Dr. Deborah Birx has become a very public figure because of her presence at the daily press conferences of the coronavirus task force that Donald Trump has turned into a substitute for his campaign rallies.

Prior to being assigned to the coronavirus task force on Feb. 26 (the same day Vice President Pence was assigned to the body), Birx was the U.S. global AIDS coordinator. That’s an ambassador-level job inside the State Department in which she oversaw the U.S. government efforts to combat the spread of HIV globally. She was appointed to the post by President Barack Obama in 2014.

She’s one of the few Obama-era holdovers at the Trump White House. Her job as AIDS coordinator included running the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the highly praised program launched by President George W. Bush that has gotten millions of people with HIV around the world onto life-saving anti-AIDS therapy.

Before that, she spent nearly a decade running the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s global HIV/AIDS division.

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We have come a long way in the short time since Donald Trump blithely announced that the 15 Covid-19 cases that had been reported thus far would start to decline to zero and that by magic the virus would disappear by April. Yesterday, the US reached a grim milestone, overtaking China to become the country with the most number of people who have tested positive for Covid-19.

The US now has more confirmed cases of coronavirus than any other country with at least 82,404 positive tests.

According to the latest figures collated by Johns Hopkins University, the US overtook China (81,782 cases) and Italy (80,589).

The grim milestone came as President Donald Trump predicted the nation would get back to work “pretty quickly”, after 3.3 million layoffs.

More than 1,100 people with Covid-19 have died in the US.

All together now: “We’re #1! USA! USA!”

I wrote earlier that we are living in a strange time when things seem normal immediately around us while the news on a larger scale is alarming. Nathan J. Robinson echoes that sentiment and says that only those who know someone who has been seriously and adversely affected by the Covid-19 disease can fully appreciate the seriousness of the situation. He goes on to say that the pandemic has undermined many of the myths that sustain right-wing ideology and nowhere is this clearer than in the crackpot idea floated by Trump, his economic advisors Larry Kudlow, and their conservative allies that we need to ease up on the restrictions in order to ‘save the economy’.
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Donald Trump’s initial response to the pandemic was to deny its potential for causing serious harm and instead, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, claim that the initial 15 cases would quickly dwindle to zero or magically go away in the spring. He and his supporters claimed that the fear was all a big campaign by his enemies to harm his presidency and re-election. Then when things started to look undeniably serious, he asserted that the US would be able to tackle it alone, even to the extent of rejecting the tests that the WHO had produced in favor of developing ones here. That led to a delay because the US tests did not initially work. Experts estimate that the US lost about four to six weeks of time due to this inaction, an eternity in pandemic time. South Korea and the US both reported their first cases on the same day but reacted quite differently, with the South Koreans moving very aggressively on testing and containment.
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Now that Donald Trump has broached the possibility of quickly easing the restrictions that he thinks are harming the economy (which in his mind is the stock market), other right wingers are joining in support, using a curious argument.

Joining the president, a growing chorus of American television pundits, business leaders, tech investors, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and right-wing influencers have decided to convince the American people that possibly dying from the coronavirus is a small price to pay for economic health.

No clearer was this utilitarian calculus articulated than by Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday night following Trump’s White House briefing. Patrick suggested that Americans over 70 would be happy to die for the good of the American economy.

“Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country,” Patrick 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 America loves for its children and grandchildren?’ And if that is the exchange, I’m all in.”

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I suggested earlier that when the stock market, the one piece of data that Donald Trump really cares about and pays attention to, drops below the level that it was at when Trump took office, he would do something stupid in an effort to try and bring it up again. That point was reached on Friday when the index closed at 19,182 and after stewing over it over the weekend, yesterday in the daily press conference, he suggested that he is considering loosening the guidelines on the movement of people at the end of the 15-day that began on Monday the 16th, causing consternation among health care professionals.
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At a time when everyone needs to follow the guidelines to control the spreading of the coronavirus, there are still people who simply do not grasp the seriousness of the situation or don’t care. For example, some Sri Lankans returning from Italy after that country got shut down evaded the checks and the quarantines imposed at the airport and went to their homes and, even worse, blithely wandered around their home areas, thus contributing to the spread of the virus. Strenuous efforts have been made to try and locate them and get them tested and quarantined, with only partial success.
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With the coronavirus resulting in people being requested or even ordered to stay at home, only some of them will be able to continue working. All the others, especially those who have hourly wages, are faced with an immediate loss of income with many dire consequences. This is a worldwide problem but workers in the US, alone among developed countries, face an additional problem and that is the loss of health insurance. That means that if they do contract the disease, they will be faced with medical bills at the very time they do not have income.

I heard on the radio today that the 80 members of the chorus (comprising 20 each of the basic four singing categories of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses) of the New York Metropolitan Opera, the people I have been seeing every night in the crowd scenes in the operas, were abruptly told during a rehearsal on March 12th to go home. Their union only managed to get management to agree that they would be paid until the end of the month but did manage to ensure that their health insurance would continue after that. But many laid off workers, especially those in non-union jobs, will no longer have health insurance, assuming that they had it to begin with.

In this time of crisis as Donald Trump flails away and mixes baseless boasting with misleading information, it is the nation’s governors who have had to step into the leadership vacuum thus created. Mike DeWine is the Republican governor of Ohio, the state I used to live in until last year. He has been in politics for almost all his adult life and became governor last year at the age of 72 but he really did not have much to show for that long career. He is a traditional Republican and an ardent opponent of abortion who signed into law the controversial “heartbeat” measure that was so extreme that his Republican predecessor John Kasich had repeatedly vetoed it.
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