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Post by Admin on Apr 8, 2020 18:32:46 GMT
The White House’s coronavirus press briefing on the afternoon of Saturday, April 4, was grueling to watch. It lasted more than 90 minutes, and much of it was dominated by President Trump making the same handful of statements, worded only slightly differently, over and over and over. (At one point, he said “We have to open our country again” so many times, I thought he might be stuck.) And the briefings since then have been no different. At Monday’s briefing, Trump hit many of the same themes, particularly his favorite: how awful the media is. What I noticed throughout Saturday’s presentation was how little new information Trump had to offer. He kept repeating his favorite talking points from the entirety of this ordeal — including that an unproven drug could be the magic bullet to take down Covid-19, that maybe churches should open up for Easter Sunday, and yet another gentle gibe about how Mike Pence doesn’t seem to be sleeping a lot. (In his treatment of Pence, he reminds me a lot of the worst boss I’ve ever had, a man who would learn one tiny detail about each of his employees, then relentlessly riff on that detail for as long as they might work for him.) There were a few newer snippets within Trump’s stream-of-consciousness ramble. He said there’s going to be “a lot of death” in the country this week, and he went on a long tangent where he named all the heads of major American sports leagues. But even when Trump was saying nominally new things, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d heard all of this before. And then I realized the best possible comparison point for his performance on Saturday and at every other press conference: a clip show.
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Post by Admin on Apr 10, 2020 18:35:08 GMT
Watch live: President Trump and Coronavirus Task Force hold briefing at the White House President Trump plans to appoint a council to advise him on how best to reopen America after much of the nation went dormant to help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Trump said Friday that he plans to announce on Tuesday whom he has named to make recommendations about some kind of path to normalcy. "I'm going to surround myself with the greatest minds," he said in another marathon news conference at the White House. "We're going to make a decision, and hopefully, it's going to be the right decision." Members of the Coronavirus Task Force, charged with leading the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, are holding a briefing Friday afternoon as Americans continue to express concerns about the country's economic future and President Trump's response to the virus outbreak. Trump and advisers must balance economic, social, public health and other priorities. The president was asked what metrics he would use in recommending when some places might begin to attempt to get back to normal. "The metrics right here," Trump said, pointing to his temple. Danger of a bounce-back epidemic The president was asked about reports that have suggested that a return to normalcy after about 30 days of social distancing and other countermeasures might mean a boomerang flare-up in cases later this year. Trump said he and advisers would contemplate the possibility of an echo spike after the current surge in cases and deaths slows. "There's always going to be a risk where something can flare up," he said. The president also acknowledged that if an echo outbreak gets desperate enough in some places, another round of social distancing and other mitigation efforts could be needed.
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Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2020 18:17:04 GMT
The economic shock from the coronavirus, or COVID-19, has been brutal on the American workforce. A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates that 3.5 million workers likely lost their employer-provided health insurance as a result of coronavirus layoffs between March 23 and April 2. That doesn’t factor in if these workers have any dependents that were on their health care plan as well. Taking into account the latest jobless claims numbers, 16,780,000 unemployment claims were filed in three weeks. Meanwhile, 49% of Americans receive insurance through their employer. And given the cost of treatment for COVID-19 (and the cost of healthcare in the U.S. more generally), that’s a problem. “The danger is that if there isn’t a concerted effort to address the health care costs, we could see continued growth of uninsured Americans and small and large businesses dropping out of operating health coverage,” Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, the state’s health care marketplace, told Yahoo Finance. “That could mean in future years that we’re less ready for the next epidemic or more Americans are showing up in emergency rooms without insurance. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
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Post by Admin on Apr 13, 2020 1:10:34 GMT
Trump ignored early urgent advice to institute social distancing guidelines, in part because he was throwing a political tantrum Multiple groups, working together and independently, attempted to alert Trump to the need for extreme action, taken early. As early as January 29, Trump received a memo from trade official Peter Navarro urging serious action to fight the virus or “leave Americans defenseless.” On February 14, another memo circulated by a group of administration experts urged social distancing, quarantining, and preparedness.
The White House’s coronavirus task force included a number of top-ranking officials who were convening to roleplay response preparedness scenarios, even before it was widely known that Covid-19 was often asymptomatic, meaning it could spread before signs of illness were detected. Then led by Azar, the task force included representatives from the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as Fauci, representing the National Institutes of Health.
On February 24, members of the task force decided to present to Trump a plan for mitigation — a comprehensive strategy for containing the effects of the virus once it began to spread within the country. The plan, called “Four Steps to Mitigation,” called for “school dismissals and cancellations of mass gatherings,” as well as aggressive testing, quarantining, and social distancing efforts.
But the group never got to present the plan, because Trump was simultaneously infuriated over a CDC statement. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, announced in a press conference on February 26 that the virus was here and it was spreading. She also publicly announced a version of the plan that had yet to be presented to Trump, called “Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza.”
Trump’s anger at the announcement of these guidelines, and the effect it had on a plummeting stock market, prompted him to demote Azar as the leader of the White House’s response, replacing him with Vice President Mike Pence. He then stalled the White House’s efforts to enact social distancing measures and other community-level actions until March 16.
Political squabbling over China meant the earliest warnings about the coronavirus went dismissed while conspiracy theories were taken seriously Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger had been investigating news of the outbreak since early January, suspecting correctly that China had restricted reports of the outbreak’s severity and spread.
But his efforts to get news and updates about the outbreak through to senior officials and health administration officials constantly met with political obstacles. Health officials downplayed his information and politicians attempted to spin the information to benefit the US in its ongoing complicated relationship with China.
The result was that Pottinger’s warnings, one of the earliest clear warnings within the administration about the coronavirus, went unheeded, as well as warnings from the National Security Council. The security experts went dismissed even as an unfounded conspiracy theory about the virus’s origin spread among some government officials and economic advisers pushed back against taking drastic measures to thwart China.
Ironically, another conspiracy theory that the virus had come from the US, floated in a single tweet by a random Chinese official, angered Trump so much that it apparently altered his entire approach toward China. After the tweet, he shifted from tentatively praising the country’s response to calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” in press conferences.
The internal fighting and politicization among Trump’s administration, as well as Trump’s own capriciousness, wreaked havoc on the country’s ability to adequately prepare for the virus in time to ameliorate lost lives and widespread damage.
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Post by Admin on Apr 18, 2020 7:04:55 GMT
Trump has aggressively promoted hydroxychloroquine for weeks, despite limited evidence at this point that it is safe or effective to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. And he has latched on to indications it could be working — even if the basic facts undermine his argument. “It is extremely unlikely that relatively low rates of the [coronavirus] infection in sub-Saharan Africa are related to the use of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine,” Michigan State University malaria researcher Terrie Taylor told us, also referring to a similar malaria drug Trump has pushed as a COVID-19 treatment. “Neither has been the first-line treatment for malaria illness for many years.” Trump first suggested hydroxychloroquine was behind other nations’ low COVID-19 counts in a March 23 coronavirus press briefing. “And countries with malaria have had a interesting thing happen,” he said. “They take this particular drug — it’s a very powerful drug — and there is very little semblance of the virus in those countries. And there are those that say because this drug is very prevalent because of the malaria.” He broached the idea again in another press briefing on April 4 after falsely claiming that “people with lupus,” who also take hydroxychloroquine to treat symptoms of their disease, “aren’t catching this horrible virus.” As we have written, it’s not yet known whether lupus patients taking the drug are less susceptible to infection with the new virus. But it’s clear that being on the drug is not a panacea. Registry data from early April show that a quarter of patients with rheumatic diseases who have contracted COVID-19 were already taking hydroxychloroquine. Trump, April 4: And there’s also other studies, you know, with the malaria, that the malaria countries have very little — people that take this drug for malaria, which is very effective for malaria — that those countries have very little of this virus. I don’t know. You’re going to check it out. As we did with Trump’s lupus remarks, we did check it out. We could find no studies that back his claim, and experts we consulted were also unaware of any such studies. The White House did not respond to our request for more information. Malaria, which is caused by a parasite that is transmitted to humans by mosquitoes, occurs in other places, dictated in large part by climate and season. But as the WHO says, the African region has a “disproportionately high share of the global malaria burden,” including 93% of all cases and 94% of deaths in 2018. On April 4, only 680 COVID-19 cases had been reported in the six African nations that collectively account for more than half of the world’s malaria cases. There’s little reason, however, to think that’s because of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, for the simple fact that few people in malaria-prone countries are taking the drugs. Chloroquine was once the go-to drug for malaria treatment in Africa, Taylor explained, but is no longer because the malaria parasite evolved and developed resistance to the drug. Hydroxychloroquine, which is a slightly modified version of chloroquine that is generally considered to be safer, suffers from the same problem; Taylor said it never has been a first-line malaria treatment in Africa.
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