Handling the coronavirus crisis

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In other words, the benefits of social distancing aren’t very visible, while the pain from it is. That creates a situation in which it can be easy to take for granted that social distancing is, according to experts and models, likely preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US..

There’s also evidence from past outbreaks, particularly the 1918 flu pandemic, that reacting quickly and aggressively — even before a disease clearly poses a threat — is crucial both to saving lives and, in the long term, potentially keeping the economy intact.

We’re not overreacting to the coronavirus pandemic - Vox

• We repeat, reacting quickly and aggressively is CRUCIAL for saving lives AND the economy
  

[Admin]

Some important articles:

• He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus - The New York Times
  
• Americans Are Paying the Price for Trump’s Failures - The Atlantic
  
• Coronavirus: Trump’s botched response and the lack of testing, explained - Vox
  
• The American Patient: How Trump Is Fueling a Corona Disaster - DER SPIEGEL
  
• The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life | US news | The Guardian
  

[Admin]

What the country needs to properly do testing, according to experts, is at least 500,000 tests a day. Some experts call for much more than that — millions or even tens of millions a day — but the general point is that the US needs to be doing multiple times the testing that it’s currently doing to be able to test everyone with symptoms and their close contacts.

The recent slowdown in new tests is driven by shortages in nasal swabs, personal protective equipment, reagents, test kits, and machines needed to run the specific tests required. According to David Lim at Politico, some labs also complain that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s testing criteria — which prioritizes hospitalized patients, health care workers, and those vulnerable to the virus, such as older people — is holding back potential tests, leaving existing testing capacity unused. To fix the gaps, experts argue, the federal government needs to relax criteria for testing, invest in new supplies and labs, and better coordinate supply chains to address, among other issues, chokepoints. States, with limited resources and little control of the national supply chain, simply can’t do this all on their own..

Chart: Trump says US coronavirus testing is growing quickly. It isn’t. - Vox

• To end lockdowns, you need to have new infections down so that their contacts can be traced
  
• But you also need massive testing, like testing people who don't show symptoms 
  
• That capacity is nowhere near there, and wasn't even mentioned in the Trump three phase guidance to end lockdowns 
  
• Trump leaves that to the states (after claiming multiple times that he had absolute power over them)
  
• The states are in a much worse position to deal with this problem, they are bidding against one-another and it's difficult to coordinate
  
• Trump could invoke Federal war powers of production to summon companies to produce stuff like swaps, which are in short supply, but he isn't interested
  
• This should have been done two months ago, it's not even done today. Why? Perhaps they don't like an increase in testing, as that will also mean an increase in cases, which could hinder his re-election chances. Difficult to find another rational reason.
  
• States are also left to their own devices with respect to hiring the people who are supposed to do the contract tracing, but where is the money for that? States are experiencing a collapse in tax income and a huge increase in expenditures and Republicans have held out against Democrats request to give states and municipalities more funds (in the proposed second bill to fund small business loans).
  

[Admin]

New data suggests that Ecuador’s coronavirus toll may be much higher than previously indicated, after figures revealed a massive jump in deaths in the province at the centre of the country’s devastating outbreak. Since the beginning of March six weeks ago, 10,939 people have died in Guayas province, which includes Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, according to figures released late on Thursday. The region would usually see about 3,000 deaths in a six-week period, with the new figures suggesting that the local death rate has almost quadrupled.

Ecuador's death rate soars as fears grow over scale of coronavirus crisis | World news | The Guardian

• The anti-lockdown crowd touts Sweden as an example
  
• However, Sweden is a high-trust society where most abide by stuff the government asks people to do, there are not that many of these high-trust societies around.
  
• And nevertheless, Sweden is doing considerably worse than its Scandinavian sister countries like Iceland, Denmark and Norway. 
  
• There are other examples showing how devastating the coronavirus can be when it has more or less free reign, like in Guayaquil in Ecuador, where there are bodies in the streets.
  

[Admin]

Success cases, what do they have in common?

• California (1041 deaths) versus New York (17,131 deaths)
  
• South Korea (232 deaths) versus the US (37,175 deaths)
  
• Germany (4352 deaths) versus France (18,681 deaths)
  
• Denmark (346 deaths) versus Sweden (1511 deaths)
  
• Taiwan (6 deaths)
  
• New Zealand (11 deaths)
  
• Iceland (9 deaths)
  

Denmark versus Sweden are figures from 4/18/20, the others are from 4/17/20.

What did the successful countries do?

• Early intervention, when something grows exponentially speed is of the essence
  
• Massive testing, contract tracking and isolation to prevent outbursts
  
• Often lockdowns as an additional measure
  

In short, what they did was:

   

Take for instance France versus Germany on early and massive testing:

France had the continent’s first confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, but the French government failed for weeks to take decisive action to impose strict social distancing measures or promote large-scale testing. Germany, on the other hand, immediately began aggressively testing and tracking people with symptoms. Now, France is under lockdown and has just extended it until at least May 11. Meanwhile, Germany plans to reopen part of its economy next week.

Coronavirus: Why France has 4 times as many deaths as Germany - Vox

Or Denmark on early lockdown:

When Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen told citizens they would be going into lockdown, the only other country in Europe to have done so was Italy – a nation which had seen hundreds of coronavirus deaths and more than 12,000 infections. In Denmark, where no one had died, the number confirmed to have contracted the virus was closer to 500. A month on and that response, which saw the government in Copenhagen break away from advice of European partners and even its own health officials, appears to have paid off. On Monday, Denmark lifted more lockdown restrictions and allowed beauty salons and hairdressers to reopen, having opened schools a week earlier..

When Ms Frederisken made her speech, Denmark had identified 514 cases compared to the UK’s 456. In just over a month, Denmark suffered just 355 deaths and 7,711 cases, compared to the UK's 16,000 deaths and 120,000 cases. The UK did not enter lockdown until 23 March. 

Coronavirus: How early lockdown helped Denmark flatten the curve | The Independent

Or South Korea's massive testing and tracking

After seeing an initial spike in COVID-19 infections in February, South Korea implemented several measures to bring the disease’s spread under control, a progression I’ve followed as a researcher on public policy. South Korea was able to lower the number of new infections from 851 on March 3 to 22 infections as of April 17 and the mortality rate from COVID-19 hovers around 2%. Several measures contribute to Korea’s success, but two measures were critical in the country’s ability to flatten the curve: extensive testing for the disease and a national system for promptly and effectively tracking people infected with COVID-19..

How South Korea flattened the coronavirus curve with technology

[Admin]

“This isn’t a plan, it’s barely a powerpoint,” spluttered Ron Klain on Twitter. Klain, the US government’s Ebola tsar during the last health crisis to test the White House, in 2014, said the proposals contained “no provision to ramp up testing, no standard on levels of disease before opening, no protections for workers or customers”.

On 28 March the Guardian exposed the missing six weeks lost as a result of Trump’s dithering and downplaying of the crisis when the virus first struck. Jeremy Konyndyk, another central figure in the US battle against Ebola, told the Guardian that the Trump administration’s initial response was “one of the greatest failures of basic governance and leadership in modern times”.

Now that the US is contemplating a shift into the second phase of the crisis – tentative reopening of the economy – scientists and public health officials are agreed that three pillars need to be put into place to manage the transition safely. They are: mass testing to identify those who are infected, contact tracing to isolate other people who may have caught Covid-19 from them, and personal protective equipment (PPE) to shield frontline healthcare workers from any flare-up.

A chorus of expert voices has also begun to be heard warning that those three essential pillars remain in critically short supply throughout the US. Less than a month after the Guardian’s exploration of the missing six weeks, the chilling recognition is dawning that the country is heading for a second massive failure of governance under Trump, this time on an even bigger scale. Unless testing capability is dramatically ramped up and a giant army of health workers assembled to trace the contacts of those infected – right now – the consequences could be devastating.

Operation reopen America: are we about to witness a second historic failure of leadership from Trump? | US news | The Guardian

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When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus. On the very same day, 5,000 miles away in Asia, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in South Korea. The confluence was striking, but there the similarities ended. In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites. One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life | US news | The Guardian

• The US (37,175 deaths) versus South Korea (232 deaths)
  

[Admin]

Things that should not have proceeded:

• Carnival in the Netherlands (became epicenter of the outbreak)
  
• US Spring break holidays in Florida
  
• Mardigras in New Orleans
  
• Champions League Atalanta Bergamo versus Valencia
  
• Religious gatherings in Malaysia and South Korea
  

[Admin]

Donald Trump has doubled down on his tweets calling for supporters to “liberate” three Democrat-led states under lockdown measures intended to slow the spread of coronavirus. During a wild and at times incoherent press conference performance on Friday, the US president spouted a series of mistruths and false claims, including his justification for those tweets, which were branded by critics as a dangerous attempt at stirring rebellion.

“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” Mr Trump tweeted on Friday, followed immediately by: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Three minutes later, the president tweeted: “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”

They came despite the advice of public health experts that stay-at-home orders and social distancing are necessary to slow the spread of the virus, which has already killed more than 36,000 in the US. The extraordinary tweets followed a segment on Fox News, Mr Trump’s favoured news broadcaster, showing a protest against the lockdown outside the Minnesota governor’s office.

Earlier this week, conservative protesters, many wearing pro-Trump gear, also stormed the state capitol in Lansing, Michigan, to demand leaders there open that state from a “stay-at-home” order. Many of the protests were fueled by anti-vaccination and anti-government groups, according to NBC News. Asked at Friday’s White House press conference about his apparent change of heart – on Thursday he had urged supporters to listen to their governors – Mr Trump said: “I think some things are too tough, and if you look at some of the states you just mentioned, it’s too tough.

“Not only relative to this, but what they’ve done in Virginia with respect to the Second Amendment is just a horrible thing. They did a horrible thing, the governor.” Mr Trump later escalated his attack on Virginia Democrats, suggesting falsely they were planning to strip Virginians of their second amendment rights entirely. In fact, governor Ralph Northam’s bill, which has been delayed for a year, would only ban the sale of guns defined as “assault firearms”.

Coronavirus: Trump doubles down on call for supporters to ‘liberate’ Democratic states in lockdown | The Independent

• A call for insubordination and a dangerous gathering which is likely to spread the virus and delay the "liberation" they are calling for
  
• Trump himself had argued that people should follow state guidelines the previous day
  

[Admin]

• Fox News opinion hosts have spent the week attacking a host of governors who’ve issued strict stay-home orders to contain the spread of the coronavirus and cheerleading those who are protesting the orders.
  
• On Friday, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld argued that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had wrongly tarred protesters who’ve accused her of being a Nazi by pointing out that they carried signs with swastikas.
  
• Some of the protesters carried signs likening Whitmer to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Others waved Confederate flags, many were armed, and some held Trump 2020 signs.
  
• Whitmer condemned the protesters, many of whom didn’t wear masks or gloves when they gathered in close proximity to others outside the Capitol building, and called the protest “political.”
  
• On Friday, less than 24 hours after telling Americans that the decision to ease coronavirus-related restrictions was up to governors, President Donald Trump tweeted a call to “LIBERATE” Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia.
  

Fox News host defended anti-lockdown protesters who called Michigan's governor a Nazi as they displayed Confederate flags and swastikas

• I'm sure these are very fine people..