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After Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman called Wednesday for the swift reopening of hotels and casinos, many who earn their livelihoods in such establishments said they were afraid to return unless strict safety measures were introduced for themselves and guests.

Although Goodman said the businesses should reopen, she provided no guidelines on how they should handle social distancing and other safety measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

"I want us open in the city of Las Vegas so our people can go back to work," Goodman said in a CNN interview. She was asked how that could be accomplished while prioritizing employees' safety by implementing social distancing.

"That's up to them to figure out. I don't own a casino," she said.

D. Taylor, the president of UNITE Here, a union that represents more than 300,000 hospitality workers across the country, called Goodman's comments "one of the worst things I've heard."

"Nobody wants people to go back more than I do, but everyone wants to go back to a safe and secure workplace and not be an experiment in a petri dish," Taylor said.

Alexander Acosta, a banquet bartender with the Caesar Forum Conference Center, said the comments "struck a nerve" among workers.

"We're not test subjects. We're people. We are employees," Acosta said. "We try to live every day as we can. We shouldn't be test subjects."

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US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to temporarily suspend the approval of some green cards.

The measure, which contains a number of exemptions, is to last for 60 days and then could be extended, he said.

Mr Trump says the order is designed to protect American workers' jobs in an economy pummelled by the coronavirus.

Critics have accused him of using the pandemic as cover to ram through long-sought hardline immigration policies in an election year.

"This will ensure that unemployed Americans of all backgrounds will be first in line for jobs as our economy reopens," Mr Trump said during Wednesday's coronavirus briefing at the White House.

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When President Donald Trump revealed his guidelines for "opening up America again" last week, among the bolded names of businesses and institutions that could reopen were restaurants, movie theaters and places of worship -- so long as they adhered to strict social distancing protocols. Tucked near the bottom of the list, right above a warning that bars should stay closed, was a curious inclusion: gyms.

While an integral part of many Americans' routines, gyms and fitness clubs would seem to present a particular risk for contact spread of a contagious virus. Filled with people sweating and breathing hard, sharing equipment and spaces, gyms are in many ways the last kind of business to prioritize during a deadly pandemic.

Their inclusion follows a last-minute lobbying push by an industry not known for flexing its muscles in Washington. While not every major company was part of the effort, conversations with 10 leaders in the fitness-club business reveal an influential network of relationships that kicked into gear over the past few weeks and helped move gyms to the front of the line -- even to the surprise of many in the industry.

Noteworthy figures in the effort include a Trump-loving fitness-center owner in Pennsylvania, Rudy Giuliani's son Andrew, billionaire real-estate mogul Steve Ross and the US Surgeon General.
Among the most influential advocates is an Iranian-born founder of one of the country's largest fitness club chains, Bahram Akradi of Life Time Fitness. Akradi has been pitching governors and the Trump administration on what he calls a "comprehensive, multifaceted tactical plan" to fight the coronavirus and rebuild the economy. He now finds himself on one of Trump's economic recovery working groups and in conference calls with the President himself, including on the day before Trump released his new guidelines.

Multiple people at fitness-center companies -- from executives at giants like Gold's Gym to independent health clubs -- told CNN they did not expect gyms to be mentioned in reopening plans from either the Trump administration or Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who announced Monday fitness centers were included in several public-space business that could begin reopening by the end of the week.

"We just really lucked out and were able to get our message into a couple of the right people's hands," said Meredith Poppler, a top official at the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association, the industry's main trade group.
Poppler told CNN that in recent weeks IHRSA, which receives funding from many of the brand-name gym companies, began a full-court press to deal with the economic fallout hitting gyms and fitness clubs. That included hiring more lobbyists and aggressively pressing its message about the importance of physical fitness during a pandemic to lawmakers in Washington as well as officials in the Trump administration.

The messaging worked even better than they'd hoped.

"We were as surprised as anyone when we saw President Trump announce the three phases and that gyms were in the first phase," said Poppler.

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New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced the launch of a massive contact tracing program in an effort to better contain the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

Bloomberg Philanthropies, which was founded by Bloomberg, will contribute $10.5 million as well as technical support and assistance to the program. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will develop an online training program and certification process for those doing the contact tracing. Vital Strategies, via its Resolve to Save Lives initiative, will advise and assist the New York State Health Department staff in developing protocols and processes to help the whole contact tracing process.

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On January 21, the day the first U.S. case of coronavirus was reported, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services appeared on Fox News to report the latest on the disease as it ravaged China. Alex Azar, a 52-year-old lawyer and former drug industry executive, assured Americans the U.S. government was prepared.

“We developed a diagnostic test at the CDC, so we can confirm if somebody has this,” Azar said. “We will be spreading that diagnostic around the country so that we are able to do rapid testing on site.”

While coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was “potentially serious,” Azar assured viewers in America, it “was one for which we have a playbook.”

Azar’s initial comments misfired on two fronts. Like many U.S. officials, from President Donald Trump on down, he underestimated the pandemic’s severity. He also overestimated his agency’s preparedness.

As is now widely known, two agencies Azar oversaw as HHS secretary, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, wouldn’t come up with viable tests for five and half weeks, even as other countries and the World Health Organization had already prepared their own.

Shortly after his televised comments, Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”

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Azar is a Republican lawyer who once clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and counts current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a friend. Under George W. Bush, Azar worked for HHS as general counsel and deputy secretary. During the Obama years, he cycled through the private sector as a pharmaceutical company lobbyist and executive for Eli Lilly. After Trump’s first HHS secretary was forced out in a travel corruption scandal, Azar stepped in, in January 2018.

Two years later, at the dawn of the coronavirus crisis, Azar appointed his most trusted aide and chief of staff, Harrison, as HHS’s main coordinator for the government’s response to the virus.

Harrison, 37, was an unusual choice, with no formal education in public health, management, or medicine and with only limited experience in the fields. In 2006, he joined HHS in a one-year stint as a “Confidential Assistant” to Azar, who was then deputy secretary. He also had posts working for Vice President Dick Cheney, the Department of Defense and a Washington public relations company.

Before joining the Trump Administration in January 2018, Harrison’s official HHS biography says, he “ran a small business in Texas.” The biography does not disclose the name or nature of that business, but his personal financial disclosure forms show that from 2012 until 2018 he ran a company called Dallas Labradoodles.

The company sells Australian Labradoodles, a breed that is a cross between a Labrador Retriever and a Poodle. He sold it in April 2018, his financial disclosure form said. HHS emailed Reuters that the sale price was $225,000.

At HHS, Harrison was initially deputy chief of staff before being promoted, in the summer of 2019, to replace Azar’s first chief of staff, Peter Urbanowicz, an experienced hospital executive with decades of experience in public health.

This January, Harrison became a key manager of the HHS virus response. “Everyone had to report up through him,” said one HHS official.

One questionable decision, three sources say, came that month, after the White House announced it was convening a coronavirus task force. The HHS role was to muster resources from key public health agencies: the CDC, FDA, National Institutes of Health, Office of Global Affairs and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.

Harrison decided, the sources say, to exclude FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn from the task force. “He said he didn’t need to be included,” said one official with knowledge of the matter.

When task force members were announced January 29, neither Hahn nor the FDA were included. Hahn wasn’t put on the task force until Vice President Mike Pence took over in February. Two of Hahn’s high-profile counterparts were on it from the start: CDC director Robert Redfield and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday insisted that flailing state and local governments should be able to “use the bankruptcy route” rather than receive aid from the federal government — signaling renewed opposition to a top Democratic demand for the next coronavirus relief package.

In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, the Kentucky Republican also expressed concern about adding billions more to the national debt in addition to the nearly $3 trillion Congress has already sent out the door to combat the economic and public health challenges of the pandemic.

“There’s no good reason for it not to be available,” McConnell said of individual localities declaring bankruptcy in order to stay afloat.

“My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that,” McConnell added. “That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of.”

States do not have the ability to declare bankruptcy under current law, and modifying the bankruptcy code would likely be a heavy lift in Congress.

The Senate on Tuesday passed a nearly $500 billion “interim” package that included additional funding for a popular small-business loan program, hospitals, and expanded coronavirus testing. During the negotiations, Democrats had demanded billions more for state and local governments, citing requests from Democratic and Republican governors alike.

McConnell’s office referred to such funding as “blue state bailouts” in a news release earlier Wednesday, further underscoring that there remains broad GOP opposition to such cash infusions. And McConnell himself said it was no surprise that governors, regardless of political party, “would love to have free money.”

“[W]e’re not ready to just send a blank check down to states and local governments to spend any way they choose to,” McConnell said, adding that “we need to have a full debate not only about if we do state and local, how will they spend it.”

"We're not interested in solving their pension problems for them," he told Fox's Bill Hemmer. "We're not interested in rescuing them from bad decisions they've made in the past, we're not going to let them take advantage of this pandemic to solve a lot of problems that they created themselves themselves and bad decisions in the past."

But at least a few Republican senators appear to disagree with McConnell. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio said Tuesday afternoon that he was working with other senators on a bill for “additional and more flexible” funding for states.

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Originally posted by jon-nyc:
I was about to make that point.

I quit my gym a week or two before it had to close.

Most people didn't, and just aren't getting billed while they're closed. Even though most people still won't go, the second they open they can start billing everyone again.

And they make it a little bit hard to cancel, so many people won't.

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Study: Elderly Trump voters dying of coronavirus could cost him in November

An academic journal projects that deaths of 65-and-older Republican voters in several swing states will far exceed those of Democrats.

Mass casualties from the coronavirus could upend the political landscape in battleground states and shift contests away from President Donald Trump, according to a new analysis.

Academic researchers writing in a little-noticed public administration journal — Administrative Theory & Praxis — conclude that when considering nothing other than the tens of thousands of deaths projected from the virus, demographic shifts alone could be enough to swing crucial states to Joe Biden in the fall.

“The pandemic is going to take a greater toll on the conservative electorate leading into this election — and that’s simply just a calculation of age,” Andrew Johnson, the lead author and a professor of management at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said in an interview. “The virus is killing more older voters, and in many states that’s the key to a GOP victory.”

Johnson and his colleagues Wendi Pollock and Beth M. Rauhaus projected that even with shelter-in-place orders remaining in effect, about 11,000 more Republicans than Democrats who are 65 and older could die before the election in both Michigan and North Carolina.

In Pennsylvania, should the state return to using only social distancing to fight infections, over 13,000 more Republican than Democratic voters in that age category could be lost.

The study is based on early fatality projections from CovidActNow.org that are orders of magnitude higher than what's borne out so far in battleground states — a point some outside experts have seized on to inject a dose of skepticism in the study’s findings. In an interview, Johnson acknowledged the high numbers used for the study, but he contended it remains early and that easing of stay-at-home orders could spark more cases and deaths.