COVID roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many good articles around that I despair of doing them all justice with a full discussion, so here’s a short roundup of some of the best or most interesting.

(1) Germany has a plan to start testing people for antibodies to determine who has gained immunity to the virus and therefore can go back out into the world:

The antibodies will indicate that the test participants have had the virus, have healed and are thereby ready to re-enter society and the workforce. The researchers plan to test 100,000 members of the public at a time, issuing documentation to those who have overcome the virus.

The researchers will use the information to determine how to properly end the county’s lockdown, including re-opening schools and allowing mass gatherings.

It’s conducted by a research firm. But there’s something somewhat creepy about a country (especially Germany, I must say) issuing certificates of healing to certain people that allow them safe passage into the world, while everyone else must stay put. I understand the need, but it still gives me the willies. Will we do something similar?

(2) There’s an analogy to be made between Trump’s approach to cutting red tape now and his method for restoring NY’s Wollman skating rink, 34 long and winding years ago. I remember, back when Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination in 2016 and I was so heavily critical of him, many pro-Trump commenters would point out what he did with the rink. My reply at the time (if I recall correctly) was that it was nice but small potatoes and could not even be remotely compared to the tasks of a POTUS. Well, it was indeed relatively small potatoes, but many of the skills involved are the same, and one big one is the need to cut red tape.

(3) Rhode Island is serious.

(4) The governor of Michigan has been threatening doctors and pharmacists for providing a drug treatment that seems safe and has shown promise. I wonder whether Chuck Todd will ask her one day if she has blood on her hands?

(5) The biggest lesson we actually should be learning is this one, which is that government regulations have crippled our response to COVID. Please read the whole thing.

COVID-19: and what of Mexico?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a good question from commenter “Sharon W”:

Shouldn’t [Mexico’s] numbers be worse than ours, not having enacted any orders and living life in normal fashion? I thought maybe the weather, but I checked Tijuana and it is the same as here in L.A.

Pandemics behave in different ways in different countries and areas of the world, and even in territory within a country. If you look at just the US at present, you can see what I mean. The disease’s effects are mostly concentrated in the NY metropolitan area, with a few other states pretty bad (Washington, Louisiana, Michigan) but nowhere near as bad as NY (and Washington was hit early and hard, and has since leveled off considerably). For all the other states, if we weren’t already alerted to the thing, COVID would barely be a blip on the radar screen. And what of Chicago, one of our largest cities? Why is the number of deaths there from the disease relatively low? And I could point to many other US cities and ask the same question.

You can think of reasons why NYC would be hardest hit: congestion, travel hub, later imposition of social distancing. But I don’t think it really explains all the disparity, although perhaps I’m wrong about that. You can also say – as some prognosticators and politicians do – that NYC is just a forecast of what will happen soon all around the country. And perhaps that’s correct, but I don’t think so and I sincerely hope I’m right in this case. There is little doubt in my mind that things will get worse everywhere before they get better, but how much worse? Hopefully not NYC levels of worse.

As for Mexico – some predict that it will get very bad there [emphasis mine]:

AMLO’s [AMLO is the president’s nickname] advice [no social distancing], experts say, is deadly. What makes matters worse is that his policies over the past few years have set the stage for a profound health crisis. In a major effort to cut government spending, AMLO has reduced funds for the country’s hospitals and medical centers by millions. It’s left the nation short of physicians, medical equipment, beds, and coronavirus tests.

That last part is especially frustrating, because Mexico has been hit hard by outbreaks before. In 2009, the H1N1 influenza was identified, originating in Mexico before it spread around the world, killing about 17,000 people in an initial count. (A 2012 Lancet study estimated there were hundreds of thousands of deaths associated with the disease.) Then, Mexico aggressively tested hundreds of thousands of its citizens to identify clusters of infection and stem the tide against transmission, said Alejandro Macías, the “czar” for the government’s emergency response at the time. “We acted then like South Korea has today,” he told me.

That’s not happening this time. The country has barely tested people, likely accounting for the low official number of 475 cases as of March 26. That comes as millions continued to move freely outside, including tens of thousands who attended a large outdoor festival in Mexico City last week.

So has COVID actually already hit Mexico somewhat, but because there’s little or no testing for it, we don’t know much about it? If a small number (relatively speaking) of people are dying in Mexico from COVID, and if they’re not being tested for it, they will not appear in any statistics unless the numbers finally increase so much that it cannot be ignored.

I hope for Mexico’s sake that doesn’t happen. One thing I can say is that I don’t trust the predictions of experts, either the catastrophic or the milder ones. I just don’t think they know enough at this point to issue anything but a description of possibilities.

April is…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the cruelest month.

Or at least, a cruel month. But it’s not really a surprising announcement; I didn’t think the edicts would be lifted as soon as right after Easter.

That line about April being the cruelest month is usually quoted alone, and it’s a great line. But here it is in context:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

I have very mixed feelings about T. S. Eliot. On the one hand, I think “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are masterpieces, although I don’t much care for his other poetry. On the other hand, he gave us the poems that were the inspiration for the musical “Cats,” and for that it is hard to forgive him.

Songs for our times

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed that on weekends I often like to post something about the arts. Because everything’s been so COVID-centric lately, this is the song that has been rolling around in my mind. So – merging arts with COVID – we have the old but still very apropos “Keep Your Distance.”

Enjoy! But don’t get too close.

Conversations with friends: “Trump did nothing”

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that we’re all housebound, I find myself talking on the phone to friends more often. Sometimes they’re people I’m not often in touch with, and – since I don’t ordinarily bring up politics in conversation anyway – most of them are people I rarely if ever talk with about politics. However, just about all of them know about my political change and therefore have at least a rough idea of my politics.

Ever since the COVID phenomenon began, though, I’ve noticed that most of them can’t seem to resist dropping quick political statements into the conversation, usually about Trump. These come unexpectedly and are often just a sentence long. They are a sorrowful reminder (although I really don’t need reminding) of the gap between most people I know and me. In this time of loneliness, that makes me feel even more lonely.

I’ve noticed that these statements seem to take one (or both) of two forms. The first one can be summed up as “Trump did nothing and that let coronavirus get a grip here.” The second is “Trump hates science.”

Let me assure you that all these people are very smart in the conventional sense. But they have been Democrats all their lives and they get their news solely from sources such as the NY Times, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and the New Yorker. Plus, they live in places where the vast vast majority of people they meet agree with them. It occurred to me the other day that I’m probably the only person most of them know who might disagree with them on politics. Or at least, the only one to whom they still talk.

Sometimes I think that what’s happening is just a form of habit. People are used to throwing a few Trump-bombs into the conversation, have everyone nod, and then move on to the next topic. It’s almost like saying “Ummm” or “Uhhh” during a pause in the conversation. So even though my politics are known to them, they may not be trying to start a fight or even a discussion with me. They may just be assuming I’ll agree, because doesn’t everyone?

Even though I realize I will not convince a single person, I usually respond by saying something on the order of “Well, you know, Trump actually did do quite a bit early on” and list things such as the early travel restrictions on China and the appointment of the task force. The task force is especially useful because there are plenty of scientists on it, the better to refute the “Trump hates science and doesn’t believe in it” contention.

But after I state my small piece, there’s usually a silence and then we go on to another topic. It’s treated as though I did something a bit rude but rather minor, like burping loudly in public, something that’s best ignored.

I had originally wanted to end this post with a timeline showing the Trump administration’s actual responses to COVID-19. But I got tired of looking for a site with the information. No matter which search engine I used (although DuckDuckGo was much better than Google), I got inundated with articles saying how awful Trump was and how terribly he’d messed up, rather than an actual list of actions that had been taken.

So I’ve given up for now; perhaps you can find it. The only thing I found – and only through DuckDuckGo – were a few statements such as this one from people already involved in the administration, and this statement by Marc Siegel, a doctor who often comments at Fox. These few positive articles were lost against the vast and concerted effort to say “Trump did nothing, and what he did was awful.”

It’s really quite impressive to see the coordination and scope of the effort to get the word out. And my friends have certainly received the message, loud and clear.

[NOTE: And please don’t tell me to get new friends. Some of the people I’m describing are beloved relatives, and the rest are long-term friends I care about and who cannot be replaced and would be sorely missed. And yes, I do have some friends (and an ex-husband with whom I’m friendly) who are in basic political agreement with me. But they are very much in the minority.]

Flu vs. COVID-19: worrying about hospital shortages is nothing new

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Montage” writes:

Covid-19 is not just like the flu, which some want you to believe. In all the years of the flu we didn’t have hospital bed shortages or a worry about the number of ventilators that will be needed.

Here’s the part with which I agree: COVID-19 is not like the flu, at least not exactly. First of all, it’s a coronavirus rather than an influenza virus. That may seem like a nit-picking (or virus-picking) point to make, but it actually matters. The reason is this:

Making vaccines is always challenging. Developing this one is made more difficult because there has never been a vaccine for any type of coronavirus. “We don’t have a production platform, we have no experience in safety, we don’t know if there will be complications. We have to start from scratch, basically,” Krammer says.

It was much easier to make a vaccine for H1N1, known as swine flu, which emerged as a never-before-seen virus in 2009. “There are large vaccine producers in the US and globally for flu,” Krammer says. Manufacturers were able to stop making the vaccine against the seasonal flu and start making a vaccine for this new strain of flu. “They didn’t need clinical trials, they just had to make the vaccine and distribute it,” he says.

We have a lot more experience with the flu in every way. But talking about “flu” as though it’s a single entity is misleading, of course. That’s why there are “bad” flu seasons and “good” ones – that is, strains of flu that become ascendant in a particular year that kill more people or fewer people. The range is fairly wide:

Influenza spreads around the world in yearly outbreaks, resulting in about three to five million cases of severe illness and about 290,000 to 650,000 deaths… Death occurs mostly in high risk groups—the young, the old, and those with other health problems.

In the United States, the range of deaths per year from seasonal flu is between 12,000 and 61,000. Those deaths don’t occur at a rate that’s equal throughout the year, either; they are concentrated in flu season, which doesn’t have a strict calendar beginning and end but tends to be late fall to early spring. Therefore, in a “good” year with 12,000 deaths, I would estimate that during the months of flu season the US death rate from flu is very approximately 2,000 per month, and in a “bad” one it is close to 10,000 per month, with deaths dropping enormously in the other non-flu-season months of the year. Or, the deaths may be more spread out than that, but certainly not evenly distributed among all the months.

That’s a lot of people. That number of people may still be dying of the flu, for all I know, and all the COVID deaths are in addition. But maybe not – perhaps someone here can find some statistics on that.

But those are “regular” flu years. There are pandemic flu years such as 1957, 1968, and 2009:

In the 20th century, three influenza pandemics occurred: Spanish influenza in 1918 ([worldwide] 17–100 million deaths), Asian influenza in 1957 (two million deaths), and Hong Kong influenza in 1968 (one million deaths).

The death tolls from these pandemics in the US were much higher than in ordinary flu years, particularly in 1918. The death toll from 2009’s flu pandemic H1N1 (as estimated by the CDC) ended up being not as bad as originally predicted; it caused the death of between 8868 and 18,306 Americans.

So it actually is highly possible that COVID-19 will end up with a death toll no higher than the toll in a “bad” flu year. Or it could be worse, even much worse. Neither of those possibilities takes in the huge economic toll of the extreme strategies used to combat it, of course. How will we know if they will have been worth it? I suppose some day the number crunchers will analyze the data and come up with an answer, or several competing answers from which you can probably pick and choose. We don’t have a control world to compare it to, where we went on with business as usual.

And now let’s take up the last part of Montage’s statement: “In all the years of the flu we didn’t have hospital bed shortages or a worry about the number of ventilators that will be needed.”

Well, we don’t yet have hospital bed shortages in this country with COVID-19 either, although there’s no shortage of people claiming that we do. But at some point we may indeed have some shortages (as they seem to have in Italy), and we’re planning for that and preparing for that (here’s an example of the preparations).

However, we certainly have worried about hospital bed shortages with the flu in the past. Remember this from October 2009? I didn’t either, but take a look:

If a third of people wind up catching swine flu [H1N1], 15 states could run out of hospital beds around the time the outbreak peaks, a new report warns Thursday.

The nonprofit Trust for America’s Health estimates the number of people hospitalized could range from a high of 168,000 in California to just under 2,500 in Wyoming.

The public health advocacy group used government flu computer models to study how quickly hospitals would fill up during a mild pandemic, like the kind the swine flu — what doctors prefer to call the 2009 H1N1 strain — is shaping up to be.

It based its estimates on the mild 1968 pandemic, suggesting up to 35 percent of the population could fall ill.

Even though only a fraction would be sick enough to be hospitalized, health officials are bracing: When H1N1 first appeared in the spring, more than 44,000 people visited emergency rooms in hard-hit New York City, the report noted. Just sorting out which patients are sick enough to be admitted from the vast majority who need to go home is a big job. And hospital capacity varies widely.

By the outbreak’s peak, the new report suggests Delaware and Connecticut hospitals would fill up soonest. Also on that list: Arizona, California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.

I found a host of articles like that one from 2009. But it never came to pass.

And what of a “regular” flu year? This is from January of 2018, entitled “A severe flu season is stretching hospitals thin. That is a very bad omen”:

A tsunami of sick people has swamped hospitals in many parts of the country in recent weeks as a severe flu season has taken hold. In Rhode Island, hospitals diverted ambulances for a period because they were overcome with patients. In San Diego, a hospital erected a tent outside its emergency room to manage an influx of people with flu symptoms.

Wait times at scores of hospitals have gotten longer.

But if something as foreseeable as a flu season — albeit one that is pretty severe — is stretching health care to its limits, what does that tell us about the ability of hospitals to handle the next flu pandemic?

Good question, eh?

More:

That question worries experts in the field of emergency preparedness, who warn that funding cuts for programs that help hospitals and public health departments plan for outbreaks and other large-scale events have eroded the very infrastructure society will need to help it weather these types of crises…

A dozen years ago or so, government officials placed pandemic influenza preparedness efforts on the front burner because of fears that a dangerous bird flu strain — spreading quickly across Asia at the time — might trigger a catastrophic pandemic…

Then in 2009, the first flu pandemic in four decades did hit. But instead of bird flu, it was a swine flu virus called H1N1. There were not mass casualties…

Pandemic influenza lost its big, bad bogeyman status. And in the years since, budgets for preparedness work have suffered…

Hospital and public health preparedness programs have sustained cuts in the order of about 30 percent in recent years, said Dr. Oscar Alleyne, a senior adviser with the National Association of County and City Health Officials, adding: “The level of funding is a concern to us.”

…A modeling program called FluSurge developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help hospitals plan generates some pretty sobering scenarios, he noted. In a bad pandemic, hospitals might have four times more people in need of a ventilator than they have ventilators, and far too few intensive care beds for the seriously ill.

“So there would be a big mismatch between demand for care, lifesaving care, and the ability to provide it,” Inglesby said. “We would have a huge problem in this country.”

…Getting help from elsewhere — as a community will often do in the case of a major medical disaster — isn’t really an option during flu epidemics, because other places are either dealing with their own or steeling themselves for a wave that’s about to hit.

Please read the whole thing.

Gantz and Netanyahu, together again

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, well, well:

In a dramatic turn of events, the Blue and White Party that served as the alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the March 2 election, broke up on Thursday after party head Benny Gantz decided to enter Netanyahu’s government.

You can read the rest of the article at the link, but the gist of it is that Israeli politics is incredibly complex and even Byzantine, and Netanyahu is a survivor.

See this for more analysis.

I think this is good for Israel. The stalemate, with election after election after election following in rapid succession, was not.

Distortion and fear: the MSM won’t quit doing this, because they think (know?) it works

The New Neo Posted on by

I think the public is scared enough. But apparently the press doesn’t think so.

They play with the statistics, picking and choosing the most alarming measure among them in order to further panic the people and the better to criticize Trump. It is no challenge at all to find such MSM articles; they are legion, and using Google to research almost any aspect of COVID will conjure up reams of them.

Right now, of course, the favored number is confirmed cases, particularly in NYC. They are “soaring” or “skyrocketing” – and yes, they certainly are. But as anyone who’s been following this should know, it is obvious that as testing has become more ubiquitous and comprehensive (although it still has a way to go), the number of diagnoses will go way up.

This means that we are doing more testing. It doesn’t mean that the change in the number of confirmed cases before and after this burst in testing reflects the actual rate of change in the incidence of COVID in the population. It’s been going up for quite some time, of course, but we really don’t know how much or how many people have been infected or when they became infected.

And yet now all we hear about is how bad the US is, because we now have the highest number of confirmed cases in the world (see this). What’s left out of these reports? Almost everything else. Just a sampler:

—China is probably lying about its number of cases.

—The US is nowhere near having the highest number of cases per capita. Comparing absolute numbers in different countries without correcting for population means nothing, and one doesn’t need advanced math to realize that. Look at the cases per million numbers here, and you’ll see that the US has one of the world’s lowest rates (at the moment, anyway), not the highest at all. That will change and go up, of course, as testing continues. But it’s the more important statistic than sheer number of cases, although neither tells us very much right now.

—Then there’s deaths per million. It’s a figure that means more, because it’s less dependent on the vagaries of mass testing (although it still does rely on proper testing of the very ill and dying, of course). On that measure, the current figure for the US is extremely low, similar to Germany which is considered to be doing very well. But this is not a number in which the media is especially interested because it’s nowhere near as effective for its uses.

—The number of serious and critical cases, which is another important measure, is more difficult to compare because I’ve noticed that these numbers change very slowly and I think countries update them at a snail’s pace. So I don’t rely on them much. But for what it’s worth, right now the US has 2463. You can look at the chart and crunch the numbers yourself; as I said, the figures are very unreliable because for many countries they don’t seem to change for weeks. Take Germany, for example, a country that is reported to have only 23 serious or critical patients but which had 37 new deaths today and 61 the day before, and yet for both days the number of serious or critical patients has been stuck at 23. Clearly, that last figure has no relation to reality.

In the last couple of days, I’ve been talking on the phone more than usual. A couple of people I’ve spoken to have made casual references to the “fact” that Trump hasn’t done much of anything – or didn’t do much of anything for a long long time – to stop the coronavirus from taking hold. I don’t usually talk politics with these people unless they bring it up, but since they brought it up, I said “Actually, he did.” And then I mentioned a few things, mostly the China travel restrictions back in late January, and the naming of the task force at the same time.

What I say to them doesn’t make much of a dent. I am almost certain most of them got these ideas from the relentless hammering of the MSM with the theme that whatever Trump has done it’s not enough, or wrong, or too much. And the press does this because most people don’t have the time (and/or the inclination) to find out whether it’s true or not.

I’ll just take one example of this coverage and let it stand for the whole. My selection is purely arbitrary: this “analysis” by Stephen Collinson of CNN entitled “Trump touts great success as US becomes world’s worst virus epicenter.” Really, you don’t have to read much more than the headline to conclude “What a dummy Trump is, and a dangerous one at that, not only stupid but dangerously stupid.” In addition, of course: “The US is the nation on earth most afflicted with this pestilence.”

And plenty of people probably read only the headline, as CNN knows full well.

Who is Stephen Collinson? Well, he’s a White House reporter who specializes in opinion pieces about how awful Trump is. He appears to be a Brit in his late forties who went to university in Scotland, and his academic background is in English and English lit. He then went straight into reporting.

The piece starts this way:

As America became the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump downplayed the escalating national crisis.

[ADDENDUM: Please see this Twitter thread for another example, this one from the NY Times about about ventilators. At one point in the thread, you can read this:

It’s not hard to understand “the point of trying to drive panic with stories that are so misleading – and, frankly, so easily checked” if one keeps the following in mind: they are writers of propaganda, and they believe they can fool many of the people much of the time. A lot more people read the Times than ever see the fact checks of the Times, and the writers and editors on the paper are well aware of that fact.

Also, many people have weak math skills, and even if they see the fact-checks, the corrected numbers don’t have nearly as much meaning as the original emotional descriptions from the propagandists of the MSM.]

Boris Johnson tests positive for COVID-19

The New Neo Posted on by

It stands to reason that people who have a great deal of contact with the public and staff, as well as dignitaries from other countries, would be at greater risk for contracting the virus. Still, it’s shocking to hear that British PM Boris Johnson has tested positive. He is in isolation and reports mild symptoms.

Hope he makes a speedy and uneventful recovery.

New York City’s boroughs and COVID-19

The New Neo Posted on by

The explanation for why New York City is being hit so hard is that it has such a dense population as well as a great deal of reliance on public transportation, as well as a lot of international travel. The more crowded together a population is, it stands to reason that the easier it is to spread a disease such as this one.

That makes sense to me overall. But I crunched some numbers for the different boroughs and find them puzzling. Maybe it’s just statistical noise at this point, but I found that the figures for confirmed cases don’t follow the pattern I would imagine, which would be that the most dense boroughs would be hit the worst, and that the differential would be significant.

I’m relying on figures I found here. And then I adjusted them for basic population. Here’s what I got for what percentage of the population of each borough has been found (so far) to have COVID-19:

The Bronx: .0027
Brooklyn: .002
Manhattan .0024
Queens .003
Staten Is .0027

The figures are all very very close. And they are constantly changing, I’m pretty sure. But why would Manhattan and Brooklyn be lowest? And one of these things is really not like the others in terms of population density or use of public transportation: Staten Island.

I’m doing this quickly and haven’t been able to find more recent data for population density, but I don’t think the relative densities of the boroughs have changed all that much since these 2000 figures, which indicate that Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx are all roughly similar to each other (Queens the least and Brooklyn the most dense of the three), Manhattan has roughly double the density of runner-up Brooklyn and triple that of Queens, and Staten Island is an outlier. It has only 11% of Manhattan’s density (the densest borough), and 37% of the density of Queens, the least dense other borough.

So why is Staten Island right up there in its COVID cases at this point? I don’t think the people in Staten Island use public transportation anywhere near as frequently as in the other boroughs, either.

I haven’t seen any explanation and can’t think of one. I’m crunching these numbers very quickly, so perhaps I’ve made an error somewhere. Please take a look and see what you think.

The House will take up the stimulus bill on Friday

The New Neo Posted on by

Not today.

The Senate passed the two trillion dollar stimulus bill late last night on a rare unanimous vote. You may or may not like the idea, but the Senate certainly does.

The bill also contains a grab bag of provisions that in some cases seem to range far afield from the coronavirus pandemic, including $13 million for Howard University, $25 million for Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and $75 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Senate aides said those allocations and others were justified to help the institutions prepare for and respond to the coronavirus outbreak.

Now Pelosi’s House will be waiting till tomorrow to take it up. She already has earned a great deal of distrust from all but the left because of her earlier insistence on adding a whole wishlist of leftist goals unrelated to the crisis at hand.

Why the one-day delay?:

Majority Leader STENY HOYER announced that the House will consider this bill FRIDAY MORNING at 9 a.m.: “In order to protect the safety of Members and staff and prevent further spread of COVID-19 through Members’ travel, the Republican Leader and I expect that the House vote on final passage will be done by voice vote. Members who want to come to the House Floor to debate this bill will be able to do so.”

PELOSI gaggled Wednesday afternoon, and laid out how she saw the process going once she got the bill (these gaggles are now pooled because of social distancing). PELOSI said she would like to see “a good debate on the floor” about this bill.

— PELOSI spoke about the voice vote procedure — where lawmakers shout “aye” or “nay” on the floor. Any one lawmaker could then ask for a recorded vote, which would force the chamber back into session. But if that happens, the leadership will likely move to change the rules to allow for “proxy voting,” a system in which a small group of lawmakers votes on behalf of a much larger group on the floor.

I don’t think these explanations are the sort of thing for which most voters have sympathy. What else is going on? Is Pelosi planning still another delay to ask for more, and more and more? That would seem extraordinarily stupid after the bipartisan nature of the Senate voting. Although nothing would surprise me, I don’t think that’s her plan. I think that perhaps she’s doing two things today (a) accepting congratulations on her 80th birthday; and (b) figuring out a way to claim credit for the entire stimulus bill.