endures from mainstream, establishment sources: the highbrow media, academics, scientists, experts, diplomats. On both left and right there is diminished respect for institutions and authority. Trump justifies and validates that disrespect. He disrespects them, too. Trump acts like a bully, but Trump repeatedly calls himself the one beset by critics. A lot of people agree. Trump is the victim. 

9. Guns. For niche of people it is an important, perhaps single, issue.

10. Trump acknowledges the primacy of traditional Judeo-Christian religion. Few Trump supporters think he is religious himself, but he does  the fighting of Jesus--and of American Christians-- for them. The "Bible in the Park" photo was obviously an insincere act of faith, but it was a powerfully sincere statement of position: he was the insincere guy who chose to hold up a Bible.

11. A lot of people have decided that Trump’s obvious personal misbehaviors are simply irrelevant, rather the way lots of Democrats decided that Bill Clinton’s horn dog behavior didn’t matter. People figure strong leaders are virile. People likely think Trump is an adulterous husband, but he is interpreted as strong. He doesn’t wear a mask while making everyone around him take Covid tests daily. He takes what he wants. A majority of white women voted for him. He grabs pussies and America gets a strong leader, and strong is what the admire.

12. He sneers at the media, and people like that. People are now choosing their own media, like Facebook, an Apple feed, or this blog.

Biden, for hope and change

     "Left and Right at the grassroots need assurance that the country is moving on a path toward significant change."

                 Herb Rothschild

The division within the Democratic party cannot be papered over with rhetoric. 

There is an income distribution problem in America. The rich are getting richer, the working poor cannot afford a place live, and the middle class is hollowing out. 

That means there is a political problem. A functioning democracy cannot exist if a significant number of people feel locked out. They rebel. Democracies turn into dictatorships.

As this blog noted repeatedly in the campaign of 2016, the Democratic prescription for young people to enter the secure middle class was to graduate from college, or better yet professional school. Program computers, practice law, do surgery.  For many people it is an impossible task. In Donald Trump's campaign he said he loved uneducated people and that he would bring back manufacturing jobs from China, that the rust belt would thrive, and coal country would be prosperous again thanks to "clean coal."

That gave working class voters two bad choices between two unpopular candidates. Hillary insulted half the population by giving them a thoroughly implausible task based on their skills and life situations. Trump insulted half the population by trying to sell them an implausible lie. By election day most undecided voters went with Trump, choosing to believe in a miracle. 

The American economy has a structural problem that the jobs that are being created don't fit the skillset of our actual workforce. Everyone is not in the top quartile. A global economy puts a great many American workers in direct competition with manufacturing workers from any low wage country that can put goods onto a container ship.

We have a political problem in that income redistribution, which would go a long way toward implementation with a higher minimum wage, more progressive taxation, and by making the two major expenses of health care and higher education universal, would be costly to the the people with the capacity to pay for it and they have the political clout to stop it. Americans lack the social cohesion to want to socialize the costs of health care. People who have what they have don't want theirs trickled down.

The net result is a large body of people who are frustrated and open to populist appeals. American just doesn't work for them. That is the subject of today's Guest Post. 

Herb Rothschild disagreed with this blog's assertion that Biden represented a good and necessary period of quiet after the Trump storm. 

Herb Rothschild is a retired professor of English Literature and longtime activist for racial justice and world peace.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

In Wednesday's column you wrote of Joe Biden, “Biden is time out, a time for the country to sit quietly, and just what the county might want.” Most of us, I think, want an end to constant chaos in and from the White House, but I think you are wrong about our wanting quiet. Both Left and Right at the grassroots need assurance that the country is moving on a path toward significant change, especially change in an economic system that has excluded the majority of people from the last 40 years of prosperity.

Herbert Rothschild

If Biden delivers no more than Clinton and Obama did, we will almost certainly see repeated the electoral results that followed their first two years in office.

When Bill Clinton entered the White House, the Congress seated with him had 267 Democrats (Ds) and 167 Republicans (Rs) in the House, 58 Ds and 42 Rs in the Senate. Six years later, in the last Congress seated during the Clinton years, the House had 207 Ds and 226 Rs; the Senate had 45 Ds and 55 Rs. During Obama’s presidency that pattern repeated itself. At its start, the House make-up was 256 Ds and 178 Rs; the Senate was 59 Ds, 41 Rs. Six years later, the House was 188 Ds and 247 Rs; the Senate was 44 Ds + 2 Independents (Is) who caucused with the Ds, and 54 Rs.

During those periods, the party turnarounds in statehouses were even more pronounced. In 1992, the governorships were 30 Ds, 18 Rs and 2 Is. In 2000 there were 19 Ds, 29 Rs, and 2 Is. In 1992, Ds controlled 25 state legislatures, Rs controlled 8, and 16 were split (one chamber was D, one was R). In 2000, Ds controlled 16 state legislatures, Rs controlled 18, and 15 were split. So, too, for the Obama years. In 2008, there were 29 D and 21 R governors; there were 27 D, 15 R, and 8 split state legislatures. In 2016, there were 18 D, 31 R and 1 I governors; there were 11 D, 31 R, and 8 split state legislatures.

In sum, Clinton and Obama seriously damaged the party they headlined. Both men were highly intelligent, charming and managerially competent, but they had no vision for our country, and their pragmatism, an approach to policy-making much lauded by the anti-Sanders camp, produced marginal results even when they had large Congressional majorities.

Let’s hope Biden meant it when he said recently that the country needs not only to be rebuilt, but transformed.

A kinder, gentler Trump

The Republican Convention has a message for suburban Americans: 

      He loves Black people and they love him. 

      Actually, he likes immigrants.

      He's OK with Muslims.

      He's sad about Covid deaths.

Mr. Nice Guy

     "For the first time in decades we have a president that has no political axe to grind, has the courage to act and has done more for this country by his actions than any president in recent history and actions, not rhetoric, are what counts."

                Letter sent to me yesterday by "Bill."

The Simpsons TV Show

Bill is a retired physician: white, male, Evangelical Christian. Earlier this month he sent me a letter saying Black athletes disrespect America when they take a knee during the National Anthem and how wonderful the original US Constitution was, and how much he liked Trump. I reminded him the original Constitution permitted slavery, did not allow Blacks or women to vote, counted Blacks as 3/5 for purposes of enumeration. I said this might be showing just a little bit of racism. He was indignant. Racist? Him? Of course he didn't actually want slavery, he said. He just liked things they way they were before modern attitudes--Democrats and liberals--ruined a darned good America.

Bill represents an important element of Trump's support. These are people who are uncomfortable amid America's changing demographics, growing secularism, renewed consciousness of racial injustice. Trump overtly appeals to these Americans' sense of tradition and of displacement of white male Christians like himself from being the presumed and default center of American culture.

Bill feels under attack by Democrats, who represent the rising tide of secularism and diversity. He says and thinks things he considers simply "normal" and "reasonable" yet finds them being described by others as "maybe just a little racist, Bill." He resents it.

He finds a refuge in Fox News. They "get" him. The opinion hosts dislike the same people he dislikes. They say things that Democrats think are xenophobic and racist. They indignantly disagree with that on the air. They say Democrats read too much into Trump's behavior and tweets. Trump is misunderstood and so is Fox and so are the vast, vast majority of White Americans. They aren't prejudiced.

Click: 2 minutes

Trump's base was shrinking. The actions that grew his support among non-college whites in rural areas was causing erosion among educated people in the suburbs. Some people liked raw meat. Trump gives it to them and Kimberly Guilfoyle provided it at the convention. There is a political market for outrage and shouting. 

That is the primary Trump style. Trump calls Maxine Walters "Low IQ," calls NFL players who take a knee "sons of bitches," and warns "suburban housewives" that Democrats intend to destroy suburbs because a Black Housing Secretary will let low income people live in their cities. He describes immigrants as invaders full of murdering gang members, so he tries to reduce legal immigration while ending DACA, blocking immigration from majority Muslim countries, and proudly used separating immigrant children from parents as a way to discourage entry by people seeking asylum. Now he is talking about law and order and urban violence surrounding Black Lives Matter.

It was too much for some. Too raw and in your face. The Republican Convention was intended to pull wavering educated suburbanites back into the fold.

Black US Senator Tim Scott spoke highly of Trump. So did Black NFL star Herschel Walker.

Melania Trump expressed sympathy for people who got Covid and died.

A Navaho leader thanked Trump for the grant money to deal with Covid. 


A Black leader thanked Trump for directing grant money to historically Black Colleges. 

Donald Trump pardoned a Black inmate who had turned his life around.

Donald Trump witnessed the citizenship ceremony for immigrants. Most were dark skinned and one wore a head scarf.

Larry Kudlow spoke to the low unemployment rate for Black and Latinix Americans, until the Covid crisis, at least. See what he did for people of color.
Trump is not trying to win minority support. This is a message to White voters that they can relax. Trump has some Black friends and he likes immigrants. The Administration feels bad about Covid deaths. Trump can't be racist or guilty of minimizing Covid.

White House Ceremony

People see what they need to see. People who needed evidence Trump was OK got it. Black endorsers. The head scarf. And if what you need to see is a person with "no political ax to grind," then--like Bill--you can. 

Trump has been the center of attention for five years. He has supporters, fans. He is a star. People who like him--and tens of millions do--will find mental reasons to justify it. The convention provides little message packets that people to latch onto, to reassure you that Trump is OK. A star has latitude. People are inclined to believe, to say "yes" to him. As Trump noted, "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."

This is an advantage for Trump. Biden isn't a star, not even close. 

                                                 ---    ----    ----



Meanwhile, a Black editor of a financial newsletter I read, has a daily column. But not today. He wrote this, instead. It gives a perspective on this political and social moment that may be of value to my White readers. Things aren't right in America:

Dion Rabouin

Axios Markets

I can't write a newsletter today. NBA players began a strike last night, refusing to play basketball and effectively saying that while we cannot control the laws or the courts or the actions of others, what we can control is ourselves. We control our bodies and our minds, and no matter what you take from us, you cannot take that. Whenever someone stands up to fight for justice, one must always ask whether that stand is a moment or a movement. I hope that what the NBA started last night was a movement. I hope it was a movement for change, and a movement for justice and for equality. I don’t have much to give to that movement, but I have my body and I have my mind and I have this little newsletter that you all read. Maybe I can make a difference somehow by showing that you don't have to be a superstar to take a stand. Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times while walking away. To my eyes, he walked away because he was sick and tired of being harassed by armed agents of the state whose occupation is supposed to be to protect him. I don’t know Jacob Blake but I know what it’s like to be tired of police harassment and to decide that enough is enough. So did Eric Garner. So did Sandra Bland. So did so many others. This is must end. I’ve been stopped and frisked. I’ve been assaulted. I’ve been thrown to the ground or on the hood of a car and handcuffed by these same armed agents of the state for the crime of looking suspicious or being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin. And I know exactly what it’s like to have that pit well up in the back of my throat as I decided that I had taken enough. I was fortunate enough to not end up dead. Or paralyzed. Many of you reading this are CEOs, presidents, founders, and asset managers who oversee billions of dollars. If I have the chance to speak to you and say one thing from my heart, it’s this: Understand that there is profound injustice happening in this country and it has been happening for as long as any of us can remember and it eats away at us every day. Nothing changes until people decide it’s unconscionable for things to continue the way they are. It feels like we may have reached that point, and I stand with the people who are taking a stand for change. Even if all I have is a little newsletter.

Field Report: Virus Response in South Florida

South Florida is a hotspot.

A hotspot of warm climate, of senior citizens, of ethnic diversity, and of Covid infection and death.

Thad Guyer gives a field report on conditions there. 

Thad is about my age, a boomer, a veteran, an activist attorney who now fights for whistleblowing employees. Earlier in his career took on cases on behalf of people victims of police brutality while being arrested or incarcerated. 

I get complaints about Thad's Guest Posts here, saying he is extreme, that he has unreasonable hatred for Biden, that he sounds like Trump sometimes, only sort of liberal.nAll fair points.

But Thad also provides this blog with useful information on facts on the ground, in previous posts and this one. Who is wearing a mast; what is the Covid testing regimen; how are young people behaving in bars. He also offers a first person perspective on what Thad--and perhaps people like him--think.

Firm handshake, big smile.

I don't share Thad's contempt for Biden. I have seen Biden up close. He comes across more like a old-time Senator windbag than as a vigorous, dynamic leader, but he is not the drooling spaced out fool that he is made out to be in GOP ads. He is better in set teleprompter speeches than when speaking extemporaneously, when his answers ramble. 

He is not just not-Trump. In some respects he is the opposite of Trump, and that may be all this political moment can handle. Trump has been a white hot center of attention, and has exhausted a lot of Americans. Biden is time out, a time for the county to sit quietly, and just what the county might want.

Below is the long comment Thad Guyer sent me today. I am doing more Guest Posts than usual, just now. I tested negative for Covid, but positive for cellulitis, a bacterial infection that has caused my right foot and leg to swell up. It is under control and the antibiotics are working, but this is a good time to quote others, while I elevate my leg and sit quietly, a bit of time out. It is what feels right after a period of high fever.

Guest Post by Thad Guyer

“Deep Blue South Florida: Covid-19, Boring!”

     If the premise that one’s sensitivity to the virus is whether they know someone who was hospitalized or died, that would explain why young Democrats here (under age 55) could care less about the virus. Much of the divide between blue and red demographics is based on the overt politicization of the virus by both parties.  Biden clearly believes that to win, Democrats must paint the worst possible picture of Trump’s Covid-19 response, the GOP believes it must depict the best possible picture.  And since the media is the news distributor, and since Americans trust it less than ever before, Covid-19 news is doubted by both red and blue readers.

     People most believe what they see, not what they hear second hand.  To date, I don’t first-hand know a single person who tested positive, much less was hospitalized or died, with one exception—my neighbors husband and wife team, both in their 40’s tested positive, but have experienced no debilitating symptoms whatsoever. Both Democrats, they wear masks and socially distance, but they don’t quarantine.  Our main street and beach fronts are packed all the time with diners and drinkers, which means they don’t have to wear masks as food and beverage customers. And that’s a big plus to at least 70% of the blue population here.  

     I live 100 yards from a private Catholic grade school that has 40% Black and Hispanic kids.  Today was the first day of school, the cars were lined up for the drop off service, kids and parents super excited and supportive of school reopening.  They are blue voters.

     Almost everyone I meet is well informed about the virus, which means they have a lot of incomplete and changing information as the CDC and local health officials lurch from one theory to another about masks, viral loads, surface contamination, etc.  People have reasonably concluded (1) the chances of infection are very high, (2) the chances of serious health consequences are very low, (3) the chances of death are almost non-existent for their demographic, (4) the “millions will die, hide in your home” initial storyline was grossly exaggerated, and (5) neither party is more credible than the other on what to fear or not.

     A low death rate pandemic like Covid-19 is a dangerous thing to build a campaign on if what you need is a high death rate to attribute to Trump.  Biden is being ridiculed by pundits in both parties for his quick proclamation to ABC News that he would “shut down the country” again if his “scientists” told him too.  There is no vaccine for idiocy.  

There is no serum that will allow Democrats to win the White House with an idiot as our candidate to unseat a personality impaired autocrat willing to say or do almost anything to take the election.

Dump Biden!




[Note: Coming later, some comments on the GOP convention. They are trying to make Trump seem kinder and gentler.]

Republicans: Virus is no Biggie

Republicans don't just have a different opinion of Trump than do Democrats. 

They have a different opinion about the virus.

Click: YouGov

CBS/YouGov Poll: 

176,000 people have died from the COVID virus. 57% of Republicans said that the number of deaths is acceptable and 73% said the American response to the virus was "going well."

Peter Lemieux is a college classmate who went on to MIT to study Political Science, and later taught there. Like yesterday's guest post political scientist, Sandford Borins, Peter Lemieux also has an active blog where he shares his work, which he describes as "political analysis for the numerically inclined": https://www.politicsbythenumbers.org  

This blog normally focuses on message and narrative. Peter Lemieux looks at numerical data. He models election outcomes by looking at net favorables, past election results, numerical trends. His blog pages are filled with charts and graphs. No pictures.

From Peter Lemieux's blog

Readers might check out his blog. Some readers will be thrilled by it, since he generally offers good news to Democrats, writing that the current trends strongly favor Biden over Trump. He considers Republican incumbent Senators Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, and Martha McSally to have a predicted vote below 50%--not a big surprise, perhaps, to close followers of politics. But he says the same for Mitch McConnell, too.

Guest post by Peter Lemieux.

My first reaction was to look at the difference in terms of who has contracted the corona virus and who has died. There's no doubt that the virus has hit communities of color much harder than it has affected whites. The CDC reports that Black, Hispanic and Native Americans have seen 2.6-2.8 times more cases than whites, are 4.6-5.3 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 1.1-2.1 times more likely to die. So we might expect that Republicans simply have less personal experience with the virus and might take it less seriously. I'll return to this below.

Peter Lemieux

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html

Next there's the "bubble" phenomenon. FoxNews viewers and other consumers of right-wing media were treated to a barrage of programming accusing mainstream outlets of jacking up numbers and creating hysteria about the virus to undermine Donald Trump. For instance, Margaret Sullivan, the former NY Times ombudsman now at WaPo and one of my favorite commentators, wrote this summary of a survey by the Kennedy School:

https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/April19_FORMATTED_COVID-19-Survey.pdf
"Those who relied on Fox or, say, radio personality Rush Limbaugh, came to believe that vitamin C was a possible remedy, that the Chinese government created the virus in a lab, and that government health agencies were exaggerating the dangers in the hopes of damaging Trump politically, a survey showed."


https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-data-is-in-fox-news-may-have-kept-millions-from-taking-the-coronavirus-threat-seriously/2020/06/26/60d88aa2-b7c3-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html

In contrast Republicans who relied on mainstream media were no less informed and no less likely to take steps to protect themselves than other Americans.

So it's certainly likely that a good chunk of that 57% who think the death toll is "acceptable" probably also think that the figures are way overstated.



Then there is the "granny" issue. The worst offender in this regard is probably Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick who back in March said

“No one reached out to me and said, ‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-19-texas-official-suggests-elderly-willing-die-economy/2905990001/

For Republicans like Patrick, reopening the economy is more important than whether more old people die, since they'll be dying soon anyway.

Now let me return to the racial question.

A purely cynical perspective would suggest that Republicans are not unhappy about coronavirus deaths because it's just the "right" people who are dying, namely people of color and implicitly Democrats. Surely that racist perspective underpins the beliefs of some of those who answered "acceptable" to the question about COVID deaths.

But there is also the question of exposure to the toll of the virus and whether it varies by party. A WaPo poll in June found that 31% of Black respondents said they knew someone who had died from the virus compared to 17% of Hispanics and just 9% of whites.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/almost-one-third-of-black-americans-know-someone-who-died-of-covid-19-survey-shows/2020/06/25/3ec1d4b2-b563-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html

Finally, there's the fact that nearly every survey response these days is intensely colored by partisanship. Asking whether the country is better off today than four years ago is essentially asking your opinion about the Trump Administration. While majorities of voters have consistently told pollsters they disapprove of the President's job while in office, most Republicans approve. The figure isn't as high as the 96% or so that Trump routinely claims, but it's certainly in the 80-90% range. So it's not surprising that 70-75% of Republicans think the US is better off than four year ago and give the Administration high marks for its handling of the economy and the virus.

Unemployment may be at 10-15% overall, but it's especially concentrated in a few industries like travel, entertainment, restaurants, etc., where employees with Republican sympathies are rare.

So, yes, we are "living in different realities." Republicans see the virus as an attack by China and reports on cases and deaths as wildly overblown to damage Trump. They are also much less likely to have had personal experience with COVID. And, for those who agree with Lt. Gov. Patrick, the death toll is a reasonable price to pay for reopening the economy.