On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn.... At each store, they cleaned out the shelves... Mr. Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” Some areas of the country need these products more than others, and he’s helping send the supply toward the demand. .. “Even at $125 a box, they were selling almost instantly,” he said. “It was mind-blowing as far as what you could charge.” He estimates he made $35,000 to $40,000 in profit.

This conveniently gives constituents the weekend to contact and yell at their Senators about stuff like perfect being the enemy of the good:

What would a normal president say and do in response to this crisis?

It’s painfully obvious that no normal person — let alone any typical president — would respond in the way President Donald Trump has.  At each stage, he has lied, he has created confusion, he has made reckless predictions, and he has, once and for all, demonstrated his manifest unfitness to serve.

In his public statements over the last few weeks, Trump has demonstrated that he is simply incapable of taking on the challenge before him. On Feb. 29, Trump confidently predicted that the number of infected people in the U.S. would “within a couple of days [be] going to be down to close to zero.”  Public figures ought to be calling on the president to resign from office, to get out of the way and let competent people step in.

Previous thread of Coronavirus Impact stories here. (Also threads specific to White House response, by NCD here and here; briefing to briefing to Congressional GOP here; general thread by Dr. Cleveland here )

A member of Congress who attended the closed-door briefing where the assessment was made called the prediction “sobering.”

By Betsy Swan & Oliver Messer @ DailyBeast.com, March 11

[....] Not all public-health experts share that view. And not everyone exposed to the virus will become infected. Still, the briefing highlighted the potential gravity of the growing crisis [...]

[....] Two sources–a member of Congress who attended the briefing and a second person with knowledge of it–described the remarks, made last week, to The Daily Beast. They were delivered by Rajeev Venkayya, the president of the Global Vaccine Business Unit at Tokyo-based pharmaceutical giant Takeda. The member of Congress said the comment was “sobering,” while the second person noted it came during a discussion about how to manage the costs of medical care related to the coronavirus. Venkayya pointed out that widespread access to medical care will be vital, given the likely breadth of the exposure, that source said.

Venkayya confirmed to The Daily Beast through a spokesperson that he made the remark about the broad scope of likely exposure, and did not provide further comment on the briefing. He was previously director of 

vaccine delivery for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, according to his bio on Takeda’s website. Before that, he worked in the George W. Bush White House as special assistant to the president for biodefense, where he led efforts to develop and implement the national strategy for pandemic influenza. 

The remarks came in a briefing to House Republicans. Executives from multiple pharmaceutical companies spoke to the members, as did Vice President Mike Pence. The comment on most Americans’ likely potential exposure to the virus came after Pence left the briefing, the sources noted [....]

The persuadable Trump voter could swing the election in November.

By Laurel Bliss & Brian Schaffner @ Vox.com, March 10

Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 was at least partly attributable to the millions of Barack Obama voters who shifted their support to Donald Trump. Four years later, it is now Trump who must worry about losing some of his supporters in November: As many as one in 10 Trump voters is considering voting for somebody else in 2020, according to our analysis of data from the 2019 Cooperative Congressional Election Study survey.

These voters are individuals who neither strongly approve nor strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president. If Democrats want to win over these voters, they’ll have to choose their message wisely.

Why should campaigns focus on persuading these potential swing voters rather than turning out nonvoters? Swing voters might be rare but they do exist, and persuading them can be particularly influential for two reasons. First, switching a person from opposing your side to supporting it has a two-vote effect on the margin: It subtracts one vote from your opponent and adds one vote to your tally. Mobilizing an additional supporter to come out to vote has only half that impact.

Second, mobilizing people to vote when they haven’t done so before can be challenging. Even if Democrats can mobilize more nonvoters to get to the polls, it is not clear that this will help them in swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan, where many nonvoters fit the profile of Trump’s base [....]

Forgot the clown troll in front of the curtain. What plotting is going on behind it?

By Nancy Cook @ Politico.com, March 9

Political and economic damage from the coronavirus crisis is mounting. Some Trump officials see the moment as an opportunity to finally deliver on promises including border restrictions, isolating China and broader tax cuts.