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.
“We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,” one official said. “These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary.”
The sources said the National Security Council (NSC), which advises the president on security issues, ordered the classification.”This came directly from the White House,” one official said.
The White House insistence on secrecy at the nation’s premier public health organization, which has not been previously disclosed, has put a lid on certain information - and potentially delayed the response to the crisis. COVID19, the disease caused by the virus, has killed about 30 people in the United States and infected more than 1,000 people.
The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.
That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.
The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.
Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country.
The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead. That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August. The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed. The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings. Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country.
Exclusive: The Military Knew Years Ago That a Coronavirus Was Coming
The Pentagon warned the White House about a shortage of ventilators, face masks, and hospital beds in 2017—but the Trump administration did nothing.
By Ken KlippensteinTwitter
Despite President Trump’s repeated assertions that the Covid-19 epidemic was “unforeseen” and “came out of nowhere,” the Pentagon was well aware of not just the threat of a novel influenza, but even anticipated the consequent scarcity of ventilators, face masks, and hospital beds, according to a 2017 Pentagon plan obtained by The Nation. “The most likely and significant threat is a novel respiratory disease, particularly a novel influenza disease,” the military plan states. Covid-19 is a respiratory disease caused by the novel (meaning new to humans) coronavirus. The document specifically references coronavirus on several occasions, in one instance saying, “Coronavirus infections [are] common around the world.” The plan represents an update to an earlier Department of Defense pandemic influenza response plan, noting that it “incorporates insights from several recent outbreaks including…2012 Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus.” Titled “USNORTHCOM Branch Plan 3560: Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Disease Response,” the draft plan is marked for official use only and dated January 6, 2017. The plan was provided to The Nation by a Pentagon official who requested anonymity to avoid professional reprisal. Denis Kaufman, who served as head of the Infectious Diseases and Countermeasures Division at the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2014 to 2017, stressed that US intelligence had been well-aware of the dangers of coronaviruses for years. (Kaufman retired from his decades-long career in the military in December of 2017.) “The Intelligence Community has warned about the threat from highly pathogenic influenza viruses for two decades at least. They have warned about coronaviruses for at least five years,” Kaufman explained in an interview. “There have been recent pronouncements that the coronavirus pandemic represents an intelligence failure…. it’s letting people who ignored intelligence warnings off the hook.” In addition to anticipating the coronavirus pandemic, the military plan predicted with uncanny accuracy many of the medical supply shortages that it now appears will soon cause untold deaths. The plan states: “Competition for, and scarcity of resources will include…non-pharmaceutical MCM [Medical Countermeasures] (e.g., ventilators, devices, personal protective equipment such as face masks and gloves), medical equipment, and logistical support. This will have a significant impact on the availability of the global workforce.” The 103-page response plan provides an overview of what might cause a pandemic, likely complications, and how the military might respond. The plan outlines conditions under which an infectious disease can become a pandemic, several of which were at play with Covid-19: crowded workplaces, proximity to international airports, unsanitary living conditions. It also contains references to classified annexes that go into further detail. (The Nation is not in possession of these annexes.) Last week, Trump lashed out at General Motors and Ford on Twitter, demanding that they manufacture ventilators, a life-and-death appliance for many people with acute Covid-19 symptoms. The plan’s warning about face masks and ventilators was prescient: The US Strategic National Stockpile of medical equipment including respirators, gloves, face masks, and gowns is reportedly nearly depleted. The military plan also correctly anticipates “insufficient hospital beds.” Indeed, hospitals are in critically short supply in Italy and rapidly filling up across New York. “Even the most industrialized countries will have insufficient hospital beds, specialized equipment such as mechanical ventilators, and pharmaceuticals readily available to adequately treat their populations during clinically severe pandemic,” the report goes on. Another prediction in the report anticipates worldwide competition for, and scarcity of, Covid-19 vaccines. Trump has already reportedly offered German scientists large sums of money for exclusive rights to a vaccine, and efforts to develop drugs are underway in several countries. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. You can read the Pentagon’s full draft pandemic plan below.
Well shitfire and hell's bells!!!! What incompetent, lazy, apathetic sumbitch had his fine ass ensconced in a chair in the Oval Office when this report was passed on to him?
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: COVID-19 4/5/2020, 2:46 am
Remembering the True Patriots in this fight as we pass our 3rd 9/11...
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: COVID-19 4/5/2020, 2:52 am
Baghdad jack wrote:
Well shitfire and hell's bells!!!! What incompetent, lazy, apathetic sumbitch had his fine ass ensconced in a chair in the Oval Office when this report was passed on to him?
Seven days before Donald Trump took office, his aides faced a major test: the rapid, global spread of a dangerous virus in cities like London and Seoul, one serious enough that some countries were imposing travel bans.
In a sober briefing, Trump’s incoming team learned that the disease was an emerging pandemic — a strain of novel influenza known as H9N2 — and that health systems were crashing in Asia, overwhelmed by the demand.
“Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918,” Trump’s aides were told. Soon, they heard cases were popping up in California and Texas.
The briefing was intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis. But unlike the coronavirus pandemic currently ravaging the globe, this 2017 crisis didn’t really happen — it was among a handful of scenarios presented to Trump’s top aides as part of a legally required transition exercise with members of the outgoing administration of Barack Obama.
And in the words of several attendees, the atmosphere was “weird” at best, chilly at worst.
POLITICO obtained documents from the meeting and spoke with more than a dozen attendees to help provide the most detailed reconstruction of the closed-door session yet. It was perhaps the most concrete and visible transition exercise that dealt with the possibility of pandemics, and top officials from both sides — whether they wanted to be there or not — were forced to confront a whole-of-government response to a crisis. The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount” — warnings that seem eerily prescient given the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
As the first alarms sounded in early January that an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China might ignite a global pandemic, the Trump administration squandered nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal stockpile of critically needed medical supplies and equipment.
A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.
By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile. That federal cache of supplies was created more than 20 years ago to help bridge gaps in the medical and pharmaceutical supply chains during a national emergency.
Now, three months into the crisis, that stockpile is nearly drained just as the numbers of patients needing critical care is surging. Some state and local officials report receiving broken ventilators and decade-old dry-rotted masks.
“We basically wasted two months,” Kathleen Sebelius, health and human services secretary during the Obama administration, told AP.
Remember, we sent 18 tons of knowingly scarce PPE to China early February, after we started getting our first cases.
Two months before the novel coronavirus is thought to have begun its deadly advance in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration ended a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat.
The project, launched by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2009, identified 1,200 different viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. The initiative, called PREDICT, also trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories — including the Wuhan lab that identified SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: COVID-19 4/6/2020, 12:11 am
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
Well shitfire and hell's bells!!!! What incompetent, lazy, apathetic sumbitch had his fine ass ensconced in a chair in the Oval Office when this report was passed on to him?
Seven days before Donald Trump took office, his aides faced a major test: the rapid, global spread of a dangerous virus in cities like London and Seoul, one serious enough that some countries were imposing travel bans.
In a sober briefing, Trump’s incoming team learned that the disease was an emerging pandemic — a strain of novel influenza known as H9N2 — and that health systems were crashing in Asia, overwhelmed by the demand.
“Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918,” Trump’s aides were told. Soon, they heard cases were popping up in California and Texas.
The briefing was intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis. But unlike the coronavirus pandemic currently ravaging the globe, this 2017 crisis didn’t really happen — it was among a handful of scenarios presented to Trump’s top aides as part of a legally required transition exercise with members of the outgoing administration of Barack Obama.
And in the words of several attendees, the atmosphere was “weird” at best, chilly at worst.
POLITICO obtained documents from the meeting and spoke with more than a dozen attendees to help provide the most detailed reconstruction of the closed-door session yet. It was perhaps the most concrete and visible transition exercise that dealt with the possibility of pandemics, and top officials from both sides — whether they wanted to be there or not — were forced to confront a whole-of-government response to a crisis. The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount” — warnings that seem eerily prescient given the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
And now, children, today's history pop quiz: Seven days prior to Trump's inauguration, who had the power, ability, and responsibility to address this scenario? Perhaps someone was too busy scrounging around for a cardboard box and packing peanuts to ship His hard-earned Nobel Peace Participation Trophy to His new residence and couldn't be bothered to deal with something as minor as this.
The first government report on the state of the nation’s hospitals amid the coronavirus pandemic has confirmed that they are facing severe shortages of tests, critical protective gear and the staff needed to treat and protect both patients and healthcare workers.
The 34-page report released Monday was based on hundreds of interviews of administrators at 323 medical centers coast to coast from March 23 to 27. It largely validated reports from news organizations, and painted a far more dire picture than the one President Trump describes at his daily news conferences.
Later, at Monday’s briefing, he angrily dismissed questions about the report, which was from the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services. “Give me the name of the inspector general,” he challenged one reporter. “Could politics be entered into that?” Last week he fired another inspector general, for the intelligence agencies in retaliation for his role in events that led to Trump’s impeachment.
The health department’s inspector general found that hospital administrators were particularly frustrated by the lack of testing. They complained that scarce resources, especially protective equipment, had to be used for patients simply suspected of having the virus because doctors had to treat them as if they were infected.
Fine was appointed as chairman of the committee last week, a move that won praise across the political spectrum
“Glenn Fine has a good reputation as a tough federal prosecutor and former [Department of Justice] Inspector General, and must exercise his full oversight authority to ensure that the Trump administration implements the CARES Act as intended,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement last week.
The move follows several steps Trump has taken to combat oversight of the bailout fund. After signing the relief package into law last month, the president issued a signing statement saying he would not allow the special inspector general for the relief program to report to Congress without his supervision.
And last week, he nominated one of his own White House lawyers, Brian Miller, for the special inspector general position.
As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.
Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.
The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia -- forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.
"Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event," one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. "It was then briefed multiple times to" the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House.
President Trump has left it largely up to states and hospitals to secure whatever supplies they can during the coronavirus pandemic. Yet the federal government has been quietly seizing some orders of those supplies, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need.
Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not publicly reporting the acquisitions, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, nor has the administration detailed how it decides which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.
Officials who’ve had materials seized also say they’ve received no guidance from the government about how or if they will get access to the supplies they ordered. That has fed concerns about how public funds are being spent and whether the Trump administration is fairly distributing scarce medical supplies.
The medical leaders on the front lines of the fight to control the coronavirus and keep patients alive say they are grasping for explanations. “We can’t get any answers,” said a California hospital official who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation from the White House.
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: COVID-19 4/8/2020, 8:20 pm
Adding to what @weijia is reporting below, a FEMA spokesperson told me: this is not the way we usually do it. FEMA usually gives to the state. Directly. Now 50% of what FEMA is flying in from overseas goes to private companies which sell it to states that offer the highest dollar https://t.co/PBSMoOcsqO
The recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency use authorization (EUA) for two malaria drugs to treat COVID-19, based on thin evidence of efficacy, has jeopardized research to learn the drugs’ real value against the pandemic coronavirus, say former agency executives under President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama. They also charge that the 28 March EUA for chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine sulfate undermines FDA’s scientific authority because it appeared to be a response not to scientific evidence, but to fervent advocacy of the drugs by Trump and other political figures.
. . .
Margaret Hamburg, FDA commissioner during most of Obama’s tenure, including the H1N1, Zika, and Ebola crises, says she was “surprised and perturbed” by the EUA. “I understand the desire to find hope, but we need more evidence than is currently available before we encourage widespread use,” says Hamburg, who is a past president of AAAS, which publishes ScienceInsider. Valuable clinical trial evidence on the two malaria drugs could be gathered in a few weeks, Hamburg adds—but the EUA could make that more difficult. “Making the drugs available in a more widespread way might actually interfere with the ability to get the data that we need.”
. . .
David Boulware, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, working on COVID-19 trials, suggests the EUA may impede testing of another potential COVID-19 treatment. He says colleagues working on a randomized, placebo-controlled, multisite trial of remdesivir, Gilead Sciences’s experimental antiviral drug, have encountered hospitalized COVID-19 patients who ask, “Do I want to get a placebo? I’m really sick and I can get hydroxychloroquine.” Some are opting out of the remdesivir study, Boulware says.
Purposely or not, and despite skepticism from many doctors, FDA might have made hydroxychloroquine the de facto standard of care for COVID-19, he and others suggest. That could also undermine the COVID-19 trials of it and chloroquine. It’s too soon to know what the impact might be, researchers organizing those trials told ScienceInsider. But Peter Lurie, a physician and FDA executive under Obama and Trump who now heads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, says the EUA weakens the incentive to sign up for a trial. “Why take a 50% chance of getting a placebo when you can be guaranteed to get a drug you’re hoping to get? Then you’re left in a situation where a drug is widely used and evidence of its effectiveness for this indication is never generated.”
. . .
FDA watchers also wonder how the agency will respond to the next remedy supported by anecdotal reports when facing public fears about a growing death toll and presidential pressure. There is no shortage of candidates—including zinc, remdesivir, the Japanese flu drug favipiravir (branded as Avigan), and a stem cell product touted by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. FDA said that by law, it “generally cannot confirm, deny, or comment” about such prospects, and “will not speculate” on future EUAs; it has, however, already approved the testing of the stem cell product in a clinical trial of COVID-19 patients.
“When the evidence base for granting the EUA is as flimsy as this, the question becomes, ‘Whose EUA will not be granted, especially in the context of an epidemic?’” Lurie says. “What happens when the epidemic is not [historically] bad, when it’s just a bad season of the flu?”
And Hamburg says she fears that with its EUA, FDA has taken “a step away from scientific rigor, to a system that is much more subject to all kinds of interference, from wishful thinking to frank political and economic motivations.”
The paper that appears to have triggered the Trump administration’s obsession with hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for infection with the novel coronavirus has received a statement of concern from the society that publishes the journal in which the work appeared.
The April 3, 2020, notice, from the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, states that the March 20 article, “Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of Covid-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial”
Quote :
does not meet the [International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy’s] expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety.
The study was led by Didier Raoult, of the University of Marseille, whose publication history has come under scrutiny.
Last month, Elisabeth Bik took a close look at the IJAA article and detailed a long list of serious problems with the study, including questions about its ethical underpinnings, messy confounding variables, missing patients, rushed and conflicted peer review, and confusing data.
Others have used PubPeer to report additional issues with the Raoult article.
Of course, the horse has left the proverbial barn on this one. An untold number of patients have been receiving hydroxychloroquine, as well as chloroquine, for Covid-19 infection, thanks in large part to cheerleading for the drugs from President Trump.
Although a certain amount of haste is to be expected in a medical crisis, and sometimes spitballing may be a viable option, the use of poorly investigated therapies is hardly risk free. In this case, not only do the drugs carry significant side effects, but they are critical treatments for people with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis — patients who now have to hope that they can still get access to medications that are keeping them alive. (Now come reports that states are hoarding hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for precisely these people.)
The paper that appears to have triggered the Trump administration’s obsession with hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for infection with the novel coronavirus has received a statement of concern from the society that publishes the journal in which the work appeared.
The April 3, 2020, notice, from the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, states that the March 20 article, “Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of Covid-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial”
Quote :
does not meet the [International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy’s] expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety.
The study was led by Didier Raoult, of the University of Marseille, whose publication history has come under scrutiny.
Last month, Elisabeth Bik took a close look at the IJAA article and detailed a long list of serious problems with the study, including questions about its ethical underpinnings, messy confounding variables, missing patients, rushed and conflicted peer review, and confusing data.
Others have used PubPeer to report additional issues with the Raoult article.
Of course, the horse has left the proverbial barn on this one. An untold number of patients have been receiving hydroxychloroquine, as well as chloroquine, for Covid-19 infection, thanks in large part to cheerleading for the drugs from President Trump.
Although a certain amount of haste is to be expected in a medical crisis, and sometimes spitballing may be a viable option, the use of poorly investigated therapies is hardly risk free. In this case, not only do the drugs carry significant side effects, but they are critical treatments for people with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis — patients who now have to hope that they can still get access to medications that are keeping them alive. (Now come reports that states are hoarding hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for precisely these people.)
Liberal Treated With Hydroxychloroquine Hopes He Still Dies Of COVID-19 To Prove Trump Is Stupid
April 7th, 2020
NEW YORK, NY—When Jeffrey Walton tested positive for COVID-19, he hoped for a speedy recovery. But since he has been treated with hydroxychloroquine, the experimental treatment President Donald Trump has been touting, he now hopes he dies quickly to help prove that Trump is an idiot. While Trump has been giving people hope that hydroxychloroquine could save lives, his political opponents have called it false hope and claimed Trump has no idea what he’s talking about. Walton, a lifelong Democrat and progressive, had joined in calling Trump “irresponsible” and an “ignoramus” and now has an opportunity to prove it by simply dying. “It’s such an opportunity, I don’t want to pass it up,” Walton said. Doctor Glenn Logan, Walton’s physician, says he’s been up and down. “After we gave him the hydroxychloroquine, he got really excited about the idea of dying to prove Trump is dumb, and his good mood helped his condition, and he started to improve. Because that would only help Trump, his getting healthier made him depressed, which caused his condition to deteriorate. Which made him really happy. Which helped him recover and... Well, it’s been a weird cycle.” Dr. Logan has been warning Walton that there is a chance he could fully recover. Walton is trying to prepare himself for this -- a world where everything isn’t black and white and Trump can be right about some things -- but he insists he’d much rather die.
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: COVID-19 4/10/2020, 2:31 pm
happy jack wrote:
Liberal Treated With Hydroxychloroquine Hopes He Still Dies Of COVID-19 To Prove Trump Is Stupid
18,000 Americans have already done that, with tens of thousands more on the way. No satire necessary.
Grace Rhodes was getting worried last month as she watched the coronavirus tear through New York and Chicago. But her 8,000-person hometown in southern Illinois still had no reported cases, and her boss at her pharmacy job assured her: “It’ll never get here.”
Now it has. A new wave of coronavirus cases is spreading deep into rural corners of the country where people once hoped their communities might be shielded because of their isolation from hard-hit urban centers and the natural social distancing of life in the countryside.
The coronavirus has officially reached nearly three-quarters of the country’s rural counties, with 1 in 7 reporting at least one death. Doctors and elected officials are warning that a late-arriving wave of illness could overwhelm rural communities that are older, poorer and sicker than much of the country, and already dangerously short on medical help.
“Everybody never really thought it would get to us,” said Rhodes, 18, who is studying to become a nurse. “A lot of people are in denial.”
Rural hospitals may not be able to keep their doors open as the coronavirus pandemic saps their cash, their CEOs warn, just as communities most need them.
As the coronavirus sweeps across the U.S., all hospitals are facing cancellations of doctor visits and procedures by a terrified populace — profitable services that usually help fund hospitals. Meanwhile, the institutions also find themselves needing to pay higher prices for personal protective equipment such as face masks and other gear that's in short supply. Vice President Mike Pence called on hospitals nationwide Wednesday to delay elective surgeries to free up capacity and resources for future coronavirus patients.
The American Hospital Association responded Thursday by asking Congress for $100 billion for all hospitals to offset coronavirus costs, citing rural hospitals' inability to withstand huge losses for long.
"If we're not able to address the short-term cash needs of rural hospitals, we're going to see hundreds of rural hospitals close before this crisis ends," warned Alan Morgan, the head of the National Rural Health Association, which represents 21,000 health care providers and hospitals. "This is not hyperbole."
Well before the COVID-19 threat, rural health care's profitability had collapsed nationwide due to a combination of narrowing Medicare reimbursements, a larger share of patients lacking high-paying private insurance and the hollowing out of rural America. Given such pressures, more than 120 rural hospitals have been forced to close over the past decade.
Small-town hospitals were already closing at an alarming rate before the COVID-19 pandemic. But now the trend appears to be accelerating just as the disease arrives in rural America. When Decatur County General Hospital shuts down indefinitely by April 15, it will be the ninth small-town hospital to close in 2020 alone. According to a report released this month by the Chartis Center for Rural Health, nearly half of rural hospitals were already operating in the red before the COVID-19 crisis.
"That idea of a perfect storm — that gets overused, but that's actually what's happened," says Allan Jenkins, an economics professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Jenkins says small-town hospitals have struggled to stay open because of perennial challenges facing rural America, such as depopulation and demographics.
"Because rural communities tend to be older and poorer and sicker and less likely to be insured, high-deductible insurance policies are very hard on rural hospitals," he says.
One recent analysis estimated that treating just one uninsured COVID-19 patient who has to be hospitalized could cost at least $40,000.
The CDC has issued recommendations for the public and businesses to follow practices such as social distancing and sanitizing workstations. OSHA could make those guidelines mandatory for all employers or for all essential employees but has not done so.
“Some of the OSHA staff is frustrated they can’t do more to protect workers. They want an emergency standard that would require employers to follow CDC guidelines,” said David Michaels, a George Washington University School of Public Health professor who served as assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health in the Obama administration.
Under Scalia, OSHA has also decided against issuing safety requirements to protect hospital and health-care workers, including rules that would mandate nurses and other providers be given masks and protective gear recommended by the CDC when at risk of exposure.
The union National Nurses United petitioned Scalia to increase the requirements during the pandemic, but a union spokeswoman said the Labor Department has not even acknowledged receipt of the letter.
Hospitals have resisted these rules for years. Tom Nickels, the chief lobbyist for the American Hospital Association, said that he hadn’t spoken to Scalia but that his group has opposed these actions in conversations with OSHA staff because widening the use of N95 respirator masks would be impractical. “The equipment is in short supply,” he said. “We can’t get it.”
OSHA also has not taken significant action to protect workers from retaliation when they speak out about dangerous conditions that expose them to coronavirus, Michaels said.
When workers at a manufacturing plant in northern Illinois tried alerting government officials about their concerns about working shoulder to shoulder, the regional OSHA official responded that “all OSHA can do is contact an employer and send an advisory letter outlining the recommended protective measures,” according to an email reviewed by The Washington Post. “This isn’t very helpful for you or your labor group, but it is the best I have to offer,” the email said.
So we'll hopefully have a definitive answer soon. I'd be nice if it works, but I'm skeptical. I'm curious to see if they'll shut the fuck up about it once we have direct evidence it doesn't do what they claim.
The US National Institutes of Health on Thursday began a clinical trial to treat adult COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug that President Trump has repeatedly promoted during the pandemic despite a lack of evidence for its effectiveness against the new coronavirus.
The trial is one of dozens underway to test the drug, which is currently used to treat malaria and rheumatoid conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. At this point it only has mixed, anecdotal evidence to support its use against COVID-19.
But that hasn’t stopped President Trump from repeatedly promoting it as a promising treatment and calling for its use. In tweets last month, Trump said that a combination treatment of hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin “have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” He followed the declaration saying he hoped they will “be put in use IMMEDIATELY.”
There is no clear evidence that hydroxychloroquine—and the closely related drug chloroquine—are effective at treating COVID-19. But there is clear evidence on risks of the drugs, which include everything from headaches, vomiting, and rashes to loss of vision (retinopathy), seizures, hypoglycemia, heart arrhythmias, and deadly heart damage. They may also pose more risks in patients with underlying health conditions, such as diabetes and liver disease.
Any reports of effectiveness are only anectodal as there is no known mechanism for it to do what they claim it does:
Quote :
It’s also unclear how hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine might hypothetically help fight off a COVID-19 infection. Early experiments with both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine suggested the drugs blocked the new coronavirus— SARS-CoV-2—from infecting monkey cells grown in petri dishes. The data hints at anti-viral activity, but such data is extremely preliminary in determining whether a drug would be effective against a virus infecting a whole human.
There’s also hope that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine could be useful at dampening out-of-control immune responses. In some critically ill patients with COVID-19, berserk immune responses are thought to cause devastating damage to lungs and other organs. And there’s some reason to think that the drugs could help with this, given their immune-quenching effects seen in patients with rheumatoid conditions, which are marked by inflammation. Some studies have suggested that the drugs work by thwarting the actions of certain receptors on human cells that trigger cascades of pro-inflammatory responses. But it’s still not entirely clear how exactly the drugs interact with the immune system—or whether it would be relevant to treating COVID-19.
Regardless, the claims of a wonder drug are dangerously premature as most of the actual data we do have was based on a single, poorly done, small sample (and likely soon-to-be-retracted) study:
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Likewise, criticism has continued to build against a very small, flawed French trial that claimed to provide evidence that a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin could treat COVID-19—a trial promoted by Trump. Among other problems, the trial jettisoned data on participants who got worse on the treatment, including three admitted to intensive care, one who stopped the trial due to adverse effects, and one who died.
In an initial statement April 3, the medical society behind the journal that published the study said that the society “shares concerns” about the article, which “does not meet the Society’s expected standard.” The society later updated the statement to note that the study is going through additional review and raised the possibility that it might retract the study altogether after the review was complete.
happy jack
Posts : 6988
Subject: Re: COVID-19 4/10/2020, 5:10 pm
Heretic wrote:
happy jack wrote:
Liberal Treated With Hydroxychloroquine Hopes He Still Dies Of COVID-19 To Prove Trump Is Stupid
A national plan to fight the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and return Americans to jobs and classrooms is emerging — but not from the White House.
Instead, a collection of governors, former government officials, disease specialists and nonprofits are pursuing a strategy that relies on the three pillars of disease control: ramp up testing to identify people who are infected. Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before. And focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.
But there is no evidence yet the White House will pursue such a strategy.
Instead, the president and his top advisers have fixated almost exclusively on plans to reopen the U.S. economy by the end of the month, though they haven’t detailed how they will do so without triggering another outbreak. President Trump has been especially focused on creating a second coronavirus task force aimed at combating the economic ramifications of the virus.
Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, say the White House has made a deliberate political calculation that it will better serve Trump’s interest to put the onus on governors — rather than the federal government — to figure out how to move ahead.
“It’s mind-boggling, actually, the degree of disorganization,” said Tom Frieden, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director. The federal government has already squandered February and March, he noted, committing “epic failures” on testing kits, ventilator supply, protective equipment for health workers and contradictory public health communication. The next failure is already on its way, Frieden said, because “we’re not doing the things we need to be doing in April.”
Tests turning up negative even when all signs point to COVID-19 has been a common experience in American hospitals over the past month, public health experts have told ProPublica. It’s unclear what proportion of these negative results are inaccurate — known as “false negatives” — and whether that’s due to some external factor, like bad sample collection, or because of an issue inherent in the tests’ design.
Neither the major test manufacturers, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would say how common false negatives are. While the FDA requires test-makers to report any known instances of false negatives as a condition of granting them provisional approval, known as emergency use authorizations, no such reports are visible in a database the agency maintains for that purpose.
Without much data on how COVID-19 tests are performing in the real world, concerns are mounting that a lack of accurate testing will make it more difficult for America to relax social distancing, as the ability to track and trace new infections will be critical for any strategy to reopen the country.
. . .
In the early days of the pandemic, the FDA, which regulates diagnostic tests, was criticized for not moving quickly enough to make testing widely available. For much of February, the only available test was the CDC’s, which initially had flaws when it was sent out to public health labs. Only on Feb. 29 did the FDA announce a new policy that made it easier for private labs and academic medical centers to make tests available as well.
Since then, the ongoing need for even more testing capacity across the United States has pushed the agency to loosen its typical requirements for manufacturers to prove that their tests are accurate before allowing them onto the market.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday signaled that there was still a possibility that Florida schools could reopen in May after being closed since March due to the coronavirus outbreak.
“We’re going to look at the evidence and make a decision," DeSantis said of the possibility of children returning to schools in the state, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
"If it’s safe, we want kids to be in school. ... Even if it’s for a couple of weeks, we think there would be value in that," he continued.
CNN reported that DeSantis added that he didn't think anyone under 25 had died of the virus.
"This particular pandemic is one where, I don't think nationwide there's been a single fatality under 25. For whatever reason it just doesn't seem to threaten, you know, kids," DeSantis said.
"And we lose in Florida between five and 10 kids a year for the flu. This one, for whatever reason, much more dangerous if you're 65 and plus than the flu, no doubt about that. If you're younger, it just hasn't had an impact, so that should factor into how we're viewing this. I think the data on that has been 100 percent consistent," he continued. "I've not seen any deviation on that."
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