Texas progressives look at coronavirus, week 20

This will be just a short post this week, but I thought that, with some Texas schools having started this past week, and more, with slight delays from their original calendars, starting either this week or next, it needed to be pulled out again.

First, are social media doing enough to crack down on disinformation? Probably not. Hucksterman has a "false news" flag, but, the "punishment"? Putting a screen over someone's post that says it's been determined to be partially, if not fully, false. It's almost never pulled down. Twitter will make people pull stuff down, but doesn't have "fake news" as a reporting category.

Related to that?

From his secondary blog, which primarily focuses on philosophy, culture and other events, SocraticGadfly looked at the ethical and other fallout of Anthony Fauci’s Platonic noble lie this spring, when he told people masks didn’t work.

Nationally, per Worldometers, the curve on daily cases has started going back down again. The daily deaths curve? It has maybe flattened out, but it has not started dropping again, and the rolling average on daily deaths still remains well above where it was in late May. The same is true of Texas, which is at the 10,000 death mark now, though the state curve has not dropped as much as the national curve has on daily cases.

Texas has the worst positive rate on coronavirus tests in the nation. More disconcerting, IMO, is that it — like several other states — has a declining test rate. Government officials — elected and apolitical, medical ones — claim part of the reason fewer people are getting tested is either a belief that, or claimed reality that, COVID is on the decline. But, other people say the frustration of waiting weeks to get tested, then weeks more for results, is a big factor.

For this reason, Abbott is taking both political and nonpolitical heat, even as his Democratic counterpart, Cal gov Gavin Newsom, is taking the same heat the other direction. Read here on both.

Whether schools should reopen or not is a fraught enough decision when looked at purely in terms of public health and public policy. Trump's pushing reopening for political-related economic reasons makes it more fraught, and only adds to the distrust of him. (And, in political terms, it could well backfire in many swing state suburban areas.) So, California wingnuts attacking Newsom on schools? Blame your Leader.

On the wingnut side of Texas wingnuttery, Luke Macias salutes wingnut of wingnuts state Sen. Bob Hall for attacking the Texas Medical Board for doing its job on Texas doctors prescribing the harmful HCQ off-label for COVID patients.

Sean Pendergast makes the case for not postponing the fall college football season. And, as with another Kuff-submitted link, on the second half of this week's roundup, he's wrong.

World

Without engaging in backdoor American exceptionalism, the coronavirus has hotspots elsewhere, too. Italy has imposed new mask mandates and New Zealand, the darling of "they defeated coronavirus," has postponed parliamentary elections a month. (Yee gads if Trump sees that and gets ideas.)