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      'Democracy is broken': state races aim to undo decade of Republican map-rigging

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      The small farming communities of Wisconsin’s 32nd state senate district, with names like Romance and Avalanche, sit nestled along the Mississippi River. It’s within these rural towns that millions of political dollars are pouring into small counties to influence a local race for state senators who are paid a far more humble amount.
      That’s because in Wisconsin, like several other states this year, both Democrats and Republicans are trying to rack up seats in the state legislatures to hold influence over the political maps which are redrawn every 10 years after the decennial census count.
      “One race should not have this kind of significance,” says Ben Wikler, the Democratic state party chairman tasked with wrestling back majority rule in a state where Democrats won 54% of the overall assembly vote in 2018, but won just over 36% of the seats. “But democracy in Wisconsin is broken.”
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      Republicans asserted their dominance in 2010 by targeting 107 state legislative seats in 16 key states through a $30m national strategy appropriately called REDMAP. It worked: the hi-tech maps the GOP produced have kept every one of those swing-state chambers red throughout this decade, even in years when Democratic candidates won more votes.
      Legislatures in these states, contrary to popular opinion, then worked quickly to undermine collective bargaining, erode voting rights, enact draconian new limits on reproductive rights, refused to expand Medicaid and much more.
      But if Republicans flip the open seat in Wisconsin’s 32nd district – carried by a Democrat in 2018 by just 56 votes – they could block the Democratic governor’s agenda and claim complete control over drawing the next decade of legislative and congressional maps. They could cement their majority in the legislature, and continue implementing restrictions on voting like they are this year, potentially impacting which way Wisconsin goes in the presidential election.
      “It’s all on the line,” Wikler says. “Imagine that? It can be a lot to run for local office and feel like the future of your state and maybe even the electoral college rests on your race.”
      While races for the White House and control of the US Senate demand the largest headlines and the wildest fundraising sums, the stakes of America’s down-ballot races are huge. In three states in particular, Texas, Wisconsin and North Carolina, these local races will determine nothing less than the next decade of the states’ politics, and also influence the electoral college state of play into the 2030s.
      “Collin county, Texas, and outside Dallas, Houston, Waco, even,” says Jessica Post, who leads the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “Overland Park, Kansas. Livonia, Michigan. Those are the places that will change the country.”
      North Carolina: ‘They know what’s at stake’
      Just how important are these district lines? A 2016 report by the Electoral Integrity Project at Harvard measuring the health of American democracy gave North Carolina a seven on a scale of 100, the worst in the nation, and a rating in line with Iran and Venezuela. North Carolina Republicans locked themselves in power, then enacted a “monster” voter suppression bill that targeted black voters with “surgical” precision. They passed the infamous transgender bathroom bill. And when voters elected a Democratic governor in 2016, they curtailed his powers in a shocking lame-duck session.
      Those maps not only kept Republicans in power with fewer votes, it allowed them to command 10 of North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts, more than 70%, again, even when voters preferred Democratic candidates.
      Chart showing North Carolina voters voted for Democrats but Republicans had the majority in the state house.
      State Democrats broke the GOP’s gerrymandered monopoly in 2018, when they gained two seats in the state senate and nine in the house. Then, the following year, a North Carolina court tossed out the map, calling it an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that violated the state constitution. A new, fairer map was introduced – but it is now up for replacement.
      The state elections this year are the last chance for Democrats to win a seat at the table for next year’s redistricting. The new, fairer map will be gone. If the GOP wins both chambers, Democratic governor Roy Cooper can’t veto the Republican plan.
      “We’re going to have maybe 15 races where we’ve spent half a million dollars, just on the Democratic side, for a [state senate] job that pays $14,000 a year,” says state Representative Graig Meyer, who has led Democratic recruitment efforts to win back at least one chamber of the North Carolina legislature ahead of redistricting. “It’s all about the maps.”
      Meyer and state Democrats made a strategic shift as they recruited candidates. Instead of seeking out veteran Democratic officeholders – quite likely a “slightly older than middle-aged white guy who was pretty boring,” Meyer says – they looked for people with deep community connections and a high degree of emotional intelligence. As a result, the ensuing slate is younger and features more women and candidates of color.
      That’s the case here in state senate district 18, which includes Franklin county, in central North Carolina, and also some of the growing far outer suburbs of Raleigh. Rising home prices in the capital region pushed more families into these once quiet rural towns. Population shifts, newcomers from the north, and now a newly drawn state senate map that now reaches deeper into the outer Raleigh rings in Wake county could bring even more change.
      In 2018, Republican state senator John Alexander held this seat by just 2,639 votes. When the court mandated a new map, however, the new district that had been carefully crafted to tilt red no longer included Alexander’s home. This newly open seat is now far more blue-leaning, and one of the seats Democrats see as a must-flip. In almost any scenario, if Democrats are to take the senate, the road runs through these towns of Zebulon and Wake Forest.
      “It’s a lot of pressure,” says Democratic senate nominee Sarah Crawford. “If I lose, I might have to consider moving out of state. I might not be able to show my face. It’s about the future of North Carolina. It’s about the next decade.”
      The mother of two and nonprofit executive said the skewed maps have taken a toll on the state.
      “In a 50/50 state, you shouldn’t have one party with an extreme majority over another,” Crawford says. “What it’s meant for North Carolina is that public education has suffered. We haven’t expanded Medicaid. Now we have a whole new layer of inaction with the Covid-19 pandemic. All of these bad things have come out of gerrymandering.”
      Just over an hour west sits the newly redrawn 31st senate district, encompassing the rural, tobacco environs surrounding Winston-Salem. This district has changed dramatically as well – from a Republican plus-18 seat to just a Republican plus-four on the new map. For the last decade, the only action has come in heated Republican primaries, followed by a November coronation.
      “We haven’t had a history of competitive elections,” says Terri LeGrand, the Democratic challenger. But this seat is winnable. The new district not only cuts deeper toward blue Winston-Salem, it includes 20 new precincts – almost all of them Democratic-leaning – that had been buried inside a neighboring Republican district.
      “My opponent is on record, very open about the fact that she supports gerrymandering. She has absolutely no problem with it. So, it’s not something that we want to leave to chance.”
      Republicans aren’t gambling, either. Millions in dark money from Republican donors have been funneled into North Carolina through something called the Good Government Coalition. It is registered to an address at a UPS store in suburban Virginia, according to Raleigh television station WRAL, and the custodian of records is listed as Matthew Walter – formerly the president of the Republican State Legislative Committee, which pioneered the party’s REDMAP efforts in 2010.
      The funds have gone toward negative ads being hurled against LeGrand, for example, incorrectly suggesting that she supports defunding the police. Similar ads have targeted other Democratic contenders in close districts, in a strategy mimicking REDMAP ads that identified a hot-button local issue, then buried mailboxes under a weeks-long avalanche of misleading negative ads.
      “It’s grinding and vitriolic,” LeGrand says. “They’ve thrown everything at me because they know what’s at stake.”
      Texas: ‘It’s not a red state. It’s a suppression state’
      Deep in the upper-middle-class suburbs north-east of Dallas are the well-manicured towns neighboring the ultra-wealthy enclaves that George W Bush and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban call home. Here, Brandy Chambers holds one of the nine keys to Democratic hopes of flipping the Texas house for the first time in nearly two decades.
      White people, for example, make up just over 40% of all Texans, according to 2019 census figures, yet still control nearly 70% of the state’s congressional and state legislative seats. In 2018, Texas Republicans won just over 50% of the statewide vote for Congress, but nevertheless won two-thirds of the seats.
      That could change in 2021, and the 112th district could make all the difference. Nine seats separate Democrats from winning an all-important ticket to the redistricting table next year. They are increasingly competitive in Texas and had been able to flip 12 seats in the 2018 midterms.
      If they succeed, Democrats would influence the drawing of as many as 39 congressional districts gerrymandered by the GOP dating back to the early 2000s redraw, which divided liberal Austin into four districts with four conservatives. There could also be a strong impact on national politics, because Texas could receive at least three new seats in Congress following census reapportionment next year.
      A Democratic state house would provide a brake on voter suppression efforts that sunk Texas to 50th in voter turnout in 2018 and limited massive counties the size of New England states to one dropbox each this fall.
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      “It’s not a red state. It’s a suppression state, and by God, my governor and my attorney general are doing their damndest to keep it that way,” Chambers says. “But when Texas goes blue, we take our 38 to 41 electoral votes with us, and then there’s no math in which a Republican can win the White House without Texas. If they draw the maps? We could be stuck like chuck for another decade.”
      According to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which rates state legislative races Moneyball-style, with an eye toward pushing donations toward the most meaningful races to impact redistricting, Texas’s 112th district is the most valuable in the state. “I was able to get so close in a historically very red district,” Chambers tells me. “If my race goes, a couple other races go, and we get a new House majority.”
      This year, determined Texans have withstood suppression efforts and set turnout records. More than seven million voted early, and numbers were highest in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and the surrounding environs that mirror the fast-growing, wealthy suburbs that have turned against the Republicans and Donald Trump.
      “The story this year is the Texas voter overcoming these obstacles inspired by the women by and large who are running for the Texas house,” says Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman who lost a Senate battle to Ted Cruz in 2018, but has organized nightly phone banks aimed at flipping the chamber. “I’ve never seen this level of organization and capitalization and strategic deployment of resources in my life.” More

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      'His lies are killing my neighbors': swing-state health workers organize in bid to defeat Trump

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      Dr Chris Kapsner intubated his first Covid patient – a 47-year-old man who arrived short of breath at the emergency room in the Twin Cities – back in April. Now, seven months later, Kapsner, who lives across the border in Wisconsin, is weary and exhausted from the steady stream of patients arriving with a virus that is spreading across this part of the midwest. Hospital beds and PPE are in short supply, and his colleagues are getting sick. “Even if we put up all the field tents in the world, we don’t have the staff for this,” he said.Kasper believes political disfunction at the state level and a “disastrous” federal response are responsible for Wisconsin’s spike in cases. It’s part of the reason he’s running for office.Kapsner is one of at least four healthcare workers who are running for Democratic seats in the Wisconsin state assembly, and one of many in his field who are speaking out against Trump and the GOP’s response to Covid.Wisconsin is in the throes of one of the country’s worst Covid outbreaks. On 27 October, the state reported more than 5,000 new cases and a test-positivity rate of over 27%. Nearly 2,000 people have died, and only the Dakotas are currently reporting more cases per capita.Despite this, Donald Trump has been holding large rallies across the state – three in the last week alone – where crowds gather by the thousands, often without masks. Another Trump rally is planned for Monday in Kenosha, the site of unrest last summer after Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police. Wisconsin is a crucial swing state in Tuesday’s election; Trump carried the state by just 27,000 votes in 2016 and is currently trailing behind Joe Biden in the polls.Last week, a group of 20 doctors sent an open letter to Donald Trump asking him to stop holding rallies in the state. On Thursday, the night before Trump was scheduled to appear in Green Bay, hospitals released a joint statement urging locals to avoid large crowds. Earlier this month, the Trump campaign scuttled plans for a rally in La Crosse, in western Wisconsin, after the city’s mayor asked him not to come amid a spike in cases there. Dr Kristin Lyerly, an Ob/Gyn who practices in Appleton, in eastern Wisconsin, said she struggles to find the right words to describe her anger over the rallies, which have been linked to subsequent coronavirus outbreaks. Last week, at a rally in Waukesha, about 100 miles south of Appleton, Trump falsely accused healthcare workers of inflating the number of Covid cases for financial gain.“His lies are killing my neighbors,” she said.Many of us were shocked that our legislature would put us in danger, and make us decide between our vote and our healthLyerly, who is also running for state assembly, said she spends her days trying to reassure terrified pregnant patients, while fearing that she might contract the virus herself. She and her colleagues are overwhelmed. She keeps her PPE in her car to ensure she never goes without it. “We’ve completely forgotten about the human impact on our healthcare workers. Our healthcare workers are exhausted, they’re burned out and they feel entirely disrespected,” she said.Lyerly said she decided to run for office in April, after the Republican-controlled state assembly refused to postpone a statewide election, in which the Democratic presidential primary and a key state supreme court seat were on the ballot. The state GOP also stymied efforts to make it easier for Wisconsinites to vote by mail.“As a physician, I think many of us were shocked that our legislature would put us in danger, and make us decide between our vote and our health,” she said. She’s running in a district that typically leans conservative, but said that her campaign’s latest polls put her within the margin of error of her opponent, an incumbent.Dr Robert Freedland, an ophthalmologist in south-western Wisconsin and state lead for the Committee to Protect Medicare, signed the letter asking Trump to stop holding rallies in Wisconsin. He wanted to go on the record as having spoken out in the name of public health.Freedland, who is 65 and has type II diabetes, said he fears for his health when he goes to work. Dr Jeff Kushner, a cardiologist who also signed the letter, said he hasn’t been able to work since March due to the pandemic. Kushner, 65, has non-Hodgkins lymphoma and is on immunosuppressants. “If I got Covid, I wouldn’t survive,” he said.Though he follows politics closely, Kushner said he’s not “politically involved” and that he tends to keep his politics to himself and a close inner circle. But he said he doesn’t consider signing the letter to Trump a political act. “It’s a statement of what I believe about our society’s health and not a political statement,” he said. “It wasn’t an anti-Trump letter, we were just saying, ‘Please don’t have these super-spreader events in our state.’”Kapsner, the emergency room doctor in north-western Wisconsin, said he still speaks with patients and voters who doubt the severity of Covid-19. “My job isn’t to shame them,” he said. “There are many people out here who have had the good fortune of not being personally affected by Covid. Their friends or families haven’t had it yet – I fear their luck is going to run out.” More

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      US election roundup: Trump and Biden swing through battleground states

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      The two US presidential candidates swung through northern battleground states on Friday amid signs that the coronavirus pandemic was once more threatening to overcome hospital capacity in several US regions.
      Donald Trump was due to hold a succession of airport rallies in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, while Joe Biden was scheduled to have drive-in rallies in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
      The trip to Minnesota marked a rare defensive move for the Democratic challenger, who held a low double-digit lead in new polls published with four days left of the election campaign. Hillary Clinton narrowly held Minnesota in 2016 and the latest polls show Biden with a five-point margin.
      But he told reporters: “I don’t take anything for granted. We’re going to work for every single vote up until the last minute.”
      The president insisted the state was vulnerable.
      “I think it’s going to flip for the first time since 1972,” he said, claiming he had stopped rioting there following the police killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked the Black Lives Matter protests.
      Before setting out from Washington on Friday morning, Trump railed against the supreme court for ruling to allow election officials in North Carolina to accept votes received by 12 November as long as they are postmarked by 3 November.
      “This decision is CRAZY and so bad for our Country. Can you imagine what will happen during that nine day period,” Trump said on Twitter.
      He has been similarly critical of a parallel supreme court decision this week to allow Pennsylvania to extend its count. His new appointee to the court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not take part in the decisions as, according to the court, she had not had time to review the arguments.
      Behind in the polls, the Republicans have put significant effort in campaign endgame focusing on procedural and legal attempts to suppress the turnout or the vote count. Trump has said he wants a result on 3 November, but by law states have until 8 December to finalise their returns. More

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      Wisconsin can't count mail-in ballots received after election day, supreme court rules

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      The US supreme court has sided with Republicans to prevent Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots that are received after election day.
      In a 5-3 ruling, the justices on Monday refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the 3 November election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold.
      The ruling awards a victory for Republicans in their crusade against expanding voting rights and access. It also came just moments before the Republican-controlled Senate voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, a victory for the right that locks in a conservative majority on the nation’s highest court for years to come.
      The three liberal justices dissented. John Roberts, the chief justice, last week joined the liberals to preserve a Pennsylvania state court order extending the absentee ballot deadline but voted the other way in the Wisconsin case, which has moved through federal courts.
      “Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin,” Roberts wrote.
      “As the Covid pandemic rages, the court has failed to adequately protect the nation’s voters,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent that noted the state allowed the six-day extension for primary voting in April and that roughly 80,000 ballots were received after the day of the primary election.
      Democrats argued that the flood of absentee ballots and other challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic makes it necessary to extend the period in which ballots can be counted. Wisconsin, a swing state, is also one of the nation’s hotspots for Covid-19, with hospitals treating a record high number of patients with the disease. The supreme court allowed a similar extension to go into effect for Wisconsin’s April election, a decision that led to nearly 80,000 additional votes getting counted in the contest (Trump carried the state in 2016 by just under 23,000 votes).
      Republicans opposed the extension, saying that voters have plenty of opportunities to cast their ballots by the close of polls on election day and that the rules should not be changed so close to the election.
      The justices often say nothing, or very little, about the reasons for their votes in these emergency cases, but on Monday, four justices wrote opinions totaling 35 pages to lay out their competing rationales.
      Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged the complications the pandemic adds to voting, but defended the court’s action.
      “No one doubts that conducting a national election amid a pandemic poses serious challenges. But none of that means individual judges may improvise with their own election rules in place of those the people’s representatives have adopted,” Gorsuch wrote.
      Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, echoed Trump in writing that states should announce results on election night.
      States “want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter”, he wrote. “Moreover, particularly in a presidential election, counting all the votes quickly can help the state promptly resolve any disputes, address any need for recounts, and begin the process of canvassing and certifying the election results in an expeditious manner.” He also wrote states had an interest in avoiding “the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.”
      That comment earned a sharp rebuke from Kagan, who said “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted”.
      She noted that the bigger threat to election “integrity” was valid votes going uncounted. “nothing could be more ‘suspicio[us]’ or “improp[er]’ than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night. To suggest otherwise, especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process,” she wrote.
      Kavanaugh cited Vermont as an example of a state that “decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules” due to the pandemic, even though, in fact, the state authorized the secretary of state to automatically mail a ballot to all registered voters this year, in order to make it easier for everyone to vote absentee.
      In a significant footnote, Kavanaugh also wrote that state courts do not have a “blank check” to step in on state laws governing federal elections, endorsing conservative justices’ rationale in deciding the election in 2000 between George W Bush and Al Gore.
      Two decades ago, in Bush v Gore, the supreme court decided – effectively – that Bush would be the US president after settling a recount dispute in the swing state of Florida. Back then, three conservative justices – William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas – said that the Florida supreme court “impermissibly distorted” the state’s election code by ordering a recount of a close election, during which voting machines were found to have issues correctly counting the votes.
      In Monday’s ruling, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch – both Trump appointees – endorsed that view expressed in the Bush v Gore case, a move that could foretell how the court, which now has a 6-3 conservative majority, would rule if the results of the presidential election are contested.
      Justices Thomas, Samuel Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh recently voted to block a deadline extension to count ballots in Pennsylvania. However, with only eight justice on the court at the time, and the conservative justice John Roberts siding with liberals – at tied court ultimately upheld the deadline extension.
      But Pennsylvania Republicans, sensing an ally in Barrett, have asked for a re-do. In making their case, they are arguing that the state supreme court overstepped by ordering officials to count mail-in ballots that are sent by election day but arrive up to three days later.
      Agencies contributed to this report More

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      Obama campaigns for Biden in Florida as Trump heads to battleground Ohio – live coverage

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      5.53pm EDT17:53

      Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris is calling for an administration that is frank about racist police brutality in America.
      “There isn’t a Black man I know, be it a relative or friend, who has not had some sort of experience with police that’s been about an unreasonable stop, some sort of profiling or excessive force,” she said. More

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      Wisconsin sees record number of early voters as Covid cases climb in state

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      After pressing forward with in-person voting back in April despite the pandemic, election officials expect a smoother process nowWisconsin, a state notoriously divided by politics, bucked national trends in April when it pressed forward with in-person midterm elections during the pandemic, despite objections of the Democratic governor, Tony Evers. Faced with a sudden exodus of volunteer poll workers, Milwaukee consolidated 180 polling locations in five, resulting in hours-long wait times.Having had six months to prepare for fall elections – stocking up on PPE, creating plans for cleaning, and finding enough volunteers to work the polls – experts and election officials expect a smoother process on 3 November. But the wave of coronavirus outbreaks that first walloped the nation’s coastal areas has now crashed on the midwest. Wisconsin cities made up seven out of 10 areas with the highest share of Covid cases relative to their populations, according to a New York Times analysis. Continue reading… More

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      Covid cases increase across US as upper midwest sees rapid rise

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      Covid-19 cases are increasing across the United States and surging in the upper midwest, in what appears to be a third pandemic peak. In North Dakota, cases are increasing at a higher and faster rate per capita than in any other state throughout the pandemic so far.
      Experts have long predicted cooler weather and pandemic fatigue would increase the spread of Covid-19 this fall. That now appears to be coming to pass, coupled with the longer and higher levels of death and disease the US has seen throughout the pandemic compared to peer countries.
      “Everyone who knew anything about infectious disease and epidemiology predicted this six to eight months ago,” said Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, vice-provost for global initiatives at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
      “Yes, it will surge in the fall, and the reason it will surge is because we are moving indoors,” said Emanuel. “Our surge is much higher than the surges in general,” he said, because the US has started, “from a higher baseline”.
      Surges are especially pronounced in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota, according to the Covid Tracking Project, but states from Wisconsin to Kentucky to Massachusetts are also seeing the curve bend upwards.
      Last week, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, activated a field hospital on state fairgrounds to expand treatment capacity. Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, called increasing cases “grim” and said officials were now revisiting surge plans made last spring.
      “We are now going back to our plans about capacity in hospitals, looking if we have to at hotel options and the use of state parks,” Beshear said during a press briefing. “Ensuring that we have the operational plans to stand up the field hospital, if necessary.”
      In Massachusetts, Boston’s mayor, Marty Walsh, said children would return to virtual learning until the city’s positivity rate – the percentage of all Covid tests that come back positive – decreased for two weeks in a row.
      But far and away North Dakota leads in increasing Covid-19. The state has the highest per-capita rate of Covid-19 infections anywhere in the nation, at 1,350 cases per 1 million residents. That is nearly double the rate of the second hardest-hit state, Wisconsin, where there are 805 new cases per 1 million residents.

      The COVID Tracking Project
      (@COVID19Tracking)
      ND is reporting far more new cases per capita than any other state has over the course of the pandemic. pic.twitter.com/QqbrDluMEr

      October 20, 2020

      Nearly three weeks ago, the state loosened public health guidance, telling residents they no longer needed to quarantine for 14 days if they came into close contact with a person positive with Covid-19, as long as both were wearing masks.
      “There’s just no science to support that,” said Dr Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Osterholm said that with “runaway” transmission in the upper midwest, “why would you be loosening up your recommendations, as opposed to [tightening]? Then it made no public health sense at all.”
      The decision was driven in part by spread inside schools, North Dakota’s governor, Doug Burgum, said at the time, because quarantining students was difficult for caregivers. The change would result in, “a more positive school experience”, Burgum said, according to the Grand Forks Herald.
      This week, Burgum called in the national guard to notify people who have tested positive, and abandoned contact-tracing, advising people to self-notify contacts. Burgum has resisted a statewide mask mandate.
      But even with increasing transmission across Europe, the United States has done worse on the whole than even “high-mortality” peer nations, studies have found.
      Emanuel recently co-authored a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in which researchers examined how the United States had fared during the pandemic compared with 18 other high-income countries.
      “We’ve done worse,” said Emanuel. “I think it’s that simple.”
      Even compared to “high-mortality” countries such as Italy, the US has performed badly. If Americans had died at the same rate as Italians, for example, between 44,000 and 100,000 fewer Americans would have died.
      “We’ve had bad leadership that has resulted in inconsistent, haphazard implementation of public health measures,” Emanuel said. “That has led to migratory outbreaks you might say – first in the north-east, then in the south, then in the south-west, and now in the midwest.”
      European countries have also taken stricter measures to contain recent outbreaks.
      Like North Dakota, France has also experienced more than 1,000 new cases per million residents in the last seven days, according to the World Health Organization. But France imposed masks at all workplaces and recently imposed a curfew. Germany, also hard-hit, is tightening mask rules and closing some schools. Some regions of Italy are also closing schools.
      “It’s clear from the data that countries like Germany, France and others that have put into place clear health communication,” have been able to “manage the growth of the disease and the spread over time,” said Reginald D Williams II, vice-president of international health policy at the Commonwealth Fund. “Unfortunately, we have not put those policies into place in a uniform fashion across the country.”
      At the same time, official case tallies probably underrepresent the problem. This week, experts at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published research that aligned with independent analyses, finding the true death toll is probably far higher than official estimates. By October, researchers said, the death toll was closer to 300,000 rather than the widely cited 215,000.
      Osterholm compared the situation to a “coronavirus forest fire”.
      “I’ve been saying it for some time – I think the darkest weeks in this pandemic are just ahead of us,” he said. “Between pandemic fatigue, pandemic anger and indoor air, everything is going to get much worse.”
      Further, wide distribution of an approved vaccine is unlikely to take place before the middle or third quarter of 2021.
      “We have to figure out how we’re going to live with this virus, or not live with it, meaning some people will, obviously many people will, get seriously ill and some will die.” More

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      Trump: If I lose, it will be to the worst candidate in history – video

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      Donald Trump has described his Democratic presidential rival, Joe Biden, as the ‘worst candidate in history’ at a rally in Wisconsin. ‘If I lose … what do I do? I’d rather run against somebody who is extraordinarily talented, at least this way I can go and lead my life.’ Trump again insisted that he was immune from Covid-19, saying he ‘got better fast’ and that he ‘can now jump into the audience and give you all a big kiss, the women and the men’

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