This week we’ve had quite a show on display. That show would be Donald John Trump repeatedly lying about the impact, scope and reaction to the CoronaVirus in the U.S.
Some would say this is merely the result of the fact that Trump is a fact-mangling fool. Others might say it’s just “Trump being Trump” when he and the political members of his staff repeatedly state that the Viras outbreak has already been “contained.” They say that’s it’s just in character for him to falsely attack the Obama administration with lie that they had created a CDC rule that limited their ability to implement tests.
But it’s not just a random string of boneheaded lies, it’s part of a plan. A plan that Trump thinks will keep himself in the White House in 2020.
Chris Hayes stated:
I want to start with a story that's been daunting the headlines, the coronavirus. There’s a lot of anxiety out there. I’m not here to freak people out, but here’s the thing. Consider this: How does anyone, you, me, Vice President Pence, know how to handle a situation if we don’t know the full scope of the problem we face? In fact, when it comes to any problem that any policymaker facts, you can not solve the problem if you do not properly know the scope.
And we’ve had three months, three months, to prepare for the CoronaVirus to come to the U.S. since the outbreak started in Wuhan China. And we have completely failed so far. The federal government and the Trump administration has completely failed until now. We are weeks and weeks behind where we should be.
The biggest problem right now, way above anything else, is that the government is not testing at the capacity. To measure the spread of the disease, you need to test for it.
And the test for this is similar to all kinds of tests for common illnesses. Other countries are doing it at tremendous scales. You swab some saliva, run it through a machine and it tells you if the patient has coronavirus. The problem is we do not have anywhere near the capacity we need, and that is because the first test developed by the CDC was deficient. It was so bad they had to recall it. It was giving false-positive results, and then the CDC had kind of kept a monopoly to itself and other people couldn't develop their own tests. When that test didn’t work we were kind of out of luck. So now they're letting others develop their own test, but it hasn’t been deployed quickly enough. They’re shipping out the thousands of tests, and that’s fine.
The CDC is starting to finally send them out across the country, but there’s a huge bottleneck still, so the key thing is that as of today if you are a random doctor somewhere who has a patient presenting symptoms and you think this person might have coronavirus, it's very hard as of today, to get them tested for it.
The CDC has also not told us how much they are testing which I think is weird. Particularly because at the beginning of the crisis the CDC was telling us how many tests they were administering per day, and then they just took that number off their website. So it has been left to news organizations to try and track down the numbers of how many tests have been run, and get this, it’s less than 2000 tests in the entire country.
That’s right folks after all this time, all these weeks since late December when the coronavirus as first discovered in Wuhan China, the United States has so far run less than 2,000 coronavirus tests the entire nation.
It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?
This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.
“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”
Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.
South Korea tested more than 66,650 people within the first week and are now testing 10,000 per day.
I strongly suspect this is not an accident. This is likely corruption, just like the corruption that has seeped into the DOJ, OMB, State Dept and Pentagon over the last few years. [A new report from Politico indicates that my hunch on this subject was likely correct, and also the Trump's appointed CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield has a shady questionable background.]
Interviews with 13 current and former officials, as well as individuals close to the White House, painted a picture of a president who rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news. For instance, aides heaped praise on Trump for his efforts to lock down travel from China — appealing to the president’s comfort zone of border security — but failed to convey the importance of doing simultaneous community testing, which could have uncovered a potential U.S. outbreak. Government officials and independent scientists now fear that the coronavirus has been silently spreading in the United States for weeks, as unexplained cases have popped up in more than 25 states.
The WH didn’t want the CDC to generate tests because then they’d have to report the numbers those tests produced. And this is all about the numbers.
14 people in Washington State have already died in the past week, and yet only 100 tests were performed in an area covering 3.4 million people. People working in Hospital ERs, who’ve been exposed to patients with coronavirus can not get tested.
Chris then compares what’s happening now with what happened at Chernobyl.
They didn't want to believe it was as big as it was. They brought out their tools to measure the levels of radiation and the detector said it was 3.6 Roentgen per hour. They thought “eh, not great but not terrible.” Here’s the problem, the tool they were using to test the radiation only went up to 3.6.
[Laughter]
True story. They were maxing out. The tool they were using to measure the scope of the problem was insufficient and later when they brought out military-grade equipment the real measurement was 15,000 Roentgen per hour. They were off by a factor of 4,500-5,000. That's why measurement matters.
Then Hayes compares this example to another time where we’ve seen this type of mistaken measurement by Trump. During Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
Hayes: In the aftermath of that storm, there was a complete disconnect between what was being presented as the scope of the problem and the actual scope of the problem. Day after day it became clearer that the Trump administration response, the Puerto Rico government response was totally inadequate. People didn’t have drinking water. There was no electricity. No place to sleep. There were many, many elderly people who were not getting medical care like dialysis.
And then President Trump flew down to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria to assess the damage, and he sat there and took a victory lap over the death toll in Puerto Rico and how low it was compared to Hurricane Katrina.
Trump: Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real disaster like Hurricane Katrina, and look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, it was a storm that was totally overpowering, nobodies every seen anything like this. What was you death count as of this moment? 17?
Puerto Rican Governor: 16 certified.
Trump: 16 people, certified.
Hayes: Except that number was wrong. It was the equivelent to 3.6 Roentgen. It was only what they had measured. Almost a year later when researches went into the Island and looked at the death toll we learned it was 3,000 people.
The death toll for Hurrican Katrina was 1,833. Most of those did not occur during this initial storm landfall, but afterward. People had been trapped inside or on top of their homes. People who had been “rescued” by the Coast Guard and then left to rot at the Superdome and on highway overpasses. Most of those deaths were not caused by the wind and rain, they happened later — just as they did with Hurricane Maria.
Hayes: The president faked his way through [Maria] by mismeasuring the crisis on the front side, and got away on the backside with pure B.S.
That’s what he did then, that’s exactly what he’s doing now. Again, I strongly suspect the incredible slowness of providing tests is not just an accident. The Trump administration tried to implement a travel ban in order to block any people from potentially carrying the virus from entering the country from China. They apparently forgot that many people may not travel directly the China to the U.S., and they may have gone through other countries such as Japan, South Korea, Iran and Europe. This is why we hear Kellyanne Conway screeching at the top of her lungs that they have “Contained” the Virus.
During a press conference, [Paula] Reid asked Conway to account for the Trump administration’s sluggish response to coronavirus in the United States — and Conway immediately denied anything wrong had happened.
“You talked about how the administration initially had this contained, but during that time, why didn’t the administration send out more tests and work to get hospitals prepared?” she asked. “Even today, the state of Florida is saying they can’t test everyone, per the administration’s guidelines, because they don’t have enough tests!”
Conway tried to pivot to say that the government was “ramping up” its production of testing kits, but Reid wouldn’t take her answer at face value.
“But why now, why didn’t they do it while it was contained?” she asked.
“It is being contained,” Conway replied, and then turned the question back on Reid. “Do you not think it’s being contained?”
“The virus is spreading throughout the country,” Reid shot back.
This virus has not been “contained,” it has only been temporarily delayed. There are supposed to be 15,000 tests made available at the end of this week — which is supposed to be Now. 1.5 Million tests are to come online at the end of next week but during that time many of the estimated 200 documented cases of coronavirus will have run through their incubation period. Most of these victims will survive, but so far 14 have died. That's a death rate of 6.3% Meanwhile the WHO has calculated based on numbers from China that the death rate for this virus is about 3.4%, which means that there are likely another 200 cases out there that haven’t been diagnosed yet.
Further, the data from South Korea where they've done the most testing produces a death rate of 0.6% which would mean that there are actually about 2,000 current cases of CoronaVirus in the nation.
But we can't confirm any of that because we don't have the tests.
If there are 500-2,000 current coronaVirus carriers inside the U.S., many of whom could be asymptomatic, spreading the virus without actually being sick -- just how many people will have contracted the virus in the U.S. by next week when the tests actually arrive?
What's the death toll going to be by then?
Trump is playing the same game he played with Hurricane Maria. He argued today that he didn’t want people who’ve been trapped on the cruise ship outside San Francisco to come off the ship "because it would increase our numbers.”
I would rather because I like the numbers where they are, I don't need to have the numbers double because of this ship. That wasn’t our fault. If that happens your 240 is going to be a higher number and your 11 is going to be a higher number.
That’s all he cares about. The numbers. The appearance. How it looks. He wants lower numbers, he doesn't care about the actual victims. He doesn’t care about the sick and the dying. He believes that the CoronaVirus outbreak will ultimately be a “political win” for him.
While the administration has already faced criticism for its handling of the outbreak, two sources say the president himself has joked that critics would be “so surprised” that the outbreak might actually “help, not hurt” his re-election campaign because of his team’s “terrific” response, reported The Daily Beast.
Trump’s view is widely shared among his closest associates, and his campaign has already honed that belief into a political weapon.
“While President Trump proactively combats coronavirus, Democrats campaign to curb Americans’ health care access [with their] Bernie Sanders-inspired, socialist health care agenda,” the 2020 campaign said Monday in a mass email.
Two officials told The Daily Beast that the process has improved, but tension remains between scientists and the vice president’s office over the release of public health information.
[...]
As the virus has spread, the president has launched customary attacks at his critics, who say the administration has underfunded and mismanaged their response — and the White House expects Trump’s allies to follow his lead.
“While the President is leading aggressive response and preparation efforts, many in the media remain focused on attacking him at every turn,” read a list of talking points sent out by the White House to the president’s media surrogates. “Blinded by their bias and ignorant to the irony, the [New York] Times is accusing the President of having a ‘credibility’ problem on this issue — while publishing politically-motivated disinformation blaming the President for a virus.”
Trump himself has been using the virus to bash Democratic policies on immigration and blame them for politicizing the outbreak — which he’s doing himself.
Trump thinks this is an immigration win for him. He thinks it's a healthcare win for him.
Unless the numbers get too big. Can't let that happen.
Here are the remain events for the week;
February 29th —
March 1st —
March 2nd —
March 3rd —
March 4th—
March 5th —
March 6th —
March 7th —
March 8th —