COVID-2019 in America, effect on politics and economy

[GVChamp]

Looks like the normies are paying attention now. Coronavirus dominated conversation pretty much all day.

Unfortunately, friends and family did NOT take the advice I gave them 3 weeks ago. They did not stock up on anything and were surprised by the massive lines at stores today.

I hope people will start taking this a bit more seriously. We had a monthly review today and I let our factory leadership know before we started that Italy had a massive number of deaths yesterday, and the situation is getting worse. Since then, it seems Belgium and Estonia have also entered limited lockdowns, Spain has placed a number of cities under quarantine, and Maryland and Ohio have closed all their schools. California and New York are banning public gatherings above certain sizes.

Unfortunately, while our company has closed corporate offices, factory leadership seems to want to continue business as usual. I will likely quit as soon as we have a few diagnosed cases.

[Oracle]

From the sounds of it, and that is an inordinate amount of meat, I would have to say it is probably the whole cast of The Walking Dead...

Say after reading that list my blood has gotten a bit sluggish in the last hour. Can anybody spare some lovastatin?

And the irony of it all, he says that's not panic buying. I ate like 10 kilos of mutton in 12 days while I was travelling, and my BP shot up. I guess he's into regular exercise and all.

2 that can actually eat meat and one that's still on breast milk.

We tend to eat a lot of meat, though. I'm not really a big fan of meatless or meat-light diets, no matter how much doctor tells me he wants me try the Mediterranean-diet.

I too am not a fan of veggies, but considering what I'm going through, I am considering running early morning and lifting weights in the evening. Also, changing my diet. But dude, that is a lot of meat. The pork that you buy, it doesn't have fat right? In UK supermarkets, they put pork without the fat on the shelves. Anyway, red meat, you might want to reduce. Fish is good protein. For the last 10 days, I'm eating fish. I got bored yesterday, went out and bought 3.2 kgs of broiler chicken, net weight should be around 2 kgs. If I buy goat meat and bring home, mom wouldn't let me stay. Big big problem staying with parents.

Get rid of the pork products (wife is allergic to pork) and add about 100 lbs of fish, 25lbs of shrimp, 5lbs of octopus. Instead of broiler chickens substitute 12 cornish hens then and mine and your freezers look about the same.

and Oracle, thats for 2 adults Doesn't include the KimChee fridge

Sea food is good protein too. Tell me something, you go to the supermarket once a month, and stock up, is it? Then the whole cycle repeats the next month. And so on. Right?

I should start preparing for doomsday. I was following a lot of the prepper stuff earlier. Got lax for some years.

[Double Edge]

Tell me something, you go to the supermarket once a month, and stock up, is it? Then the whole cycle repeats the next month. And so on. Right?

They do that as a matter of habit. Not to prepare for any doomsday. Any offers they buy and store in the freezer.

Gunny said even after the hurricane there was no shortage of food.

There is a guy in Wuhan i follow. He got locked into his complex on Jan 28.

Only online orders permitted. He said cost of food went up 4 to 5 times.

Temporary supply shortage

So they organised into groups and bought like that for a week.

Then the prices came back down. So even in Wuhan there is no shortage of food.

Food will not be in short supply. This i'm confident of.

Might not get your favourite flavour of Oreos or Tacos but essentials you need will be there.

[Double Edge]

Still not clear who pays for testing because insurance does not cover it.

So we have to assume the tests to date have been voluntary ?

If you offer to donate blood, will they test for free ; )

[DOR]

Forget the pundits; look at the facts

CDC Budget
2018 $6,824 mn
2019 $6,478 mn
2020 $5,215 mn
https://www.cdc.gov/budget/fact-sheets.html

Did President Trump Cut the CDC Budget?
snopes.com, Feb 27, 2020-03-13
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-cut-cdc-budget/

Mixture—
What’s True
The Trump administration's proposed 2021 budget includes cuts to the CDC's activities related to chronic disease.
What's False
Congress hasn't approved the budget, so CDC funding in 2021 remains unclear.

“It is also true that in 2018 the Trump administration fired key officials connected to the U.S. pandemic response, and they were not replaced.”
Funding to fight epidemics in ‘hot spots’ including China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda, and the Congo were also cut by about 80% in 2018.

“Trump’s budget director stands by plans to cut CDC budget by 15 percent,”
salon.com, March 12, 2020
https://www.salon.com/2020/03/12/tru...by-15-percent/

“That budget proposes reducing Health and Human Services funding by $9.5 billion, in the process cutting $1.2 billion from the CDC's budget (a reduction of 15%) and eliminating $35 million from the Infection Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund.”

[snapper]

I know this virus will take some adverse effects on the US - world - economy but it seems a bit Trumpetesque to worry about the economy rather than the lives it may claim. Only 1 reported case here so far - but that is almost certainly BS - and am thinking of retreating to my yacht (with a small arms cache to repel boarders) and casting off for the mid Atlantic.

[tbm3fan]

Well here goes nothing. My wife had gotten a free hotel in Las Vegas for this weekend which is my son's 11th birthday. So we must go being free lodging and all. Taking off at 05:15 hours for the 560 mile drive. Back late Monday afternoon. Be good...

[Oracle]

They do that as a matter of habit. Not to prepare for any doomsday. Any offers they buy and store in the freezer.

Gunny said even after the hurricane there was no shortage of food.

There is a guy in Wuhan i follow. He got locked into his complex on Jan 28.

Only online orders permitted. He said cost of food went up 4 to 5 times.

Temporary supply shortage

So they organised into groups and bought like that for a week.

Then the prices came back down. So even in Wuhan there is no shortage of food.

Food will not be in short supply. This i'm confident of.

Alright. How did organising into groups and buying products make prices go down?

Might not get your favourite flavour of Oreos or Tacos but essentials you need will be there.

Might want to replace those with Jameson/Famous_Grouse or Glenfiddich. Those are the only essentials in life without a women and zombies trying to sneak into my house. I always keep stock of smokes. I also have booze in stock. But I'm thinking of cutting down on alcohol.

As an Indian, I've not seen anyone stocking up on food, that would last them for say 6 months. It's the psychological thing I guess, to buy fresh and eat fresh. Canned foods are not very popular in India. Now, what if disaster strikes? What would we do then?

What if the next COVID-19 originates from India. We're not China, we can't order a lockdown that easily, for example Shaheen Bagh protests, and people don't stockpile food. Makes me really scared.

Well here goes nothing. My wife had gotten a free hotel in Las Vegas for this weekend which is my son's 11th birthday. So we must go being free lodging and all. Taking off at 05:15 hours for the 560 mile drive. Back late Monday afternoon. Be good...

I'm 99% sure you have medical insurance. Have fun.

[TopHatter]

Trump reportedly rejected aggressive coronavirus testing in hopes it would help his re-election

The U.S. government's response to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak has been "much, much worse than almost any other country that's been affected," Ashish Jha, who runs the Harvard Global Health Institute, told NPR on Thursday. "I still don't understand why we don't have extensive testing. Vietnam! Vietnam has tested more people than America has." Without testing, he added, "you have no idea how extensive the infection is," and "we have to shut schools, events, and everything down, because that's the only tool available to us until we get testing back up. It's been stunning to me how bad the federal response has been."

There are a lot of reasons why the U.S. lags other countries in testing for the new coronavirus — defective early tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the decision not to adopt an effective German test adopted by the World Health Organization — but Politico's Dan Diamond told Fresh Air's Terry Gross on Thursday that politics also seems to have played a role, along with mismanagement and infighting between, for example, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Seema Verma, the Medicare chief.

In January, Azar "did push past resistance from the president's political aides to warn the president the new coronavirus could be a major problem," Diamond said, but he "has not always given the president the worst-case scenario of what could happen. My understanding is [Trump] did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that's partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear — the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential re-election this fall."

[Oracle]

^ Oh! My F****** Lord! Best President the US ever had. His IQ can be compared with a new born baby I suppose.

[TopHatter]

His IQ can be compared with a new born baby I suppose.

Sounds about right.

[astralis]

not him alone.

geezus christ, we're eff'd.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a9400291.html

Jared Kushner has asked the father of his sister-in-law, supermodel Karlie Kloss, for help in leading the United States response to coronavirus, according to reports.

Kloss’s father, a doctor, then reportedly turned to Facebook to ask other doctors for help with the situation.

“If you were in charge of federal response to the pandemic, what would your recommendation be. Please only serious responses,” Kurt Kloss wrote in his post to a group of emergency room doctors, according to screenshots captured by the Spectator. “I have direct channel to person now in charge at White House and have been asked for recommendations.

“I have already expressed concern for need for ventilators and more PPE (personal protective equipment) for frontline and test kits.”

Earlier this week, it was reported by Politico that President Trump had placed his son-in-law, who was previously tasked with Middle East relations and who has no medical qualifications, in charge of deciding whether the country should declare a national emergency amid the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the report, the president is delaying making a final decision until he speaks to Mr Kushner about his findings.

After Dr Kloss’s initial post, which prompted hundreds of responses from doctors, the supermodel’s father shared another post in which he attempted to clarify who he is, according to screenshots.

Thanking everyone who offered suggestions for how the country should proceed amid the coronavirus outbreak, Dr Kloss explained that some members of the group had “challenged” him on the validity of his claims.

“So for transparency I will provide some background about my unique circumstance,” he wrote, adding that he has not shared this information in a “professional forum before”.

He continued: “Our daughter Karlie Kloss (one of the top models in the world, 45 Vogue covers and counting; proud dad commentary) is married to Mr Joshua Kusher. His brother is Mr Jared Kusher, son-in-law to the president and who is now directly involved with the response to this.”

According to Dr Kloss, he had repeatedly shared his concern over the country’s lack of preparation for the pandemic to his son-in-law over the last few weeks. Eventually, Jared Kusher came to him for help, at which point he decided to crowd-source responses from fellow doctors, which he explained he then planned to have the group peer-review, before sending to the president’s advisor.

“I hope to have this posted before I go to bed later this morning,” Dr Kloss said, before concluding: “In the almost 30 years of training for and practising EMERGENCY MEDICINE I have not been afraid until today.”

Harvard professor calls US coronavirus response a 'catastrophic failure'.mp4
After receiving advice from the group, the doctor then summarised his final list of 13 points, which included suggestions such as: “Nationalise as in wartime production of PPE’s, testing kits and ventilators, pop-up field hospitals with ICU capability Israel seems to have expertise, decentralised testing away from hospital or if on hospital away from ED, Draconian travel restrictions, and cancelling all mass gatherings.”

The list also includes measures such as providing a massive marketing public statement announcement “explaining what patients to do especially not going to ED if not in respiratory distress (need to refine this message)”, locking down nursing homes and requiring the caregivers to wear full gear and provide frequent testing, and using emergency funding to compensate quarantined.


Trump's coronavirus travel ban could make things worse, WHO doctor
Upon concluding his crowd-sourcing of medical advice, Dr Kloss updated the group’s almost 22,000 members that “Jared is reading now,” according to a screenshot of his post.

While President Trump announced Wednesday night from the Oval Office that the US would be implementing a 30-day ban on travel from Europe, it is not clear which, if any, suggestions from the doctors the US government will implement.

Despite reports suggesting that the president is awaiting Mr Kushner’s advice, a White House official told Politico: “In his role as a senior adviser to the president, Jared Kushner is, of course involved in the coronavirus response, but he is not in charge of coronavirus research.”

As of Friday, there are more than 1,700 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US, and 41 deaths.

The full list of Dr Kloss’s crowd-sourced recommendations are below:

Nationalise as in wartime production of PPE's, testing kits and ventilators
Suspend EMTALA (the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act)
Activate FEMA and DMAT teams
Pop-up Field Hospitals with ICU capability Israel seems to have expertise
Decentralised testing away from hospital or if on hospital away from ED (emergency department)
Drive-through testing capability and I would add pulse ox capability
Draconian travel restrictions
Cancelling all mass gatherings
Massive marketing of PSA explaining what patients to do especially not going to ED if not in respiratory distress (Need to refine this message)
National Telemedicine for screening
Locking down Nursing Homes require all caregivers in full gear and frequent testing
Use state ACEP (American College of Emergency Physicians) for some sort of incident command structure
Use emergency funding to compensate quarantined

[TopHatter]

The Trump Presidency Is Over
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.

When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent?

What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.

“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago. “No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.” I added this:

Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.

It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.

To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look.

That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.

“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”

Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity have been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not."

We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)

But that’s not all. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)

Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong.

Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.

The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.

Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.

“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)

On and on it goes.

To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”

Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.

The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.

Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.

The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.
___________

I hope to god that the headline of this op-ed is true...

[astralis]

it's too bad that it'll take hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars lost to educate Americans why electing pig-ignorant con-men to the Presidency is a bad idea.

[TopHatter]

Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller made last-minute changes to Trump's error-riddled coronavirus speech before he delivered it

• Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and top adviser, and Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser, took the lead in writing the president's error-riddled coronavirus speech to the nation on Wednesday night.
• The two aides have no public-health or medical expertise and haven't been deeply involved in the administration's coronavirus response.
• Top health experts in the Trump administration weren't able to review a final draft of the speech, The Washington Post reported.
• The 10-minute speech was widely viewed as a disaster; Trump made at least six false or misleading statements, and Dow Jones industrial average futures fell as he spoke.

Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and top adviser, and Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser, took the lead in writing President Donald Trump's error-riddled address to the nation about the coronavirus outbreak.

The two aides, who have no public-health or medical expertise and haven't been deeply involved in the administration's coronavirus response, were making edits to the speech just minutes before Trump delivered it live on Wednesday night, The Washington Post reported.

And while Kushner hadn't attended any meetings of the White House task force handling the response to the pandemic, many aides who were involved in the effort weren't consulted or were ignored during the speechwriting process, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Top health experts in the Trump administration weren't able to review a final draft of the speech, The Post reported.

The 10-minute speech was widely viewed as a disaster; Trump made at least six false or misleading statements, and Dow Jones industrial average futures fell as he spoke.

Trump said his European travel ban applied to all of Europe and suggested Americans would be subject to it. In fact, the ban applies only to the Schengen region, which excludes the UK and Ireland, and it doesn't apply to US citizens and permanent residents, as well as some of their family members.

Trump also incorrectly said the travel ban would apply to cargo and trade — a statement he later corrected on Twitter.

The president also falsely claimed that US insurance companies had agreed to waive patient copayments for coronavirus treatment, when in fact industry officials agreed only to waive patient costs for testing, a more limited offer.

Kushner had pushed for the national address as a way to calm fears and illustrate that the administration was taking the crisis seriously, but other White House aides, including Kellyanne Conway, thought it was a bad idea, The Journal reported.

Trump has made several other misleading statements about the coronavirus and has repeatedly downplayed the threat the pandemic poses to the country. In late February, Trump even insisted that the number of infected Americans would be "close to zero" in "a couple days."
_____________

Kushner wasn't wrong that a national address would be a way to calm fears....the problem is the person delivering the address and his Administration are a burning dumpster fire of dog shit.