In The News (16)

Detailed Turnout Data Shows How Georgia Turned Blue By Nate Cohn, Matthew Conlen and Charlie SmartNov. 17, 2020 Democrats have long dreamed of turning Georgia blue, with young voters and nonwhite voters leading a progressive charge. Now, a blue Georgia is a reality, but with a winning coalition that might have stunned the party not that long ago. ......... Republican candidates won more votes than Democrats in the state’s two Senate contests, even as President Trump was defeated at the top of the ticket. ............ the relatively low Black share of the electorate could mean that Democrats have the potential for a better showing, perhaps even in the two Senate runoffs in January. ............. Over all, Mr. Biden ran well ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing in well-educated, wealthy and increasingly diverse precincts around Atlanta, while making relatively few gains elsewhere in the state.  

Groupthink Has Left the Left Blind A constricted view of the world leaves progressives surprised by the world as it is.   ....... Trump once again stunned much of the liberal establishment by dramatically beating polling expectations to come within about 80,000 votes of another Electoral College victory. .......... The old liberal left paid attention to complexity, ambiguity, the gray areas. A sense of complexity induced a measure of doubt, including self-doubt. The new left typically seeks to reduce things to elements such as race, class and gender, in ways that erase ambiguity and doubt. The new left is a factory of certitudes. ......... Trump won a majority of the vote of white women against both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. ......... He also improved his vote share over 2016 with both Latino and Black voters, while losing most of the advantage he previously had with college-educated white males — precisely the demographic his policies had supposedly done most to favor. ............. “Trump did a much better job at understanding Hispanics. Sometimes, Democrats see Hispanics as monolithic.” Latino voters in his South Texas district were particularly turned off by progressive rhetoric about defunding the police, opposition to fossil fuels and decriminalizing border crossings. .......... People are rarely reducible to a single animating political consideration. Nor should they be subject to a simple moral judgment. Motives are complicated ..................  the unemployment rate reached record lows before the pandemic hit   

American health care workers issue a call to arms for wearing masks as the coronavirus pandemic rages across the United States, breaking records nearly every day for deaths — and cases — in state after state. ........... the frustration felt by some of the nation’s health care workers over the refusal of so many Americans to wear masks ..........  It’s a call to arms. “We put our lives on the line daily to keep you safe. So, do something for us. Wear. A. Mask,” the caption reads.  

Hospitals Know What’s Coming “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path,” said a COVID-19 doctor at America’s best-prepared hospital. ........... One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.” ..............  “We’re watching a system breaking in front of us and we’re helpless to stop it,” says Kelly Cawcutt, an infectious-disease and critical-care physician. ............ “I don’t see how we avoid becoming overwhelmed,” says Dan Johnson, a critical-care doctor. People need to know that “the assumption we will always have a hospital bed for them is a false one.” ............. What makes this “nightmare” worse, he adds, “is that it was preventable.” The coronavirus is not unstoppable, as some have suggested and as New Zealand, Iceland, Australia, and Hong Kong have resoundingly disproved—twice. Instead, the Trump administration never mounted a serious effort to stop it. Whether through gross incompetence or deliberate strategy, the president and his advisers left the virus to run amok, allowed Americans to get sick, and punted the consequences to the health-care system. And they did so repeatedly, even after the ordeal of the spring, after the playbook for controlling the virus became clear, and despite months of warnings about a fall surge. .............   UNMC’s preparations didn’t fail so much as the U.S. created a situation in which hospitals could not possibly succeed. “We can prepare over and over for a wave of patients,” says Cawcutt, “but we can’t prepare for a tsunami.” ...........  with the third national surge, “all the trends have gone out the window,” Sarah Swistak, a staff nurse, told me. “From the 90-year-old with every comorbidity listed to the 30-year-old who is the picture of perfect health, they’re all requiring oxygen because they’re so short of breath.” ................  UNMC is struggling not because of any one super-spreading event, but because of the cumulative toll of millions of bad decisions. ..........  When the hospital first faced the pandemic in the spring, “I was buoyed by the realization that everyone in America was doing their part to slow down the spread,”  Johnson says. “Now I know friends of mine are going about their normal lives, having parties and dinners, and playing sports indoors. It’s very difficult to do this work when we know so many people are not doing their part.” The drive home from the packed hospital takes him past rows of packed restaurants, sporting venues, and parking lots. ................ the Midwest has taken entirely the wrong lesson from the Northeast’s ordeal. Instead of learning that the pandemic is controllable, and that physical distancing works, people instead internalized “a mistaken belief that every curve that goes up must come down,” he said. “What they don’t realize is that if we don’t change anything about how we’re conducting ourselves, the curve can go up and up.” ............... some of the people who get infected over Thanksgiving will struggle to enter packed hospitals by the middle of December, and be in the ground by Christmas. .................  Patients with strokes and other urgent traumas aren’t getting the normal level of attention, because the pandemic is so all-consuming. ........... “many of us feel like we haven’t had a day off since this thing began” ........ people with COVID-19 are far sicker than the average patient. In an ICU, they need twice as much attention for three times the usual stay. To care for them, UNMC’s nurses and respiratory therapists are now doing mandatory overtime ............... “I used to be able to leave work at work, but with the pandemic, it follows me everywhere I go,” she said. “It’s all I see when I come home, when I look at my kids.” ............. Long and other nurses have told many families that they can’t see their dying loved ones, and then sat with those patients so they didn’t have to die alone. Lindsay Ivener, a staff nurse, told me that COVID-19 had recently killed an elderly woman whom she was caring for, the woman’s husband, and one of her grandchildren. A second grandchild had just been admitted to the hospital with COVID-19. “It just tore this whole family apart in a month,” Ivener said. “I couldn’t even cry. I didn’t have the energy.”