Handling the coronavirus crisis

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The Stanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan last year hypothesized a scenario in which President Trump would condition disaster assistance to states on their giving in to his personal demands during a national crisis. “Wouldn’t you know in your gut that such a president had abused his office?” Karlan said while testifying at Trump’s impeachment hearings in December. Karlan’s testimony catapulted back into the spotlight this month as Trump suggested a quid pro quo similar to the one she laid out.

Specifically, he implied that the federal government would send urgently needed financial aid to Democratic-led states grappling with coronavirus outbreaks only if they gave in to his political demands regarding tax policy and sanctuary cities. “Professor Karlan correctly envisioned this scenario, where an out-of-control president extorts change in policies for disaster-relief funds,” one Justice Department veteran told Business Insider. “The hypothetical worst-case scenarios are now becoming par for the course.”

An impeachment witness foreshadowed Trump's coronavirus response before the pandemic even began

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A House committee probe found that the Trump administration failed to adequately screen travelers from Italy and South Korea in early March after both countries showed earlier outbreaks of the coronavirus.  “This investigation reveals another opportunity the administration missed to limit the impact of coronavirus,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy.

House subcommittee says Trump administration did not adequately screen travelers from Italy, South Korea for COVID-19 | TheHill

The interview -- such as it was -- allowed Trump to give voice to his various grievances and celebrate his alleged successes, all without a word of contradiction from the Fox hosts.

The 40 most astonishing lines from Donald Trump's Friday 'Fox & Friends' interview - CNNPolitics

• That interview is downright bizarre.
  

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The Department of Health and Human Services turned down an opportunity to access millions of U.S.-manufactured N-95 masks in January, according to The Washington Post. The N-95 masks have been in high demand since the pandemic hit the United States and healthcare workers scramble to protect themselves as thousands of patients flood local hospitals.  On January 22, a medical supply company in Fort Worth, Texas, Prestige Ameritech, offered to ramp up production to make an additional 1.7 million N95 masks, noting that the federal government’s stockpile was diminishing. The government turned down the offer.

US government turned down opportunity to manufacture millions of N-95 masks at start of pandemic: report | TheHill

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Back in February, Germany’s political establishment was in crisis. In the east German state of Thuringia, the far-right AfD and Angela Merkel’s CDU worked together to elect a state premier, breaking an unwritten rule against collaborating with the far right. The outcry led to the resignation of CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, previously considered to be Merkel’s successor. But just three months on, things look very different. The AfD is polling at just 10 per cent, its lowest result since 2017, and its usually opportunistic politicians have failed to work the coronavirus outbreak to their advantage. An analysis of the party’s social media accounts showed its reach from mid-March to early April was almost down by half.

Meanwhile, the CDU has jumped from 27 per cent in February up to 38 per cent, and a huge 67 per cent of Germans say they are either ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the government’s handling of the pandemic. “In times of crisis it does tend to be the incumbent that gains votes,” says Andrea Roemmele, professor of communication in politics and civil society at the Hertie School in Berlin. “They are the only ones who can do anything – the opposition doesn’t really have any way to act.” In other European countries where populist right-wing parties are in opposition, such as Spain, Austria, Sweden and Finland, they have also seen drops in support.

In addition, the nature of this particular crisis – a viral outbreak – has robbed the AfD of its usual tactics. “The AfD worked well when there was a scapegoat. Now we don’t really have one,” continues Roemmele. “It’s a far-right party, and what we’re seeing now is the return of the big, powerful state, with all the money that’s being poured into the labour market. That’s the opposite of what the AfD stands for.” Another interesting development throughout the crisis has been renewed trust in science and expertise – the opposite of the AfD’s populist narrative. The virologist Christian Drosten, who advises the German government, has become a household name since the beginning of the outbreak, and his daily podcast with state broadcaster NDR has racked up a huge 34.5 million downloads..

Merkel has also won praise for her clear and consistent communication, which has contributed to her trust level and approval ratings. “She’s often accompanied by one of the virologists [when she addresses the public on TV] and it shows how much she relies on science and on the numbers,” says Roemmele. “She’s not the most bubbly, sparkling, charismatic character, but in her technocratic way she does have a new charisma, I think.”

How coronavirus has restored faith in experts and Merkel’s establishment in Germany – and hurt the far right | The Independent

• Incumbent leaders tend to do well politically in a crisis, they are the only ones that can act (unless they make a mess of it).
  
• Leaders that defer to science and expertise back in vogue, like Merkel.
  

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Here’s the truth: Lockdown is economically ruinous, and we can’t sustain it from now until a vaccine. And you don’t have to take it from me. “You can’t be in lockdown for 18 months,” says Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “We’ll destroy society as we know it, and we don’t know what we’ll accomplish with it.”

But this is also the truth: Reopening without a way to control the coronavirus will be lethal to both human life and economic growth, as an escalating death toll will force states back into lockdown. “We can’t just let the virus go,” Osterholm says. “Lots of people will die and it’ll shut down our health system, not just for Covid patients, but for anyone with a health problem.” “What we need,” Osterholm continues, “is a plan.”

It is shocking. More than 60 days after President Trump declared a national emergency over the novel coronavirus, there is still no clear national plan for what comes next. “The lockdown is not meant to be a permanent state of affairs; it’s intended to be a giant pause button that buys you time to get ready for the next phase,” Jeremy Konyndyk, of the Center for Global Development think tank, says.

But the Trump administration wasted the pause. Over the past two months, the US should have built the testing, contact tracing, and quarantine infrastructure necessary to safely end lockdown and transition back to normalcy — as many of our peer countries did. Instead, Trump has substituted showmanship for action, playing the president on TV but refusing to do the actual job. He has both dominated the airwaves and abdicated his duties. As a result, America’s progress against the coronavirus has stalled, even as the lockdown has driven the economy into crisis..

60 days in, Trump still doesn’t have a coronavirus plan - Vox

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Experts have a range of ideas to suppress the Covid-19 pandemic, save lives, and avert new waves of economic misery. But President Donald Trump seems to be embracing another plan — massaging the numbers to make inconvenient deaths go away. But experts believe the problem with the numbers is the opposite — official statistics understate the Covid-19 death toll.

Recent methodological changes have annoyed the president by pushing death numbers higher. These changes, according to experts, are a sound and reasonable effort to reduce the amount of undercounting. They factor in that deaths have surged by more than the official coronavirus stats say. On Wednesday, the Daily Beast reported that Trump and members of his coronavirus task force are now pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to get states to change how they count deaths, a campaign designed to lower the numbers.

As Trump tries to juke the stats, he’s committing the original sin of America’s pandemic response — falling way beyond the curve in terms of testing and surveillance. For Trump, that seemingly doesn’t matter because it’s more politically convenient to keep official infection numbers low..

Trump thinks coronavirus death tolls are overstated - Vox

The article goes on to discuss the reasons the figures are likely to understate, not overstate the death toll of Covid-19..

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Five minutes into federal whistle-blower Rick Bright's opening statement to a Congressional committee on the coronavirus response, Fox New cut from the hearing for a discussion about.... baseball.

Trump news live: Latest coronavirus updates as president smears vaccine whistleblower in Twitter rant | The Independent

Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham spent three consecutive hours Tuesday night attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, questioning if the nation’s top infectious disease expert was “right about the science” after he cautioned against reopening businesses and schools too quickly amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Carlson, who like his Fox News colleagues is a political commentator with no medical background, questioned the science behind Fauci’s testimony earlier in the day before a panel of top U.S. senators.

Fox hosts without medical backgrounds question top disease expert: ‘How is that based in science?’ – Alternet.org

Donald Trump’s nominee to be the nation’s top consumer watchdog was involved in the decision to sideline detailed guidelines to help communities reopen during the coronavirus pandemic, internal government emails show. Democrats on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee now ask how the ex-American Chemistry Council director came to help shelve the CDC guidelines. Ms Beck is not a medical doctor and has no background in virology, but emails obtained by The Associated Press (AP) show that Ms Beck was the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) main point of contact at the White House about the proposed recommendations.

Trump nominee involved in ditching CDC coronavirus guide to reopening, emails show | The Independent

• That testimony became a little too inconvenient for Fox, no surprise there..
  
• Rick Bright is ousted for speaking the truth and he is a recognized expert in his field, the Trump appointee who killed the CDC guidelines on reopening is a nobody with no relevant expertise whatsoever. That just about sums it up..
  
• And why did they kill those CDC guidelines? Get as much distance between Trump and events on the ground enables him to position as the re-opener and blaming stuff that goes wrong on the states. 
  

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What caught the media’s attention were two comments he made about the disease. There would be four million testing kits available within a week. “The tests are beautiful,” he said. “Anybody that needs a test gets a test.”


Ten weeks later, that is still not close to being true. Fewer than 3 per cent of Americans had been tested by mid-May. Trump also boasted about his grasp of science. He cited a “super genius” uncle, John Trump, who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and implied he inherited his intellect. “I really get it,” he said. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” Historians might linger on that observation too.

What the headlines missed was a boast that posterity will take more seriously than Trump’s self-estimated IQ, or the exaggerated test numbers (the true number of CDC kits by March was 75,000). Trump proclaimed that America was leading the world. South Korea had its first infection on January 20, the same day as America’s first case, and was, he said, calling America for help. “They have a lot of people that are infected; we don’t.” “All I say is, ‘Be calm,’” said the president. “Everyone is relying on us. The world is relying on us.”


He could just as well have said baseball is popular or foreigners love New York. American leadership in any disaster, whether a tsunami or an Ebola outbreak, has been a truism for decades. The US is renowned for helping others in an emergency.

In hindsight, Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself.

South Korea, which has a population density nearly 15 times greater and is next door to China, has lost a total of 259 lives to the disease. There have been days when America has lost 10 times that number. The US death toll is now approaching 90,000.

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What has gone wrong? I interviewed dozens of people, including outsiders who Trump consults regularly, former senior advisers, World Health Organization officials, leading scientists and diplomats, and figures inside the White House. Some spoke off the record.

Again and again, the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie, led by his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner – the property developer who Trump has empowered to sideline the best-funded disaster response bureaucracy in the world.

People often observed during Trump’s first three years that he had yet to be tested in a true crisis. Covid-19 is way bigger than that. “Trump’s handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has exposed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First,” says William Burns, who was the most senior US diplomat, and is now head of the Carnegie Endowment.

“America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America’s influence and reputation will be very hard to undo.”

The psychology behind Trump’s inaction on Covid-19 was on display that afternoon at the CDC. The unemployment number had come out that morning. The US had added 273,000 jobs in February, bringing the jobless rate down to a near record low of 3.5 per cent. Trump’s re-election chances were looking 50:50 or better. The previous Saturday, Joe Biden had won the South Carolina primary. But the Democratic contest still seemed to have miles to go. Nothing could be allowed to frighten the Dow Jones.

Any signal that the US was bracing for a pandemic – including taking actual steps to prepare for it – was discouraged.

“Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it,” says a Trump confidant who speaks to the president frequently. “That advice worked far more powerfully on him than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate.”

Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown | Financial Times

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Poll after poll shows that Republicans and Democrats are responding to the coronavirus crisis in starkly different ways. One from ABC News and Ipsos last week, for example, showed that 65 percent of Republicans want the American economy to reopen right now, while only 6 percent of Democrats do. And their behaviors, ranging from buying extra food to wearing masks, seem to fall along partisan lines. How is it possible that Americans are polarized along party lines even on something as seemingly apolitical as a virus? One big reason is what Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, calls “truth decay.” Simply put, Americans no longer rely on facts and data as much as they should. That’s a problem at any time, but it’s especially troubling during a pandemic, when people need the best, most reliable information to stay safe.

Truth decay encompasses four trends, each of which is relevant to what we’re experiencing now.
The first is increasing disagreement about facts and data. An example in this context would be the disagreement about the safety of vaccines and whether people will take them once they’re made and distributed.
The second trend is the increased blurring of the line between fact and opinion. This is caused a lot by commentary in cable news or social media, places where facts and opinion are mixed together and make it really hard to determine what’s real and what’s someone’s opinion or analysis.
The third trend is the increasing volume of opinion compared to fact. You’re just seeing a lot more opinion out there. If you’re looking for facts, you have to work pretty hard to dig through all that commentary before you can actually find the raw facts you might be looking for.
Finally, declining trust in key institutions that provide information. We’re experiencing this now with the government and the media.
Put together, people are not sure what’s true what’s not, and they don’t even really know where to turn to find factual information they’re looking for.

America’s coronavirus recovery is hindered by “truth decay” - Vox

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President Trump on Thursday suggested the practice of widespread coronavirus testing may be "overrated," even as health experts insist it is critical to safely loosen restrictions and reopen businesses. Trump boasted about the United States's testing capabilities during remarks at a Pennsylvania medical equipment distribution center, where he announced the country has administered 10 million tests since the outbreak began. "We have the best testing in the world," Trump told employees at Owens & Minor Inc. in Allentown. “Could be that testing’s, frankly, overrated. Maybe it is overrated." “But we have the greatest testing in the world,” he added. “But what we want is we want to get rid of this thing. That’s what we want."

The U.S. has more than 1.4 million confirmed coronavirus cases, by far the most of any country in the world. But Trump suggested the soaring infection numbers were merely a reflection of America’s testing capacity. "We have more cases than anybody in the world, but why? Because we do more testing,” Trump said. “When you test, you have a case. When you test you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases. They don’t want to write that. It’s common sense. We test much more." The Trump administration has drawn intense criticism for its slow initial rollout of coronavirus testing in February and March when the first U.S. cases were reported. Even as testing has ramped up, lawmakers have questioned why the federal government has failed to outline a national testing strategy and instead deferred to states...

Still, public health experts say the U.S. should be running hundreds of thousands of more tests per day before the country can safely reopen or risk new outbreaks, needless death and more economic damage. “It was inadequate testing that precipitated the national shutdown. We must not make the same mistakes again as we open up our nation,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told House lawmakers during a briefing Wednesday. 
Testing varies widely from state to state and some areas are still seeing very high percentages of tests coming back positive, indicating they are not testing enough people. If states reopen without having enough testing in place, they can miss cases that turn into large outbreaks.

Trump says testing may be 'frankly overrated' | TheHill

• "If you don't have a test, you don't have a case." But the case nevertheless exists..
  
• The quote nicely illustrates why the Federal government has left the states in the lurch, having to fend for their own testing, still not invoking the Defense Production Act to relief scarcity of reagents and swabs, letting states compete against one another.
  
• Testing overrated?? It's crucial for opening up the economy, as every health expert will tell you.