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The country is now nearly evenly split on whether businesses like gyms, hair salons and shopping malls should resume operating in the next month, in a notable shift from earlier polls finding Americans overwhelmingly supported stay-at-home measures even if that meant furthering economic pain, health care reporter Rachel Roubein writes.
“What we have here is a very real partisan split that you don't expect to find in a public health epidemic,” said Robert Blendon, a Harvard professor of health policy and political analysis who helped design the poll.
Just over 60 percent of Republicans said they supported reopening nonessential businesses in their states, about double the 29 percent of Democrats who felt similarly. Just over half of independents said those businesses should come back online.
While many people gave their governor high marks for their response to the health and economic crises, African Americans were more critical of their governor’s performance — a reflection of how many of their communities have been devastated by the pandemic.
Over three-fourths of Americans — including nearly two-thirds of Republicans and about 90 percent of Democrats — said they believe the coronavirus outbreak in their state is a “serious problem.”
The poll surveyed 1,007 adults between May 5-10. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for the full sample.
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A message from PhRMA:
America’s biopharmaceutical researchers work every day in the lab to find treatments and cures for patients. But patients must be able to access these discoveries. We built MAT, our Medicine Assistance Tool, to match patients with resources that may help with out-of-pocket medicine costs. Access resources. |
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Passengers on an American Airlines flight to Charlotte, N.C. at San Diego International Airport. U.S. airlines have taken a major financial hit with air travel down an estimated 94 percent. | Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
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100,000 — On the last day of March, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci projected that between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans would die from Covid-19. The lower number was considered a best-case “goal” if deaths were minimized through physical distancing and other measures. By time Memorial Day rolls around, we’ll likely have reached those 100,000 deaths — in eight weeks.
What the number will be on Labor Day will depend on how people behave, modelers say. With social-distancing measures lifted in many states, much of the spread of the virus comes down to individual behavior, which is why death toll predictions are becoming harder. The University of Washington’s IHME model, which projected 60,000 deaths by August last month, now forecasts that the daily death toll will decline throughout the summer and total deaths will hit 143,000 deaths on August 4.
Whether that number will be even higher depends on whether people continue to social distance even without a government mandate. If 30 percent of people go back to pre-Covid life — that is, they commute to work and go to bars and attend big parties and don’t wear masks and no longer wash their hands raw — the death toll will easily top 200,000 by the end of the summer, said Nina Fefferman, a professor of math and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who models diseases in people and animals.
There’s a chance that the virus might be less contagious in hot weather, but growing case counts in hot places like India suggest otherwise. A more likely scenario is that as social distancing measures relax and people let down their guard, case counts and the death toll will continue to grow.
That is, if you believe the official death toll. There’s a debate over the inclusion of “probable” deaths in the numbers. But public health experts (including Fauci) believe the official numbers also hide thousands of virus victims who didn’t get tested because far more people died over March and April this year compared with previous years, according to the CDC’s data on excess deaths.
Many cities in the U.S. had their lowest transmission rates in mid-April, when people were sheltering in place, but infections have been growing as people start to venture out, according to Lauren Ancel Meyers, a mathematical biologist leading the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which uses GPS data from mobile phones to track whether people are social distancing. The Texas consortium predicts the death toll will rise as high as 110,000 in the next three weeks.
But it could go even higher if people don’t take precautions as they venture out, said Meyers.
Things will be worse in states that don’t have the virus under control. It spreads exponentially. Places that were able to keep the infection rate low — that is, to ensure that on average every case leads to fewer than one additional infection — are starting the summer off with a huge advantage.
Among the states that have clearly kept the reproductive rate of the virus under one are Alaska, Montana, Utah and Wyoming, according to research from early May by Columbia University’s Jeffrey Shaman that looked at 25 states that were reopening. In those four states and others like them, Covid cases were decreasing. In Ohio, Alabama and South Carolina, among others, the reproductive rate was higher than one. When that happens, a handful of new cases can quickly expand into a hotspot.
There’s large variation within states, too. The daily death count will decline over the next three weeks, according to the University of Texas consortium. But in certain cities — Des Moines; Dallas; Minneapolis; Fresno, Calif.; Fort Myers, Fla.; and Jackson, Miss. — daily deaths are likely to increase over the next few weeks.
The summer’s death toll won’t become clear until deep into the fall. There’s evidence that the virus was circulating in the United States as early as December. Now we know the virus is here, but there’s still a lag in the data. Usually three or four weeks pass from the moment someone shows symptoms to the day they get a positive test result. A death, when it happens, could take another week or even longer.
The death toll on Election Day, not on Labor Day, will tell us whether we had a summer of relief or recklessness.
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HAPPENING WEDNESDAY - GLOBAL BANKING AND INVESTING DURING A PANDEMIC: Join Global Translations author Ryan Heath on Wednesday at 9 a.m. EDT for a virtual interview with Suma Chakrabarti, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Why is so much of the Covid-related government spending is inefficient? How did EBRD became the world’s first Covid-only bank? Will the push for the private sector to become more sustainable pay off? Don't miss out on this fascinating conversation presented in partnership with The Atlantic Council. REGISTER HERE.
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BETWEEN A BLOCK AND A GUARD PLACE — More than 40,000 National Guard troops are deployed across the U.S. to help respond to coronavirus. But thousands are set to miss out on key federal benefits by one day if the White House doesn’t extend their deployment past June 24, and the National Guard sent guidance to state governments to wind down troops’ federal deployment for coronavirus relief work. Health care reporter Alice Miranda Ollstein explains in the latest edition of POLITICO Dispatch : “They described it as a hard stop, even though the National Guard told me for the story that there is still the possibility it could be extended. The fact that they described it on the call as a hard stop, no other officials contradicted that description, or raised the possibility of an extension on the call, really stuck out to me.”
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MARGIN OF ERROR — Why do we even take nationwide polls for a presidential election decided by the Electoral College, not the popular vote? Video reporter Eugene Daniels talked with campaigns reporter Zach Montellaro about the glut of national Trump-Biden polling, and whether it means anything.
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SOUTH AMERICA GETS SLAMMED — With all 50 U.S. states now at least partially reopened, Ryan Heath looked into how are the rest of the world is faring with their reopening efforts.
South Korea thought it had beaten the virus, but an outbreak centered on a Seoul nightclub led authorities to track and test 65,000 people over the past two weeks and revealed 170 infections. Europe’s Baltic countries have created their own travel bubble, allowing Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians to visit each other, but the neighboring Nordics have not: Sweden’s high infection and death rate is now the worst in Europe.
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40.3 percent
The proportion of Georgia’s workers who have filed for unemployment insurance payments since the pandemic led to widespread shutdowns in mid-March, according to a POLITICO review of Labor Department data. (h/t Megan Cassella)
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What is the best way to stabilize the economy for the long term?
“It all depends on how long the health shock lasts. If a vaccine came out next month, I think stabilization would be totally straight forward. I think the tying of health care to employment is especially problematic in a health crisis and that long-term, thinking that through as a component of the 21st century social contract, if you will, is first-order important.” — Austan Goolsbee, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration and current economics professor at the University of Chicago, in a Reddit AMA chat with POLITICO reporters today
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BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: A DIFFERENT KIND OF NEWSLETTER: “The Long Game,” presented by Morgan Stanley, explores the convergence of private sector leaders, political actors and NGO/Academic experts on the key sustainability issues of our time. Engage with the sharpest minds from the worlds of finance, technology, energy, agriculture and government around our biggest challenges, from pandemics to plastics, from climate change to land use, from inequality to the future of work. Searching for a nuanced look at these issues and solutions? Subscribe today.
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Residents jump off a bridge while swimming, paddle boarding and kayaking in Austin, Texas. | Tom Pennington/Getty Images
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A message from PhRMA:
While America’s biopharmaceutical companies are working around the clock to develop a treatment for COVID-19, companies are also expanding efforts to help patients access other medicines they need. PhRMA’s Medicine Assistance Tool was built to connect patients with resources that may help lower out-of-pocket costs. |
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