Handling the coronavirus crisis

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The US has emerged as a global hotspot for the pandemic, a giant petri dish for the Sars-CoV-2 virus. As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way. None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money” to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the US.

The president’s abrupt decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization last month also came as a shock. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, wrote on Twitter: “There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.” A poll in France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader. Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.


A survey this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters. Dacian Cioloș, a former prime minister of Romania who now leads the Renew Europe group in the European parliament, captured a general European view this week as the latest statistics on deaths in the US were reported. “Post-truth communication techniques used by rightwing populism movements simply do not work to beat Covid-19,” he told the Guardian. “And we see that populism cost lives.”

World looks on in horror as Trump flails over pandemic despite claims US leads way | US news | The Guardian

• Living in a complete fantasy world, amazing..
  

[Admin]

As Donald Trump agitates for the US to reopen, the American right appears to have found a novel way to deal with the rising coronavirus death toll: deny it altogether. Top Trump officials, huddled in the White House, itself the subject of a coronavirus outbreak, have according to reports begun questioning the number of deaths – and the president is among the skeptics. It’s a handy thought process for an administration desperate to send Americans back to work even as deaths from the virus rise each day, with marked surges in some traditionally Republican states. Trump is said to be coming round to the idea, pushed in the rightwing media for weeks, that hospitals, coroners and medical professionals across the US have been mislabelling deaths.

As far back as early April, Fox News personalities were casting doubt on the number of people who had succumbed to Covid-19. Senior political analyst Brit Hume led the charge, suggesting fatalities in New York City – the worst-hit area in the country – were “inflated” because the city did not “distinguish between those who die with the disease and those who die from it”. Hume retweeted a chart showing that many people who died had pre-existing conditions. Hume repeated the claim on Tucker Carlson’s show. He appeared to convince Carlson, who suggested “there may be reasons that people seek an inaccurate death count” and added: “When journalists work with numbers, there sometimes is an agenda, unfortunately.”

In fact, epidemiologists including Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top public health expert, say more people have died from coronavirus than has been reported. But it’s a struggle to find similar perspectives in the rightwing media upon which many Americans rely.

Worryingly, the disinformation push seems to be working. An Axios-Ipsos poll found that the death toll has become a political issue, 40% of Republicans believing fewer Americans are dying from coronavirus than the official toll says. A separate study, published at the end of April, revealed the stark consequences of prominent figures underplaying the impact of Covid-19. A group of researchers tracked the spread of coronavirus among viewers of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, after Hannity spent weeks downplaying the threat. “Greater exposure to Hannity,” the researchers wrote, “leads to a greater number of Covid-19 cases and deaths.”

Faced with an appalling US coronavirus death toll, the right denies the figures | World news | The Guardian

• This is an easy issue to settle: Look at the higher death rates (from all causes) compared to last year. And even then there is underreporting as there are far fewer deaths from traffic accidents or perhaps even gun violence during the lockdown.
  

[Admin]

“A cadre of influential conservatives is growing increasingly convinced that the nation’s foremost infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is recklessly driving the nation to financial ruin — possibly even in a concerted attempt to undermine President Donald Trump,” Markay and Suebsaeng explain. “And in an effort to stop him, they’re resorting to tried and true methods, from public shaming to online conspiracy theories to lawsuits meant to unearth e-mails pertaining to his work.” The article is headlined “Team ‘Lock Her Up’ Is Now Going After Fauci” — a reference to the “lock her up, lock her up” chants aimed at Clinton at MAGA rallies. In fact, Markay and Suebsaeng note, some of the Trumpistas who despise Fauci are “key figures who helped spearhead the campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections” — for example, former Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon, who served in Trump’s administration in 2017.

The far-right extremists who hate Hillary Clinton are now turning their venom on Dr. Anthony Fauci: report – Alternet.org

[Admin]

• Two Italian studies suggest that Italy's coronavirus deaths could be twice as high as the official death count.
  
• US researchers have also estimated that the nation is substantially underreporting cases. 
  
• Coronavirus deaths across 25 states could be up to 40% higher, while total fatalities could be twice the current count in some states.
  

Coronavirus deaths in Italy and US may be double official count - Business Insider

• The Trumpies argue that deaths are overreported as some kind of medical-media conspiracy..
  
• As usual, the contrary is much more likely to be right.
  

[Admin]

Spain has had one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the world, which makes a recently completed antibody-testing study of the Spanish population so significant — and so scary. Preliminary results from a well-designed survey of antibody presence among Spaniards suggest that even as the Spanish outbreak exploded and then was brought under control, only 5 percent of the country’s population has been infected with the coronavirus so far. This means that the vast majority of the Spanish population remains susceptible to infection if the lifting of restrictions there leads to a new spike in cases. The message to the rest of the world is that as awful as the pandemic has been in Spain — where more than 27,000 people have died, a far higher per-capita death rate than in the US or even Italy — it’s not even close to an upper limit on how bad things can get.

Covid-19 antibodies: Spanish study has a scary takeaway about coronavirus immunity - Vox

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President Donald Trump's son-in-law and special advisor Jared Kushner reportedly urged his father-in-law in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic not to prioritize testing or ordering potentially life-saving equipment like ventilators because of fears it might drive down stock prices. Kushner's efforts to convince the president not to take decisive action were first reported in the Financial Times: 

"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."

"And there you have it," tweeted strategist Mark Elliott. "150,000 Americans sacrificed for the stock market."
GQ's Luke Darby pointed out Thursday that the advised ploy didn't even work. "Kushner's advice did nothing to prevent a market crash," wrote Darby, "and it's likely that the administration's refusal to act in time only threw the economy into more chaos."

'150,000 Americans Sacrificed for the Stock Market': Kushner Reportedly Advised Less Covid-19 Testing to Calm Wall Street | Common Dreams News

[Admin]

Even as it makes a big PR show of supporting state by state “liberation” in America, the Trump administration is advising state governments on how to remove workers from unemployment insurance once orders are lifted. Without government directives, employers can demand workers show up, and if they refuse they no longer qualify. And why might workers refuse? Perhaps because their workplaces are still unsafe and they have vulnerable family members they want to keep from getting infected? Not good enough—once the state has been “liberated”..

Reopening Isn’t Reopening—It’s Cutting Off Unemployment | naked capitalism

The United States has reached the worst levels of unemployment since the Great Depression and many people are still waiting for their unemployment benefits, as states' backlogged systems fail to process claims. But instead of trying to fix the problem, Donald Trump’s Labor Department has decided to issue guidance to “remind” states that they need to ensure that rooting out “improper payments and fraud” remains a “top priority.”

With states beginning to reopen businesses early during the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment offices across the country have emphasized that employees need to return to work, or else they’ll likely lose their unemployment benefits. In order to identify people who might be turning down suitable work, the federal government is directing states to get companies to snitch on their employees if they are refusing to return to their jobs.

The DOL guidance issued Monday “strongly encourages” states to “request employers to provide information when workers refuse to return to their jobs for reasons that do not support their continued eligibility for benefits.” The guidance also reiterates the fact that people can’t get benefits if they turn down work. “As states begin the process of phased reopening, we expect historically high levels of suitable return to work opportunities. .

Trump Administration Wants Bosses to Snitch on People Scared to Go to Work - VICE

• So chose between going back to unsafe jobs or lose your unemployment benefit and healthcare insurance. Modern slavery..
  

[Admin]

Eric Trump claims coronavirus will 'magically go away' after the election because it's all a hoax to stop Trump rallies

Eric Trump claims Democrats are 'milking' coronavirus to stop Trump rallies | indy100

• How stupid do they think we are?
  

[Admin]

If the novel coronavirus pandemic were turned into a movie, a pivotal scene would capture the unforgettable events of Saturday, March 14, at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Three days prior, U.S. President Donald Trump had suddenly announced sweeping travel restrictions on most European countries that would go into effect at midnight on Friday, March 13. Although the travel ban was intended to apply only to foreigners, Trump declared on national television that he was “suspending all travel from Europe to the United States,” prompting thousands of panicked Americans to cut short their vacations and business trips and rush back to the United States. Spilling into packed arrival halls, they found themselves shoulder-to-shoulder in nearly motionless customs and immigration lines, healthy travelers sharing the stale air with those who had picked up the virus, some of whom were sweating and coughing. Social media posts from O’Hare showed a seething human mass of contagion as far as the eye could see.

Travelers waited in this tight-packed mob for as long as seven hours before they were “screened”—given a rudimentary questionnaire asking if they felt any symptoms or had been in contact with people known to be infected with the virus. Then most of them were allowed to return to their homes and communities, reportedly without clear instructions to self-isolate or quarantine. Similar scenes played out in at least a dozen other U.S. airports that day. There is no way to know for sure, since the United States had not—and still has not—organized adequate testing or contact tracing, but the airport rush of March 14 may well have set the United States on course to become the most COVID-19-infected country in the world..

Why Travel Bans Fail to Stop Pandemics| Foreign Affairs

[Admin]

Brazil has seen its most deadly day since the coronavirus outbreak began, prompting Donald Trump to consider a ban on travel to the US from Brazil as he declared the huge number of US cases of coronavirus was “a badge of honour”. After a cabinet meeting on Tuesday at the White House, Trump said: “I don’t want people coming over here and infecting our people. I don’t want people over there sick either,” in relation to Brazil. When asked if about the possibility of a travel ban, the president said he was considering it and went on to say he saw the large number of US cases as a “badge of honour”. “You know when you say that we lead in cases, that’s because we have more testing than anybody else,” he said. “It’s a great tribute to the testing and all of the work that a lot of professionals have done.” The US president has previously claimed “incredible” victories in testing despite criticism over his administration’s repeated failures..

Global report: Brazil's deadliest day as Trump calls US cases a 'badge of honour' | World news | The Guardian

President Donald Trump is now dismissing medical information promulgated by his own government as a “Trump enemy statement.” Trump made that remark on Tuesday afternoon, when he was asked following a lunch with Republican senators to explain his rationale for promoting unproven and potentially dangerous hydroxychloroquine treatments for coronavirus. The president’s ensuing effort to defend the stunning announcement he made on Monday that he’s taking the anti-malarial drug didn’t end up making much sense. But it did reveal a reflexive contempt for scientific reasoning that undercuts his talking points. “Why is it okay for you to promote the use of this drug when you’re not a doctor?” a reporter asked. Trump responded by making a case that he knows better than medical professionals do. “I worked with doctors,” he began. “If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape, they were very old, almost dead. It was a Trump enemy statement.”

The “Trump enemy statement” in question is a study of coronavirus patients in Veterans Affairs hospitals that became the basis for a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warning about hydroxychloroquine treatments for coronavirus. The study, which the National Institutes of Health posted to its website last month and is the largest of its kind, was not peer-reviewed, but it found more deaths among those treated with hydroxychloroquine than those treated with standard care. Researchers also reported finding no benefit to its use. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) subsequently posted a warning on its website that “cautions against use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for COVID-19 outside of the hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems.” To hear Trump tell it, however, the FDA has been infiltrated by his deep state enemies.

Trump dismisses hydroxychloroquine study as “enemy statement” - Vox

• Have another round of bleach.. It's getting more bizarre by the day