Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Unsanitized-052820
A rally at the state Capitol in Harrisburg, PA on May 15. Days later, a Republican legislator tested positive for COVID-19, and the caucus didn't tell their Democratic colleagues.
First Response
The nation hit two milestones within the last 24 hours. The official death toll from coronavirus surpassed 100,000 Americans, and first-time jobless claims since the onset of the virus went above 40 million. In reality, we know that both of these figures were reached a while ago. Analyzing obituaries gets at the excess death problem and reveals that far more Americans died above the normal rate for this time of year than are reflected in the coronavirus death statistics. And strained unemployment systems are likely just getting around to processing older claims, not just dealing with new ones. This Census Bureau survey shows that nearly half of all households have lost income, which is a closer depiction of reality in the crisis.
We know that states have an incentive to downplay the fatality and case numbers if they want to restart their economies; the data is linked to reopening. And we know that they have been doing so. At least a dozen states “have inflated testing numbers or deflated death tallies by changing criteria for who counts as a coronavirus victim and what counts as a coronavirus test.” Other states aren’t even reporting hospitalizations or changing the metrics for what constitutes “safe” for the public. Thumbs are on scales everywhere. The data isn’t accurate, and I don’t believe it to be consistently inaccurate.
All of this bad data risks lives, if the threat of community spread is downplayed and used to allow for more congregating. But of all the reports of hidden information and official deception, the situation in the Pennsylvania legislature takes the cake.
Read all of our Unsanitized reports
If you asked Republicans in the state legislature the number of coronavirus cases among their members, up until yesterday they would have said “zero.” But state House member Andrew Lewis announced on Facebook that he had contracted the virus a week ago. He claims to have self-isolated and hadn’t been at the Capitol. But this was a time when state Republicans were demanding to reopen the state. So Lewis didn’t tell anyone, nor did any other Republican member of the legislature, despite staffers and other members going into quarantine. Democrats working side-by-side with their colleagues were kept completely in the dark.
One House Republican who claimed to be isolating since May 21 was spotted that day, before being informed, giving a speech in the state House, without a mask, arguing for reopening Pennsylvania. That guy’s also only quarantining for a week, less than the two-week guideline. Even now, Republican spokespeople are not identifying how many were told to isolate as a result of the positive test, though they disclosed that four lawmakers were in quarantine. The Capitol remains open.
This is just a microcosm of what states have been doing: hiding information to push an agenda. The difference is that the universe of people put at risk—legislative Democrats in Pennsylvania—is smaller and more tangible. And those Democrats are rightfully livid, calling for the resignation of the state House speaker.
It’s a lesson that we really don’t know the scope of this virus. We’re learning that outdoor activity is probably safe, that you really need prolonged contact to get infected. The statistics we have show improvement over the past month. But we don’t know who the spreaders are. In some cases they’d rather not identify themselves. And without that full spectrum of information, we cannot really speak with confidence about this pandemic.
Odds and Sods
At the Prospect today, we commissioned a debate on the two options for supporting workers amid a crisis: enhanced unemployment or government-funded paychecks. It’s a clarifying debate for how those on the left think about the labor force and its challenges. For government-funded paychecks we got Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), co-author of the Paycheck Recovery Act. For enhanced unemployment, we got researchers Wesley Bignell and Marshall Steinbaum, who have been giving the most powerful arguments for this approach. I think it worked really well, check it out.
Also today, Brittany Gibson reports on the voting rights lawsuits, particularly regarding mail-in balloting, surging across the country.
All of our coronavirus coverage can be found at prospect.org/coronavirus. And email me with tips, comments, and experiences.
Fed Bailout Update
Here are a couple related items to our feature story yesterday about the Federal Reserve stealth bailout of the investor class. As if to provide me with evidence of the negative consequences of running a bailout through backstopping private-sector credit markets, Boeing yesterday revealed cuts to more than 12,000 jobs, with “several thousand more” on the way. The aircraft maker has previously targeted around 16,000 cuts. Now this is a company that just secured $25 billion in bonds, and could have taken $70 billion. But it doesn’t have enough to pay its workers, and because it was a private transaction there were no conditions on retaining them. It reinforces that only investors were given insurance protections in the Fed rescue; workers are left on their own.
Since this corporate bond-buying program will last at least five years before all the bonds roll off, if not perennially as the Fed reinvests interest income, what the central bank represents and how it operates is of paramount importance. Graham Steele has a great piece on that subject, pointing out that the Fed “values numbers and markets over people and experiences.” Putting it in a position to be the nation’s primary economic policymaker, given those values, is not only a failure of Congress, but it dooms the economy to operate under the Fed’s predilections and rules, which are not neutral at all. Read the whole thing.
Finally, the Fed bailout correlates to this updated statistic from the Institute for Policy Studies: since March 18, as 100,000 died from COVID-19 and 40 million lost their jobs, billionaires in America have added $485 billion in wealth. There’s something wrong with a public policy that produces such an outcome.
If a Tree Falls
Former Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota inspires extreme opinions for some reason, but as a reporter he typically dares to go into hidden corners to expose deceit, for which we should all be grateful. This story about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo giving nursing home executives immunity from prosecution over coronavirus outbreaks is a perfect example. His aides snuck the provision into a budget bill. Deaths in New York nursing homes have hit at least 5,000, and that’s likely an undercount. Cuomo’s administration also allowed sick patients to be readmitted into nursing homes without coronavirus testing as recently as March, and eased pressure on nursing homes to record deaths.
The final piece of this puzzle is the $1 million in independent expenditure support Cuomo got from the Greater New York Hospital Association for his re-election campaign in 2018. GNYHA lobbies for hospital networks, including large nursing home networks. Hospital systems are major contributors to campaigns, and have lots of clout in state capitals.
This is certainly a scandal, but it’s a curiously muted one, because the national media has been building up Andrew Cuomo as a hero since the crisis began, mainly for appearing at press conferences and yelling a lot. Protecting donors over the rights of nursing home patients was apparently also part of Cuomo’s crisis response, but there’s little incentive for the pre-digested media narratives to incorporate that.
Today I Learned
- An “avalanche” of evictions expected. This is a policy choice! (New York Times)
- The hectic frenzy of federal contracting for medical equipment has inevitably led to billions given to brand-new firms and possible fraudsters. (ProPublica)
- Four million Americans are getting stimulus checks as prepaid debit cards, a good idea made bad by the fact that it comes in a plain white envelope that looks like junk mail. (CBS Marketwatch)
- Michalle Lujan Grisham, the governor of New Mexico, apparently got a jewelry store to open for her during a stay-at-home order. (KRQE News 13)
- Millennials suffering two enormous economic blows during their prime earning years. (Washington Post)
- The financialization of Hertz meant that its minority ownership, led by Carl Icahn, could engineer cash even as the company failed. (Epsilon Theory)
- RIP Larry Kramer. Here’s his friend Anthony Fauci on his life as a resister in a time of plague. (New York Times)
