Trump failing in national health emergency

And his handling of the coronavirus epidemic should get him impeached again.

Christ!  It's been happening for years now: Ebola, SARS, MERS.  Where the fuck has he been?

"We were going to hit 30,000...on the DOW...and all of a sudden this came out."  He still only sees it as a reelection problem.  "Who would have thought...six, seven, eight weeks ago."  A whole fucking lot of people!  

Hey, sick people: don't mess up his numbers!  You tryin' to make him look bad?

Despicable.

Jesus wept.  Seriously, you have to listen to that one.  Seriously.  It's even beyond his typical brag about being the smartest person in the room.

You want to know how smart he is about "this stuff" that he loves?


And...

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.

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.

  Politico

As of this writing, reported deaths are up to 19.

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.

Everything under control. I think we can make an educated guess as to who made the decision to forgo the WHO test.

“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.

Who wants to fall on their sword? Because they're not going to name the actual culprit.

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.

Containment? The horse was well out of the barn when the doors were closed. That travel ban only interrupts trade, adversely affecting the economy. It sounds good to people who don't think very deeply...like TSA making you remove your shoes at the airport.

“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!”

[...]

“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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

No. "We" haven't.

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.

How many body bags will be coming off that ship?

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.

[...]

[A]dministration 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.

[...]

[I]ntrinsically 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.

Tell that to your president.

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

UPDATE: