“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can,” said former first lady Michelle Obama, in one of the evening’s longest speeches. “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is. ”
The very nature of the convention helps to illustrate Democrats’ message: that the nation, led by Trump, stumbled badly on handling the pandemic.
It’s hard to forget the pandemic even for a moment while viewing a convention that is fully virtual. Speakers are located in dozens of remote locations around the country, and they’re interspersed with prerecorded interviews, video clips and musical performances. Even Biden and Harris aren’t traveling to the convention’s base in Milwaukee to accept their nominations later in the week.
“Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trump golfs,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said. “His actions fanned this pandemic resulting in over 170,000 deaths and a nation still unprepared to protect its people.”
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) characterized Trump as “a president who fights his fellow Americans rather than fight the virus that’s killing us and our economy. ”
And New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), who has been criticized for his own handling of the pandemic, called covid-19 “the symptom, not the illness.”
“Our nation is in crisis. And in many ways, COVID is just a metaphor. A virus attacks when the body is weak and when it cannot defend itself. Over these past few years, America’s body politic has been weakened. The divisions have been growing deeper,” Cuomo said.
Biden holds a clear lead among voters when it comes to the pandemic – especially those who are most worried about it.
Forty-six percent of voters said the country’s response to the coronavirus outbreak would be better under Biden compared with Trump, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Biden also has an opening with Republicans who are deeply worried about the pandemic. One in six Republicans and Republican leaners who are worried about contracting the virus say they plan to vote for Biden instead of Trump, according to the same poll.
Trump has a 79-point lead among Republican voters, but his lead is just 55 points among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are worried about contracting the virus, my colleague Philip Bump notes.
And Republicans and leaners who are more worried about the virus and the pandemic are 21 points less likely to approve of Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
“The view of Trump’s job performance overall follows the same patterns,” Philip writes. “Republicans worried about contracting the virus are 20 points less likely to approve of Trump’s overall performance as president. Those who say the virus isn’t under control are 19 points less likely to approve of how Trump’s doing overall.”
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost loved ones to covid-19 – and Democrats put them front-and-center.
Arizona resident Kristin Urquiza, who lost her father to covid-19 in June, got one of the convention’s highly coveted speaking slots.
She wrote an obituary in the Arizona Republic blaming his death on the “carelessness of the politicians who continue to jeopardize the health of Brown bodies through a clear lack of leadership.”
“My dad was a healthy 65-year-old,” Urquiza said last night. “His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that, he paid with his life.”
“The coronavirus has made it clear that there are two Americas: the America that Donald Trump lives in and the America that my father died in,” she added.
At one point during the evening, the DNC ran a 53-second video called “Those We’ve Lost” remembering people who have died from covid-19.
David Litt, former speechwriter for President Obama:
Mother Jones bureau chief David Corn:
Expect to hear repeated themes through the rest of the week.
Harris is scheduled to speak Wednesday, followed by Biden on Thursday night.
“As Americans all over the country tune in to the Democratic convention this week, it will be very clear which presidential candidate is putting the health and safety of our nation first,” Biden spokeswoman Rosemary Boeglin told The Health 202.
“Through both words and actions, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be demonstrating the competent and caring leadership that Americans are desperately lacking in this moment of national crisis,” she added.
The Biden campaign has put forward at least three proposals related to the pandemic: one laying out how Biden would combat the virus, another outlining a path to economic recovery and a third guiding schools on reopening. Last week, Biden called on governors to mandate Americans wear masks for the next three months — a remark that prompted a backlash from Trump.
Democratic strategists say they don’t want to characterize the coronavirus as a political opportunity — after all, it has killed nearly 170,000 Americans — but it’s hard to say mismanagement of it isn’t a boon to Biden.
“Having access to health-care coverage is something we understand as critical in a different way we did just a few months ago,” said Jess O’Connell, who served as a senior adviser to the presidential campaign of former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Ahh, oof and ouch
AHH: Trump tweeted that he has stopped a Pentagon proposal to cut military health services by $2.2 billion.
The planned cuts were part of an overall spending review being readied by Defense Department officials. The potential cuts, first reported by Politico, would have reduced dollars for The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, which prepares graduates for the medical corps, and the Murtha Cancer Center.
Two senior defense officials told Dan Diamond and Lara Seligman that the cuts would have effectively gutted the Pentagon’s health care system amid the ongoing pandemic. The proposal drew quick criticism from lawmakers and advocacy groups including VoteVets.
“A lot of the decisions were made in dark, smoky rooms, and it was driven by arbitrary numbers of cuts,” one senior defense official told Dan and Lara. “They wanted to book the savings to be able to report it.”
OOF: Nursing home cases rose nearly 80 percent earlier this summer.
The American Health Care Association found there were 9,715 coronavirus cases in nursing homes the week of July 26, a 77 percent increase from a low point the week of June 21, the Associated Press reports. Widespread cases in the Sun Belt states largely drove the spike.
Controversial decisions in New York, including a directive requiring long-term care facilities to take coronavirus patients discharged from hospitals, have been implicated in the devastating toll of the virus in these facilities through March and April. But months of extra time to prepare do not seem to have protected nursing homes in the South and West from rampant outbreaks.
The study underscores this: Once the virus spreads rapidly through a community, it is nearly impossible to keep it from entering long-term care facilities.
While the Trump administration has promised a rollout of rapid testing, distribution is not expected to be completed until the end of September. In the meantime, some facilities are dealing with testing delays and a shortage of equipment like N95 masks.
“The situation is a politically sensitive issue for President Donald Trump, who is scrambling to hold on to support from older voters as polls show disapproval of his administration’s response to the pandemic,” the AP writes.
Just 1 percent of Americans live in long-term care facilities, but 40 percent of those who have died of covid-19 have been in nursing homes, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
OUCH: China’s CDC was set up specifically to stop epidemics that often emerge from sourthern China – and it failed in that mission.
An in-depth investigation by the Wall Street Journal tracks missed opportunities in China’s early response to the virus. For example, the head of the agency, George Gao, did not learn of the outbreak until December 30, nearly a month after the outbreak started. It took seven weeks between the first recorded case and the lockdown in Wuhan.
“Dr. Gao’s agency, known as the China CDC, was set up in 2002 precisely to detect and stop epidemics that often emerge from southern China. It was a mission that grew more urgent after a deadly outbreak that year of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS,” Jeremy Page and LingLing Wei write.
“The China CDC trained hundreds of its staff in outbreak-response techniques with U.S. help, sent teams to fight Ebola in Africa and introduced a China-wide, real-time reporting system for infectious diseases,” they write. “In Dr. Gao, they recruited an expert with credentials from Oxford and Harvard universities.”
“I can very confidently say there won’t be another ‘SARS incident,’ ” Gao said in a speech last year. “Because our country’s infectious-disease surveillance network is very well-established, when a virus comes, we can stop it.”
Chinese officials point to their success in controlling domestic cases compared to the United States, but some researchers have made the case that intervening just a few weeks earlier could have drastically reduced the number of cases, Jeremy and LingLing write. Failure of hospitals to report cases, efforts by local officials to hide bad news, and restrictions on publishing research about the virus all contributed to a delayed response.
A federal court blocked the Trump administration’s rewrite of Obamacare rules on transgender care.
The new rules, set to take effect today, would have reversed Obama-era regulations from the Affordable Care Act that said discrimination protections “on the basis of sex” should apply to transgender people, Samantha Schmidt writes. Civil rights advocates said the new interpretation could be used to deny care to transgender patients.
The federal judge, who issued a preliminary injunction against the new rules, cited the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that federal nondiscrimination protections based on sex include gay and transgender employees. U.S. District Court Judge Frederic Block said that the administration’s new rules contradicted this ruling and that the Department of Health and Human Services acted “arbitrarily and capriciously in enacting them.”
