Grieder: Texans frustrated with lack of progress on coronavirus pandemic
A recent Gallup survey found that 13 percent of Americans are satisfied with the state of the nation.
That’s a dismal figure, down 32 points from February. And yet somehow it seems too high, doesn’t it?
After months of being mired in the coronavirus pandemic, it’s debatable whether we’re even making all that much progress in fighting what President Donald Trump occasionally refers to as “the invisible enemy.”
Texas, for example, has been grappling with a surge in novel cornavirus cases and fatalities since the summer began. As of this past weekend, state health officials were reporting more than 440,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 7,000 fatalities.
Those are grim statistics, and a majority of Texans believe some blame lies with our political leaders, including Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott. The latter’s approval rating for his handling of the crisis has plummeted from 61 percent in April to just 38 percent last month, according to a new poll from Harvard, Northeastern, Northwestern and Rutgers universities. And Abbott was singled out for blame by at least one bereaved family after the death of 79-year-old David W. Nagy, a father of five, in east Texas in July.
“Family members believe David's death was needless,” his wife Stacey wrote in a scathing obituary. “They blame his death and the deaths of all the other innocent people, on Trump, Abbott and all the politicians who did not take this pandemic seriously and were more concerned with their popularity and votes than lives.”
Making matters even more bleak is the fact that Texas’s numbers, as ominous as they are, are apparently not telling the whole story. A Houston Chronicle analysis published Aug. 2 found the state is likely undercounting coronavirus cases by tens of thousands because it is not including the results of antigen tests in official tallies.
The antigen tests, which give rapid results, are considered less reliable than some others, which have to be shipped to laboratories for analysis. But they’re considered reliable enough as a gauge of “probable” cases by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the concern, according to public health experts, is that antigen tests fail to pick up all cases of the virus, not that they yield false positives.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to act as if the pursuit of reliable data is itself exacerbating the pandemic, rather than giving us the means to combat it effectively.
In a new interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios, Trump insisted again that the reason the United States has so many confirmed cases of COVID-19 is because we’re testing for it.
“It is what it is,” said Trump, confronted with the fact that more than 150,000 Americans have lost their lives to this disease thus far. “But that doesn't mean we aren't doing everything we can. It's under control as much as you can control it.”
“Take a look at some of these charts,” the president continued, producing a few sheets of paper. He examined the charts himself and pronounced the U.S. “lowest in numerous categories,” before handing the documents over to a nonplussed Swan.
[FONT="]Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,” Swan said, after examining them himself. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad.”[/FONT]
[FONT="]“You can’t do that,” Trump said, unwilling to acknowledge the grim reality.[/FONT]
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[FONT="]The upshot of all of this is that Americans are to some extent fighting an invisible enemy while blindfolded. Clearly the coronavirus has yet to be contained, but our leaders are apparently content for it to be accommodated rather than confronted directly.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Dr. Peter Hotez of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine argues in a new commentary for the journal “Microbes and Infection” that “it is not too late to chart a different course”—and that the United States, with a coherent national strategy, could achieve some semblance of normalcy by October.
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[FONT="]But part of Hotez’ plan involves acknowledging that the current, scattershot approach is not working. Fewer than 100 days before the election, Trump is having none of that.[/FONT]
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[FONT="]And so we’ll continue to stumble through this pandemic, with Houston-area hospital ICU units near capacity, students warily returning to classrooms and limited meaningful data from testing and tracing in Texas.[/FONT]
[FONT="]In a bid to facilitate re-opening for in-person instruction, Abbott on Tuesday announced that the state has distributed vast quantities of personal protective equipment to schools — more than 59 million masks, over 500,000 face shields, a small ocean of hand sanitizer.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Meanwhile, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner announced this week that law enforcement officials will begin issuing citations and fines, rather than just warnings, to people caught violating the statewide mask order that Abbott announced at the beginning of July.[/FONT]
[FONT="]“It’s all about public health and driving our numbers down, especially when in-person schooling is scheduled to start,” Turner explained.[/FONT]
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[FONT="]This is not where we were supposed to be in August, four months after Abbott declared, “We have demonstrated that we can corral the coronavirus.”[/FONT]
[FONT="]We can and must do better. The data about coronavirus cases is patchy, but there’s no doubt that an overwhelming majority of Americans are rightly dissatisfied with our response to this pandemic.[/FONT]
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/ne...frustrated-with-lack-of-progress-15458892.php
