New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
One cannot come back without first going away, and consequently NA Confidential is winding down after 16 years, but let's not neglect the selection of New Albany’s "Person of the Year" for 2020.
As in 2019, there'll be no run-ups and time-wasting teasers, although our basic definition remains intact, as gleaned so very long ago from the pages of Time magazine.
Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States news magazine Time that features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year."
Obviously the biggest story of 2020 was the COVID-19 pandemic, as yet ongoing in spite of the bleating and jabbering of my fellow aging white men.
Mercifully the pandemic has kept Mayor Jeff "Dear Leader" Gahan stranded in his Down Low Bunker to an even greater daily extent than in previous years, thus sparing us from the worst excesses of his forever fawning ProMedia propaganda machine.
And so, with sincere gratitude, we thank Jeeebus for small favors like this temporary shrinking of the mayoral personality cult.
Meanwhile, we survey the field in search of the next biggest story behind only the coronavirus itself, and ironically, find the answer in the pages of Time magazine.
New Albany's co-persons of the year for 2020 are the city's frontline health care workers and those comprehending the year's movement for racial justice, or precisely the same ones who SHOULD have topped Time's list this year, both of them applicable locally, and both of them with far more relevance to humanity's shared contemporary experience than Mayor Nabob or Councilman Nobody might ever expect to be.
Following are Time's own definitions, which were rejected, and let us note the ridiculousness of the magazine selecting Joe Biden, although doing so probably delighted His Deafness, Squire Adam, a handful of elderly DemoDisneyDixiecratic grandees and (sadly) a few politically impotent but materially comfy local progressives. I retain hope that the latter will eventually realize they must do, and not merely say.
Frontline Health Care Workers
"The COVID-19 pandemic has put the world on hold. However, anyone deemed essential—like health care workers, postal workers, sanitation workers, transportation workers and many others—had to keep going. They risked their lives and in doing so, saved countless other lives."
Movement for Racial Justice
"The tragic killing of George Floyd started a movement, not just in America but across the globe. In the midst of a worldwide pandemic, protesters took to the streets, demanding action to fight racial injustice at the hands of police and any entity that embodies systemic discrimination. There have been some positive outcomes since the movement started but it’s far from over."
Displaying the guileless eagerness of a fresh military recruit going into battle for the very first time, I began attending New Albany city council meetings in 2005, concurrently submitting to engagement in all sorts of grassroots public meetings.
After a few months thrashing through this stinking, fetid swamp, my only goal in life became finding a nice, dry branch to hang on to.
My persistence in indulging this gavel-pounding, head-throbbing, BDSM-like fetish for social dysfunction subsequently extended far past the point when most normal people would have been forcibly loaded onto the padded taxi for a no-expenses-paid visit to Fantasy Island.
It’s a testament to my sheer, stubborn cantankerousness that I never became one of the zombie drones, although not unlike formaldehyde, copious quantities of beverage alcohol certainly helped preserve my sanity.
Then in 2019, lest the gateway martinis lead me down a path to heroin, I withdrew from the fray. After 15 years, I finally reached a sensible conclusion that as long as undemocratic Democrats ruled the municipal roost, there’d never be improvement. Rehabilitation proceeds apace.
But those outlandish nightmares of King Larry Kochert ogling my leotards?
They’ll last forever.
One lesson from this era of trauma and self-harm also stays with me, because whenever Floyd County politicians belonging to either major political party suddenly cite an alarming lack of information as a reason to delay acting, even when the vital information deemed essential has reposed for weeks and maybe months atop a case of Bud Light Kumquat-A-Rita in their dens—in Bob Caesar’s case, immediately adjacent to the “missing” crate containing his Bicentennial Commission financial records—it invariably leads to two closely related outcomes.
Their sleeves are being tugged by self-appointed pillars (read: fixers) of the community … and as a result, an embarrassing retrograde maneuver is in the offing.
Given my pre-retirement history of gleefully exposing the dismal antics of New Albany's DemoDisneyDixiecrats, currently extinct beyond city limits, many heads will be nodding in anticipation of the usual verbiage directed against Adam’s Ants.
Not this time.
Instead, let’s take a journey to the other side of the aisle, and consider our information-deprived county commissioners, Republicans all: Shawn Carruthers, John Schellenberger and Tim Kamer.
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Dear reader, unless you’re a complete imbecile, you've grasped with clarity and certainty that the COVID-19 pandemic has entered a particularly gruesome stage as the holiday season approaches.
Consider the self-inflicted wounds of Indiana’s governor, Eric Holcomb. After more than seven months of futility spent trying to thread the GOP’s culture-wide needle of pandemic denial, even as his predecessor Mike Pence stood off to the side, maskless, breathing vapid scripture into his eyeglasses, Holcomb opened, then partially closed, and finally conceded his own impotence in declaring a new color-coded system to put COVID mitigation measures into the hands of local county officials.
Just think how much Holcomb’s late autumn devolution might have helped had it been implemented in April. Perhaps he was frightened by the Libertarian insurgency in the gubernatorial race. Pence might have been distracted by the need to find a new job. None of it would matter if not for the potential for a worse pandemic than we already experienced, and presently are witnessing.
Now, in November, for all intents and purposes, COVID-era devolution means that local unelected county officials are being charged with formulating and enforcing policies pertaining to the pandemic.
There’s the rub.
With the vast majority of Indiana’s elected Republicans, as well as a far larger percentage of minority Democrats than you might imagine, all unwilling to risk leadership during an election-year public health crisis, but yearning to preserve their electoral viability for future pandering, the magical solution is to put unpopular decisions in the hands of folks like Dr. Thomas Harris, chief of the Floyd County Health Department.
Frequent readers will recall the infamous "Pour Gate" scandal in 2013 (see here for a full account), when Dr. Harris sought to exceed his agency’s statutory limitations and was wrestled to the ground and repelled by a holy coalition of Hoosiers. Obviously, Dr. Harris and I are not bosom buddies, and quite likely won’t ever be.
However, 2013 and 2020 are one hundred and seven years apart.
It was reported last week that Dr. Harris has been approved to serve another term by the health department board, a decision customarily "certified" by the three Floyd County Commissioners (as noted, all are Republican).
However, the certification was tabled, with Kamer, the least experienced commissioner, stepping forward as de facto spokesman to cite the telltale absence of critical information. Carruthers and Schellenberger merely confined themselves to disinterested nods, and transparency crawled off to die.
The optics of the unanticipated delay couldn’t be much worse for the commissioners, given that earlier in the week Dr. Harris has announced tighter pandemic restrictions on restaurants and bars, still more timid than those taken in surrounding states, and yet a step in the right direction.
Unless, of course, you’re among the whack-jobs who still deny the efficacy of any pandemic restrictions, or the existence of COVID itself. Whether the three commissioners do or don’t embrace science is a question we can’t answer, although their haste in stalling Dr. Harris’s reappointment seems to me an irrefutable clue. After all, one of them is the Republican Party’s county chairman.
Scuttlebutt meanwhile suggests their arms are being twisted by Republican grandees besotted with lunatic fringe Kool-Aid and evangelical Christianity; perhaps Dr. Harris failed to properly fill out the Right to Life questionnaire, or forgot to put a MAGA sign in his yard.
Or, as my friend Occam suggests, it’s exactly as it seems, and local Republicans are terrified lest they be viewed as surrendering to nasty masked liberals who worship George Soros.
Freedom! Liberty! Mass infections and an early death to grandma!
Well, you know, the stock market rules.
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As many of you are aware, I’m employed part-time by a restaurant, and have another part-time job writing about restaurants. When Dr. Harris usurped his department's power in 2013, I spent two years fighting against him, and winning, because he was wrong—and quite a few Republicans agreed, and did the heavy lifting required.
However, I fully support the measures announced last week by Dr. Harris to address the pandemic’s spread. They’re something, as opposed to nothing, and also necessary, as opposed to Disney World.
In point of fact, Harris’s actions during a single day last week shot this unelected official straight to the top of the local leadership board, seeing as leadership from elected officeholders has been even more AWOL than usual since March.
Yes, city council passed a toothless resolution, and two weeks ago, the mayor attached his name to a ludicrously belated social media pronouncement divulging his lightbulb-above-noggin recognition of the pandemic, and urging citizens to mask up and distance themselves. News travels slowly into the shadowy bowels of the bunker, and it only took hundreds of days, but better late than never.
We needn't elaborate as to what local elected Republicans have done concerning COVID, since as Billy Preston once reminded us, nothing from nothing leaves … nothing.
Dr. Harris exercised a semblance of leadership, and his Republican handlers immediately hung him out to dry. It isn’t a coincidence. They inhabit a political belief system that would have exiled Dr. Anthony Fauci before Memorial Day if not checked. Many of them are entangled in religious superstition that would have been right at home in Spain during the Inquisition. We stream music via weird and mysterious invisible waves; they spin 78-rpm discs coated with shellac.
Dear reader, if you espouse human reason, and respect the veracity of the scientific method, I suggest you query the commissioners as to what sort of petty game they're playing, and who is issuing their marching orders. Their phone numbers are here, although not their e-mail addresses.
I'll begin by saying that in my own personal opinion, pandemic safety far outweighs the understandable urge on the part of some to "recreate" a festival canceled owing to ... that's right, pandemic safety.
Consequently, the letter from NAPD, while uncharacteristically firm, is entirely fitting. I agree with these sentiments completely.
I'm confused by only one passage, and will hazard an interpretation: "Ensure no patron exits your business with alcoholic beverages."
I believe the chief means to say alcoholic beverages must not exit businesses in open, non-original containers, which is to say a cocktail or draft beer in a plastic cup, seeing as the governor's statewide emergency writ currently allows carry-outs even from those establishments lacking the proper permit to do so. The city doesn't have any restrictions against open containers out in the open, although of course the police might choose to interpret public intoxication broadly. The Alcohol & Tobacco Commission generally is the final authority on such matters.
To reiterate, I'm personally uninterested in the various crowd-gathering events being staged during the time when Harvest Homecoming normally would be in progress, and I support the city's vigilance.
One question, though: If these crowd-gathering events are judged not to be in the interest of public health amid the pandemic, couldn't the city and/or health department have pro-actively nixed them? In particular, as with the ATC and beverage licenses, the health department can intervene in a situation involving public health any time it wishes to do so.
I've said all along, and will now repeat, that it's the ultimate in despicable governmental cowardice to "encourage" face masks, but to allow retail workers to do the dirty work of enforcement.
A restaurant subject to health department guidelines regarding hygienic standards, generally now including face masks, must obey (and most are aboard) or face sanctions. Meanwhile elected officials from BOTH major political parties see no issue with issuing unenforced mandates leading to ordinary workers being compelled to act as police on behalf of spineless politicians.
It's bullshit, and it needs to stop. I live in a place called New Albany, Indiana, and the unmitigated, calculating drivelers currently serving in elective office here can be the place where rationality begins.
... In a country stumbling to control a rampant and deadly virus, masks are effective and popular weapons. Three-quarters of Americans favor requiring people to wear face coverings in public to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, including 89 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in July.
Now, with the nation reeling from more than 5 million infections and nearly 170,000 virus-related deaths, a rising sense of outrage is leading this silent majority to push back against the smaller but louder anti-mask contingent.
Instead of flashy protests and confrontations, however, mask supporters are expressing their exasperation in quieter ways, writing letters to local newspapers, posting on social media, patronizing businesses identified as mask-enforcers on dedicated Facebook groups and urging state and local officials to mandate mask-wearing in public.
So far, 34 states and the District have adopted mask requirements. Now, mask advocates want police to enforce those orders, a move some police chiefs have said they are reluctant to make. They are seeking legal protection for retail workers put in the awkward position of enforcing mask rules. And they are lobbying for a coordinated federal mask policy ...
I like the idea of beginning the column with music. Thank you for the idea, Charles P. Pierce.
Meanwhile, they hath stolen my damn thunder.
I'd been preparing a sermon about the path of the righteous masked man, and how it is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil unmasked men.
Then these Republicans went and canceled me.
First it was Indiana’s Governor Eric Holcomb, followed by the Floyd County Health Department chief Dr. Thomas Harris.
Holcomb’s statewide mask mandate starts on Monday, but once the potential for heat from the home office in Indy was reduced, Dr. Tom at long last implemented a must-mask decree here, to begin tomorrow (Friday, July 24).
Enquiring minds want to know: What on earth took Dr. Tom so long?
Back in 2013 he was willing to fight for two entire YEARS for the health department’s inalienable “right” to regulate breweries pouring cups of beer at outdoor events.
... On July 1, 2015, when a "beer bill" authored by Rep. Ed Clere officially becomes state law, it will be demonstrated for a third (and we trust final) time that the FCHD and its head, Dr. Tom Harris, were mistaken all along.
The new law is clear and explicit, as based on the two preceding legal precedents, both hitherto ignored by the FCHD.
All thanks to Ed Clere. His hard work in compelling local government functionaries to obey their own laws will not be forgotten, especially by me.
I digress, of course, but not before adding an important addendum.
The preceding events occurred between 2013 and 2015. They’re minor in relative terms compared with a pandemic, and yet it behooves me to note that when conditions, facts and realities on the ground change, we’re obliged to change with them.
Ask me a year ago what I thought about masks, and I’d likely to have shrugged and described them as comical. Now I’m not laughing.
Let’s be clear about these mask mandates.
They are an unqualified good.
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The available evidence has long since convinced all but the most strident of dogma-driven refuseniks that we are in the midst of a coronavirus public health emergency. Sorry, Ayn Randians; the coronavirus itself has proven to be notoriously indifferent to the philosophy of objectivism.
Reputable scientific opinion existing outside our partisan propaganda silos is consistent and persuasive; COVID-19 is not the customary seasonal flu, and we’ve thoroughly botched our response to it.
The pandemic is not “going away” on its own, and if we can yet muster a coherent collective response, perhaps lives can be saved and post-COVID after-effects on personal health reduced.
Truth is truth. I needn’t have mentioned one of the worst novelists in recent American history to support the point.
Moreover, it serves no purpose to refer to the stock market, presidential elections, the purported expertise of rogue orthodontists who have found a link between Chinese viruses and the Trilateral Commission, or the way that social media renders both libtards and fascists into evil incarnate depending on the way the light bounces from mirrors none of us seem interested in using any longer.
As for the bizarre and almost purely American-derived "issue" of face masks, I support their use. Block, mute and unfriend to your heart's content. I’m satisfied with the testimony of trained medical authorities possessing long years of experience. Masks strike me as helpful and courteous in a time of pandemic. You and I can work together to keep a percentage of spray particles to ourselves. It's not a panacea; nothing is. It helps, and that's good.
Early on, as the merits of masks in spaces where social distance is harder to achieve became increasingly obvious, I noticed how few of the denizens of downtown New Albany were wearing them. Among them were many folks who in one way or another are “official,” or somehow consider themselves among the societal vanguard in some dimension – indie biz advocates, city employees and retail personnel, as examples.
It’s gotten gradually better since.
However, what I thought to myself at the time is that being part of any solution, great or small, implies the acceptance of holding yourself to whatever standards you’re touting. The old-school terminology is being a “role model,” and being a role model means bad actors need not apply.
If I go for a walk in the neighborhood when no one else is out, or am inside my own car, those are low-intensity examples. I’ll have my mask with me, just in case it is needed. But when I’m downtown, where many more people are out and about; if my employer’s admirable sense of professionalism and conscience precluded him from reopening his pub until he could make it as safe an experience as humanly possible, then it’s incumbent on me to wear the mask.
You know, being a positive role model.
That’s been easy, because wearing a mask isn’t political unless you’ve no better way to squander misspent brain cells. It’s about courtesy and public health in an uncommon period. A mask doesn’t violate my manhood or cause me to grow wool and go “baaahh.” I don’t have a finely waxed Rollie Fingers handlebar mustache to display in the hope of causing the fairer sex to swoon. Masks are fine with me, for no other reason than a way of pitching in.
It’s true that various economic theorists of the Narcissism as Economic Dishevelment have proven wonderfully capable of deconstructing the concept of “community” completely and putting it out of existence, and yet when I look outside, that’s what I see. A community. I don’t accept the foolishness of the selfish. I trust my own two eyes, and I believe in being a good actor as opposed to a soul-sapping malignancy with skeletons in the closet.
Maybe you had a different sort of upbringing, and if so, my sincerest condolences.
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Holcomb’s and Harris’ mask directives surely pleased the ever-calculating grandees of the Floyd County Democratic Party. If the three-percenter anti-mask jihadists run amok, Democrats can blame the Republicans. If tantrum-prone adult snowflakes suddenly get the memo and decide to mask up, the Democrats can point to their toothless city council resolution and claim to have gotten there first.
Come what may, we should try not to forget that since the pandemic shutdown was launched on March 16, municipal Democrats have controlled all levers of local governance. They have a city council majority and hold the mayor’s office. Their appointees populate every board that matters and others that don't. Seldom before has so much power been held by so few at the apex of the pyramid.
If they have no intention whatever of using this power, would they mind if I borrowed it for the weekend?
There are literally dozens of proactive measures Democrats might have implemented these past five months to address the pandemic, but apart from an early and short-lived meal subsidy for displaced restaurant workers, signage for curbside parking and city anchor sticker logos slapped crookedly on canisters of hand sanitizer produced at Starlight Distillery, very little has been said or done except for irregular social media requests for the citizenry to be nice and behave itself.
In noting these facts, I’m foregoing polemics. No, really -- I am. Go to the News and Tribune web site, perform a few simple searches, and see so for yourself. Here in New Albany, agoraphobia and detachment remain the political orders of the day, both in sickness and health.
You're advised to believe me when I say that this time around, because of the way a pandemic fundamentally changes the nature of the playing field, I thought maybe for once ... just once ... local Democrats would rally the cadres and rise to the occasion.
I thought wrong, and it’s very depressing. Lucy pulled back the football. The crickets have chirped. The sound of pins dropping is like thunder, and somewhere, a lonely mutt bays at the indignity of it all.
Come November, Donald Trump will yet again win the city, almost surely by at least a 15% margin, probably more, illustrating that quite a few theoretical “Democrats” who voted for the incumbent mayor in 2019 will (again) opt for an abominable failure of a president in 2020.
How do they sleep at night, these "democrats"? It's been eight years; still, hope springs eternal. I cling to that most faint of pulses, the one suggesting that there'll come a time when they actually remember what it means to be democratic.
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While we’re on the topic of institutional memory, did you know that National Cognitive Dissonance Day is the oldest public holiday in the United States?
It has been running 24/7/365 since July 4, 1776 (or thereabouts), when the clever rhetorical hocus pocus contrived by wealthy slave owners and wealthy rum trade merchants working together to pontificate about human rights in theory, while acting to enshrine property rights in reality, made lasting hypocrites out of us all.
I've likely said this before, but it bears repeating.
When the pandemic's lock-down doo-doo hit the fan blades, many in the local food and drink business were either catatonic (and understandably so; my empathy for them abounds), or, bizarrely, eager to dismiss hundreds of years of scientific achievement at the drop of a narcissistic and self-serving cap (purely inexcusable, then as now).
That's when the LEE Initiative made the biggest pivot of all and organized in a remarkably short time to help people who were in need.
What a concept.
Joe Phillips followed suit at Pints&union. He put people before profit and ran toward the fire. He converted the business into The Lee Initiative's relief outpost in SoIN. He ran himself ragged during the "business as usual" down time. He wasn't coming in every day and asking whether he was getting the credit and publicity. He did what was right, when it was needed.
Now Joe is doing it again, in conjunction with Steven Cavanaugh, our new general manager. Pints&union has safety protocols and socially-distanced indoor occupancy. We are enforcing safety, and our patrons get it. They know it's better to err on the side of caution during a public health emergency than to be the agent of dysfunction. We know better than to relax, but so far, it's going well.
Speaking personally, it is a joy to be an employee in an atmosphere like this, one of integrity and respect.
Here's what Joe had to say about it in a recent Edible Kentucky & Southern Indiana magazine article.
When the COVID-19 quarantine shut down local restaurants in March, we were devastated and silent. We all knew it was coming, but to know it’s knocking at your door is a very different reality than watching others face it on social media or television. We were shell-shocked for two days—then realized we needed to get back to work, somehow.
Knowing our perishable food would go bad, we donated it to our workers who were suddenly out of work. We needed a sense of purpose; we needed to give back to the workers who have been providing hospitality to our communities every day for years.
Chef Edward Lee and Lindsey Ofcacek, founders of the LEE Initiative, gave us that opportunity with the Restaurant Workers Relief Program. Thanks to a donation from Maker’s Mark Distillery, we gathered essential household items and served hot meals to feed laid off restaurant workers and their families every day. There are no words to fully describe what it felt like to experience the gratitude of the many service workers who received support and love during this scary time. With additional donations, we joined forces with 610 Magnolia, Lee’s flagship Louisville restaurant, to serve Louisville industry workers while still keeping tabs on the people we served in New Albany, Indiana. The streets were empty but our hearts were full, serving over 200 people per week. The program expanded to 18 other cities in the U.S., providing over 275,000 meals.
Moving forward, we are working with the LEE Initiative’s Restaurant Reboot Relief Program, a $1 million commitment to purchase produce from local farmers for restaurants to create more sustainable food supply chains. Restaurants that have hosted restaurant-worker relief centers will receive the food and help select other local restaurants to participate.
This remains a trying time for all of us. I have witnessed firsthand amazing beauty from great loss. I have seen open doors and hearts, open minds and people united for a greater sense of purpose. We look forward to enduring this time, coming out stronger together.
Be well,
Joe Phillips, Owner Pints & Union Restaurant
114 East Market St.
New Albany, IN 47150
812.913.4647
Learn more about The LEE Initiative Restaurant Relief Program, Restaurant Reboot Relief Program, McAtee Community Kitchen, Restaurant Regrow Program and Women Chefs Program.
Narcissists don't care about others. When you don't care about others, it's easier to rationalize when they die. Let the rationalizations renew; after all, it's an election year.
There was always a logical, simple explanation for why cases rose through the end of June while deaths did not
... There is no mystery in the number of Americans dying from COVID-19.
Despite political leaders trivializing the pandemic, deaths are rising again: The seven-day average for deaths per day has now jumped by more than 200 since July 6, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. By our count, states reported 855 deaths today, in line with the recent elevated numbers in mid-July.
The deaths are not happening in unpredictable places. Rather, people are dying at higher rates where there are lots of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations: in Florida, Arizona, Texas, and California, as well as a host of smaller southern states that all rushed to open up.
The deaths are also not happening in an unpredictable amount of time after the new outbreaks emerged. Simply look at the curves yourself. Cases began to rise on June 16; a week later, hospitalizations began to rise. Two weeks after that — 21 days after cases rose — states began to report more deaths. That’s the exact number of days that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated from the onset of symptoms to the reporting of a death.
Many people who don’t want COVID-19 to be the terrible crisis that it is have clung to the idea that more cases won’t mean more deaths. Some Americans have been perplexed by a downward trend of national deaths, even as cases exploded in the Sun Belt region. But given the policy choices that state and federal officials have made, the virus has done exactly what public-health experts expected.
When states reopened in late April and May with plenty of infected people within their borders, cases began to grow. COVID-19 is highly transmissible, makes a large subset of people who catch it seriously ill, and kills many more people than the flu or any other infectious disease circulating in the country.
We've been talking about this for the last two days. Doing so by no means compromises my sabbatical; after all, the topic is health, medical science and public safety.
Following is a letter written to city council members yesterday by Kate Caufield.
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Good afternoon, New Albany city council members! I'm writing today to urge you to adopt a mask ordinance for the City of New Albany, when indoors or in areas where social distancing cannot be observed. We are in a pandemic. There are some things we know for sure about COVID-19, regardless of our personal views as to the politics of a virus (viruses aren't political and don't much care whether you attribute their existence to US politics or not, and are just happy to have a host.) We know that there are several risk factors that cause citizens to become infected more easily, more severely, and with higher mortality rates than others. These risk factors include:
Thousands of Black and white protesters got a taste recently of what it is like to feel the agony of being gassed by the police. It was painful, sickening and scary.
But citizens in western Louisville are regularly “gassed,” causing long-term health problems. The mayor’s own office admits this truth, with people dying an average of 10 years earlier in western Louisville compared to the rest of the city. In some neighborhoods, the life span is less than in war-torn Iraq according to Louisville’s Health Department.
In other words, 60,000 folks (enough to fill Cardinal Stadium) are dying prematurely and most of them are African Americans. As you address “systemic racism” in Louisville look at pollution in Black neighborhoods and the institutions that profit from it. Western Louisville’s air, water and soil are so toxic and rank among the worst of any American city. It is unlivable for a modern American neighborhood ...
snip
The calls for greater equity also means cleaning up the air, water and soil. Poor people needlessly suffer more here than the same low-income people in West Coast cites. If we adopted the same tough, environmental regulations as our West Coast counterparts, western Louisville would surely bloom.
The unfairness between black and white neighborhoods is stark and vivid. As the great urbanist, Jane Jacobs, once said: "everyone hungers for a first class neighborhood for both pride and dignity ... nobody wants a second class neighborhood." First class neighborhoods are safe, healthy, sustainable, and prosperous. It is a human right, an American right.
Ron DeSantis is the latest in a long line of Republicans who made the state a plutocratic dystopia. Now he’s letting its residents die to save the plutocrats.
On Tuesday, DeSantis took a break from welcoming the Republican National Convention to Jacksonville, waving the starting flag at a Nascar race south of Miami, and pushing for schools to open this fall, to announce that “No, we’re not shutting down, you know, we’re going to go forward.” He also echoed President Trump and Vice President Pence in writing off the troubling rise in Covid cases as attributable to higher rates of testing. But all the available data show that Florida has a dangerously high, rising number of positive tests per capita; positive tests now make up as many as 7 percent of all tests in Florida. Testing is finding more afflicted Floridians because there are more afflicted Floridians. “The fact that these are going up means there’s more community spread,” said Palm Beach County health director Alina Alonso. “The virus now has food out there. It has people that are out there without masks, without maintaining distancing. So it’s infecting more people.”
A long read but entirely worthwhile. Throughout American history we see the many instances of an unprepared country muddling through a crisis. COVID is the most recent. It's likely we'll continue arguing viciously about symptoms instead of addressing the rotten superstructure.
The coronavirus is coursing through different parts of the U.S. in different ways, making the crisis harder to predict, control, or understand.
There was supposed to be a peak. But the stark turning point, when the number of daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. finally crested and began descending sharply, never happened. Instead, America spent much of April on a disquieting plateau, with every day bringing about 30,000 new cases and about 2,000 new deaths. The graphs were more mesa than Matterhorn—flat-topped, not sharp-peaked. Only this month has the slope started gently heading downward.
This pattern exists because different states have experienced the coronavirus pandemic in very different ways.
The U.S. health system isn't being fixed. As noted occasionally hereabouts, we also can't fix stupid.
This point cannot be overstated: The pandemic patchwork exists because the U.S. is a patchwork to its core. New outbreaks will continue to flare and fester unless the country makes a serious effort to protect its most vulnerable citizens, recognizing that their risk is the result of societal failures, not personal ones. “People say you can’t fix the U.S. health system overnight, but if we’re not fixing these underlying problems, we won’t get out of this,” says Sheila Davis of Partners in Health. “We’ll just keep getting pop-ups.”
And the conclusion ...
The pandemic discourse has been dominated by medical countermeasures like antibody tests (which are currently too unreliable), drugs (which are not cure-alls), and vaccines (which are almost certainly at least a year away). But social solutions like paid sick leave, which two in three low-wage workers do not have, can be implemented immediately. Imagine if the energy that went into debating the merits of hydroxychloroquine went into ensuring hazard pay, or if the president, instead of wondering out loud if disinfectant could be injected into the body, advocated for health care for all? “We have decades of social-science research that tells us these things work,” says Courtney Boen, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s a question of political will, not scientific discovery.”
And while a vaccine will protect against only COVID-19 (if people agree to take it at all), social interventions will protect against the countless diseases that may emerge in the future, along with chronic illnesses, maternal mortality, and other causes of poor health. “This pandemic won’t be the last health crisis the U.S. faces,” Boen says. “If we want to be on better footing the next time, we want to reduce the things that put people at risk of being at risk.”
Of all the threats we know, the COVID-19 pandemic is most like a very rapid version of climate change—global in its scope, erratic in its unfolding, and unequal in its distribution. And like climate change, there is no easy fix. Our choices are to remake society or let it be remade, to smooth the patchworks old and new or let them fray even further.
Last week was the first in Indiana for reopened restaurants. We'll all be looking at the trends after the coming week. After that, we'll see.
Following is the newsletter synopsis, so click the link to read the complete article.
--- For reopening states, circuit breakers are needed, by Max Nisen (Bloomberg) As even hard-hit states begin to reopen, the last thing anyone wants to hear about is the possibility of closing back down. Unfortunately, it’s something governors need to consider. As rules are relaxed, more new infections are inevitable. Given Covid-19’s ability to spread undetected and America's limited ability to test, isolate and trace contacts of infected individuals, there will be opportunities for those infections to multiply into fresh outbreaks. The risk of deadly surges will grow as people grow more comfortable, and activity expands. States and cities need to watch the data and design circuit breakers that prompt new restrictions if infections start snowballing. Other countries have set a precedent. China has imposed new lockdowns and dramatic testing efforts in several regions in response to relatively few untraced cases. Singapore managed to control an early outbreak with intensive testing and tracing efforts. Still, it tripped a circuit breaker and imposed significant new restrictions in April after a rash migrant worker infections. It recently extended many of those measures into June. Germany, as it reopens, is watching to see whether any region exceeds 50 new infections per 100,000 residents over seven days; if so, limits on movement and behavior will be reinstated there. America is in a more precarious state without a consistent plan. Several states reopened quite broadly without meeting the Trump administration’s guidelines like a 14-day downward trajectory in new cases or positive test rates. Contact tracing programs are forming amid widespread community transmission that’s well above Germany’s line for further restrictions. America’s high rate of infections only amplifies its need to draw lines. States and cities need circuit breakers in place well before autumn, when a possible surge in Covid-19 could combine with an emerging flu season to produce especially dangerous new outbreaks. An outbreak large enough to threaten hospital capacity is the worst-case scenario, but states shouldn’t wait until then to act. Rapidly escalating spread should also trigger targeted restrictions, giving hospitals and contact tracers a chance to catch up. As New York City and other profoundly affected areas have demonstrated, hospitals take longer to empty than they do to fill, and a great deal of suffering occurs long before all the beds are full. Any renewed restrictions are likely to be both disruptive and divisive. But early, targeted, and data-driven closures are likely to be far more popular than the broader shutdowns that may be required if severe new outbreaks aren't successfully interrupted.
Just because Charlie Daniels has become a filter-less spittoon of repellent MAGA dogma in his old age DOESN'T mean he didn't make good music back in the day.
Meanwhile, as you enjoy Saddletramp (from which "Dixie on My Mind" is drawn, and for my money Daniels' finest album), here are ill tidings from the fiddler's favored milieu.
Southern governors are beginning to reopen their states. For most, it is too early
“You could be looking at a perfect storm,” says Thomas LaVeist, the dean of public health at Tulane University in New Orleans. “When this is over, the South will be the region of the country that will be most severely impacted.”
At first glance, it makes no sense. Why are Republican governors down South targeting their own voters?
The South is likely to have America’s highest death rate from covid-19 It has unusually unhealthy residents and few ICU beds
If covid-19 does infect most Americans, the highest death rates will probably not be in coastal cities—whose density is offset by young, healthy, well-off populations and good hospitals—but rather in poor, rural parts of the South and Appalachia with high rates of heart disease and diabetes. Worryingly, the three states that announced plans this week to relax their lockdowns (Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina) are all in this region.
Ah, yes. There HAD to be a time-honored GOP angle to this.
Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Covid-19 exposed stark inequalities: Rates of mortality and severe illness are far higher among Americans of color. Politicians, journalists and scholars have been attempting to explain these racial differences by pulling from a wide range of past studies and assumptions. Many of these early suggestions emphasize how Covid-19 is illuminating pre-existing inequality.
Yet, early reporting and existing studies suggest Covid-19 is not simply exposing past inequality. It is also creating it. Like previous crises, such as natural disasters, war, and economic recessions, our response to Covid-19 is exacerbating racial disparities. However, this is not inevitable. Addressing unequal distributions of Covid-19 testing, racial biases in health care, and policy responses to racial segregation now could mitigate how unjust this crisis turns out to be.
Magee believes Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's decision to reopen some businesses across the state starting today is an "attack" on African Americans -- one of the groups hit hardest by the virus. And he says it's no coincidence that the businesses being reopened -- including barbershops, nail salons and churches -- are communal gathering places for black residents.
Returning to music, the song "Saddletramp" finds Daniels' lyrical gaze stretching all the way to Arizona, home of the legendary lawman Joe Arpaio.
How many people watch you ride away
Wonder why you never promise
To come back some day
Maybe thinking you were holding
All the pieces in your hand
Or are they slippin' through your fingers
Like the endless desert sand
Ignore the lyrics if you must, and give it up for the late, inimitable guitarist Tom Crain.
The erosion of the public-health workforce has taken place even as the U.S. health-industry workforce swells. In addition to medical staff doing heroic work right now, untold numbers of workers spend their days adjudicating zero-sum disputes over medical bills that add complexity and cost without healing anyone. One analysis found 10 administrative workers for every physician.
Why do we tolerate a system that doesn't work for us?
The following appeared on Friday at Bloomberg's Bloomberg Prognosis, a daily coronavirus newsletter.
---
Without a trace As the U.S. begins to consider how to lift measures to slow the spread of Covid-19, it’s going to need a new army to hunt down the coronavirus. As many as 100,000 contact tracers will be needed to track down people exposed to the virus and prevent them from spreading it, according to a new estimate this week from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. How big a lift is that? Across the U.S., about 130,000 people work for local health departments full-time, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials. About 91,000 more work in state health agencies, down 15% in the past decade as a consequence of government belt-tightening. “Clearly over time that capacity has eroded,” John Wiesman, Washington State Secretary of Health, said on a call with reporters Wednesday. Public-health departments will have to train thousands of people to do the rigorous work of retracing the steps of coronavirus patients, reaching out to others they may have encountered, and ensuring they can safely isolate to interrupt chains of transmission. Students of medicine and public health may be good candidates, along with retired medical staff or others who simply need jobs – as millions do now. The erosion of the public-health workforce has taken place even as the U.S. health-industry workforce swells. In addition to medical staff doing heroic work right now, untold numbers of workers spend their days adjudicating zero-sum disputes over medical bills that add complexity and cost without healing anyone. One analysis found 10 administrative workers for every physician. It’s a cliché to say the U.S. doesn’t have a health-care system, it has a sick-care system. Covid-19 has exposed some of the risks of skimping on prevention and public health, even as we spare few expenses on costly treatments. The core operations of local health departments can keep cases from becoming clusters, and keep clusters from exploding into uncontrolled spread. In one sense, they constitute the country’s immune system. That was weakened when coronavirus arrived in the U.S. As the virus runs its course, can the system’s strength be renewed?—John Tozzi
A region beset by obesity and diabetes is uniquely vulnerable.
A virus that is particularly lethal for people with underlying health conditions is now spreading into the unhealthiest part of the U.S.: the South.
For decades, people in the 11 states that seceded during the Civil War -- America’s poorest region -- have suffered from a scourge of obesity and hypertension, which intensify the danger of the coronavirus and the Covid-19 respiratory disease that it causes. Four of the five states with the highest diabetes rates are in the South. And eight didn’t expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving thousands of families without access to routine care, even as financially troubled rural hospitals wither away.
Those factors give the South a special vulnerability, as did the haphazard response from some governors as the disease began to course through the country. Without clear direction from the Trump administration, they were loath to mandate stay-at-home orders. Beaches were open in Florida, churches held services in rural Tennessee and Mardi Gras went on in Louisiana.
Now Covid-19 has infected 47 long-term care centers in Georgia, overwhelmed hospitals in New Orleans, spread into at least six Alabama nursing homes, forced the evacuation of scores of elderly residents from a Tennessee rehabilitation center and killed a country music star in Nashville.
“Covid-19 is going to be a disaster in the Southeast,” said Aaron Milstone, a Tennessee pulmonologist. “We’ll see higher morbidity, which is getting sick from the virus, and higher mortality, which is dying from the virus” ...
Gov. Holcomb Announces More Steps to Slow the Spread of COVID-19
INDIANAPOLIS — In a continuing effort to slow the spread of novel coronavirus (COVID-19), Governor Eric J. Holcomb has announced additional efforts.
The governor and other state officials will conduct a COVID-19 briefing today at 2:30 p.m. in the south atrium of the Indiana Statehouse with the latest updates on testing and cases.
Here are additional directives from Governor Holcomb.
Under the current guidance for schools, 273 public school districts are closed, using e-learning days, or on spring break and have announced a future closure. The Department of Education is working with the remaining 16 school corporations to determine their next steps and needs
Bars, nightclubs and restaurants are required to close to in-person patrons and may provide take-out and delivery services through the end of March
Hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers should cancel and/or postpone elective and non-urgent surgical procedures immediately. This action will help the healthcare system conserve resources and personnel necessary to meet emerging health needs
Physicians should continue to perform critical procedures necessary to prevent short-term and/or long-term adverse effects to their patients’ overall health
The state’s Emergency Operations Center has been raised to a Level 1 status and will work in conjunction with the incident command center at the Indiana State Department of Health for planning, coordination, predictive analysis and other functions
State employees will maximize the use of remote work and meet virtually whenever possible while maintaining operations. Non-essential in-person meetings will be limited to 10 persons or less and should meet virtually whenever possible. High-risk individuals should not attend meetings in person
State employees over the age of 60 with underlying health conditions are advised to work from home, and agencies should identify work that can be accomplished remotely for those individuals
The Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites, which are closed on Mondays, will close to the public beginning Tuesday
The visitors center at White River State Park will close
Indiana state parks and recreation centers, including state park inns, remain open. Restaurants will convert operations to take-out and delivery
State agencies already are developing remote work plans for employees and will continue to implement them while maintaining necessary state services. Employees who work outdoors are encouraged to practice social distancing
The Department of Workforce Development (DWD) has suspended rules requiring certain unemployment insurance claimants to physically appear at a Work One location to engage in reemployment services for the next four weeks. This will ensure that individuals who may be symptomatic do not have to physically appear to continue their unemployment insurance eligibility
The DWD will also request flexibility under federal and state law to expand eligibility for claimants and ease burdens on employers.
The Indiana Economic Development Corporation will postpone the inaugural Indiana Global Economic Summit, scheduled for April 26-28
Communities are encouraged to work together to provide child care options for all who need assistance and delivery services of meals and other necessities for senior citizens
Hoosiers who can donate blood are encouraged to visit local blood centers. Blood supplies are low. Please follow the guidance at www.redcross.org
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