By Denny Gulino
WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The virus is still moving, killing more than 2,000 people in the United States for the fourth day in a row Friday and only for the fifth time ever.
The death toll is leveling, on a deadly plateau. Except in those states like Illinois, where the daily death toll keeps getting worse..
The hope is that a slackening in new infections will, toward the end of the month, mean the death toll will start to trend down.
The hope is that an anti-viral drug, remdesivir, will help sick virus victims recover a lot faster. That hope lifted stocks by the most since last month, with the Dow industrials closing up 705 points, a 3% increase. Gilead Sciences shares rose 9.7%.
The hope is the ultimate death toll will be at the lowest end of projections, around 60,000. Said the president Friday evening, “I think we’ll be substantially, hopefully below the hundred number and I think right now we’re heading it probably around sixty.”
The hope of the NIH’s Tony Fauci – and it may be well grounded – is that when the current massive effort to scale up diagnostic and eventually immunity testing gets rolling, it will be enough. As he said Friday night, “If these things are done correctly – … I believe they can – we will have and there will be enough tests to allow us to take this country safely through Phase One.”
Hope for the future while the present is horrible. Can either be the more important?
There are other hopes alive in the land, that the president won’t be entirely consumed by his passion to engage his base in his many battles, with Democratic governors, with China, with the World Health Organization, with Congress, with the harsh realism getting in the way of vision of renewed MAGA rally crowds.
“I hope we can resume rallies because I think they’re an important part of politics, actually,” the president said. “I hope we’re going to have rallies. I think they’re going to be bigger than ever.”
Yes, swabs are still in short supply. Now a new design is being manufactured, Fauci said, as part of a long, technical explanation by Task Force medical experts on how the nation’s testing regime is being upgraded by several magnitudes.
Within minutes of the briefing’s conclusion, a check of the cable channels showed nurses and doctors still talking about shortages of testing materials, masks, gowns and swabs.
There are hopes by the millions that beloved parents won’t be claimed by the virus, that many nursing homes will be spared. Many more states are finally revealing the death counts in their nursing homes and in several cases it’s worse news than worst-case scenarios.
Hope can overcome all the high dudgeons of the day. No, South Dakota’s governor is still not ordering residents to stay at home, while the virus burns through the employees sent home from the Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls. More than 500 have tested positive and the hope is they are voluntarily isolating themselves. South Dakota’s new cases are up 200% in a week.
Yes, the president said in the evening briefing he’s “comfortable” with tweeting to “Liberate” the residents of three states – Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia – with Democratic governors. Liberate from the stay-at-home orders? Liberate from rule by Democrats? In Virginia’s case, he said the residents should be liberated from the efforts of the governor and the Democratic legislature to take away their Second Amendment gun rights.
If so much of the daily high-dudgeon news seems petty, ill-considered or beside the point in the context of day after day of another 2,000 or so Americans dying from the virus, it helps to compartmentilize all the noise. Put aside that exquisitely drafted angry tweet for another day and enter the non-partisan world of science.
Science? It was science that led the Centers for Disease Control to reject the World Health Organization template for a diagnostic test provided by China back on Jan. 21. So it wasted weeks developing its own test which proved defective. That’s the science to listen to?
Easy, after all, the scientist par excellence Tony Fauci owned up to his colleagues’ failings in the latest briefing. It couldn’t be determined if, as he spoke, whether the president was gritting his teeth.
“No doubt that early on we had a problem,” Fauci conceded as Trump never has. “I have publicly said that we had a problem early on. There was a problem that had to be corrected and it was corrected.”
So for that and several other reasons that have been hashed over again and again the U.S. was late and let the virus get a big head start. Some countries did a better job but they were few.
Catching up is hard but it’s apparently happening. Crews of contact tracers are popping up in several places and their legions will grow by the tens of thousands. Testing and processing facilities are multiplying and soon up to 4 million or more tests will be done a week.
No, the science to take some comfort in is like that done by the often-cited Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle which is circling the virus with data and leading the way toward its avoidance.
In the afternoon the Institute published its latest state-by-state survey that suggested Vermont, West Virginia, Montana and Hawaii can enter the Phase One part of reopening within a little more than two weeks.
At the same time the study suggested Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, Arkansas and Oklahoma won’t get to that point until late June or July. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut will be later still, possibly.
The best news in the report was, “that the number of daily COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. may have peaked two days ago, April 15, with 2,481 deaths.”
The data “suggest that mobility and presumably social contact have declined in certain states earlier than the organization’s modeling predicted, especially in the South,” so the projections have been improved.
Is it hopelessly optimistic to think that hopes and reality don’t have to be at odds? Maybe hopes can become the new reality.
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Contact this reporter: denny@macenews.com