No Gloating. 

By Hank Silverberg

The President of the United States has Covid-19. The same man who tried to convince us it was a hoax, then tried to downplay it as "the flu" as he ridiculed his political opponents for following social distancing and wearing masks, has caught the virus. This is the same man who encouraged quack treatments like injecting bleach into your body.  

Trump is being treated with monoclonal antibodies, an experimental treatment that is not yet available to the general public. Special approval from the FDA had to be granted to allow it to be used since it has not been approved and is still in clinical trials. (It's likely most people would not get such approval so fast or at all.)

He is also getting Remdesivir, an experimental drug that has mitigated some symptoms of Covid-19.  It lowers the amount of virus in the body and could reduce the length of a patient's hospital stay from  15 down to 11 days.  But the drug is in short supply and not available to most coronavirus patients.

(On the way to Walter Reed,,Photo by
 Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images) 

https://www.aol.com/trump-receiving-remdesivir-antiviral-drug-175407525.html

Monoclonal antibodies are made in a lab. They mimic the body's natural antibodies acting on the Covid-19 virus and help a person's immune system fight it off. The treatment's effectiveness is still being tested. 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-receives-experimental-antibody-treatment-for-covid-19-diagnosis/ar-BB19EB2w?ocid=uxbndlbing

Neither of these regimens is a cure, though other people have had it in clinical trials with some positive, though not definitive, results. 

Trump is the President. He should get the best treatment available, simply for national security reasons. We don't want our enemies to think we have a power vacuum that they can take advantage of. 

But for this President, who still has a lawsuit in the courts to kill the Affordable Care Act and take away health care from at least 20 million people, the irony is excruciating. 

I do hope Mr. Trump recovers from Covid. I want him to be healthy and coherent when the election results come in next month and he is soundly defeated. I want him to know that his arrogant, self-centered, incompetent leadership has been totally rejected by the majority of the American people so that he will go quietly into the footnotes of history as a one-term failed president far worse than James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover and even Richard Nixon.    

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/abc-trump-covid-positive-2020

I also hope that all those unmasked people out there who have been ignoring the best advice of medical experts for the past six months because Trump was telling them to do so, will learn from Mr. Trump's ignorance and help us defeat this virus with science instead of bravado and disinformation. 

And that may be the case. A new ABC/Ipsos poll finds an increasing

number of Americans are now concerned that they or someone they know will be infected with the virus. It's up to 81% compared to 72% just two weeks ago. And the overall jump can be entirely attributed to Republicans whose concern went up 18 points from 52% to 70%.  

As I have said before, put on your mask and go vote. Leave no doubt what America wants and needs--an end to Donald Trump's attack on American ideas and decency. 

And then there is this: 

The reaction to Mr. Trump's Covid-19 diagnosis has been mixed. Many people like me, have enough compassion to acknowledge the devastation of this disease on people, and we would not wish it on our worst enemy. 

But Mr. Trump apparently didn't consider the people around him. As many as eight of his close advisors (it could be even more) have now tested positive, much of it traced back to either debate preparations or the announcement of his Supreme Court nominee. Several Senators who were at the ceremony, unmasked and ignoring social distancing, are now infected with Covid-19.  And he may have rushed off to a fundraiser with big donors last week even AFTER he found out he had been exposed to the virus, maybe even after he got positive test results. 

 Some folks are more to the point. Here's a tweet from well-known conservative political activist Bill Kristol, who disavowed Trump a long time ago: 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Kristol

@BillKristol

·

5h

I hope President Trump has a swift and complete recovery from COVID. I hope the United States has a swift and complete recovery from President Trump.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That was one of the clever reactions. Some were more harsh. 

Of Note:

With the election just a few weeks away, a new NBC/WSJ poll shows Joe Biden's lead increasing. The poll was taken after the chaotic debate (which I am particularly avoiding rehashing here because of its' nonsense) but before Trump's Covid-19 diagnosis. 

It shows Biden's lead has widened 53% to 39% nationwide. 

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7221894-200781-NBCWSJ-October-Post-Debate-Poll-1b.html

National polls, of course, can be deceptive because of the Electoral College. But this poll from CBS shows in this case, Biden's leading in most of the battleground states as well. And some of the poll was conducted after the President's illness become public.  

https://www.cbsnews.com/2020-us-election-battleground-tracker/

For example, Biden has a 51% to 44% lead over Trump in Pennsylvania and a 51% to 47% lead in Wisconsin, both states in which Trump won four years ago. Biden is tied 47% to 47% in Ohio, a state that all winning candidates have secured in every presidential election since 1964. 

Update:

I have been writing about early voting across the country. People are now voting in ten states. Virginia, where my wife and I voted two weeks ago, allows voting earlier than most other states. So far, the Old Dominion, which used to have lots of restrictions on voting, now leads the country in number of votes already cast.   

As of October 4th, 618,751 people have voted either early in person or have already returned their absentee ballots in Virginia, a state that requires voter I-D.  Here's a look at all the early voting states according to "Blue Virginia," which keeps track. 

There is some significance to all this. It's going to make counting on election night more difficult in some states. Virginia law allows the absentee ballots to be "processed" when they come in, but not counted until election day. That means the outside envelope is checked against voter registration records, but the inside envelope with the actual vote is held aside in a separate pile and not counted until November 3rd or later, after the machines are counted.    

Some states don't even allow the processing of absentee ballots until after the polls close election night, making the counting process take a lot longer.  

And of course, there's no way to know now who those early voters cast their votes for. Historically, Democrats have used absentee ballots more than Republicans. 

Feedback:

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