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OROn Monday, Republican Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, a close ally of Donald Trump and a frequent visitor to the White House, opened his daily coronavirus briefing with a big announcement. “Today is May 4,” he said, “the first day of relaxed restrictions across the state.”
With his statement, Ricketts placed Nebraska at the forefront of the reopening of the United States. Churches can now open their doors to worshipers, wedding bells and funeral homes will be heard once again, hospitals can reschedule elective surgeries, and most Nebraska residents will be able to resume haircuts, nails taken care of, the bodies massaged and the skin tattooed.
The restaurants serve diners again, albeit at half capacity. Nebraska Crossing has become one of the first shopping malls in North America to welcome shoppers.
It is a happy day in sunny Nebraska.
But statistics paint a very different picture. In the last seven days, the state recorded a jump of 57% in the daily number of new cases, to a total of 7,190. The death rate is also increasing sharply, standing at 90.
Measured at Covid-19 cases per 100,000 residents, Nebraska is battling the worst disease outbreak outside of early critical points in New York and the Northeast, Louisiana and Illinois, all of which are now seeing a declining pandemic.
Nebraska’s lack of preparation for the challenges involved in the reopening is even more alarming. According to Covid’s Exit Strategy, a group of crisis and public health experts with experience in the White House and the US government. Nebraska ranks 49th out of 50 states in terms of its willingness to restart its economy.
We have to open our country. We cannot keep our country closed
That country has managed to contain the virus, largely by testing 151 per thousand, eight times more.
“Opening prematurely, which is happening in most states in the United States right now, is only going to make things worse,” said Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in San Diego. “It will inevitably lead to more cases of infection, then to intensive care patients, and then to deaths. Most of the lives we have lost so far have been unnecessary, so why do we want to increase that number? “
Nebraska is not an aberration within the United States: At least 42 states have begun easing the restrictions. Many of those states, like Nebraska, are far from having the disease under control and insufficiently prepared to face the challenges that lie ahead.
Nor is it Nebraska’s decision to reopen randomly or by chance. It is the direct consequence of White House policy.
It is the product of Donald Trump’s latest bet, and arguably the most impressive. He is rolling the dice not only in his own political life before the November election, but also in the lives of tens of thousands of Americans.
A day after Governor Ricketts announced the reopening of Nebraska, Trump praised those states that were rapidly moving to regain the economy even as the virus continues. The President decided not to wear a mask while touring a Honeywell factory in Arizona that makes the same masks that he rejected.
In the background, the factory sound system. damned Live and Let Die.
Trump has been criticized for showing a lack of empathy in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, but even by his own standards, his comments at Honeywell were in cold blood. “We have to open our country, we cannot keep our country closed,” he said.
When asked if reopening the economy too soon could come at a cost, he replied with a euphemism for death. “Will some people be seriously affected? Yes, “he said.
For the army of epidemiologists, health crisis experts, biostatisticians, and other scientists who have hands-on experience fighting global diseases, Trump’s insistence on moving forward with the reopening of the United States while the virus is still on the rise amounts to stirring the white flag.
“You don’t stop fighting a war in the middle, just because it has become expensive or burdensome. And you can’t ask a virus for a truce, “wrote Jeremy Konyndyk, a key player in the 2014 US response to Ebola, on Twitter. Triumph, he added, was “surrendering to the virus instead of fighting it”.
The United States now has more than 1.2 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 74,000 deaths, far more than anywhere else in the world. By the end of this month, the country is almost certain to surpass the bleak milestone of 100,000 deaths, and epidemiologists are already talking about 200,000 in late summer.
More troubling for those states that are now lifting restrictions, a new analysis this week showed that if you exclude New York, where the number of new cases is declining, the rest of the US. USA It is still on an inexorably upward curve.
However, there remains a lack of urgency within the Trump administration in terms of its response to the crisis. There are no signs, in particular, of a federal push to increase testing, without which states like Nebraska will begin to reopen blindfolded.
“It’s hard to understand White House politics,” said Howard Forman, a professor of public health at Yale University. “Why wouldn’t you prioritize the only lever we know works: the central coordination of a mass testing strategy? However, that has not been a national strategy in the United States.”
We should buy some time to let science do its work; instead, we are seeing the opposite: lack of leadership, chaos, deaths
Topol is equally baffled by Trump in encouraging states to go ahead with reducing the blockade before security measures are put in place. “Most of the country went through mitigation for several weeks, with dire economic consequences. Why did we do that if we are going to abandon that strategy in defiance of American protection?
Topol’s frustration with the federal leadership is reinforced by what he sees as optimistic signs from science. A study suggests the antiviral drug. remdesivir promises to help Covid-19 patients recover faster; Monoclonal antibodies are being experimented with, which could offer possibilities for virus treatment and prevention; and, above all, the race to find a vaccine is happening at a previously unimaginable speed.
“Science is advancing at a surprising rate and everything is positive. We should buy some time to let science do its work; instead, we are seeing the opposite: lack of leadership, chaos, deaths.”
As one state after another revolves to begin reopening, an especially thorny question has begun to drive us crazy: what is the value of an American life? Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, expressed the thought most frankly this week.
“The fundamental question, which we are not articulating, is how much is a human life worth? The faster we reopen, the greater the human cost will be due to the loss of more lives, ”he said.
Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who has been central to the federal Covid-19 response, addressed the issue. “How many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept?” He said, adding that the states that lifted the restrictions were “inviting a rebound.”
One reason states like Nebraska can gleefully choose to reopen, despite the risks, is that the impact won’t be immediately visible. “It takes him a while to build a wave,” Forman said. “I guess when the states reopen, we will see a wave build sometime in the late summer that will start to get more and more terrifying.”
Topol agreed. “In the first days of the reopening, everyone feels great. The weather is perfect, people congregate. Come back in a month and see how it goes. “
This virus has not only exposed, but has exacerbated the deep and structural racial inequalities that have killed people of color for generations.
There is another reason for complacency with the virus: Many people cannot see its ravages where they live. As the coronavirus crisis deepens in the United States, evidence is mounting that its impact is concentrated among certain racial and ethnic groups and older Americans, often behind closed doors.
Although someone is at risk from the contagion, the virus has swept prisons and nursing homes and charged especially high in African American and other minority communities. “It is very clear that this virus has not only exposed, but exacerbated, the deep and structural racial inequalities that have been taking lives and livelihoods of people of color for generations,” the former Democrat candidate told the presidency, senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. Guardian.
“The staggering health disparities we have seen with Covid-19 will not simply disappear as states begin to reopen, but will remain and worsen. This means that communities of color will continue to face greater health risks due to the president’s reckless and irresponsible orientation. “
The pattern that Booker describes is amply illustrated in Nebraska. Here, the pandemic is hitting hardest in the center of the state, where there is a concentration of meat packing plants with a largely immigrant workforce.
“People are scared,” said Audrey Lutz, executive director of the Multicultural Coalition, a nonprofit organization that works with immigrants in the area. “Fear is widespread. You have to support your family, you know many people who are sick, maybe you are sick too, so what do you do?
JBS Beef, one of the most affected meat packing plants, has had hundreds of confirmed cases of Covid-19, but has remained open after Trump declared meat plants to be “critical infrastructure.” Health authorities have struggled to maintain control over the plant as an incubator for the disease, an almost impossible job due to the lack of evidence in the area.
Lutz said the national guard was providing 300 tests a day for Hall County and the surrounding health district that JBS Beef covers. At that rate, it would take 12 days to evaluate every employee at the plant, let alone the other 80,000 people in the area.
“It is devastating,” said Lutz. “People in power are not affected by the decisions they make. In our state, those people are white and privileged, while those who have to accept their decisions are minorities and immigrants, and they are paying a terrible price. ”
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