You’ve heard the story of the Imperial College report from the UK that changed WH minds (Neal Ferguson, the lead investigator, now has the virus himself).
Here it is in story form. We have a lot of work to do.
FT:
The shocking coronavirus study that rocked the UK and US
Five charts highlight why Imperial College’s research radically changed government policy
This raises the important question of whether — and at what cost — such a curfew could be maintained by any government in the western world.Without a vaccine, as soon as the toughest restrictions are relaxed, a second wave of infections would be expected to follow.
Since the number of escalating tests is a function of testing, and since anything we do has a two week lag before we see results., I’m following NYC’s Influenza Like Illness surveillance to get an idea of what’s going on. And it seems that we have increased activity.
Note that the bottom graph matches the top, so ILI seems validated as a measure to follow, and all regions do it. They just don’t update daily for the public the way NYC does.
Jonathan Chait/New York Magazine:
Trump: State and Local Governments, Not Him, Have to Solve Coronavirus Shortages
American hospitals are sitting on the precipice of a catastrophe. A deluge of coronavirus patients is about to overwhelm their supply of beds, protective equipment, and ventilator machines. President Trump has been asked about the crisis for several days on end, and his answers have focused almost entirely on deflecting blame away from himself without proffering any solution.
The pattern held again at his Thursday press conference. Trump argued the pandemic was a completely unforeseeable event. “No one in their wildest dreams thought we’d need tens of thousands of ventilators,” he proclaimed.
Many people thought this. Trump’s own government studied the issue and warned this past fall that it was unprepared for a pandemic. The vulnerabilities cited in the report included an acute shortage of ventilators. In recent weeks, news reports have highlighted the ventilator shortfall in increasingly urgent terms. More than three weeks ago, Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar testified that hospitals lacked enough ventilators and other equipment to handle the coronavirus.
Hospitals and congressional Democrats have been pleading with Trump to use the Defense Production Act to commandeer industrial resources to crank out more equipment. Asked about this again, Trump shifted the responsibility onto state and local governments:
“Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work … the federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping. We’re not a shipping clerk. As with testing — the governors are supposed to be doing it … but this is really for the local governments, governors, and people within the state, depending on the way they divided it up.
Walter Schapiro/TNR:
The Political Media’s Blurred Reality
How market pressures and professional hubris have undone campaign journalism
Too many political reporters, and quite a few candidates, felt frustrated by the stubborn refusal of voters to make their decisions for the convenience of the pollsters rather than at the polls. In hindsight, all 2020 polls should have been introduced with a prominent disclaimer announcing that these premature surveys possess the accuracy of medieval cannon fire. Nevertheless, TV and print reporters peddled the illusion that the latest polls offered an exclusive window into the future.
How bad was the pre-Iowa and pre-New Hampshire polling? Think of the Edsel, the 2000 butterfly ballot in Florida, and the movie version of Cats.
An even more damning criticism is how badly politics media reports on Donald Trump, giving him every benefit, sanitizing his rants, cleaning up his incoherence. But as polling from WA state shows, some things break through.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Will a recession doom Trump? A new forecast says yes.
Only time will settle whether this prediction is correct. But the very possibility that a recession could doom Trump — which is plausible — has major implications for what’s now about to happen, in political and substantive terms.
The big political question right now: Can Trump insulate himself from the massive political fallout of a deep recession by positioning himself as leading the party that most fully supports a major mobilization of government to stave off economic calamity?
The new forecast from Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University, focuses on the prediction among some economists that GDP could shrink by as much 5 percent in the second quarter, with possible spillover into the third. We are only beginning to glimpse the massive economic disruptions that will be caused by extensive social distancing and other aspects of the coronavirus crisis.
Dan Pfeiffer/Crooked:
HOW DEMOCRATS SHOULD NAVIGATE PANDEMIC POLITICS
In other words, we cannot make the same mistakes again.
1. Hold Trump Accountable for his failures: President Trump’s response to coronavirus pandemic has been a moral, political, and economic disaster. On a daily basis, Trump makes George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina seem positively Churchillian. The fact that the United States is so far behind the curve on testing and other response measures is a direct result of Trump’s unique blend of malevolence, incompetence, and narcissism. It should be devastating to his chances for reelection. The question is how to prosecute the case. The Democratic critique of Trump on Twitter and cable news has been largely stylistic. These critiques are legitimate and well deserved. Trump has refused to abide by proper social-distancing practices, downplayed the seriousness of the disease, and repeatedly passed along incorrect information that has endangered lives. His tone has been dismissive and self-congratulatory, and his tweets have, as always, been evidence of his unfitness for office.
His Oval Office address was without a doubt the worst presidential address in American history. It was Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner, and a “Heckuva job, Brownie” moment all in one. However, a focus on the specific, substantive failures of the Trump administration is likely to be more impactful in the long run than attacking his comportment.
LA Times:
Coronavirus forces reckoning for Trump’s healthcare cuts
And the administration is now moving to make it easier for poor Americans to get care through Medicaid, after championing multiple efforts over the last three years to slash the joint federal and state program and cut millions of people from its rolls.
Public health experts have mostly welcomed the moves. But many note that the actions forced by the coronavirus underscore the fundamental problems with the Trump administration’s healthcare agenda.
“Having tens of millions of Americans without insurance or with inadequate coverage is particularly concerning during a public health emergency, though in a sense, coronavirus simply makes more palpable and immediate the ramifications of opposition to coverage expansion,” said Dr. Benjamin Sommers of Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who has extensively documented how health insurance improves patients’ health.
“People without adequate health insurance will get sicker, become poorer, and die younger than if they had insurance,” Sommers said.
WaPo:
CDC, the top U.S. public health agency, is sidelined during coronavirus pandemic
Former CDC director Tom Frieden has said in tweets and essays that the public needs to hear daily from Schuchat and Messonnier, both of whom have experience in outbreak responses. Messonnier warned several weeks ago, on Feb. 25, about the need to prepare for the kinds of measures the White House is urging, such as school closures and the cancellation of mass gatherings. She had been conducting most of the CDC briefings.
CDC has more than 1,000 people deployed for the response in Atlanta and in hard-hit states. About a dozen task forces within the agency are working on topics, from outbreak epidemiology to strategies to optimize face mask supplies for health-care workers because of worsening shortages.
The health officials who have been prominent recently are Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator and a retired U.S. Army physician and global AIDS expert, and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.