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Sunday, March 29, 2020

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

Spring hills, dark contraries:a glade in a fall valley,its one flower steeped with sun.

From Sixty, by Philip Booth (1925-2007)

Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be like the reality of yesterday an illusion tomorrow.

-- Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), Italian writer, best known for his plays

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

-- Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s. Its slightly weird to me, by the way, that it will soon be misleading now to refer to The Twenties, Roaring or otherwise, now that were in the, what? Viral Twenties?

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Vacant Waterplace Park

The current emergency may be making far more people aware of early-spring Nature because far more are walking around outside to battle claustrophobia and to get exercise, partly because most gyms have been closed. But its not a very social experience, as, for example, people tend to keep on the other side of the street from fellow walkers. Still, at least theyre looking at the flowers and trees more than they might have in a normal spring.

Ive been thinking that this would be a good time to head up to New Hampshire and Vermont, get a room at a Motel 6 and check out maple-syrup-making operations for a few days. Yeah, COVID-19 will be circulating up there too but the scenery is therapeutic.

An old friend of ours who lives in Florida part of the year has several dozen acres of field and woods in the Clayville section of Scituate, R.I. She only half-jokingly suggested that shed move full time back to Clayville and live off the land, as people there (mostly) did 250 years ago. It wasnt that long ago, historically speaking, that many of our ancestors lived on farms. My maternal grandfathers family had a couple of farms in Upstate New York, and even some of my New England ancestors in the great-grandparent generation had working farms in Massachusetts. Those who didnt might have had a couple of cows and some chickens.

Newspapers Shrinking to Death

With many newspapers shrinking unto death, all they seem to have room for is COVID-19 stuff; there are many other important things happening around the world that arent being reported. As the late Bill Kreger, a news editor to whom I reported at The Wall Street Journal once observed: Sometimes the most important story starts out at the bottom of Page 37. What might we be missing?

Well, The Boston Guardian reports that property and violent crime is down in its circulation area this year. But maybe thats a virus-related story? As newly unemployed people run out of money will property crimes increase?

Then theres an inspiring little item from the March 24 Wall Street Journal: Voters in Mexican border city of Mexicali have admirably told the U.S. company Constellation Brands not to complete a $1.4 billion brewery there because the facility would take so much water that it could jeopardize the irrigation-dependent agriculture in the region.

In other heartening, if mostly symbolic, news, the U.S. has indicted Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and some sidekicks for drug trafficking and is offering $15 million to those who aid his capture. Dont expect Maduro to appear any time soon in a federal court, but the move is apt to make him nervous.

And theres the important unhappy news that the worlds greatest coral reef, Australias Great Barrier Reef, had just suffered another mass bleaching caused by global warming, whose associated increase in carbon dioxide makes sea water more acidic. For more information, please hit this link:

More virus-free stuff below!

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Gotham Greens

With some medical-supply chains from China and now India broken, the idea of reducing our dependence on some Chinese imports, as Trump and many others have proposed, is quite right. But domestic supply chains can be compromised, too, by pandemics. That includes food. Thus the more food we can grow and ship regionally the better e.g., via the huge Gotham Greens greenhouse in Providence.

xxx

My heroes! A fine bookstore open near our house has remained open, God bless em, with proper space precautions inside. It offers some mental trips into brighter days.

xxx

Much has been made of the dangers of living in cities in times of epidemics because of the density. Quite a few people, mostly rich folks, have, for example, left New York in the past couple of weeks to shelter in place in rural and/or summer resort places angering many of the locals. But too little has been made of cities advantages during such times.

The biggest is having lots of hospitals and other health-care facilities, and thus lots of health-care professionals, of which there are obviously far fewer in exurban and rural areas. Indeed, many rural hospitals have been closed in recent years. (So have some urban hospitals, such as Pawtuckets Memorial Hospital. Can and should Memorial be reopened? Its closure has put intense pressure on nearby Miriam Hospital.) The fragmented, inefficient and astronomically expensive U.S. health-care system is a mess. The failure to have adequate testing systems and equipment in place to address the current crisis is yet another symptom of how disordered it is.

The failure to have enough testing kits, and protective gear for health-care professionals, has resulted in a huge undercount in the number of people with COVID-19. So many of us have it now, but have no, or mild, symptoms. The development of extensive herd immunity through mass exposure, is probably well underway. The surge in reported cases probably mostly just reflects belated testing. Speaking of reported cases, dont believe numbers from China (or Russia).

Ironically, as my friend insurance executive Josh Fitzhugh noted: New York City may be one of the first places that could reopen for business because most residents will have been infected and either recovered or unfortunately passed away.

In any event, with our health-care systems inadequacies, we must focus even more on the most vulnerable populations the immuno-compromised and the elderly and limit our ambitions regarding the wider population. Eventually, herd immunity will bring the pandemic to heel, although there will be, as with flu epidemics, recurrent waves of sickness. But a vaccine, and better treatments, will probably be available within a year or so to stop or at least mitigate such epidemics. Be it by Easter, as per Trump, or later, when social-distancing rules are to be loosened, they should be eased gradually, not all at once, so that the sudden resulting increases in real or suspected cases dont further overwhelm health-care personnel and institutions.

Throughout the crisis, the core emphasis should be on tracking cases by testing so that medical resources can be most effectively geographically deployed and the most at-risk populations isolated. Then whack-a-mole, maybe for years.

Meanwhile, watch this extended interview by an old friend at The Press and the Public Project with Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University. Dr. Ioannidis cautions that we do not have reliable data to make long-term decisions about COVID-19, and that an extended lockdown could have far graver effects than the disease itself.

Dr. Ioannidis is C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention, Professor of Medicine, of Health and Research Policy, of Biomedical Data Science, and of Statistics, and is the Co-Director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford.

By the way, some major work on researching COVID-19 to develop a vaccine is being done at Boston Universitys National Emerging Infectious Diseases Institute in Bostons South End and elsewhere in Greater Boston. Yes, its supposed to be a very secure location though it unsettles some of the neighbors. To read more, please hit this link:

Recession Was Coming Anyway

After a few more weeks of severe social controls, we must start opening up the economy again to have the resources to address the longer-term public-health, economic and social effects of the virus. When a country has a market economy, it has few alternatives to doing so. That said, COVID-19, even without the social controls now in place, would have accelerated a run into a recession already made inevitable by the business cycle turned toxic by burgeoning corporate and public debt and runaway speculation in the financial markets, fueled by politically driven Federal Reserve Board policy. (And if you thought public debt was bad before.)

People calling in sick with the virus, and an increase in death rates, would be hitting the economy now anyway even without states and localities severe social-distancing orders.

Then there are aging populations, ever-widening economic inequality, trade wars, and, perhaps, the growing economic effects of global warming. How unfair all this is to the young adults hammered by the Great Recession (also caused by runaway speculation fueled by deregulation) of 2008-09, with painful lingering effects for years after! But they plug on.

As to where this pandemic is going public-health-wise, economy-wise or politics-wise: A hearty Who knows! But I do think that New Englanders, with a tendency to follow the facts, to be more skeptical than other Americans and with stronger health-care systems and institutions, will do better than in most of the United States. As our flinty second president, Massachusettss John Adams, famously noted:

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

xxx

Trump has grossly exaggerated his actions in the early days of the virus crisis, which he downplayed for weeks. His only early action against the virus came on Jan. 31, when he blocked most foreigners who had recently visited China from entering the United States. Good! But his order didnt apply to Americans who had been traveling in China.

See Here

Hes also lately bragged again that he patriotically doesnt take the $450,000 presidential salary even as he sends millions in taxpayer dollars to his resorts, clubs and other facilities of the Trump OrganizationAnd so it goes: a nonstop smoke machine.

And the Electoral College may well keep him in office. Demagogues, who prosper by appealing to many citizens fear and wishful thinking, and know how to use their lack of interest in important, if boring, facts, can do very well in crises. Thats especially if they have developed superb skills of mass-media manipulation, and especially of television. (It also helps to have a foreign dictator helping out.) Biden looks like a weak candidate, at this point.

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Governor Gina Raimondo

This goes too far: Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo said Thursday she plans to give State Police the power to stop any car with New York license plates in order to obtain contact information from the driver and passengers as part of her COVID-19 quarantine program.

Sounds brazenly unconstitutional to me! As the ACLU noted:

While the governor may have the power to suspend some state laws and regulations to address this medical emergency, she cannot suspend the {U.S.} Constitution. Under the Fourth Amendment, having a New York state license plate simply does not, and cannot, constitute probable cause to allow police to stop a car and interrogate the driver, no matter how laudable the goal of the stop may be.

I think that Governor Raimondo, except for the excess above, and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker have done fine jobs overseeing their states response to the virus: They are calm, articulate, data-savvy and very well-informed. What a difference from Trumps fantastical campaign-rally-style briefings. More Deep State experts, please, and less noise from our Duke of Deception. (Still, Ill miss the daily spectacles, if they ever end, especially Mike Pences impersonation of a butler -- or is it Stepinfechit? -- and Dr. Anthony Fauci with arms crossed and looking at the floor as the carnival-barker-in-chief unloads yet another whopper for his adoring Red State audience to consume whole.

Hit this link to see how one media outlet is responding to Trumps briefings.

Just Obsess on the Asteroid

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Whitcomb: Cities vs. Countryside in COVID-19 Crisis; Baker, Raimondo Handling It Well - GoLocalProv