Short and sweet today. As I’ve written about previously, my partner has been pushing for the creation of alternative birthing sites in NYC during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read her excellent, short Medium pieces, Birth Centers NOW – on the urgent need, during the pandemic, to convert “a handful of spaces much smaller than the Javits Center into safe alternative birthing sites so we can get through this crisis without causing unnecessary trauma and harm to birthing people and their babies” – and The Problem in New York, which can be summed up by her statement: “In Downtown NYC alone, the loss of midwifery and birth services [in recent decades] has been staggering.”

Now, as I wrote to friends this morning:

Tl;dr: Keep Pregnant People Safe During COVID-19 in New York petition is live. Please sign it and share it widely. Thank you!!!

I’m sending this to a number of you who expressed interest in supporting the push to create Alternative Birthing Sites in NYC (now being called “Auxiliary Maternity Units” owing to choices made by some national bodies in the birth world) and some of you who haven’t, but who, I hope, may be interested in supporting the effort.

Neelu has worked steadily in recent weeks, and although she’s succeeded in making the case to staffers at the City Council, Mayoral, State Senate, and US House levels – and in contributing to the national conversation that has been rapidly evolving on this subject – as yet, we’ve seen no meaningful action in NYC.

Sadly, at the State and City levels, we now have reliable information that neither the Governor, nor the Mayor sees this issue as a priority. It’s unfortunate that elected executives are not prioritizing the needs of pregnant New Yorkers at this critical juncture, and their inaction is certainly exacerbating our existing birth apartheid: People who can afford to have largely shifted to last-minute home births, left the City to give birth elsewhere, or, at very least, are relying on private care providers they trust will insulate them from the crisis in our hospitals. Everyone else faces an increasingly desperate circumstance as our hospitals are overwhelmed with very sick people and yet pregnant people are still expected to go into these same hospitals to give birth.

Given the political dead-end we seem to have reached, Neelu has reluctantly decided to launch a petition – Keep Pregnant People Safe During COVID-19 in New York – which is live now, and with which we’d love your support. Please share it as widely as you see fit.

As always, we’d welcome your feedback or advice on this effort, and would be happy to formally list you as a supporter on the petition if you’d like.

Since its launch yesterday evening (that is, on April 9th), the petition – which, again, I encourage you to sign, share and support! – has already garnered nearly 1,000 signatures. We’re hoping to hit 10,000 by the end of the weekend with your help.

From the petition, you’ll also find links to a number of helpful resources. Neither of us loves this strategy, but our hope is that, if it petition garners enough public support, perhaps it will succeed in putting this issue on the political agenda where other efforts have thus far failed. Obviously, the creation of such sites should have happened weeks/a month ago, and the hour is rather late here in the City, but it should not be forgotten that traumas to birthing people and their babies alike were (and, in many instances, still are) avoidable – just like this entire crisis was – and by demanding that our elected officials acknowledge this issue, we help to lay the groundwork for birth justice today and in our future post-pandemic world.

As my partner has been urging for weeks: “We need alternative birthing sites NOW.”

I hope you’ll join the movement to make them a reality.

There’s an illuminating passage in Mike Wallace’s Greater Gotham which links the name “Spanish Flu” to the fact that – unlike in the combatant nations of World War I – “in neutral Spain […] coverage [of the spread of the deadly influenza] was unchecked.” I’ll delve into Wallace’s account of the impact of the 1918 flu pandemic on New York City in an upcoming post, but today I’m going to examine some recent accounts of the responses to COVID-19 in China and the US.

First, though, news broke today that researchers at Mount Sinai had confirmed that most of the strains of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in New York arrived here via Europe – not China or elsewhere in East Asia – and further, as Trevor Bradford’s work indicated had been the case in Seattle, that the virus circulated in New York for weeks – from at least mid-February, and perhaps as early as late January – before the first official case of community transmission was identified.

As in a last-minute high school essay – like which I hope the following does not read, as its structure was premeditated! – much of what follows will be in the form of quotations. I’ve previously linked to Mike Davis’ excellent piece Lessons From Wuhan, but will start by quoting from that piece once again. As Davis wrote:

In recognizing China’s achievements, however, we should avoid learning the wrong lesson: State capacity for decisive action in an emergency does not necessitate the suppression of democracy. Despite what many talking heads are claiming, putting a million Uighers in reeducation camps was not a precondition for quelling the coronavirus in Hubei, nor did the Big Brother practice of surveilling all the jaywalkers in Chinese cities and scoring their “social credit” prove decisive to the national quarantine.

Still, it’s inevitable that the right-wing leaders in the White House, Downing Street, Beit Aghion, and elsewhere will seize every opportunity, as they did with 9/11, to appropriate new authoritarian powers, exploiting the consequences of their own inaction and disastrous leadership to set more precedents for closing public spaces, banning assemblies, and even suspending elections.

I start with Davis both because I like his work personally (his Late Victorian Holocausts is a masterful, wrenching look at the intersection of global climate dynamics and the atrocities of European colonization that offers profound insights for the changed/rapidly changing world we occupy today – in the midst of accelerating global climate crisis – and presages prescient work like that of Christian Parenti in Tropic of Chaos) and because of his impeccable Marxist credentials. Few on the US left would label him a reactionary.

Sad to say, but from the spiraling Trade War of 2019, we’ve only seen escalation in the Sino-US tensions as the global impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic intensify. Now, as China has evidently brought its own outbreak under control, while things meanwhile spin wildly out of control in this country, a simultaneous ideological battle has been unfolding between the two countries that has seen mutual expulsions of journalists (and publications) and rather unhinged accusations originating from within the official state apparatuses of both countries. (As usual, Bill Bishop offers helpful insights into the latest from within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including around “Aggressive diplomacy and disinformation” as relates to the pandemic.)

Yet, in an experience somewhat novel for me, but that will no doubt be familiar to some of my elders – hearkening, as it does, back to the disorienting cross currents of Cold War propaganda – I find thinkers I respect diametrically opposed in their interpretations, as Great Power Politics threaten to divide not only the world, geopolitically, but – intellectually – our minds and spirits.

One thing, at least, everyone I respect seems to agree on, so we can dispense with that point: The pandemic response of the US President and his Administration has been an unqualified disaster. He has, among other things, surrounded himself with sycophants, kleptocrats, and frightening Right-wing ideologues; undermined science (in a way that will haunt this country for generations); sought to exploit the crisis to enrich the already-too-wealthy and to force through his suicidal deregulatory/extractivist agenda; and failed, utterly, to support state and local governments overwhelmed by the speed and ferocity of COVID-19’s spread.

Okay – happy we got that out of the way. With respect to China, however, it’s much harder to have clarity. I’ve just listened to Laurie Garrett’s long piece for the New Republic, Grim Reapers (which is, itself, essentially a combination of two of her previous articles for Foreign Policy – Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response and How China’s Incompetence Endangered the World – from late January and mid-February respectively, updated to reflect the radical deterioration of the situation in the US and the significant improvement in the situation in China in the interim). As my gloss would suggest, our President and China’s Prime Minister are the Reapers in question in Garrett’s view, but this is where things start to get muddy.

On the one hand, Garrett writes, in the latter of her Foreign Policy pieces:

Unfortunately, China is showing how all this can go wrong, making a crisis into a catastrophe. Xi’s government has provided the world with reams of data, but their credibility, or lack thereof, is inextricably bound to the CCP’s methods of governance, censorship, intimidation, and toadyism. The rest of the world is left to prognosticate and prepare without really knowing what havoc the coronavirus enemy is capable of wreaking.

On the other, Vijay Prashad (with two co-authors) writes for The People’s Dispatch:

Whether it is the New York Times or Marco Rubio, there is an urgency to conclude that China’s government and Chinese society are to blame for the global pandemic, and that their failures not only compromised the WHO but caused the pandemic. Facts become irrelevant. What we have shown in this report is that there was neither willful suppression of the facts nor was there a fear from local officials to report to Beijing; nor indeed was the system broken. The coronavirus epidemic was mysterious and complex, and the Chinese doctors and authorities hastily learned what was going on and then made—based on the facts available—rational decisions.

From a media/information standpoint, China is something of a black box, while sitting here in the US as I do, I find myself enveloped in the deafening noise of mis- and dis-information and the de facto state propaganda of our corporate media. It’s a problem of parallax and there is no neutral position, but in acknowledging – with the late and much-missed Howard Zinn –the impossibility of neutrality, and looking to stand for something in life – even something as slippery as ideals like liberty, justice, and compassion – one looks for some solid ground on which to stand.

Who is Laurie Garrett? An accomplished and incisive science journalist who has spent most of her career writing about infectious disease and, for some time, was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, which some on the left might find disqualifying as a sign of her attachment to the security state.

And Vijay Prashad? A prolific and courageous Marxist historian and internationalist political thinker of undeniable humanity and political commitment who left a tenured position at Trinity College in Connecticut to found Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, in my view, one of the most important intellectual outfits active in the world today.

It would be nice if they could simply agree on things, but, obviously, they do not. Perhaps I’d been well-propagandized, myself, here in this echo chamber, but I’d come to feel confident that China had badly mishandled its response to the initial outbreak of what, then, was simply a novel coronavirus of unknown origin. But Qiao – a collective of Chinese leftists living in the diaspora – writes, in After the West: China’s Internationalist Solidarity in the Age of Coronavirus:

Where China’s mass production of masks, test kits, and ventilators, construction of emergency hospitals, universal testing and treatment, and regional coordination of food production and distribution speaks to the power and dynamism of a socialist market economy, the U.S. response is emblematic of a system in which decades of neoliberalism have utterly neutered the state’s ability to meet the needs of the people without relying on the cooperation of individual corporate actors. Where China marshalled state-owned enterprises and confiscated private capital to meet the production needs of the pandemic, the Trump Administration’s coronavirus response has been a who’s who of the corporate class. A March 13 press conference saw Trump flanked by the CEOs of WalMart, CVS, and Target, who pledged vague support to continue operating stores and provide parking lot space for drive-through testing sites. Federal and state governments have failed to provide adequate medical supplies for hospitals, leaving hospital staff haggling with private sellers price-gouging protective masks and facing a proprietary monopoly banning third-party repairs on life saving ventilators and other medical equipment.

And:

But the spectacular contrast between the Chinese and American political and economic systems is made even more clear in the realm of global geopolitics, where out of this global pandemic has emerged the multilateral world presaged by the Munich Security Conference’s requiem for the American Century. Where Mike Pompeo praised a triumphant neoliberal ideology of “individual freedom [and] free enterprise,” this very Western consensus on neoliberal austerity has left Western governments politically subservient to the very industries they now beg to work in the public interest to meet the needs of this crisis. Lacking the state-owned enterprises that spearheaded China’s crisis response, the U.S., for instance, has turned to prison labor and Korean War-era war powers which require private manufacturers to prioritize government orders for medical supplies—making clear that carceral and military logics are the last recourse of a state emaciated by the tenets of neoliberalism.

And further:

Turned inwards by crisis, the United States and EU have abdicated even the pretension of leadership over the liberal world order: leaving nations across the world turning increasingly towards China for support.

And further still:

Simply put, socialism is beating this pandemic where capitalism has failed.

Before triumphantly concluding:

The American recourse to xenophobia, nationalism, and Cold War antagonisms attempts to foreclose the revolutionary potential of this crisis, in which the fundamental incompatibility between capitalism and public health is becoming clearer to millions every day. Where a Cold War framework insists that Chinese “authoritarianism” has now contaminated the West, we must insist on the real roots of a [crisis] which has [been] manufactured by decades of neoliberal austerity which has left Western powers with emaciated health infrastructures unprepared to meet the needs of a pandemic. Cold War visions of zero-sum geopolitics no longer hold in a global pandemic that demands internationalist solidarity. Yet the ruling class has found an easy recourse in this time of crisis to simplistic ideological binaries of East vs. West, U.S. vs. China. As one pundit put it in Foreign Policy just this week: “China cannot be allowed to win.” This is a vision of the world antithetical to Wang Yi’s call to “to see our shared planet as a community for all.” America’s zero-sum framing reflects the fact that hegemony, power, and violence have always been core to the project of the West—one founded in the structures of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. For too many, the West was not just a fairy tale, but a nightmare. As the world comes together to heal from this pandemic, we might all finally awake from the nightmare of neoliberalism and colonialism and realize the dream of another world.

Among Qiao’s stated goals are to “challenge the U.S. rising aggression towards the People’s Republic of China and to be a bridge between the U.S. left, particularly the Chinese diaspora left, and China’s rich Marxist, anti-imperialist historical and contemporary political work and thought”; “to build a movement of leftists determined to push back against the U.S.’s increasing aggression against the China [sic] and to critically consider the current role of China and socialism with Chinese characteristics in contemporary geopolitics”; and “to disrupt Western misinformation and propaganda and to affirm the basic humanity of Chinese people.”

I quote at length here not so much to give full credence to a perspective that unabashedly takes a very positive view of “socialism with Chinese characteristics in contemporary geopolitics,” but to shed light on – or at least point to – a realm of discursive conflict that will likely only become hazier and harder to make sense of in coming years, especially given that – their stance on the CCP aside – Qiao’s critiques of US policy – including of US aggression against China – and of US pandemic response are all objectively accurate.

Perhaps this Collective seems too brazenly partisan for the taste of some readers in the US – though we should be mindful of how our own media consumption shapes our sense of the shape of the world – but closer to home, we can look to FAIR – a “national media watch group” the work of which I’ve admired for years – which in articles entitled Coronavirus Alarm Blends Yellow Peril and Red Scare and You Don’t Need to Believe China About China’s Coronavirus Success (from March 6th and April 2nd, respectively) makes much the same case about US corporate media’s anti-China bias and misrepresentations – approaching or tantamount to falsehoods – of the account of the early day’s of the disease’s spread in and around Wuhan. On the subject of whistleblowers, China’s transparency about the nature of the disease and the extent of its spread, and other key issues, FAIR’s accounts are much closer to Prashad’s or that of the Qiao Collective, than that of Laurie Garrett, and yet of all the individuals and entities in question, I’m most inclined to trust Garrett’s grasp of the facts here, though least inclined to relate to her politics.

A conundrum which I won’t attempt to resolve, lacking as I do the knowledge and information so to do myself, but circling back before I end this long post to what I wrote yesterday about the primaries in Wisconsin, they were, of course, not just “idiocy” just like the War on Iraq was not just “a mistake”; in searching for truly trustworthy media, I often circle back to The Intercept these days – though even First Look Media, The Intercept’s parent company, was founded by a billionaire: Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay – and I encourage you to listen to the latest episode – Pandemic Racism: The Wisconsin Primary, Disenfranchisement, and the Cost of Life – of Jeremy Scahill’s podcast, Intercepted (from which the text at bottom is copied directly).

If some things are uncertain, one thing is not. Republicans don’t care about the lives of Democratic voters any more than they care about the lives of most of the people in this country, and they definitely don’t care about Black people. Those of us who stand against authoritarianisms of all stripe may sometimes find ourselves befuddled by the layers of uncertainty that enshroud us, like mummies, in this existence, but beneath those layers meant to blind and deceive us, we go on living, and in certain moments – like the one I hope will roar to life in the wake of this pandemic – threaten to break all our binds and breathe free.

If you or someone you know needs emotional support or is contemplating suicide, resources include the Crisis Text Line, the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the Trevor Project, or the International Association for Suicide Prevention.

Postscript: I’ve neglected to mention intelligence agencies above, but they are always lurking in the background. In expelling each other’s journalists, both the United States and China have accused reporters of being spies; we know that US intelligence agencies (and Senator Richard Burr, among others) understood the threat posed by this novel coronavirus as early as January; and the New York Times has relied on CIA claims in recent reportage questioning the validity of Chinese COVID-19 data. The escalating diplomatic dust-up over blame for and origins of the spread of the virus is no doubt just the public face of a multifaceted conflict – the tip of this particular iceberg (a metaphor we may sadly have to retire in coming decades), and – taking for a moment a broader view – we know that from the Arab Spring overall, to the popular uprising in Syria, to the popular movement in defense of Democracy in Hong Kong, to name just a few examples, there have been both accusations and evidence that US intelligence agencies have manipulated authentic popular anger (or attempted to) in pursuit of ends altogether different from those of the popular movements in question.

Finally, ex post facto, here’s Noam Chomsky from today’s Democracy Now! (the above post was written yesterday, April 9th):

[The President] is desperately seeking some scapegoat that he can blame for his astonishing failures and incompetence. The most recent one is the World Health Organization, the China bashing. Somebody else is responsible.

But it’s simply — the facts are very clear. China very quickly informed the World Health Organization last December that they were finding patients with pneumonia-like symptoms with unknown etiology. Didn’t know what it was. About a week later, January 7th, they made public the fact to the World Health Organization, the general scientific community in the world, that Chinese scientists had found out what the source was: a coronavirus resembling the SARS virus. They had identified the sequence, the genome. They were providing the information to the world.

U.S. intelligence was well aware of it. They spent January and February trying to get somebody in the White House to pay attention to the fact that there’s a major pandemic. Just nobody could listen. [The President] was off playing golf or maybe listening — checking his TV ratings. Yesterday, we learned that one very high-level official, very close to the administration, Peter Navarro, in late January had sent a very strong message to the White House saying this is a real danger. But even he couldn’t break through.

My best take on all this at the moment is that while many in the US have overplayed Chinese malfeasance for their own cynical political reasons, some on the left – perhaps even Chomsky included here – are downplaying the granular details of how the initial weeks of the outbreak were handled in Wuhan; that is, in countering the false claims that have been widely propagated, including in the US corporate media, regarding China’s interactions with the WHO, etc., prominent left intellectuals who are not infectious disease experts may be papering over significant missteps – up to and including distortion of data and outright lying – that were happening in Wuhan in January even as the Chinese Government was simultaneously working with the WHO and others to address the novel and fast-moving crisis.

It was once my grim duty to clean out an apartment in which a person had died unnoticed. I’ll never forget what Jim – who, I know, reads these dispatches – did in flying, as I had, a great distance to help me in the accomplishment of that horrible task.  No burning sage could cover the haunting smell of death, and it was with alarm yesterday that – in catching the, in New York, not uncommon smell of sewage – I hesitated for a moment to wonder: Is there a body rotting behind one of these windows?

This is the what the situation has come to in our beloved, beleaguered City. Yesterday, I quoted AOC regarding the number of New Yorkers daily dying in their homes, and today Democracy Now! and Gothamist both have coverage of this sad phenomenon. According to Gothamist, “[A]nother 200 city residents are now dying at home each day [beyond those dying in the hospital], compared to 20 to 25 such deaths before the pandemic”; I have no reason to believe that this accounts for the discrepancy between State and City figures on the COVID-19 death toll in NYC (which I believe is a result of delays in reporting because the City is only counting deaths of those with confirmed positive tests for COVID-19, even though we know we’re dealing with a critical limitation of testing capacity).

The Gothamist piece goes on to explain:

The FDNY says it responded to 2,192 cases of deaths at home between March 20th and April 5th, or about 130 a day, an almost 400 percent increase from the same time period last year. […] That number has been steadily increasing since March 30th, with 241 New Yorkers dying at home Sunday — more than the number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths that occurred citywide that day. On Monday night, the city reported 266 new deaths, suggesting the possibility of a 40% undercount of coronavirus-related deaths.

To simplify, it’s likely that on top of the 4,000+ COVID-19 deaths which State figures already showed for New York City as of two days ago (April 6th), there may be as many as 2,000 additional deaths which haven’t been included in that count. Is it any surprise, then, that I’m now – I hope only – imagining the smell of death on the wind?

The President continues to bungle and politicize the pandemic response (from The Intercept, “If Your State Needs Help With Coronavirus From Trump, Don’t Be a Strong Woman Governor”), attack science (from InsideClimate News, “Trump EPA’s ‘Secret Science’ Rule Would Dismiss Studies That Could Hold Clues to Covid-19”), and engage in unabashed corruption and self-dealing (from Democracy Now!, “The New York Times reports Trump could personally profit if drug sales increase, because he owns a small financial interest in a French company that makes hydroxychloroquine.”).

In Florida, the “Unemployed […] Crowd Public Spaces Seeking Benefits”; in Wisconsin, “In-Person Voting [was held] in [the] Midst of [this] Deadly Pandemic”; in New York, a glimmer of actual good news – not the manufactured good news of plateauing daily death counts that hadn’t yet actually plateaued – in the form of reports that we may not need as many ventilators as was once projected.

The New York Times has a long-ish piece out – How Delay’s and Unheeded Warnings Hindered New York’s Virus Fight – detailing the various fuck-ups of our elected executives in February and March that landed us in this colossal mess. Of course, the Times is slightly more well-resourced than am I (and enjoys a different and unparalleled sort of access; just imagine, if my partner and I could easily reach Melissa De Rosa, “the governor’s top aide” – and we’ve tried – perhaps New York City would have Alternative Birthing Sites up and running; instead, pregnant people in the City are still being asked to deliver in our overwhelmed hospitals, often without adequate PPE, in many instances, without any access to testing, etc., etc.), but writing for the paper, J. David Goodman reached much the same conclusion that I – and others – had already reached in the first half of March: Namely, that the State and the City massively mishandled pandemic preparedness and response efforts, and that – although outsized blame sits with the Federal Government for what has befallen us here – the Governor and the Mayor acted with arrogance and incompetence; failed to ensure that anything approaching adequate supplies were on hand; missed clear signals that a full-blown crisis was already upon us in early March; acted far too slowly once they did acknowledge the reality of the crisis and, even then, took only inadequate half-measures; and, of course, engaged in their longstanding Abbott-and-Costello routine, which didn’t help matters either.

Now, at least 41 transit workers have died in NYC, and a reported 25 Department of Education employees. (Transit Center has a good, straightforward piece up about what it looks like to actually protect transit workers during a pandemic; much of this guidance, I imagine, has now been implemented by the MTA, though too late for those who have died or been made, unnecessarily, gravely ill, but – just as an aside – we should beware of the dishonest attempts that will be made to attack public transportation as a public good in the midst and aftermath of all this suffering.)

A friend writes: “I’m now in Milwaukee, which was insane yesterday. Voting lines definitely triggered the weeping reflex.”

I write back: “So sorry. What colossal idiocy. Hard not to have that reflex triggered at least daily at this point, but I think it’s part of what keeps us going.”

Bernie Sanders – the only presidential candidate, and one of the very few national political figures advancing a sane, just, humane response to the intersecting crises of the moment – has suspended his presidential campaign. It’s hard not to see the cynical push of the Democratic Party to continue having in-person primaries during the pandemic as an attempt to force Sanders’ hand. After all, he’s the only person in the picture who actually cares about people getting sick. Remember Tom Perez and the DNC’s stance on in-person voting during the pandemic? Now Wisconsin has had “the most undemocratic” election in its history.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden – who lies about just about everything (and whom, if he survives the coming months, it looks like I’ll be obliged to support in November) – waited until immediately following the Wisconsin primary, to which he’d previously given his de facto support, to announce, “Well, my gut is that we shouldn’t have had the election in the first place, the in-person election.”

Oh, that’s your gut, Joe? Where the fuck were you yesterday with that important news?!

Let me head off any criticism that may flow my way for, say, showing “a lack of unity” or “undermining the presumptive Democratic nominee,” by pointing out that anyones who think that our current President – a vicious and skillful bully with an obscenely well-funded smear machine behind him – won’t easily identify and exploit the many, obvious weaknesses (including credible claims of sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct) of this doddering candidate who’s been forced down our throats by a Thanatic Party establishment and the self-serving people around Biden (the people running a kind of Weekend at Bernie’s-style campaign with the sunsetting old man; a description that, save for a bizarre coincidence of names, I imagine would already have gained much more social media traction) are kidding themselves. We can only hope that the pandemic itself, or the President’s disastrous response to it, renders the incumbent a far less viable candidate in the fall.

Still, Wuhan has reopened. The sun also rises. Wuhan was shut down on January 23rd. Today is April 8th. That’s roughly 75 days. New York’s lax “Stay-at-Home” order went into effect on March 22nd. That would put us at about June 5th, optimistically.

I may write a little more this evening, but for now, (Zoom) yoga is calling.

Postscript: Relative to the Wisconsin primary, I’d intended to link to this piece  (“Media Silent as Poll Workers Contract Covid-19 at Primaries That DNC, Biden Campaign Claimed Were Safe”) following the Florida primary. Safe, if tragic, to expect similar consequences in Wisconsin. Florida primary was held on March 17th, so one signal that the primary contributed significantly to the spread of the disease would be a marked uptick in hospitalizations in the past week, and/or an uptick in the number of deaths starting around now. I’ll see if I can find that data.

Relative to the eventual reopening of New York, Governor Cuomo is rightly emphasizing the need for mass serological/antibody testing. Until we have clarity about whether reinfection is possible/likely, how long antibodies last, what consequences will follow from the rapid mutation of SARS-CoV-2, etc., we won’t know for certain the value of having antibodies, but the ability to test for them at scale will certainly be a major step, and can potentially differentiate our situation here from the one that was faced by the people of Wuhan.

Hard to believe that it was only a month ago that I wrote this post, my first focused exclusively on what then was obviously already a pandemic, but had not yet officially been declared one by the WHO. (I first addressed COVID-19 in a substantial way in this post from February 27th in which I wrote: “As COVID-19 spreads, I have an eerie feeling of watching, in fast forward, the global response to the climate crisis to date.”)

But on March 7th, I wrote the following: “According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, there are more than 400 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US […] and […] in New York State, Governor Cuomo has declared a state of emergency today as the total number of identified cases of COVID-19 (hereafter: the disease) in New York has roughly doubled for each of the past three consecutive days.

And: “Am I afraid of the disease personally? Not particularly, but I certainly don’t want to get sick. Do I fear its potential consequences? I’m terrified. And you should be too.”

And: “As with climate crisis, so with pandemic: We’ve waited until it’s too late to do anything at all, and now that the crisis is upon us – and as the rich and the kleptocrats, for the most part, shelter themselves and ask how, from this, they can profit – we’re panicking and scrambling to salvage from the worst-case scenario, something less bad. It’s a worthy goal, and (on the climate side), what I see as my life’s work. But relative to the virus, we should at least be realistic. If we were serious about containing it, we would have confronted capitalism month’s ago, at least in a limited way. Air travel, cruise ships, and tourism more generally have all been major, often intersecting, vectors for the global spread of the disease. Why did we continue flying, cruising, and touring as the virus rapidly circumnavigated the globe?”

And: “Here in New York, most of us continue to go about our daily lives. Is there something brave about this? Or something idiotic, or at least foolhardy? I think we need to confront the fact that we’ve already made a choice: That although this disease is quite different than the seasonal flu […] we will treat it in much the same fashion.”

Hard to believe: One month ago, the national confirmed case count was 400. Now, it’s 400,000. Fuck. What have we done? And what haven’t we? As Nate Silver argues, and I’ve addressed elsewhere (including yesterday), these case count numbers are largely meaningless, so variable, inconsistent, and insufficient have been our testing paradigms. Still, the 1000x increase in the last 31 days does paint a vivid picture of our distress. That amounts to a doubling of confirmed cases roughly every three days, though who knows what the rate has been of the actual spread of infection. Quite high. Very high. Astronomical. All of those seem roughly in the ballpark. Until we have mass serological testing or some other clever indicator of the extent of total past infection in the population, only rates of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death give us any objective sense of the scale of the crisis, which is, again, large. Very large. An extremely big crisis of historic magnitude.

But sadly, even those numbers – especially those around deaths – have been politicized. Here in New York City, mortality figures reported by the State and by the City vary widely, and media outlets have been highly selective – to the point of dishonesty – in their treatment of these numbers. Certainly, major media outlets must be aware that while the State appears to be announcing raw data on deaths (by county) on a daily basis (likely based on presumed diagnosis in the case where someone dies of pneumonia in the absence of a positive COVID-19 test), the City has been updating its data gradually (I suspect based on posthumous confirmed positive tests, but perhaps owing also to reporting delays from individual hospitals), such that, right now, the City shows a total death count in NYC of 2,738 (as of 4/06/2020 at 5 PM) while the State shows a total death count – again, in NYC – of 4,111 (as of 4/06/2020). That’s a difference of more than 50%.

The images that follow are drawn from, of all places, my Instagram stories (everything is being archived in this highlight). Please forgive, in advance, my jeremiad against the New York Times.

Of course, the reportage in recent days from the Times and other major media outlets has been confusing and contradictory. On the one hand, the above headline, on the other,  from Crain’s, “Cuomo extends stay home rules amid glimmer of hope,” followed the very next day by, “Coronavirus deaths in the state jump by 132 after two-day plateau“. What about the glimmer, though? I guess it flickered out. This is the problem with lying about objective facts in hope of manipulating public sentiment.

I quote Angeles Solis, an organizer with Make the Road’s COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund who was interviewed this morning on Democracy Now!:

While New York Governor Cuomo enjoys his moment of fame on a national scale, his actions behind the scenes have harmed thousands of New Yorkers. He passed an austerity budget that fails the working poor and favors the rich. Now, just on the topic of Amazon, while the governor of Kentucky immediately intervened when positive cases of COVID popped up in Amazon warehouses, our governor has yet to respond to the strikers calling on him to ensure their safety and the safety of the public. And in fact, this was the man who wanted to rename himself Amazon Cuomo. And we need the governor of New York to enact real protections for all undocumented immigrants, for all workers in our state. Leadership in front of a camera is one thing, but behind the scenes the budget has hurt our communities. It has taken resources from our schools. It has made cuts to Medicaid. And it has failed to tax the rich and billionaires in our state that have the ability to provide the resources and do their part to slowing the spread of this crisis.

It’s important that we not believe lies, and it’s important that the media not dutifully repeat them.

Why am I calling this a lie though? (Incidentally, it’s 7 PM and I hear the banging and hollering outside. I hope it moves the hearts of those for whom it’s meant.)

But why lie to us? Or couldn’t it be a simple misunderstanding? A mistake?

Could it simply be that the most well-resourced newsroom in the world missed obvious facts that were obvious to me, even from the confines of my own apartment? Just as it was remarkable, really only a few weeks ago, when we witnessed the whole Democratic Party establishment and “liberal” corporate media pivot in brutal unity to assert that Bernie Sanders would not be the Democratic nominee for president and that Joe Biden would (and hard to believe how little time has elapsed since all that transpired, as well, and that, as the unfortunate voters of Wisconsin can attest, there is still an epochally consequential presidential race afoot), so, too, the lining up behind the Governor’s agenda of the corporate media has been striking.

It seems clear to me that people at the Times knew perfectly well that the numbers they were (and still are) publishing are unrepresentative of the facts to the point of being dishonest. They’ll shield themselves by saying they simply consulted the City’s portal, but why didn’t they also consult the State’s? Are they incapable of addition? Or only of scrutinizing the agendas of powerful politicians – and of one politician in particular (the one who has the population dutifully hootin’ and hollering’ out their windows as they bang on pots and pans)?

We live in a democracy, if an increasingly fragile one, and part of defending our democracy is demanding that we are told the truth by our elected officials (a demand not often met, even in the best of times); holding these officials accountable when they lie; and creating institutions and structures (such as open data architectures and freedom of information laws) that make it possible for the public to access accurate and timely information about the state of our society and polity.

In that same piece on March 7th, I predicted: “We will take basic precautions – including handwashing, covering our sneezes, and perhaps even temporarily avoiding social practices like hugging and shaking hands – but we will otherwise continue to go about our daily lives. We certainly won’t subject ourselves (or be subjected by our elected officials) to anything like the draconian city-wide quarantines which were mandated across much of Hubei Privince by the (authoritarian) Chinese Communist Party. As a byproduct, many people will die […]”

I was, of course, both right and wrong in this, as we’ve obviously been under a “Stay-at-Home” order now for more than two weeks, but – based on the short walk I took earlier – we’re still not taking it very seriously, and we never have.

As I’ve written elsewhere – in looking to the work of Mike Davis, among others – in the global struggle against fascism, we need robust public debate about our pandemic preparedness (or lack thereof) and our pandemic response (including its troubling and authoritarian aspects). The President and his cronies are moving to take every advantage they can of this crisis. The CEO of Chase Bank (where I still, in spite of my best intentions, have accounts) is trying to position Chase – from a PR standpoint – as a leader in humane response to this crisis (I quote: “JPMorgan Chase has built its reputation on being there for clients, customers and communities in the most critical times.”) as Chase simultaneously moves to back the Keystone XL pipeline project currently being thrust recklessly and in the worst tradition of disaster capitalism down the throats and through the communities of indigenous and other rural folks, because it – the pipeline, that is; not the integrity of these communities – is “essential”.

These are lies, but not plain and simple. They are complex lies, lies that masquerade as a form of (ideological) truth. That the strength, pride, health, well-being, and very identify of “everyday Americans” is somehow caught up with the wealth, power, greed, and brutality of this country’s largest corporations and of the State itself, in all its disfiguring violence.

Mehdi Hasan is right in advising: “After Coronavirus, Let’s Never Forget: Republicans Recklessly Put Our Lives in Danger.” And I took heart in the (long) Twitter thread from Andy Slavitt to which my partner directed my attention this morning. There will be an after to this crisis, and our efforts, even in this country, are working to slow the spread and lessen the severity of what is already quite devastating, but could still easily be much more so. There will be an after, but not quite as soon as the New York Times, Governor Cuomo, and others have been promising us.

For a democracy to function, we need an informed, engaged populous. What this crisis has shown is that – after 40+ years of neoliberalism and the gutting of our public institutions and our public spirit, alike – we are floundering somewhere out in the no-person’s deep between authoritarianism and democracy. It’s a familiar place in this country, as in this City, but we should be demanding better.

To quote Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also from today’s episode of Democracy Now!:

In New York City alone, we are seeing 200 to 300 people dying in their homes a day — per day in New York City, inside their homes, in addition to the hospitalizations. These numbers that you’re seeing, all in all, many of them are confirmed coronavirus cases. As you mentioned, many people do not have access to tests, so a lot of these deaths that you are seeing, there are many more that are uncounted, that are being counted as pneumonia or being counted as other causes of death, because those people were not able to get a COVID-19 test.

We need more transparent data, not less. We need more public engagement, not less. We don’t need a population chided and brow-beaten into following rules they don’t understand (and so largely ignore). We need a population that is informed, gives a shit, and is backed up by functioning public institutions – including those of public health – in taking necessary action in the face of daunting circumstances. In short, we need more democracy, not less, and we certainly don’t need facile and numbing lies.

Death to fascism. One truth at a time.

 

 

According to CNN, “22 New York City subway employees have died of complications due to coronavirus.” Less than a month ago, the MTA was still prohibiting transit workers from wearing masks. The Post reports that the “NYC DOE [has been] tight-lipped about coronavirus cases among educators,” but we know for certain that at least one principal and one teacher have died from the virus. Remember when Mayor de Blasio was valiantly keeping the schools open just three weeks ago? Reliable personal accounts suggest that at least 10 nannies have already died from COVID-19 in NYC. Were these women – like employees of New York City Transit and the Department of Education – working well beyond when they should’ve been without protection? One wonders how their former employers are now feeling.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes it), but certainly, we knew enough soon enough to avert the above catalogued tragedies, and real leaders would already be coming forward to apologize for all the harm their bad decisions caused.

Skimming LitCovid today, this fragment – in particular, its neologism – caught my eye: “filtering out fact from fiction in the infodemic.” The infodemic. That’s nice. The abstract for the article – from the title of which the fragment is drawn – reads as follows:

As the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) continues to spread across the world, and the associated lung disease COVID‐19 remains difficult to treat, information from media and private communication flows at high speed, often through unfiltered channels. Much of this information is speculative, as it derives from preliminary and inconclusive studies, and creates confusion as well as anxiety. This phenomenon was recently labelled as “infodemic” by the World Health Organization.

Truer words never written, and it’s fascinating to see the variety of approaches being used in attempts to fill the gaps in our knowledge: Mass serological testing (for antibodies against COVID-19) will, of course, be essential, but researchers are also looking to sample sewage as a way of gauging presence and prevalence of the disease in a population, and according to at least one article, social media search indexes (SMSI) “could be a significant predictor of the number of COVID-19 infections” and “an effective early predictor, which would enable governments’ health departments to locate potential and high-risk outbreak areas.” Truly amazing of what we are collectively capable.

On the flip-side, the British Government has had to pressure social media platforms “after mobile phone masts in Birmingham, Merseyside and Belfast were set on fire amid a widely shared conspiracy theory linking 5G networks to the coronavirus pandemic.” According to Bill McKibben – who’s been writing furiously on this issue which I’ve also pointed to in recent weeks – “Big Oil is using the coronavirus pandemic to push through the Keystone XL pipeline“; as McKibben questions, “How could anyone be this low?” The answer as to who could be? Chase Bank and Alberta’s provincial government. Meanwhile, as this monumental crime unfolds and “70% of COVID-19 Deaths Are Black” in Chicago, in a Jungle Prince of Delhi-style gesture of exoticist (read: racist) neocolonialism, the New York Times found time to do a major feature on a South African couple who thought it wise to start their honeymoon in the Maldives on March 22nd. As the Times subtitles: “They were surrounded by a fleet of staff, who were stranded themselves, trapped in an eternal honeymoon in the Maldives. Their adventure continues.” One can only assume that “their” here does not refer to the “resort’s full staff” who are, according to the article “at hand, because of the presence of the two guests.”

To quote at more length than the piece deserves:

Government regulations won’t allow any Maldivians to leave resorts until after they undergo a quarantine that follows their last guests’ departure. Accustomed to the flow of a bustling workday, and the engagement with a full house of guests, most of the staff, having grown listless and lonely, dote on the couple ceaselessly. Their “room boy” checks on them five times a day. The dining crew made them an elaborate candlelit dinner on the beach. Every night performers still put on a show for them in the resort’s restaurant: Two lone audience members in a grand dining hall.

At breakfast, nine waiters loiter by their table. Hostesses, bussers and assorted chefs circulate conspicuously, like commoners near a celebrity. The couple has a designated server, but others still come by to chat during meals, topping off water glasses after each sip, offering drinks even though brimming cocktail glasses stand in full view, perspiring. The diving instructor pleads with them to go snorkeling whenever they pass him by.

I’d ask what heartless monster produced this dehumanizing drivel, but the piece has a byline, so no need. Truly amazing of what we are collectively capable.

Back in the world of people with hearts and minds working in tandem, as we confront persistent uncertainty about how long the isolation period should be, what fraction of cases are asymptomatic, and even what the infection fatality rate is, it’s understandable that Nate Silver (in an article shared with me by our friend Neha, who always sends me interesting data-driven content and is, coincidentally or not, married to a data analyst), would conclude that “Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless,” although with an asterisk. I’ve written and posted about this elsewhere, but to the point, present-tense instances from New York and from India are instructive. In New York, the Governor has intimated that we may be reaching “the peak” – emphasis on “may – and yet major news outlets, including the aforementioned Times and Crain’s are reporting optimistically on this potential good news. The Crain’s piece itself quotes the Governor:

We could either be very near the apex, or the apex could be a plateau and we could be on the plateau right now. […] You can’t do this day to day. You have to look at three or four days to see a pattern.

Such uncertainty and (justifiable) equivocation from the Governor has justified a raft of encouraging headlines, while, at the same time, the Times and others are muddying the water about the mortality data from New York City in a way that, as I wrote on Instagram, “reflect[s] either incompetence, or […] a lie.”

In India, researchers are now pursuing the hope that BCG vaccination (which is universal in India) may slow the spread of the disease. I’m with them in their hope, tendentious as it seems. In a country that is testing at one of the lowest rates in the world, where the Prime Minister is gaslighting the entire population into performing astrological rituals to counter the pandemic (in the process, threatening India’s electricity grid with the “prospect of a potential grid failure due to a human decision”), and “the fight against coronavirus looks and sounds like a Diwali celebration” as The Wire put it, “we know that perhaps we have nothing left but hope.”

Back in the United States, The Intercept reports that, “As Coronavirus Looms in Federal Detention, People Inside Are Being Denied [their] Constitutional Right to Speak with Lawyers”; that the “Untested Covid-19 Treatment” being promoted by the President “Can Have [a] Fatal Side Effect, Cardiologists Warn”; and that “Coronavirus Is Exposing How Foreign Crusades Bled America’s Domestic Resources Dry”; on this last point, all of this was foretold years and decades ago, but here we are now, living it.

Thank goodness for the likes of Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad and Yanis Varoufakis who have released a joint statement in “Solidarity with shack dwellers in South Africa”; imagine if the New York Times gave enough of a shit to direct their (remarkably powerful) attention thusly instead of towards the clueless vacationers holding a whole resort of ill-paid Maldivians hostage. Roy has an excellent, long piece in The Caravan on “Fiction in the time of fake news,” and I’ve linked to work of the other four in recent weeks. Would that more of the elite/corporate media-following world took their lead, instead, from these thinkers and their compatriots.

To point to a few more bright spots, Laurie Garrett has been out ahead of this pandemic since day one, and I found this interview with her worth listening to in spite of the sometimes self-indulgent host. This webinar with the brilliant Sonia Shah (and a full slate of thoughtful panelists) was amazing; Shah cut more to the heart of COVID-19 matters in 10 or 15 minutes than I’ve heard anyone else do in an hour, and her emphasis on the fact that a stay-at-home/lockdown approach will simply not be effective in many contexts (eg, places where people have no option either to safely stay at home without starving or to socially-distance where they reside) stayed with me, as did Garrett’s exasperated insistence that improved pandemic response is a function, not of of medical systems, or even of universal healthcare, but of a serious commitment to and investment in public health. I’ve been writing a lot about the latter point lately – especially in reflecting back on New York City’s own long, proud, seemingly-now-forgotten history of public health leadership – and I plan to write more on this very topic tomorrow.

Finally, our friend Krystal – the founder of Grouphug Tech and a recent Shark Tank winner – has put together this fundraiser to buy N95 masks (“[t]hrough [her] manufacturing partners in China” where her beautiful window solar chargers are made) for healthcare workers in NYC. I just donated and encourage you to do the same if you’re able to.

And last, but definitely not least, I’m copying this directly from the website of Jeremy Scahill’s podcast, Intercepted:

If you or someone you know needs emotional support or is contemplating suicide, resources include the Crisis Text Line, the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the Trevor Project, or the International Association for Suicide Prevention.

Stay healthy, stay sane, and stay engaged. In solidarity and love – especially for my fellow New Yorkers – for another tough week ahead.