Your initial paragraph should preclude any knee-jerk comments at all by people who just seek every possible outlet to vilify the Trump administration.

Experience, though, suggests it won't, and that the Usual Suspects who spend so much time commenting on the PA Weekly site will rehash their usual repertoires here; be justly deleted for content that's both off-topic and breaking the clear ground rules spelled out on this blog; and then, like sulking children, go and post wildly inaccurate claims about this blog on other of the Weekly's comments pages that aren't adequately monitored against such nonsense. (Seeing some of the wild fabrications they post when they do that, I wonder occasionally if a libel action might be salutary. With personal libel -- unlike trade libel -- there's no requirement to prove concrete damage, only willful or reckless inaccuracy.)

> Because of the urgency...

The House passed the bill on Saturday, March 14th.

The Senate left town on Thursday, the 12th, not to return until the 16th.

The Senate took a 3 day weekend break in the middle of this crisis "because of the urgency..."

This is month old news.

All political rants these days, including this one, cannot help but serve to obfuscate the actual truth on the ground. Casting the "other" in a demonized role may not in turn specifically advocate for conservative principles, (which conservatives themselves admit would never prevail in a fair election), but it serves the same narrative. Hence, this blog is clearly not for me.

And, if I see the word "elite" used one more time in any post, anywhere, I shall scream!

I think it is important to note that while here there are people stating how poorly the situation is being dealt with in this country, it is worth noting that people who live in almost every country are complaining how their own particular governments are dealing with this. Every country is in this and every country is trying to do its best and regardless what they are doing the people can and do criticize. There is no "right" way, just a lot of learning going on.

There is no play book for something like this. There is no experienced method. There is no rules set in place. And for some, there is a lot going on behind our backs that we are not aware of. These things that are not publicized have been going on not only from when this pandemic started, but since the fear of germ warfare as part of a terrorist attack. If all the things that have been going on for many years was publicized we would be putting national security at risk - and that is not just for this country but for all countries worried and concerned about the risk of deliberate germ warfare attacks.

I won't criticize any government or any official in this. One of the things we must do is not panic. Any signs of panic from leadership will only panic the people. I actually think the people are coping remarkably well. I see no looting, no organized defiance, no mass hysteria, no mass civil unrest. This is a good thing. This is how it should be. If panic was seen at the top, then panic would escalate at the bottom.

The good news is that people are surviving. That people are helping each other. That we are safe in our homes. That there is food and money coming through. That there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Happy Easter.

@Resident, we have food here in Palo Alto, delivered to our doorstep, no less. It would not surprise me to see insurrection in parts of the country when people cannot buy food to feed their families - point to Mr. Moran. If China starts to get a double infection peak We will know we are not ready to relax social distancing here. I don't know where the balance should be strick.

Resident wrote: "There is no play book for something like this. There is no experienced method. There is no rules set in place."

That's a widespread US perception -- but it's not exactly true.

A shining example of preparedness and planned reaction is offered by Taiwan (which rarely gets media attention regarding the Covid-19 crisis, maybe because it has comparatively few deaths, which are what make headlines and attract viewer eyes). I see sporadic reports, but even that shows comparatively strong preparedness. Web Link

Located so near mainland China, Taiwan experienced real scares from SARS and other modern potenial pandemics originating there, and chose not to be complacent. Taiwan had an Epidemic Command Center and well-thought-out measures in place that the US could have emulated, but didn't (including pre-installed special washing stations at medical facilities, pro-active testing for other known epidemic diseases, and rapidly mobilized Covid-19 testing capability that allowed the country to gather epidemic intelligence and quickly isolate outbreaks).

I see the lack of timely testing as maybe the main strategic US failing. Ability to identify and focus on local outbreaks has allowed better-prepared regions to manage the disease and greatly reduce mortalities *without* the blanket shutdown of normal activity and work that is the necessary response to a contagion when you have, basically, no clue who's infected and who isn't.

@month old 'news'
The bill I was talking about here is referred to as "phase 3" of the response and its potential successor. You are talking about an earlier phase.
I fully agree with you that Congress - Republicans and Democrats - has shown a remarkable lack of a sense of urgency throughout, but by the time of phase 3, the need for urgent action was undeniable. And the almost immediate depletion of the PPP funds demonstrated that the situation was more dire than that.
While Congress routinely give their agendas and special interests priority over the needs of the country, the degree to which they did so here qualifies as "news" to me.

@Rich (first comment)
"Elite" is an established term in Political Science and History. The dislike for this term has come up several times in earlier blogs, but no one has provided an alternative that is widely understood to reference that group.

@Resident
Yes, people in many countries are complaining about their governments' handling the situation, but that is about ineptness, incompetence, and unpreparedness. This blog was about one political faction exploiting the emergency to advance their agenda, at the expense of the nation. In other countries, the similar worry is about the governing party taking a temporary reduction of rights of the citizenry that is justified by the emergency and making that permanent.

@Resident
Seconding "Former PA resident" on there not being a playbook not being true.
There is one dating back to the late 200x's, but multiple exercises since then have vividly demonstrated that the US was unprepared to execute that playbook, with the revealed problems persisting.
This was mentioned in my early blog "Remember the failures for when it's time for fixes: COVID-19" (2020-03-27) in section "A failure preordained by multi-admininstration failures".

@Rick (first comment, first paragraph)
The theme of this blog is criticism of those who seek to exploit the need for urgent action on an urgent problem. In a tangled way, you seem to be tying that to "conservative principles" and to me serving that narrative. You clearly didn't mean to argue that those who support such urgency should be supporting conservatives.
Oh, and I am letting pass your acknowledging the blog's opening sentence and then ignoring it.

A fundamental traditional conservative value is to accord a privileged status for the heirarchy - the rich, powerful, connected - and have various rationales for that, even if the person's only qualification was being born into the "right" family. This is still the hugely dominant faction of the leadership of Republican Party and I don't see this changing. This also holds true of the Democratic Party establishment: Look at how easily they maneuvered to crush Bernie Sanders' candidacy.

thanks of writing this Douglas Moran.

Well I'm not smart enough to get into this entire political debate but I see that 17,000,000 , yes 17 million people 10% of our workforce are out of work (with numbers to grow) and mostly those at the low end of the pay scale in service jobs like restaurants, hotels, store workers that are "non-essential".

Juxtaposed to total deaths in USA of 16,000 so far , yes to grow by a factor of 3 or 4. But ...

Simple question, easy for most of you elites sitting at home, working from home, zooming at home to say keep the economy "locked down", but let's start thinking about those out of a job and all the consequences of that depression, suicide, drug use, family breakdowns. How many of those 17+ million will literally and figuratively lose their lives?? My guess is many more than the victims of Covid.

and by the way as Moran's article pointed out good luck on the government quickly coming to rescue given the divisiveness in congress. Many jobs, small businesses lost forever. We will save some but many and I fear most will be lost. So time to get serious about letting some businesses reopen, where masks, social distancing, limit number of people in stores, protect the elderly but todays "shelter in place" is economic ruin if continued for much longer

Isn't it the case that a laid-off employee in many cases is entitled to continue their health insurance policy for 18 months under the COBRA act? (Granted they may have trouble with payments.)

RE: COBRA coverage

Updated: When I said "dropped from their employers' medical insurance", I should of included the availability of COBRA for most. As you note, cost may be a problem because the unemployed now has to pay what was the employer's contribution which can sizable relative to the unemployed person's resources.

BTW, during the 2001 recession -- DotCom Bomb, 9/11 -- I vaguely remember that there were some situations that were excluded, I believe I heard about it relative to shuttered small start-ups.

Mr. Moran,

Democrats only delayed the current legislation because it did not include equally urgent support for Hospitals and local governments (Congress is not on "vacation", they are sheltered like the rest of us). We can argue about whether local governments need immediate support. Hospitals clearly need whatever we can provide, just not all of them at the same time. There is indeed a playbook, only 69 pages in fact. Because it says "Obama" on the front, Nobody in Trump World appears to have read it. We halted commercial flights from China, but evacuated both inflected and healthy Americans on the same planes. We obviously got the start up of testing badly wrong. The President's retroactively defined "aspirational" rhetoric has been far from helpful. I won't go on because the longer I go, the angrier I get!

RE: Old Steve (immediately above)

> Democrats only delayed the current legislation because it did not include equally urgent support for Hospitals and local governments.

Doubly false. First, there is a range of other provisions they want included. Second, there isn't equally urgent need: A significant portion of the previous funding allocation for hospitals remains and while state and local governments will certainly need help, I have seen no claims of an immediate need.

> (Congress is not on "vacation", they are sheltered like the rest of us).

False. This is their traditional Easter recess. There was no need for most of them to return to their districts if sheltering was the rationale. The big effect of them scattering is the difficulty of the level of communication needed to hammer out appropriate legislation -- there have been multiple media reports of 200-participant teleconferences (House Democrats). I use the word "difficulty" instead of "problem" because the latter implies that the difficulty was unintentional.

> We can argue about whether local governments need immediate support.

Reversing your opening statement.

> Hospitals clearly need whatever we can provide, just not all of them at the same time.

Again you seem to be reversing your opening statement.

> There is indeed a playbook, only 69 pages in fact. Because it says "Obama" on the front, Nobody in Trump World appears to have read it.

As I discussed in an earlier blog, there was an exercise on this playbook in 2017 -- which is during the Trump administration. It was a major failure, same as the earlier exercises during the previous administrations and the after-action assessments indicate that the failings were the responsibility of the professionals/bureaucrats/permanent government.

> We halted commercial flights from China, but evacuated both inflected and healthy Americans on the same planes.

That was against Trump's explicit instructions, backed by the CDC. They were overridden by low/middle-level bureaucrats in the State Dept and somewhere in HHS. Discussed in a previous blog.

> We obviously got the start up of testing badly wrong.

Again, this was the result of multiple failure of the bureaucrats in the CDC and FDA. Discussed in earlier blog. Also see "The Infuriating Story of How the Government Stalled Coronavirus Testing" by Julia Ioffe in GQ.

> The President's retroactively defined "aspirational" rhetoric has been far from helpful.

That is a very controversal judgment. In the emergency management literature, there is much debate about what the appropriate level of hope that the top leadership should convey.

>I won't go on because the longer I go, the angrier I get!

Media outlets long ago learned that outrage/anger promotes continued engagement, that is, it boosts ad revenue. For various outlets, stoking outrage takes priority over providing good information.
Some media outlets function as partisan political propaganda operations, and outrage is what they are selling.
If you aren't looking to have your anger stoked, may I suggest that you switch the media outlets you are reading/listening to. This typically takes some experimentation.

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Here are (some of) the problems with your argument:

1. This is additional money. There is already something like $350B allocated, and not one penny has been received yet. So just what is the big hurry here?

2. I don't know the details of the Democratic proposals, but the main things I know of are for funds to be included for state governments (obviously and very much needed) and for hospitals (any argument there?). Why not include those? Which leads me to ...

3. As you acknowledge, getting Congress to meet will get very dicey for a while. So it seems very important to make every bill count.

4. Delaying bills to get them 'right' is very important in any case, and the Republicans have been known to push thru bills very quickly with no review that are extremely flawed - witness their tax bill, which had provisions that were so badly written that even the Republicans wanted to pass additional legislation to correct them.

In addition, I strongly urge Democrats to force a provision to provide states money to manage voting by mail for November. After Wisconsin this is a requirement.

Your statement "Senate Democrats have made it clear that their ideology takes precedence over the lives of Americans, and that they are willing to hold us hostage to get what they want." is not helpful to any useful discussion.

We all have our own viewpoints and both conscious and unconscious biases. But we can only be certain of our own motivations.

Why I like Dr. Fauci? He is an experienced and serious science and fact/data driven researcher and straight shooter, and stands up to anyone who isn't...yes, even our President. And he knows how to handle obvious planted baited questions from CNN hosts. Jake Tapper is the most egregious example. He never lets up on asking if Trump would have introduced the separation, self-quarantining, and stay at home ideas earlier, would that have spared more lives? Well one big 'duh' to Jake. Of course it would have. I expect this to become one of the Democrats campaign main talking points. If the epidemic is over and life and business activity is starting to get back to normalcy by November Trump's trumped up failures will fade away.

@BruceS "... not one penny has been received yet. So just what is the big hurry here?

Notice the choice of the word "received". The need for the additional funding was based upon the much larger than expected number of applications and that the loans were intended to be made very quickly.
This word choice indicates that that this initial point was at least disingenuous if not designed to be deceptive. And if the commenter started with deception, I discount any of the remaining points being sincere.

@TomB "... we can only be certain of our own motivations."

"Certain", yes. But beyond a reasonable doubt is sometimes possible.

The Senate Democrats negotiated an urgent bill that they said they were willing to vote for. But just before the vote -- on the instructions of the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) conveyed from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- they voted it down. They, and House Democrats, demanded a laundry list of items unrelated to the crisis. And it was subsequently revealed that the House Majority Whip (#3 Democratic leader) had announced that intention in a phone call to House Democrats the preceding Thursday.

So we have the announcement of intent, action corresponding to that intent, plus bad-faith bargaining to delay the funding that increased the leverage for that intent. What more does one need?? (rhetorical)

I just wish everyone would STOP THE BLAME, as @resident above stated,
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there is no playbook for this and everyday brings a new scenario, and new way of looking how we move forward. But for those who continue to post false allegations that Trump waited too long I would like you to please read and absorb this:

Here's a quote from Dr. Anothony Fauci to the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health given on December 4th, 2019.

Improving Vaccine Production Strategies

Most existing influenza vaccines are produced by growing the virus in eggs. This is a time-honored, but time-consuming process. Furthermore, the vaccine undergoes a process of adaptation to grow in eggs that may in itself lead to mutations that make the resulting vaccine less effective. In recognition of these limitations, the President signed the Executive Order on Modernizing Influenza Vaccines in the United States to Promote National Security and Public Health on September 19, 2019. Broadly, the Executive Order directs BARDA, CDC, NIH, and FDA to accelerate the adoption of improved influenza vaccine technologies. In alignment with the goals of the Executive Order, NIAID is conducting and supporting research to develop state- of-the-art vaccine platform technologies that could be used to develop universal influenza vaccines as well as to improve the speed and agility of the influenza vaccine manufacturing process. These platform technologies include DNA, messenger RNA (mRNA), virus-like particles, vector-based, and self-assembling nanoparticle vaccines. For example, NIAID- supported scientists are investigating an mRNA vaccine candidate that would allow for a more rapid and flexible response to both seasonal and pandemic influenza than do existing vaccine production strategies.

I repeat: President signed the Executive Order on Modernizing Influenza Vaccines in the United States to Promote National Security and Public Health on September 19, 2019.

Sharing this just in case anyone out there is listening to this BS that he dropped the ball on the virus. Here is a link to the full testimony: Web Link

Crickets. Fascinating.

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