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Javier E

Opinion | Trump Is Asking Us to Play Russian Roulette With Our Lives - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-coronavirus-testing.html

trump response pandemic strategies testing

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • More specifically: As a society, we will be betting that as large numbers of people stop sheltering in place, the number of people who will still get infected with Covid-19 and require hospitalization will be less than the number of hospital beds, intensive care units, respirators, doctors, nurses and protective gear needed to take care of them.
  • it is clear that millions of Americans are going to stop sheltering in place — their own President is now urging them to liberate themselves — before we have a proper testing, tracking and tracing system set up.
  • Until we have a vaccine, that kind of system is the only path to dramatically lowering the risk of infection while partially opening society — while also protecting the elderly and infirm — as Germany has demonstrated.
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  • What will be so cruel about this American version of Russian roulette is how unfair it will be
  • This is the state of play when you have a president who one minute is responsibly issuing sober guidelines for when and how people should go back to work, and the next minute is telling states that they are responsible for getting the testing, tracking and tracing units that we need in place and then, in the third minute, is inciting people on Twitter to “liberate” their workplaces, cities and beaches — even though none of the conditions are in place to do so safely.
  • “Liberate”? Think about the use of that word. We were not in jail! We were not doing something wrong! We were doing what our president, governor, mayor, and national epidemic experts told us to do: behave responsibly and shelter in place to break the transmission of this virus.
  • Is there anything more irresponsible that this president could do, after weeks of complimenting the American people for how they pulled together and sacrificed to shelter in place — patriotically doing their part to bend the curve of this virus?
  • When the president is calling on governors to “let their people go” before comprehensive testing facilities are in place, he is basically saying that, until there is a vaccine, we are betting on herd immunity. Achieving herd immunity requires that more than two-thirds of a community be immune, a process that could involve many more deaths, if proper preparations are not in place.
  • That may work out for some places and people. It may not.
  • First, this is the bet Trump is urging you to make in his “liberate” tweets — when he should be ordering out the National Guard and mobilizing American industry to get testing everywhere.
  • Second, this bet will fall very unfairly and unevenly in our society, when so little testing and tracing is in place.
  • third, if this is the future, every business, restaurant, hotel, theater, sporting facility, factory, nonprofit and government office needs to ask itself: What does my business look like when, on the best days, the responsible people coming to my door will be wearing a mask, gloves, distancing six feet apart and volunteering to have their temperature taken before they enter, and the irresponsible ones won’t be? How do I handle that?
  • Bottom line, my fellow Americans: Your president is telling you that you’re on your own to make these decisions. And if this strategy works, you can be sure that he will take credit. And if it doesn’t, you can be sure that he will tweet that it was all Anthony Fauci’s idea.
Javier E

California Coronavirus: Tips for Going to the Grocery Store - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-grocery-shopping.html

grocery shopping pandemic

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • what to know to make your trip to the supermarket as safe as possible:
  • If you have to go to the store, touch as little as possible and sanitize all the stuff you buy when you get home.
  • most produce is placed on displays by hand — sometimes they’re gloved. But it’s safe to assume that if a piece of produce has been out, it’s been handled by at least 10 people.
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  • He recommended misting produce with a very diluted bleach solution (a teaspoon of bleach per gallon of water) and letting it air dry. Or, if you’re nervous about using bleach on something you’ll eat, he said you could use a disinfecting wipe.
  • Other goods are less risky, but it’s still worth wiping down cardboard boxes of crackers or other packaged items.
  • the best thing to do is stay away from other people, particularly if you’re part of a vulnerable population.
  • Hand soap really will protect you.“One thing about this coronavirus,” he said, is that “it’s very susceptible to disinfectants and soap and water.”
  • if you go to a store, touch a contaminated surface, then touch your hair and then your face, even once between hand-washing, you could become infected.
  • if you’re really concerned, it might be worth throwing your clothes in the wash and showering after you get back from the store. (Your shoes, he said, are probably fine to bring into the house.)
  • one thing to watch out for is your reusable grocery bags: “When was the last time you sanitized your favorite bag?
  • Although state health officials released guidelines for grocery stores saying they should limit how many customers are in a given store and should keep people at least six feet apart even when they’re in line, this is proving to be easier said than done.
  • he suggested calling the store you’d like to visit before you leave, both to inquire about the wait and what’s in stock.
Javier E

Opinion | The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-outcomes.html

pandemic model outcome crisis

shared by Javier E on 21 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • About four out of five people known to have had the virus had only mild symptoms, and even among those older than 90 in Italy, 78 percent survived.
  • Two-thirds of those who died in Italy had pre-existing medical conditions and were also elderly
  • “I’m not pessimistic. I think this can work.” She thinks it will take eight weeks of social distancing to have a chance to slow the virus, and success will depend on people changing behaviors and on hospitals not being overrun. “If warm weather helps, if we can get these drugs, if we can get companies to produce more ventilators, we have a window to tamp this down,”
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  • Dr. Neil M. Ferguson, a British epidemiologist who is regarded as one of the best disease modelers in the world, produced a sophisticated model with a worst case of 2.2 million deaths in the United States.
  • I asked Ferguson for his best case. “About 1.1 million deaths,” he said.
  • one can argue that the U.S. is not only on the same path as Italy but is also less prepared, for America has fewer doctors and hospital beds per capita than Italy does — and a shorter life expectancy even in the best of times.
  • up to 366,000 I.C.U. beds might be needed in the United States for coronavirus patients at one time, more than 10 times the number available. A Harvard study reached a similar conclusion.
  • This is an interval of quiet when the United States should be urgently ramping up investment in vaccines and therapies, addressing the severe shortages of medical supplies and equipment, and giving retired physicians and military medics legal authority to practice in a crisis
  • During World War II, the Ford Motor Company turned out one B-24 bomber every 63 minutes; today, we should be rushing out ventilators and face masks, but there’s nothing like the same sense of urgency.
  • After initial missteps in Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first discovered, China adopted protocols for protective gear that are more rigorous than those in the United States, involving N95 masks and face shields, double gowns, gloves and shoe covers, plus special areas to remove protective clothing — and all this worked. Not one of the 42,000 health workers sent to Wuhan is known to have become infected with the coronavirus. The United States isn’t protecting health workers with the same determination; it seems to be betraying them.
  • This crisis should be a wake-up call to address long-term vulnerabilities. That means providing universal health coverage and paid sick leave — and if you think that the coronavirus legislation Trump signed on Wednesday achieves that, think again. It guarantees sick leave to only about one-fifth of private-sector workers. It’s a symbol of the inadequacy of America’s preparedness.
  • “We are all making dying contingency plans at this point just in case,” she said. “Wills, backup people to take care of kids, recording bedtime stories.”
  • The United States is in a weaker position than some other countries to confront the virus because it is the only advanced country that doesn’t have universal health coverage, and the only one that does not guarantee paid sick leave
  • with infectious diseases, the burden will be shared by all Americans
  • In Italy, 8.3 percent of coronavirus cases involve health workers. A doctor in the Seattle area who is forced to reuse N95 masks told me that she and her colleagues fear that the lack of supplies will be deadly.
  • We may dodge a bullet this time, but experts have been warning for decades that a killer pandemic will come;
  • if we, too, can be scared enough to invest in public health and fix our health care system, then something good can come from this crisis — and in the long run, that may save lives.
  • Ferguson questions whether South Korea and other countries can sustain their success for 18 months until a vaccine is ready, even as new cases are constantly being imported
  • America and South Korea reported their first Covid-19 cases on the same day, but South Korea took the epidemic seriously, promptly created an effective test, used it widely and has seen cases go down more than 90 percent from the peak.
  • In contrast, the United States badly bungled testing, and President Trump repeatedly dismissed the coronavirus, saying it was “totally under control” and “will disappear,” and insisting he wasn’t “concerned at all.” The United States has still done only a bit more than 10 percent as many tests per capita as Canada, Austria and Denmark.
  • Peter Hotez, an eminent vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me that he and his colleagues have a candidate vaccine for the coronavirus but still haven’t been able to line up sufficient funding for clinical trials.
katherineharron

Trump privately says he's facing pressure over refusal to use Defense Production Act - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 23 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump has told people around him that he's under pressure to utilize the authorities given to him under the Defense Production Act, after he spent the weekend fielding criticism over why he hasn't mandated that private companies mass produce needed medical supplies during the coronavirus pandemic.
  • Trump told aides he wanted to be at the microphone during optimal viewing hours -- and his appearance came after he spent the day paying close attention to appeals from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who called on him to use the Defense Production Act instead of having states get into "a mad bidding war" over supplies.
  • Trump signed the act that grants him authority to direct private companies to ramp up production of needed supplies last week, but has refused to wield his powers for now.
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  • There has been an internal divide in the West Wing over whether to move forward with it or to continue to let companies voluntarily speed up production without orders from the federal government. Health care providers have bluntly warned they do not have the protective gear or medical equipment to treat an influx of coronavirus patients, and state officials have said attempts to get more supplies has turned into a free-for-all.
  • "My job at the White House now is to help marry the full force of the federal government with the full power of private enterprise to mobilize our industrial base and thereby quickly get what we need, most urgently Personal Protective Equipment such as masks and gloves and testing kit element like swabs," Navarro told CNN. "It's been enormously helpful that the President signed the DPA last week. We've seen a noticeable uptick in the intensity of that mobilization, and my office is using the DPA every day as quiet leverage to turbocharge the great outpouring of volunteer efforts from the business community," he added.
Javier E

The Pattern That Epidemics Always Follow - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...607495

pattern epidemic culture crisis psychology panic

shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • More Homo sapiens have probably died from infectious disease than all other causes combined
  • Only in the past 150 years, owing to nutritional and medical advances, have we emerged from living in constant worry that a cough or fever or scrape might be a death sentence. But that fear of infectious disease remains embedded in the brain, as visceral as our sudden alarm when encountering a snake in the wild.
  • I have noticed a pattern in how the media, governments, and public-health systems respond to infectious-disease outbreaks. There are four stages of epidemic grief: denial, panic, fear, and if all goes well, rational response.
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  • According to Cirium, an aviation-industry consulting firm, more than 200,000 flights in and out of China have been canceled, a 60 percent decline. In 2003, in the midst of SARS, global air travel was down 25 percent.
  • Fear dissipates eventually, replaced by a more realistic sense of the risks. An epidemic, even one of a disease as seemingly easy to transmit as COVID-19, while burdening public-health systems and potentially deadly for the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, is eminently survivable by the majority of the population
  • Which brings us to the last stage of epidemic grief: rational response. After denial, panic, and fear, we can finally get down to the business of basic sanitary measures and infection protocols
  • there are only four things you need to know about a virus: “What is it? What does it do? Where does it come from? And how do you kill it?”
  • We never did develop a vaccine. With SARS, infections peaked sometime in May 2003, at about 9,000 cases. By then, the daily rate of new infections had dipped below the number declared cured or dead
  • That is the inflection point of any outbreak, the point at which the worst is over.
  • Why did the rate of transmission slow? Part of the answer is seasonality: The Northern Hemisphere’s virus season tends to run from winter to mid-spring, perhaps because people aren’t clustered indoors and so are less contagious, or because viruses might weaken in lower relative humidity or direct sunlight. (Nobody actually knows.)
  • In the antibiotic era, infection control has been largely delegated to IV drips rather than sanitary cordons. With respiratory diseases like SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, 19th-century medical techniques and equipment—masks, gloves, galoshes, sealed wards, quarantines, and ventilation—are what comprise a rational response.
Javier E

Safety Advice If You Must Visit the Grocery Store - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-the-grocery-store-11585336520

grocery shopping pandemic safety personal response

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • if you must go to the store, what’s the best way to navigate the aisles and crowds? Information and guidance about the virus is changing quickly, so we asked the experts.
  • Try to minimize visits to the store. “The biggest risk factor is really being around other people,”
  • If you must go, maintain a buffer around yourself and try to go at off-hours. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a 6-foot buffer
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Try to avoid exchanging money or credit cards with the cashier. Use a credit-card reader when possible.
  • all Americans to wear cloth face masks when out in public, which includes when in the grocery store.
  • wash your hands with soap and water before going out and when coming home, and use hand sanitizer when out.
  • If you use gloves, choose disposable ones and throw them before getting into your car or as soon as you get home
  • Try not to use your phone when in the store. If you do, clean it when you get home.
  • it’s a good idea to bring your own, mainly to wipe the grocery cart
  • Wipes can also be used for other high-touch areas in the store like freezer handles or tongs used in self-serve bins.
  • To be extra cautious, you could heat food in the oven or microwave, though this hasn’t been specifically studied so it’s unclear if there’s a particular length of time needed.
  • People over 65 and those who have medical conditions that put them at greater risk of hospitalization and serious illness should avoid going to the grocery store, if possible. Try to order groceries online or have a family member or friend deliver them while taking precautions.
  • Though there have been no documented cases of transmission of the novel coronavirus through food packaging, a recent NEJM study found that the virus can live on cardboard for up to 24 hours and on hard surfaces such as plastic and stainless steel for two to three days.
  • use self-checkout when possible and use hand sanitizer when you’re done.
  • experts say wiping down cereal boxes and other packages isn’t necessary. “Use the wipes when you need them,” says Dr. Chapman. If you’re home you can easily wash your hands. “That’s going to reduce your risk as much if not more than trying to wipe everything down,” he says.
  • instead of being preoccupied with wiping down packaging and containers, focus on washing your hands. “It’s much better to treat your hands, wash your hands, rather than dealing with all the surfaces,”
  • Your mouth is a gateway to both your respiratory system (your lungs) and your digestive system (stomach). Respiratory viruses like the novel coronavirus are believed to enter the body and reproduce through the respiratory tract, not the digestive tract.
  • Experts say it is possible that if the virus rubs off from any object to the inside of your mouth, it could infect you if it goes into your respiratory system. But there doesn’t appear to be any risk of infection via your digestive trac
  • doctors say getting the virus through ingestion of contaminated food seems unlikely. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minn., speculates that the gastric acid in the stomach would kill it. “My own speculation is that the GI route would be very low likelihood compared to known and efficient methods of infection,”
  • the studies were done in a laboratory with high doses of the virus, so it’s unknown if in real life the virus can be transmitted that way. Most likely if someone were to sneeze or cough on a cardboard container, the virus would degrade more quickly due to environmental factors, such as sunlight.
  • If you touch virus particles on raw food and then touch your nose, eyes or mouth, that is a potential source of transmission. But experts note that is very unlikely. To be vigilant, thoroughly wash your hands with soap and water, and don’t eat your food with your hands.
  • Experts urge people not to wash fruits and vegetables with anything but water. The chemicals on wipes and chlorine solutions especially can be dangerous—don’t ingest those.
  • There’s no evidence that the virus can be transmitted through clothing, but it hasn’t been specifically studied
  • The good news is it can be killed by doing laundry. So if you were in a grocery store where people near you were coughing, it’s a good idea to remove your clothes when you get home. Don’t shake clothing. Place it in your laundry hamper.
  • The CDC recommends laundering contaminated clothes in the warmest appropriate water setting and drying them thoroughly.
  • The CDC says there are no known cases of the novel coronavirus being spread through the fecal-oral route, which is a common route of transmission for stomach viruses like the norovirus.
  • But a recent study that hasn’t been peer reviewed yet found the virus in the stool of some patients. This route of transmission remains unknown, and experts say it’s unlikely to be contributing significantly to the pandemic.
Javier E

Warnings Ignored: A Timeline of Trump's COVID-19 Response - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/ne-of-trumps-covid-19-response

timeline trump response pandemic history policy politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • the White House is trying to establish an alternate reality in which Trump was a competent, focused leader who saved American people from the coronavirus.
  • it highlights just how asleep Trump was at the switch, despite warnings from experts within his own government and from former Trump administration officials pleading with him from the outside.
  • Most prominent among them were former Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb, and Director for Medical and Biodefense Preparedness at the National Security Council Dr. Luciana Borio who beginning in early January used op-eds, television appearances, social media posts, and private entreaties to try to spur the administration into action.
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  • what the administration should have been doing in January to prepare us for today.
  • She cites the delay on tests, without which “cases go undetected and people continue to circulate” as a leading issue along with other missed federal government responses—many of which are still not fully operational
  • The prescient recommendations from experts across disciplines in the period before COVID-19 reached American shores—about testing, equipment, and distancing—make clear that more than any single factor, it was Trump’s squandering of out lead-time which should have been used to prepare for the pandemic that has exacerbated this crisis.
  • What follows is an annotated timeline revealing the warning signs the administration received and showing how slow the administration was to act on these recommendations.
  • The Early Years: Warnings Ignored
  • 2017: Trump administrations officials are briefed on an intelligence document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” That’s right. The administration literally had an actual playbook for what to do in the early stages of a pandemic
  • February 2018: The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”
  • May 2018: At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.
  • One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded
  • Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.” Note: It was not
  • January 2019: The director of National Intelligence issues the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security. Among its findings:
  • A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”
  • Page 21: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
  • September, 2019: The Trump Administration ended the pandemic early warning program, PREDICT, which trained scientists in China and other countries to identify viruses that had the potential to turn into pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, “field work ceased when funding ran out in September,” two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan Province, China.
  • 2020: COVID-19 Arrives
  • anuary 3, 2020: The CDC is first alerted to a public health event in Wuhan, China
  • January 6, 2020: The CDC issues a travel notice for Wuhan due to the spreading coronavirus
  • Note: The Trump campaign claims that this marks the beginning of the federal government disease control experts becoming aware of the virus. It was 10 weeks from this point until the week of March 16 when Trump began to change his tone on the threat.
  • January 10, 2020: Former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert warns that we shouldn’t “jerk around with ego politics” because “we face a global health threat…Coordinate!”
  • January 18, 2020: After two weeks of attempts, HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally gets the chance to speak to Trump about the virus. The president redirects the conversation to vaping, according to the Washington Post. 
  • January 21, 2020: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC tells reporters, “We do expect additional cases in the United States.”
  • January 27, 2020: Top White House aides meet with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to encourage greater focus on the threat from the virus. Joe Grogan, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council warns that “dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”
  • January 28, 2020: Two former Trump administration officials—Gottlieb and Borio—publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring the president to “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic.” They advocate a 4-point plan to address the coming crisis:
  • (1) Expand testing to identify and isolate cases. Note: This did not happen for many weeks. The first time more than 2,000 tests were deployed in a single day was not until almost six weeks later, on March 11.
  • (3) Prepare hospital units for isolation with more gowns and masks. Note: There was no dramatic ramp-up in the production of critical supplies undertaken. As a result, many hospitals quickly experienced shortages of critical PPE materials. Federal agencies waited until Mid-March to begin bulk orders of N95 masks.
  • January 29, 2020: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro circulates an internal memo warning that America is “defenseless” in the face of an outbreak which “elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
  • January 30, 2020: Dr. James Hamblin publishes another warning about critical PPE materials in the Atlantic, titled “We Don’t Have Enough Masks.”
  • January 29, 2020: Republican Senator Tom Cotton reaches out to President Trump in private to encourage him to take the virus seriously.
  • Late January, 2020:  HHS sends a letter asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.
  • Trump’s Chinese travel ban only banned “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.” This wording did not—at all—stop people from arriving in America from China. In fact, for much of the crisis, flights from China landed in America almost daily filled with people who had been in China, but did not fit the category as Trump’s “travel ban” defined it.
  • January 31, 2020: On the same day Trump was enacting his fake travel ban, Foreign Policy reports that face masks and latex gloves are sold out on Amazon and at leading stores in New York City and suggests the surge in masks being sold to other countries needs “refereeing” in the face of the coming crisis.
  • February 4, 2020: Gottlieb and Borio take to the WSJ again, this time to warn the president that “a pandemic seems inevitable” and call on the administration to dramatically expand testing, expand the number of labs for reviewing tests, and change the rules to allow for tests of people even if they don’t have a clear known risk factor.
  • Note: Some of these recommendations were eventually implemented—25 days later.
  • February 5, 2020: HHS Secretary Alex Azar requests $2 billion to “buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment.” He is rebuffed by Trump and the White House OMB who eventually send Congress a $500 million request weeks later.
  • February 4 or 5, 2020: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and other intelligence officials brief the Senate Intelligence Committee that the virus poses a “serious” threat and that “Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives.”
  • February 5, 2020: Senator Chris Murphy tweets: Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.
  • February 9, 2020: The Washington Post reports that a group of governors participated in a jarring meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield that was much more alarmist than what they were hearing from Trump. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.
  • the administration lifted CDC restrictions on tests. This is a factually true statement. But it elides that fact that they did so on March 3—two critical weeks after the third Borio/Gottlieb op-ed on the topic, during which time the window for intervention had shrunk to a pinhole.
  • February 20, 2020: Borio and Gottlieb write in the Wall Street Journal that tests must be ramped up immediately “while we can intervene to stop spread.”
  • February 23, 2020: Harvard School of Public Health professor issues warning on lack of test capability: “As of today, the US remains extremely limited in#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs haveCDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.
  • February 24, 2020: The Trump administration sends a letter to Congress requesting a small dollar amount—between $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion—to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. This is, of course, a pittance
  • February 25, 2020: Messonier says she expects “community spread” of the virus in the United States and that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump is reportedly furious and Messonier’s warnings are curtailed in the ensuing weeks.
  • Trump mocks Congress in a White House briefing, saying “If Congress wants to give us the money so easy—it wasn’t very easy for the wall, but we got that one done. If they want to give us the money, we’ll take the money.”
  • February 26, 2020: Congress, recognizing the coming threat, offers to give the administration $6 billion more than Trump asked for in order to prepare for the virus.
  • February 27, 2020: In a leaked audio recording Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (reauthorization of PAHPA), was telling people that COVID-19 “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
  • March 4, 2020: HHS says they only have 1 percent of respirator masks needed if the virus became a “full-blown pandemic.”
  • March 3, 2020: Vice President Pence is asked about legislation encouraging companies to produce more masks. He says the Trump administration is “looking at it.”
  • March 7, 2020: Fox News host Tucker Carlson, flies to Mar-a-Lago to implore Trump to take the virus seriously in private rather than embarrass him on TV. Even after the private meeting, Trump continued to downplay the crisis
  • March 9, 2020: Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, publishes an op-ed saying it is “now or never” to act. He advocates for social distancing and school closures to slow the spread of the contagion.
  • Trump says that developments are “good for the consumer” and compares COVID-19 favorably to the common flu.
  • March 17, 2020: Facing continued shortages of the PPE equipment needed to prevent healthcare providers from succumbing to the virus, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkeley and Ron Wyden call on Trump to use the Defense Production Act to expand supply of medical equipment
  • March 18, 2020: Trump signs the executive order to activate the Defense Production Act, but declines to use it
  • At the White House briefing he is asked about Senator Chuck Schumer’s call to urgently produce medical supplies and ventilators. Trump responds: “Well we’re going to know whether or not it’s urgent.” Note: At this point 118 Americans had died from COVID-19.
  • March 20, 2020: At an April 2nd White House Press Conference, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was made ad hoc point man for the coronavirus response said that on this date he began working with Rear Admiral John Polowczyk to “build a team” that would handle the logistics and supply chain for providing medical supplies to the states. This suggestion was first made by former Trump Administration officials January 28th
  • March 22, 2020: Six days after calling for a 15-day period of distancing, Trump tweets that this approach “may be worse than the problem itself.”
  • March 24, 2020: Trump tells Fox News that he wants the country opened up by Easter Sunday (April 12)
  • As Trump was speaking to Fox, there were 52,145 confirmed cases in the United States and the doubling time for daily new cases was roughly four days.
Javier E

The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ce-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic

pandemic profit economic response opportunity financial

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have,” he said over the phone. No argument here. He wouldn’t specify an amount, but reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year.
  • He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech, one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks, with the expectation that when the virus made it across the Pacific the company would get government contracts to produce more. The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share, and so, for cents on the dollar, he bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars: he was betting that it would go up much more than that. By the end of February, the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share
  • He quickly put some money to work
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  • He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.
  • Last October, he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and plagues in my head,” the Australian said. “In December, I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China, and then in early January there was a lot on Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family, and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find.
  • The Australian, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty.
  • The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path.
  • perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.
  • I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s
  • they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus
  • They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program “Mad Money,” on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.
  • it’s hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings.
  • This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the virus’s victims, the economy had a preëxisting condition—debt, instead of pulmonary disease.
  • “It’s as if the virus is almost beside the point,” a trader I know told me. “This was all set up to happen.”
  • the “smart money,” like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by March’s end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit lines
  • In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down “just” $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.
  • It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapses—haircuts for baldheads—leading to more defaults.
  • In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.
  • As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didn’t have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions
  • On March 20th, Goldman Sachs spooked the world, by predicting a twenty-four-per-cent decline in G.D.P. in the second quarter, a falloff in activity that seemed at once both unthinkable and inevitable. Subsequent predictions grew even more disma
anonymous

First CO2 rise in four years puts pressure on Paris targets - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-41941265

climate world glove co2 Crisis

shared by anonymous on 13 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Global emissions of CO2 in 2017 are projected to rise for the first time in four years, dashing hopes that a peak might soon be reached.
  • The main cause of the expected growth has been greater use of coal in China as its economy expanded. Researchers are uncertain if the rise in emissions is a one-off or the start of a new period of CO2 build-up.Scientists say that a global peak in CO2 before 2020 is needed to limit dangerous global warming this century.
  • "With global CO2 emissions from human activities estimated at 41 billion tonnes for 2017, time is running out on our ability to keep warming well below 2 degrees C, let alone 1.5C."The most important element in causing this rise has been China, which is responsible for around 28% of the global total. Emissions there went up 3.5% in 2017, mainly because of increased coal use, driven in the main by a growing economy.
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  • Europe also saw a smaller decline than expected, falling by 0.2% compared with 2.2% over the last 10 years.One common theme around the world is continued use of gas and oil
  • "The climate will not let us wait until 2020 when the Paris agreement comes into force," said Nicaragua's chief negotiator, Paul Oquist."Climate change is happening now and it's vital that immediate actions to cut emissions become a feature of this summit."
anonymous

Opinion | Cuomo Thought There Was No Limit to His Power - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cuomo-covid.html

Politics

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Cuomo Thought There Was No Limit to His PowerBesieged on multiple fronts, the governor is no longer holding forth; he’s just trying to hold on.
  • ret Stephens: I can’t believe I’m saying this, Gail, but Cuomo may make former Gov. Eliot Spitzer look good by comparison. At least Client 9’s behavior was, well, transactional, as compared to Cuomo’s creepy come-ons. And the cover-up of the nursing home Covid death count strikes me as possibly criminal and definitely worthy of impeachment. Especially since he was also trying to peddle a book about his Covid leadership skills while he was busy fudging the numbers.What’s your view?Gail: Have to admit it makes me sad. But the double whammy seems impossible to overcome. If it had just been the sex part we could have had some interesting conversations about what’s acceptable in an era that combines feminism with a fairly expansive view of what people — at least unmarried people — can and can’t do.Bret: “If It Had Just Been The Sex Part” could have been the title of a memoir by anyone from Caligula to Johnny Rotten. Sorry, go on.
  • ret: My gut reaction to your scenario is that it sounds very “Ooh la la,” like it could be a movie starring Cate Blanchett as Gov. Fatale, whereas Cuomo’s behavior is strictly “Ugh Yuck,” like it could be a movie starring Mickey Rourke. I just don’t think it works in quite the same way.Gail: If young workers in a state capitol started complaining that their female governor was touching them inappropriately, I sorta doubt the voters would see it as a glamorous movie.
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  • Bret: One of the many reasons I despise Donald Trump is that he took perfectly legitimate policy issues, distorted and lied about them to suit his personal needs, and rendered them politically radioactive. Ballot integrity and public confidence in elections is a legitimate issue. In New York’s upstate 22nd district, we had a congressional race that took over three months to resolve because of a lack of uniform ballot-counting standards and a tidal wave of absentee ballots. In Pennsylvania, a state court ruled that the deadline for late-arriving mail-in ballots would be extended, resulting in the addition of about 10,000 ballots to the overall vote tallies and giving fodder to pe
  • Gail: Ballot harvesting is that system where a person receives an absentee ballot, fills it out, and then relies on somebody else to get it returned. That can be a good deed — or a system party workers use to control the voting. We just need to make sure it’s only used for good purposes. There was a big scandal in North Carolina a while back involving (cough, cough) Republicans.
  • Bret: Or Shere Khan from “The Jungle Book.” As for the bill itself, the most I can say on its behalf is that I’m happy Joe Manchin is in the Senate as a Democrat. We should not pay people more money to be on unemployment than to have a job, especially as the economy opens up again. We should not be sending benefit checks to people with upper middle-class incomes. We s
  • Gail: Well, we can still complain a little, right? Otherwise we’d have to change the name of The Conversation to Quiet Contemplation of a Perfect World.Bret: Agreed. Let’s keep finding things to complain about. You know, the masks are about to come off, which means the gloves are, too.
Javier E

In Minnesota, a G.O.P. Lawmaker's Death Brings Home the Reality of Covid - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...relph-covid-minnesota.html

harm principle morality pandemic responsibility liberty

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • while Republicans insist that their freedom was at issue in refusing to wear masks or enforce mandates, such events and the death of Mr. Relph raise urgent questions as to where individual “freedom” ends and where responsibility to others begins in a pandemic during which breathing shared air can be fatal.
  • “It’s ironic that Senator Gazelka, as majority leader, was always the person most outspoken in opposing the governor’s emergency order and would state to us over and over again that Minnesotans would do the responsible thing,” said Richard Cohen, a Democrat who retired from the Legislature last month. “And now it is alleged that because of a caucus event, where apparently many people were not wearing masks, a caucus member became ill and then passed away.”
  • An owner of the catering hall, John Schiltz, said that his servers had worn masks and gloves throughout that evening, and that none had later tested positive. Although masks were offered to guests, state guidelines at the time allowed them to be removed at tables.Mr. Schiltz said the dinner was the only event any group had booked at his venue in November before he had to close on Nov. 20.
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  • Pressed about the dinner in a radio interview in late November, Mr. Gazelka, 61, who is reported to be considering a run for governor, said he had no regrets.
  • “The idea that everyone can just be trusted rings a little hollow with the knowledge” that Republicans did not tell Democrats of the positive cases before the special session, Ms. Kent said in an interview last week.
  • He continued through the year to argue that mask mandates or limits on restaurants and bars were not needed because Minnesotans could be trusted to make responsible choices, and that the harmful effects on schools, the economy and people’s mental health outweighed the value of restrictions.
  • Holding the celebratory dinner wasn’t the only point of contention.Afterward, Republicans alerted their own caucus about the virus outbreak, but not Democrats. They instructed Republican staff members not to go to the Capitol for a special session of the Legislature on Nov. 12 — but did not inform Democrats, who were livid after learning of the positive cases from news reports.
  • “There was a lot of food and a lot of beverage, and when you’re at an activity when the food and beverage is there, that’s when you don’t have your mask,” he said. “I don’t regret that we had the celebration. The Republican majority was the No. 1 target to switch from Republican to Democrat.”
  • She described the working environment of the Senate as poisoned by Republicans’ disregard for masks. Most refuse to wear them on the Senate floor, she said. One Republican senator, she recounted, broke into fake coughing while waiting for an elevator in a cramped vestibule with Democratic colleagues.
  • After learning of the outbreak from Republican leaders, Mr. Relph, who did not have any symptoms, went for a coronavirus test, his daughter said. It came back positive.
  • “None of us can be sure he got sick at that party, but it’s really, really likely,” Dana Relph said. “There wasn’t any other place he would have gotten it.”
  • As one of the Senate’s oldest members, Mr. Relph was one of the few Republicans known for regularly wearing a face covering. He had an underlying condition, mild asthma, his daughter said.
  • As a lab technician for 3M, Ms. Relph tests industrial masks. “The fact that people deny the science behind masks makes me even angrier,” she said. She recalled that a Senate colleague of her father’s had stopped by her family’s house, without a mask, while her father was in the hospital. “Point blank, he said, ‘I don’t think this is as serious as they’re telling us it is,’” Ms. Relph said. “My dad was dying. These are people that think they’re good, kind, compassionate people, and yet they don’t act that way.”
  • Last week, as the Legislature returned for its 2021 session, senators held a moment of silence for Mr. Relph. Mr. Gazelka called him “a great senator, a true friend.”
  • The majority leader also led his party in blocking a Democratic proposal to require masks in public areas of the Capitol, flouting a statewide mask mandate, imposed by the governor, in indoor settings. (The Legislature is not subject to the governor’s orders.) Republicans questioned the effectiveness of masks. But Mr. Gazelka did include language in a resolution “strongly encouraging” mask wearing.
  • Ms. Kent, the Democratic leader, said that she had noticed lately that Mr. Gazelka was always wearing a mask himself in the Capitol, where before he had not worn one. Besides Mr. Relph’s death, Mr. Gazelka’s mother-in-law died in December after contracting Covid-19.
katherineharron

This is the price of admission for the 2024 GOP race - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 29 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • On January 20, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem was in Washington to celebrate the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president."Congratulations to President Biden and Vice President Harris on your inauguration today...thankful for my @SitkaGear gloves," she tweeted, alongside a picture of her seat at the event. "Brrr...cold and it snowed!"
  • Noem was asked by reporters in her home state whether she regretted tweeting that the election was "rigged" in the days after the 2020 vote. And she responded this way:"I think that we deserve fair and transparent elections. I think there's a lot of people who have doubts about that."
  • The ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one's head has become a necessity for ambitious Republicans politicians over the last four years. There's what they know to be true (there's absolutely no evidence of any widespread voter fraud or rigging of the 2020 election) and what they have to say in order to preserve their own political futures in a party that has spent the last several years being led by a pied piper of prevarication.
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  • Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley led the charge in contesting the Electoral College results on January 6 -- before and after the riot at the US Capitol. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was his wingman. (Cruz had previously offered to serve as the lawyer for a spurious case brought by the Texas attorney general to invalidate votes in other states. The Supreme Court rejected the case.) Even House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (California) got in on the act, traveling to Florida to make nice with Trump on Thursday. "President Trump's popularity has never been stronger than it is today, and his endorsement means more than perhaps any endorsement at any time," read a statement released after the get-together.
  • Republican politicians spent four years cowering in fear from Trump's wrath, worried that any hint of something short of utter fealty to his cult of personality would lead to a presidential tweet that could cost them their jobs in the next election. It appears that fear hasn't abated, even with Trump out of office. And it also appears that the next Republican presidential primary will be heavily shaped by Trump -- whether or not he decides to run again.
Javier E

Opinion | Impeachment Would Defend Congress Against Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rump-impeachment-congress.html

US politics history crisis constitution impeachment

shared by Javier E on 10 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • If Congress declines to impeach and convict the president for his actions on Wednesday, its failure to act will weaken the basic structure of the Constitution.
  • The key issue is this: One of the three branches of the federal government has just incited an armed attack against another branch
  • Beyond the threat to a peaceful transition, the incident was a fundamental violation of the separation of powers.
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  • Prompted by the chief executive, supporters laid siege to, invaded, and occupied the Capitol building, deploying weapons and subjecting members of both chambers of Congress to intimidation and violence in an effort to produce a particular decision by force.
  • We have all been taught about “checks and balances” in school. The Constitutional strategy for limiting power requires that officeholders defend the institutions they occupy against what the framers called “encroachments” by the other branches. Usually encroachments are understood metaphorically, and there is time to allow the branches to work out their differences in the back and forth of political negotiation and occasional court battles. The president’s attempted encroachment on the constitutional rights of Congress this past Wednesday was anything but metaphorical
  • The president aimed to reverse the decision that Congress was making on a question that the Constitution expressly reserved for the legislature.
  • At Wednesday’s rally, Mr. Trump gave some prepared remarks on the so-called evidence of election fraud, but he worried aloud that the crowd would be bored by those details. The more powerful thread running through his speech was an argument that constitutional constraints were forms of weakness, that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress should not be allowed to certify the election, and that it was time to take the gloves off and fight.
  • If the cabinet and vice president decided to remove the president temporarily from his duties through the 25th Amendment, they would protect us against some immediate dangers, but their action would do nothing to stand up for the integrity of Congress as a coequal branch of government. In fact, it would reinforce the notion that true power is concentrated only in the executive branch. Impeachment and conviction offer the only constitutionally appropriate response to the president’s encroachment on the legislative branch.
  • When James Madison described the checks and balances in Federalist No. 51, he wrote that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” and that “the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” This means that members of Congress should feel that their personal interests and ambitions are intertwined with the power of the institution they occupy.
  • Members who said they wanted to satisfy popular sentiment questioning the election results by channeling it through a congressional commission should see that the president’s actions have made a mockery of their procedural efforts. Their place in history depends on whether they counteract the president’s ambition and resist the humiliation of Congress in the way the constitutional framers assumed any self-respecting legislator would.
  • Not so long ago, the Republican Party described itself as “the party of Lincoln” and flaunted its commitment to constitutionalism. Now, the question is whether enough Republican senators will do what is necessary to help the country step away from what Lincoln called the “mobocratic spirit,” which he identified as the greatest threat to our political institutions.
  • If Congress does not utilize the constitutional means of defending itself and deterring future attacks, this moment will come to be regarded by historians as a decisive capitulation, not just to President Trump, but to a dangerous new mode of presidential action. The precedent that a president can stir up mobs to intimidate the other branches will be set, and even if it recedes into the background for a while, eventually that precedent will be followed.
Javier E

Rape and murder of student in church sparks outrage across Nigeria | Sexual violence | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-sparks-outrage-across-nigeria

nigeria sexual crime police

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Women and activists in Nigeria have in recent years demanded greater action against sexual violence. Yet reported crimes come up against the systemic failings of Nigeria’s criminal justice system, which rarely prosecutes cases.Police have already been criticised for their response to Uwa’s murder. Evidence at the scene remained uncollected for days after the crime, said Akpobi.
  • Priscilla Usiobaifo, who works to combat gender violence with the BraveHeart Initiative in Edo state, said it was common for police officers in Nigeria to not collect evidence or even visit crime scenes, undermining the chances of a successful prosecution.
  • “Suspects and victims are often taken to the crime scene together. Then it’s shocking how they [police] behave at the scene of the crime. Situations where police collect evidence without gloves. A woman was gang-raped, police made her pick up the condom hidden under leaves at the scene,” she said. “You can see a huge training gap in police officers assigned to investigating roles.”
anonymous

Tainted Cutter polio vaccine killed and paralyzed children in 1955 - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...paralyzed-children-coronavirus

history US

shared by anonymous on 20 May 20 - No Cached
  • On Aug. 30, 1954, Bernice E. Eddy, a veteran scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., was checking a batch of a new polio vaccine for safety.Created by Jonas Salk, the vaccine was hailed as the miracle drug that would conquer the dreaded illness that killed and paralyzed children. Eddy’s job was to examine samples submitted by the companies planning to make it.As she checked a sample from Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, Calif., she noticed that the vaccine designed to protect against the disease had instead given polio to a test monkey. Rather than containing killed virus to create immunity, the sample from Cutter contained live, infectious virus.
  • As scientists and politicians desperately search for medicines to slow the deadly coronavirus, and as President Trump touts a malaria drug as a remedy, a look back to the 1955 polio vaccine tragedy shows how hazardous such a search can be, especially under intense public pressure.
  • Despite Eddy’s warnings, an estimated 120,000 children that year were injected with the Cutter vaccine
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  • Roughly 40,000 got “abortive” polio, with fever, sore throat, headache, vomiting and muscle pain. Fifty-one were paralyzed, and five died,
  • It was “one of the worst biological disasters in American history: a man-made polio epidemic,” Offit wrote.
  • “People weren’t sure how you got it,” he said in an interview last week. “Therefore, they were scared of everything. They didn’t want to buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store. It’s the same now. … Everybody’s walking around with gloves on, with masks on, scared to shake anybody’s hand.”
  • The worst polio outbreak in U.S. history struck in 1952, the year after Offit was born. It infected 57,000 people, paralyzed 21,000 and killed 3,145. The next year there were 35,000 infections, and 38,000 the year after that.
  • Many survivors had to wear painful metal braces on their paralyzed legs or had to be placed in so-called iron lungs, which helped them breathe
  • In 1951, Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to find a vaccine. During intense months of research, he took live polio virus and killed it with formaldehyde until it was not infectious but still provided virus-fighting antibodies.
  • On April 26, 1954, Randy Kerr, a 6-year-old second-grader from Falls Church, Va., stood in the cafeteria of the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean and became the first to be vaccinated in a massive field study.Salk’s vaccine was given to 420,000 children. A placebo was given to 200,000. And 1.2 million were given nothing.
  • She had started at NIH in 1937, had headed testing of vaccines for influenza, and in 1954 was asked to help test the Salk polio vaccine. The pressure was intense. “For weeks she and her staff worked around-the-clock, seven days a week,” O’Hern wrote.“This was a product that had never been made before, and they were going to use it right away,” Eddy had said.She began testing Cutter’s samples in August 1954 and continued through November, according to a later report in the Congressional Record. She found that three of the six samples paralyzed test monkeys.“What do you think is wrong with these monkeys?” she asked a colleague, Offit recounted.“They were given polio,” the colleague replied.“No,” Eddy said. “They were given the … vaccine.”
hannahcarter11

White House again flouts public health recommendations during holiday party season - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

public health white house coronavirus trump

shared by hannahcarter11 on 01 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • There are some safety protocols in place for the events, but most, if not all, of the holiday parties will still flout US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for size restrictions, as well as Washington, DC, restrictions for indoor gatherings, which is currently capped at 10 people.
  • The Trump White House itself has already been the epicenter of at least three Covid-19 outbreaks among staff and allies, and a series of events such as holiday gatherings will likely put in peril several hundred more guests, workers and staff.
  • A copy of the invitation seen by CNN makes no mention of mask-wearing or other coronavirus safety precautions.
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  • In the Red Room, they admired the tree with ornaments saluting essential workers, including doctors, nurses and scientists, many removing their masks as they held beverages.
  • However, publicly accessible social media images posted by partygoers indicate there was little social distancing at Monday's event and many guests were not wearing masks.
  • That party comes in the wake of Brian Monahan, the US Congress attending physician, issuing a memo asking all members and congressional staff to practice social distancing, wear surgical masks and to avoid social gatherings.
  • Guests for those events have been informed that, unlike years' past, there will be no individual photo opportunities with the President and first lady, due to coronavirus guidelines.
  • "Guests will enjoy food individually plated by chefs at plexiglass-protected food stations. All passed beverages will be covered. All service staff will wear masks and gloves to comply with food safety guidelines," she added.But, Grisham said, it will be up to invitees to decide whether to attend.
martinelligi

Coronavirus in the U.S: How Did the Pandemic Get So Bad? | Time - 0 views

time.com/...onavirus-united-states-failure

pandemic crisis

shared by martinelligi on 07 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • If, early in the spring, the U.S. had mobilized its ample resources and expertise in a coherent national effort to prepare for the virus, things might have turned out differently. If, in midsummer, the country had doubled down on the measures (masks, social-distancing rules, restricted indoor activities and public gatherings) that seemed to be working, instead of prematurely declaring victory, things might have turned out differently. The tragedy is that if science and common sense solutions were united in a national, coordinated response, the U.S. could have avoided many thousands of more deaths this summer.
  • Among the world’s wealthy nations, only the U.S. has an outbreak that continues to spin out of control. Of the 10 worst-hit countries, the U.S. has the seventh-highest number of deaths per 100,000 population; the other nine countries in the top 10 have an average per capita GDP of $10,195, compared to $65,281 for the U.S. Some countries, like New Zealand, have even come close to eradicating COVID-19 entirely.
  • t this point, we can start to see why the U.S. foundered: a failure of leadership at many levels and across parties; a distrust of scientists, the media and expertise in general; and deeply ingrained cultural attitudes about individuality and how we value human lives have all combined to result in a horrifically inadequate pandemic response
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  • Common-sense solutions like face masks were undercut or ignored. Research shows that wearing a facial covering significantly reduces the spread of COVID-19, and a pre-existing culture of mask wearing in East Asia is often cited as one reason countries in that region were able to control their outbreaks. In the U.S., Trump did not wear a mask in public until July 11, more than three months after the CDC recommended facial coverings, transforming what ought to have been a scientific issue into a partisan one.
  • Testing is key to a pandemic response—the more data officials have about an outbreak, the better equipped they are to respond. Rather than call for more testing, Trump has instead suggested that maybe the U.S. should be testing less. He has repeatedly, and incorrectly, blamed increases in new cases on more testing. “If we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases,” the President said in June, later suggesting he was being sarcastic.
  • Seven months after the coronavirus was found on American soil, we’re still suffering hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand, deaths every day. An American Nurses Association survey from late July and early August found that of 21,000 U.S. nurses polled, 42% reported either widespread or intermittent shortages in personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks, gloves and medical gowns.
  • . More than 13 million Americans remain unemployed as of August, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Sept. 4.
  • The coronavirus has laid bare the inequalities of American public health. Black Americans are nearly three times as likely as white Americans to get COVID-19, nearly five times as likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes, being Black in the U.S. is a marker of risk for underlying conditions that make COVID-19 more dangerous, “including socioeconomic status, access to health care and increased exposure to the virus due to occupation (e.g., frontline, essential and critical infrastructure workers).” In other words, COVID-19 is more dangerous for Black Americans because of generations of systemic racism and discrimination. The same is true to a lesser extent for Native American and Latino communities, according to CDC data.
  • Americans today tend to value the individual over the collective. A 2011 Pew survey found that 58% of Americans said “freedom to pursue life’s goals without interference from the state” is more important than the state guaranteeing “nobody is in need.” It’s easy to view that trait as a root cause of the country’s struggles with COVID-19; a pandemic requires people to make temporary sacrifices for the benefit of the group, whether it’s wearing a mask or skipping a visit to their local bar.
  • ut at least some Americans still refuse to take such a simple step as wearing a mask. Why? Because we’re also in the midst of an epistemic crisis. Republicans and Democrats today don’t just disagree on issues; they disagree on the basic truths that structure their respective realities.
  • There’s another disturbing undercurrent to Americans’ attitude toward the pandemic thus far: a seeming willingness to accept mass death. As a nation we may have become dull to horrors that come our way as news, from gun violence to the seemingly never-ending incidents of police brutality to the water crises in Flint, Mich., and elsewhere. Americans seem to have already been inured to the idea that other Americans will die regularly, when they do not need to.
  • Our leaders need to listen to experts and let policy be driven by science. And for the time being, all of us need to accept that there are certain things we cannot, or should not, do, like go to the movies or host an indoor wedding.
  • The U.S. is no longer the epicenter of the global pandemic; that unfortunate torch has been passed to countries like India, Argentina and Brazil. And in the coming months there might yet be a vaccine, or more likely a cadre of vaccines, that finally halts the march of COVID-19 through the country.
Javier E

Norovirus is almost impossible to stop - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673116

infection prevention epidemic

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Disinfection is back.
  • “Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.
  • norovirus has seeded outbreaks in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Last week, the U.K. Health Security Agency announced that laboratory reports of the virus had risen to levels 66 percent higher than what’s typical this time of year. Especially hard-hit are Brits 65 and older, who are falling ill at rates that “haven’t been seen in over a decade.”
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  • The U.S. logs fewer than 1,000 annual deaths out of millions of documented cases
  • this is more a nauseating nuisance than a public-health crisis. In most people, norovirus triggers, at most, a few miserable days of GI distress that can include vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers, then resolves on its own; the keys are to stay hydrated and avoid spreading it to anyone vulnerabl
  • norovirus is the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States.)
  • the virus is far more deadly in parts of the world with limited access to sanitation and potable water.
  • Still, fighting norovirus isn’t easy, as plenty of parents can attest. The pathogen, which prompts the body to expel infectious material from both ends of the digestive tract, is seriously gross and frustratingly hardy. Even the old COVID standby, a spritz of hand sanitizer, doesn’t work against it—the virus is encased in a tough protein shell that makes it insensitive to alcohol.
  • At an extreme, a single gram of feces—roughly the heft of a jelly bean—could contain as many as 5.5 billion infectious doses, enough to send the entire population of Eurasia sprinting for the toilet.
  • norovirus mainly targets the gut, and spreads especially well when people swallow viral particles that have been released in someone else’s vomit or stool.
  • direct contact with those substances, or the food or water they contaminate, may not even be necessary: Sometimes people vomit with such force that the virus gets aerosolized; toilets, especially lidless ones, can send out plumes of infection
  • If the spittle finding holds for humans, then talking, singing, and laughing in close proximity could be risky too.
  • Once emitted into the environment, norovirus particles can persist on surfaces for days—making frequent hand-washing and surface disinfection key measures to prevent spread
  • Handshakes and shared meals tend to get dicey during outbreaks, along with frequently touched items such as utensils, door handles, and phones.
  • One 2012 study pointed to a woven plastic grocery bag as the source of a small outbreak among a group of teenage soccer players; the bag had just been sitting in a bathroom used by one of the girls when she fell sick the night before.
  • Once a norovirus transmission chain begins, it can be very difficult to break. The virus can spread before symptoms start, and then for more than a week after they resolve
  • Once the virus arrives, the entire family is almost sure to be infected. Baldridge, who has two young children, told me that her household has weathered at least four bouts of norovirus in the past several years.
  • Roughly 20 percent of European populations, for instance, are genetically resistant to common norovirus strains. “So you can hope,” Frenck told me. For the rest of us, it comes down to hygiene
  • Altan-Bonnet recommends diligent hand-washing, plus masking to ward off droplet-borne virus. Sick people should isolate themselves if they can. “And keep your saliva to yourself,” she told me.
  • The family fastidiously scrubbed their hands with hot water and soap, donned disposable gloves when touching shared surfaces, and took advantage of the virus’s susceptibility to harsh chemicals and heat. When her son threw up on the floor, Cameron sprayed it down with bleach; when he vomited on his quilt, she blasted it twice in the washing machine on the sanitizing setting, then put it through the dryer at a super high temp
  • After three years of COVID, the world has gotten used to thinking about infections in terms of airways. “We need to recalibrate,” Bhumbra told me, “and remember that other things exist.”
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