At the Blue Sky Café...

... you can talk all night.

Sunrise, 6:53.

Actual sunrise time: 6:59. That's back before 7 again. The daylight today goes for 12 hours and 12 minutes. Nicely balanced between light and dark, with a slight tip toward light, those extra 12 minutes. Possibly of use as a metaphor.

"Well, I couldn't believe it when I got up this morning and turned on the TV, checking to see what the coronavirus was doing, and they told me that my friend and singing partner, Kenny Rogers, had passed away..."

You never know how much you love somebody until they’re gone. I’ve had so many wonderful years and wonderful times with my friend Kenny, but above all the music and the success I loved him as a wonderful man and a true friend. pic.twitter.com/hIQLIvt8pr

— Dolly Parton (@DollyParton) March 21, 2020

"If it were up to me, and it's not, I would stop putting those briefings on live TV. Not out of spite but because it's misinformation."

"If the president does end up saying anything true, you can run it as tape but if he keeps lying like this every day on stuff this important, all of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it's gonna cost lives."

Said Rachel Maddow — to whom it is not up, who can safely indulge in that figure of speech — quoted in "MSNBC's Maddow wants Trump kept off TV, blasts 'fairytale' news briefings" (Fox News).

That's being made a thing of on Twitter I see, and I really don't care. Do you?

A lesson in managing alarm...

car alarm kept going off so i improvised pic.twitter.com/c8zMC2VueW

— Andrea Long Chu (@theorygurl) March 20, 2020

"President Trump has taken historic, aggressive measures to protect the health, wealth and safety of the American people — and did so, while the media and Democrats chose to only focus on the stupid politics of a sham illegitimate impeachment."

"It’s more than disgusting, despicable and disgraceful for cowardly unnamed sources to attempt to rewrite history — it’s a clear threat to this great country."

Said a White House spokesman statement, quoted in The Washington Post, which sought a response for its article, "U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic." From the article, published last night:

The intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public health officials should take.... But they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak....

But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans. Lawmakers, too, did not grapple with the virus in earnest until this month....

To be fair, "lawmakers" were very preoccupied with the impeachment of the President.

Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president. [Health and Human Services Secretary Alex] Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials....

On Jan. 27, White House aides huddled with then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in his office, trying to get senior officials to pay more attention to the virus, according to people briefed on the meeting Mulvaney then began convening more regular meetings....

Just so you know the timeline: Trump was caught up in an impeachment trial and was not acquitted until February 5th. He had the obligation to perform all his duties as President while dealing with the impeachment, but it sounds as though the White House was working on the virus throughout January, whether Trump did personal meetings with Azar or not.

WaPo quotes some of Trump's early public statements about the virus, and, indeed, he did express optimism. He's still doing optimism. How that correlates to serious protective action for us is another matter.

And here's a WaPo article from January 21st, 11 days before the aquittal: "Trump administration announces mandatory quarantines in response to coronavirus."

The White House declared a “public health emergency” and — beginning on Sunday at 5 p.m. — will bar non-U.S. citizens who recently visited China from entering the United States, subject to a few exemptions.... Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar also said the Trump administration would quarantine any Americans who had visited China’s Hubei province, where the disease originated, within the past 14 days....

President Trump so far has remained uncharacteristically muted on the coronavirus and praised China’s extraordinary response to the growing outbreak. On Wednesday, he tweeted photos of his Situation Room briefing and said his administration was working closely with China to contain the outbreak....

That happened at a time when the World Health Organization was recommending that there be no travel restrictions.

Looks like we won the imaginary tournament.

I'm looking at a screen shot from the front page at FiveThirtyEight:



But if you go to the article — "Your Guide To The NCAA Men’s Tournament That Could Have Been" — Wisconsin is on the "Sleepers" list  ("Final Four probability: 6 percent").

So, how are you doing without your spectator sports? It's not a problem for me at all, but if you're a big sports spectator, what are you doing? Are you watching the channels that show old sports events? If you don't remember the outcome, is it kind of the same as watching a live game?

"Joe Biden is planning a regular shadow briefing... to show how he would handle the crisis and address what he calls the lies and failures of President Trump."

"Biden gave a preview of what’s to come in a conference call with reporters Friday, where he listed a litany of false and misleading statements from Trump.... 'President Trump stop saying false things, will ya?' Biden said. 'People are worried they are really frightened, when these things don't come through. He just exacerbates their concern. Stop saying false things you think make you sound like a hero and start putting the full weight of the federal government behind finding fast, safe and effective treatments.'... [H]e said, his house is being outfitted with equipment that would enable him to livestream events, have interactive tele-press conferences and broadcast interviews with network television. 'I would like to get in the position and we're trying to work out so that the headquarters ... to be able to accommodate my directly answering questions in front of a press that's assigned to me,' he said. 'We've hired a professional team to do that now. And excuse the expression that's a little above my pay grade to know how to do that.'"

Politico reports.

It is a real challenge for Biden and his people to figure out how to campaign from a distance. Sitting on the sidelines and taking potshots at the man who is working nonstop to manage the crisis — this might not feel right to some of us. Biden has to stay in the game somehow, but maybe less is more. Don't make the President's job any more difficult than it is. And don't turn on the cameras just to agitate us with non-insights like "People are worried... they are really frightened." Every guy in America knows how to watch TV and then turn on the videocam and live-stream about how the President bothers him.

Or... I guess Biden wouldn't know how to make such a video. He has "a professional team" to push the little buttons for him, and he's not embarrassed to call the work "above my pay grade."

If you're trying to remember when Obama used that expression, it was in answer to the question when does the unborn have human rights: "… whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity … is above my pay grade." I believe Obama was trying to say he is not God, so he cannot be the one to say where that subtle line is.

In the case of Biden, he was just trying to say, he doesn't do electronic gadgets. He didn't really mean that the work he can't do is above him. More like below him. Or part of a world that he hasn't engaged with and never will.

IN THE COMMENT: rehajm said:

So he's going to pretend he has a job where he has press conferences and updates people on the functioning of government even though he doesn't work for the government. Then he's going to do mystery science theater on Trump press conferences and also 'fact check' Trump and government agencies.

How faux Presidential. That's not helping...

Chris N said:

When I was young it was all sidewalks and bikes and maybe a few hot rods out there. Guys n gals at Community pools. You wanted mashed potatoes you got mashed potatoes but some people need help with the butter.

Folks, this isn’t that hard. We’re a global village now with global challenges and 18 gigs of RAM!

"De Blasio’s senior staff in near revolt over his coronavirus response."

The NY Post reports.

When Mayor de Blasio dragged aides and members of his NYPD security detail to his Brooklyn YMCA Monday morning amidst the coronavirus outbreak, fellow fitness enthusiasts were coughing and sneezing — and a mentally ill person was walking around touching the equipment, a gym source said.

“It’s crazy that he made his staff and detail come with him to the gym and expose them like that,” the source said.

That scene lends insight into this: "Majority of NYC’s coronavirus cases are men between 18 and 49 years old."

But wait a minute. That headline is not right. The majority of cases are men (59%), and the majority of cases are people between the ages of 18 and 49 (54%). You can't combine these 2 facts that way! That's some serious innumeracy!

"Why do you keep calling this the Chinese virus? Ethnicity does not cause the virus?"/"It comes from China... I'm not a racist... I comes from (pause) China."

This is an exchange that took place at a recent White House press conference. It's become a meme on TikTok, where someone posted the original, and then — because this is how TikTok works — many other people have done their own little lip sync to the audio track. The original with Trump and all the variations are collected on this page. I'm reading these as supportive of Trump. I think!

I'll just give you 2 examples:

"It was only natural for me to document my experience. I decided to map the four walls I was confined in and see where that took me creatively."

Said Gareth Fuller, quoted in "What happens when a map artist goes into quarantine" (CNN). Go to the link to see both his very elaborate artwork depicting cities and his cartoon-style mapping of his own little place. Both levels of art are good, and it resonates with me because it fits my favorite abstract category big and small.

At the Ice Cold Café...

... it's the second day of Spring.

"Doctors have reckoned with the need to allocate resources in the face of overwhelming demand long before coronavirus."

"[Lydia Dugdale, professor of medicine and director of the center for clinical medical ethics at Columbia University] points out that the New York department of health’s ventilator allocation guidelines, published in November 2015 to address the issue amid a flu epidemic, states that first-come first-serve, lottery, physician clinical judgment, and prioritizing certain patients such as health care workers were explored but found to be either too subjective or failed to save the most lives. Age was rejected as a criterion as it discriminates against the elderly, and there are plenty of cases in which an older person has better odds of survival than someone younger. So the decision was to 'utilize clinical factors only to evaluate a patient’s likelihood of survival and to determine the patient’s access to ventilator therapy.' In tie-breaking circumstances, though, they did approve treating children 17 and younger over an adult where both have an equal odds of surviving.... 'I would say that leaving some to die without treatment is NOT ethical, but it may be necessary as there are no good options,' David Chan, philosophy professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, writes. 'Saying that it is ethical ignores the tragic element, and it is better that physicians feel bad about making the best of a bad situation rather than being convinced that they have done the right thing.'"

From "Ethicists agree on who gets treated first when hospitals are overwhelmed by coronavirus" by Olivia Goldhill (Quartz).

Do you think it's right to take age into account only to benefit the super-young — those under 18? Would you choose between a 20 year old and a 70 year old solely on the basis of who is more likely to survive? I suspect the age factor is bundled into the assessment of who's more likely to survive, which would simply hide the disapproved-of discrimination against the elderly. By contrast:

Italy has prioritized treatment for those with “the best chance of success” but adds as a second criterion those “who have more potential years of life.”

Another thing I wonder about is the issue of surviving without the ventilator. What if, for example, X has an 80% chance of surviving without a ventilator and a 90% chance of surviving with it and Y has a 10% chance of surviving without a ventilator and a 60% chance of surviving with it? Does X, the more vigorous person, get the task of struggling to survive without the ventilator? And do you take into account how long a person will need the ventilator? Maybe you could save 2 of my Xs in the time it would take Y to get well or perish.

"Red and Blue America Aren’t Experiencing the Same Pandemic/The disconnect is already shaping, even distorting, the nation’s response."

From the perspective of Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic:

A flurry of new national polls released this week reveals that while anxiety about the disease is rising on both sides of the partisan divide, Democrats consistently express much more concern about it than Republicans do, and they are much more likely to say they have changed their personal behavior as a result. A similar gap separates people who live in large metropolitan centers, which have become the foundation of the Democratic electoral coalition, from those who live in the small towns and rural areas that are the modern bedrock of the GOP.....

If the virus never becomes pervasive beyond big cities, that could reinforce the sense among many Republican voters and office-holders that the threat has been overstated...

"President Trump on Thursday exaggerated the potential of drugs available to treat the new coronavirus..."

"... including an experimental antiviral treatment and decades-old malaria remedies that hint of promise but so far show limited evidence of healing the sick. No drug has been approved to treat the new coronavirus, and doctors around the world have been desperately administering an array of medicines in search of something to help patients, especially those who are severely ill. The malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, are among the remedies that have been tried in several countries.... Doctors in China, South Korea and France have reported that the treatments seem to help. But those efforts have not involved the kind of large, carefully controlled studies that would provide the global medical community the proof that these drugs work on a significant scale. In a White House briefing Thursday, Mr. Trump said the anti-malaria drugs had shown 'tremendous promise.'.... The drugs’ potential has been highlighted during broadcasts on one of Mr. Trump’s favorite news channels, Fox News, where hosts like Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and Jeanine Pirro have trumpeted the possibility of a real treatment...."

The NYT reports.

"The Angel Moroni statue atop the Salt Lake Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lost his trumpet in an earthquake Wednesday."

CNN reports.

The Salt Lake Temple, dedicated in 1893, was the first temple topped with Angel Moroni, according to the church. The 12-foot-5-inch statue, made of copper and gold leaf, stands on a stone ball atop the 210-foot central spire on the east side of the temple....

The church teaches that Moroni was an ancient prophet who led Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, to the golden plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated. Moroni's horn, the church says, symbolizes spreading the message of the restoration of Christianity that Mormons believe was begun by Smith....