Coronavirus

Congress has oversight. I may have mentioned that.

 

Putin

 

I always think Chris del Conte when I see CDC.

I bet he could run things pretty well but they can’t have him.

 

The Covod-19 team keeps shooting down the hateful MSM narratives. I wish the libs here would listen to these experts than their garbage news sources.

 

Who was president before Trump? You appear to be blaming all of federal gov dysfunction on Trump.

 

No thank you. Let’s go ahead and split up red and blue states before there is civil unrest. The libs like totalitarian government telling them and enforcing them.

 

Here in Austin, I was a little disappointed to see pictures of parents having their middle school age looking kids holding up signs protesting the shelter-in-place rules. I would never use my kids to protest things that are very complicated and that impact everyone.

#yourrightsendwhereminebegin

I know it's complicated when it comes to losing your job but there are people now who don't care if they get sick or pass it on.

 

Looks like social isolation eliminated the tail.

 

The first day President Trump mentioned the coronavirus in public, only one American was known to be infected. He assured the rest of the country it had no reason to worry.

“We have it totally under control,” Trump said Jan. 22 from Davos, Switzerland. “It’s going to be just fine.”

Behind the scenes, however, even some of his close aides thought the virus posed a much greater threat to the nation and to Trump.

Three months later, the United States leads the world in reported numbers of people infected and killed by the virus, with more than 39,000 dead. States, counties and local hospitals are desperately bidding against one another for scarce ventilators and other lifesaving equipment in a marketplace dominated by chaos, profiteering and fraud. And the country's economy is in free fall, with more than 20 million Americans filing unemployment claims in the last month.


President Trump gives a thumbs-up Jan. 22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he told an interviewer that the U.S. had the coronavirus "totally under control." (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP/Getty Images)

Trump has at various times called the catastrophe unforeseeable or blamed the World Health Organization and China; his predecessor, who he claimed left him an "empty shelf" of medical equipment; and state governors whom he accused of mismanaging the health crisis.

But from the first international reports of the virus’ appearance in China in late December until Trump declared a nationwide emergency in mid-March, his administration delayed or bungled basic but crucial steps to contain the spread of infections and prepare the country for a pandemic, according to a Times review of internal government records and interviews with administration officials and outside experts.

In that key early period, many of the Trump presidency’s most deeply ingrained characteristics — its distrust of the federal bureaucracy, internal personality conflicts, lack of a formal policymaking process and Trump’s own insistence on controlling the public message — severely hampered the federal response, according to current and former White House officials and public health experts.

Even senior members of the administration who sought to warn Trump about the looming dangers were rebuffed, said several administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on internal discussions.

Containing such an easily spread contagion was certain to be arduous under any circumstances, many experts concede. Making it even harder, China initially played down the infection danger, and it was unclear at that point how readily the virus could spread.

But Trump's unwillingness to take the health threat seriously and disagreements among his top aides effectively sidelined the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, leaving key responders without direction from a White House that was focused on the president's impeachment trial in the Senate.

Weeks were lost that could have been used to test and isolate the first infected patients, purchase medical supplies, prepare makeshift hospitals and enlist corporations in quickly ramping up production of badly needed respirators and other supplies.


Medical workers treat a critical COVID-19 patient March 1 at a Red Cross hospital in Wuhan, China. (AFP/Getty Images)

“In an ideal world, there would have been a structure and someone with vision empowered in the White House,” said J. Stephen Morrison, a health policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “Everything was seen through the impeachment and reelection process.”

The White House said in a statement that Trump acted to control the virus while Democrats in Congress and the news media ignored the danger in January and February.

"President Trump took bold action to protect Americans and unleash the full power of the federal government to curb the spread of the virus, expand testing capacities, and expedite vaccine development when we had no true idea the level of transmission or asymptomatic spread," White House spokesman Judd Deere said.

The statement added that Trump "remains completely focused on the health and safety of the American people and it is because of his bold leadership that we will emerge from this challenge healthy, stronger, and with a prosperous and growing economy."

'It will cost the election'

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The first official warning about the new virus came on the last day of 2019, when Chinese authorities reported that residents of Wuhan in the central Hubei province were coming down with pneumonia from an unknown cause. China soon identified the cause of the outbreak as a new strain of coronavirus but said there was “no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission.”

At the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Director Robert Redfield, a physician and former AIDS researcher, tweeted Jan. 14 that “there is no confirmed person-to-person spread” of the illness in China, though his agency was “monitoring the situation closely.” The CDC issued a routine “level 1 travel notice,” advising Americans traveling to Wuhan to “practice usual precautions.”

Three days later, the CDC announced that airports would conduct health screenings for passengers traveling from Wuhan to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

The screenings didn’t initially cover all airports with flights from China. Nor did they address travelers from Europe, another likely source of infection. And the cursory temperature checks didn’t detect patients who were carrying the virus but were still asymptomatic, a problem that became fully apparent only later.


Travelers pass through the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX on March 15 amid heightened U.S. travel restrictions. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

At the White House, Trump and his close advisors, consumed by his impending impeachment trial in the Senate, rebuffed attempts by Redfield's boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, to alert them about the threat, according to a former federal official with knowledge of the communications.

Unlike some other Trump Cabinet officials, Azar has considerable experience in his field, having served in the agency in the administration of President George W. Bush and having been an executive at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co.

His relationship with Trump and senior health and budget officials in the White House had been strained for months, in part because of Azar’s inability to deliver on one of Trump’s signature campaign promises — to lower prescription drug prices. Trump also blamed Azar for entangling him in what turned out to be a politically complicated effort to crack down on vaping.

The health secretary finally connected with Trump on Jan. 18, when the president was at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla., resort. By then, Thailand and Japan were reporting confirmed coronavirus infections. Trump wanted to discuss the vaping ban, not the coronavirus, a White House aide familiar with the call said.

Two days later, the CDC confirmed the first coronavirus case in the U.S.

A Washington state man in his 30s had returned from Wuhan on Jan. 15 at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where no screening was being conducted. Later, he reported pneumonia-like symptoms to his doctor.

“It’s one person coming in from China,” Trump said during his Jan. 22 interview with CNBCfrom Davos.


A traveler wearing a mask waits at Los Angeles International Airport on March 18. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

As Trump reassured the nation, the WHO, the United Nations agency for international public health, announced that evidence suggested “human to human” transmission in China but that more investigation was necessary.

Trump did not consider the virus a major worry and trusted Azar to handle it, a senior administration official said. Other White House aides were concerned that Azar would overreact, the official and another senior White House aide added.


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In late January, Joseph Grogan, the White House domestic policy chief and a former lobbyist for a pharmaceutical company, sounded the alarm about the administration potentially overlooking what could become a major crisis. He voiced reservations about Azar's ability to handle the matter during a meeting in the office of Mick Mulvaney, then the president's acting chief of staff, one of the senior administration officials said.

"It could be so big that if we mishandle it, it will cost the election," Grogan said with several senior staffers present.

Mulvaney convened meetings aimed at coordinating the U.S. government response, but the discussion at first focused only on evacuation flights to bring Americans in China and other affected countries home, one of the senior White House officials said. There was little discussion about how to keep the virus out.

Daily intelligence updates from the CIA and other intelligence organizations tracked the international spread of the coronavirus, but their reports did not recommend steps to contain it in the U.S., according to a senior Defense official familiar with the warnings.

On Jan. 29, the White House announced a 12-member task force of officials from multiple agencies “to work to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.” Trump was briefed in the White House Situation Room.

Privately, some advisors were warning about massive disruptions if the virus caused a pandemic. Peter Navarro, Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, suggested stopping travel from China in a memo written the same day the task force was announced. The memo, first reported by the New York Times, warned of potentially devastating effects on the economy if no containment measures were taken.

But Navarro, a longtime China hawk known around the West Wing as having a combustible temper, was largely dismissed after he erupted at Azar during a staff meeting, leading the health secretary to demand that Mulvaney keep him off the task force, according to one of the senior administration officials.

The conflicts inside the White House along with the impeachment trial underway in the Senate kept the health threat barely on Trump’s radar.

"You have Trump as the lone-wolf operator," said Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump's director of communications and has recently been critical of the president. "What happens is everybody gets immobilized. They don't know what their marching orders are … so that's caused them to be very slow-footed in the midst of this crisis."

Others in the administration took their cue from Trump.

The same day as the Situation Room briefing, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross observed that the alarming rise in cases in China could “accelerate the return of jobs to North America."

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters the next day that Trump and his senior aides were continuing "to monitor the situation." Standing next to her, Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health, said that the outbreak was "under control" and that "all the resources were in place."

As head of the task force, Azar tried to carve out a major role overseeing the federal response without sounding public alarms that were sure to upset the president, according to another administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

 

Lobot record. That’s one long copy and paste. I’m thinking I should not think for myself either. Think about that - or don’t. Find a twitter feed that tells you everything you should know. Don’t think though. That’s too much work.

 

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On Jan. 31, Azar declared a public health emergency and announced the U.S. was temporarily prohibiting foreign nationals who had traveled in China within the previous 14 days from entering the country. Americans returning from China were allowed back after being screened at select ports of entry and for 14 days afterward to monitor any possible symptoms.

It was Trump who had made the decision to impose the travel restrictions, Azar told reporters, following the “uniform recommendation of the career public health officials here at HHS.”

But Azar would run into resistance from some White House aides later as he sought more federal funding to respond to the virus. During one tense meeting, a White House budget official accused him of trying to go around the president to get the money from Congress, according to a former government official.

For much of the next month, Trump and other senior White House officials played down the risk to Americans, even as evidence mounted that the virus was deadly and highly communicable.

Disaster predicted
Public health and disaster experts had warned for years about the possible devastation that a pandemic could wreak.

Internal government studies conducted months earlier had shown that a fast-spreading flu virus from China would quickly overwhelm the nation’s health system unless preparations were taken beforehand.

A 2019 exercise overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, dubbed Crimson Contagion, concluded that a massive, deadly epidemic would result in confusion and limited coordination among federal agencies and state governments as school closures and other social distancing measures were put into place. Hospitals would struggle with shortages of medications, personal protective equipment, ventilators and other supplies, according to a draft report on the results, disclosed by the New York Times.


Members of the California Air National Guard in Oxnard on April 7 prepare a shipment of 200 ventilators to be delivered to New York. (Senior Airman Jonathan Lane / U.S. Air National Guard)

At the White House, the Council of Economic Advisors warned in September that the economic damage of a fast-spreading virus could reach $3.79 trillion and kill 500,000 Americans. And a 2017 study by the Defense Department on the possibility of a pandemic predicted a shortage of medical masks, gloves, ventilators and hospital beds.

The federal government had an array of options to prevent the predictions from becoming a reality, experts said, including invoking the Defense Production Act to require private companies to address shortages of medical masks, ventilators and other equipment; mobilizing the military to construct field hospitalsand organize testing centers around the country; and dispatching Navy hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles sooner.

But there was little urgency to the government response.

“It was one failure after another, piling up on each other,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “When that happens, it usually means it wasn’t a priority. It was a lack of leadership.”

In early February, the WHO warned that the coronavirus was spreading rapidly in China and assumed in its response plan that human-to-human transmission was widespread. Chinese authorities had quarantined entire cities. Limited testing in other countries was complicating the effort to detect the virus.

The international organization urged countries to scale up “preparedness and response operations, including strengthening readiness to rapidly identify, diagnose and treat cases.”

Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore rolled out COVID-19 tests fairly quickly, giving health officials a head start on tracing the spread of the virus and imposing a degree of containment measures that the United States did not take until weeks later, said Dr. C. Jason Wang, director of Stanford University’s Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention.

Not everything went smoothly. Singapore is now fighting an outbreak among a large population of migrant workers the government mostly overlooked in its initial efforts against the virus.

But as of late Saturday, the total number of deaths reported in Singapore was just 11, and only half a dozen had been tallied in Taiwan. There were 234 reported fatalities in South Korea — a tiny fraction of the per capita deaths in the United States.

“South Korea did massive testing and containment,” Wang said.

He said Taiwan also deployed its military to manufacture medical masks, upping production from 2 million to 10 million a day within three weeks.

“We could have done that — absolutely,” said Nick Vyas, executive director of USC’s Center for Global Supply Chain Management. "Masks would have been very easy to replicate and inventory.”

In the U.S., Trump mentioned the virus during a Feb. 10 campaign rally in New Hampshire, telling the crowd that "by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away."

It is now clear that the virus was spreading rapidly in the U.S., but tracing its path proved impossible because the CDC had fumbled its initial attempt to create a reliable test.

The agency shunned a proven German test that had been adopted by the WHO, and it relied on an existing network of public health labs, a model better suited for smaller, less deadly outbreaks.

It distributed kits to more than 100 public health labs run by states and counties, sending each facility enough testing supplies to sample 300 to 400 patients, far fewer than would eventually be needed.

The agency's early effort was on a small scale because there was little initial recognition that the virus could be transmitted easily between humans, said an agency official who discussed the CDC response.

When state labs began to run sample tests using the CDC kits, a flaw quickly became apparent: Running ordinary water through the test produced false positives.

Paul Fulton, a CDC spokesman, said the agency was still studying the flawed test but said a new version is now “accurate and reliable.” He noted that the CDC’s role was "to equip state public health labs, which is only one part of total testing that needs to be conducted.”

 

I'm a little behind ... but Obama was nothing short of a disaster for the folks on the ground.

If ya wanna know why, PM me your phone number and let's have a chat ... let's just say "haste makes waste" and Obama was more than hasty. Personal experience at the tip of the spear.

 

PM me your phone number and I’ll ring you.

 

Maybe those kids know they are going to be on the street soon if their parents don't get back to work.

I mean we still work through flu season every year. Best estimates of death rate right now are 0.1%-0.3%, right about where flu is. Poverty is a way bigger threat than Kung Flu.

 

clearly you're not sufficiently curious but would rather camp-out in your cordon of comfortable cageyness.

I've already spoken with 2 ... So ... ball's in your court, LH.

gonna return it, or just stomp yer feet as it goes floating by?

 

The more we learn about the true death rates of the "Kung Flu," the less dangerous it seems and more unreasonable onerous restrictions look in light of the catastrophic economic and financial costs. However, the use of children as political props has always bugged me.

 

And again, remember that during this same period, Democrats were saying to let infected people from China freely travel to the United States and for people not to socially distance. If Trump's judgment was poor (and that case can be made), theirs was horrendous.

 

America bad! America bad!

No. FDA and CDC is bad. If not for there malfeasance, America would have more testing performed.

 

Still insufficient testing. What’s your excuse now?

 

Is it Kung Flu, or the Holocough?

 

Everyone who needs a test gets a test, so stop lying.

 

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Sweeping US Navy testing reveals most aircraft carrier sailors infected with coronavirus had no symptoms

"What we've found of the 600 or so that have been infected, what's disconcerting is a majority of those, 350 plus, are asymptomatic," he said, adding, "So it has revealed a new dynamic of this virus that it can be carried by normal, healthy people who have no idea whatsoever that they are carrying it."
​

So we can infer that close to 60% of this sample group whose average age is probably in their mid 20s, and above average in terms of fitness, will be asymptomatic. Hopefully the Navy will give follow-up and disclose how many of those with symptons require hospitalization and so forth. Keep in mind, this sample group most likely does not include many obese, diabetic, or otherwise health compromised individuals and most would be young in age. Compare that to the Diamond Princess, where the sample group would have been older and contain a number of maladies. The general US population is probably more like those on the Diamond Princess.

Diamond Prinecss:
3618 tested
712 cases
331 asymptomatic (46%)
13 deaths (1.8%)

Roosevelt
4800 tested
approximately 600 cases
approximately 350 asymptomatic (58%)
deaths?

This doesn't square with the Stanford study or the Boston Homeless survey where the number of asymptomatic far outweighs those with symptons.

 

I don't need any excuse. More testing is better. Serological case studies are being performed, and it is showing there are many more cases out there than previously known.

But you, again, totally misunderstood my comment.

Why hasn't the US tested more than they have?

 

These writers show their bias clearly. Everything is disconcerting or scary. What they are finding is actually very encouraging. It means we are closer to herd immunity and statistically getting the infection isn't a threat.

The big difference is time scale. The Stanford and Boston studies show that the virus has been circulating for a longer period of time than expected to. The 2 boat cases contain a short duration for people to be in contact with each other. Plus, once they heard about the issue, they isolated. It isn't the same kind of event.