COVID-19

Heretic wrote:

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Donald Trump again struggled to reassure a fearful nation on Thursday as it emerged the US now has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world.

News that America had surpassed virus hotspots China and Italy with 82,404 cases of infection, according to a tracker run by Johns Hopkins University, broke as the president was holding a press conference at the White House.

His instinctive response was to question other countries’ statistics. “It’s a tribute to the amount of testing that we’re doing,” Trump told reporters. “We’re doing tremendous testing, and I’m sure you’re not able to tell what China is testing or not testing. I think that’s a little hard.”

. . .

While the US has increased its testing capacity in recents days the process has been flawed and incoherent, and the country still lags behind leaders such as South Korea in terms of the number of tests administered per-capita.

On a grim day, the death toll in America surpassed 1,000 and it was revealed that last week 3.3 million people filed for unemployment – the biggest single-week jump in history. The president has been widely condemned for failing to act fast enough, misjudging the public mood and seeking to blame others rather than taking personal responsibility.

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Trump said of the jobless figure. “Certainly not in this country. Nobody’s fault. We got very lucky when we made a decision not to allow people in from China on a very early date. I say that because some people don’t want to accept it, but this was a great decision made by our country, or the numbers that you’re talking about – we’re a big country – they’d be far greater, far bigger.”

. . .

Even as New York hospitals become overwhelmed, with doctors complaining of nightmarish conditions, and cases spike in cities such as New Orleans, Trump continued to talk down the threat from the virus. “Many people have it. I just spoke to two people that had it. They never went to a doctor, they didn’t report it ... The people that actually die, that percentage is much lower than I actually thought.”

He added, “The mortality rate, in my opinion, is way down,” even though experts have warned that this is likely to worsen in the coming weeks.

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The far-right’s most zealous Trump supporters have set their sights on Dr. Anthony Fauci.

To the vast majority of Republicans, the entire medical community and the country at large, Fauci is the government’s leading infectious disease expert, respected for providing Americans with consistent, factual information about the coronavirus pandemic — even if it means contradicting President Donald Trump while he hovers feet away.

But to a vocal minority of right-wing blogs and pro-Trump pundits, Fauci is the embodiment of the establishment forces that have been arrayed against the president since he came to Washington. And those voices are getting louder amid rumblings about Fauci’s standing with Trump as the president itches to get the economy restarted in the coming weeks.

. . .

Fauci’s portrayal in conservative media circles could play a crucial role in the coming days as the country comes to the end of a 15-day period of social distancing and business closures intended to slow the coronavirus outbreak. While public health officials like Fauci have cautioned that the country will likely have to extend that period, Trump and his team are signaling that they want to get people back to work soon, by mid-April if possible. The cues from right-wing media, as split as they are, could influence how much Trump listens to Fauci.

Very Stable Genius wrote:

You can call it a germ. You can call it a flu. You can call it a virus. You can call it many different names. I'm not sure anybody even knows what it is.

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On Feb. 5, with fewer than a dozen confirmed novel coronavirus cases in the United States but tens of thousands around the globe, a shouting match broke out in the White House Situation Room between Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and an Office of Management and Budget official, according to three people aware of the outburst.

Azar had asked OMB that morning for $2 billion to buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment, according to individuals familiar with the request, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions.

The previously unreported argument turned on the request and on the budget official’s accusation that Azar had improperly lobbied Capitol Hill for money for the repository, which Azar denied, the individuals said.

The $2 billion request from HHS was cut to $500 million when the White House eventually sent Congress a supplemental budget request weeks later. White House budget officials now say the relief package enacted Friday secured $16 billion for the Strategic National Stockpile, more money than HHS had asked for.

. . .

Anecdotally, there are wide differences, and they do not appear to follow discernible political or geographic lines. Democratic-leaning Massachusetts, which has had a serious outbreak in Boston, has received 17 percent of the protective gear it requested, according to state leaders. Maine requested a half-million N95 specialized protective masks and received 25,558 — about 5 percent of what it sought. The shipment delivered to Colorado — 49,000 N95 masks, 115,000 surgical masks and other supplies — would be “enough for only one full day of statewide operations,” Rep. Scott R. Tipton (R-Colo.) told the White House in a letter several days ago.

. . .

Florida has been an exception in its dealings with the stockpile: The state submitted a request on March 11 for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields and 238,000 gloves, among other supplies — and received a shipment with everything three days later, according to figures from the state’s Division of Emergency Management. It received an identical shipment on March 23, according to the division, and is awaiting a third.

President Trump repeatedly has warned states not to complain about how much they are receiving, including Friday during a White House briefing, where he advised Vice President Pence not to call governors who are critical of the administration’s response. “I want them to be appreciative,” he said.

Last month Trump said the 15 cases of coronavirus would quickly drop down to zero.

Today Trump says anything less than 2.2 million dead means he did a great job managing the pandemic.

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) March 29, 2020

In 2014, there were 11 cases of Ebola and 2 deaths in the U.S. and Trump demanded President Obama resign.

Today, we have nearly 140,000 cases of coronavirus and 2,400 deaths in the U.S. and Trump insists he's doing a great job. https://t.co/eFpFMlTK5H

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) March 29, 2020

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Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Monday said that his state received the wrong type of medical masks from the federal government in a shipment meant to equip medical professionals responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

"My team is sorting through the shipment of 300,000 N95 masks the White House personally told me would be sent to our state, and while we do not have a final count on this yet, I can say with certainty that what they sent were not the N95 masks that were promised but instead were surgical masks, which is not what we asked for," he said at a press conference, according to CNN, which noted that doctors wear the N95 masks when interacting with infected patients.

Pritzker added the he couldn’t “emphasize enough how much we need the federal government to step up and amplify the size of their PPE [personal protective equipment] deliveries to Illinois and, frankly, across the nation.”

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President Donald Trump finally leveled with America about the desperate reality of the coronavirus pandemic, warning of cruel weeks to come in one of the most chilling White House moments in modern history.

Even with blanket nationwide adoption of stringent mitigation efforts, between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans could face death in the coming weeks in a cascading nationwide ordeal, according to modeling explained by senior members of the President's emergency task force Tuesday.

. . .

The stark spectacle of a president, especially one who spent weeks dismissing the virus, warning of the imminent demise of so many Americans encapsulated the scale of the crisis.

"I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We're going to go through a very tough two weeks," the President said in the White House briefing room.

Trump's briefing mostly lacked the elements of self-congratulation and false hope that have characterized his heavily criticized leadership in the crisis.

Heretic wrote:

Trump's alarming message portends tragic days ahead

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President Donald Trump finally leveled with America about the desperate reality of the coronavirus pandemic, warning of cruel weeks to come in one of the most chilling White House moments in modern history.

Even with blanket nationwide adoption of stringent mitigation efforts, between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans could face death in the coming weeks in a cascading nationwide ordeal, according to modeling explained by senior members of the President's emergency task force Tuesday.

. . .

The stark spectacle of a president, especially one who spent weeks dismissing the virus, warning of the imminent demise of so many Americans encapsulated the scale of the crisis.

"I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We're going to go through a very tough two weeks," the President said in the White House briefing room.

Trump's briefing mostly lacked the elements of self-congratulation and false hope that have characterized his heavily criticized leadership in the crisis.

So we're looking at somewhere between 33 to 80 9/11s, for perspective, and that's with "blanket nationwide adoption of stringent mitigation efforts." That seems unlikely, so expect even higher.



We'll all know someone that's died from this by the end of it, if you don't already.

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The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.

The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.

Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.

Pandemic preparedness and global health security are issues that require government-wide responses, experts say, as well as the leadership of a high-ranking official within the White House who is assigned only this role.

“Health security is very fragmented, with many different agencies,” said J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It means coordination and direction from the White House is terribly important. ”

The personnel changes, which Morrison and others characterize as a downgrading of global health security, are part of Bolton’s previously announced plans to streamline the NSC. Two members of Ziemer's team have been merged into a unit in charge of weapons of mass destruction, and another official's position is now part of a unit responsible for international organizations. White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert, who had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks, is out completely. He left the day after Bolton took over last month.

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There should be a national stay-at-home order to combat the spread of the coronavirus, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, on Thursday night, adding: “I don’t understand why that’s not happening.”

Fauci made the recommendation during an interview on CNN, and hours later location data published by Google backed up his claim that the state-by-state patchwork of restrictions currently in place is leading to a huge disparity in how effectively social distancing is being implemented across the country.

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The Trump administration changed the Strategic National Stockpile website's description of the program yesterday after White House adviser Jared Kushner falsely claimed that the medical-supply stockpile is not meant to be used to help states. The description was changed to minimize the stockpile's role in helping states through crises like the current pandemic, but other portions of the official website still make it clear that Kushner was wrong.

Kushner acknowledged that the federal government is giving ventilators and other equipment to states, even though he argued that the stockpile isn't meant to be used by states. But the Strategic National Stockpile website homepage, maintained by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), previously made it clear that the stockpile is for the entire country.

If the goal was to completely remove all traces of the stockpile's role in helping states, the effort was not thorough enough. An "About the Stockpile" link on the homepage still leads to a fuller description that says it is supposed to "resupply state and local public health agencies in a catastrophic health event."

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The Pentagon and the White House, in the weeks leading up to the president’s national emergency declaration on Friday, quarreled over the response to the coronavirus outbreak that was sweeping the country.

Defense Department leaders urged measures such as restricting troop travel in order to contain the virus. But other administration officials pushed back, arguing against any “rash” steps that could have political ramifications and economic impact, defense officials told POLITICO.

It wasn't until President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on March 13 that leaders began to coalesce around a strategy. Trump’s comments served as a “green light” for DoD leaders to take more aggressive steps such as providing medical equipment, putting field hospitals on alert and making preparations to dispatch the military’s twin hospital ships to virus hotspots, said the defense official.

“We’re muddling through,” one defense official said.

Absent clear direction from the White House, the Pentagon’s initial internal response to the crisis, was ad hoc. In recent days, officials have scrambled to prepare the Navy's hospital ships, USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy, to help relieve pressure on civilian hospitals, defense officials said. Despite Trump’s assertion that the ships are “in tip-top shape,” the Comfort, homeported in Norfolk, Va., has been in pierside maintenance since December after returning from a five-month deployment and will not get underway until April 2. Meanwhile the Mercy, based out of San Diego, will be able to launch to its West Coast destination, either in California or Washington State, on Monday.

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At a White House briefing Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said officials had been alerted to the initial reports of the virus by discussions that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had with Chinese colleagues on Jan. 3.

The warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies increased in volume toward the end of January and into early February, said officials familiar with the reports. By then, a majority of the intelligence reporting included in daily briefing papers and digests from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA was about covid-19, said officials who have read the reports.

. . .

Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president.

Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials. When he reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market, the senior administration officials said.

On Jan. 27, White House aides huddled with then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in his office, trying to get senior officials to pay more attention to the virus, according to people briefed on the meeting. Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, argued that the administration needed to take the virus seriously or it could cost the president his reelection, and that dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.

Mulvaney then began convening more regular meetings. In early briefings, however, officials said Trump was dismissive because he did not believe that the virus had spread widely throughout the United States.