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      500,000 Americans have died of Covid. That's more than the population of Miami | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      Five hundred thousand deaths can be hard to picture. But we have to try. Imagine, for instance, that everyone in Miami, Colorado Springs or Minneapolis died in the course of a single year. If that seems too absurd, combine the number of Americans who died in the second world war, Korea and Vietnam, then imagine that they too had been killed in a single year, on American soil.But such thought exercises only get us so far. They help us understand the scale and speed of the coronavirus crisis, but not much else. In particular, they don’t help us appreciate the ways in which death has been unequally distributed across America, and how that has affected society’s response. The disappearance of an entire city would affect a broad cross-section of society, while wars tend to unify the whole nation even as they kill mostly the young. But coronavirus is different, generating neither equal suffering nor equal concern. Instead, it disproportionately kills the elderly, the poor and racial minorities.These inequalities have shaped America’s response to the virus profoundly, with Republicans minimizing its risk and Democrats seeing it for the national emergency which it is. Republican dismissal of the virus has in part been due to the tooth-and-claw individualism that forms a key part of American identity, but it would not have been possible without something more. It has also been based on the idea that the dead were somehow expendable because of who they were.It comes as no surprise that Republican politicians show little concern for the poor or minorities. But for the lack of concern to extend even to seniors, who form such a key Republican voting bloc, the ideological blinkers must be powerful indeed.Not all prominent Republican voices went as far as the Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who suggested that the elderly ought to be willing to sacrifice their lives in order to save the economy. But the general drumbeat of misinformation and minimization, from Donald Trump on down, showed at best a profound indifference to the fates of the senior Americans who make up the vast proportion of the dead, and yet whose fate is presented as incidental to the need to “reopen the economy”.If the Republican response has been based on a characteristically narrow definition of which Americans are worthy of saving, the response of other parts of society has been much more uplifting. The challenge of the coronavirus has also called forth exactly the things which have always made America truly great but which the contemporary political right stands against: expertise, technological progress, a sense of civic duty, and an inclusive definition of Americanness. Although these ideas remain under assault, Joe Biden’s victory represents the triumph of these values over their opposites – and most of all a victory for the idea that all American lives are worth saving, regardless of whether they are considered economically valuable or not.For this reason, it has been incredibly encouraging to see that the Biden administration has recognized that the response to the virus must also involve addressing the structural inequities revealed by it. Measures such as raising the minimum wage to $15 are morally required after low-paid, disproportionately non-white essential workers have kept society humming at great personal risk during the pandemic. They are also popular among the public at large. Support for raising the minimum wage is at 61%, and 68% of Americans support Biden’s broader economic relief plan.Although Biden’s victory was a necessary first step, the deep callousness revealed by the pandemic will take much more than one election to address. In 2012, Mitt Romney famously lamented the 47% of the population who he said could never be convinced to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives”. But the pandemic has shown that this gets the American problem precisely backwards. The real problem isn’t people who refuse to take responsibility for themselves, but those who refuse to take responsibility for others – including the 47% of the electorate who voted for Donald Trump despite the complete disregard for America life he showed in the handling of the pandemic.What can be done about this 47%? In the short-term, not a great deal. There is little reason to believe they can be won over. Another lesson of the pandemic has been just how deep America’s divisions are – not even a deadly plague has brought together the two sides in what Biden has called America’s “uncivil war”. If the Republican party remains a primarily destructive rather than constructive force, then Democrats must abandon their hopes of bipartisanship and push on without it.Ultimately, Democrats must demonstrate to people the value of a government which cares for their wellbeing, materially, medically and otherwise. Building a coalition of care ought to be easier than a coalition of indifference. But in order to do it, Democrats must seize the opportunity to address the deeper American problems which the virus has revealed. Offering meaningful improvements to people’s lives isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s also the best way of guarding against the return to power of those who couldn’t care less whether their fellow Americans live or die. More

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      Fauci laments 'historic' Covid toll as US nears 500,000 deaths

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      As the US approached half a million Covid-19 deaths, the country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, struggled for words to convey the grim magnitude of the death toll from the pandemic.“It’s terrible,” he told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “It’s really horrible. It is something that is historic. It’s nothing like we’ve ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic.”Fauci added that “decades from now” people would be “talking about this a terribly historic milestone in the history of this country. To have these many people to have died from a respiratory born infection, it really is a terrible situation that we’ve been through and that we’re still going through.”The US death toll stood at 497,957, according to Johns Hopkins University. The US has long had the highest Covid-19 death toll of any country. According to the World Health Organization it has one of the worst per capita death rates, at 148.61 per 100,000. Countries including the UK, Italy and Portugal have higher per capita rates.Although infection rates have been steadily declining since record highs in early January, the US still recorded 13,347 deaths and more than 500,000 new cases in the past week, according to Johns Hopkins.Last week an average of 1.32m vaccines were administered each day, according to a tracker by Bloomberg News. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said more than 61m doses had been administered in the US, with about 5.47% of the population now fully vaccinated.Fauci, who is President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, acknowledged in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that cold weather across the US south had set back vaccine rollout, but projected the deficit would be made up by the middle of next week.“It’s a temporary setback,” he said. “And when you just, you know, put your foot to the accelerator and really push, we’ll get it up to where we need to be by the middle of the week.”The Biden administration has pledged to administer 150m vaccinations by 29 April.On CNN, Fauci acknowledged that despite the rollout of vaccines, Americans could still be asked to wear masks into 2022.“I think it is possible that that’s the case,” Fauci said. “It depends on what you mean by normality … if normality means exactly the way things were before we had this happen to us … I can’t predict that. Obviously I think we’ll have a significant degree of normality beyond the terrible burden that all of us have been through over the last year.”Fauci added that only when transmission rates fell significantly and vaccines had been rolled out to the point of “minimal, minimal threat” of transmission would mask requirements begin to be dropped.“When it [transmission] goes way down and the overwhelming majority of the people in the population are vaccinated, then I would feel comfortable in saying, you know, ‘We need to pull back on the masks’,” he said.Elsewhere on Sunday, former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger told CBS the Trump administration “misjudged” the need to advocate for mask-wearing a year ago, in the early stages of the pandemic.“We misjudged the nature of this thing to think that it was like flu,” he told Face the Nation. “One of the mistakes that followed on from that was the misjudgment by public health officials in this country to not advocate for the widespread generalised use of face coverings, cloth masks, surgical masks and what have you.”Pottinger continued: “The mask misstep cost us dearly. It was the one tool that was widely available, at least homemade, you know, cotton masks were widely available. It was the one effective, widely available tool that we had in the arsenal to deal with this. But public health officials were stuck in this sort of flu mentality. It was a grave misstep.” More

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      AOC calls for 'full investigation' into Cuomo's handling of nursing homes

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined growing calls for an investigation into New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic.“I … stand with our local officials calling for a full investigation of the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during Covid-19,” the high-profile progressive congresswoman, who represents a New York City district, said in a statement on Friday.Last week, it was revealed that a Cuomo aide told New York legislators the true picture of nursing home deaths wasn’t given last year, for fear it would be used against the governor during an investigation launched by Donald Trump’s justice department.Cuomo, who has already published a book about his handling of the crisis, has dismissed claims of wrongdoing. On Friday, he said information was not produced fast enough, which created “a void. And conspiracy theories and politics and rumors fill that void and you can’t allow inaccurate information to go unanswered.”But in January, New York state attorney general Leticia James said nursing home deaths from Covid-19 were undercounted by as much as 50%. Now, federal prosecutors in New York City and the FBI are reported to be investigating and state officials are seeking to strip Cuomo of emergency powers.The governor is under increasing pressure and Ocasio-Cortez’s intervention adds drama to a combustible mix.As a former federal housing secretary and son of former governor Mario Cuomo, the governor is a pillar of the Democratic centrist establishment. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez has rapidly risen to become a prominent voice on the progressive wing of the party.In her statement, she said: “Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic. Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership, and the secretary to the governor’s remarks warrant a full investigation.”In March, at the outset of the pandemic, New York reeled from a surge in cases. While Cuomo rose to worldwide prominence as the face of efforts to tackle the problem, an administration directive said nursing homes should not deny admission or readmission to a patient because they had Covid-19.That policy was rescinded two months later. Keeping the true number of nursing home residents who died hidden would theoretically deflect any blame for a bad policy choice. Cuomo has blamed staff entering nursing homes for spreading the virus to the vulnerable population, not patients brought in with Covid-19. He has said it would be discriminatory not to let those patients into nursing homes.The scandal has spread to CNN, a network which has a major presence in New York and for which Cuomo’s younger brother, Chris Cuomo, is a primetime host.Interviews between the two brothers went viral last spring but the network has now reinstated a prohibition on Chris Cuomo interviewing or covering his brother.The last time the governor appeared on his brother’s show, in June, Chris Cuomo asked: “Nursing homes. People died there. They didn’t have to. It was mismanaged. And the operators have been given immunity. What do you have to say about that?”Andrew Cuomo replied that some of what his brother said was incorrect, adding: “But that’s OK. It’s your show. You say whatever you want to say.” More

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      Kamala Harris promises federal relief for Texas victims of winter storms

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      Kamala Harris has sent a message to residents of Texas and other states hit by power outages and prolonged winter conditions that help is on the way.“I just want to mention all of those folks in Texas and the mid-Atlantic,” the vice-president said in a live interview on Wednesday morning on NBC’s Today show, her first national network interview since taking office.“I know they can’t see us right now, because they’re without electricity, but the president and I are thinking of them, and really hope we can do everything that is possible through the signing of the emergency orders to get federal relief to support them.”Biden signed a declaration of emergency for Texas on Sunday, opening the way for state officials to move more quickly to tap a larger share of federal aid.Harris also echoed a promise made by Joe Biden on Tuesday night that the United States would have enough doses on hand to vaccinate “all Americans” by July. “We have a vaccine now, and that is great, but we need to get it in the arms of all Americans,” Harris told the Today show host Savannah Guthrie.“And as the president said last night, we expect that that will be done in terms of having the available supply by the end of July, and so we are very excited about that.”Harris touted the speed with which the federal government is sending vaccine doses to states, a rate the White House pegs at 13.5m doses a week or a 57% increase since the inauguration.“As quickly as we’re producing it, we’re getting it out,” she said.Challenged on a guideline issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying teachers could return to work without being vaccinated, Harris said the White House felt strongly that teachers should be bumped up in line for vaccine doses.“Teachers should be a priority,” she said. “We think they should be a priority, and the states are making decisions individually.”Teachers’ unions have expressed concern that Biden’s plan to reopen most elementary schools in the next three months could expose teachers to health risks.While the federal government issues recommendations about who should receive vaccine doses in what order, each state maintains its own priority list.Harris said that a $1.9tn Covid relief and economic stimulus package the Biden administration is trying to guide through Congress would help make schools safer by providing funds to improve ventilation, erect social distancing barriers and other measures.“Our goal is that as many K-8 schools as possible will reopen within the first 100 days,” Harris said. “Our goal is that it will be five days a week. And so we have to work to achieve that goal.”To respond to complaints from states that there remained a lack of coordination on federally supplied aid, Harris said the Biden administration had begun to put national protocols in place to support states “that need that kind of coordination and support”.As part of its vaccine initiative, federal agencies have doubled direct shipments of vaccine doses to pharmacies, Harris said, and expanded a program to ship doses to community health centers serving vulnerable populations.“We just want to say to everybody, just please get vaccinated,” Harris said. “And in the interim, wear a mask, social distance and make sure you wash your hands and do that frequently.”Harris deflected a question about whether Donald Trump should face criminal charges after being acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial earlier this month.“You know, right now Savannah I’m focused on what we need to do to get relief to American families,” Harris said. “And that is my highest priority, it is our administration’s highest priority, it’s our job, it’s a job we were elected to do, and that’s our focus.“I haven’t reviewed the case through the lens of being a prosecutor, I’m reviewing the case of Covid in America through the lens of being vice-president of America.” More