Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Daily Report, March 17, 2020

Election nightmares, supply chain resiliency, and the scene in Teaneck, New Jersey.

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First Response

Today is Election Day and it absolutely should not be. Just yesterday the White House recommended limiting “social gatherings” to under 10 people and told older Americans to “stay home and away from other people.” There will be more than 10 people in polling places in Illinois, Arizona, and Florida, and most pollworker volunteers are older people.

The events in Ohio yesterday, where Mike DeWine (a standard-issue bland Republican who has transformed into a hero simply for taking things seriously) tried to postpone the election, got turned down by a state judge, and then closed the polls as a public health emergency, and got a blessing on that from the state Supreme Court, were farcical. “There was no way in good conscience we could order an election,” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (a Republican), which makes you wonder where the consciences of Florida, Arizona, and Illinois’ elections officials have gone.

Sam Stein is relaying some check-ins on voting locations around the country, and there and elsewhere voters report lines (probably due to some precautionary measures to wipe down machines after voting) where people aren’t keeping six feet of distance between one another, pollworkers without gloves, people sharing pens, election judges not showing up. Other locations seem to be doing a better job. But “scattershot” is not a way to handle an in-person voting experience when nobody should really be in person anywhere. 

It’s not just the fact of exposing people to potential infections, it’s the legitimacy of the election itself. Large swathes of the electorate will be afraid to go to the polls, and you cannot blame them. They have no recourse at this late date to find another option to cast a ballot. So was this election a reflection of the will of the population? Especially considering the tight connections in the presidential race between demographics and voting, can we trust the outcome?

There are a lot of villains in this scenario: county registrars, secretaries of state, governors, elected officials who just can’t help touting their candidacies with practiced lies about safety, voting rights advocates who put their common (and valid) concerns about suppression ahead of public safety, partisans who put their hatred of their opponents ahead of the same, even presidential candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who should have been forceful about postponement. Track these four states and see if hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people unnecessarily congregating leads to a spike in infections or a cluster from a particular polling place.

But more than that, we need to think ahead in America for a change. The November election, and all primaries in the summer, simply must be all vote by mail, and we need to put the funding and infrastructure in place now to do that. Otherwise we put ourselves in a moral quandary, between safety and legitimacy of the democracy. Texas Democrats have the right idea, calling for this to take effect in May. We have three illegitimate elections happening today. Let’s make that the last of them.

Vital Stats

The CDC site is not the most up-to-date. The New York Times lists 4,482 U.S. cases in 49 states (86 deaths). Johns Hopkins University has it at 4,661 (85 deaths). The COVID-19 Tracker puts the number at 4,380 cases (79 deaths), with, with 49,423 tests completed, up from 38,631 yesterday. The test growth is good, nearing South Korea levels. But the infections are multiplying as more get tested.

Supply Chains

Our virtual event with the American Economic Liberties Project is set for today at 3pm ET. There’s still time to register here.

Since we have seen a sudden stop to the economy’s demand, you might think that a focus on supply is outdated. But that would be foolish. The biggest near-term crisis we’re facing is the overwhelming of the health care system. That’s a supply issue; not just the supply of hospital beds and doctors but the supply of medical equipment and protective gear. Donald Trump told governors in a conference call yesterday to try to get ventilators themselves, with no help from the federal government. Testing is hitting a potential wall that seems almost impossible: a lack of cotton swabs to collect the specimens that get sent to the labs. The disposable plastic tips used in labs to transfer specimen liquids are also in short supply.

These are the kinds of little products that invariably have been outsourced from this country. And that’s before you get to the outsourcing of medications, mostly to China and China-dependent India. That process has its roots in both group purchasing organizations whose contracting practices made it unprofitable for generic manufacturers to stay in the United States, and other “power buyers” that control drug purchasing and also take a large cut. The common line in the medical supply world was that this outsourcing, this just-in-time logistics, made sense for everybody. The fragility embedded in the system was ignored.

And while a large headline at the New York Times blared that “there is plenty of food in the country,” a less-heralded Politico story raised the nightmare scenario: that countries, preserving their need to supply their own people, would cut off exports, putting export-dependent nations like the U.S. on uncertain footing. With China returning to something approaching normalcy, this threat has lessened somewhat. But it’s a reminder of how irresponsible we’ve managed the country. There are near-term answers to this, like rolling out the Defense Production Act and immediately addressing shortages with domestic production. But in the long term we must learn this lesson, and build resiliency into our systems.

I’m looking forward to the discussion today to address these issues more fully. I hope you can join me.

Our Coverage

Here’s a sampling of what we’ve been writing about the crisis at the Prospect:

I interviewed Barry Lynn, who had identified a fatal vulnerability with centralized supply chains in our pages 13 years ago. (Read the story)

Brittany Gibson on coronavirus and the elections.

Paul Waldman on this crisis as a defining moment for Donald Trump.

Bob Kuttner on the tools we should be using to battle the crisis.

Keyvan Shafiei on how sanctions are crippling the Iranian response.

All our coverage is available at prospect.org/coronavirus.

The View from Your Window

I have a relative in Teaneck, New Jersey, one of the most hard-hit areas. I asked her to sketch out what life is like. Here is her report.

It was a little confusing hearing our mayor say in the media that we should all be self-quarantining on the news, but the town had not officially given any details or definitions about what that really meant. The next day, we were given some more specifics.

Basically, we should all stay home. People could go to work if they had to. Also, only one person from a family can go into a store. Our main grocery store can only have 50 people at a time. I went today in search of toilet paper which has been sold out everywhere for about 10 days. There were two police officers at the door to make sure I was alone, and to keep count on how many shoppers were in the store. I used self-check out. There was an employee there to wipe down the pads between uses.

It’s quiet on the roads. We have a curfew from 8pm to 5am.

[Their son, a college student] is on spring break and his PS4 has saved it from being a total bust! After break, he’ll start online instruction for two more weeks. Who knows what Rutgers will decide after that. Our high schooler has plenty of school work coming her way virtually. She was in her room all day working. I’m seeing my clients via video sessions. [Her husband, a teacher] will be calling each of his 20+ second graders every day. They received printed packets of work and took home their books. As they complete work, they snap pics of it and text it back to him. The families can come to school every morning to pick up breakfast and lunch for their student. His students have his number and can call at any time to ask questions.

We all believe this is for the best. The cases were rising rapidly and we were getting very worried about the ability of our healthcare system to respond if things got out of control. My friend’s son has bacterial pneumonia and was test for the virus last Wednesday night. They still don’t have virus results. There must be 100s of people around here who have undetected, untested, or undiagnosed cases. 

Tell me about how you’re dealing with COVID-19 by emailing me at ddayen-at-prospect-dot-org.

Today I Learned

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