COVID19 Update - Day 168

US Tests: 73,016,779*

US Cases: 5,749,803*

US Deaths: 170,353*

Worldwide Cases: 23,820,104*

Worldwide Deaths: 818,137*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

Trump is a dangerous fascist, and he has completely failed to respond to the pandemic.  One silver lining, however, is that he hasn't (yet) used the pandemic as an excuse to crack down on public protest (instead, he has demonized the protesters and violated their rights).  Some authoritarian regimes have been a bit more subtle:

Though the coronavirus has posed an enormous challenge for world leaders, it has also presented an opportunity—for those who wish to consolidate power, pandemic containment rules offer a convenient tool to stifle inconvenient dissent. Here in Hong Kong, for example, the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, postponed legislative elections scheduled for September by an entire year, sapping momentum from a prodemocracy camp that looked poised to make sizable gains. (Lam has said that the move was not at all political and based solely on public-health concerns, but given the wide-ranging crackdown in the city over the past year, few have bought that justification.) Lam’s decision has also deepened a rift among serving prodemocracy lawmakers, and risks fragmenting a group that put aside long-held differences in opposition to Lam last year.

Hong Kong is hardly the only place where the pandemic has proved to be useful political cover. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the public-health crisis to shut down the country’s Parliament and judiciary—which enabled the prime minister to not only postpone his own corruption trial, but also authorize the security service to track citizens’ movements using cellphone data without legislative oversight. In Bolivia, a forthcoming general election has been twice delayed because of the pandemic—an excuse that opposition parties allege has allowed the country’s interim president to extend her rule. Poland did manage to hold presidential elections last month, but the ruling Law and Justice Party leveraged the crisis to its advantage by banning public events, making campaigning all but impossible. (The Law and Justice–backed incumbent, Andrzej Duda, who was free to organize public meetings and press conferences, remained largely unaffected.)

In Thailand, where protests against the government have grown in recent weeks to the largest in years and have expanded to criticize the largely untouchable monarchy, rights groups have warned that regulations enacted as a pandemic response serve ulterior motives. Measures “ostensibly aimed at protecting the Thai people from a public-health threat” are being misused to “harass and obstruct peaceful protesters,” Matthew Bugher, the Asia-program head at the British human-rights organization Article 19, wrote in June. Elsewhere, Algeria’s government utilized the crisis to halt a year-long protest movement against the country’s ruling elites. Similar bans on public demonstrations were imposed in Chile, Lebanon, and the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte authorized the police and military to shoot dead anyone found to be violating the country’s coronavirus restrictions. “Do not intimidate the government. Do not challenge the government,” Duterte warned in April. “You will lose.”

I guess Trump just isn't as creative as other thuggish leaders.