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I'd just like to point out that neither myself nor any of my fellow nurses, fellow advanced nurse practitioners, and other healthcare providers ever swore an oath that we would lay down our lives for

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Welp, it finally happened. I snapped in public today. I went into work for a bit this morning because I’m trying to figure out the safest way to host physicians we are recruiting given our CV-19 sit

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I don't really know what to say anymore tbh. What happened last night is hard to put into words for anyone who hasn't worked in a hospital healthcare setting. Just unreal. Everyone is getting fucked.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32,406

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Posted (edited)

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing-failure-123166

 

Quote

On Saturday Jan. 11 — a month and a half before the first Covid-19 case not linked to travel was diagnosed in the United States — Chinese scientists posted the genome of the mysterious new virus, and within a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the disease.

Soon after, researchers in other nations rolled out their own tests, too, sometimes with different genetic targets. By the end of February, the World Health Organization had shipped tests to nearly 60 countries.

 

Quote

The United States was not among them.

Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.

 

Quote

The slowness of the testing regimen — which, administration officials acknowledged this week, is still not producing enough tests to meet the national demand — was the first, and most sweeping, of many failures. So far there have been confirmed cases in at least 23 states, and at least 15 deaths, while the stock market plunged and an otherwise healthy economy braced for a major disruption.

But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the WHO test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays.

 

Quote

“Please provide an explanation for why the Covid-19 diagnostic test approved by the World Health Organization was not used,” Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate health committee, who represents the hard-hit state of Washington, asked in a 3½-page letter on the testing fiasco to Pence, Health Secretary Alex Azar, CDC director Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn.

So far, none has been provided.

 

Spoiler

“We developed a test very rapidly after China produced the [genetic] sequence. We are in the process of validating that and that’s the test we’re going to be using,” said the CDC’s Stephen Redd, a 30-year veteran of the agency, at a recent briefing, even as members of the presidential task force acknowledged that the pace of testing had lagged.

Azar, who initially led the White House response and has now been sidelined by Pence, also has kept defending the testing regime.

“We’ve actually been progressing with this on par with our peer countries,” he told reporters recently.

* * *

The government’s incapacity to conduct widespread testing slowed diagnoses, creating chains of infection. It also deprived epidemiologists of a map that could have told them how far and how fast the virus was traveling and where they should concentrate efforts to slow it down.

But there were additional problems with the administration’s approach to testing, according to experts and former officials. From the start, the White House focused on containment, trusting that a limited ban on travel to and from China could somehow force a fast-moving virus to stop cold when it hit the Chinese border. But, while containment might have helped buy the U.S. some time, without aggressive domestic surveillance through testing, it was an incomplete strategy.

“They needed and still need to be searching for where the cases are, instead of trusting that limited travel bans were keeping out a virus that was probably already on the march,” said former FDA Commissioner David Kessler.

That wasn’t how the president viewed it.

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted on Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

But once the CDC finally began its national testing regime, it faltered in almost every way imaginable.

The initial tests didn’t work, and officials are probing whether there was possible contamination. The protocol for who could be tested was restricted to people already known to have been exposed to the virus or who had been in China, even as the epidemic raced to multiple countries like Japan, South Korea, Italy and Iran.

Decisions about testing are usually made by scientists, but Democrats have accused the White House of putting politics above expertise — and lacking a coherent response.

“We are staring down a potential pandemic,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently. “We have a crisis of coronavirus, and President Trump has no plan, no urgency, no understanding of the facts or how to coordinate a response.”

The failures weren’t by any means the CDC’s alone. The FDA did not immediately trigger a regulatory workaround enabling qualified medical centers to roll out tests that they had designed themselves — tests that are now starting to become more widely available.

And the mistakes were not just in testing.

Trump repeatedly boasted of airport screening and travel restrictions — which Azar and other administration leaders touted as aggressive and historic in their scope — but experts told POLITICO that those measures that were far too little, too late, and too focused on China.

“I closed them down very early, against the advice of almost everybody, and we’ve been given rave reviews,” Trump proclaimed to a Fox News audience at a televised town hall this week.

But after the virus started spreading and cases popped up outside China, the U.S. policy did not immediately change.

Other failures appear to have been related to a lack of preparation within agencies that spanned administrations but certainly continued through the first three years of Trump’s tenure.

Masks and gowns were in short supply despite years of talk about bulking up federal emergency stockpiles — without Congress appropriating enough money. A whistleblower has alleged HHS staff were inadequately protected when greeting U.S. evacuees returning from Wuhan, China. The CDC has had trouble wrangling passenger information from airlines to contact people who may have been exposed on flights, administration officials said. And health officials are trying to figure out how to handle a second “floating petri dish” in the Pacific, another cruise ship contagion with elderly passengers at high risk. With some passengers already sick, test kits were delivered by helicopter.

James Lawler, a global-health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security, where some coronavirus evacuees are being treated and the possible course of the epidemic is being modeled, said the government’s failures have been so extensive that when asked what went wrong, he parried, “What went right?”

Airport passenger screening has gotten less scrutiny than testing, but it appears to be lagging, too. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told House lawmakers that Customs and Border Protection and medical staff had screened more than 50,000 passengers on flights from China and Iran who were funneled through 11 airports. But the screening, which involved measures such as testing people for elevated body temperatures, may have detected only one in three infected travelers arriving from overseas, Harvard School of Public Health communicable disease expert Marc Lipsitch told a news briefing this week.

“I think you could have certainly hundreds, if not more, cases around the United States by this point,” he said.

In recent days, the administration has stressed the seriousness of its preparations and downplayed partisan politics. It hailed the bipartisan support for an $8.3 billion emergency spending bill to rush money and supplies to states, hospitals and labs, as well as to key federal agencies searching for vaccines, treatments and shorter term solutions to minimize the spread.

But at many times, administration officials have seemed to be under political pressure to minimize the risks of the coronavirus, partly to fall in line with the president’s own statements. Trump has often downplayed the severity of the outbreak, contradicting the top government scientists squirming right by his side. At other times, health officials have outlined the risks of a major epidemic while Trump’s economic officials, eyeing the plunging stock markets, have insisted that everything’s under control.

“We have contained this,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow insisted to a television interviewer on Feb. 25. “I won’t say airtight but pretty close.”

Two days later, the CDC reported the first case of community transmission, meaning there was no known link to any travel. More would follow.

* * *

The cascade of miscues and misjudgments continues to challenge the U.S health care system, the economy and the national transportation network, as the Trump administration struggles to mount a response in an era of rancor, disunity and distrust.

The rivalries in the administration — between health agencies such as the FDA and CDC, and between individual officials — that appeared to hamper the initial response have been only partly quelled by the appointment of Pence as leader of the task force. This week, Pence sidelined Azar while adding new officials, like Medicare chief Seema Verma, to the group of officials joining the vice president for his news briefings.

“The level of chaos with which the administration has greeted the spread of coronavirus is unacceptable and frankly frightening,” several dozen House Democrats wrote in a letter to Trump this week, citing “wildly conflicting answers to critical questions” that suggest a lack of coordination and communication among crucial federal agencies.

And science can be hard: Experts can fumble. Assessments of risk and plans of counterattack change as scientists learn more about a new virus that is believed to have leapt from bat to pangolin to human and then surreptitiously swept across the planet.

The disease has now spread to more than 60 countries in six continents, sickening more than 100,000 and killing well over 3,000.

Soon there will be a second wave of decisions to be made about controlling the “hot spots” emerging in the U.S. — politically sensitive moves that could disrupt daily lives and damage businesses. Some of those steps may turn out to be mistaken as well — and intrinsically difficult public health measures will be even harder to carry out if people get mixed messages from the government and don’t know whom or what to believe.

Some state and local public health agencies and political leaders have begun to order quarantines of people who might have been exposed to the virus and canceled schools and events in order to stop the progress of the disease.

While the administration has been supportive of some of those moves, it is still sending mixed signals.

“I know events are being canceled,” Kudlow told CNBC on Friday. “I wish they wouldn’t be canceled, because I think there may be overreaction in certain cases.”

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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washparkhorn

washparkhorn 9,939

Posted
Posted (edited)
11 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

This tweet has already been debunked. 

Thanks, but I am not seeing that.

The presenter - Dr. Lawler - was part of the NU team on Ebola and he did give that presentation on his views on Corona and hospital load in a AHA presentation. The timeframe was questioned (2 mos) but AHA confirmed this was legitimate and part of their work. 

Here is Lawler - https://www.nebraskamed.com/biocontainment/ebola/nebraska-medicine-unmc-sends-ebola-response-team-to-uganda

But - seriously - let me know if there is anything additional I should know. 

If this is merely a fight between the "it's just as deadly as the flu" v. "it's worse" camps - not interested.

Hospitals are preparing with great haste as cases show up in their states. They are making interesting employment policy positions, so I would like to know whether they are downplaying, overplaying or just doing the right thing.

 

Thank you.

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RomaVicta

RomaVicta 29,964

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, DixonHur said:

So these idiots believe there is a Deep State powerful enough to secretly launch global biological warfare just to hurt Trump's reelection campaign (editor's note: surely there are easier ways), but couldn't get Hillary elected?

They believe that Obama is both a Muslim terrorist and Black Christian revolutionary.

They believe Hillary is a secret lesbian who had an affair with Vince Foster whom she had murdered.

They think they're anti-government while calling the press, attorneys, and unions enemies of the state.

 

This thing about the deep state is eezy-peezy for these double thinkers.

War is Peace

Ignorance is Strength

Plague is Conspiracy

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29,194

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing-failure-123166

 

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

“We developed a test very rapidly after China produced the [genetic] sequence. We are in the process of validating that and that’s the test we’re going to be using,” said the CDC’s Stephen Redd, a 30-year veteran of the agency, at a recent briefing, even as members of the presidential task force acknowledged that the pace of testing had lagged.

Azar, who initially led the White House response and has now been sidelined by Pence, also has kept defending the testing regime.

“We’ve actually been progressing with this on par with our peer countries,” he told reporters recently.

* * *

The government’s incapacity to conduct widespread testing slowed diagnoses, creating chains of infection. It also deprived epidemiologists of a map that could have told them how far and how fast the virus was traveling and where they should concentrate efforts to slow it down.

But there were additional problems with the administration’s approach to testing, according to experts and former officials. From the start, the White House focused on containment, trusting that a limited ban on travel to and from China could somehow force a fast-moving virus to stop cold when it hit the Chinese border. But, while containment might have helped buy the U.S. some time, without aggressive domestic surveillance through testing, it was an incomplete strategy.

“They needed and still need to be searching for where the cases are, instead of trusting that limited travel bans were keeping out a virus that was probably already on the march,” said former FDA Commissioner David Kessler.

That wasn’t how the president viewed it.

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted on Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

But once the CDC finally began its national testing regime, it faltered in almost every way imaginable.

The initial tests didn’t work, and officials are probing whether there was possible contamination. The protocol for who could be tested was restricted to people already known to have been exposed to the virus or who had been in China, even as the epidemic raced to multiple countries like Japan, South Korea, Italy and Iran.

Decisions about testing are usually made by scientists, but Democrats have accused the White House of putting politics above expertise — and lacking a coherent response.

“We are staring down a potential pandemic,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently. “We have a crisis of coronavirus, and President Trump has no plan, no urgency, no understanding of the facts or how to coordinate a response.”

The failures weren’t by any means the CDC’s alone. The FDA did not immediately trigger a regulatory workaround enabling qualified medical centers to roll out tests that they had designed themselves — tests that are now starting to become more widely available.

And the mistakes were not just in testing.

Trump repeatedly boasted of airport screening and travel restrictions — which Azar and other administration leaders touted as aggressive and historic in their scope — but experts told POLITICO that those measures that were far too little, too late, and too focused on China.

“I closed them down very early, against the advice of almost everybody, and we’ve been given rave reviews,” Trump proclaimed to a Fox News audience at a televised town hall this week.

But after the virus started spreading and cases popped up outside China, the U.S. policy did not immediately change.

Other failures appear to have been related to a lack of preparation within agencies that spanned administrations but certainly continued through the first three years of Trump’s tenure.

Masks and gowns were in short supply despite years of talk about bulking up federal emergency stockpiles — without Congress appropriating enough money. A whistleblower has alleged HHS staff were inadequately protected when greeting U.S. evacuees returning from Wuhan, China. The CDC has had trouble wrangling passenger information from airlines to contact people who may have been exposed on flights, administration officials said. And health officials are trying to figure out how to handle a second “floating petri dish” in the Pacific, another cruise ship contagion with elderly passengers at high risk. With some passengers already sick, test kits were delivered by helicopter.

James Lawler, a global-health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security, where some coronavirus evacuees are being treated and the possible course of the epidemic is being modeled, said the government’s failures have been so extensive that when asked what went wrong, he parried, “What went right?”

Airport passenger screening has gotten less scrutiny than testing, but it appears to be lagging, too. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told House lawmakers that Customs and Border Protection and medical staff had screened more than 50,000 passengers on flights from China and Iran who were funneled through 11 airports. But the screening, which involved measures such as testing people for elevated body temperatures, may have detected only one in three infected travelers arriving from overseas, Harvard School of Public Health communicable disease expert Marc Lipsitch told a news briefing this week.

“I think you could have certainly hundreds, if not more, cases around the United States by this point,” he said.

In recent days, the administration has stressed the seriousness of its preparations and downplayed partisan politics. It hailed the bipartisan support for an $8.3 billion emergency spending bill to rush money and supplies to states, hospitals and labs, as well as to key federal agencies searching for vaccines, treatments and shorter term solutions to minimize the spread.

But at many times, administration officials have seemed to be under political pressure to minimize the risks of the coronavirus, partly to fall in line with the president’s own statements. Trump has often downplayed the severity of the outbreak, contradicting the top government scientists squirming right by his side. At other times, health officials have outlined the risks of a major epidemic while Trump’s economic officials, eyeing the plunging stock markets, have insisted that everything’s under control.

“We have contained this,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow insisted to a television interviewer on Feb. 25. “I won’t say airtight but pretty close.”

Two days later, the CDC reported the first case of community transmission, meaning there was no known link to any travel. More would follow.

* * *

The cascade of miscues and misjudgments continues to challenge the U.S health care system, the economy and the national transportation network, as the Trump administration struggles to mount a response in an era of rancor, disunity and distrust.

The rivalries in the administration — between health agencies such as the FDA and CDC, and between individual officials — that appeared to hamper the initial response have been only partly quelled by the appointment of Pence as leader of the task force. This week, Pence sidelined Azar while adding new officials, like Medicare chief Seema Verma, to the group of officials joining the vice president for his news briefings.

“The level of chaos with which the administration has greeted the spread of coronavirus is unacceptable and frankly frightening,” several dozen House Democrats wrote in a letter to Trump this week, citing “wildly conflicting answers to critical questions” that suggest a lack of coordination and communication among crucial federal agencies.

And science can be hard: Experts can fumble. Assessments of risk and plans of counterattack change as scientists learn more about a new virus that is believed to have leapt from bat to pangolin to human and then surreptitiously swept across the planet.

The disease has now spread to more than 60 countries in six continents, sickening more than 100,000 and killing well over 3,000.

Soon there will be a second wave of decisions to be made about controlling the “hot spots” emerging in the U.S. — politically sensitive moves that could disrupt daily lives and damage businesses. Some of those steps may turn out to be mistaken as well — and intrinsically difficult public health measures will be even harder to carry out if people get mixed messages from the government and don’t know whom or what to believe.

Some state and local public health agencies and political leaders have begun to order quarantines of people who might have been exposed to the virus and canceled schools and events in order to stop the progress of the disease.

While the administration has been supportive of some of those moves, it is still sending mixed signals.

“I know events are being canceled,” Kudlow told CNBC on Friday. “I wish they wouldn’t be canceled, because I think there may be overreaction in certain cases.”

 

he's a criminal.  he's disgusting.  he's racist, sexist, xenophobic.  he's a pathological liar. 

but this is another classic example of why he should lose in november - he's really bad at being president.

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JimmyJames

JimmyJames 12,271

Posted
Posted
53 minutes ago, GRHorn said:

If it took half a million deaths and a likely deep recession to get Trump out would you take it?

No. Trump’s gonna lose badly in November anyway. His bungling of this as a result of his and his administration’s obvious total incompetence will just hasten the demise of dear leader and many other people. Nobody wants people to die despite your projection. 

Or do you agree that dear leader has handled this “perfectly.” 

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 46,046

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

Cross-posted in the non-political forum thread. American Hospital Association is warning hospitals Covid19 is 10x worse than the flu.

 

That doesn't seem to make sense.  2 months is ~ 61 days.  If we start with last week's number of 421 cases, we need to add another week, bringing us to 68 days.  Using the most extreme doubling time (7 days) quoted for an R0 of 2.5, that would mean we should expect our caseload to have doubled 9.7 times by early May (68 / 7).

2^9.7 = 832X cases

421 x 832 = 350,000 cases in two months.

 

That's a long way from 96,000,000 cases. 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32,406

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Posted (edited)

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/07/trump-coronavirus-management-style-123465

 

Quote

On Friday, as coronavirus infections rapidly multiplied aboard a cruise ship marooned off the coast of California, health department officials and Vice President Mike Pence came up with a plan to evacuate thousands of passengers, avoiding the fate of a similar cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, which became a petri dish of coronavirus infections. Quickly removing passengers was the safest outcome, health officials and Pence reasoned.

 

Quote

But President Donald Trump had a different idea: Leave the infected passengers on board — which would help keep the number of U.S. coronavirus cases as low as possible.

“Do I want to bring all those people off? People would like me to do it,” Trump admitted at a press conference at the CDC later on Friday. “I would rather have them stay on, personally.”

“I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault,” Trump added, saying that he ultimately empowered Pence to decide whether to evacuate the passengers.

 

Quote

For six weeks behind the scenes, and now increasingly in public, Trump has undermined his administration’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak — resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear. Members of Congress have grilled top officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield over the government’s biggest mistake: failing to secure enough testing to head off a coronavirus outbreak in the United States. But many current and former Trump administration officials say the true management failure was Trump’s.

 

Quote

“It always ladders to the top,” said one person helping advise the administration’s response, who noted that Trump’s aides discouraged Azar from briefing the president about the coronavirus threat back in January. “Trump’s created an atmosphere where the judgment of his staff is that he shouldn’t need to know these things.”

 

Spoiler

Interviews with 13 current and former officials, as well as individuals close to the White House, painted a picture of a president who rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news. For instance, aides heaped praise on Trump for his efforts to lock down travel from China — appealing to the president’s comfort zone of border security — but failed to convey the importance of doing simultaneous community testing, which could have uncovered a potential U.S. outbreak. Government officials and independent scientists now fear that the coronavirus has been silently spreading in the United States for weeks, as unexplained cases have popped up in more than 25 states.

“It’s a clearly difficult situation when the top wants to hear certain answers,” said one former official who’s briefed the White House. “That can make it difficult for folks to express their true assessment — even the most experienced and independent minds.”

While Trump last week allowed hospitals and labs to start developing their own coronavirus tests, wrongly blaming Obama administration regulations for a delay, the same move could have been made weeks ago had the president and his advisers felt it was necessary, said two officials.

The White House press office declined to comment on the record, referring questions to HHS.

The health department said that Trump had been responsive to the department's concerns and understood the seriousness of the coronavirus threat from the first day he was briefed.

"The President took early and decisive actions like instituting travel restrictions and utilizing the quarantine authority" to protect Americans from the outbreak, an HHS spokesperson said.

HHS also stressed that Azar and Trump had a good working relationship.

"The Secretary always offers the President his honest assessment, and always insists when briefing the President on public health issues that the relevant experts participate," the spokesperson said.

Trump-inspired disorganization plagues early response

As the outbreak has grown, Trump has become attached to the daily count of coronavirus cases and how the United States compares to other nations, reiterating that he wants the U.S. numbers kept as low as possible. Health officials have found explicit ways to oblige him by highlighting the most optimistic outcomes in briefings, and their agencies have tamped down on promised transparency. The CDC has stopped detailing how many people in the country have been tested for the virus, and its online dashboard is running well behind the number of U.S. cases tracked by Johns Hopkins and even lags the European Union’s own estimate of U.S. cases.

After senior CDC official Nancy Messonnier correctly warned on Feb. 25 that a U.S. coronavirus outbreak was inevitable, a statement that spooked the stock market and broke from the president’s own message that the situation was under control, Trump himself grew angry and administration officials discussed muzzling Messonnier for the duration of the coronavirus crisis, said two individuals close to the administration. However, Azar defended her role, and Messonnier ultimately was allowed to continue making public appearances, although her tone grew less dire in subsequent briefings. 

Trump’s defenders can point to many coronavirus crises that, so far, have been failures of bureaucracy and disorganization. The president didn’t lock out a government scientist from CDC. He didn’t know that officials decided to fly back coronavirus-infected Americans aboard planes with hundreds of others who had tested negative, with Trump bursting in anger when he learned the news.

But Trump has added to that disorganization through his own decisions. Rather than empower a sole leader to fight the outbreak, as President Barack Obama did with Ebola in 2014, he set up a system where at least three different people — Azar, Vice President Mike Pence and coronavirus task force coordinator Debbie Birx — can claim responsibility. Three people who have dealt with the task force said it’s not clear what Birx’s role is, and that coronavirus-related questions sent to her have been rerouted to the vice president’s office. 

In response, Pence’s office said it has positioned Birx as the vice president’s “right arm,” advising him on the response, while Azar continues to oversee the health department's numerous coronavirus operations.

Trump on Friday night also shook up White House operations, replacing acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney with Rep. Mark Meadows, a longtime ally. The long-expected ouster of Mulvaney was welcomed in corners like the health department, given that Mulvaney had been one of Azar’s top critics. But the abrupt staff shuffle in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak injects further uncertainty into the government’s response, said a current official and two former officials. It’s not yet clear what Mulvaney’s departure will mean for his key lieutenants involved in fighting the outbreak, like Domestic Policy Council chief Joe Grogan, for instance.

“Every office has office politics — even the Oval Office,” said one individual. “You’d hope we could wait to work it out until after a public health emergency.”

Health officials compete for Trump’s approval

The pressure to earn Trump’s approval can be a distraction at best and an obsession at worst: Azar, having just survived a bruising clash with a deputy and sensing that his job was on the line, spent part of January making appearances on conservative TV outlets and taking other steps to shore up his anti-abortion bona fides and win approval from the president, even as the global coronavirus outbreak grew stronger.

“We have in President Trump the greatest protector of religious liberty who has ever sat in the Oval Office,” Azar said on Fox News on Jan. 16, hours after working to rally global health leaders to fight the United Nations’ stance on abortion rights. Trump also had lashed out at Azar over bad health-care polling that day. 

Around the same time, Azar had concluded that the new coronavirus posed a public health risk and tried to share an urgent message with the president: The potential outbreak could leave tens of thousands of Americans sickened and many dead.

But Trump’s aides mocked and belittled Azar as alarmist, as he warned the president of a major threat to public health and his own economic agenda, said three people briefed on the conversations. Some officials argued that the virus would be no worse than the flu.

Azar, meanwhile, had his own worries: A clash with Medicare chief Seema Verma had weakened his standing in the White House, which in December had considered replacements for both Azar and Verma.

“Because he feels pretty insecure, about the feuds within his department and the desire to please the president, I don’t know if he was in the position to deliver the message that the president didn’t want to hear,” said one former official who's worked with Azar.

The jockeying for Trump’s favor was part of the cause of Azar’s destructive feud with Verma, as the two tried to box each other out of events touting Trump initiatives. Now, officials including Azar, Verma and other senior leaders are forced to spend time shoring up their positions with the president and his deputies at a moment when they should be focused on a shared goal: stopping a potential pandemic.

“The boss has made it clear, he likes to see his people fight, and he wants the news to be good,” said one adviser to a senior health official involved in the coronavirus response. “This is the world he’s made.”

President swayed by flattery, personal appeals

Trump’s unpredictable demands and attention to public statements — and his own susceptibility to flattery — have created an administration where top officials feel constantly at siege, worried that the next presidential tweet will decide their professional future, and panicked that they need to regularly impress him.

The most obvious practitioner of this strategy is Azar, who became Trump’s second health secretary after the first, Tom Price, failed to bond with Trump and was ousted over a charter-jet scandal. Azar decided early in his tenure to have “zero daylight” with the president, said three individuals close to him, and the health secretary routinely fawns over the president in his TV appearances on Fox News. “No other president has had the guts, the courage to take on these special interests,” Azar told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in December after Trump pushed new price transparency on the health care industry. 

Azar’s team also has insisted upon using background photos for his Twitter account that always show him with the president — sometimes silently standing behind Trump while he speaks. Azar is alone among Cabinet members in this practice; secretaries like HUD’s Ben Carson, Transportation’s Elaine Chao and Treasury’s Steven Mnuchin opted for bland Twitter backgrounds that show their headquarters.

"The Secretary respects the President and values their strong relationship," said an HHS spokesperson, when asked about Azar’s approach to working with Trump and use of Twitter photos.

Other health officials have modeled similar behavior as Azar. Asked by Trump if he wanted to make a “little statement” on Friday, CDC Director Redfield responded by praising the president’s “decisive leadership” and visit to CDC headquarters amid the outbreak. “I think that’s the most important thing I want to say,” Redfield said.

At least one health official has offered a more subtle reminder of her loyalties. Verma wore an Ivanka Trump-brand pendant to some meetings and events with the president, before it was stolen in 2018.

Health officials also have to guard their words and predictions, worried that the president will fixate on the wrong data point or blurt out damaging information in public. Trump on Friday told reporters that he’d initially scrapped a trip to the CDC because of a possible coronavirus case at the agency. The announcement came as a surprise to CDC staff, including those preparing for Trump’s visit, because they hadn’t been briefed on the potential coronavirus case, POLITICO first reported.

Meanwhile, Trump’s political allies have tried to circumvent the policy process, causing further headaches for the overwhelmed health department. Alabama Republicans prevailed upon Trump to scrap an HHS contingency plan to potentially quarantine some coronavirus-infected Americans at a facility in their state last month. 

“I just got off the phone with the President,” Sen. Richard Shelby tweeted on Feb. 23. “He told me that his administration will not be sending any victims of the Coronavirus from the Diamond Princess cruise ship to Anniston, Alabama.” 

But Democrats in a California city facing a similar situation failed to get a similar guarantee, leading them to file a lawsuit that accused the administration of political favoritism.

“California must not have the pull to get taken off the list,” attorney Jennifer Keller, representing Costa Mesa, Calif., reportedly said during a court hearing last month. “Alabama does.” A federal judge later halted plans to transfer coronavirus-stricken patients to a facility in the city.

Meanwhile, the president has allowed feuds to fester and spill into public view. Azar, for instance, has battled with White House officials and Verma for months over policies, personnel and even seats aboard the presidential airplane. Those fights have been reignited amid the coronavirus crisis, when Azar clashed with longtime rivals like Grogan over funding the response and whether enough coronavirus tests were being performed. 

They’ve also cast a long shadow over strategy, like Azar’s decision not to push for Verma to be added to the coronavirus task force that he oversaw for nearly a month. Verma instead was added to the task force on March 2, several days after Pence took over leading the effort. While Azar said he asked for Verma to join the task force, and an HHS spokesperson pointed to the secretary’s public statement, two people with knowledge of task force operations said that the White House officials had raised questions about her omission. 

Officials call the original decision to exclude Verma from the task force short-sighted at best, given the virus’ potential threat to the elderly patients covered by the Medicare program and residents living in nursing homes that are regulated by Verma’s agency.

With Trump unwilling — or unable — to put a stop to the health department's fights, they’ve occupied and gripped Washington during relative peacetime. When at war against a potential pandemic, there’s no room for these distractions, officials say.

“If this sort of dysfunction exists as part of the everyday operations — then, yes, during a true crisis the problems are magnified and exacerbated,” said a former Trump HHS official. “And with extremely detrimental consequences.”

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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RayDog

RayDog 682

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27 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

That doesn't seem to make sense.  2 months is ~ 61 days.  If we start with last week's number of 421 cases, we need to add another week, bringing us to 68 days.  Using the most extreme doubling time (7 days) quoted for an R0 of 2.5, that would mean we should expect our caseload to have doubled 9.7 times by early May (68 / 7).

2^9.7 = 832X cases

421 x 832 = 350,000 cases in two months.

 

That's a long way from 96,000,000 cases. 

Except the real number of infections is closer to 100,000 now. The real R0 when there is no containment  is 4 to 7 with the real doubling rate at 2.5 to 4 days.

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28,795

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2 hours ago, triplehorn said:

https://mobile.twitter.com/learyreports/status/1236451644612714496

at Mar-a-Lago tonight: “I’m not concerned at all,” the president said when asked about Coronavirus getting closer to White House. “We’ll hold tremendous rallies,” he said — rallies will continue.

Excellent. 

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DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt

DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12,301

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53 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/07/trump-coronavirus-management-style-123465

 

 

 

 

 

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Interviews with 13 current and former officials, as well as individuals close to the White House, painted a picture of a president who rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news. For instance, aides heaped praise on Trump for his efforts to lock down travel from China — appealing to the president’s comfort zone of border security — but failed to convey the importance of doing simultaneous community testing, which could have uncovered a potential U.S. outbreak. Government officials and independent scientists now fear that the coronavirus has been silently spreading in the United States for weeks, as unexplained cases have popped up in more than 25 states.

“It’s a clearly difficult situation when the top wants to hear certain answers,” said one former official who’s briefed the White House. “That can make it difficult for folks to express their true assessment — even the most experienced and independent minds.”

While Trump last week allowed hospitals and labs to start developing their own coronavirus tests, wrongly blaming Obama administration regulations for a delay, the same move could have been made weeks ago had the president and his advisers felt it was necessary, said two officials.

The White House press office declined to comment on the record, referring questions to HHS.

The health department said that Trump had been responsive to the department's concerns and understood the seriousness of the coronavirus threat from the first day he was briefed.

"The President took early and decisive actions like instituting travel restrictions and utilizing the quarantine authority" to protect Americans from the outbreak, an HHS spokesperson said.

HHS also stressed that Azar and Trump had a good working relationship.

"The Secretary always offers the President his honest assessment, and always insists when briefing the President on public health issues that the relevant experts participate," the spokesperson said.

Trump-inspired disorganization plagues early response

As the outbreak has grown, Trump has become attached to the daily count of coronavirus cases and how the United States compares to other nations, reiterating that he wants the U.S. numbers kept as low as possible. Health officials have found explicit ways to oblige him by highlighting the most optimistic outcomes in briefings, and their agencies have tamped down on promised transparency. The CDC has stopped detailing how many people in the country have been tested for the virus, and its online dashboard is running well behind the number of U.S. cases tracked by Johns Hopkins and even lags the European Union’s own estimate of U.S. cases.

After senior CDC official Nancy Messonnier correctly warned on Feb. 25 that a U.S. coronavirus outbreak was inevitable, a statement that spooked the stock market and broke from the president’s own message that the situation was under control, Trump himself grew angry and administration officials discussed muzzling Messonnier for the duration of the coronavirus crisis, said two individuals close to the administration. However, Azar defended her role, and Messonnier ultimately was allowed to continue making public appearances, although her tone grew less dire in subsequent briefings. 

Trump’s defenders can point to many coronavirus crises that, so far, have been failures of bureaucracy and disorganization. The president didn’t lock out a government scientist from CDC. He didn’t know that officials decided to fly back coronavirus-infected Americans aboard planes with hundreds of others who had tested negative, with Trump bursting in anger when he learned the news.

But Trump has added to that disorganization through his own decisions. Rather than empower a sole leader to fight the outbreak, as President Barack Obama did with Ebola in 2014, he set up a system where at least three different people — Azar, Vice President Mike Pence and coronavirus task force coordinator Debbie Birx — can claim responsibility. Three people who have dealt with the task force said it’s not clear what Birx’s role is, and that coronavirus-related questions sent to her have been rerouted to the vice president’s office. 

In response, Pence’s office said it has positioned Birx as the vice president’s “right arm,” advising him on the response, while Azar continues to oversee the health department's numerous coronavirus operations.

Trump on Friday night also shook up White House operations, replacing acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney with Rep. Mark Meadows, a longtime ally. The long-expected ouster of Mulvaney was welcomed in corners like the health department, given that Mulvaney had been one of Azar’s top critics. But the abrupt staff shuffle in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak injects further uncertainty into the government’s response, said a current official and two former officials. It’s not yet clear what Mulvaney’s departure will mean for his key lieutenants involved in fighting the outbreak, like Domestic Policy Council chief Joe Grogan, for instance.

“Every office has office politics — even the Oval Office,” said one individual. “You’d hope we could wait to work it out until after a public health emergency.”

Health officials compete for Trump’s approval

The pressure to earn Trump’s approval can be a distraction at best and an obsession at worst: Azar, having just survived a bruising clash with a deputy and sensing that his job was on the line, spent part of January making appearances on conservative TV outlets and taking other steps to shore up his anti-abortion bona fides and win approval from the president, even as the global coronavirus outbreak grew stronger.

“We have in President Trump the greatest protector of religious liberty who has ever sat in the Oval Office,” Azar said on Fox News on Jan. 16, hours after working to rally global health leaders to fight the United Nations’ stance on abortion rights. Trump also had lashed out at Azar over bad health-care polling that day. 

Around the same time, Azar had concluded that the new coronavirus posed a public health risk and tried to share an urgent message with the president: The potential outbreak could leave tens of thousands of Americans sickened and many dead.

But Trump’s aides mocked and belittled Azar as alarmist, as he warned the president of a major threat to public health and his own economic agenda, said three people briefed on the conversations. Some officials argued that the virus would be no worse than the flu.

Azar, meanwhile, had his own worries: A clash with Medicare chief Seema Verma had weakened his standing in the White House, which in December had considered replacements for both Azar and Verma.

“Because he feels pretty insecure, about the feuds within his department and the desire to please the president, I don’t know if he was in the position to deliver the message that the president didn’t want to hear,” said one former official who's worked with Azar.

The jockeying for Trump’s favor was part of the cause of Azar’s destructive feud with Verma, as the two tried to box each other out of events touting Trump initiatives. Now, officials including Azar, Verma and other senior leaders are forced to spend time shoring up their positions with the president and his deputies at a moment when they should be focused on a shared goal: stopping a potential pandemic.

“The boss has made it clear, he likes to see his people fight, and he wants the news to be good,” said one adviser to a senior health official involved in the coronavirus response. “This is the world he’s made.”

President swayed by flattery, personal appeals

Trump’s unpredictable demands and attention to public statements — and his own susceptibility to flattery — have created an administration where top officials feel constantly at siege, worried that the next presidential tweet will decide their professional future, and panicked that they need to regularly impress him.

The most obvious practitioner of this strategy is Azar, who became Trump’s second health secretary after the first, Tom Price, failed to bond with Trump and was ousted over a charter-jet scandal. Azar decided early in his tenure to have “zero daylight” with the president, said three individuals close to him, and the health secretary routinely fawns over the president in his TV appearances on Fox News. “No other president has had the guts, the courage to take on these special interests,” Azar told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in December after Trump pushed new price transparency on the health care industry. 

Azar’s team also has insisted upon using background photos for his Twitter account that always show him with the president — sometimes silently standing behind Trump while he speaks. Azar is alone among Cabinet members in this practice; secretaries like HUD’s Ben Carson, Transportation’s Elaine Chao and Treasury’s Steven Mnuchin opted for bland Twitter backgrounds that show their headquarters.

"The Secretary respects the President and values their strong relationship," said an HHS spokesperson, when asked about Azar’s approach to working with Trump and use of Twitter photos.

Other health officials have modeled similar behavior as Azar. Asked by Trump if he wanted to make a “little statement” on Friday, CDC Director Redfield responded by praising the president’s “decisive leadership” and visit to CDC headquarters amid the outbreak. “I think that’s the most important thing I want to say,” Redfield said.

At least one health official has offered a more subtle reminder of her loyalties. Verma wore an Ivanka Trump-brand pendant to some meetings and events with the president, before it was stolen in 2018.

Health officials also have to guard their words and predictions, worried that the president will fixate on the wrong data point or blurt out damaging information in public. Trump on Friday told reporters that he’d initially scrapped a trip to the CDC because of a possible coronavirus case at the agency. The announcement came as a surprise to CDC staff, including those preparing for Trump’s visit, because they hadn’t been briefed on the potential coronavirus case, POLITICO first reported.

Meanwhile, Trump’s political allies have tried to circumvent the policy process, causing further headaches for the overwhelmed health department. Alabama Republicans prevailed upon Trump to scrap an HHS contingency plan to potentially quarantine some coronavirus-infected Americans at a facility in their state last month. 

“I just got off the phone with the President,” Sen. Richard Shelby tweeted on Feb. 23. “He told me that his administration will not be sending any victims of the Coronavirus from the Diamond Princess cruise ship to Anniston, Alabama.” 

But Democrats in a California city facing a similar situation failed to get a similar guarantee, leading them to file a lawsuit that accused the administration of political favoritism.

“California must not have the pull to get taken off the list,” attorney Jennifer Keller, representing Costa Mesa, Calif., reportedly said during a court hearing last month. “Alabama does.” A federal judge later halted plans to transfer coronavirus-stricken patients to a facility in the city.

Meanwhile, the president has allowed feuds to fester and spill into public view. Azar, for instance, has battled with White House officials and Verma for months over policies, personnel and even seats aboard the presidential airplane. Those fights have been reignited amid the coronavirus crisis, when Azar clashed with longtime rivals like Grogan over funding the response and whether enough coronavirus tests were being performed. 

They’ve also cast a long shadow over strategy, like Azar’s decision not to push for Verma to be added to the coronavirus task force that he oversaw for nearly a month. Verma instead was added to the task force on March 2, several days after Pence took over leading the effort. While Azar said he asked for Verma to join the task force, and an HHS spokesperson pointed to the secretary’s public statement, two people with knowledge of task force operations said that the White House officials had raised questions about her omission. 

Officials call the original decision to exclude Verma from the task force short-sighted at best, given the virus’ potential threat to the elderly patients covered by the Medicare program and residents living in nursing homes that are regulated by Verma’s agency.

With Trump unwilling — or unable — to put a stop to the health department's fights, they’ve occupied and gripped Washington during relative peacetime. When at war against a potential pandemic, there’s no room for these distractions, officials say.

“If this sort of dysfunction exists as part of the everyday operations — then, yes, during a true crisis the problems are magnified and exacerbated,” said a former Trump HHS official. “And with extremely detrimental consequences.”

 

Fake news

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bolverk

bolverk 29,705

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1 hour ago, GRHorn said:

That’s a fresh take. I’ll add one back. Everyone knows the rules of the competition. 

To answer your original question, no, I wouldn't take those deaths as some sort of make believe tribute you're trying to ascribe in your sadistic question.

That said, your query does show that you might now have started to have an inkling about his utter fucking incompetence, so that's progress.

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achooloco

achooloco 1,072

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3 hours ago, GRHorn said:

If it took half a million deaths and a likely deep recession to get Trump out would you take it?

With epa evisceration and climate denying, could you really tell the difference in KIA in the end?

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29,194

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2 hours ago, Message Board User said:

 

jokes aside, if trump were symptomatic, the general public would never hear about it.

if covid tests were administered on trump, the general public would never hear about it.

if trump tested positive for coronavirus, the general public would never hear about it.

seriously, the only way we would ever know if trump was infected, is if he died from it.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105,200

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If it took half a million deaths and a likely deep recession to get Trump out would you take it?

It’s not up to us. It’s up to a fucking moron you support, whose election made an outcome like this inevitable. A crisis like this is fucking EXACTLY why many of us sounded the alarm about him well before the weekend. He’s utterly and completely, 100% incapable of handling anything like this.
Many people are going to die. The economy is going to take a big hit.
It’s not my fault. Fuck, it’s not Trump’s fault. It’s YOUR fault - you put him in the Oval Office. Reap the fucking whirlwind, you fucking idiot.
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