Faced with an appalling US coronavirus death toll, the right denies the figures

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Fox News is foremost in promoting the idea that official figures are inflated, whereas experts believe more people have died

As Donald Trump agitates for the US to reopen, the American right appears to have found a novel way to deal with the rising coronavirus death toll: deny it altogether.

Related: ‘Obamagate’: Fox News focuses on conspiracy theory rather than Covid-19

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Why the Sale of a Tuscaloosa Abortion Clinic Could Signal a Massive Change in Abortion Care

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Exactly a year after Alabama passed into law one of the country’s most severe abortion restrictions, the state’s abortion fund is taking a major step toward expanding access to the procedure in the Southeast.

Gov. Kay Ivey signed the Human Life Protection Act, which would have effectively banned abortion in the state, on May 15, 2019, though a US district judge issued an injunction that temporarily blocked the law from going into effect. While its future remains in limbo, the passage of the ban drove home just how vulnerable access is in a state that has long been dedicated to winnowing away abortion rights through its legislature.

“I’d be surprised if we didn’t see more funds running clinics in the future.”

The state is down to three clinics, two of which were owned by aging proprietors—a fairly commonplace reality in several other states that are hostile to abortion rights. But Alabama is also home to robust grassroots abortion advocacy; one of the biggest beneficiaries of the backlash to last year’s law was the Yellowhammer Fund, the state’s only abortion fund, which saw a massive influx of cash. Just days after the ban was signed into law, my Mother Jones colleague Marisa Endicott reported that the fund was able to support three times the number of clients as the year prior.

Now, on the anniversary of that dark day for abortion rights, the Yellowhammer Fund is purchasing a clinic in Tuscaloosa, the West Alabama Women’s Center.

“We’re probably going to need more clinics in safe places as executive orders slow things down, as whatever happens with SCOTUS slows things down,” says The Very Reverend Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, a professional association for abortion providers. “Existing clinics can’t necessarily handle the volume of the closures that could be looming.”

Today, though, is more than a local victory. In fact, it may herald a shift in abortion care strategy much more broadly. Traditionally, abortion funds, which offer financial and logistical assistance to people seeking abortion care, have remained separate from clinics—operating in tandem with them only insofar as to set their clients up with appointments and work through the financials. But consolidating their mission may be exactly what is needed to shore up the precarious network of access in the region and make abortion care available to low-income folks.

“I’d be surprised if we didn’t see more funds running clinics in the future,” says Gloria Gray, the former owner of West Alabama Women’s Center, who reached out to Yellowhammer to ask if it was interested in purchasing the clinic. “I think that would be a good, good way to go—I will say Yellowhammer has totally amazed me at how well they’ve been able to get to the donors, and how they have done as well as they have.”

Gray has owned and operated the clinic since 1993. In recent years, the clinic has provided more than half the abortions in the state, serving women across the Southeast as states in the region have implemented increasingly draconian abortion restrictions. Gray, though, felt now was time to step aside. “I was turning 70 years old,” she tells Mother Jones. “I wanted to enjoy my grandchildren, I wanted to travel a bit, I wanted to [go visit] my son—those were my main reasons for wanting someone else that I knew could keep the clinic open and would go in and run it well.”

Amanda Reyes, executive director of the Yellowhammer Fund, explains the organization’s decision to take over the clinic as it sort of coming full circle—after all, she tells me, Yellowhammer started by offering escort services to shield patients from protesters at the same Tuscaloosa clinic. “This gives us an opportunity to have a direct impact on access,” she says. “Even starting the fund was a bit of a pipe dream, but when we started the fund, we had an idea that we would like to buy or start a clinic if we were successful beyond our wildest dreams. And we were!” 

“Those of us who are poised to take over this kind of work, we don’t have the money.”

The younger generation of abortion rights activists has often been more likely to work with abortion funds or in general activism than to work with or as abortion providers, in part because of a lower economic barrier to entry. Many clinic owners are of a generation that was less bogged down by student debt and the consequences of the 2008 recession; they purchased their businesses when the economy was steadier and the wealth gap was lesser.

“Those of us who are poised to take over this kind of work, we don’t have the money. It’s hard for us, we have all this student debt, we can’t always just spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a clinic that might just be a money pit that we keep open because we believe in the ability of people to have abortion care,” Reyes, who is 31, tells me. “How the economy has played out over the last several decades is a major factor, and student debt is one of the dangers to keeping abortion clinics open.” Reyes adds that having a collective effort like an abortion fund makes for more possibilities than a single prospective buyer, and she explains that most of the clinic’s current staff plans to stay on—meaning they will be able to retain valuable institutional knowledge.

There are, of course, also the challenges and costs associated with keeping a clinic open, particularly in a red state, where anti-abortion legislation is always brewing in the background, creating expensive, burdensome restrictions and policies that clinics must follow to continue operating. “One of the reasons why [independent clinic owners] may have such a hard time retiring is that there’s not always a lot of money in this business,” Reyes says. “And it’s expensive to run this kind of clinic—you have to deal with TRAP laws and all kinds of things, you may not have savings.” Gray also admits that while it’s not why she’s retiring, the constant legislative onslaught, the stress of running a medical practice, and the regular abuse from protesters wore on her. She even recalls a time when an anti-abortion protester called her religious mother to inform her that her daughter had purchased an abortion clinic. “I did get tired, constantly being told what an evil person I was for doing what I did,” Gray says. 

For Yellowhammer, the money for the acquisition was actually made possible by the extreme outpouring of support in the wake of last year’s ban. “That’s really fantastic, to be able to say that one year later, after [lawmakers] passed an abortion ban, we now have enough resources to buy a clinic and make not only abortion care more accessible, but comprehensive reproductive and sexual health care more accessible to people in Alabama,” Reyes says. “That’s not something [those lawmakers] were intending to do.”

Ragsdale acknowledges taking on an abortion clinic is a tall ask for anyone—which is another reason why abortion providers are aging out of the business even while there are not enough new providers to take their places, particularly in hostile states like Alabama. Ragsdale notes that red states often rely on traveling doctors to serve as abortion providers, as it’s less of a risk if their families live in a state that has more liberal views on abortion. “People go into [this field] out of passion,” Ragsdale says. “They go into it to serve their values and to do work that’s meaningful, and that’s great, but if you’re young, you also have a life to build, perhaps a family to build and support. You can’t just completely ignore the financial realities.”

Under the new ownership, the West Alabama Women’s Center plans to expand the services offered at the clinic over the next several years to cover full-spectrum reproductive health care. This too may signal another shift in modern abortion care. Yellowhammer plans to use a model similar to that of CHOICES in Memphis, which was one of the first clinics to bill itself as a reproductive health care center rather than strictly an abortion clinic. “Because our focus is as a reproductive justice fund, there is a whole host of other things that we are interested in,” Reyes says, “including comprehensive reproductive and sexual health care, continuation of pregnancies, trans-affirming health care.”

“After [lawmakers] passed an abortion ban, we now have enough resources to make not only abortion care more accessible, but comprehensive reproductive and sexual health care more accessible. That’s not something they were intending to do.”

These kinds of changes, particularly in the Southeast, are crucial in this moment. Abortion access in the Bible Belt has been whittled down significantly and has become a major battleground in the fight for abortion rights since a wave of bans swept through the region a year ago. While all those laws have since been temporarily blocked in federal court, states in the region more recently tried to use the coronavirus pandemic to reignite the fight over abortion access. And over just the next few weeks, the Supreme Court is set to rule on an abortion rights case that could open the door to more restrictions in 15 states, Alabama included; a new analysis from Guttmacher, a research and policy organization focused on reproductive health care, estimates that the clinic in Tuscaloosa would be one of only two clinics that could withstand that pressure in the state. 

“This gives us the chance to try to rework the health care system and provide a model for what health care in this country should look like,” Reyes says. “I think that running this clinic and having this knowledge about how the health care system works and using that to our community’s advantage will help us create some really great policy ideas, too.”

Self-distancing a pipe dream in Hong Kong’s cramped ‘cubicle flats’

We have 12 people living here,” Wong told AFP, gesturing to the five other cubicles that have been squeezed into the apartment alongside a shared kitchen and shower.

“We have to line up to cook our meals, queue for shower. Around dinner time, the kitchen will be so crowded and every one of us wears a mask,” she added.

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HONG KONG (AFP) – Squashed inside the 50-sq-ft living space she shares with her son, Wong Mei-ying knows social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic is all but impossible.

The 70-year-old Hong Konger lives in one of the city’s notorious “cubicle flats” – subdivided apartments that make up some of the most densely packed buildings in the world.

Earlier this week, authorities announced a new local outbreak of the deadly coronavirus in Wong’s neighbourhood – the first local transmission case in the financial hub in nearly a month.

The news has put Wong on edge.

With officials testing hundreds of residents nearby, Wong says she tries to follow the government’s social distancing and hygiene advice.

But that’s not easy inside cubicle flats.

“We have 12 people living here,” Wong told AFP, gesturing to the five other cubicles that have been squeezed into the apartment alongside a shared kitchen and shower.

“We have to line up to cook our meals, queue for shower. Around dinner time, the kitchen will be so crowded and every one of us wears a mask,” she added.

Jack Sit from Asbury Methodist Social Services told AFP that subdivided flats were “high-risk” in terms of virus transmission, saying that ventilation and drainage systems were often poor in those buildings.

Wong’s subdivided apartment is located in a crumbling walk-up building with cracked walls. What should be a main living room for a single family contains six cubicles separated from each other by thin pre-fab walls.

She sleeps on the bottom bunk, her 43-year-old son takes the top bed.

On paper Hong Kong is one of the richest cities in the world. But it suffers from pervasive inequality, an acute housing shortage and eye-watering rents that successive governments have failed to solve.

In 2016 authorities estimated some 200,000 people lived in cubicles that were 50-sq-ft or less.

Wong’s cubicle – which costs HK$2,000 (S$367) a month – is not even the smallest type of home available on the market.

That dubious accolade belongs to so-called “cage homes”, which are little more than a single bed surrounded by a lockable metal cage.

Wong works at a fast food chain and recently had her shifts cut from six days a week to five as business suffers during the pandemic.

She dreams of having an apartment for just herself and her son, who works in construction.

“But that would cost HK$7,000-8,000 per month, about the same as what I earn each month,” she said.

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China gives fresh details of virus response, denies cover up

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BEIJING  (BLOOMBERG) – China said it did not know until Jan 19 how infectious the new coronavirus is, pushing back against accusations that it intentionally withheld information about the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan from the world. 

While Chinese officials knew that there were signs of human-to-human transmission earlier, it was hard to ascertain the new virus’s level of contagiousness, said Zeng Yixin, vice-minister of the National Health Commission, at a press briefing in Beijing on Friday (May 15).

There are diseases like HIV that while infectious, are not easily transmitted from person to person, he said. 
It was only on Jan 19 that Chinese scientists concluded  the virus spreads easily among people and China released that information to the world the next day, said Zeng. 

The accounting of events from top officials came as China faces growing blame for a delay in sounding the alarm about the coronavirus, which allowed people to spread it unwittingly for some time.

Zeng was responding to an Associated Press report in April that cited confidential documents showing Chinese officials waited six days before President Xi Jinping warned the public of the dangers of the virus outbreak. 

The alleged delay resulted in millions of people travelling from Wuhan to elsewhere in the country and the world, seeding a pandemic that has now sickened over 4.4 million people and killed over 300,000. 

Giving a rundown of events since the crisis began, Zeng said that China concluded on Jan 9 that it was dealing with a novel coronavirus and began developing test kits the next day. On Jan 12, it informed the World Health Organisation (WHO) about the outbreak. On Jan 14, a national meeting of provincial health officials was held. 

“Many uncertainties remained. We understood there’s more research needed on human-to-human transmission and we couldn’t rule out the chance of a further spread of the virus,” said Zeng. “But we couldn’t reach conclusions to many questions.” 

Besides its alleged delay in disclosing information on the virus outbreak at an earlier stage, China has also faced skepticism about its official tallies of deaths and infections. 

The pandemic has revived tensions between the world’s two largest economies. China and the United States are escalating disputes from visas to supply chains as the two countries continue blaming each other regarding the origins of the virus, a mystery that global experts are trying to unravel. 

While the number of infections has dropped dramatically in China, the nation still faces the threat of a second wave after a new cluster emerged in its north-eastern region ahead of high-profile political meetings scheduled to convene next week in Beijing. 
Xi on Thursday called for stronger measures to contain any risk that could undermine the country’s success so far.

In Wuhan, officials have been directed to prepare for mass testing the entire population of 11 million after new cases were reported for the first time since the city’s lockdown lifted in April. 

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Pandemic Playbook — In Saner Thought

I am weary of the total lies spread by that mental midget Donald the Orange about how this country was caught flat footed by the spread of this virus….. If he would learn to read then he would have been able to handle this disease in an effective way instead of the slap shot crap […]

via Pandemic Playbook — In Saner Thought

There was NO DAMN reason to be caught flat footed and yet Donald was totally caught with his pants down.  (A familiar position)

USDA Hit Over Food Box Grants – (me – getting food to food banks disrupted by Trumponomic Profiteers)

Companies receiving contracts under USDA’s Farmers to Families Food Box Program include a Texas-based event marketing agency, a California company that offers “business finance solutions,” and a small company that sells personal care products online, Politico reports.

Source: USDA Hit Over Food Box Grants

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