Tag Archives: pandemic

medical news, national news

Looking for more good-news signals

I find myself awakening each day and searching for good news among all the coronavirus pandemic gloom and doom.

Then we get snippets of signs of relief, or so we should hope:

Wuhan, China, where the pandemic was first hatched, is considering whether to relax the societal shutdown; Italy, which became the world’s second epicenter, is experiencing a slowdown in new cases; China reports several consecutive days with no new coronavirus cases.

The news from the U.S. of A. isn’t so positive, but maybe the good news will find its way to our shores. The rate of new cases is increasing exponentially, along with the rate of death from the coronavirus.

Then I have to remind myself of what the medical experts keep telling us: Let’s not be swayed by the glimmers of good news; there well might be more spikes in new cases once we relax the “social distancing” methods we’ve been practicing.

And so it goes. The good news is temporary. It vanishes. Then we face more grim news.

Then I find myself looking for long-range good news in what the medical experts tell us: social distancing is the best way to reduce the spread of the killer virus.

I am now beginning to accept that social distancing is going to be with us for a long time after the medical minds determine that the pandemic has passed. If it’s meant to be, I’m all in … even though it will inhibit the way I greet friends after not seeing them for a good while. Indeed, this shelter in place/stay at home policy is keeping my wife and me away from our family members and our friends.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking for good news and will keep seeking that which turns the glimmer into a full-blown flash of brilliance.

national news

Just pick up the phone and call, Mr. VPOTUS

Joe Biden reportedly is considering whether to talk to Donald Trump about how the president can — or should — respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden’s campaign team has been commenting on the possibility of the phone call. Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway has been openly critical of Biden for not calling her boss. I guess her needling got through to the former vice president, the frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

Here’s where I come down on this matter.

All Biden has to do is call the White House. He knows the number. He and the president can talk privately; there is no need to blab all over creation about what they discuss. It could be just the two of them.

I cannot predict how either of them would handle such a conversation. I don’t know who between them would spill the beans to the media.

To be frank, I don’t care what they say to each other. They’re both grownup. Biden has sat at the center of power, the place now occupied by Trump. He knows a thing or two about how to wage the kind of fight that this struggle requires. I don’t know with any certainty what Trump understands, other than what he says about his alleged knowledge of these medical matters.

If there’s going to be a conversation between these two politicians, let it happen … even it if is out of sight and out of hearing.

national news

Strange to be complimented for showing proper seriousness

Donald Trump is getting some curious words of praise over the past couple of days.

Why? Because he is showing the appropriate emotional response to a worldwide tragedy. Imagine that. The president of the United States is being saluted by the media and even from his critics for taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously.

Is he being “damned with faint praise”? I suppose so.

I will give Trump a quiet golf clap for acting finally the way he should have been acting all along. His “briefing” on Tuesday night contained all the appropriate body language from Trump, not to mention the sight of his emergency response team actually demonstrating appropriate “social distancing” as they watched and listened to Trump say whatever he was saying.

All of this is good, as far as it goes. I remain reluctant to heap the praise on Trump because I also remain committed to the notion that he should have swung into action long ago. Say, perhaps in January and/or February when the coronavirus first presented itself. He didn’t. He dawdled and delayed. He disparaged the threat and denigrated those in the media who were issuing dire warnings.

I can’t get the image of Trump standing in front of us telling us that the 15 cases diagnosed early would disappear as if by some miracle or by magic. It’ll take a whole lot of a more serious-sounding and looking Donald Trump to erase that memory … if you get my drift.

None of this change of modus operandi, to be sure, is a game changer. It most assuredly won’t persuade me to endorse Donald Trump’s re-election when the time comes for Americans to cast their ballots.

Critics of this blog and supporters of the president just will have to accept that your friendly blogger only will say what needs to be said: It’s about damn time!

national news

Hey, Sen. Sanders, stop the delusion!

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders apparently is clinging tightly to an illusion, which is that he thinks he still can win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination this year.

Earth to Bernie: No! You cannot!

The democratic socialist/independent senator from Vermont who masquerades as a Democrat has no path to the nomination. Former Vice President Joe Biden has trounced Sanders in a series of party primary elections and has piled up an insurmountable lead in delegates selected for the Democratic National Convention this July in Milwaukee.

Sanders cannot overtake Biden. Yet he continues to stay in the hunt, continues to insist that while the path to a nomination is “narrow,” he can walk it carefully. I have to ask: How in the world does that happen?

Joe Biden has emerged as the overwhelming favorite among Democrats whose main mission this election year is to defeat Donald John Trump. Thus, this nomination is all but in the bag for Biden.

I realize at this moment that virtually no one is talking seriously about the presidential election. The nation is fixated instead on more pressing crises presented by the coronavirus pandemic. Thousands of Americans have died already from the virus; many thousands more are expected to succumb to it.

Indeed, the crisis has frozen the election in place … for the moment. Which makes me think that the stalling of the nominating fight is the only thing that is preventing Sen. Sanders from making the patently obvious decision to drop out of the race and endorse Joe Biden.

Bernie is deluding himself if he actually thinks what he has said publicly, that he can still be nominated by the Democrats to take on Donald Trump. Get real, Bernie. End it now.

medical news, national news

How do we declare victory in this newest ‘war’?

They’re calling our national response to the coronavirus pandemic a fight against an “invisible enemy.”

Donald Trump calls himself a “wartime president.” So, if we’re going to war against this enemy, I am left to wonder how we’re going to know when the war is over. When or how do we declare victory? Will we even be able to declare victory?

These questions rise the way they rose when we went to war against international terrorism immediately after 9/11. I have posed the question myself: Will we be able to declare victory in the global war on terror? 

If we can eradicate the disease, what will happen to the way we behave, the way we interact with our friends — or even our family, the folks who live elsewhere?

It well might be that this pandemic is going to have lasting — possibly permanent — impact on the way we lead our daily lives.

My wife and I already are wiping down door handles, fuel pumps, shopping carts with antiseptic wipes. We already are washing our hands with far more frequency than before the coronavirus changed the world. We’re keeping our safe “social distance” from those we see in our quiet Princeton, Texas neighborhood.

Is this the way it will be, um, forever? Man, I hope not. Then again, I don’t know when or how we’ll be able to declare an end to this “war against an invisible enemy.” 

medical news, national news

POTUS is getting it, finally: Pandemic is serious … and deadly

Donald Trump has signed on to what his medical response team has known all along: that the coronavirus pandemic is serious, it is deadly and it deserves an all-hands-on-deck response.

It took far too long for the president to accept what the scientists and medical gurus were telling him. However, his statement today tells me that the warnings he has heard are finally sinking into his thick, and vacuous skull.

Trump said today we can expect a very difficult two-week period ahead. The rate of COVID-19 infections are going to increase, as will the rate of death.

Governors have gotten it. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has extended the shelter in place directive to the end of April; he also has extended public school closures to May 4. Those dates remain fluid, of course, but at least our state government is taking the kind of proactive approach that — until this moment — has been missing at the federal level of government.

The president now projects 100,000 to 200,000 deaths from the virus. It’s a far cry from what he said not that long ago. It was just in February when Donald Trump said the infection stood at 15 and would vanish all by itself before too long. Hmm. It didn’t happen.

Indeed, it has gotten far worse than the president was letting on.

But … now he is on board with what the experts have told him. Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci are stellar infectious disease experts assigned to the task force led by Vice President Mike Pence. They have delivered a grim prognosis.

If only the president had accepted the bad news long before now. At least, though, he has signed on.

For now.

media news

Newspapers become casualty of coronavirus … wow!

This is what I call a serious punch in the chops to those of us who love newspapers and cherish their role in reporting the news to the communities they serve.

Gannett Corp., which owns scores of newspapers around the country — including the one I left in August 2012 at the end of my journalism career — has announced unpaid leaves for its staff of reporters, editors and support staff.

That means, the Amarillo Globe-News in Texas — the paper to which I referred — will be left with even fewer people to cover a region afflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

GateHouse Media bought the Globe-News in 2018, then purchased Gannett this past year. Gannett’s name, though, remains the one in force. So it fell to Gannett Corp. to announce the furloughs.

The Globe-News reporting and editing staff has been decimated already by the changing media climate. Now comes this news, about the pandemic, and the newspaper’s reporting capabilities have been reduced even further — if that is even possible.

The newspaper company announced the furloughs this way: Gannett advised in a memo to staff … that it will be instituting furloughs and other cost reductions in response to big advertising declines.

Those “big declines” have occurred because businesses that advertise with the newspapers have been shuttered by the pandemic. Since they can’t stay open, they can’t earn revenue, some of which they spend on advertising with newspapers and other media.

The victims of this terrible turn of events aren’t just the businesses, or the media outlets that deliver their message through paid ads. They include rank-and-file Americans like you and me who depend on newspapers to tell us what is going on in our communities. We need to know what’s going on; we need to understand how the pandemic is affecting life in our surroundings.

Oh, sure, we can turn on the TV, boot up our computers, activate our smart phones and all of that. I happen to be rather old school. I also depend on the printed word that is tossed onto my driveway before the sun comes up.

I am unclear how the regional editors of the Amarillo Globe-News will be able to cover the news of their community. For that matter, I’ve wondered how they do it for some time, given the precipitous decline in personnel on hand to report on and deliver the news to the region.

Read about the announcement here.

This “news” saddens me way beyond measure. Gannett says the austerity moves are “temporary.” I want to believe it. That rumbling in my gut tells me something quite different.

medical news

Coronavirus is far deadlier than the flu, correct Mr. POTUS?

Among the many zigs and zags that Donald John Trump has performed in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, I want to look briefly at one of his acrobatic tricks.

When he was downplaying the significance of the outbreak in its early stages — referring to how it would disappear miraculously from the face of the planet — he compared it to influenza. Trump said the flu kills many more Americans annually than he projected the coronavirus would claim. Do you recall that?

The flu kills 37,000 people each year, Trump said, disparaging the potential impact of the COVID-19 strain of the virus.

OK, that’s all changed now.

Donald Trump his own self said the coronavirus could kill as many as 200,000 Americans before the crisis ends. The implication is that the deaths would occur perhaps before the end of the calendar year.

Why has no one called him out on that?

It’s an example of the idiocy that Trump was spouting early in the crisis, seeking to downplay its significance while also seeking to cover his own (ample) backside while the rest of us began to worry ourselves into near apoplexy.

The worst is yet to arrive in the United States of America.

Leadership from the top of our governmental chain of command requires truth telling at all times. We damn sure weren’t getting it in the beginning of this pandemic. Truth telling remains missing in action now.

local news, medical news

Mayor teaches a course in Leadership 101

Leadership reveals itself in many forms.

One way is when a leader prepares for the worst while hoping for the best outcome. Example: U.S. Army Gen. Dwight Eisenhower launched the D-Day invasion of Europe in June 1944 hoping for ultimate victory, but he was prepared to deliver a message to the world in the event of failure; he would take full responsibility for a tragic outcome.

Another way is when an elected public servant battles a potentially deadly disease, steps away from his or her public duties and then returns to announce a strategy to deal with a worldwide health crisis, such as the coronavirus pandemic. Example: Amarillo Mayor Ginger Nelson.

I doubt Nelson — who I don’t know well, but is someone with whom I am acquainted — would welcome a comparison with the great Ike, but I am going to offer it anyway.

Nelson is battling cancer. She has backed away from her normal mayoral duties to fight the disease. But this week she issued a mandatory shelter-in-place order for the city of 200,000 residents. She issued the order calmly, with confidence and with compassion. I didn’t watch her make the declaration in real time, but I am willing to bet my entire (and dwindling) retirement fund that she made no mention of her illness, that she didn’t lay a “woe is me” guilt trip on her constituents.

We’re all enduring some level of discomfort during this difficult time. Those who are stricken by the coronavirus deserve our love and compassion. Others of us deserve unflinching leadership from those elected to serve us.

We do not need to hear self-congratulatory blather and mindless happy talk during this dire time … and if you detect a reference to what we’re getting from the very highest levels of our nation’s government, then you win the daily prize.

Well done, Mayor Nelson. Stay strong. Your city needs you.

media news, medical news, national news

Trump exhibits monumental leadership void

The reporting of Donald John Trump’s daily briefings dealing with the coronavirus pandemic depresses me terribly. It tells me plenty about the president’s inability or unwillingness to lead a nation in distress.

More than 150,000 Americans have been stricken by the virus; nearly 3,000 Americans have died. The death toll is approaching the number of those killed on 9/11.

Donald Trump’s response at the Q&A sessions that commence during these briefings? He has attacked the media for asking him “nasty” questions. Trump told a respected PBS reporter that she needs to be “nice” to him, wondering why Yamiche Alcindor was no longer working for the New York Times.

This is not how a leader of a nation in distressed is supposed to comport himself.

President Bush led the nation in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack. He didn’t lash out at the media. He didn’t criticize his political foes. Bush talked candidly to us about the challenges that confronted us. The president reminded us that we weren’t at war with “Islam,” but were going to do battle with those who perverted that religion and brought destruction to our shores.

This president cannot rise to the level of a leader at war. He did call himself a “wartime president,” but has yet to demonstrate a single trait associated with that label. He exhibits pettiness, petulance, partisan pandering.

He attacks Democrats and the media. He denigrates governors who are on the front lines in the fight against the coronavirus.

This is not how a president who seeks to lead and unify a nation under siege is supposed to act.

It doesn’t matter to this president. He cannot lead. This individual who brought not a single moment of public service experience to the only political office he ever sought is demonstrating what many of us feared all along … that he isn’t up to the job.