Getting it right in Wisconsin:
Almost two months had passed since Chinese health officials first described a fast-moving new coronavirus that had jumped the species barrier from animals to humans. By the time President Donald Trump strode into the White House briefing room on the evening of Feb. 26, the virus had killed more than 2,700 people in China and forced the lockdown of 11 million residents in Wuhan. Infections in Italy were rising by an astonishing 40% a day.
That night Trump assured Americans, “We’re very, very ready for this, for anything.”
Then he held aloft a report co-produced by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security ranking 195 countries on their readiness to confront a pandemic.
“The United States,” he said, “is rated number one most prepared.”
The nation did indeed rank first on the Global Health Security Index. But the president never mentioned the report’s ominous central finding: “No country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics. Collectively, international preparedness is weak.”
Moreover, the index revealed a number of U.S. flaws that have proved crippling in the fight against COVID-19. America received the lowest possible score for public confidence in government; low rankings among the index’s 60 high-income countries for doctors per capita (38th) and hospital beds per capita (40th); and a dismal rating for access to health care — 175th out of 195 countries.
What the index could not have predicted — what stunned the nation's public health experts as months passed — was America’s lethargic and inconsistent response, and its failure to follow basic precepts of its own pandemic playbook.
"It's not that the index measured anything inappropriately, it's that none of it was acted on," said Joe Smyser, CEO of the national health care nonprofit Public Good Projects. "I don't think we've ever failed on this scale. The level of failure is almost inconceivable."
The pandemic playbook, passed down from President Barack Obama to President Donald Trump, had been one of the nation's key planning documents: a 69-page blueprint laying out the decisions to be made and agencies to be mobilized in a health disaster. Throughout its pages, the document stressed the need for an early public health response coordinated by the federal government.
That did not happen.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel interviews with public health experts and reviews of numerous studies by government agencies, watchdog groups and scientists reveal a cascade of blunders that contributed to the deaths of more Americans in the pandemic than died in the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.
Among the most serious lapses:
Money for public health had been cut steadily for decades.
The cuts became critical because America's leaders ignored warnings about the dire consequences should the federal government abandon its central role in a pandemic, and leave states to fend for themselves.
When this scenario occurred, some states were forced to compete with one another in order to purchase scarce medical supplies. Further, in the absence of detailed federal guidelines, states imposed a hodgepodge of lockdown policies, only to have some undermined by politicians, including the president.
Despite more than a decade of scientific warnings about the specific threat posed by coronaviruses, the government and drug companies allowed a potential vaccine to be shelved for three years instead of testing it in human trials.
Trump routinely dismissed the advice of his own health experts, downplaying the severity of the pandemic. The president told journalist Bob Woodward, as recounted in the book "Rage," that he played down the pandemic to avoid triggering panic.
While leaders of other countries united their citizens behind the idea of collective sacrifice through lockdowns and other measures, U.S. leaders, especially the president, politicized the pandemic.
The report in the Journal-Sentinel is quite long and includes a timeline of the failure of the Trump GOP, and excerpts like this:
Asked why the U.S. lacked basic medical supplies and left states to find them on their own, the HHS spokesperson said the Strategic National Stockpile "was not designed or congressionally funded to respond to a nationwide pandemic."
The HHS website, by contrast, describes the national stockpile as "organized to support any public health threat."
There were other explanations for the lack of basic medical supplies, according to the HHS spokesperson. Critical supplies were manufactured overseas, the U.S. had difficulty early on ensuring that supplies went to the states that needed them most, and finally, she said, "unknowns about the virus itself led to overuse of PPE in hospitals and treatment centers."
Lurie, the former assistant secretary for preparedness and response, offered a much harsher view of the federal response to COVID-19.
“I’ve never seen a situation where you are having a national and international emergency and the response is not being coordinated by the federal government," she said. “For the federal government to virtually abdicate responsibility is unheard of.” And this: At various times since launching Operation Warp Speed, Trump forecast that the vaccine could be ready by October, before Election Day or by the end of the year.
Experts in public health and vaccine development have dismissed all of these dates as unrealistic.
“It’s been very damaging,” said Hamburg, the former FDA commissioner. “There is a process for how vaccines need to be made. There has been an effort made to accelerate that process, but it is absolutely essential that scientific rigor be the driving force, not political pressure.”
"The government has appropriately invested heavily in vaccine development, but its rhetoric has politicized the development process and led to growing public distrust," editors of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote last week. Their withering editorial declared that in dealing with the new coronavirus, America's leaders had "failed at almost every step" and "taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy."
And this:
Trump has defended the actions his administration took, especially the travel restrictions, saying the measures saved an ever-shifting number of lives.
Others speak not of lives saved, but those lost due to delays and missteps.
“It has to be in the tens of thousands,” said Lurie at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
She pointed to reporting by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which has produced estimates of the lives that could be saved simply through consistent mask-wearing.
The institute, an independent research center that is part of the University of Washington, projects that by Feb. 1, 2021, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 will have reached 395,000. Projections by the institute's model range from 374,000 deaths to 421,000.
But the institute also struck a note of hope:
Its model projects 79,000 American lives can be saved by Feb. 1 by increasing mask use from the current estimate of 70% to 95%.
While 95% mask use may seem unprecedented, it isn't. It's the same level achieved by the nation of Singapore.
Singapore, which has 5.8 million people, roughly the same as the state of Wisconsin, has reported 27 deaths from COVID-19.
https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/2020/10/14/america-had-worlds-best-pandemic-response-plan-playbook-why-did-fail-coronavirus-covid-19-timeline/3587922001/No matter what, Trump fucked up. He has the blood on his tiny hands. Yet, Kid and his ilk continue to try to protect him and focus on the minutiae of Rasmussen polls or make fun of Kamala Harris's first name, because in Kid's tiny self-driven myopic world, America and truth and morality doesn't matter as much as trying to gainsay reality in order to "win" an argument on the Internet.
Trump is despicable. That's proven, but anyone who would attempt to shift the reality of the abject irresponsibility and criminal negligence of the Trump White House with their "response" to the pandemic for such trivial reasons as kid presents here?
THAT is truly loathsome.
Loathsome, kid.
Loathsome.
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