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Poll

What do you expect on Wednesday?

Reports of protests are overblown. A few incidents around the country, but nothing major.
- 5 (45.5%)
A few major incidents in capitals, but nothing much in DC.
- 5 (45.5%)
A major incident in DC, but nothing much around the country.
- 0 (0%)
More than 10 capitals have major upheavals, but nothing much in DC.
- 0 (0%)
A major incident in DC plus more than 10 capitals with significant upheavals.
- 1 (9.1%)
More than half the capitals around the country have problems with protesters, but DC is quiet.
- 0 (0%)
DC has major problems, while more than half the capitals around the country also have considerable trouble with protesters.
- 0 (0%)
Huge disruption to the day.
- 0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 9

Voting closed: January 19, 2021, 10:49:21 PM


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Author Topic: Trump Administration  (Read 2042051 times)

kiidcarter8

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49080 on: September 01, 2020, 12:52:08 PM »

"I think what is really humbling to those of us in medical research and clinical care is when we confront something we just don't know enough about," Li said. "But we need to take it seriously, and we need to have the humility to recognize that were just starting to observe and collect the data right now."



https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/health/long-haul-coronavirus-doctor-patient/index.html
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bankshot1

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49081 on: September 01, 2020, 12:55:05 PM »

Its a good thing that colleges are self-contained communities with little or no interaction with the outside world.

Imagine what might happen if there were "college towns" where college students mingled with the others who were dependent upon college related commerce in restaurants, bars, retail stores of all sorts. Just imagne the possibiity of spreading a virus in that environment. !!! Thank gawd, there aren't any of those in the US.
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NeedsAdjustments

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49082 on: September 01, 2020, 12:57:24 PM »

"I think what is really humbling to those of us in medical research and clinical care is when we confront something we just don't know enough about," Li said. "But we need to take it seriously, and we need to have the humility to recognize that were just starting to observe and collect the data right now."



https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/health/long-haul-coronavirus-doctor-patient/index.html

Dude, you are the one arguing that in situations where only young people get sick its all good.  The context of the quote above is that this is incorrect.  We don't know what long-term health issues arise (studies on this posted previously here by myself and others) so the true effects are not captured by hospitalization and death numbers.
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"When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done."  -  The impeached "president" on Feb 27, 2020

NeedsAdjustments

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49083 on: September 01, 2020, 12:58:02 PM »

Its a good thing that colleges are self-contained communities with little or no interaction with the outside world.

Imagine what might happen if there were "college towns" where college students mingled with the others who were dependent upon college related commerce in restaurants, bars, retail stores of all sorts. Just imagne the possibiity of spreading a virus in that environment. !!! Thank gawd, there aren't any of those in the US.

Like I said, probably would have been beneficial for kiidcarter8 to have attended a college.
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"When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done."  -  The impeached "president" on Feb 27, 2020

Echo4

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49084 on: September 01, 2020, 12:59:20 PM »

Follow-up to the story about the NH GOP and illegal absentee ballots they sent out:

Quote
GOP sent out 200,000 of those illegal absentee ballots. 2900 or so have been returned. (Maybe postage barcoded). They plan to reach out by newspaper ad and telephone to those voters


need a link

I didn't have one, when I posted that. It came straight from one of the legal team in NH that works elections. But I have one now:

http://indepthnh.org/2020/08/31/nh-gop-submits-plan-to-correct-unlawful-absentee-ballot-form-mailer/
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kiidcarter8

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49085 on: September 01, 2020, 01:01:32 PM »

WSJ  Part 1




GENEVA— Sylvie Briand landed in China looking for answers. Nearly a month had passed since word of a mysterious pneumonia had emerged. It was now late January and the World Health Organization was struggling to learn more about it.

Frustrated with mounting cases and limited information from China, the WHO’s top brass, including Dr. Briand, flew to Beijing to resolve a burning question: How easily did this new disease spread?

They met with President Xi Jinping. They had a phone call with local WHO staff just back from the Wuhan epicenter, quarantined after one developed a cough. Dr. Briand, the agency’s director of global infectious hazard preparedness, drew up a list of questions for Chinese health officials.

By the time the WHO received answers, the Covid-19 pandemic was stumbling into emergency rooms on three continents. Its spread around the world had already begun on Jan. 30 when the WHO declared a global public-health emergency, its one and only level of alert.

The announcement was a dud. Few countries paid enough attention.

Over the next weeks, the WHO warned nations the virus was headed their way. “Now is the moment for all countries to be preparing themselves,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared on Feb. 4, when the WHO reported more than 20,600 cases in 25 countries.

But that same day, the WHO also asked nations not to close borders—following its standard protocol, as such restrictions might discourage governments from reporting outbreaks. Within weeks, the virus landed on the agency’s doorstep, turning Geneva into a hot spot. By March, Dr. Briand, a physician, was quarantined in her own apartment, tending to her husband and teenage son, who had become infected at school.

“Very frustrating,” she said. “Everybody realized, we are not talking about theoretical threats.”

The WHO spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars honing a globe-spanning system of defenses against a pandemic it knew would come. But the virus moved faster than the United Nations agency, exposing flaws in its design and operation that bogged down its response when the world needed to take action.

The WHO relied on an honor system to stop a viral cataclysm. Its member states had agreed to improve their ability to contain infectious disease epidemics and to report any outbreaks that might spread beyond their borders. International law requires them to do both.

Time and again, countries big and small have failed to do so. The WHO, which isn’t a regulatory agency, lacks the authority to force information from the very governments that finance its programs and elect its leaders. It can’t parachute disease-fighting teams to an outbreak unless a government invites it. And years of painstakingly worded treaties, high-level visits and cutting-edge disease surveillance—all meant to encourage good-faith cooperation—have only bitten around the edges of the problem.

It doesn’t have a mandate to investigate,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the global health policy center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It can’t demand entry into a country because they think something bad is happening.”


Nearly 200 countries were counting on an agency whose budget—roughly $2.4 billion in 2020—is less than a sixth of the Maryland Department of Health’s. Its donors, largely Western governments, earmark most of that money for causes other than pandemic preparedness.

In 2018 and 2019, about 8% of the WHO’s budget went to activities related to pandemic preparedness. Nearly three times that amount was budgeted for eradicating polio, a top priority for the WHO’s two largest contributors: the U.S. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Its headquarters’ staff numbers 2,500, spread across a range of diseases.
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Echo4

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49086 on: September 01, 2020, 01:01:51 PM »

Its a good thing that colleges are self-contained communities with little or no interaction with the outside world.

Imagine what might happen if there were "college towns" where college students mingled with the others who were dependent upon college related commerce in restaurants, bars, retail stores of all sorts. Just imagne the possibiity of spreading a virus in that environment. !!! Thank gawd, there aren't any of those in the US.

Like I said, probably would have been beneficial for kiidcarter8 to have attended a college.

Or more than one, like I did!

(And I don't mean grad school, though those, too...)
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facilitatorn

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49087 on: September 01, 2020, 01:02:28 PM »

http://thebulwark.com/newsletter-issue/the-essence-of-late-stage-trumpism/

We’ll find him in a spider hole and get a look at his natural hair, whatever Bedminster Bob tries to sell as alternative facts.
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Republicans will deliver only poverty and world war

bodiddley

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49088 on: September 01, 2020, 01:03:40 PM »

The US had a lot of warning.  Factor that in too.
The China outbreak became publicly known by Jan 1 and the outbreak grew majorly throughout Jan/Feb.  Jan 21-23 China locked down. 

The No. Italy and Iran outbreaks started raging circa Feb 22.
These were flashing red lights that the Trump Admin ignored or disdained.

March 15 is when the US first decided the virus was an actual problem and still they did a terrible and half-assed job of dealing with it.

A week later, circa March 21, China started coming out of a 2 month lockdown.  March 23 I was able to play basketball at one indoor gym -- the first maskless contact I had in public in China since Jan 23 (one guy wore a mask while playing).

A 2 month lockdown with everybody masking up in public and then China started carefully and gradually reopening.  In May, they resumed the school year.  Schools just reopened as normal for the Fall semester.
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Echo4

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49089 on: September 01, 2020, 01:04:10 PM »

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/tech/trump-facebook-twitter-fact-check/index.html

Republicans are flooding the internet with deceptive videos and Big Tech isn't keeping up
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kiidcarter8

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49090 on: September 01, 2020, 01:07:59 PM »

WSJ  Part 2


To write its recommendations, the WHO solicits outside experts, which can be a slow process. It took those experts more than four months to agree that widespread mask-wearing helps, and that people who are talking, shouting or singing can expel the virus through tiny particles that linger in the air. In that time, about half a million people died

The agency’s actions in the Covid-19 pandemic are now a subject of an international review, with nearly all member states calling for an accounting of early missteps

A review of the WHO’s initial response to the pandemic, based on interviews with current and former WHO staff, public-health experts advising it and officials who work with it, suggests that the agency’s bureaucratic structure, diplomatic protocol and funding were no match for a pandemic as widespread and fast-moving as Covid-19


In particular, The Wall Street Journal found:



* China appears to have violated international law requiring governments to swiftly inform the WHO and keep it in the loop about an alarming infectious-disease cluster. Those laws were written so that governments could break them with impunity—there are no clear consequences for violations.

* The WHO lost a critical week waiting for an advisory panel to recommend a global public-health emergency, because some of its members were overly hopeful that the new disease wasn’t easily transmissible from one person to another

* The institution overestimated how prepared some wealthy countries were, while focusing on developing countries, where much of its ordinary assistance is directed.

“Retrospectively, it’s always easy to reinterpret the facts,” said Dr. Briand. “I was in the middle of the storm myself….It was like driving at 400 kilometers per hour. You don’t see the landscape when you are at this speed.”

The U.S. intends to withdraw from the organization next year. President Trump has said the agency responded too slowly to the pandemic and wasn’t tough enough on China. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has pledged to keep the U.S. in the WHO.

Public-health leaders say the WHO plays a critical role in global health, leading responses to epidemics and setting health policies and standards for the world. It coordinates a multinational effort every year to pick the exact strains that go into the seasonal flu vaccine, and has provided public guidance and advice on Covid-19 when many governments were silent.

“We sounded the alarm early and we sounded it often,” Dr. Tedros repeated during thrice-weekly news conferences

It is up against a particularly contagious pathogen that has flummoxed some of the world’s best-resourced health agencies. Many institutions were slow to realize that the new coronavirus was spreading before its victims showed symptoms, helping it slip through fever checkpoints at the borders the WHO encouraged to stay open.

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NeedsAdjustments

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49091 on: September 01, 2020, 01:16:00 PM »

The US had a lot of warning.  Factor that in too.

The world got caught flat-footed by this pandemic, and the WHO wasn't ready, responded late, and could have (should have) done better. 

But the US had their own pandemic plan and two months to prepare, but did NOTHING.

And when States went into lockdown to flatten the curve the US still did NOTHING at the federal level.

Trump, kiidcarter8 and the WSJ want to blame China and the WHO?  This has been on us for seven months, and look at where we are compared to other countries.  Almost 190,000 dead.

Piss poor leadership at the Federal level.  There is no other explanation for a disaster like this.
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"When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done."  -  The impeached "president" on Feb 27, 2020

kiidcarter8

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49092 on: September 01, 2020, 01:17:28 PM »

WSJ   Part 3



Frightening news

The world’s public-health agency was born weak, created in 1948 over U.S. and U.K. reluctance. For decades, it was legally barred from responding to diseases that it learned about from the news. Countries were required to report outbreaks of only four diseases to the WHO: yellow fever, plague, cholera and smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980

In early 2003, the WHO confronted some frightening news. A strange new pneumonia was spreading from China to other countries.

The WHO immediately issued global alerts and the agency’s chief, Gro Harlem Brundtland, publicly scolded China for not reporting the new disease, called severe acute respiratory syndrome, before it jumped borders.


SARS convinced governments to retool the WHO. The next year, delegates arrived in the Geneva palace where the League of Nations once met to resolve a centuries-old paradox: Countries don’t report outbreaks, because they fear—correctly—their neighbors will respond by blocking travel and trade.

As months rolled on, it became clear that governments were reluctant to allow the U.N. to scold, shame or investigate them. An early draft included blunt language allowing the WHO to call out countries that don’t share information on a potential outbreak, said Gian Luca Burci, then a WHO senior legal officer: “Everybody pushed back. No sovereign country wants to have this.”

China wanted an exemption from immediately reporting SARS outbreaks. The U.S. argued it couldn’t compel its 50 states to cooperate with the treaty. Iran blocked American proposals to make the WHO focus on bioterrorism. Cuba had an hourslong list of objections.

Around 3:15 a.m. on the last day, exhausted delegates ran out of time. The treaty they approved, called the International Health Regulations, imagined that each country would quickly and honestly report, then contain, any alarming outbreaks. In return, the treaty discouraged restrictions on travel and trade. There would be no consequences for reporting an outbreak—yet no way to punish a country for hiding one.

The treaty’s key chokepoint: Before declaring a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, the WHO’s director-general would consult a multinational emergency committee and give the country in question a chance to argue against such a declaration. Delegates agreed this could give some future virus a head start but decided it was more important to discourage the WHO from making any unilateral announcements that could hurt their economies

Over the next few years, emergency committees struggled over how to determine whether an outbreak was a PHEIC. It took months to declare emergencies for two deadly Ebola epidemics. Yet the WHO declared one when a few hundred polio cases imperiled an eradication push.

Early warning

Just before dawn on Dec. 31, reports started streaming in on a multimillion-dollar early-warning system, which scans the internet for keywords. The reports were translations of health notices from officials in the city of Wuhan to hospitals that had been leaked to Chinese media.

“The South China Seafood Market in our city has seen patients with pneumonia of unknown cause one after another,” read one.

“Whether or not it is SARS has not yet been clarified, and citizens need not panic,” read another.

A short notice in Chinese soon followed on the website of the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, reporting 27 cases. “The investigation so far has found no obvious person-to-person transmission,” read the notice, which has since been deleted. Another sentence suggested the opposite: “Avoid closed public places and crowded places with poor air circulation.”

The WHO’s electronic system receives hundreds of notices daily. Still, “every time we see a cluster of unexplained pneumonia, especially in China, it always catches our attention,” Dr. Briand said. Anything beyond five cases was cause for alarm.

Following protocol, the WHO formally requested verification from Chinese health officials. By now it was Jan. 1.

On Jan. 3, representatives of China’s National Health Commission arrived at the WHO office in Beijing. The NHC acknowledged a cluster of pneumonia cases, but didn’t confirm that the new pathogen was a coronavirus, a fact Chinese officials already knew. That same day, the NHC issued an internal notice ordering laboratories to hand over or destroy testing samples and forbade anyone from publishing unauthorized research on the virus.

China’s failure to notify the WHO of the cluster of illnesses is a violation of the International Health Regulations, said Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University who has advised the WHO on international health regulation matters. “Once a government knows that there is a novel virus that fits within the criteria, which China did, it’s obliged to report rapidly,” he said.

China also flouted the IHR by not disclosing all key information it had to the WHO, said David Fidler, an expert on global health and international law at the Council on Foreign Relations. The regulations call for member states to provide the WHO with “timely, accurate and sufficiently detailed public health information available to it on the notified event.”

When asked for comment, the National Health Commission pointed to a Chinese government white paper that said China reported the new virus “in an open, transparent, and responsible manner and in accordance with the law.”

The WHO said it’s up to member states to decide whether a country has complied with international health law, and that the coming review will address those issues.

In Geneva, the WHO’s emergency response team had been meeting since Jan. 1, searching for evidence the disease was spreading between people, infecting more than those who had been at the seafood market where the early cases originated. The agency’s infectious disease experts were convinced it was.

“Whenever you hear of a cluster of atypical pneumonia you think respiratory and you think human-to-human transmission,” Maria van Kerkhove, a specialist in Middle East respiratory syndrome and now the WHO’s technical lead for the Covid-19 response, said in a May briefing. “It’s not if—it’s just what is the extent?”

While Chinese scientists had sequenced the genome and posted it publicly, the government was less forthcoming about how patients might be catching the virus. WHO scientists pored over data they did get, and consulted with experts from national health agencies, including the CDC, which has 33 staff detailed to the WHO.
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Echo4

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49093 on: September 01, 2020, 01:19:40 PM »

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bodiddley

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Re: Trump Administration
« Reply #49094 on: September 01, 2020, 01:20:11 PM »

WHO is somewhat toothless.
Reportedly China mostly met the minimum of their responsibilities by informing WHO of consequential virus/pandemic info within 3 days as called for, which means they slow-walked info, likely massaged it before giving it to WHO in the beginning, etc.

WHO didn't do a good job.
But what about the CDC, which used to be one of the elite international health institutes?  They've been sidelined and were hugely ineffective, wasting weeks at a crucial early juncture with their botched tests and not allowing private labs to run tests, etc. 

China was so overwhelmed with the Wuhan/Hubei outbreak that they used the quick antigen test to get results as fast as possible.  And despite it's comparatively low accuracy, China stuck with that the whole time as its primary CV test, understanding time is the essential component.  Fast results (same day results as far back as March and probably February) mean you can isolate and quarantine, and effectively contact trace. 

Trump boasts about the number of US tests -- when he isn't lamenting them -- but when results aren't available for more than 2 days and with some states averaging nearly a week delay -- the tests and results are all but useless in terms of preventing transmission.  There was excitement a few weeks ago that the US was thinking of going in for fast antigen testing (with results now being able to be processed in under 30 minutes).


Quite seriously, so many mistakes were made by the Trump Admin in dealing the CV-19 that it becomes hard to remember all the blunders and failures.  I probably should make a reference list, which would easily have a dozen items on it.
« Last Edit: September 01, 2020, 01:28:02 PM by bodiddley »
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