Public health expert Jeremy Konyndyk was interviewed on All Things Considered today. He worked at USAID directing the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance from 2013-2017. He’s now a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. He also served with the World Health Organization working on “Outbreaks and Emergencies with Health and Humanitarian Consequences”.
He said a lot of things, and fair use will prevent reproducing them all here. About the outbreak and its dynamics:
First, the nature of an outbreak is that you're never seeing what's actually happening; you're seeing an echo from the past. So right now we know that this disease has an incubation period of about a week, and you can spread it before you know you have it. So that means that the numbers we're seeing today is actually the transmission dynamics from a week ago.
About the maladministration’s (non)response:
I don't think the Trump administration has done nearly enough on really any of the priorities that we need to be on top of to tackle this pandemic. … When we saw what was happening in Wuhan in mid-January to the hospitals there, the way they were overwhelmed by a surge of cases, that was the warning sign of what could happen, and we're seeing it now play out in northern Italy. We may be only a week or two from that beginning to play out in U.S. cities.
And, in particular, about the ridiculous travel ban:
It's actually worse than useless at this point because what it does - it doesn't really afford us any protection. Once the disease is here, once the disease is spreading in our country, that is the greatest threat. Banning travel anywhere in the world at this point is a bit like locking the door after the killer is already in the house. The reason it's actually worse than just useless is that it's a distraction. The people who need to be enforcing and monitoring that travel ban are the kind of public health officials that we would want to be protecting nursing homes, supporting hospitals to get ready. We don't have an infinite supply of those people; we need to prioritize them where they do the most good.
“Worse than useless.” The Big Policy Move is (of course it is) making things worse. Based no small amount on rabid xenophobia, and who knows what else, including Yet Another Chance to stick it to the EU (and, conveniently, many of the most important NATO countries.)
And, of course, what’s really important to this imPOTUS:
I think what we have repeatedly seen since the middle of January is a White House that is inclined to downplay the seriousness of the risk, and that makes it very, very hard for the rest of the federal government to contradict that. I think it's very hard - and I say this as a former federal official - it's very, very hard to get out in front of the president. And if the president has made clear to you what he does and doesn't want to hear, it's difficult to get out of line with that.
Hear or read it all at the link.
Meanwhile, over on Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Politico reporter Dan Diamond, who has been covering the goings-on at the WH during the outbreak.
Say what you will about Tiger Beat On The Potomac, Diamond has covered this well. I know this may shock all of you terribly, but it’s not pretty.
Let me add that annieli has also covered this interview and the response. I’m going to try not to duplicate but add coverage. In response to a question from Terry, Diamond says:
As one official has said, Terry, the question might not be what went wrong; it's what went right? The Trump administration and health officials knew back in January that this coronavirus was going to be a major threat. They knew that tests needed to be distributed across the country to understand where there might be outbreaks. But across the month of February, as my colleague David Lim at Politico first reported, the tests that they sent out to labs across the country simply did not work. They were coming back with errors. … By the time that the Trump administration made a decision to allow new tests to be developed by hospitals by clinical laboratories, it was a step that was seen as multiple weeks late.
Did I hear that right? Did the maladministration delay allowing hospitals to develop accurate tests? Of course it did — and despite the fact that there was a known working test from the World Health Organization:
The World Health Organization did have a working test. Someone somewhere made the decision that the U.S. was going to go its own way, and that started a chain reaction of not having a working test and then having these delays for weeks - so certainly a failure, not necessarily the worst failure but the one that started us down this path.
At this point Diamond notes that South Korea has probably done more testing for the virus in the last 24 hours than the US has done in 2 months. They’re doing like 10,000 a day; we’ve done less than 8,000 total. (And the population of South Korea is less than one sixth of the US population.)
We already know why Dotard doesn’t want testing, right? “Numbers.” Bad “numbers.” You can read a lot about it at annieli’s diary, linked above particularly Alex Azar’s reluctance to do more testing because then we might, y’know, find more cases — which would be bad for the “numbers” and iDJiT’s reelection prospects. Because that’s what really matters.
When President Trump went on air and did a press conference talking about his concern over the, quote, "numbers" and didn't want a cruise ship with infected Americans to necessarily dock and have the passengers evacuated because he was worried about the numbers, it was a remarkable statement for a president to say. The president has been obsessed with the numbers, obsessed with the optics of how this looks, which is not what you want the U.S. president to be focused on. The president's decisions on coronavirus, Terry, are, I think, an outgrowth of how he has approached government the past three years. ...
And when I look back on what the president did or did not do, one major piece of behavior is his attack on what some might call the steady state, the career civil servants across the government who work for multiple presidents and bring expertise. The president has driven a lot of those people away. That has weakened the response across government. …
The president famously axed a team in the White House about two years ago that was focused specifically on pandemic preparedness. He cut funding for a program that predicted when viruses could jump from animals to humans basically around the same time that this new coronavirus appears to have jumped from animals to humans in China. And there are big parts of the bureaucracy that he has either tried to cut or otherwise alienated and driven people away.
There’s a lot in this interview about Alex Azar and his machinations, not only during the last months, but going all the way back to Whitewater and the Florida 2000 recount, in the interview. Please read or listen to the whole thing. He’s another Bill Barr: first and foremost a party operative. But over and above all that, he has a horrible management style, calling HHS the “Department of Life”, alienating staff and officials including the Surgeon General (who, for his own part, is on the teevee machine busily asserting, without basis, that the outbreak is “contained”), and blocking out other officials entirely, especially if he perceives them as threats. Not that he’s the only one making things worse. Azar and Seema Verma (head of Medicare and Medicaid, FSM help us) are “kind of at war with each other” in the department. In trying to please You Know Who, and also in f**ing things up.
Meanwhile, Seema Verma, since being added to the team, has announced all kinds of actions that could be seen as cracking down on the problem - dispatching a team of investigators to Washington state, where there has been a major outbreak of corona virus, predominantly in local nursing homes. But I've talked to officials who say that Seema Verma, in an effort to show that she's cracking down, may actually be creating more problems by having her investigators demanding paperwork, demanding answers at a moment when these nursing home officials are just trying to provide basic patient care to people who have been infected by coronavirus.
I know we all know this, but it’s bad. It’s really, really bad. And there is so much more that I can’t reproduce for fair use reasons.
To give Dan Diamond the last word,
I don't use this word lightly, Terry, but I'd say that this testing failure and the broader response to the coronavirus has been a catastrophe.
Strap down, everyone.