Inside the Trump administration’s coronavirus response — and missed opportunities to contain COVID-19 before it was too late. Correspondent Martin Smith speaks with global health experts about warnings to the White House that went unheeded, including a health policy expert who said his 2019 study pointing to the threat of a pandemic was met with silence.
As he investigates how the crisis unfolded in the U.S., Smith finds: “There’s a lot of unknowns as to who dropped the ball and when. It’s clear that at the top, and I mean by that the president, the wrong messages were being given.”
Trump was unfit long before the pandemic came – autocratic, bigoted, corrupt, ignorant, and disordered. The sadness of this preventable tragedy is both that thousands have needlessly died and that Trump will convince his followers that those many deaths don’t matter.
There will be even worse from Trump until the political conflict against him is won. The political conflict can only be won through a tenacious and resolute opposition.
Thursday in Whitewater will see showers of rain and snow with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 10m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
Kayleigh McEnany got the job Tuesday. She got it despite her appalling Twitter joke in 2012 about President Barack Obama’s brother having never left his Kenyan hut and smears centered on “birtherism” conspiracy theories — unfounded questions about whether Trump’s predecessor was born in the United States — to stoke racism.
She got it despite confidently stating that President Trump doesn’t lie (everybody knows he does, a lot) and that in 2002 “President Obama” (actually a state senator then) went golfing after journalist Daniel Pearl was abducted and killed.
And perhaps worst of all, Trump’s former 2020 campaign spokeswoman got the job after spouting rose-tinted hype about the president’s supposed victories over the coronavirus. That included this beauty, uttered Feb. 25 on the since-canceled Fox Business show hosted by Trish Regan: “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.” Five weeks later, 13,000 have died of the disease in the United States and hundreds of thousands more are infected.
That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities.
Those who have committed to Trump, and remain committed, will not yield now. Even his failures during a pandemic will not shake their resolve. On the contrary, they’ll say anything, and perhaps do anything, in support of their prior commitment. One should not be shocked by this — Hobbes was right, at least regarding the weak-minded, that reason is a spy for the passions (“the Thoughts, are to the Desires, as Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired”).
One reads from Brian Stelter that Trumpism’s dead-enders are now falsely insisting that the coronavirus death count is overstated:
Some of the biggest names in right-wing media are questioning the official Covid-19 death toll. Indeed, they’re suggesting the numbers might be inflated in an effort to paint President Trump and/or the crisis in the worst possible light. In recent days, a version of this theory has been floated by personalties such as Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson, Brit Hume, and “Diamond & Silk.”
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Hume and Carlson are not alone. Levin tweeted Tuesday evening that he has “suspected this for weeks.” And Limbaugh, who initially dismissed the coronavirus as the “common cold,” said recently, “It’s admittedly speculation, but … what if we are recording a bunch of deaths to coronavirus which really should not be chalked up to coronavirus?”
Wednesday in Whitewater will see an afternoon rain with a high of sixty-five. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:30 PM, for 13h 08m 04s of daytime. The moon is nearly full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1911, Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity.
Three months into the coronavirus epidemic, the Trump administration has yet to devise a national strategy to test Americans for the deadly disease — something experts say is key to blunting the outbreak and resuming daily life.
In the absence of a national plan, several states are developing their own testing systems, but the emerging picture varies widely. States with more money and robust medical sectors have devised comprehensive plans, while others lag far behind.
The White House, meanwhile, is still debating which types of tests should be sent to which regions and how much to focus on testing Americans to see who may have developed immunity to the disease.
“Unfortunately, states really are on their own,” said Partners in Health medical director Joia Mukherjee, whose group is working with Massachusetts to develop the country’s most extensive contact tracing network to track infected patients’ interactions with others. “It’s problematic at best and egregious at worst, because some states have more resources than others; some states have more leadership than others.”
The Center for Public Integrity analyzed policies and guidelines from 30 states meant to direct how hospitals should ration ventilators if they don’t have enough. All but five had provisions of the sort advocates fear will send people with disabilities to the back of the line for life-saving treatment.
These policies take into account — in ways that disability advocates say are inappropriate — patients’ expected lifespan; need for resources, such as home oxygen; or specific diagnoses, such as dementia. Some even permit hospitals to take ventilators away from patients who use them as breathing aids in everyday life and give them to other patients.
The remaining 20 states either have not established rationing policies or did not release them.
Doctors and medical ethics experts say these states need to have policies in place now, before coronavirus cases peak, and should not cloak them in secrecy.
Expecting doctors to make heart-rending decisions on who lives and who dies, experts say, runs the risk that they will lean on personal biases and stereotypes, even unwittingly.
“There is a long history of people with disabilities being devalued by the medical system. That’s why we have civil rights laws,” said disability-rights activist Ari Ne’eman. “We don’t have an exception in our country’s civil rights laws for clinical judgment. We don’t take it on trust.”
(The contention here isn’t that a ventilator is a sure-fire aid; the contention is that what might be an effective aid could be wrongfully denied.)
The drug is used to treat certain diseases like lupus and malaria. But Dr. Fauci confirms there is no substantial data suggesting it’s a coronavirus treatment. Health experts warn it may have dangerous side effects. But Trump continues to hype up the drug, leading to a prescription rush and a shortage for patients who actually need these pills to stay alive.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see an afternoon thunderstorm with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:29 PM, for 13h 05m 13s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s School Board meets in closed session again today via videoconference at 5:45 PM to conduct to conduct district administrator screening interviews.
Trump’s narrative at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis was that by acting before anyone else to ban travel from China, when “everybody said, it’s too early, it’s too soon,” he had reduced U.S. COVID-19 cases to “a very small number.”
But every single thing about this narrative was false.
There was never a travel ban, only restrictions with gaping exceptions that included Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and every American returning home from China.
Trump did not act before everybody else.
His travel restrictions were effective as of February 2. Dozens of countries, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, also issued travel restrictions in the first week of February, many of which were effective before February 2.
Trump did not act contrary to the advice of government health care professionals. According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, the restrictions were “the uniform recommendations of the career public health officials.”
And Trump’s limited China travel restriction didn’t hold U.S. COVID-19 cases to a very small number. At most, it bought a little time, which Trump promptly squandered by inaction, resulting in more COVID-19 cases in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. (Though of course it’s possible that China has more cases and is lying about their numbers—justy as they’ve lied about nearly everything else concerning the pandemic they allowed to fester.)
But forget—just for a moment—about the dishonesty of Trump’s narrative and what it says about Trump’s character.
The real problem is that his false narrative shaped the actual, real-world action—or, more accurately, inaction—of the government in response to the crisis. And not just the federal government. Republican governors across the nation—not all of them, but enough to cost many, many lives—adopted Trump’s narrative and acted accordingly.
The City of Milwaukee on Friday announced five in-person voting centers for Tuesday’s election – just a fraction of the 180 polling sites that are usually open on election day.
Officials had said previously that they expected to have 10 to 12 voting sites, or possibly fewer, open for in-person voting citywide.
A severe shortage of poll workers has forced the city to decrease the number of polling locations. According to a statement from the city Friday, only 350 poll workers are scheduled to work the election, down from about 1,400 the city normally has.
So Speaker Vos and Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald want Gov. Evers to allow an exception to the Safer at Home order for Easter Sunday services. (They’ve also included Passover in their request, but they’re either too ignorant or too dishonest to concede that Passover is commemorated traditionally in a home setting. It’s obviously a certain Christian voter they aim to beguile.)
One can put aside for a moment the suspicion that Vos & Fitzgerald simply want to portray Tony Evers – probably the most moderate Democratic governor in America – as somehow hostile to religion.
Instead, even when taking Vos & Fitzgerald as defenders of Christian liberty, one finds that their grasp is weak. The state’s largest Christian religious institution, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, for example, has already decided against in-church mass on Easter. Leading protestant denominations have said the same (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4.)
There is a clear scriptural injunction against testing God’s providence when it need not be tested (Deut. 6:16, Mt. 4:7). If Vos & Fitzgerald read more, perhaps they would speak less on this subject.
And yet, and yet — they have read (or understood) less of the religious tradition they claim to defend than Wisconsin’s prominent religious institutions.
As for a political constituency they aim to incite, well, in that selfish effort they’re more practiced. (Vos’s third wife, conservative pundit Michelle Litjens Vos, thinks the response to this pandemic is an “overreaction.” She’s offered her untrained medical opinions on Facebook, for those gullible enough to take her advice over that of America’s finest epidemiologists.)
Robin Vos & Scott Fitzgerald are, in this and so much else, scheming political men.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a passing shower this afternoon, and a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:28 PM, for 13h 02m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s School Board meets in closed session via videoconference at 5:45 PM to conduct to conduct district administrator screening interviews.
A coroner in Indiana wanted to know if the coronavirus had killed a man in early March, but said that her health department denied a test. Paramedics in New York City say that many patients who died at home were never tested for the coronavirus, even if they showed telltale signs of infection.
In Virginia, a funeral director prepared the remains of three people after health workers cautioned her that they each had tested positive for the coronavirus. But only one of the three had the virus noted on the death certificate.
Across the United States, even as coronavirus deaths are being recorded in terrifying numbers — many hundreds each day — the true death toll is likely much higher.
More than 9,400 people with the coronavirus have been reported to have died in this country as of this weekend, but hospital officials, doctors, public health experts and medical examiners say that official counts have failed to capture the true number of Americans dying in this pandemic. The undercount is a result of inconsistent protocols, limited resources and a patchwork of decision-making from one state or county to the next.
The hospital network’s [Phoebe Putney Health System’s] C.E.O., Scott Steiner, is monitoring supplies in real time. “Surgical gowns, we are three days from running out,” he told me on Tuesday. “N95s, we’re seven days. Surgical masks, the thinner ones, we’re at about six days. Face shields, we’re in good shape. Hand gel—we’ve been going through an incredible amount, but we think we have about ten days on hand.” He went on, “We’re constantly sourcing new products. New sources. Our traditional sources no longer have anything available and haven’t for two weeks.”
Hospital employees have begun sewing their own masks, “MacGyvering things up,” as Steiner put it. “We rolled that out yesterday morning,” he said. “That’s helped extend the life of our N95 masks. Had we not done that, we’d be out of N95 masks now.” (“I’ve almost likened it back to the war effort back in the day, when family members would help with munitions or whatever it took,” Black told me.) Since Tuesday, the hospital has produced twenty thousand fabric masks, allowing them to further stretch their supply of N95s and surgical masks, which Steiner expects will now last about two and three weeks, respectively. They’re down to six days of hand sanitizer and two days of face shields, he said in a follow-up call.“It’s impossible to predict what we’re going to get here and when,” Steiner explained. “Sometimes it comes on a skid from the state stockpile. We’re also sourcing items individually from certain vendors.”
Palm Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:26 PM, for 12h 59m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1792, Pres. Washington first exercises a veto of federal legislation.
While the government does not publicize all of the contents of the repository, at the time Trump took office, the Strategic National Stockpile, as it is formally known, reportedly contained vast amounts of materials that state and local health officials could use during an emergency,including vaccines, antiviral drugs, ventilators and protective gear for doctors and nurses.
“The SNS was definitely not an empty shell,” Dr. Tara O’Toole, a former homeland security official during the Obama administration who is now executive vice president at the nonprofit strategic investment firm In-Q-Tel, told us in an email.
At least three times in the past week, however, Trump has sought to blame former President Barack Obama’s administration for the currentstate of the stockpile, which has been unable to meet the demand for additional supplies expected to be needed to treat people with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, or to protect the doctors and nurses caring for those patients.
But NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce was allowed to visit one facility in June 2016 — only months before Trump was inaugurated in January 2017. In her article about the warehouse she toured, she described the shelves as being the opposite of bare.
“A big American flag hangs from the ceiling, and shelves packed with stuff stand so tall that looking up makes me dizzy,” Greenfieldboyce wrote.
Someday presidential historians will fully explore the defects of heart and character that led Donald Trump, in the midst of an unprecedented national crisis threatening hundreds of thousands of deaths, to brag that the television ratings for his afternoon briefings rivaled the “Bachelor” finale or “Monday Night Football.” This is not mere pettiness. It is clinical solipsism. Exploiting this type of tragedy in the cause of personal vanity reveals Trump’s spirit to be a vast, trackless wasteland. Trump seems incapable of imagining and reflecting the fears, suffering and grief of his fellow citizens. We have witnessed the total failure of empathy in presidential leadership.
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President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats convinced people in the bread lines of the Great Depression that an aristocratic president had their back. Following the March on Selma in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint session of Congress. He compared Selma to the sacrifices of the American Revolution and the Civil War. And he concluded: “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” In that moment, Johnson assured the civil right protesters that the American “we” encompassed their cause and that the president himself would be their advocate.
