This week’s edition of Throwback Thursday is curated by my sister. The picture is of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, which famously led convicted criminals from the courthouse to the prison and—poetically speaking, at least—gave them their last look at beautiful Venice. The song is Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street,” presumably because my sister is a huge Anglophile and likes the title. Enjoy!

Last night, on national TV, in a prepared address, President Trump said that (a) we would ban all travel from Europe, (b) we would ban some or all trade with Europe, and (c) insurance companies had agreed to waive copays for coronavirus treatment. All of this was mistaken. The travel ban applies only to foreign nationals, not US residents. No trade is being banned. And insurance companies are waiving copays only for coronavirus testing, not treatment.

This morning, Trump said that everyone entering the United States is being tested. This is . . . what? A lie? A delusion? A panicky response to a question? Does anyone know? The truth, of course, is that we’re not testing anyone arriving in the US. Hell, people who are returning from the hottest hotspots in northern Italy have reported not even being questioned, let alone tested.

Trump claims (falsely) all Americans returning to country are being tested:”We have heavily tested. If an American coming back or anybody coming back, we have a tremendous testing set up where people coming in have to be tested … if it shows positive … We have to quarantine.” pic.twitter.com/ndGlKmSFJh

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 12, 2020

This is way beyond outrageous. It’s not a partisan thing. There’s something wrong with Trump, and it either needs to be addressed or he needs to be taken out of the loop. This kind of stuff can’t be allowed to continue.

My latest M-protein numbers came back yesterday. They’re up from the previous month:

This is not as bad as it seems. As you may recall, I was on a cocktail of drugs last year that included something called Pomalyst. In December, suspecting that the Pom might be causing the shortness of breath that I was suffering, we discontinued it. This is why my M-protein number has increased.

I’ll see my oncologist next week, but the answer to this is almost certainly to start back up on the Pom. There’s no reason not to, since my shortness of breath has continued for the past three months, which means it wasn’t the fault of the Pom to begin with. Presumably it’s caused either by the Darzalex or the dex, and I can’t discontinue either of those. So I’m just going to have to live with it.

Denmark is safe for now.Kevin Drum

Back in the day—i.e., 2016—I always figured there were two big reasons to hope Donald Trump didn’t win the Republican nomination. The first and most important was his straight-up appeal to bigotry and xenophobia, which the other Republican nominees mostly didn’t share. The second was that he might nuke Denmark.

That was the joke, anyway, but it was just shorthand for Trump screwing up some kind of foreign policy emergency, getting himself deeper and deeper into a hole, and then somehow ending up in a war that no one wanted. Nobody thought this was especially likely, but still, it was a 1 percent risk that the other candidates didn’t pose.

Then Trump got elected and three years passed. No war. No real threat of a war, either. Maybe we were all wrong?

Nope. “War,” it turned out, was itself shorthand for an emergency that Trump’s personality would cause him to mismanage. And the emergency turned out to be a pandemic. At first, Trump’s narcissism prevented him from believing that anything could be seriously wrong while he was in charge. Then his xenophobia caused him to address the problem solely by closing off a border, even though no one thought that would work. That eventually morphed into Trump’s bullheadedness preventing him from admitting he was mistaken and changing tack. And that, in turn, has caused him to close yet more borders.

In the meantime, there’s no consistent leadership from the White House. No consistent set of recommendations. No plans for mass testing. No national plans for containment or quarantine. Just experts becoming ever more shrill as the president does nothing and Mitch McConnell shrugs.

So in the end, Trump did nuke Denmark. Metaphorically speaking, that is. But it’s not Denmark that will pay the price, because—again, metaphorically—it’s actually the United States that he’s nuked.

Today’s news:

• WHO officially deemed the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.
• The NBA has canceled the rest of its season.
• March Madness will continue but without fans.
• Ditto for lots of TV shows performed before live audiences.
• President Trump has banned travel from Europe to the US for foreign nationals.
• Except for the UK.
• Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson have both tested positive for coronavirus.

This feels like the first day the country started taking coronavirus seriously.

The youth vote at work.Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal via ZUMA

What’s with the youth vote, anyway? Every four years the kids seem really excited, but then they don’t turn out to vote. What’s going on?

The answer is surprisingly simple. When we think of the “youth vote,” the image that almost certainly pops into your mind is a 20-year-old college student wearing a Bernie cap and leading campus rallies against sexual violence. They care about social justice, climate change, and trans rights. But even if college students vote in large numbers, they make up only a small percentage of the 18-29 population. There are roughly 17 million undergrads enrolled in two- and four-year colleges right now, compared to a total population of 54 million. That’s 30 percent.

The other 70 percent are all working stiffs. You won’t see them in the pictures used to illustrate stories about “what young people are thinking today,” but they constitute by far the biggest share of this demographic—and to put it gently, they probably care about different things than your typical university undergrad. This is the real youth vote, and that makes them the voters we need to target. But do we?

Politico reports on discussions within the White House:

President Donald Trump is reluctant to declare an expansive emergency to combat the escalating coronavirus outbreak, fearful of stoking panic with such a dramatic step, according to three people familiar with the situation….Trump’s concern at this point is that going further could hamper his narrative that the coronavirus is similar to the seasonal flu.

….Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is pushing for the designation but Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump tapped to lead the administration’s coronavirus response, doesn’t want Trump to act until Congress passes a stimulus package, according to two of the people.

There’s no deadline for a decision, but one of the people familiar with the talks said the task force will not give Trump its final verdict until Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, finishes his research and comes to a conclusion himself.

We are doomed. Trump doesn’t want to confess that he was wrong. Pence wants to use the pandemic as leverage for a tax cut. And the “final verdict” rests on the shoulders of Jared Kushner, who hasn’t proven himself competent at anything over the past three years, let alone matters of infectious disease control.

Speaking of which, here’s a chart from the Financial Times showing the spread of coronavirus in various countries. This is similar to the one I showed you this morning except that it displays the raw number of cases, not percentage of the population:

The important thing about the United States is neither the current number of cases nor the percentage of the population that’s infected. Those are both probably underestimated anyway due to lack of test kits. What’s important is the growth rate, and this is where the US stands alone. If we’re lucky, this is being overestimated as more test kits finally become available, but I wouldn’t count on it. It’s more likely that cases are skyrocketing because we’ve had no national response from the Trump administration, which wants to continue pretending that coronavirus is “just like the seasonal flu.” This is better for Trump’s reelection chances, you see.

This is a wild geranium growing near a tree on the Blue Ridge Parkway. As I recall, I spent most of my time at this location trying to catch a shot of a particular butterfly, and failing miserably. The butterfly was practicing intermittent reinforcement on me, always seeming just a hair away from my getting a good picture of it. But I never did. However, I got this flower instead.

Stuart Staniford has created this chart to compare the coronavirus outbreak in different countries:

“My slapdash extrapolation of the US case curve (the dashed line) has performed just about flawlessly,” he says. China, Japan, and Korea appear to have the virus relatively under control. Italy and Iran are high and still growing fast. The UK and the United States are on the low end of things, but unless something happens to flatten our growth rate we’re going to blow past everyone else in a week or two.

Right now it doesn’t look like anything is going to happen to flatten our growth rate.

wtf?

The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials.

The officials said that dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room at the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), a key player in the fight against the coronavirus. Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings, which included video conference calls, the sources said.

This White House is insane. How many extra people are going to die because they’re hellbent on letting Donald Trump pretend that everything is totally under control instead of doing everything they can to limit the spread and mortality rate of the coronavirus?