Skyline Happenings

By Maureen Dowd in the NYT

WASHINGTON — Never mind Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

You want to see a real can’t-look-away train wreck of a relationship? Look to the nation’s capital, where a messy falling out is chronicled everywhere from the tabloids to a glossy fashion magazine, replete with a photo shoot by a swimming pool.

The saga has enough betrayal, backstabbing, recrimination, indignation and ostracization to impress Edith Wharton.

The press breathlessly covers how much time has passed since the pair last spoke, whether they’re headed for splitsville, and if they can ever agree on what’s best for the children.

It was always bound to be tempestuous because they are the ultimate odd couple, the doctor and the president.

One is a champion of truth and facts. The other is a master of deceit and denial. One is highly disciplined, working 18-hour days. The other can’t be bothered to do his homework and golfs instead. One is driven by science and the public good. The other is a public menace, driven by greed and ego. One is a Washington institution. The other was sent here to destroy Washington institutions. One is incorruptible. The other corrupts. One is apolitical. The other politicizes everything he touches — toilets, windows, beans and, most fatally, masks.

After a fractious week, when the former reality-show star in the White House retweeted a former game-show host saying that we shouldn’t trust doctors about Covid-19, Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci are gritting their teeth.

What’s so scary is that the bumpy course of their relationship has life-or-death consequences for Americans.

Who could even dream up a scenario where a president and a White House drop oppo research on the esteemed scientist charged with keeping us safe in a worsening pandemic?

The administration acted like Peter Navarro, Trump’s wacko-bird trade adviser, had gone rogue when he assailed Dr. Fauci for being Dr. Wrong, in a USA Today op-ed. But does anyone believe that? And if he did, would he still have his job?

No doubt it was a case of Trump murmuring: Will no one rid me of this meddlesome infectious disease specialist?

Republicans on Capitol Hill privately confessed they were baffled by the whole thing, saying they couldn’t understand why Trump would undermine Fauci, especially now with the virus resurgent. They think it’s not only hurting Trump’s re-election chances, but theirs, too.

As though it couldn’t get more absurd, Kellyanne Conway told Fox News on Friday that she thinks it would help Trump’s poll numbers for him to start giving public briefings on the virus again — even though that exercise went off the rails when the president began suggesting people inject themselves with bleach.

“How did we get to a situation in our country where the public health official most known for honesty and hard work is most vilified for it?” marvels Michael Specter, a science writer for The New Yorker who began covering Fauci during the AIDs crisis. “And as Team Trump trashes him, the numbers keep horrifyingly proving him right.”

When Dr. Fauci began treating AIDs patients, nearly every one of them died. “It was the darkest time of my life,” he told Specter. In an open letter, Larry Kramer called Fauci a “murderer.”

Then, as Specter writes, he started listening to activists and made a rare admission: His approach wasn’t working. He threw his caution to the winds and became a public-health activist. Through rigorous research and commitment to clinical studies, the death rate from AIDs has plummeted over the years.

Now Fauci struggles to drive the data bus as the White House throws nails under his tires. It seems emblematic of a deeper, existential problem: America has lost its can-do spirit. We were always Bugs Bunny, faster, smarter, more wily than everybody else. Now we’re Slugs Bunny.

Can our country be any more pathetic than this: The Georgia governor suing the Atlanta mayor and City Council to block their mandate for city residents to wear masks?

Trump promised the A team, but he has surrounded himself with losers and kiss-ups and second-raters. Just your basic Ayn Rand nightmare.

Certainly, Dr. Fauci has had to adjust some of his early positions as he learned about this confounding virus. (“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” John Maynard Keynes wisely observed.)

“Medicine is not an exact art,” Jerome Groopman, the best-selling author and professor at Harvard Medical School, put it. “There’s lots of uncertainty, always evolving information, much room for doubt. The most dangerous people are the ones who speak with total authority and no room for error.”

Sound like someone you know?

“Medical schools,” Dr. Groopman continued, “have curricula now to teach students the imperative of admitting when something went wrong, taking responsibility, and committing to righting it.”

Some are saying the 79-year-old Dr. Fauci should say to hell with it and quit. But we need his voice of reason in this nuthouse of a White House.

Despite Dr. Fauci’s best efforts to stay apolitical, he has been sucked into the demented political kaleidoscope through which we view everything now. Consider the shoot by his pool, photographed by Frankie Alduino, for a digital cover story by Norah O’Donnell for InStyle magazine.

From the left, the picture represented an unflappable hero, exhausted and desperately in need of some R & R, chilling poolside, not letting the White House’s slime campaign get him down or silence him. And on the right, some saw a liberal media darling, high on his own supply in the midst of a deadly pandemic. “While America burns, Fauci does fashion mag photo shoots,” tweeted Sean Davis, co-founder of the right-wing website The Federalist.

It’s no coincidence that the QAnon-adjacent cultists on the right began circulating a new conspiracy theory in the fever swamps of Facebook that Dr. Fauci’s wife of three and a half decades, a bioethicist, is Ghislane Maxwell’s sister. (Do I need to tell you she isn’t?)

Worryingly, new polls show that the smear from Trumpworld may be starting to stick; fewer Republicans trust the doctor now than in the spring.

Forget Mueller, Sessions, Comey, Canada, his niece, Mika Brzezinski. Of the many quarrels, scrapes and scraps Trump has instigated in his time in office, surely this will be remembered not only as the most needless and perverse, but as the most dangerous.

As Dr. Fauci told The Atlantic, it’s “a bit bizarre.”

More than a bit, actually.

Washington was the initial epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus outbreak, and an early lockdown helped contain it. Six months later, cases are spiking again, and the future looks uncertain.

By Rachel Abrams in the NYT

YAKIMA, Wash. — In what seems like almost a lifetime ago, America’s coronavirus story started in January in Washington State, with the nation’s first confirmed case followed by an early outbreak that spread with alarming ferocity.

But swift lockdown measures were credited with holding down illnesses and deaths. By June, nail salons and bars had begun to reopen, even as the virus began to rage in Texas, Arizona and Florida. Washington still had relatively low case numbers, and some counties were even contemplating a return to movie theaters and museums.

Now, those plans are on hold.

The coronavirus is once again ravaging Washington, and the number of cases has hit grim new milestones. Since the middle of June, the state has reported an average of 700 new cases per day — the highest levels since the start of the pandemic. More than 45,000 people have been infected, and over 1,400 have died.

“If these trends were to continue, we would have to prepare to go back to where we were in March,” Gov. Jay Inslee said recently.

Six months after the coronavirus first reached the United States, the state that was on the initial front line — a state that locked down early and hard — is only now beginning to see how complicated and lengthy the fight may be.

A lot of things are going wrong at once. Young people, less likely to die of the virus and undoubtedly weary of social distancing measures, have been driving a spike in new infections in the Seattle area. And an outbreak here in Yakima County that began powering its way through agriculture workers in the spring has now spread widely through a community that has not embraced self-isolation and masking to the degree that many Seattleites have.

Yakima, the eighth-most populous county, now has the second-highest number of cases. While the county cannot be blamed for hot spots elsewhere, Yakima does show how the virus can simmer along at a seeming lull — until a new outbreak suddenly surges through an entire region, challenging officials to stitch together cohesive policies for a patchwork of different problems.

“It’s really important for people to understand that their individual behaviors, everyone’s individual behaviors, collectively have a big impact on transmission,” said Dr. Kathy Lofy, Washington’s health officer. “We can increase testing, we can do case and contact investigations, we can do outbreak response, but those activities only get us so far.”

When the virus first came to Washington, the eastern part of the state was not hit as badly as Seattle, a liberal city with legions of tech workers who dutifully stayed home. But lockdown measures were not as effective in Yakima, a much less affluent county where more than 60 percent of people work in meat- or fruit-packing plants or other essential jobs.

The county is home to a large Hispanic population, which officials have said is more at risk for the coronavirus because of crowded living conditions where the virus can easily spread or limited access to health care. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, and if they were able to get up and go to work, they did.

By mid-May, people who worked in Yakima’s fruit-packing facilities had started to get sick. Terrified of working on crowded assembly lines or in warehouses that were not regularly cleaned, many went on strike, even as the virus spread outside the buildings’ walls.

Cases hit a peak in early June, according to Dr. Teresa Everson, the health officer for the Yakima Health District, just as more workers were cramming into processing facilities for the beginning of Washington’s busy cherry-picking season.

Still, only a third of those in the county wore masks, according to one survey from health officials. In the past few weeks, infectious people have gone to at least 20 family gatherings, 15 birthday parties, two baby showers and two weddings, Dr. Everson said. Some businesses were even reluctant to work with her office, which was trying to track cases and do contact tracing.

“There are a few large employers that persistently do not return our phone calls and do not want to work with us,” Dr. Everson said.

Angelina Lara, who packs fruit for Allan Brothers, was among the workers who got sick, and she still has not recovered her sense of taste and smell. She cannot enjoy cooking the recipes her children find for her on TikTok, but she is grateful that no one else in her home got as sick as she did. She knows at least one person who has died. He worked in a warehouse, too.

Ms. Lara was among the workers who went on strike, demanding more protections, including free masks, which Allan Brothers initially wanted to charge for, Ms. Lara said. (The company did not respond to a request for comment).

Sitting at a picnic table in Sarg Hubbard Park, Ms. Lara and three other workers described being hassled by the police during the protests. Once, a man who was watching the demonstrations — a private citizen, they believed, who had come around before — drew a gun on them, one said.

Ms. Lara said she was dismayed that she had to fight for basic protections that some of her neighbors appeared to see as an infringement on their liberty.

“What liberty?” Ms. Lara said, shaking her head.

Local law enforcement authorities have been reluctant to aggressively enforce virus-control measures ordered by the state. When the governor issued a statewide mask mandate, Yakima County’s sheriff, Robert Udell, issued a statement saying that he would not arrest or detain anyone who violated the “controversial” rule.

As in many conservative towns, masks are a political issue here, and rumors have swirled: The masks are bad for your health. Officials are inflating the numbers.

“Our county health department’s cooking the books,” a Yakima County sheriff’s detective, Judd Towell, said one recent afternoon at a dusty gun range in Yakima. He went on to argue, without evidence, that the severity of the outbreak was not what county health officials were making it out to be.

Dr. Everson said she had heard plenty of such suspicions.

“We are accused daily of blatantly lying about our numbers to either scare the public or make money,” she said. “I don’t know what to make of that.”

Mr. Udell, who was stepping up to the range not far behind Mr. Towell, said that his wife had recovered from the virus and that he did not share Mr. Towell’s theory. Still, when the outbreak moved to eastern Washington and the morgues in Yakima did not overflow, and the hospital did not run out of beds, Mr. Udell did not necessarily see a public health victory — he saw that people had been scared unnecessarily.

“At the beginning when the Covid started, there were these huge estimates of burning piles of bodies and all that kind of stuff,” he said, “and it’s obvious the estimates have been way high.”

With only 60 deputies and one of the highest murder rates in the state, Mr. Udell argues that he has bigger problems to deal with than enforcing the mask mandate. And ultimately, Mr. Udell, an elected official, has no interest in wading into a debate over masks that could alienate voters.

“I get emails, dozens of emails a day, saying ‘I’m never going to do it, you can’t make me,’” he said. “On the other side, we get emails saying, ‘Put those people in jail.’”

For health officials, there is no debate. The government can increase testing only so much, they say. But to reopen businesses, to re-establish a normal way of life, Washington will have to rely on a weary public that may have thought they had the virus beat.

Just a few weeks ago, the state was confident that it could reopen schools in the fall, allowing many parents to go back to work and fuel the state’s economic recovery. But amid mounting opposition from educators and health experts, those plans look increasingly unlikely. And on Tuesday, Mr. Inslee said that no counties would be allowed to loosen lockdown restrictions for at least two weeks.

In Seattle, still the heart of the state’s outbreak, many people are resigned to the precautions they envision for the foreseeable future. On July 4, families wearing masks grilled tortillas, played on swings and enjoyed the parks — many feet away from anyone else. Salons took customers’ temperatures before letting them in. At Target, people lined up six feet apart at the cashier.

Mr. Inslee, in a recent interview, sounded hopeful.

“Mask usage is changing very rapidly in my state,” he said. “What we’re asking people to do, they are doing.”