Trump response to COVID-19

[Vrede too]

03/25/2020:
Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook
The 69-page document, finished in 2016, provided a step by step list of priorities – which were then ignored by the administration.

Obama Prepared for a Potential Pandemic. Trump Gutted His Work.

Today:
82,018
Total deaths
(lots of useful real time graphs and info at this link)

[Vrede too]

Biologist: Avoid these places to protect against Covid-19

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Biology Professor Erin Bromage tells CNN's John Berman which environments have an increased risk of spreading coronavirus.

The list includes workplaces, social gatherings, restaurants, and public transportation.

Interestingly, a point is made that if an indoor place is noisy, then the risk of infection is higher due to people talking more loudly.

What does this have to do with Trump response to COVID-19? Does PINO disagree with Bromage at the link? Did you forget about your own How to know and avoid Corona Virus risks?
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4153

[Vrede too]

Oh stop being such a pathetic pedantic OCD whiner.

Awww, you poor illiterate thing. I merely asked questions, ones you're cowering from, and didn't whine at all.
(in fact, I was very careful not to in anticipating this exact tantrum, you are so easy!)

Truth be told I think it's hilarious that you're too stupid to even find your own more appropriate topic in this subforum and hope you will do it some more .

Anyhow, you're welcome for the directions to YOUR OWN topic.
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4153&p=119350#p119350
It must sting to have re-posted .

[Vrede too]

What "Hall Monitor", crybaby? I praised your stupidity and encouraged you to repeat it.

billy.pilgrim doesn't like it when you deceptively alter posters' words:
viewtopic.php?p=118219#p118219
I won't hold my breath waiting for him to scold you.

I think you may have missed this. I edited just before you posted.

Anyhow, you're welcome for the directions to YOUR OWN topic.
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4153&p=119350#p119350
It must sting to have re-posted .

[Vrede too]

Facts:

Oh stop being such a pathetic pedantic OCD whiner.

Awww, you poor illiterate thing. I merely asked questions, ones you're cowering from, and didn't whine at all.
(in fact, I was very careful not to in anticipating this exact tantrum, you are so easy!)

Truth be told I think it's hilarious that you're too stupid to even find your own more appropriate topic in this subforum and hope you will do it some more .

Anyhow, you're welcome for the directions to YOUR OWN topic.
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4153&p=119350#p119350
It must sting to have re-posted .

You cower, as always.

[billy.pilgrim]

Biologist: Avoid these places to protect against Covid-19

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Biology Professor Erin Bromage tells CNN's John Berman which environments have an increased risk of spreading coronavirus.

The list includes workplaces, social gatherings, restaurants, and public transportation.

Interestingly, a point is made that if an indoor place is noisy, then the risk of infection is higher due to people talking more loudly.

Thanks, good to see something relevant in a trump thread.

But I guess everything is open for attack these days.

[Vrede too]

I think you're confused about the definition of "relevant".

I appreciate your support. It is indeed a shame that Ulysses attacked me for asking some polite questions about his post.

[Vrede too]

Faced with an appalling US coronavirus death toll, the right denies the figures

Donald Trump
Top Trump officials
Fox News personalities
Brit Hume
Tucker Carlson
Laura Ingraham
Alex Jones, the InfoWars host
Diamond and Silk
Scott Jensen, a Minnesota state senator and family physician
40% of Republicans
Sean Hannity

It makes me wish that there is a Hell because these assholes would surely be sent to it.

[Vrede too]

Placed in this thread for quick reference, though it condemns not just President* Trump but also the too passive, mostly GOP Govs:

Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Show

If the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers.

And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83% — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated.

Under that scenario, about 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May....

After Italy and South Korea had started aggressively responding to the virus, President Donald Trump resisted canceling campaign rallies or telling people to stay home or avoid crowds. The risk of the virus to most Americans was very low, he said.

“Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on,” Trump tweeted on March 9, suggesting that the flu was worse than the coronavirus. “At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

In fact, tens of thousands of people had already been infected by that point, researchers later estimated. But a lack of widespread testing allowed those infections to go undetected, hiding the urgency of an outbreak that most Americans still identified as a foreign threat....

[Vrede too]

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Exposes Trump's 'Colossal' Lie About Obama

President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed former President Barack Obama for his administration’s shortcomings in dealing with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

“The last administration left us nothing,” Trump said last month.

But the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found that Trump’s own budget documents show the opposite ― exposing what it called “a lie of colossal Trumpian proportions.”

The newspaper’s editorial board said the Trump administration told Congress that the Obama administration left it with everything needed for a pandemic ― and sought big budget cuts from the programs as a result.

Trump’s 2020 budget asked Congress to cut the pandemic preparedness budget by $102.9 million, part of $595.5 million in requested cuts to public health preparedness and response outlay.

“Obama left office with an unblemished record of building up the nation’s pandemic preparedness,” the newspaper said. “Trump systematically sought to dismantle it.”

Trump has since blamed his predecessor for lack of personal protective equipment and testing supplies, saying “our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile.”

But the newspaper said a chart provided by the Trump administration with the budget shows that by 2016 ― Obama’s final year in office ― the nation’s public health emergency preparedness was at between 98% and 100% by every key measure.

“That’s by the Trump administration’s own assessment,” the Post-Dispatch said. “If the cupboard was bare, it’s because Trump swept it clean.”

Read the full editorial here.

Comments:

If Donald Trump got caught telling truth, he would lie to get out of it.

It sounds like a joke, but I think that's already happened more than once.

Parental block Fox on your dad's cable box.
It's bad for him to watch that stuff.

[Vrede too]

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4213&p=124284#p124284

The Lincoln Project
@ProjectLincoln

This is the Trump legacy.

[Vrede too]

Forum post, not fully verified by me but accurate as far as I know:

Let's compare the records of Obama and Trump when it comes to health crises.

In December 2013, an 18-month-old boy in Guinea was bitten by a bat and died a brutal death a day later. After that, there were five more fatal cases.

When Ebola spread out of the Guinea borders into neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone in July 2014, President Obama activated the Emergency Operations Center at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The CDC immediately deployed CDC personnel to West Africa to coordinate a response that included vector tracing, testing, education, logistics, and communication.

Altogether, the CDC, under President Obama, trained 24,655 medical workers in West Africa, educating them on how to prevent and control the disease before a single case left Africa or reached the U.S.

Working with the U.N. and the World Health Organization President Obama ordered the re-routing of travelers heading to the U.S. through certain specific airports equipped to handle mass testing.

Back home in America, more than 6,500 people were trained through mock outbreaks and practice scenarios. That was done before a single case hit America.

Three months after President Obama activated this unprecedented response, on September 30, 2014, we detected our first case in the U.S.A. A man had traveled from West Africa to Dallas and somehow slipped through the testing protocol. He was immediately detected and isolated. He died a week later. Two nurses who tended to him contracted Ebola but later recovered. All the protocols had worked. It was contained.

The Ebola epidemic could have easily become a pandemic, but thanks to the actions of our government under President Obama, it never did. Those THREE EBOLA CONFIRMED CASES were the ONLY cases of Ebola in the U.S.A. because Obama did what needed to be done THREE MONTHS PRIOR TO THE FIRST CASE.

Had Obama not acted swiftly, millions of Americans would have died horrible, painful, deaths like something out of a horror movie (if you’ve never seen how Ebola kills, it’s horrific).

It is ironic because since President Obama acted decisively we forget about his actions since, other than the one case, the disease essentially never reached our shores.

Now the story of COVID-19 and Trump’s response that we know about thus far:

Before anyone even knew about the disease (even in China) Trump disbanded the pandemic response team that Obama had put in place. He cut funding to the CDC, and he cut our contribution to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Trump fired Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, the person on the National Security Council in charge of stopping the spread of infectious diseases before they reach our country - a position created by the Obama administration.

When the outbreak started in China, Trump assumed it was China’s problem and sent no research, supplies or help of any kind. We were in a trade war, why should he help them?

In January he received a briefing from our intelligence organizations that the outbreak was much worse than China was admitting and that it would definitely hit our country if something wasn’t done to prevent it. He ignored the report, not trusting our own intelligence.

When the disease spread to Europe, the World Health Organization offered a plethora of tests to the United States. Trump turned them down, saying private companies here would make the tests “better” if we needed them. However, he never ordered U.S. companies to make tests and they had no profit motive to do so on their own.

According to scientists at Yale and several public university medical schools, when they asked for permission to start working on our own testing protocol and potential treatments or vaccines, they were denied by Trump’s FDA.

When Trump knew about the first case in the United States he did nothing. It was just one case and the patient was isolated. When doctors and scientists started screaming in the media that this was a mistake, Trump claimed it was a “liberal hoax” conjured up to try to make him “look bad after impeachment failed.”

The next time Trump spoke of COVID-19, we had SIXTY-FOUR CONFIRMED CASES but Trump went before microphones and told the American public that we only had FIFTEEN cases “and pretty soon that number will be close to zero.” All while the disease was spreading, he took no action to get more tests.

What Trump did was to stop flights from China from coming here. This was too late and accomplished nothing according to scientists and doctors. By then the disease was worldwide and was already spreading exponentially in the U.S. by Americans, not Chinese people as Trump would like you to believe.

Another forum post, also not fully verified by me but accurate as far as I know:

In response to all that was learned by the Bush and Obama administrations from the H1N1, SARS and Ebola outbreaks, President Obama's White House National Security Council left the Trump administration a detailed dossier on how to respond to an impending pandemic. The document was entitled — conspicuously enough — the “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”

The playbook contained step-by-step advice on questions to ask, when to ask them, decisions to make, when to make them, an assignment of critical tasks to various federal agencies, and how the agencies should coordinate the implementation of those tasks in the face of an impending pandemic. It even included sample documents that officials could use for inter-agency meetings. And lest there be any doubt, the dossier explicitly identified novel coronaviruses as one of the pathogens that could require a major coordinated response.

Additionally, outgoing senior Obama officials led an in-person pandemic response exercise for senior incoming Trump officials in January 2017 -- as required by a new law on improving presidential transitions that Obama signed in 2016.

It is now obvious that the Trump Administration followed none of the guidance provided by the outgoing administration. Even though Trump had been warned of the seriousness of COVID as early as January, he publicly downplayed the threat (and even the existence) of the virus well into March, pretending it would just go away while playing golf and holding campaign rallies. When it was obvious the virus wasn’t a “hoax” but instead was rapidly overtaking us, and wishing it away still wasn’t a viable option, he and his HHS administrators still wasted precious time gearing up to act, and completely fumbled the ball getting critical PPE and testing supplies distributed to areas of the country with the greatest need — pitting desperate states against the federal government and, indeed, even against each other.

Now that virus is continuing to spread at alarming rates — indeed, it is literally exploding in populous states such as Florida, Texas and California — Trump still pretends it’s no big deal. Still unwilling to make the hard decisions required during a national crisis, he continues to inexcusably downplay its prevalence and its seriousness, making reckless comments like “99% of the cases are not serious,” and “this will be over very shortly.” That is because acknowledging the current alarming rates of infection would be admitting his abject failure to responsibly deal with the crisis for the last 6 months.

Trump’s continuing denials of the dangerousness of COVID 19 are simply fueling the explosion of cases around the country. His public denials have sent a message to a large uneducated segment of the American public that it is safe to participate in reckless social and other public gatherings. No masks needed, of course — those are for Democrats and weaklings.

But the ultimate outrage is that, at the very moment when: (1) the virus is exploding; (2) millions of Americans have or will be infected; and (3) hospitals around the country are literally on the brink of being overwhelmed, Trump is asking the United States Supreme Court to declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. If he is successful, millions of Americans will lose their health care insurance at the precise moment they will need it most. What will millions of Americans who get infected over the next few months do if they need medical care? By all accounts, Trump could not care less.

The sad truth is that Trump’s entire response to the pandemic has been driven not by science, empathy, or concern for the health of our nation, but instead by rank political calculation. And as far as political calculations go, it has been a disastrously misguided one at that— his complete mismanagement has rendered our country’s response to the pandemic the worst in world. I mean that literally — we have the highest rates of infection anywhere on the planet. And all because of Trump’s self-interested pursuit of an economic political agenda which, in the most tragic of ironies, has simply prolonged and, indeed, exacerbated the economic downturn with exploding rates of joblessness that grow exponentially every week, with no end in sight.

By placing his own political ambitions over the health and safety of the American public, Trump has failed the most basic test of leadership in the face of the most serious public health crisis this generation has ever faced. His failures have come at a cost of over 130,000 American lives, and counting. Enough is enough.

[Vrede too]

'They didn't run the plays': Ex-officials say Trump administration didn't use pandemic 'playbooks'



153K+ dead