We are in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed over 50,000 people. We do have a serious deadly challenge ahead of us and yet the Trump administration is still totally, completely dropping the ball.
Birx, one of the top officials on the White House's coronavirus task force, said Thursday that part of the $2 trillion economic stimulus measure that was signed into law by President Donald Trump requires that all tests conducted get reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But Birx says
she has not received that data yet.
"Well, I'm telling you, I'm still missing 50% of the data from reporting," she said. "I have 660 (thousand) tests reported in. We've done 1.3 million. ... So, we do need to see -- the bill said you need to report. We are still not receiving 100% of the tests."
When pressed about the possibility that 1 in 3 tests had produced false negatives, Birx said, "I haven't seen that kind of anomaly."
Birx added that "the number of positive tests is tracking very closely with a number of cases diagnosed."
The absent data underscores how issues surrounding testing -- including overall
volume, public
accessibility and timely
processing -- have remained a steady component of the federal government's coronavirus response.
This means that the current estimate to 250,000 positive test cases for the US is in fact tragically wrong. There are possibly 25% or 50% or 75% more victims with a positive diagnosis out there who are currently contagious. And that's on top of the fact that CDC rules had been restricting tests to patients showing severe symptoms meaning that people who remain asymptomatic for the first 5-7 days after infection remain uncounted.
Just like how they responded to the news that Russia was trying to help them in the election with incompetence and craven self-interest, choosing to meet with over a half dozen Russian operatives without informing the FBI and then repeatedly lying about those meetings, the Trumpers have been blowing the CoronaVirus response from day one, losing six weeks of reaction time right from the beginning.
Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.
The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
A week after that, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by two former top health policy officials within the Trump administration under the headline Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic. Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb laid out a menu of what had to be done instantly to avert a massive health disaster.
Top of their to-do list: work with private industry to develop an “easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic test” – in other words, just what South Korea was doing.
It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
This initial delay gave the virus a six-week headstart and has been followed by further delays and mistakes involving the distribution of needed N95 masks, PPE equipment and ventilators. The federal response, including the decision not to issue a national "stay at home" order, has been a pathetic mess.
One that now looks even worse now that Jared Kushner has admitted that he personally arranged for N95 masks to be delivered to "a friend" while other Hospitals in New York went wanting.
Kushner, who spoke at a Thursday briefing about his work on the federal government’s “supply chain task force,” said Trump had been very “hands on” and “instructed us to leave no stone unturned” in the effort to source PPE and medical equipment like ventilators. “Very early this morning I got a call from the president,” Kushner said. “He told me he was hearing from friends of his in New York that the New York public hospital system was running low on critical supply.” He said he called Dr. Mitchell Katz, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, who told him they needed N95 masks the most—so Kushner sourced a month’s worth from the federal inventory. Trump called Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday to say it was on the way, Kushner added.
Is that how things are supposed to work? Give Trump a personal call and things get done?
Again, this is pathetic.
Meanwhile, a large swath of the public, particularly senior citizens, continue to ignore "stay at home" and "social distance" rules because…. Fox News.
I’m a huge pest, in fact. “I’m going to block your number, if you don’t stop,” my mother said to me over the phone several weeks ago from Florida, after I had texted her the umpteenth chart about the spread of coronavirus across the country. All of these graphs had scary lines that went up and to the right. And all of them flashed big honking red lights: Go home and stay there until all clear.
She ignored my texts, so I had switched to calling her to make sure she had accurate information in those critical weeks at the end of February and the beginning of March. She is in the over-80 group that is most at risk of dying from infection. I worry a lot.
But she was not concerned — and it was clear why. Her primary source of news is Fox. In those days she was telling me that the Covid-19 threat was overblown by the mainstream news media (note, her daughter is in the media). She told me that it wasn’t going to be that big a deal. She told me that it was just like the flu.
And, she added, it was more likely that the Democrats were using the virus to score political points. And, did I know, by the way, that Joe Biden was addled?
[...]
I could not lay the blame at the feet of social media this time. No, Facebook was not my mother’s source of misinformation (in fact, the company has been trying to improve in this area). It was not the fault of Dr. Google, which has at least pushed out more good information than bad. And my mom doesn’t use Twitter.
Instead, it was Fox, the whole Fox and nothing but the Fox.
Many children of older parents have come to know this news diet as the equivalent of extreme senior sugar addiction mixed with a series of truly unpleasant and conspiracy-laden doughnuts.
You know all those awful GIFs using a Meryl Streep line from “A Cry in the Dark”: “A dingo ate my baby!”? Well, it sometimes feels like Fox News is eating my mother’s brain.
Just yesterday Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia finally decided to issue "stay at home" orders for the state after he discovered that people could be asymptomatic and still spread Covid-19.
The governor of Georgia — the state where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is headquartered — said Wednesday he had only just learned that the coronavirus can be spread by people who aren't showing any symptoms. Public health officials have been warning for months that asymptomatic people can transmit the virus, which appears to be a major factor behind its rapid spread around the world.
Governor Brian Kemp, in a press conference announcing a statewide stay-at-home order, said he was "finding out that this virus is now transmitting before people see signs."
"Those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad, but we didn't know that until the last 24 hours," said Kemp, a Republican. He said the head of Georgia's Department of Public Health told him this fact "was a game-changer for us."
That was a game-changer? There are still nearly a dozen states that haven't issued lockdown orders, all of whom are completely vulnerable to becoming the next viral hot spot and losing thousands of lives. These Trump/Fox addicts are becoming a danger to our health and safety.
While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, refused until this week to face the threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic and dragged his feet about issuing a shelter-in-place order (saying that Trump hadn’t asked him to) the city of Tampa was actually taking action with strict bans on gatherings and movement. Rodney Howard-Browne, a Trump-loving preacher who has claimed coronavirus is a “phantom plague” invented to trick people into getting vaccines, was arrested for defying those orders and holding packed church services anyway.
DeSantis finally cracked and issued a statewide shelter-in-place order, but exempted church services — effectively overriding the local restrictions in Tampa and elsewhere.
[...]
Chanel Rion, a “reporter” from the far-right, conspiracy theory-obsessed One America News Network, was nailed for repeatedly violating the social distancing rules in the White House press briefing room, showing up in the throng on days when she wasn’t scheduled to attend. The fact that she was ever invited to the White House should be a scandal all by itself — Rion personally and her network routinely spread lies favorable to Trump — but it quickly became clear that she was getting favorable treatment even under the new, coronavirus-caused limits imposed on the briefing room.
[...]
With 200,000 people infected and nearly 5,000 dead already — and the numbers rising every hour and every day — one might think that conspiracy theorists trying to deny or minimize this virus would be humbled and begin to back down.
Unfortunately, psychology tells us otherwise. When people are faced with evidence that they’re wrong and that their entire worldview is false — including the belief that Trump is a great leader — they tend to dig in deeper, spinning out ever more elaborate rationalizations meant to explain that they were right all along and that reality-based people who disagree have sinister motives.
To make it worse, these conspiracy theorists have been constantly empowered and enabled by Trump, who is a conspiracy theorist himself. With his daily tirade of lies, hunches, harebrained theories and baseless speculation, Trump has helped normalize and encourage his followers to just invent reality for themselves. Worse, the fact that he continues to get away with it helps bolster their view that there are no consequences for flouting reality so boldly.
Heaven help us.
Here are the remaining events for this week;
March 26th —
March 27th —
March 28th —
March 29th —
March 30th —
March 31st --
April 1st --
- Trump says he wouldn't have handled CoronaVirus any better without Impeachment.
- Nunes complains that closing schools in response to Covid-19 is "Way Overkill."
- CoronaVirus death toll in NYC pass 1000.
- Coast Guard directs Cruise ships to remain at sea "indefinitely."
- 12 Red States including Montana, Utah, Iowa, Colorado, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Alabama and Tennesee do not have "Stay Home" orders, and they also haven't done testing or contact tracing when Rural areas in a tough spot. [All future hot spots.]
- George Conway destroys McConnell's "Impeachment" defense of Trump; During that time Trump went to Mar-A-Lago four times, held two rallies and got in several rounds of golf. He claimed on January 22nd "We have it totally under control, it's just one guy coming in from China."
- Trump's allies warn him against feuding with Michigan's Governor.
- Louisiana is desperately searching for ventilators.
- Surgeon General argues WH guidelines are a "National Stay At Home Order." [Yeah, literally nobody else sees it that way.]
- Pence struggles to respond to WH projection of 100,000 Covid-19 fatalities.
- Florida Gov. DeSantis finally issues a "Stay At Home" order.
- Widespread testing and lots of ICU beds gave Germany an upper-hand with Covid-19.
- House Dems are pushing for a CoronaVirus Commission to oversee Trump administration handling of things.
- More than 1 in 5 of the ventilators in the National Stockpile don't work.
- OAN reporter Chanel Rion is banned by WHCA from WH Briefing room for repeatedly violating social distance rules.
- Navy Captain of USS Roosevelt says his carrier faces a "dire coronavirus threat."
- Trump says he wants to build more Hospital ships [Which will take years.]
- Jennifer Rubin blasts Fox News for misinforming America during the CoronaVirus.
- MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says his company is part of QAnon, and the devil is attacking his website.
- DeSantis says he'll order a rescue for the stranded cruise ships, but only for Floridians.
- Pentagon Inspector General builds a huge team of watchdogs to oversee the Stimulus.
- NYTimes reports the WH Economists wrote a report predicting a pandemic that would kill Millions last year, and it was ignored.
- Pelosi; Blaming his failures on "impeachment” shows he can't handle his job.
- Hobby Lobby re-opens dozens of stores despite the lockdowns.
- Trump's Walmart and CVS testing centers are a flop.
- NYTimes Columnist writes about how hard it is to get her mother to take Covid-19 seriously. "Fox News has eaten her brain."
- Claire McCaskill blasts GOP Lawmakers for ignoring the CoronaVirus infected Aircraft Carrier after they spent years on Benghazi.
- Trump refuses to reopen enrollment for the ACA to allow the uninsured to gain coverage during a pandemic.
- Doctor on Morning Joe blames DeSantis for allowing spring breakers to spread the virus last weekend.
- CoronaVIrus Task Force admits more lives could have been saved if Trump had acted sooner and that he took a gamble that things would improve when the weather got warmer. “If there were infections under the radar, it might have made a difference.”
- 215,003 positive, 5,102 dead.
April 2nd —
April 3rd —