Handling the coronavirus crisis

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Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s decision to extend lockdown measures led armed right-wing protesters to storm the State House in Lansing to demand an end to quarantine, the men subsequently praised as “very good people” by Trump.

Trump news live: Latest coronavirus updates as president attacked over China conspiracy theory | The Independent

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Observers of American politics sometimes wonder why White House reporters don’t do a better job asking President Donald Trump questions that expose his obviously false claims for what they are. An exchange on Thursday showed why it isn’t so simple. During a White House press availability on Thursday, CNN’s Jim Acosta asked Trump to explain how it makes sense to blame former President Barack Obama for testing problems pertaining to a virus that didn’t even exist until nearly thee years after he left office. “The last administration left us nothing. We started off with bad, broken tests, and obsolete tests,” Trump asserted, prompting Acosta to jump in and ask: “You say ‘broken tests’ — it’s a new virus, so how could the tests be broken?” Acosta’s question succinctly revealed the fundamental absurdity of Trump’s ongoing efforts to pin blame for coronavirus testing problems on his predecessor. Trump, however, just plowed forward with variations of the same false claim over and over again.

Trump has been using this particular “Pants on Fire” lie for weeks now, even though anyone with a basic understanding of how time works can easily see how absurd it is. The novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 didn’t even exist until late 2019, and didn’t arrive in the US until January. So barring some sort of time travel, it was not possible for Obama to develop a test for a virus that didn’t exist until nearly three years after he left office. It’s total nonsense, but for those not paying close attention, it perhaps sounds plausible enough. And so Trump keeps saying it again and again and again in his efforts to distract from his government’s failure to develop and mass-produce a reliable coronavirus test during a crucial period in January and February, when the virus was spreading across the country in a mostly undetected manner.

While it wasn’t possible for Obama to leave coronavirus tests for Trump, his administration did leave behind a detailed pandemic response playbook put together by Obama’s National Security Council in 2016. But instead of using it, Trump fired the government’s pandemic preparedness team in 2018, and later spent six weeks after the coronavirus arrived in the US downplaying it at every turn.

Trump blaming Obama for broken coronavirus tests is complete nonsense - Vox

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• Overwhelming evidence suggests that lockdowns help contain coronavirus outbreaks and prevent additional deaths.
  
• Italy’s lockdown prevented around 200,000 hospitalizations, according to a recent study.
  
• Another study found that Wuhan’s restrictions prevented tens of thousands of infections throughout the Hubei province.
  
• While it’s possible to reduce transmission through social distancing alone, lockdowns ensure that citizens abide by these guidelines.
  

Lockdowns save lives. The evidence is clear around the world.

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For weeks, President Donald Trump’s backers on TV went all in on hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria and autoimmune drug that had horrific side effects and little evidence backing it, as a potential treatment for coronavirus. Now, the medical community is showing promising results for the antiviral drug remdesivir. But this time, according to Politico, many of Trump’s backers don’t believe the experts — even as Trump himself expresses hope in the drug. “Over three weeks ago, hydroxychloroquine was all the rage in MAGA world, despite flawed and scattered evidence about whether drug could help cure coronavirus. Now there is another drug, remdesivir, with positive early scientific data,” wrote Tina Nguyen. “Much of MAGA world wants little to do with it.” “Indeed, the same segment of the right that claimed scientists and the media were deliberately downplaying hydroxychloroquine in order to hurt Trump’s standing are now the ones downplaying remdesivir,” continued the report. “On Fox News, Laura Ingraham suggested that remdesivir, as a newer drug being produced by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, could be unsafe and expensive. Those who initially helped raise the profile of hydroxychloroquine raised doubts about the remdesivir studies.”

Trump supporters trashing new COVID-19 drug because the president pushed hydroxychloroquine first: report – Alternet.org

• Once idiots with an agenda are starting to mess with science, there is no end to the nightmare, for instance the following possibility if a working vaccine is found:
  

The president’s near-constant stream of lies, misinformation, obfuscations, and half-truths has systematically destroyed Americans’ last reserves of trust in government. A logical consequence of this behavior is that many Americans will end up wary of a cure produced by the administration, even with rock-solid proof of its efficacy. This could be catastrophic. Public reluctance to accept a vaccine will mean continued suffering, despite a treatment in hand, and an even slower road back to regular life. As much as Trump would like to believe that a vaccine would be gratefully embraced by all Americans—no doubt a catalyst for his urgency in pursuing one—Trump himself has made that outcome less likely.

How Trump may already be discrediting a COVID-19 vaccination – Alternet.org

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But analysts say that without centralized governance and coordination, the national effort remains a competing coalition of state and local outfits hampered by duplicated work, competition for supplies, siloed pursuits of non-transferable solutions and red tape that leaves some labs with testing backlogs and others with excess capacity. All of which leaves the US without a unified, coherent strategy for testing and contact tracing to contain a virus that does not respect state borders and has already killed more than 60,000 Americans. Without it, the imminent experiment of reopening the country could be catastrophic, warned Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina in a conference call with reporters this week. “My concern is that we’ll end up right where we have been, with major cities having healthcare systems that get overrun quickly because of major outbreaks,” Mina said.

Meanwhile, as states begin to relax social distancing measures, the Trump administration is spreading dangerous misinformation, denying persistent supply shortages, underestimating the number of Covid-19 cases and exaggerating the margin of safety conferred by the current volume of testing and contact-tracing, experts say. “We’ve done more than 200,000 tests in a single day,” Mike Pence said at a taskforce briefing this week, in which Trump touted testing as “one of the great assets that we have” in reopening the US. But at current testing levels, with only rudimentary plans for contact tracing for new cases, the US will be flying virtually blind as it reopens, said Glen Weyl, a technologist who co-authored a report issued by Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics that calls for 5m tests a day by early June.

No leadership and no plan: is Trump about to fail the US on coronavirus testing? | US news | The Guardian

• Trump invoked the Defense Production Act for the meatpack industry, hardly essential, but testing has been lingering for months..
  
• And testing levels are touted as great achievements enabling the country to open up which couldn't be further from the truth as testing has to be at least an order of magnitude larger for that to happen, not to speak of the contact tracing manpower necessary, which is left to the states which have already catastrophic finances which will soon force them to lay-off essential workers (police, teachers, nurses, etc.) whilst the Republicans resist bailing out "spendthrift" (read blue) states (while the reality is that blue states have been bailing out red ones for decades)..
  

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An influential coronavirus model often cited by the White House is now forecasting that 134,000 people will die of Covid-19 in the United States, nearly double its previous prediction. The model, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, had predicted 72,433 deaths as of Monday morning. Relatedly, a Trump administration model projects a rise in coronavirus cases and deaths in the weeks ahead, up to about 3,000 daily deaths in the US by June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times. Over the past week, about 2,000 people died daily in the US, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. 

The sharp increases in the two models are tied to relaxed social distancing and increased mobility in the US. States across the country -- including Florida, Colorado, Indiana, Nebraska and South Carolina -- have eased restrictions in an attempt to revive a sputtering economy and calm restless residents.

US coronavirus: Influential model projects 135,000 deaths in US, nearly double its last estimate - CNN

• No the US isn't ready to open the economy..
  
• New cases haven't declined for two weeks
  
• There isn't the capacity to handle 2m-5M test a day
  
• There isn't the capacity to do the contact tracing
  
• The states who are supposed to take care of the testing and contact tracing are basically bankrupt, but Republicans have resisted bailing them out
  

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Numerous contributing causes have been mooted for the discrepancy in various individual countries: lower life expectancy meaning fewer vulnerable elderly people still alive, lower population density, fewer flights to China, lower testing rates or even just sheer luck. The obligatory wearing of masks outdoors, now common to much of Europe, was implemented very early on by the Czech Republic and Slovakia and may also have helped stop the spread. The most important reason, however, seems to be the early lockdown implemented by almost all countries in the region. While in Britain and other western European nations, public events and gatherings were still going on in the second and third weeks of March, in central and eastern Europe, governments saw what was happening in Italy and implemented rapid lockdowns.

Why has eastern Europe suffered less from coronavirus than the west? | World news | The Guardian

• It isn't rocket science, when something grows exponentially, the sooner one intervenes the better the outcome..
  

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President Donald Trump’s February response to the coronavirus pandemic was so botched that the New York Times described it as a “lost month.” Throughout that month, Trump spent much of his time denying that the novel coronavirus was a significant threat to Americans — suggesting the virus would miraculously subside — and his administration failed to scale up the testing and health care capacity needed to confront the challenge ahead. Now, it looks like April was another lost month. In a viral tweet thread, Jeremy Konyndyk, an expert in disease outbreak preparedness at the Center for Global Development, argued that the federal government wasted April in its response to the coronavirus: Despite some gains in March on health care capacity and testing, the US failed to capitalize on social distancing throughout April to continue scaling up measures and get the coronavirus under control.

Consider testing. Experts widely agree that the US needs at least 500,000 Covid-19 tests a day, on the low end, or even tens of millions, on the high end, to safely end extreme social distancing measures. Throughout March, the US made some progress toward that: It went from a few dozen tests a day to a few hundred to more than 100,000. In April, that progress seemed to stall out. In the last week of April, the US averaged around 220,000 tests a day — not much of an improvement from the roughly 150,000 a day that it reported during the first few weeks of the month, and far from what experts say is needed to control the outbreak (as South Korea and Germany have). The result, Konyndyk and other experts warn, is the US still isn’t ready to safely reopen its economy. Confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths aren’t trending down — with the country reporting around 25,000 to 30,000 new cases each day throughout April and now into May..

No country is escaping — or at least is expected to escape — the coronavirus pandemic unscathed. Besides the US, developed nations like Italy, Spain, and France have also dealt with a frightening number of cases and deaths. But in Konyndyk’s view, the US is unique among the rest of the developed world in that it has consistently bungled its response even after it became clear that the coronavirus is a real threat. From South Korea to Germany, other countries have taken the steps necessary — scaled-up testing, expanded contact tracing, and built-up health care capacity — as coronavirus began to appear within their borders. The US has taken some steps here and there, but it’s struggled to build an expansive national response. The difference isn’t that all of these other countries have better public health systems than the US, Konyndyk argued. It’s that their political systems have done a better job, with strong national leadership and coordination.

April was another lost month for Trump’s coronavirus response and Covid-19 testing - Vox

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The Trump administration was warned in late January that it had a critical shortage of surgical masks needed to combat coronavirus and that it needed to prioritize the development of a vaccine. But it failed to take action, a top administration health official alleges in a whistleblower complaint formally filed on Tuesday. The complaint from Dr. Rick Bright, who led the government’s efforts to find a vaccine for the coronavirus before being reassigned to a position at the National Institutes of Health, details what he describes as a staggering degree of inaction from administration officials bracing for a historic pandemic.

Whistleblower Alleges Trump Administration Ignored Dire Covid Warnings

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A draft government report projects covid-19 cases will surge to about 200,000 per day by June 1, a staggering jump that would be accompanied by more than 3,000 deaths each day. The document predicts a sharp increase in both cases and deaths beginning about May 14, according to a copy shared with The Washington Post. The forecast stops at June 1, but shows both daily cases and deaths on an upward trajectory at that point. The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disavowed the report, although the slides carry the CDC’s logo. The creator of the model said the numbers are unfinished projections shown to the CDC as a work in progress..

On Monday, however, the IHME model — widely used by states and heavily relied upon in the past by the White House — also revised its deaths significantly upward to reflect the reopenings in several states. The IHME model — created by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington — is now estimating that the United States will reach nearly 135,000 deaths by August 1. That number is significantly higher than its mid-April estimate of 60,308 deaths. The IHME’s new higher projections “reflect the effect of premature relaxation of restrictions,” said its creator Christopher Murray. “In this era where those mandates are being relaxed, people should be aware the risk of infection is still there.”

Even more optimistic than that, however, is the “cubic model” prepared by Trump adviser and economist Kevin Hassett. People with knowledge of that model say it shows deaths dropping precipitously in May — and essentially going to zero by May 15.

Government report predicts coronavirus cases will surge to 200,000 a day by June 1 - The Washington Post

• That alarming draft model might be just that, an unfinished exercise not ready for publication.
  
• However, the widely used (including by the Trump government) IHME model has nearly doubled its projected deaths to 135K by early August on a relaxation of social distancing.
  
• The cubic Hassett model is really embarrassing. He's not an epidemiologist and the data methods are really idiotically simple.