All things CoronaVirus

[Trinity]

Trump was briefed Jan 3. Again on January 18. Limited travel ban on Wuhan was, what, Jan 29?

[MDlaxfan76]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/c ... tions.html

Trump’s China travel ban was Swiss cheese. Screening at airports? Pu-lease.

Which I wrote about on here at the time, as my son and his girlfriend traveled back from that region. You could fly through Hong Kong and come to the US without being tested. They felt they were being responsible as they'd been for 17 days in a remote part of Thailand, which country-wide had very few detected cases. But they went through Bangkok, to Hong Kong to Chicago to Florida without a test.

Should have been tested, but no one was.

Temp "screening" is nice to have, but actual tests were what should have been done.

[tech37]

Trump was briefed Jan 3. Again on January 18. Limited travel ban on Wuhan was, what, Jan 29?

And what snarky/condescending post came from you when you learned about the travel ban? I'm sure you were all for it. What? It didn't come early enough for you?

But wait, you were so busy cheering on the impeachment shamwow at the time, you may have forgotten to comment.

Hindsight... a beautiful thing.

[MDlaxfan76]

Trump was briefed Jan 3. Again on January 18. Limited travel ban on Wuhan was, what, Jan 29?

To be fair, the Chinese implemented their own travel ban Jan 23rd in Wuhan, as tens of thousands were being identified fast. They had confirmed that it was a new coronavirus on Jan 7, should have locked down then or earlier, but were slow off the mark. We think they underreported their #'s at each stage of this, but we knew the #'s they were publicly reporting were big and growing very fast. And our IC was apparently very clear that the situation was very dire in China.

We should have been focused on preparing for testing those first weeks, but once the Chinese actually hit the panic button we definitely knew that this could be huge if it had already gotten out of China, which anyone with access to travel data could have swiftly predicted as a near certainty. The Federal gov't has such data. They knew.

January 28 we had already found two cases in the US, January 30 we had first confirmed community spread in the US. Of course, that had already begun in multiple areas of the US, just undetected.

So, while the Jan 29 ban was correct to do, it was already much too late to be relied upon as sufficient.

Frankly, I can see all these mistakes being made by any unlucky administration, including the initial snafus with testing. But that next week of February should have been an all hands call to action on multiple key fronts, not happy talk throughout February and early March. That's the truly missing 6 weeks...and we're still getting miserable communications from Trump.

Arguing publicly with the medical experts, contradicting what they had just said. "We can't let the cure be worse"; "we need to reopen"... No, you governors don't need to shutdown, right after the docs said Everyone should do so. CDC recommends mask, but "voluntary", "you don't need to do it, but you can" and "I'm not". And everyone should take hydroxychloroquine, "I don't know why they shouldn't" and "I've seen really good results" and "I may just take it myself"...even though there are known contraindications with other drugs and for those with diabetes and heart disease...and that was just yesterday's presser...

Miserable.

[Peter Brown]

Turns out Florida is now second already in the country in testing for Coronavirus (only NY had tested more) with a remarkably (so far) low positive rate. Our hospitals are overwhelmingly empty. The peak here won’t hit til early May but estimates keep getting revised down.

I thought Ron Desantis was the devil?

Two counties in Florida will not do well here. I don’t even need to tell anyone here who runs these counties. Predictable doesn’t begin to describe it. But I will also tell you that in spite of the age problem, Florida is likely to not suffer as predicted by the nabobs here because we’ve been shut down much longer than the press wanted you to think plus we simply aren’t as densely populated as advertised. We also (because of the age issue) have a decent-sized medical infrastructure.

Probably time to train the anti-Republican schadenfreude elsewhere.

[MDlaxfan76]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/c ... tions.html

Trump’s China travel ban was Swiss cheese. Screening at airports? Pu-lease.

China (WUHAN) had been dealing with the virus since November and in JANUARY they allowed 381,000 passengers to fly into US airports.

The Chinese are the Villains in this piece.

The Chinese definitely fouled up royally. No doubt about it.
"Villains"...no, that would suggest intentionality.

We didn't elect them POTUS.
Our 'duly elected POTUS', despite a big head start on how bad this was going to be, fiddled while Rome burned.
Still fiddling.

[Kismet]

The media hid FDR's paralysis his entire Presidency.
Trump would be called a liar for trying to conceal it from the public.
How was FDR's messaging on the internment camps ?

Not just FDR. Literally all presidents lie. Most every, if not every, politician lies. It's just a reality of the industry. With this said, Trump's lying is not like most anything we've seen before. Certainly in my life time. Politicians have had bigger lies. but in terms of how blatant the lies are and how often they're shared, Trump is off the charts.

The "media hid FDR's paralysis"????
BS.

There was NO ONE who didn't know of FDR's physical issue.
The degree of pain he was in, probably not, but absolutely everyone knew he was in a wheel chair.

Show us contemporary media images of FDR in a wheelchair.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-fdr ... ing-2019-4

That's indeed true, he didn't want that image of him.
Took great pains to avoid it.
But it was nevertheless widely known.
The pain was not widely known.

Excellent and thoughtful piece by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on Presidential leadership during crisis enumerating both FDR and Lincoln and their approaches to dealing with such things.

https://time.com/5807870/doris-kearns-g ... d=tcoshare

[MDlaxfan76]

Turns out Florida is now second already in the country in testing for Coronavirus (only NY had tested more) with a remarkably (so far) low positive rate. Our hospitals are overwhelmingly empty. The peak here won’t hit til early May but estimates keep getting revised down.

I thought Ron Desantis was the devil?

Two counties in Florida will not do well here. I don’t even need to tell anyone here who runs these counties. Predictable doesn’t begin to describe it. But I will also tell you that in spite of the age problem, Florida is likely to not suffer as predicted by the nabobs here because we’ve been shut down much longer than the press wanted you to think plus we simply aren’t as densely populated as advertised. We also (because of the age issue) have a decent-sized medical infrastructure.

Probably time to train the anti-Republican schadenfreude elsewhere.

Peak in Florida looks like early May, 175 deaths per day.
Hope it's better, not worse.
Depends on how much undetected spread happened in the northern cities and towns before things actually closed down.

I think what folks are angry at DeSantis about is the spring breakers who returned to all over the country as carriers. While publicly telling Floridians and America that it wasn't a problem, in lock step with Trump.

DeSantis was not alone in that regard.
Sure, he happens to be an R, but it's really that he made the choices he did. You don't hear folks ripping R Hogan.

[tech37]

The media hid FDR's paralysis his entire Presidency.
Trump would be called a liar for trying to conceal it from the public.
How was FDR's messaging on the internment camps ?

Not just FDR. Literally all presidents lie. Most every, if not every, politician lies. It's just a reality of the industry. With this said, Trump's lying is not like most anything we've seen before. Certainly in my life time. Politicians have had bigger lies. but in terms of how blatant the lies are and how often they're shared, Trump is off the charts.

The "media hid FDR's paralysis"????
BS.

There was NO ONE who didn't know of FDR's physical issue.
The degree of pain he was in, probably not, but absolutely everyone knew he was in a wheel chair.

Show us contemporary media images of FDR in a wheelchair.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-fdr ... ing-2019-4

That's indeed true, he didn't want that image of him.
Took great pains to avoid it.
But it was nevertheless widely known.
The pain was not widely known.

Excellent and thoughtful piece by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on Presidential leadership during crisis enumerating both FDR and Lincoln and their approaches to dealing with such things.

I'm just posting this book again (recommend it highly) as reference. Notice both Lincoln and FDR are featured in the cover collage.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_ ... frontcover

[MDlaxfan76]

The media hid FDR's paralysis his entire Presidency.
Trump would be called a liar for trying to conceal it from the public.
How was FDR's messaging on the internment camps ?

Not just FDR. Literally all presidents lie. Most every, if not every, politician lies. It's just a reality of the industry. With this said, Trump's lying is not like most anything we've seen before. Certainly in my life time. Politicians have had bigger lies. but in terms of how blatant the lies are and how often they're shared, Trump is off the charts.

The "media hid FDR's paralysis"????
BS.

There was NO ONE who didn't know of FDR's physical issue.
The degree of pain he was in, probably not, but absolutely everyone knew he was in a wheel chair.

Show us contemporary media images of FDR in a wheelchair.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-fdr ... ing-2019-4

That's indeed true, he didn't want that image of him.
Took great pains to avoid it.
But it was nevertheless widely known.
The pain was not widely known.

Excellent and thoughtful piece by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on Presidential leadership during crisis enumerating both FDR and Lincoln and their approaches to dealing with such things.

I'm just posting this book again (recommend it highly) as reference. Notice both Lincoln and FDR are featured in the cover collage.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_ ... frontcover

And Kennedy.

Have you actually read the book, tech37?
Even the Table of Contents?

[Trinity]

70 wasted days

[seacoaster]

I hate these establishment guys and all their "preparations" and "preparedness." Give me a "disruptor" any day:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george- ... d=69979013

"In the summer of 2005, President George W. Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he began flipping through an advanced copy of a new book about the 1918 flu pandemic. He couldn't put it down.

When he returned to Washington, he called his top homeland security adviser into the Oval Office and gave her the galley of historian John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza," which told the chilling tale of the mysterious plague that "would kill more people than the outbreak of any other disease in human history."

"You've got to read this," Fran Townsend remembers the president telling her. "He said, 'Look, this happens every 100 years. We need a national strategy.'"

Thus was born the nation's most comprehensive pandemic plan -- a playbook that included diagrams for a global early warning system, funding to develop new, rapid vaccine technology, and a robust national stockpile of critical supplies, such as face masks and ventilators, Townsend said.

The effort was intense over the ensuing three years, including exercises where cabinet officials gamed out their responses, but it was not sustained. Large swaths of the ambitious plan were either not fully realized or entirely shelved as other priorities and crises took hold.

But elements of that effort have formed the foundation for the national response to the coronavirus pandemic underway right now.

"Despite politics, despite changes, when a crisis hits, you pull what you've got off the shelf and work from there," Townsend said.

When Bush first told his aides he wanted to focus on the potential of a global pandemic, many of them harbored doubts.

MORE: Experts warn about big dollar fraud in $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package
"My reaction was -- I'm buried. I'm dealing with counterterrorism. Hurricane season. Wildfires. I'm like, 'What?'" Townsend said. "He said to me, 'It may not happen on our watch, but the nation needs the plan.'"

Over the ensuing months, cabinet officials got behind the idea. Most of them had governed through the Sept. 11 terror attacks, so events considered unlikely but highly-impactful had a certain resonance.

"There was a realization that it's no longer fantastical to raise scenarios about planes falling from the sky, or anthrax arriving in the mail," said Tom Bossert, who worked in the Bush White House and went on to serve as Homeland Security secretary in the Trump administration. "It was not a novel. It was the world we were living."

According to Bossert, who is now an ABC News consultant, Bush did not just insist on preparation for a pandemic. He was obsessed with it.

"He was completely taken by the reality that that was going to happen," Bossert said.

In a November 2005 speech at the National Institutes of Health, Bush laid out proposals in granular detail -- describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. Among those in the audience was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the current crisis response, who was then and still is now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire," Bush said at the time. "If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it."

The president recognized that an outbreak was a different kind of disaster than the ones the federal government had been designed to address.

"To respond to a pandemic, we need medical personnel and adequate supplies of equipment," Bush said. "In a pandemic, everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators masks and protective equipment would be in short supply."

Bush told the gathered scientists that they would need to develop a vaccine in record time.

"If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine on line quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain," he said.

Bush set out to spend $7 billion building out his plan. His cabinet secretaries urged their staffs to take preparations seriously. The government launched a website, www.pandemicflu.gov, that is still in use today. But as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to justify the continued funding, staffing and attention, Bossert said.

"You need to have annual budget commitment. You need to have institutions that can survive any one administration. And you need to have leadership experience," Bossert said. "All three of those can be effected by our wonderful and unique form of government in which you transfer power every four years."

Bush declined, through a spokesman, to comment on the unfolding crisis or discuss the current response. But his remarks from 15 years ago still resonate.

"If we wait for a pandemic to appear," he warned, "it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today."

[Peter Brown]

Turns out Florida is now second already in the country in testing for Coronavirus (only NY had tested more) with a remarkably (so far) low positive rate. Our hospitals are overwhelmingly empty. The peak here won’t hit til early May but estimates keep getting revised down.

I thought Ron Desantis was the devil?

Two counties in Florida will not do well here. I don’t even need to tell anyone here who runs these counties. Predictable doesn’t begin to describe it. But I will also tell you that in spite of the age problem, Florida is likely to not suffer as predicted by the nabobs here because we’ve been shut down much longer than the press wanted you to think plus we simply aren’t as densely populated as advertised. We also (because of the age issue) have a decent-sized medical infrastructure.

Probably time to train the anti-Republican schadenfreude elsewhere.

Peak in Florida looks like early May, 175 deaths per day.
Hope it's better, not worse.
Depends on how much undetected spread happened in the northern cities and towns before things actually closed down.

I think what folks are angry at DeSantis about is the spring breakers who returned to all over the country as carriers. While publicly telling Floridians and America that it wasn't a problem, in lock step with Trump.

DeSantis was not alone in that regard.
Sure, he happens to be an R, but it's really that he made the choices he did. You don't hear folks ripping R Hogan.

Larry Hogan, though not super old by most governor's age range, is 18 years older than Ron and considerably less conservative (out of necessity, since Maryland is a lunatic left state driven by Baltimore corruption and DC government employees). Also, he has had cancer so his future as a POTUS candidate is not super-bright. I like him (certainly more than the alternative), but his future is limited.

Now why would our vaunted American media go after Ron every day?

Well....he's the youngest governor in America at 40 years of age, he has a super-impressive bullet-proof resume, his family is Norman Rockwell-ish, he doesn't suffer fools (uh oh, media and Dems! they hate this a ton), his approval rating in a purple state is at 71%, and most of all, his future is way too bright for Dems and media. The time for American media (and some here ) to kneecap a Republican with a future is before they start running hard. If our Dems and media can't kneecap DeSantis now, they'll only be left with the tired 'racist' card (see: Romney, McCain, Bushes, Reagan); Dems and the media can't be sure anyone will listen to the charge of 'racism' anymore. I mean, DocB swallows that line (about everyone), but he lives in a rubber-padded room and a politician can't rely strictly on lunatics in America to win.

C'mon man, don't play games with this board. Let's call spades spades. I don't even mind that the media and Dems (and some here ) don't like DeSantis; let's just be honest why!

Let's go, America!!! Back to work. Like DeSantis:

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local ... 9-testing/

[Peter Brown]

Also, companies are good citizens (explains why America is the best country in world history).

Gilead producing millions of Remdesevir without approvals at their cost and risk, to be ready in case they are approved.

https://www.gilead.com/purpose/advancin ... r-covid-19

[Peter Brown]

Well this is odd. Anyone care to explain how pneumonia deaths have dropped off the face of the earth this season?

Pneumonia.jpg (34.48 KiB) Viewed 1770 times

[kramerica.inc]

Trump was briefed Jan 3. Again on January 18. Limited travel ban on Wuhan was, what, Jan 29?

And what snarky/condescending post came from you when you learned about the travel ban? I'm sure you were all for it. What? It didn't come early enough for you?

But wait, you were so busy cheering on the impeachment shamwow at the time, you may have forgotten to comment.

Hindsight... a beautiful thing.

+1000



You nailed it, Techie!

[CU88]

yeah, i had briefly seen heart and retinal and assumed there were others.
i don't expect it to be at the local rite aid.

The diabetes is a huge one, so is heart.
Yet, our POTUS is saying to people "what's the harm"...

Speaking of the heart...and this virus/situation we are all in.

Interesting tidbit. Dr. has me on the lowest dosage of an ACE for pre-hypertension. I have not taken it in 4 days and have monitored my BP multiple times each day at roughly the same time each day. it is dang near the same or even lower without it....the only difference, no traffic, sleeping in a bit later, emails are less than 100 each day, and the cell phone barely rings any more. I have not changed diet or exercise routines....probably slipped a bit on the diet with both kids home.

Interesting how nature and the chaos of our careers can influence our health. I suppose we all know that already, just sharing how slowing down allows us to reveal a bit more that we often overlook.

Good luck with it; I do recommend focusing on the eating and exercise (except for the splurge with the kids!)...in addition to the obvious long-term benefits, controlling the little things in our lives, when so much is not within our control, can further help with stress. Sleep is very important as well, and I know I've found that actually easier to do in this less hectic period...though I do still have those middle of the night wake-ups with mind racing...but I had that issue just as much pre-this mess.

Be well.

+1

[youthathletics]

Well this is odd. Anyone care to explain how pneumonia deaths have dropped off the face of the earth this season?

Pneumonia.jpg

How dare you.

I tried to find that graph for flu this year and have had a tough time.

[kramerica.inc]

Well this is odd. Anyone care to explain how pneumonia deaths have dropped off the face of the earth this season?

Pneumonia.jpg

Reposted for emphasis.

[RedFromMI]

Well this is odd. Anyone care to explain how pneumonia deaths have dropped off the face of the earth this season?

Pneumonia.jpg

Covid-19. Weeks 10 and 11 is the nosedive, and that is when the coronavirus really is starting to take off.

Pneumonia as a cause of death is not always the only health problem happening at the time of death - but it does have the habit of finishing off people in weakened health states (like it was the cause of death of my 101 year old grandmother). Now someone in the hospital who tests positive and dies won't necessarily be listed as a pneumonia death even if it is present...