Handling the coronavirus crisis

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President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner boasted in mid-April about how the President had cut out the doctors and scientists advising him on the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, comments that came as more than 40,000 Americans already had died from the virus, which was ravaging New York City. The statement reflected a political strategy. Instead of following the health experts' advice, Trump and Kushner were focused on what would help the President on Election Day. By their calculations, Trump would be the "open-up president."

Kushner's comments about the administration's handling of the pandemic underscore the extent to which Trump and Kushner minimized the public health crisis even as it was exploding last spring. At that time, positive cases in the US regularly crested at around 30,000 per day. On April 15, three days before Kushner's interview, deaths from Covid-19 reached their all-time peak at more than 2,600 per day. And hospitalizations for the virus were at their first peak as well, nearly reaching 60,000 for several days in April.

During this period, New York still bore the brunt of the virus, and deadly surges had not yet swept across the South and Midwest. Kushner's comments reflect what many health experts say is at the heart of the administration's flawed approach to the pandemic -- a premature push to reopen the country and sideline medical professionals that led to waves of new infections during the summer and record-setting cases this fall. "It was almost like Trump getting the country back from the doctors. Right?" Kushner told Woodward on April 18. "In the sense that what he now did was, you know, he's going to own the open-up."

Jared Kushner bragged in April that Trump was taking the country 'back from the doctors' - CNNPolitics

• Instead of treating this as a national disaster, which Trump was fully aware off as of January 28, their approach was entirely driven by political calculation to maximize their chance of reelection (or so they thought).
  
• There was no national plan, they shifted the difficult stuff to the states, so that they could blame them, and in the first wave, it was mostly Democratic states which bore the brunt of the pandemic
  
• Then they would 'liberate' the states from the Democrates and the doctors and imagined this would be popular
  
• As it turned out, the opening up was done way too fast and now mostly red states, who enthusiastically followed it, bore the brunt of the second wave while the blue states like New York and New Jersey, who bore the brunt of the first wave, kept the pandemic under control by opening up in a more controlled fashion. 
  

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Shortly after joining the White House as President Donald Trump's pandemic adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas launched a quiet effort that seemed counterintuitive to some of his colleagues -- encouraging officials to limit Covid-19 testing mainly to people experiencing symptoms. Atlas, a neuroradiologist, not an infectious disease expert, strongly supported a decision in August to revise federal guidelines to de-emphasize the need to test people without symptoms, according to two sources familiar with the process. He shared his view with state officials, including Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and several others in Florida, according to transcripts of public events and accounts from private meetings in that state.

Their push to de-emphasize tests coincided with a dramatic drop in testing across Florida, even as the country was careening toward a fall coronavirus surge. A CNN analysis of the Florida state official numbers, aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project, shows that testing dropped off at the end of July and early August, with a peak seven-day average over 90,000 tests per day on July 18. Six weeks later, in early September, the seven-day average dropped by nearly half, with fewer than 48,000 tests per day, and hovered between there and 60,000 during the fall. If Atlas and DeSantis' advocacy in Florida is, in fact, responsible for the state's testing decrease, that would be in keeping with the wishes of Trump, who for months has falsely suggested that the US has so many coronavirus cases only because it conducts so many tests. In June, Trump even said publicly that he wanted to "slow the testing down, please."

Though both Atlas and DeSantis declined to discuss their views with CNN for this story, they have articulated them in public. Some state and local officials believe the pair was influential in taking Trump's anti-testing pronouncements and helping to turn them into public policy. And the drop-off in testing is of deep concern to some. It took place as positivity rates remained high, in the range that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers indicative of high community spread. Asymptomatic Covid-19 carriers are still contagious, experts say. A lack of widespread testing makes it harder to map the disease as it spreads and to warn those at risk of illness.

Florida covid-19 testing declined while Atlas pushed to 'slow the testing down' - CNNPolitics

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President Donald Trump repeated an unfounded accusation at a campaign rally in Michigan on Friday, asserting U.S. doctors are misrepresenting the number of coronavirus fatalities because they receive "like $2,000 more" if they report Covid-19 as the cause of a patient's death, a baseless charge that has angered many in the medical community...

1,336: That's the estimated number of healthcare workers who have died from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. 

Donald Trump Jr., falsely claimed Thursday evening that the number of Americans dying from Covid-19 has dropped to "almost nothing," despite the U.S reporting more than 1,000 fatalities for a second consecutive. The president's son referred to medical experts expressing grave concerns about potential dangers related to the recent Covid spike as "morons."

Trump Baslessly Accuses Doctors Of Overreporting Covid Deaths For Financial Gain

• Blaming doctors who put their lives on the line, that sums their pandemic response up pretty well... 
  
• Now compare that how things could have been:
  

Taiwan just marked its 200th consecutive day without a locally transmitted case of the disease. Taipei's response to the coronavirus pandemic has been one of the world's most effective. The island of 23 million people last reported a locally transmitted case on April 12, which was Easter Sunday. As of Thursday, it had confirmed 553 cases -- only 55 of which were local transmissions. Seven deaths have been recorded..

Taiwan has never had to enact strict lockdowns. Nor did it resort to drastic restrictions on civil freedoms, like in mainland China.
Instead, Taiwan's response focused on speed. Taiwanese authorities began screening passengers on direct flights from Wuhan, where the virus was first identified, on December 31, 2019 -- back when the virus was mostly the subject of rumors and limited reporting. Taiwan confirmed its first reported case of the novel coronavirus on January 21 and then banned Wuhan residents from traveling to the island. All passengers arriving from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao were required to undergo screening. All this happened before Wuhan itself went into lockdown on January 23. By March, Taiwan banned all foreign nationals from entering the island, apart from diplomats, residents and those with special entry visas..

Taiwan Covid: How they went 200 days without a locally transmitted case - CNN

[Admin]

Why herd immunity is a terrible idea:

1. The dichotomy between economy and health is false, you can't have an economic recovery with a raging pandemic
   
2. The right respons is right in front of our nose; in much of Asia the pandemic is under control or was never even out of control in the first place and their economies have opened up or didn't even close in the first place
   
3. It's immoral, it will cause at least 800K deaths, much more if hospitals get overrun again
   
4. And this could repeat itself as there are increasing signs immunity only lasts a number of months
   
5. Then there are the people who do not die but get seriously ill and stay ill for months ('long-covid'), with as of yet unknown future health consequences
   
6. No pandemic has flamed out without a vaccine
   
7. Postponing infections gives time to accumulate knowledge and gets the death rate down
   
8. You can't isolate the vulnerable people, 20% of the US population is 65+, nearly 50% has a pre-existing condition, then there are many for whom it's impossible to avoid contact with these people
   
9. These ideas come from the same corner as climate deniers, it's pseudo science. 
   

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Stanford University economists published a study that connected 18 of President Donald Trump's reelection rallies from June 20 to September 30 with more than 30,000 Covid-19 infections and over 700 deaths—tallies that don't include the month of October, when cases nationwide surged. 

"Our analysis strongly supports the warnings and recommendations of public health officials concerning the risk of Covid-19 transmission at large group gatherings, particularly when the degree of compliance with guidelines concerning the use of masks and social distancing is low," wrote (pdf) Stanford's B. Douglas Bernheim, Nina Buchmann, Zach Freitas-Groff, and Sebastián Otero. "The communities in which Trump rallies took place paid a high price in terms of disease and death."

Stanford study links 18 Trump rallies to over 30,000 cases and 700 deaths: 'Killing Americans' to 'serve his own ego' - Alternet.org

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“The last time I spoke to the president was not about any policy; it was when he was recovering in Walter Reed, he called me up,” Fauci told the paper. “All of a sudden, they didn’t like what the message was because it wasn’t what they wanted to do anymore. They needed to have a medical message that was essentially consistent with what they were saying,” he said in the interview. While he told the paper that he has been attending staff meetings by phone, he also said he hasn’t been at the White House often since it saw its own coronavirus outbreak among staffers last month.

The interview comes roughly two weeks after Trump blasted Fauci in a call with his campaign staff, saying the public health expert was a “disaster” and claiming that Americans “are tired of COVID.” “Yup, there’s going to be spikes, there’s going to be no spikes, there’s going to be vaccines. With or without vaccines, people are tired of COVID,” Trump said on the call, according to audio obtained by The Hill. “I have the biggest rallies I have ever had and we have COVID. People are saying whatever, just leave us alone. They’re tired of it.”   “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots, these people, these people that have gotten it wrong. Fauci is a nice guy, he’s been here for 500 years, he called every one of them wrong,” Trump also said. Fauci said in his interview over the weekend that the “the only medical person who sees the president on a regular basis is Scott Atlas.”

Fauci rips White House coronavirus approach | TheHill

• So he calls Fauci when he himself is sick but he doesn't want him to talk to the American people and calls him an idiot who got everything wrong..
  

[Admin]

Fox News host Chris Wallace grilled Trump campaign adviser Steve Cortes on Sunday about the refusal to wear masks by some people close to President Donald Trump. During an interview on Fox News Sunday, Wallace noted that seven people who attended the White House event with Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett were not wearing masks and have now tested positive for COVID-19. "People packed together, the vast majority not wearing masks," Wallace said. "How does that make sense?" For his part, Cortes insisted that the White House took "tremendous precautions" to protect the president, including testing people in close contact with him. "The fact that he still got infected shows us that unfortunately this virus has that kind of power," Cortes said. "The president, though, and he's made this clear, he was unwilling to completely sequester himself, to take no risk, because leaders take risks. And he is the servant of the people as well as the commander-in-chief and so he said he must be around the people he serves. He took reasonable risks."

"Let's talk about reasonable risks," Wallace pushed back. "Because there was the debate on Tuesday night that I moderated. The rules from the Cleveland Clinic could not have been more clear. Everyone in the audience was to wear a mask." "After the first family came in, they all took off their masks," the Fox News host pointed out. "So did the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Do they think that the health and safety rules for everybody else do no apply to them?" "No, that's not the reality," Cortes stuttered. "Everybody was tested before that event as you well know. Those of us who went first were tested by Cleveland Clinic directly." "Steve, it doesn't matter," Wallace interrupted. "Everybody in that room was tested and the Cleveland Clinic's regulation was, it didn't matter, everybody except for the three of us on the stage was to wear a mask and people from the Cleveland Clinic came over and offered the first family masks, thinking maybe they didn't have them. They were waved away and the Commission on Presidential Debates has issued a statement saying, from now on if you don't wear a mask, you're going to be escorted from the hall."

Chris Wallace triggers Trump aide meltdown over first family not wearing masks - Alternet.org

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Jason Miller, a senior campaign adviser to President Donald Trump, defended the president’s attacks on frontline health care workers on ABC’s This Week Sunday — and refused to repudiate Trump’s false claims about Covid-19 deaths. Recently on the campaign trail — like when Trump took the stage at a rally in Waterford Township, Michigan, near Detroit on Friday — the president has pushed a baseless conspiracy theory that “our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid,” and that they are inflating the Covid-19 death toll because of this. There is, of course, no evidence for either part of that theory — either that Covid-19 deaths are being overcounted in the US, or that medical workers are doing so to profit from a pandemic that has, as of November 1, killed more than 230,000 people in the US.

But when This Week host George Stephanopoulos asked Miller point-blank about the attacks, Miller denied that Trump has said what he said. He refused to say whether he thought “doctors are inflating Covid deaths for money,” and incorrectly claimed there was evidence to back up Trump’s falsehood, before finally pivoting to the subject of tax cuts, leaving Stephanopoulos’s question unanswered..

Trump’s latest defense on Covid-19 is a false attack on health care workers - Vox

• The deaths are undercounted, lots of people dying without ever having been tested and this is revealed in the level of excess deaths (deaths over and above the average for the period).
  

[Admin]

A top White House coronavirus advisor criticized lockdowns in an interview appearance on Russian propaganda outlet RT, saying shutdown policies are "killing people." "It's a deadly pandemic, there's no understating that," Scott Atlas, a closer advisor to President Donald Trump, said. "We've had 230,000 lives roughly lost from the virus and certainly many lost from the policy of shutdowns." "The lockdowns will go down as an epic failure of public policy," Atlas added. "The argument is undeniable. The lockdowns are killing people."  Public health officials have been recommending lockdowns and business closures for months to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, along with other measures like wearing a mask and maintaining a social distance of six feet.  Atlas said lockdowns and other measures taken to slow the spread of coronavirus are "creating a generation of neurotic children" and said data shows college students are killing themselves "due to the lockdown."

The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention reported that the number of students between the ages of 18 to 24 considering suicide increased in the month of June, but not because of lockdown policies as Atlas said in the interview. The spike is due to increasing mental health problems and anxiety, according to CDC data. Students reported feeling more anxious and depressed because of the coronavirus in part, but the feelings are not specific to lockdowns. 

Scott Atlas appeared on a Russian propaganda outlet and slammed lockdowns - Business Insider

• Rasputin at it again, and where else than on Russian propaganda TV?
  
• In the same interview he argued that without Trump the US would have had 2.3M deaths.
  
• No, that would have happened if they would have followed Atlas policy of herd immunity, it's actually the lockdowns that short-circuited that.
  
• Confronted with the dramatic contrast between the US (712 deaths per 1M inhabitants on Nov 1 2020) and South Korea (9 deaths per 1M inhabitants) he argued the South Koreans have some genetic advantage that nobody else has noticed).
  

[Admin]

And with respect to lockdowns, here are the new cases in Israel. Notice the peak and the rapid decline after? Now what could have caused that, Mr Rasputin, euh, Atlas? Could that be a lockdown? They are now easing it, as it has been pretty effective: