Concerned about Trump's Ratings? Take a Closer Look

There's a lot of talk right now of Trump's approval ratings. Do read this very helpful NPR piece by Domenico Montonaro that puts it all into perspective.  It takes a comparative look of the Trump presidency relative to that of presidents Obama, Clinton, Bush, Carter, and Reagan when they faced crises. 

Key quotes from within: 

"We're seeing although his numbers have inched up, it's still roughly in his zone of support," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducts polling for NPR. "Look, he's not getting the rally-around-the-president [effect] that presidents in crisis have gotten."

"We're seeing although his numbers have inched up, it's still roughly in his zone of support," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducts polling for NPR. "Look, he's not getting the rally-around-the-president [effect] that presidents in crisis have gotten."

An implicit, underlying dynamic that, among other things, the data may reveal, is that wishy-washiness is not rewarded.  

Read on.

-Angela Valenzuela

Trump's Approval Hits New High, But A Rally-Around-The-Flag Effect Is Small

by Domenico Montonaro | March 27, 2020  5:00 AM ET | NPR

Asked if he has any regrets about the way he's handled the coronavirus crisis so far, President Trump said no — and he cited polling to back him up.

"No, I think that we've handled it really well," Trump said on Monday. "The American public thinks that we've handled it well, if you look at polling data."

Survey data has been mixed.

Trump has hit his highest approval rating since becoming president – 47%, according to an average of the polls. That's an increase of nearly 3 points over the last two weeks.

On Trump's handling of the pandemic, Gallup found 60% of American adults approve. A Fox News poll out Thursday found it lower, at 51%. Reuters/Ipsos and Economist/YouGov polls similarly had it at 49%.

Those are all increases from two weeks ago, when the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found 44% approved of his response to the crisis.

How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

But there are lingering questions about the president's approach. Over the last several weeks, Trump has been inconsistent. He first downplayed the threat of the coronavirus, then appeared to take it much more seriously last week, and then said the White House can't let the "cure" of public health measures be worse than economic harm and suggested "opening up" the country by Easter.

Trump has faced criticism for the United States being slow to test for the virus, and for not using his full authority to distribute needed supplies. The U.S. now has the most confirmed cases in the world, and more than 1,000 Americans have died, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers.

It's possible current polling is a lagging indicator from Trump publicly taking the virus more seriously than he had been previously. Surveys so far largely aren't reflecting Trump's pivot this week to suggesting he wants to reopen the economy within weeks.

Regardless, the 3-point increase in his approval rating so far is not much of a bump, certainly not the kind of increase other presidents have seen in other rally-around-the-flag moments, pollsters say.

"We're seeing although his numbers have inched up, it's still roughly in his zone of support," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducts polling for NPR. "Look, he's not getting the rally-around-the-president [effect] that presidents in crisis have gotten."

Largely — as has been the case for the entirety of his presidency — Trump's approval and handling of the pandemic are split sharply along party lines. Overwhelming numbers of Republicans approve, and overwhelming numbers of Democrats don't.

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"Certainly, there's no bounce — it's very minimal," Miringoff said. "It's all playing out depending on the filter people have. The partisan split is as wide as can be. I don't think it's something that reflects a president who is about to break 50% [approval] for the first time."

Historical rally-around-the-flag bounces

Partisanship did not begin in the Trump era.

Its sharp rise appears to have taken hold during the Obama years. That's evident by how little former President Barack Obama's approval fluctuated once his honeymoon period was over and legislation aimed at combating the Great Recession was passed.

According to data from the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center, George W. Bush after 9/11 and before the Iraq War, George H.W. Bush before the Gulf War, Ronald Reagan during the Grenada military action and the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon, and Jimmy Carter at the outset of the Iran hostage crisis all saw much bigger rally-around-the flag approval bounces than either Trump (so far) or Obama.

- Obama and the Great Recession

At the beginning of Obama's presidency, the country was largely behind him, and his approval rating, per Gallup, was in the 60s.

That came down with the partisan fight over the health care bill and languished in the 40s until it hit 50% again with an improving economy by January 2011. His biggest bounce — about 8 percentage points — came with the killing of Osama bin Laden.

That didn't last. Apart from his first months in office, Obama's approval rating never went below 40% or higher than 59%, which he hit once — on the eve of leaving office.

By comparison, Trump's range has been even narrower — from 35% to 49% in Gallup's polling.

- George W. Bush, 9/11 and the Iraq War

Bush's approval hit an astounding 90% immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, jumping 39 points from the day before 9/11.

The Iraq War is remembered as an American foreign policy blunder, but Bush experienced another significant jump on the eve of that war. His approval went up 14 points, from 57% to 71%, in March 2003.

Eventually, his job approval cratered, nosediving to 31%, as Iraq spiraled into civil war in 2006, and then declined again to 25% the month before the 2008 election, as the Great Recession hit.

- Clinton, the Kosovo bombing and his overall popularity

There wasn't much of a bounce for Clinton because of the Kosovo NATO bombings in March 1999. But realize, he was popular already.

According to Gallup, Clinton had a 64% approval rating before the bombing and 64% immediately after it. It fell to 53% months after the bombing, but that was the lowest point in his entire second term — and Clinton had been impeached.

His popularity in office is remarkable considering today's partisanship. Clinton's approval rating peaked at 73% in December 1998, days after he was impeached. He left office with a 66% approval rating.

- George H.W. Bush and the Gulf War

Bush's approval rating jumped 16 points, from 60% to 76% from July to August of 1990 when the Gulf War began.

His approval peaked just before the end of the war at 89% in March 1991. But, as the economy worsened, his approval skidded all the way down to 29% over the next year, leading to Clinton's election.

- The Reagan shooting, the Marine barracks bombing and Grenada

Reagan's presidency started out rough — double-digit inflation, gas lines and getting shot just two months after taking office.

But that event helped his approval rating. He went from 51% when he was sworn in to 68% two months after being shot. (That was tied for the highest of his presidency.)

Reagan saw another bounce in 1983. The economy was improving, but there were rally-around-the-flag moments with the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in October, then the U.S. invasion of Grenada the same month.

The invasion lasted through December, and from October to December, Reagan went from 45% to 54% approval, according to Gallup.

Reagan started 1983 with just a 35% approval rating. He started 1984 with a majority approving of the job he was doing. He coasted to reelection that year, winning every single state except Minnesota, along with Washington, D.C.

- Carter and the surprising case of the Iran hostage crisis

The Iran hostage crisis, along with the country's economic problems, are widely believed to have hobbled Carter and led to Reagan's landslide election in 1980.

Initially, the country rallied around Carter during the hostage crisis. In October 1979, Carter's job approval rating stood at a dismal 29%. But November, when the hostages were taken, marked a sharp rise in his rating over the next two months. He jumped to 58% by the end of January 1980.

But the botched attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980 led to a precipitous slide that put Carter at 31% by June. That's where it stood in November when he lost reelection.

THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS: Here are details on how the $2 Trillion Break Down (March 26, 2020)

In a nutshell (see below), "There can be no room for public versus private when it comes to pandemic." This is, of course, the antithesis of "Coronavirus capitalism," as laid out in an earlier blog post.

-Angela Valenzuela

Published on

Thursday, March 26, 2020

by

Common Dreams

'For Common Benefit of All,' Ireland Nationalizes Hospitals for Duration of Coronavirus Crisis, Sparking Demand for US to Follow Suit

"How wonderful is this. A beautiful silver lining."

by

Eoin Higgins, staff writer

The news that Ireland is nationalizing its healthcare system for the duration of the coronavirus crisis inspired observers including Rep. Ilhan Omar to call for the same approach in the U.S. as the world's largest economy faces the disease.

"For the duration of this crisis the State will take control of all private hospital facilities and manage all of the resources for the common benefit of all of our people," Ireland's Health Minister Simon Harris announced Tuesday. "There can be no room for public versus private when it comes to pandemic." 

The move follows a decision by Spain on March 16 to do the same to that country's system and represents a "massive change" in Ireland's social safety net, tweeted Irish author Caelainn Hogan.

"There should be no going back from this," said Hogan.

Ireland's decision to nationalize the nation's healthcare system was made for the country's "national unity of purpose," Harris said. 

"We must of course have equality of treatment, patients with this virus will be treated for free, and they’ll be treated as part of a single, national hospital service," said Harris.

The move was seen by observers as a sign of hope in a world battered by the coronavirus pandemic, which has sickened hundreds of thousands around the globe and killed at least 22,184 people.

"How wonderful is this," tweeted journalist Beena Sarwar. "A beautiful silver lining."

Mexico’s Coronavirus Fight Has Just Begun. Doctors Say They’re Already Running Out Of Masks

We think we have it bad in the U.S.  Check out Mexico. As you can read here, President López Obrador’s response to the Coronavirus has undergone much criticism.  The minimum wage in Mexico is $5.00 per day, suggesting just how devastating orders to stay home will be for most families.

Migrant camps along Mexico's northern border with the U.S. are exceedingly vulnerable, too.  I have a lot of family in Mexico.  I fear for them because their health system—like that of most poor countries—is simply unprepared for this pandemic.

-Angela Valenzuela

Mexico’s Coronavirus Fight Has Just Begun. Doctors Say They’re Already Running Out Of MasksFEATURED NEWS, NEWS & EVENTS

MARCH 26, 2020

BY CMSC

By: KATE LINTHICUM, Los Angeles Times – March 25, 2020

MEXICO CITY — As the novel coronavirus spreads in Mexico, doctors and nurses at public hospitals have begun protesting a shortage of personnel and basic supplies such as masks and gloves.

Medical staff held strikes and walkouts across the country this week, warning that a lack of resources increases the risk for them and their families as well as for patients.

“We can’t work without equipment,” implored a nurse in Tabasco state in a widely viewed video on Twitter. “We also have families — children and parents.”

The federal government says that $150 million in additional medical supplies is on the way and that it is rushing to fill roughly 42,000 job openings for doctors, nurses and other medical professionals that predate the coronavirus crisis.

“We invite health personnel ... to heed the call and commit to the future of this country, to being a person who helps face the epidemic,” Deputy Health Secretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell said Tuesday.

But within the medical community there were growing concerns that the government has moved too slowly, leaving Mexico’s public healthcare system unprepared to fight a major outbreak of the disease.

One doctor who screens dozens of people a day for COVID-19 at a public hospital in impoverished, populous Mexico state, which includes Mexico City, said she is allotted just two disposable masks for each 12-hour shift. Ideally she would put on a new mask for each patient.

“We feel unprotected,” said the doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to give interviews.

Even before COVID-19 arrived in Mexico, which has seen more than 400 confirmed cases and five deaths, the nation’s healthcare system was strained.

Lengthy wait times for procedures are common at the country’s vast network of public hospitals and clinics, where most Mexicans receive care. Often, doctors and nurses have been forced to ask patients to buy them surgical masks, gowns and other basic supplies.

By many accounts, things have gotten worse since President Andres Manuel López Obrador took office in December 2018 and embarked on a program of deep cuts in government spending.

The leftist populist — who ran on an anti-corruption platform — has canceled contracts with drug companies, which he alleged were working with a crooked network of hospital administrators.

That may have been true. But López Obrador’s dramatic changes have led to shortages of life-saving drugs. Two of the groups hardest hit by the shortages are children with cancer and patients with HIV.

Last year, the head of Mexico’s Social Security Institute stepped down and issued an unusual public resignation letter declaring that “excessive savings and controls in health spending are inhumane.”

López Obrador’s response to COVID-19 has generated a new wave of criticism.

Compared with other countries in the region, Mexico has been slow to implement preventative measures to stop the spread of the disease.

Mexico had its first confirmed COVID-19 case in late February, yet it wasn’t until this week that it ordered schools to close and recommended that businesses let employees stay home.

The jacaranda-dotted streets of Mexico City are emptier than usual, but many restaurants, businesses and gyms remain open.

To the chagrin of his critics, López Obrador has repeatedly contradicted the advice of his own health authorities. In a video message Sunday, he sat at a table near a supporter in Oaxaca and implored Mexicans to maintain the normal rhythm of their lives.

“Don’t stop going out,” he said.

The Mexican government has held off on implementing more drastic measures because it is deeply worried about its struggling economy. The peso has fallen dramatically in recent weeks, this week hitting a new record of 25 pesos to the dollar, and prices for basic goods are rising. At a market on Mexico City’s south side, the price of a pound of chicken rose by 25 cents in a week, a major jolt in a country where the minimum wage is about $5 a day.

On Tuesday, Lopez Obrador implored business leaders to not lay off employees and said his government would grant loans to some small businesses to help them stay afloat.

He did not directly address demands for more medical personnel and supplies, though he said Mexico was prepared for an onslaught of COVID-19 cases.

On Twitter, political analyst Denise Dresser said Mexicans deserve more details about those preparations.

“What we wanted to hear: We need to equip hospitals, manufacture ventilators, sew face masks, train doctors and nurses and ask for help from industries and laboratories and factories so they can focus on producing what is urgent and necessary,” she wrote.

Of growing concern is the number of COVID-19 tests available in Mexico. Authorities have given a range of figures, from about 9,000 to 35,000. The government has conducted fewer than 3,000 tests, primarily in people who recently traveled to areas with significant numbers of infections.

The World Health Organization has recommended that all suspected cases be tested.

Even at private hospitals, where tests are more readily available, patients have reported long lag times in getting results.

Ariana Sawyer, a human rights worker who recently traveled to France and California, said she was tested for the disease at a private hospital in Mexico City on March 15 after falling ill. Nine days later, she still hadn’t received results, though doctors said it was “probable” that she was infected and ordered her to self-quarantine at home.

She said she is worried about the disease spreading to poorer communities in Mexico or migrant camps along the U.S. border, where there are unhygienic conditions “and people don’t have access to social distancing.”

“It’s going to be devastating for them,” she said.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful by Ed Yong in THE ATLANTIC

Good information here by Ed Yong who writes for The Atlantic . There remain many, many questions about the Coronavirus.  What we do know is why the virus differentially affects people within age groups.  Some of this could be genetic and/or related to individuals' immune systems, as well as to the amount of virus that one is exposed to.

Matthew Frieman from the University of Maryland School of Medicine offers the following:

“The scary part is we don’t even know how many people get normal coronaviruses every year,” Frieman says. “We don’t have any surveillance networks for coronaviruses like [we do for] flu. We don’t know why they go away in the winter, or where they go. We don’t know how these viruses mutate year on year.”

The scientific community and the science itself have to take a dramatic turn in focus if we are to succeed in battling this pandemic.

-Angela Valenzuela

Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful

We’ve known about SARS-CoV-2 for only three months, but scientists can make some educated guesses about where it came from and why it’s behaving in such an extreme way.

ED YONG

MARCH 20, 2020

Editor's Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.

One of the few mercies during this crisis is that, by their nature, individual coronaviruses are easily destroyed. Each virus particle consists of a small set of genes, enclosed by a sphere of fatty lipid molecules, and because lipid shells are easily torn apart by soap, 20 seconds of thorough hand-washing can take one down. Lipid shells are also vulnerable to the elements; a recent study shows that the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, survives for no more than a day on cardboard, and about two to three days on steel and plastic. These viruses don’t endure in the world. They need bodies.

But much about coronaviruses is still unclear. Susan Weiss, of the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying them for about 40 years. She says that in the early days, only a few dozen scientists shared her interest—and those numbers swelled only slightly after the SARS epidemic of 2002. “Until then people looked at us as a backward field with not a lot of importance to human health,” she says. But with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2—the cause of the COVID-19 disease—no one is likely to repeat that mistake again.

To be clear, SARS-CoV-2 is not the flu. It causes a disease with different symptoms, spreads and kills more readily, and belongs to a completely different family of viruses. This family, the coronaviruses, includes just six other members that infect humans. Four of them—OC43, HKU1, NL63, and 229E—have been gently annoying humans for more than a century, causing a third of common colds. The other two—MERS and SARS (or “SARS-classic,” as some virologists have started calling it)—both cause far more severe disease. Why was this seventh coronavirus the one to go pandemic? Suddenly, what we do know about coronaviruses becomes a matter of international concern.

[Read: What will you do if you start coughing?

The structure of the virus provides some clues about its success. In shape, it’s essentially a spiky ball. Those spikes recognize and stick to a protein called ACE2, which is found on the surface of our cells: This is the first step to an infection. The exact contours of SARS-CoV-2’s spikes allow it to stick far more strongly to ACE2 than SARS-classic did, and “it’s likely that this is really crucial for person-to-person transmission,” says Angela Rasmussen of Columbia University. In general terms, the tighter the bond, the less virus required to start an infection.

There’s another important feature. Coronavirus spikes consist of two connected halves, and the spike activates when those halves are separated; only then can the virus enter a host cell. In SARS-classic, this separation happens with some difficulty. But in SARS-CoV-2, the bridge that connects the two halves can be easily cut by an enzyme called furin, which is made by human cells and—crucially—is found across many tissues. “This is probably important for some of the really unusual things we see in this virus,” says Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research Translational Institute.

For example, most respiratory viruses tend to infect either the upper or lower airways. In general, an upper-respiratory infection spreads more easily, but tends to be milder, while a lower-respiratory infection is harder to transmit, but is more severe. SARS-CoV-2 seems to infect both upper and lower airways, perhaps because it can exploit the ubiquitous furin. This double whammy could also conceivably explain why the virus can spread between people before symptoms show up—a trait that has made it so difficult to control. Perhaps it transmits while still confined to the upper airways, before making its way deeper and causing severe symptoms. All of this is plausible but totally hypothetical; the virus was only discovered in January, and most of its biology is still a mystery.

Read: Should you take Advil for COVID-19?

The new virus certainly seems to be effective at infecting humans, despite its animal origins. The closest wild relative of SARS-CoV-2 is found in bats, which suggests it originated in a bat, then jumped to humans either directly or through another species. (Another coronavirus found in wild pangolins also resembles SARS-CoV-2, but only in the small part of the spike that recognizes ACE2; the two viruses are otherwise dissimilar, and pangolins are unlikely to be the original reservoir of the new virus.) When SARS-classic first made this leap, a brief period of mutation was necessary for it to recognize ACE2 well. But SARS-CoV-2 could do that from day one. “It had already found its best way of being a [human] virus,” says Matthew Frieman of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

This uncanny fit will doubtlessly encourage conspiracy theorists: What are the odds that a random bat virus had exactly the right combination of traits to effectively infect human cells from the get-go, and then jump into an unsuspecting person? “Very low,” Andersen says, “but there are millions or billions of these viruses out there. These viruses are so prevalent that things that are really unlikely to happen sometimes do.”

Since the start of the pandemic, the virus hasn’t changed in any obviously important ways. It’s mutating in the way that all viruses do. But of the 100-plus mutations that have been documented, none has risen to dominance, which suggests that none is especially important. “The virus has been remarkably stable given how much transmission we’ve seen,” says Lisa Gralinski of the University of North Carolina. “That makes sense, because there’s no evolutionary pressure on the virus to transmit better. It’s doing a great job of spreading around the world right now.”

Read: The U.K.’s coronavirus “herd immunity” debacle

There’s one possible exception. A few SARS-CoV-2 viruses that were isolated from Singaporean COVID-19 patients are missing a stretch of genes that also disappeared from SARS-classic during the late stages of its epidemic. This change was thought to make the original virus less virulent, but it’s far too early to know whether the same applies to the new one. Indeed, why some coronaviruses are deadly and some are not is unclear. “There’s really no understanding at all of why SARS or SARS-CoV-2 are so bad but OC43 just gives you a runny nose,” Frieman says.

Researchers can, however, offer a preliminary account of what the new coronavirus does to the people it infects. Once in the body, it likely attacks the ACE2-bearing cells that line our airways. Dying cells slough away, filling the airways with junk and carrying the virus deeper into the body, down toward the lungs. As the infection progresses, the lungs clog with dead cells and fluid, making breathing more difficult. (The virus might also be able to infect ACE2-bearing cells in other organs, including the gut and blood vessels.)  

The immune system fights back and attacks the virus; this is what causes inflammation and fever. But in extreme cases, the immune system goes berserk, causing more damage than the actual virus. For example, blood vessels might open up to allow defensive cells to reach the site of an infection; that’s great, but if the vessels become too leaky, the lungs fill even more with fluid. These damaging overreactions are called cytokine storms. They were historically responsible for many deaths during the 1918 flu pandemic, H5N1 bird flu outbreaks, and the 2003 SARS outbreak. And they’re probably behind the most severe cases of COVID-19. “These viruses need time to adapt to a human host,” says Akiko Iwasaki of the Yale School of Medicine. “When they’re first trying us out, they don’t know what they’re doing, and they tend to elicit these responses.”

Read: We were warned

During a cytokine storm, the immune system isn’t just going berserk but is also generally off its game, attacking at will without hitting the right targets. When this happens, people become more susceptible to infectious bacteria. The storms can also affect other organs besides the lungs, especially if people already have chronic diseases. This might explain why some COVID-19 patients end up with complications such as heart problems and secondary infections.

But why do some people with COVID-19 get incredibly sick, while others escape with mild or nonexistent symptoms? Age is a factor. Elderly people are at risk of more severe infections possibly because their immune system can’t mount an effective initial defense, while children are less affected because their immune system is less likely to progress to a cytokine storm. But other factors—a person’s genes, the vagaries of their immune system, the amount of virus they’re exposed to, the other microbes in their bodies—might play a role too. In general, “it’s a mystery why some people have mild disease, even within the same age group,” Iwasaki says.

Coronaviruses, much like influenza, tend to be winter viruses. In cold and dry air, the thin layers of liquid that coat our lungs and airways become even thinner, and the beating hairs that rest in those layers struggle to evict viruses and other foreign particles. Dry air also seems to dampen some aspects of the immune response to those trapped viruses. In the heat and humidity of summer, both trends reverse, and respiratory viruses struggle to get a foothold.

Read: How you should get food during the pandemic

Unfortunately, that might not matter for the COVID-19 pandemic. At the moment, the virus is tearing through a world of immunologically naive people, and that vulnerability is likely to swamp any seasonal variations. After all, the new virus is transmitting readily in countries like Singapore (which is in the tropics) and Australia (which is still in summer). And one recent modeling study concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 can proliferate at any time of year.” “I don’t have an immense amount of confidence that the weather is going to have the effect that people hope it will,” Gralinski says. “It may knock things down a little, but there’s so much person-to-person transmission going on that it may take more than that.” Unless people can slow the spread of the virus by sticking to physical-distancing recommendations, the summer alone won’t save us.

“The scary part is we don’t even know how many people get normal coronaviruses every year,” Frieman says. “We don’t have any surveillance networks for coronaviruses like [we do for] flu. We don’t know why they go away in the winter, or where they go. We don’t know how these viruses mutate year on year.” Until now, research has been slow. Ironically, a triennial conference in which the world’s coronavirus experts would have met in a small Dutch village in May has been postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“If we don’t learn from this pandemic that we need to understand these viruses more, then we’re very, very bad at this,” Frieman says.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

ED YONG is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.