Handling the coronavirus crisis

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For weeks, President Trump has minimized the coronavirus, mocked concern about it and treated the risk from it cavalierly. On Tuesday he took to the White House lectern and made a remarkable assertion: He knew it was a pandemic all along.

“This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

This is what Mr. Trump has actually said over the past two months:

On Jan. 22, asked by a CNBC reporter whether there were “worries about a pandemic,” the president replied: “No, not at all. We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

On Feb. 26, at a White House news conference, commenting on the country’s first reported cases: “We’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.”

On Feb. 27, at a White House meeting: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

On March 7, standing next to President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil at Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach, Fla., when asked if he was concerned that the virus was spreading closer to Washington: “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.” (At least three members of the Brazilian delegation and one Trump donor at Mar-a-Lago that weekend later tested positive for the virus.)

On March 16, in the White House briefing room, warning that the outbreak would “wash” away this summer: “So it could be right in that period of time where it, I say, wash — it washes through. Other people don’t like that term. But where it washes through.”

Trump Now Claims He Always Knew the Coronavirus Would Be a Pandemic - The New York Times

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The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald called Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s physical interactions with a crowd of supporters Sunday “virtually homicidal” amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. Greenwald, who has had tense interactions with the current Brazilian government, told Hill.TV Tuesday that he thinks Brazil is seven to 10 days behind the U.S. in the coronavirus outbreak, leading the country to still be in “the denial stage.” “Brazil is still very much in the process where the realization is starting to kick in about how grave this is,” he said. But the former Guardian journalist criticized the Brazilian president for leaving “his own medical quarantine” to physically interact with anti-democracy protesters outside the presidential palace. “Still, to watch him do something, virtually homicidal … and to go and touch people and hug them and take their phones and knowingly subject them to what could kill them, ... is something that really has shocked people even who believed in him and who defended up until to this point,” he continued.

Glenn Greenwald calls it 'virtually homicidal' that Bolsonaro physically interacted with crowd of supporters | TheHill

• Take that in for a moment, a president leaving his quarantine to physically interact with anti(!)-democracy protesters..
  

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That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion,” 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 local hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own way on school closings.

Coronavirus Outbreak: A Cascade of Warnings, Heard but Unheeded - The New York Times

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An American woman who tested positive for Covid-19 has reportedly been sent a bill for almost $35,000 to cover the cost of her treatment. Danni Askini, who was in treatment for lymphoma, began to feel unwell in late February, and after several visits to the ER she was given a test to confirm that she had contracted the virus.  A few days later she received the bill for her testing and treatment: $34,927.44, which it appears she will have to somehow pay out of pocket given she was in between ensurers at the time.

Coronavirus: American woman receives bill for almost $35,000 for Covid-19 treatment | indy100

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US intelligence officials reportedly warned President Donald Trump and Congress about the threats posed by the novel coronavirus beginning in early January — weeks before the White House and lawmakers began implementing stringent public health measures and as the president minimized the threat posed by the virus in his tweets and public statements. The fact those warnings were largely disregarded — something first reported by the Washington Post’s Shane Harris, Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, and Ellen Nakashima — suggests Trump administration officials failed to take action that could have prepared the health care system to handle an influx of patients, helped Americans avoid mass social distancing, and saved lives.


Top health officials first learned of the virus’s spread in China on January 3, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Friday. Throughout January and February, intelligence officials’ warnings became more and more urgent, according to the Post — and by early February, much of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA’s intelligence reports were dedicated to warnings about Covid-19. All the while, Trump downplayed the virus publicly, telling the public the coronavirus “is very well under control in our country,” and suggesting warm weather would neutralize the threat the virus poses.

Privately, Trump reportedly rebutted health and intelligence officials’ attempts to get him to take action to prepare communities in the US while rebuking officials who were delivering sober risk assessments. For instance, in late February, when Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said, “It’s not a question of if [community spread] will happen, but when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” Trump reportedly responded by calling Azar to complain “that Messonnier was scaring the stock markets, according to two senior administration officials,” the Post reports.

Intelligence reports warned about a coronavirus pandemic in January. Trump reportedly ignored them. - Vox

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As Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics has written, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese medical products in early 2018 and more in 2019. Higher prices on imported equipment resulted in lower purchases and depleted inventories. Reluctance to “buy Chinese” may partly explain why the Trump administration ignored advice to increase stockpiles of protective gear well in advance of any crisis.

Don't Abandon Globalization—Make It Better - The Atlantic

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The American people have done Donald Trump a giant favor. By telling pollsters they want to extend social-distancing restrictions, they’ve persuaded him—for the moment—to act in his own political self-interest. Trump has great difficulty accepting short-term pain in exchange for long-term gain—even though in the case of COVID-19, doing so is his best reelection strategy. Luckily for him, ordinary Americans are demanding that he do exactly that.   

Until this week, Trump had spent most of the year downplaying the threat from COVID-19. As The Washington Post noted in a timeline of Trump’s statements, he had minimized the coronavirus threat until mid-March. Then, after briefly announcing that the United States was at war with the virus, he minimized the danger again late last month when he demanded that the U.S. economy reopen by Easter. But this week his tone changed dramatically. Trump—who had previously said the coronavirus would soon “disappear”—on Tuesday indicated that, even under the administration’s “goals of community mitigation,” it would kill 100,000 to 240,000 Americans.

Trump Finally Saw the Benefits of Preventing Death - The Atlantic

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The Trump administration ignored a pandemic warning from White House economists who published a study estimating possible effects of a pandemic in September, according to a New York Times report.  The White House study reportedly cautioned that a pandemic, like the coronavirus outbreak the world is now facing, could cause the deaths of a half-million Americans and cost the economy as much as $3.8 trillion. The study contradicts what administration officials have repeatedly said about the coronavirus coming out of nowhere and causing unforeseen devastation to the U.S. economy, the Times noted. The 2019 study was ordered by the National Security Council, two people familiar with the matter told the newspaper, which added that it warned officials not to conflate the risks of the annual flu with a potential pandemic.

Trump administration ignored pandemic warning from White House economists: report | TheHill

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President Donald Trump has decided not to reopen the Obamacare marketplace to millions of uninsured Americans as the coronavirus continues its spread across the country, multiple news outlets reported this week. A host of health insurance companies and Democratic lawmakers have called on the White House to open up the exchanges for a special enrollment period during the pandemic. Notably, the exchanges will still be open to those who recently lost their jobs, which includes hundreds of thousands of Americans who’ve recently become unemployed as a result of the pandemic. But about a third of US states’ healthcare exchanges aren’t controlled by the federal government and several Democratic-led states have already reopened their exchanges.

Trump is refusing to reopen the Obamacare exchanges to help millions of uninsured Americans get coverage during the coronavirus pandemic

Chemicals used to construct military missiles. Materials needed to build drones. Body armor for agents patrolling the southwest border. Equipment for natural disaster response. A Korean War-era law called the Defense Production Act has been used to place hundreds of thousands of orders by President Trump and his administration to ensure the procurement of vital equipment, according to reports submitted to Congress and interviews with former government officials. Yet as governors and members of Congress plead with the president to use the law to force the production of ventilators and other medical equipment to combat the coronavirus pandemic, he has for weeks treated it like a “break the glass” last resort, to be invoked only when all else fails. “You know, we’re a country not based on nationalizing our business,” Mr. Trump said earlier this month. “Call a person over in Venezuela, ask them how did nationalization of their businesses work out? Not too well.”

Defense Production Act Has Been Used Routinely, but Not With Coronavirus - The New York Times

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One of Trump’s major flaws, she argued, is his distrust of expertise. And that’s largely what the federal government is: an army of subject-matter experts overseeing their own areas of responsibility. A president needs to understand how to use that apparatus to detect emerging disasters and respond to them as they’re coming. Instead, Trump dismisses these experts as the “deep state.” “What most presidents understand is they need a system around them that accesses the expertise in the federal government,” Kamarck said. But Trump has never understood this.

Under his leadership, the pandemic office at the National Security Council was disbanded. It seems this made it much harder for the issue to make its way to the president’s desk early on, when active intervention could have mitigated the disaster we’re now experiencing. According to the Washington Post’s reporting, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar tried to get the president’s attention on the issue in January, but he struggled to contact Trump. It explained: Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials. When he reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market, the senior administration officials said. Kamarck argued that if Trump hadn’t let the NSC pandemic office disband, it could have come to him even earlier in January and alerted him that there was a problem, assuming he would listen.

This researcher wrote the book on presidential failure. She’s never see anything like Trump’s – Alternet.org

President Trump, who at one point called the coronavirus pandemic an “invisible enemy” and said it made him a “wartime President,” has in recent days questioned its seriousness, tweeting, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” Trump said repeatedly that he wanted the country to reopen by Easter, April 12th, contradicting the advice of most health officials. (On Sunday, he backed down and extended federal social-distancing guidelines for at least another month.) According to the Washington Post, “Conservatives close to Trump and numerous administration officials have been circulating an article by Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, titled ‘Coronavirus Perspective,’ which plays down the extent of the spread and the threat.”

The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration | The New Yorker