The United States is now number one in the number of confirmed coronavirus deaths — news that’s coupled with other developments:
“The United States on Saturday has passed Italy for the most confirmed covid-19 deaths in the world, with more than 20,000 fatalities, a figure experts have called “an underestimation.” Much-smaller Italy has still lost more people per capita — roughly 31 of every 100,000 people there have been killed by the virus. If the death rate in the U.S. were to match that in Italy, more than 100,000 Americans would die.
“The news comes as Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said he hopes for “a real degree of normality” by November.”
The Washington Post also notes that:
“****A federal judge has blocked Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer from banning drive-in church services on Easter.
President Trump has rejected potential emergency funding for the U.S. Postal Service, which has suffered financially during the coronavirus pandemic.
Why is Trump willing to let the Postal Service go under? The Washington Post notes, among other things:
“Trump has long been antagonistic of the post office, calling it once in a tweet Amazon’s “delivery boy.” The Postal Service often serves as a vendor for Amazon, UPS, FedEx and other shipping companies, delivering the “last mile” service to often rural and remote areas. It is a crucial service for the Postal Service, for which package delivery is a growing part of its business.
“Much of Trump’s invective on the Postal Service is aimed at Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. Trump has advocated for increasing the prices on Amazon deliveries, against the recommendation of shipping experts and the agency’s own Board of Governors, a majority of whom Trump appointed.”
Is so, it suggests Trump is willing to have thousands of people lose their jobs just to get back at Bezos.
One question also would be: if the Postal Service goes under would this mean an end or major logistical problems for voting by mail in November? Donald Trump and the GOP have opposed voting by mail (but not in all cases).
Meanwhile, the Huff Post reports that the Trump administration has told employers not to worry about recording coronavirus cases:
“The Trump administration announced Friday afternoon that employers outside of the health care industry generally won’t be required to record coronavirus cases among their workers, a decision that left some workplace safety advocates incredulous.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is classified as a recordable illness, meaning employers would have to notify the Occupational Safety and Health Administration when an employee gets sick from an exposure at work. But the nation’s top workplace safety agency now says the majority of U.S. employers won’t have to try to determine whether employees’ infections happened in the workplace unless it’s obvious.
… OSHA, which is part of the Labor Department, released an enforcement memo Friday spelling out the recording rules. Employers in health care, emergency response and corrections would have to inform the agency when they become aware of a COVID-19 case that probably resulted from work. But other entities would not have to do so unless there was “objective evidence” that the transmission was work-related, or there was evidence “reasonably available to the employer” ? for example, if a whole slew of people who work right next to each other got sick.
The rationale: Those employers outside of health care “may have difficulty making determinations about whether workers who contracted COVID-19 did so due to exposures at work,” the memo stated.
But if employers don’t have to try to figure out whether a transmission happened in the workplace, it could leave both them and the government in the dark about emerging hotspots in places like retail stores or meatpacking plants.
Add to that an exhaustive New York Times piece that recounts in careful detail how Trump was repeatedly warned in January (more than once) about a possible pandemic and either fixated on other things or dismissed aides warning him as “alarmist.”
The title of the article — which has six bylines on it — is “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus.”
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.