The list of Governors who ignored science and completed failed at COVID-19 response continues to grow. New York should have been a warning to these governors. They had weeks to get their acts together to provide a proper response. During this time they should have been putting contract tracing into place, instituting testing, and properly locking down. Instead they mocked Cuomo while stating how great their states were and rushed to re-open. These failures rest fully on the backs of the governors. These governors should not evade or ignore responsibility for what they failed to do. As the top executive in the state they own the COVID response; they provide the example and regulations for the residents in the state to follow. In public health emergency the executive branch of a state has broad powers to institute measures for public safety. The citizens of these states should hold their governors accountable for this public health disaster. The example today is South Carolina.... ‘Worse Than New York’: How Coronavirus Exploded in South Carolina https://www.thedailybeast.com/south-carolinas-coronavirus-outbreak-is-worse-than-most-countries South Carolina is besieged by the coronavirus, reporting more cases per capita than most countries. “We’ve completely lost control of the situation,” one doctor told the Beast. At one hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, emergency-room nurses are recycling used N-95 masks as doctors in other departments pitch in to staff COVID-19 units. At another, shortages have forced health-care staffers to work unprecedented overtime. All told, more than 75 percent of hospital beds are already occupied across the Palmetto State—and the tidal wave of new coronavirus cases is only growing. Simply put, South Carolina hospitals are under siege. “We’re going to be worse than New York,” one Charleston ER nurse told The Daily Beast. “But at least in New York, people took the virus seriously. Here, we’re in a war zone that people refuse to accept.” One of the earliest states to loosen coronavirus restrictions amid the pandemic, South Carolina is now struggling to address its brewing COVID-19 crisis. But while the growth rate of infected residents has exploded over the last week—making the state one of the newest hot spots for the deadly disease—many residents continue to ignore the problem. Last week, thousands of boaters gathered at Lake Murray to declare their support for President Trump, while organizers of a motorcycle event in Myrtle Beach next week say they have no intention of modifying or canceling the annual tradition. “Who is staying home? If you look at the roads here, nobody is staying home,” Sonny Copeland, the founder of Myrtle Beach Bike Week, which typically attracts thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts, told The Daily Beast. “Here in South Carolina, we’ve been acting normal since Day 1. We live in real life—this ain’t something politicians want us to do though.” To date about 898 people have died and 50,548 others have been infected with the virus in South Carolina—with roughly one in five tests returning a positive result. Overnight, the state experienced a 20 percent increase in the number of new cases, with about 2,300 positive tests, while the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control on Thursday announced that more than 75 percent of its total hospital beds are occupied. Of the 7,991 hospital beds currently occupied statewide, about 1,433 of them are being used by COVID-19 patients. South Carolina’s majority-black communities have been hit the hardest, according to media reports and statistics from the state health agency DHEC. Anthony Alberg, an epidemiologist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, told The Daily Beast he’s not surprised the state has failed to contain the pandemic—as its reopening occurred far too soon. “Early on, South Carolina took the essential steps needed to flatten the curve,” Alberg said. “The problem has been reopening too soon, which has led to a very large upsurge in COVID-19 cases that cannot be accounted for solely due to the increased testing for active SARS-CoV-2 infections.” South Carolina’s current surge of cases is so bad that it’s currently one of the top three worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world. In a New York Times study of the number of daily infections between June 28 and July 5, Arizona and Florida are the two most impacted areas in the world—followed by South Carolina, the country of Bahrain, and Louisiana. Hospitals are overwhelmed, understaffed, and short on supplies—unable to keep up with what researchers believe is the “tipping point” before the state loses control of the pandemic. “We’ve completely lost control of the situation in South Carolina—and it’s completely embarrassing,” Dr. Helmut Albrecht, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and Prisma Health, told The Daily Beast. “In the medical community, we feel like we are getting completely dumped on.” Some doctors insist the surge in South Carolina was inevitable, given the state officials’ response to the virus. Aside from closing schools, in the first month or so of the coronavirus’ spread in South Carolina, there was very little in the way of a statewide effort to slow the pathogen. As late as the end of March, the Republican-led state government was actively discouraging local public health efforts. “We affirm that local governments cannot exercise the emergency powers delegated to the governor by the general assembly,” Attorney General Alan Wilson stated on March 27. The general assembly is South Carolina’s state legislature. Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin, a Democrat, brushed off Wilson’s memo and continued with local social distancing measures. “The actions taken by the city are entirely within our authority,” Benjamin said. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster eventually caved and allowed cities to implement public health measures, while also taking some modest steps to enforce social distancing on a statewide level—such as closing some businesses. But many South Carolinians chafed under the restrictions. The first major public protest against social distancing measures in South Carolina occurred in Columbia on April 24. A few hundred people, many of them from out of town, marched or demonstrated from their cars. On April 24, McMaster was one of the first state officials to begin loosening coronavirus restrictions, announcing an executive order that allowed most retail and department stores to reopen with social distancing. The order came only after three weeks of “actual closure,” one Charleston ER doctor said. “Nobody really had the time to take it seriously,” said the ER doctor, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of professional retaliation. At the peak of social distancing in South Carolina in early April, DHEC estimated the population’s mobility to be down 42 percent compared to normal. By comparison, in New York City mobility dropped by more than an estimated 90 percent in late March, though metrics used to gauge mobility varied in the two appraisals. “The mindset from the government was that the ongoing pandemic was not that big of a deal, and people continued to live life as normal,” the ER physician added. “People went to the beach, they traveled—all without proper social distancing and mask use. Now, our hospitals are paying the price.” The ER doctor, who works at one of the largest hospitals in Charleston, a city that saw four deaths overnight and 325 new cases, also said that hospital staffers are being forced to treat patients without adequate protective equipment and work overtime. “It’s only going to get worse here as summer goes on. People flock down here to go to lakes, to Myrtle Beach,” the Charleston doctor added. “We’re just all really unprepared.” Myrtle Beach, a popular tourist destination along South Carolina’s coast, seems to be one of the biggest problem zones in the Palmetto State. A spring-break destination with a large elderly community, Myrtle Beach has contributed to increasing COVID-19 cases nationwide—including 50 cases in Philadelphia. An internal state report obtained by ABC News foreshadows that South Carolina’s COVID-19 outbreak has no end in sight. The July 4 report, which warned of the state’s hot-spot status, particularly in coastal counties, said that in Horry County, where Myrtle Beach is located, “cases continue to sharply rise” with “widespread travel to the area contributing to cases.” In Charleston, there is “no sign of cases slowing down,” according to the report. Locals, however, refuse to let the pandemic that has killed more than 131,000 people nationwide ruin their summer. “We’re making no changes. Everything is going according to plan,” Copeland, 61, said about the 81st Annual Myrtle Beach Bike Week. The bike rally, which was moved from May to July due to coronavirus concerns, will begin on July 13 and bring together thousands of motorcycle riders, residents, and out-of-town enthusiasts. Last May, Copeland said about 250,00 to 300,000 bikers came to the event. Even officials are not terribly concerned about the implications of such a large gathering, telling local news outlets that if residents are not comfortable they have the option of staying home. “The way I look at it, we don’t need the damn government to tell us what to do,” Copeland said. “We are smart enough to look after ourselves. We’re smart enough to know how to take care of ourselves, distance when we ride, and we have common sense.” “We’re not a bunch of teenagers who are going to hug and kiss on the beach,” he added. “This is about riding motorcycles, being in the wind. This is about enjoying life and riding. This is about common sense.” Albrecht believes large events like Bike Week are actively contributing to the influx of hospitalizations in the state. Calling the carelessness in the community “concerning,” the doctor added that South Carolina’s biggest problem right now is “community spread” and “things open that shouldn’t be open.” “Leadership is not only making certain good or bad decisions and they are leading by example,” Albrecht said, adding that he is “pro-opening” and believes it is a citizen’s personal responsibility now to ensure the state does not go into free-fall. “Right now, it’s all about regaining control over the spread of the infection. It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t have to be this way.” To date, South Carolina does not have a mask mandate despite recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. McMaster’s office did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment about the COVID-19 increase in South Carolina, but the governor has previously bashed some preventative measures, calling mask mandates “impractical” and “ineffective.” “There’s no power on Earth that can follow everyone in the state around to be sure that they are following the rules,” McMaster said in a June 26 press conference. While the state government has all but surrendered to the virus, cities are continuing to fight. Columbia, Charleston, Myrtle Beach, and more than two dozen other municipalities have, since late June, passed ordinances requiring people to wear masks while indoors in public. The city-level rules include lots of exceptions—and enforcement on the street level is weak. Columbia delegated enforcement of the mask rule to fire marshals and parking-meter monitors instead of making it a policy priority. For the Charleston ER nurse, the lack of strong government action is directly correlated to the dire ICU situation in her hospital. “Asking people nicely to follow the CDC guidelines is not going to change anything,” she said. “At the end of the day, people don’t want to stay inside, wear a mask, or stop living their lives any longer. People can be selfish—and that choice is seen every day in my overflowed hospital.”
Another failure - Abbott Texas border county had 'model' Covid-19 response – then the governor stepped in Officials in Latino Starr county say Greg Abbott’s reopening orders have rendered them toothless, and cases are surging https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/10/texas-starr-county-covid-19-model-greg-abbott Five residents from Starr county on Texas’s southern border died on a single day last week after contracting Covid-19. New infections in the rural border community of around 65,000 people have soared in recent weeks, and two intubated patients had to be airlifted to Dallas and San Antonio when overwhelmed local hospitals couldn’t care for them. Texas has become one of the US’s new coronavirus hotspots, with new confirmed cases surging to around 14% of the country’s total, when measured by a seven-day average. Elective surgeries were paused this week as the state tries to free up hospital beds for increasing numbers of Covid-19 patients. But Starr county’s public officials knew months ago that is was especially vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic: roughly one in three residents lives in poverty, a sizable slice of the population doesn’t have health insurance, and risk factors such as diabetes and obesity prevail. To protect their constituents, who are more than 99% Latino, they acted fast to curtail the contagion. They developed what officials said was at the time the only drive-through testing site south of San Antonio. They closed schools. They implemented a stay-at-home order, curfew and mandatory face coverings. Only when necessary, they flexed their authority to fine and even jail anyone who flouted the law. Their strategy worked. The first few coronavirus cases trickled into Starr county in late March, but for three weeks in April, there were no new infections. Before the end of May, weekly tallies of new confirmed positives never once reached double digits. Even seasonal influenza, coughs, colds and fevers that would normally travel through the community suddenly vanished. “What we did here was a model for the rest of the nation to follow, but it was lost,” said Joel Villarreal, the mayor of Rio Grande City, one of four small cities in the county. “In fact, I think we had it right.” The inflection point came when the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, unilaterally decided to reopen the state, and stripped local governments of their power in the process. By early May, malls, restaurants, movie theaters, gyms and salons threw open their doors, albeit at limited capacity. Texans lost their fear of the virus as politicians told them it was safe to re-emerge from lockdown, and once masks became politicized, localities could no longer require their use. “We had local input to close down. But to reopen, we didn’t have any, at all,” said Villarreal. When local officials contacted the attorney general’s office for clarity about what orders they could continue to enforce, they were informed that the governor’s policies superseded their own. Any attempt to give feedback fell on deaf ears. Both Eloy Vera, the county judge, and Villarreal agreed that the state had to reopen at some point, but they felt Abbott’s approach was too much too fast, and ignored science. “I think if it would have been slower, we could have kept the curve down,” said Vera. Instead, “our numbers are exponentially increasing, and our hospitals are getting to capacity.” They have tried to devise workarounds to protect their communities, including incentivizing businesses to act responsibly. At Border Town Foods, Amando Peña requires all of his employees to wear masks and face shields. He has lost a handful of customers because he continued to enforce mask-wearing at his stores, even when the law and big-box retailers didn’t. “I was like, ‘OK, well, that’s all right,’ because our employees need that protection,” Peña said. “They deserve that respect. So I don’t care that some customers left.” As of last week, Starr county can now mandate face coverings again. But the local government’s other emergency protocols – including a curfew and quotas on gatherings – remain toothless in practice. In Rio Grande City, attorneys are trying to work out what can actually be enforced. “Here we are, fighting a global pandemic, and we’re having to figure out loopholes on how to keep people safe. That is so ridiculous,” Villarreal said. Meanwhile, the virus is spreading like wildfire in a community woefully underequipped to handle an outbreak. About 20 members of a single family contracted Covid-19 after a get-together, as did 30 or 40 attendees at a 500-person wedding, Vazquez said. A local nursing home system has faced a barrage of cases, and altogether, 936 Starr county residents have tested positive for the disease. “Basically, you have no chance to be admitted in a hospital here in the Valley,” said Jose Vazquez, the county’s health authority. As the situation grows dire, people are starting to realize that “if you were to get sick, nobody can guarantee you any longer that you are going to be doing fine”. Vazquez has also tested positive. Although Texas’s official count is lagging, the county has already suffered 18 fatalities, according to its own data. Its local hospital only recently expanded the Covid-19 unit from eight beds to 18, and in one day, the unit’s occupancy rocketed from eight to 13. “We’re the ones down here. We’re the ones who know our community, we know what our needs are,” said Villarreal. “I say this to the governor: you cannot tie my hands at all.”
And yet, New York has the most number of deaths? What about New Jersey? What about Michigan who has one of the highest death percentages as to infected people. Extreme liberal states run by Democrat governors have the most deaths but, nothing to see here. LOL https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/country/united-states/
Give him the benefit of the doubt. He has hundreds of articles to sift through. I'm sure he'll post some on them. Its a tough job posting articles all day.
Another failure - Newsom. There is plenty of blame for governors on both sides of the aisle. "The real problem with the Republican governors is not their mistakes but their arrogance. Until this current surge, they bragged that their approach was the right one, proof that the Republicans had the answer even as Democratic states were struggling. No wonder their critics pounced when it turned out they weren’t right. " The other problem with some Republican governors is that their administrations have deliberately hidden or manipulated COVID data to drive their re-open agenda. Why Isn't California Criticized Like Florida on Covid-19? It’s a blue state, of course. But the virus doesn’t discriminate based on party affiliation. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...alifornia-criticized-like-florida-on-covid-19 Why aren’t critics of pandemic reopenings talking about California in the same breath as some other states? And what does that say about combating Covid-19? The pundits always single out Florida. Or Texas. Or Arizona. Or all three. Consider Paul Krugman’s column on Monday. Krugman, one of the liberal stalwarts on the New York Times’s op-ed page, believes that the reason the U.S. is “losing its war against the coronavirus” is Republican politics. He pointed to President Donald Trump’s mid-April tweets calling for states to end their lockdowns and then wrote: Republican governors in Arizona, Florida, Texas and elsewhere soon lifted stay-at-home orders and ended many restrictions on business operations. They also, following Trump’s lead, refused to require that people wear masks, and Texas and Arizona denied local governments the right to impose such requirements. They waved away warnings from health experts that premature and careless reopening could lead to a new wave of infections. Krugman is hardly alone. “Amid escalating infections, Florida, once held up by President Trump as a model for how to manage the novel coronavirus, is faring poorly,” the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday. “How Arizona ‘lost control of the epidemic,’” a Post headline read over an article that described the state as “an epicenter of the early summer coronavirus crisis.” Texas? “Here we are,” wrote Houston resident Mimi Swartz in the Times in late June, “with a jittery populace and the Texas Medical Center’s coronavirus website competing with TikTok. ICUs in Houston are at 97% capacity, with ‘unsustainable surge capacity’ predicted for hospital beds in late July.” No question about it: Things have gone badly for the three states since early June. The number of new cases being recorded by each is staggering, and they threaten to overwhelm hospitals in Houston, Miami and Phoenix. Texas and Florida both have more than 200,000 recorded cases of Covid-19, twice what they had less than three weeks ago. Arizona, a much smaller state, passed the 100,000 mark on Monday. There is also no getting around that the Republican governors — Ron DeSantis of Florida, Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona — have made plenty of mistakes, which the media has pounced on. As Krugman noted, Abbott and Ducey not only refused to issue statewide mask mandates, they wouldn’t let local governments do so, either. They all began the reopening process ahead of their own state guidelines. A particularly egregious error, it’s clear now, was allowing bars to reopen, which attracted young people who wanted to party. The vast majority of new Covid-19 victims are in their 20s and 30s. But I repeat: What about California? Virtually everything you can say about Texas, Florida and Arizona can also be said about California, starting with the shape of its Covid curve, which climbs gradually until mid-June and then explodes. It took almost two months for California to record its first 100,000 positive cases; it took less than three weeks to record its most recent 100,000. As of July 7, California was second only to New York with 277,000 positive cases. Los Angeles is said to be close to running out of available hospital beds. Another similarity is that the number of people who have died of Covid-19 in California is remarkably low — just more than 6,500 in a state of almost 40 million people. In Arizona, the number of deaths just crossed 2,000. In Florida, 4,009 deaths have been recorded, and in Texas, the number is 2,813. New Jersey has recorded more deaths than all four states combined. Since the surge in the South and Southwest began in early June, a theory has developed as to why the death toll has remained relatively low, though it has begun to climb in recent days. Partly, it’s that doctors have a better understanding of how to treat Covid-19; drugs such as remdesivir are among the factors that have apparently made a difference. But it’s also because, well, let’s listen to DeSantis explain what’s going on: If you look at that 25-34 age group, that is now by far the leading age group for positive tests. … You can’t control them. … I mean they’re younger people. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. Abbott and Ducey have offered similar explanations. And so has Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. “The young invincibles,” Newsom called the Californians who have been infected in recent weeks. Indeed, several articles about Newsom’s remark included a photograph of a crowded California beach, full of people without masks — exactly the kind of photo that went viral on Twitter a few months ago when the beach in question was in Florida. As you may recall, the hashtag read #floridamorons. It’s pretty obvious why California and Newsom haven’t been pummeled the way Florida, Texas and Arizona have. California is a Democratic state. Newsom is a Democratic governor. Bringing up California’s pandemic woes punctures the critics’ narrative that Republican mismanagement is the reason for the scary surge in infections. In truth, Newsom has done many of the same things that his Republican counterparts are being criticized for. He ceded the reopening process to the counties — which raced to end the lockdown before it was wise. Like the Republican governors, he declined to issue a statewide mask mandate, though he did encourage people to use them. He reopened bars, which caused the same problems in California that it caused elsewhere. In recent days, Newsom has put the brakes on the reopening in much of the state. He issued a mandatory mask order. He shut down the bars, and indoor dining. But that’s exactly what Abbott has done in Texas. All of these governors are trying to recover from mistakes. Why did DeSantis, Abbott and Ducey reopen their states so early? For the same reason Newsom did. Not to curry favor with Trump, but because they were all desperate to get businesses up and running and people back to work. Did it backfire? Yes. But it also explains why 38 states — red and blue alike — are experiencing rising numbers of positive cases, according to data compiled by the New York Times. They all opened too early. And it backfired on all of them. The real problem with the Republican governors is not their mistakes but their arrogance. Until this current surge, they bragged that their approach was the right one, proof that the Republicans had the answer even as Democratic states were struggling. No wonder their critics pounced when it turned out they weren’t right. But in their own way, the critics are just as wrong-headed. Yes, Trump and his administration have failed mightily, and they deserve every bit of criticism that is heaped on them. But party affiliation is not the reason cases are on the rise in various states. Finger-wagging is counterproductive and even beside the point. The real question is how to get Covid-19 under control and the country going again. In the face of this terrible, unseeable virus, hubris has no place, not from Republican governors or progressive pundits. There’s only one right attitude: humility.
What we should focus on is finding a cure the shortest possible time and failing at that, concentrate on mitigating the number of deaths thru the use of various methods like steroids, remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin or combos of those drugs, whichever works as each person is different with different health issues. Doctors are already doing the latter which is a step in the right direction. More people now are surviving as a result of those efforts. Of course, you do not hear extreme liberal media mention it because it goes against their agenda of shutting down everything.
And now you're spamming him. I've no problem if he wants to show both sides of the argument for discussion. But I'm not sure you can blame the governors for the Covid response across the board outside of the "Captain is responsible for the ship" argument. There hasn't been a single governor that did an outstanding job, and this has to do with the fact that there simply was no preparedness in this country. That goes back multiple administrations and everyone shares the blame.