By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times @mikemcgannpa
We’d like it to be over, but it’s not.
The news that some 24 Pennsylvania counties will move a more open “yellow” stage next week naturally has folks in Chester County asking when will things open up here?
The honest answer: not that soon. June, maybe.
The numbers tell the story: new case numbers are not declining, if anything, they’ve been trending up here, even if the last few days looked better. Five people died Saturday in our county from this virus – for a total of 117 and honestly that number is very suspect — sources suggest the number is notably higher. At best, we’ve stalled this virus. At worst, Chester County, despite the lockdown, is losing this fight.
The question you have to ask yourself: how many people are you willing to see die just to open things up again?
There’s a lot of different reasons (most at the federal level), but to me and a lot of health experts, without broad testing and contact tracing, we’re not going to be able to contain this virus. Now, Chester County Health disagrees and argues that only testing symptomatic people — and using antibody testing for first responders and key personnel — is the way to go.
And while there are some arguments for that position — early active case testing suffered from a problem with false negatives — it is a minority opinion the public health world. Another problem: we do not have enough tests, reagents and swabs for broad testing, despite almost two months of claims by the Trump Administration otherwise.
It seems also that the antibody testing has been an issue – if not specifically with the kits Chester County is using (I’m honestly not sure), but most have not been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration and many are proving wildly inaccurate.
Look, I disagree with our Health Department, but let’s be clear: they’re focused on getting this right. We may have different opinions, I know they want this to end with as few deaths as possible as soon as possible.
This differs greatly from our federal government response.
As noted, there are not enough tests. There, still, is not enough personal protective equipment – and the federal government has swooped in and stolen it some from states. Those governors — especially in “blue” states — who dare to question the performance of the Trump Administration, find their supplies routed to a “red” state.
And while it is easy to blame Donald Trump for his personal massive failure of response, you have to also put blame on a bevy of elected Republican officials.
Sen. Pat Toomey’s plan to reopen the state is laughable in a “let the serfs die” kind of way. His alleged desire to run for governor in 2022 and lose very, very badly to Josh Shapiro would be hilarious were it not so sad.
Had we had a better response, more testing, less denial, we’d be back open or on the verge of it right now. Had the administration and its minions in the Congress not screwed the pooch on unemployment (and are actively fighting to stop additional benefits for so many not likely to return to work anytime soon), small business loans/grants (which, of course, mostly went to big businesses) and utter failure to help states and municipalities cope have made this worse than it needed to be.
You aren’t stuck in your home because of Gov. Tom Wolf. You are stuck in your home — maybe watching your small business die – because Donald Trump is an arrogant, incompetent ass.
Try to remember that this fall.
***
As almost all of you know, we had some pretty powerful storms race through Chester County on Thursday. There was some wind — gusts in the upper 40s – and some rain.
But the damage to PECO’s electrical grid in the county was awful. Thousands of people lost power and it took days to restore in many cases.
So the question is this: was the storm that bad or has PECO again fallen down on maintenance and continued to cut its workforce to pump up profit for parent company Exelon?
The evidence suggests it is a maintenance issue.
There were not nearly enough crews to handle this week’s events — and many of the outages appear to be at least partially related to poor maintenance.
I can only speak to my own experience in Pocopson. We have a PECO right of way behind our house that feeds 24 homes in our neighborhood. We’ve repeatedly had issues with overgrowth of trees/plants in the right of way, which then fall on wires, poles and transformers.
We complained.
PECO cleared out the space behind our home. Only. Not our neighbors or the roughly 1/4 mile long right of way.
So when a moderately large branch from behind our next door neighbor hit the pole behind our yard, I wasn’t surprised.
When the pole exploded — shattered into a million pieces because it had rotted away – I was a bit more surprised, even as I watched in real time.
This story was repeated across the county — failure to trim, failure to maintain and a thinning of the workforce — all because Exelon wanted to boost its stock price.
This is where I remind you PECO is a monopoly: you have to get your power from them.
PECO should be regulated by the state, but our Public Utilities Authority is slightly less effective than a drunken Pomeranian puppy and even less powerful.
Most other states tightly regulate their utilities, being publicly sanctioned monopolies, but not Pennsylvania. This might just be something to ask your favorite state legislative candidates about this summer/fall during election season — what are they going to do about it?
***
Obviously, being in the news business these days is a bit challenging.
Doing so in the era of the Stay At Home does add a bit of challenge to it.
Still, after years of doing this, we’ve gotten used to working around the power outages (thank heaven for our trusty generator, which at least gives us power for our water pump, fridges and yes, Internet). Normally, we’d decamp to our lightly used Valley office — which does have power.
So, while it was delightful that PECO managed to restore our power in about 36 hours, Friday night, they managed to sever our fiber optic cable from Verizon FiOS. So, now we have power, but no Internet or office phone. For what it is worth — the exhausted workers on site from PECO denied doing so, but we lost FiOS just as the power came back, as did our neighbors.
While that would normally be a problem, it’s a much bigger one with two college kids home needing to Zoom their classes. Verizon can’t send anyone out before Tuesday (and I doubt they can fix it in one visit — I think we may need new fiber run), so we’re kind of left in the lurch in these stay at home, Internet dependent times.
Even though AT&T wireless upped our limits for hotspots, we quickly ran out of data and had to buy a mobile hotspot with 100GB of data, just to keep up (that’s how you’re reading this today).
If as expected, we’re going to evolve into a lot more people working from home, we need to start building out infrastructure — and making sure our public utilities maintain it properly.
One thing that might help: 5G wireless. Calling back to my time as tech writer, it is possible that within a couple of years, we might get all of our Internet & cable TV over a cellular wireless router (similar, but faster to what my family is using right now — and without the data caps), which will be one less wire/cable to break during storms.
We’re also going to have to have a conversation about solar power and battery storage systems for homes. Pennsylvania’s government has been downright hostile to solar power of late — let’s just say those who profit from a lack of solar power know which Republican state legislators to generously target with campaign funds.
Within a decade, with some of the technology emerging, we could see houses no longer need PECO so badly. By using solar power and large batteries for all of their power needs — PECO would be little more than a backup for many homeowners. Aside from being cleaner, it would mean the end of broad power outages — and all of the issues they mean for those working from home.
This state needs to improve the tax breaks for solar installs to make the numbers work for the average home owner.
Again, something to ask your local state legislative candidate about.
Not sure the point of your numbers. Those are the CURRENT numbers. They could be MUCH higher with this. (BTW firearms don’t cause suicides, look at Japan which has a large suicide rate but no firearms). There could be 150,000 additional deaths or more from the lockdown. THAT’s what I mean by have compassion. But you’d rather subjugate the people to a lockdown because you are irrationally scared.
“What if it was your parent? Your brother?”
I would be sad, but I understand life. What if it was your parent or brother who died because they were too scared to get their chest pain checked on or because they were laid off and could pay for food?
Its OK open up because we will not have more people die. Again, this isn’t about stopping the number of people dying – that’s impossible and not what this was about – but about allowing time for the hospitals to deal with patients. We’ve done that. And look at Florida and Georgia, who ignore people like who who said it would be DEATH DEATH DEATH, and instead who are opening up just fine.
Our government did fail us. By locking down too tightly. That’s who you should contempt. And yourself, since you support more deaths by keeping us locked down.
We will be fine. Time to open back up.
“The question you have to ask yourself: how many people are you willing to see die just to open things up again?”
Really? This was sold as a way to flatten the curve, not to prevent people from dying. We’ve flatten the curve, time to open back up.
My question to you then how many people are you willing to see die just to keep things closed up? Because people will die (ODs, suicides, etc)
Of course, that question on both sides ignores the fact that we as a society are willing to “let people die” to do things. Car crashes are a price we pay. But nobody has to take cars, just like you don’t have to go out into the world.
Those of us who need to work and need money have different priorities, and understand the risk isn’t as big as you make it out to be, especially since you can make money working from home, and plenty of people can’t.
Have some compassion.
Total annual deaths by suicide: 48,000 (and by the way, incidence rate MUCH higher in areas with gun stores — virtually all the growth comes from firearm deaths); 70,000 opioid deaths yearly. I don’t personally accept or tolerate either, nor do many, many others. Car deaths? Cars are extremely regulated and have become vastly safer in recent years — because people cared about the death rates. You talk about compassion, but 70,000 people have died in the US in two months. What if it was your parent? Your brother? And is it OK for another, per CDC estimates, 130,000 people to die if we open up too quickly? I’m sorry your fiscal situation sucks — mine does too, as we depend upon ads from all the businesses that are closed right now. Our government has failed us, both in moving swiftly to deal with this pandemic — and in providing the financial safety net to allow us to stay closed up until we have a way to manage the virus. For them, I have no compassion, only contempt.
You are just another Democrat Socialist so called journalist who is hell bent on blaming the President and OUR Republican Congress for everything and anything. When In fact, its you’re childish, bunch of dopes House that has done nothing for 3 years but chase the President and try to bring him down. Seriously, absolutely nothing. You all spend your day pointing fingers and spewing ur anger because ya all LOST the election in 16. Frankly buddy, we all see right through it and honestly, most of us are just really dam tired of it. Its the same old herd mentality broken record. When are u all gonna start trying to help instead of remaining part of the problem.
Just wondering: what sort of product do you use to clean up all that spittle you spew? I assume you rant a lot — or when Fox News tells you to — which would be a lot. You sound a lot like Alex Jones – you into canabalism, too?