Good morning to all and, as usual, we’re going to jump right into the pundit round-up with talk of...supply chains.
Ricardo Ernst and Jerry Haar write for the Miami Herald on what a properly functioning supply chain should be able to do that it is not doing right now.
Supply chain management is not a terribly sexy topic; moreover, it falls overwhelmingly within the purview of the private sector. In the public sector, it is associated more with the armed services, such as the Defense Logistics Agency, and the U.S. General Services Administration that helps manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies, such as the purchase and distribution of office furniture, computer equipment and other materiel.
However, the greatest failures of preparedness for and confronting COVID-19 are all related to supply chain management: insufficient tests, inadequate testing, scarcity of personal protection equipment and ventilators, and a lack of hospital space and refrigerated trailers to serve as morgues.
A fully functioning, well-managed supply chain system is capable of coordinating three challenging management functions into one: demand management (understanding what is going to be needed), procurement management (where is it going to be made) and fulfillment management (how is it going to be delivered). At the same time, it needs to do all this in a very responsive manner, which translates into “fast.” Supply chains, by definition, search for “optimality,” which is generally translated into “lean,” which results into “cost efficiencies.”
This model has been extremely successful and robust in “normal” conditions where the boundaries of operational performance are reasonable. In reality, nobody plans for the landing of the Black Swan since that would be “inefficient.” Yet without some redundancies in the supply chain and more onshoring and less offshoring of materiel of vital importance to health and national security, our country could be faced with critical shortages of equipment and supplies, as we are at present.
How can those supply chains function when the feds continue to seize vital supplies from the states that need them?
The correspondence, linked at the New England Journal of Medicine, concludes
This experience might have made for an entertaining tale at a cocktail party, had the success of our mission not been so critical. Did I foresee, as a health-system leader working in a rich, highly developed country with state-of-the-art science and technology and incredible talent, that my organization would ever be faced with such a set of circumstances? Of course not. Yet when encountering the severe constraints that attend this pandemic, we must leave no stone unturned to give our health care teams and our patients a fighting chance. This is the unfortunate reality we face in the time of Covid-19.
Nicole Nerea at Vox points out that while the United States will probably not experience actual food shortages on the whole, the food supply chain isn’t faring much better.
The food supply chain — the system that takes food from farm to fork through production, processing, distribution, and consumption — is designed to be nimble. It’s largely self-sufficient: Most of what Americans eat comes from American growers, brokers, factories, warehouses, and distribution centers and is shipped on American trucks. Food production is also spread out across the country, meaning that crises in any one area won’t cripple the system. And many sectors don’t, for the most part, require intensive human labor, instead employing industrial-scale machinery.
Still, some food industries are hurting from the current crisis. Some meatpacking plants have shut down. Farmers are struggling to find buyers for their produce. The price of corn has plummeted, which could put some farms out of business and have a ripple effect on other food industries.
But the most pressing challenge lies not with America’s farmers, but with the supply chain itself. The supply chain has already had to adapt to America’s changing eating habits amid the pandemic — now, consumers are almost entirely dependent on supermarkets, rather than restaurants and the food service sector. The supply chain is still catching up to this sudden shift in demand, but most experts are optimistic that it can adapt.
The question, in other words, isn’t whether there will be enough food. It’s whether that food will end up where consumers can actually buy it.
Jessica Corbett of CommonDreams.org reports that not enough food seems to be reaching the nation’s food banks.
U.S. food pantries have faced unprecedented demand while billions of dollars in produce has gone to waste due to supply chain disruptions from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—conditions that are renewing calls for reforms to make the nation's food systems more localized, resilient, and sustainable.
Coronavirus-related lockdowns and business closures this year have led to "staggering" levels of job loss, with the U.S. Department of Labor reporting Thursday that roughly 22 million people have applied for unemployment insurance since mid-March.
Those job and income losses have driven up demand for assistance from U.S. food banks and soup kitchens. In recent days, social media networks have been flooded with footage of long lines of cars full of people seeking free or affordable options:
"This year, the COVID-19 crisis is driving more of our neighbors into food insecurity and putting a strain on food banks to provide more meals," Feeding America CEO Claire Babineaux-Fontenot said in a statement last week. "Never has the charitable food system faced such tremendous challenge, and we need all the resources we can get to help our neighbors during this terrible time.
Talmon Joseph Smith writes for the New York Times about the return of President Barack Obama to the public conversation and what it means— and could mean— for young progressives.
Many progressives who came of age during the Obama presidency — myself among them — became disillusioned with its caution. Too many of us took for granted Mr. Obama’s uncanny ability to make sense of contrasting truths: the give and take of liberty and fairness in an economy; “the goodness of our nation” and its “original sin of slavery.” And as Republicans blocked him in bad faith while inequality soared, we grew weary of his earnest civics of solidarity — the way he wove competing policy ideas into a narrative in which all of us were imperfect protagonists.
Many of us feel our critiques of the Obama years remain valid. But now we are older, and living through a deadly pandemic with a leader who embodies the antithesis of Mr. Obama’s empathy and rationality. Suddenly an Obama-style civics and the bipartisan-minded, competent technocrats of the Obama administration would be a godsend. Instead, we have the fumbling leadership of Donald Trump, a man who attempts to ignore or erase all realities inconvenient to him and who seeks gain through bluffing when division, his first instinct, fails.
John Rash of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on how The Damn Fool’s relentless attacks on the press are especially dangerous in these times of a pandemic.
“The Trump administration has stepped up prosecutions of news sources, interfered in the business of news owners, harassed journalists crossing U.S. borders, and empowered foreign leaders to restrict their own media. But Trump’s most effective ploy has been to destroy the credibility of the press, dangerously undermining truth and consensus even as the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to kill thousands of Americans.”
The 30-page, deeply researched report was written by Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of the Washington Post who was so committed to objectivity that he made a virtue of not voting, lest he pull a lever for a candidate the Post would report on.
Downie, now a journalism professor at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, previously penned a 2013 CPJ report that was highly critical of the Obama administration’s prosecution of suspected government leakers and investigations of journalists who reported on the leaks. So he comes at this issue from a professorial, professional lens, not a partisan one. And in fact, some of the report’s most impactful criticism comes from journalists affiliated with news organizations the president has often favored.
“I believe that President Trump is engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history,” Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said at a Society of Professional Journalists event last December. “He has done everything he can to undercut the media, to try to delegitimize us, and I think his purpose is clear: to raise doubts, when we report critically about him and his administration, that we can be trusted.”
Justin Feffer chronicles the new American dystopia for TomDispatch.com.
...Covid-19 has decisively put the lie to American exceptionalism. Not only can it happen here, but it's happening here, far worse than anywhere else. The United States is adding upwards of 30,000 new infections daily, twice the rate of China on February 12th, that country’s worst day, and nearly five times what Italy faced at its peak on March 20th.
Meanwhile, adding depression to disease, the U.S. economy has crashed. Claims for unemployment benefits have risen by an astounding 17 million in just three weeks, pushing the jobless rate close to 10% (and still rising fast). Yes, the whole global economy is taking a hit, but other countries have moved in more sensible directions. China’s blunt-force quarantine has now enabled it to restart its economy, South Korea’s pinpoint approach has so far avoided a full-scale economic lockdown, and Denmark has paid its companies directly to maintain their payrolls and retain workers during the downturn of self-isolation.
In other words, in true dystopian fashion, Washington has managed to fumble both its response to the pandemic and its potential economic recovery plan. Presidential incompetence, incomprehension, and intransigence have been key to these glaring failures. The myriad defects that Donald Trump displayed from his first day in the White House, then largely grist for the monologues of late-night talk-show hosts, have now turned truly tragic. They include his stunning disregard for science, his undeniable compulsion to spread misinformation, his complete refusal to take responsibility for anything negative, his thoroughgoing contempt for government, and his abrupt vacillations in policy.
Most of all, the president exhibited extraordinary hubris. Out of a belief in his own infallibility, he thinks he knows better than the experts, any experts, no matter the topic.
As it happens, he doesn’t.
As soon as I saw the word “hubris,” I already knew where Mr. Feffer’s essay was headed; after all, I too, have thought of and compared The Damn Fool to the similar situation faced by King Oedipus. And granted that The Damn Fool and the fictional King of Thebes share the so-called “fatal flaw” (hamartia) of hubris, can you imagine The Damn Fool fixing his mouth to say anything like this?
I pity you, children, You have come full of longing,
but I have known the story before you told it
only too well. I know you are all sick,
yet there is not one of you, sick though you are,
that is as sick as myself.
Your several sorrows each have single scope
and touch but one of you. My spirit groans
for city and myself and you at once.
Continuing with the literary theme, Kathryn McKinley writes for The Conversation that just as COVID-19 is no great equalizer of existing social inequalities, neither was the Black Death of the 14th century.
“The Decameron” begins with a gripping, graphic description of the Black Death, which was so virulent that a person who contracted it would die within four to seven days. Between 1347 and 1351, it killed between 40% and 50% of Europe’s population. Some of Boccaccio’s own family members died.
In this opening section, Boccaccio describes the rich secluding themselves at home, where they enjoy quality wines and provisions, music and other entertainment. The very wealthiest – whom Boccaccio describes as “ruthless” – deserted their neighborhoods altogether, retreating to comfortable estates in the countryside, “as though the plague was meant to harry only those remaining within their city walls.”
Meanwhile, the middle class or poor, forced to stay at home, “caught the plague by the thousand right there in their own neighborhood, day after day” and swiftly passed away. Servants dutifully attended to the sick in wealthy households, often succumbing to the illness themselves. Many, unable to leave Florence and convinced of their imminent death, decided to simply drink and party away their final days in nihilistic revelries, while in rural areas, laborers died “like brute beasts rather than human beings; night and day, with never a doctor to attend them.”
Vanity Fair’s T. A. Frank tries to explain: exactly what is going on in Sweden?
To start with, it’s a myth that Sweden is doing nothing about the virus. Most Swedes have changed their habits a lot. Schools for older kids are closed, as are universities. People are working from home, when they can, and the elderly are being urged to keep to themselves. Gatherings of over 50 people are prohibited, and ski resorts are closed. Restaurants and bars are allowing table service only, and grocery stores are installing glass dividers between customers and cashiers. People who go to Stockholm may be stunned to see bars and cafés with customers, but they’re seeing only the Swedes who choose to run higher risks. They’re not seeing all the Swedes who are staying home.
Second, contrary to the claims of John Fund and Joel Hay and many others, Sweden isn’t trying to develop “herd immunity,” meaning a state of affairs in which so many people get the virus that the virus runs out of kindling. (At least, Swedish officials claim they aren’t doing this, and they would have a lot to lose by lying about it.) Instead, Sweden intends to take as loose an approach as possible that still keeps case growth down to nonexponential numbers. “We are not in the containment phase,” said Sweden’s chief state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, last month. “We are in the mitigation phase.”
What Tegnell means is that the coronavirus is all over the world now, and, without a vaccine or a massive outbreak that brings about herd immunity, you won’t get rid of it. Even if you do what China did and lock down so hard that you eradicate the virus within your borders, it will return as soon as you allow any travel in and out of your country to resume. So Sweden has based its policies on two premises: (1) The coronavirus can only be managed, not suppressed. Short of going full Wuhan on the entire planet, we’ll have to live with it. (2) People won’t tolerate severe lockdown for more than a month or two, since boredom, isolation, and economic desperation will get overwhelming.
I’m trying to understand what Sweden is trying to do as best as I can but with a CFR (case-to-fatality ratio) of ~11%...
Both the Vanity Fair and Vox articles mention one very unique aspect of the COVID-19 decision-making in Sweden. This from the Vox article:
That sense of security comes partly from widespread trust in the Public Health Agency. It’s a mostly independent organization that takes the lead during major public health crises like disease outbreaks and is heavily protected from political interference.
No government minister actually oversees the agency, which gives Tegnell, the government’s chief epidemiologist and response coordinator, a lot of room to make decisions as he sees fit.
“There’s cause for a [government] minister to get sacked if they interfere” with independent public bodies, Lindgren told me. “The scandals that get reported here are when ministers try to place undue influence on the experts.”
No, I don’t like that the Trump Administration has largely based its disastrous decisions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic on the politics of the moment to the near-exclusion of the advice of scientific and public health officials. However, in light of what I have read of the situation in Sweden, I can’t say that I like the almost total autonomy being exercised by Sweden’s Public Health Agency.
Christopher Stokes writes for AlJazeera on the tremendous strain that may be faced by the health care systems in Africa pretty soon.
Intensive care units have buckled under pressure in China, Europe and the US. However, large swaths of the world face a different scenario. Gaza has approximately 20 mechanical ventilators for two million people; the Central African Republic has three ventilators for a country of five million; and Burkina Faso has a grand total of 12 critical care beds for its 20 million citizens.
We can hope that a younger demographic in most of these countries will help mitigate the effect of COVID-19. But many already suffer from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, various non-communicable diseases, and infections such as cholera, measles, or malaria. Catching COVID-19 on top of these may prove to be a deadly combination.
For now, the working assumption is that the pattern of severe infection will at least match that seen in Asia and Europe: 80 percent may not require hospitalisation, but some 20 percent will. Most of the latter will need oxygen therapy, and a full quarter of them - mechanical ventilation. For those without such care, death by asphyxiation is all but inevitable.
Oxygen and ventilators will be the dividing line between the north and south, just as access to antiretrovirals drugs (ARVs) were at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1990s. For years, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) scaled-up ARV treatment projects in South Africa to demonstrate that this divide was neither necessary nor acceptable.
I have no idea as to the identity of the writer who has chosen as a pseudonym the name of a classical Indian scholar and diplomat but Chanakya’s essay, for the Hindustan Times, on the importance of both an Opposition party and the need for all parties to be cooperative in these times is...interesting.
To be sure, there may be underlying differences in approach. But it is important to note that this is a rare moment in Indian democracy, which is otherwise marked by constant arguments, rancour, squabble, battles, and bitter contestations. The gravity of the crisis is such that, notwithstanding the barbs exchanged every day by the social media warriors of differing persuasions on Twitter, there is a spirit of cooperation that is unprecedented in recent times.
This, then, brings us to what the role of the Opposition should be? In normal times, in any democracy, especially in a parliamentary democracy like India, the Opposition’s job is to ruthlessly critique the government, point to gaps in each policy decision, speak up for those who are not being heard in decision-making, mobilise both grassroots and elite opinion against the ruling dispensation, and eventually, through elections, displace the party in power and win a democratic mandate.
But in exceptional times such as these, the role of the Opposition changes somewhat. It has to begin with the premise that the government’s intent is noble — that even if there is political rivalry, those who are exercising State power want to help the country overcome the challenge posed by the pandemic. This faith in intent has to be supplemented by cooperation, for it is only when the political class in a united manner takes on a challenge — across federal units — that there can be a commonality in the action plan and the implementation of it. This has indeed happened. The Opposition has supported the lockdown announced by the PM; there is also a broad consensus about the methods to be adopted to battle the pandemic — from testing to identifying hotspots and containment zones, from the importance of social distancing to increasing isolation and quarantine facilities, from providing relief to the poor to redressing the economic slowdown.
I think that this sounds ideal (I wish that this was more the reality in the United States but I haven’t studied in too much depth the extent to which this applies to PM Modi and the Oppositionn parties in India (although I don’t think that Modi, overall, has done a bad job from what I’ve read and seen although sometimes Modi’s use of police powers has gone a little overboard)
Puja Changoiwala reports for Undark that that cooperation between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and The Opposition will become increasingly important because India’s health care system is not prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the Covid-19 pandemic begins making its way through India — the country has documented 358 deaths and more than 10,500 confirmed cases so far according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, though these are surely undercounts — reports of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions in state-run testing and quarantine centers have been multiplying. Patients with Covid-19 symptoms, many who had previously travelled abroad, are reportedly abandoning state-run isolation wards — including 11 patients who fled from a government facility in Navi Mumbai. This could help the virus spread, further threatening the country’s already inadequate public health infrastructure.
Until recently, India had only 111 Covid-19 testing centers to handle a population of 1.35 billion people. The number of beds in government-run quarantine facilities across the country, meanwhile, is about 60,000. As a result, most patients have been relying on understaffed and underfunded state-run facilities like Kasturba Hospital for Covid-19 diagnosis and treatment.
Faced with a looming surge of Covid-19 cases, the government recently urged private hospitals to begin admissions, and roped in 35 private laboratories across the country to conduct coronavirus tests. This came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on March 23, announced a 21-day national lockdown to contain the spread of the virus. Presumably aware of the plight of the public health care system, Modi also committed $2 billion to boost infrastructure through increased availability of testing facilities, isolation beds, ICU beds, ventilators, and other necessary tools.
Finally, this morning...from South Africa
Hey….why not? That pride looks as if they are sleeping GOOD, too!
Everyone have a good day!