Category Archives: Leadership Trust

Bill Gates says the world is entering ‘uncharted territory’ because it wasn’t prepared for a pandemic like COVID-19

Posted on by • Posted in Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Clinical Research, Clinical Research Funding, Clinical Testing, Clinical Trial Recruitment, Coronavirus, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Economic Crisis, Economic Impact, Economic Stimulus, Economy, Failure, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Intensive Care (ICU), Leadership Cares, Leadership Integrity, Leadership Respect, Leadership Trust, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, Ventilators • Leave a comment

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-warns-world-is-entering-uncharted-territory-coronavirus-2020-4

5 Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read This Summer | Time

  • Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said the world was entering into “uncharted territory” because it was not prepared for a pandemic like COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
  • Speaking to “BBC Breakfast” by video chat on Sunday, Gates said the world should’ve invested more in mitigating a global health crisis.
  • “There is the period where the virus shows up in those first few months,” he said. “Were the tests prepared? Did countries think through getting their ICU and ventilator capacity up?”
  • He added that once the crisis is over “very few countries are going to get an A grade” for their handling of the outbreak.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said the world was entering into “uncharted territory” because it was not prepared for a pandemic like COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Gates, who has been warning about the risk of a pandemic disease for years and who has poured millions into fighting the new coronavirus outbreak, told “BBC Breakfast” on Sunday that the world should have invested more into mitigating a global health crisis.

“Well, there was a period when I and other health experts were saying that this was the greatest potential downfall the world faced,” he told the BBC in an interview on Sunday, highlighting his previous warnings against the possibility of a deadly pandemic.

“So we definitely will look back and wish we had invested more,” he said, “so that we could quickly have all the diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines. We underinvested,” he said.

The 67-year-old billionaire warned that in the period before COVID-19 became a public-health crisis, countries could have better prepared their testing capabilities and made sure hospitals were stocked with ventilators and other necessary health supplies.

“There is the period where the virus shows up in those first few months,” he said. “Were the tests prepared? Did countries think through getting their ICU and ventilator capacity up?”

He added that once the crisis is over “very few countries are going to get an A grade” for their handling of the outbreak.

“Now, here we are, we didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice,” he said. “So both in health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”

Gates has become an outspoken advocate for preparing for a global health crisis like COVID-19.

Speaking to the Financial Times earlier this month, Gates said that COVID-19 was the “biggest event that people will experience in their entire lives” and world leaders and global policymakers have “paid many trillions of dollars more than we might have had to if we’d been properly ready.”

He told FT he was confident that lessons learned from this outbreak would encourage people to better prepare for next time but lamented that the cost this time around was too high.

“It shouldn’t have required a many trillions of dollars loss to get there,” he said. “The science is there. Countries will step forward.”

 

 

 

 

Trump reportedly squandered 3 crucial weeks to mitigate the coronavirus outbreak after a CDC official’s blunt warnings spooked the stock market

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Clinical Testing, Conflicts of Interest, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Emergency Preparedness, Expectations, Failure, False Hope, Fault, Fear, Health Policy, Indecision, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership Alignment, Leadership Culture, Leadership Decentralized, Leadership Intent, Leadership Trust, Quarantine, Social Distancing, Special Interest Groups, Status Reporting, Transparency, Underinsured, Uninsured, Unintended Consequences, Wall Street, Warning Signs, Wishful Thinking • Leave a comment

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-wasted-3-weeks-coronavirus-mitigation-time-february-march-nyt-2020-4

Dow closes with decline of 950 points as coronavirus continues to ...

  • President Donald Trump’s administration wasted three key weeks between February and March that could have been spent enacting mitigatory measures against COVID-19, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
  • By the end of February, top officials knew that time was running out to stem the virus spread, and wanted to present Trump with a plan to enact aggressive social distancing and stay-at-home measures.
  • But on February 26, a top CDC official issued stark warnings about the virus’ spread right before the stock market plummeted, which angered Trump for being, in his view, too alarmist. 
  • The Times reported that the entire episode killed off the efforts to persuade Trump to take aggressive, action to mitigate the virus’ spread. In the end, Trump didn’t issue stay-at-home guidance until March 16. 

President Donald Trump’s administration stalled three key weeks in February that could have been spent enacting mitigatory measures against COVID-19 after Trump was angered by a public health official issuing a dire warning about the virus, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

On Saturday,The Times published a lengthy investigation of all the instances Trump brushed aside warnings of the severity of the coronavirus crisis, failed to act, and was delayed by significant infighting and mixed messages from the White House over what action to take and when. 

The Times wrote: “These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him.”

The Times conducted dozens of interviews with current and former officials and obtained 80 pages of emails from a number of public health experts both within and outside of the federal government who sounded the alarm about the severity of the crisis on an email chain they called “Red Dawn.”

One of the members of the email group, Health & Human Service disaster preparedness official Dr. Robert Kadlec, became particularly concerned about how rapidly the virus could spread when Dr. Eva Lee, a Georgia Tech researcher, shared a study with the group about a 20-year-old woman in China who spread the virus to five of her family members despite showing no symptoms.

“Eva is this true?! If so we have a huge [hole] on our screening and quarantine effort,” he replied on February 23. 

At that point, researchers and top officials in the federal government determined that since it was way too late to try to keep the virus out of the United States, the best course of action was to introduce mitigatory, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like social distancing and prohibiting large gatherings.

As officials sounded the alarm that they didn’t have any time to waste before enacting aggressive measures to contain the virus, top public health officials including Dr. Robert Kadlec concluded that it was time to present Trump with a plan to curb the virus called “Four Steps to Mitigation.”

The plan, according to The Times, included canceling large gatherings, concerts, and sporting events, closing down schools, and both governments and private businesses alike ordering employees to work from home and stay at home as much as possible, in addition to quarantine and isolating the sick.

But their entire plan was derailed by a series of events that ended up delaying the White House’s response by several weeks, wasting precious time in the process.

Trump was on a state visit to India when Dr. Kadlec and other experts wanted to present him with the plan, so they decided to wait until he came back.

But less than a day later, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, publicly sounded the alarm about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in a February 26 press conference, warning that the outbreak would soon become a pandemic.

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” Messonnier said, bluntly warning that community transmission of the virus would be inevitable.

The Times reported that Trump spent the plane ride stewing in anger both over Messonnier’s comments and the resulting plummet of the stock market they caused, calling Secretary of Health & Human Services Alex Azar “raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily,” The Times said. 

The Times reported that the entire episode effectively killed off any efforts to persuade Trump to take aggressive, decisive action to mitigate the virus’ spread and led to Azar being sidelined, writing, ” With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages.” 

In the end, Dr. Kadlec’s team never made their presentation. Trump did not issue nationwide social distancing and stay-at-home guidelines until March 16, three weeks after Messonnier warned that the US had limited time to mitigate community transmission of the virus, and several weeks after top experts started calling for US officials to implement such measures.

In those nearly three weeks between February 26 and March 16, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rose from just 15 to 4,226, The Times said. As of April 12, there are over half a million confirmed cases in the United States with over 21,000 deaths.

 

 

 

 

Trump retweeted a threat to fire Fauci after he said the US’s slow response to COVID-19 has cost lives

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Damage Control, Emergency Preparedness, Health Policy, Honesty, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Integrity, Leadership, Leadership Culture, Leadership Integrity, Leadership Intent, Leadership Trust, Mortality, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, Transparency, Trust, Truth • Leave a comment

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-retweets-threat-fire-fauci-2020-4

Coronavirus: Trump retweets call to fire Dr Fauci who said US ...

  • On Sunday, President Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci to his 76.8 million followers.
  • Earlier in the day, Fauci had told CNN that “no one is going to deny” that lives could’ve been saved if the US had implemented containment measures earlier in the novel coronavirus outbreak.
  • A week ago, at a White House briefing, Trump stopped Fauci from weighing in on using hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, for people with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.
  • It’s unclear whether his retweet was more than a vague threat, but Trump has fired several government officials over the past few weeks.

President Donald Trump on Sunday retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US government’s top infectious-disease expert who has so far lasted six presidential administrations, to his 76.8 million followers.

The Trump administration has been in damage-control mode over the slow response to dealing with the coronavirus outbreak. Fauci, who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, helping to tackle AIDS, Zika, and Ebola outbreaks, is one of the top experts on the White House’s coronavirus task force.

The tweet, written by DeAnna Lorraine, a Republican who ran for Congress in California, said: “Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives. Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US public at large. Time to #FireFauci.”

It’s been about two months since the US’s first coronavirus case was reported. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, as of Sunday night more than 22,000 people had died from the virus in the US and more than 555,300 had been infected.

A week ago, during a White House briefing, Trump stopped Fauci from telling reporters what he thought about using hydroxychloroquine, a antimalaria drug, for people with COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus. Trump has been vocal about his support for the drug — though it is not approved for treating COVID-19 — repeatedly saying, “What do you have to lose?”

It’s unclear whether Trump’s retweet was more than a vague threat, but he has fired several government officials in the past few weeks.

Five days ago, he got rid of Glenn Fine, the acting inspector general at the Department of Defense, who had been tasked with overseeing the implementation of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package. On April 3, he fired Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general who alerted Congress about the whistleblower complaint that accused Trump of soliciting election interference from Ukraine.

Fauci had spoken to CNN earlier on Sunday, and he was quoted in a New York Times report on Saturday that outlined recommendations he backed on February 21.

The Times reported that — in stark contrast to Lorraine’s tweet — Fauci, along with the Trump administration’s other top public-health experts, said on February 21 that the administration needed to announce aggressive social-distancing policies, even at the cost of disrupting normal life and the US economy.

On Sunday, Fauci said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “no one is going to deny” that lives could have been saved if the US had implemented containment measures earlier in the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Fauci suggested that fewer people would have died if the Trump administration had announced isolation measures in February instead of in mid-March after warnings from public-health officials.

“As I’ve said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint,” he said. “We make a recommendation. Often, the recommendation is taken. Sometimes it’s not. But it is what it is. We are where we are right now.”

 

 

 

 

New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve. It’s squashing it.

Posted on by • Posted in Collective Purpose, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Expectations, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership, Leadership Centralized, Leadership Commitment, Leadership Trust, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Strategy • Leave a comment

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/new-zealand-isnt-just-flattening-the-curve-its-squashing-it/2020/04/07/6cab3a4a-7822-11ea-a311-adb1344719a9_story.html?fbclid=IwAR0G_nNMxXlu82cnEElI4E3napU5ug5XyMQqeiFyhfl0Cx_aIH4K91GwdUY&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

New Zealand isn't just flattening the curve. It's squashing it. #1 ...

 It’s been less than two weeks since New Zealand imposed a coronavirus lockdown so strict that swimming at the beach and hunting in bushland were banned. They’re not essential activities, plus we’ve been told not to do anything that could divert emergency services’ resources.

People have been walking and biking strictly in their neighborhoods, lining up six feet apart while waiting to go one-in-one-out into grocery stores, and joining swaths of the world in discovering the vagaries of home schooling.

It took only 10 days for signs that the approach here — “elimination” rather than the “containment” goal of the United States and other Western countries — is working.

The number of new cases has fallen for two consecutive days, despite a huge increase in testing, with 54 confirmed or probable cases reported Tuesday. That means the number of people who have recovered, 65, exceeds the number of daily infections.

“The signs are promising,” Ashley Bloomfield, the director-general of health, said Tuesday.

The speedy results have led to calls to ease the lockdown conditions, even a little, for the four-day Easter holiday, especially as summer lingers on.

But Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is adamant that New Zealand will complete four weeks of lockdown — two full 14-day incubation cycles — before letting up. She has, however, given the Easter Bunny special dispensation to work this weekend.

How has New Zealand, a country I still call home after 20 years abroad, controlled its outbreak so quickly?

When I arrived here a month ago, traveling from the epicenter of China via the hotspot of South Korea, I was shocked that officials did not take my temperature at the airport. I was told simply to self-isolate for 14 days (I did).

But with the coronavirus tearing through Italy and spreading in the United States, this heavily tourism-reliant country — it gets about four million international visitors a year, almost as many as its total population — did the previously unthinkable: it shut its borders to foreigners on March 19.

Two days later, Ardern delivered a televised address from her office — the first time since 1982 that an Oval Office-style speech had been given — announcing a coronavirus response alert plan involving four stages, with full lockdown being Level 4.

A group of influential leaders got on the phone with her the following day to urge moving to Level 4.

“We were hugely worried about what was happening in Italy and Spain,” said one of them, Stephen Tindall, founder of the Warehouse, New Zealand’s largest retailer.

“If we didn’t shut down quickly enough, the pain was going to go on for a very long time,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s inevitable that we will have to shut down anyway, so we would rather it be sharp and short.”

On the Monday, March 23, Ardern delivered another statement and gave the country 48 hours to prepare for a Level 4 lockdown. “We currently have 102 cases,” she said. “But so did Italy once.”

From that Wednesday night, everyone had to stay at home for four weeks unless they worked in an essential job such as health care, or were going to the supermarket or exercising near their home.

There have been critics and rebels. The police have been ordering surfers out of the waves. The health minister was caught — and publicly chastised by Ardern, who said she would have fired him if it weren’t disruptive to the crisis response — for mountain biking and taking his family to the beach.

But there has been a sense of collective purpose. The police phone line for nonemergencies has been overwhelmed with people calling to “dob in,” as we say here, others they think are breaching the rules.

The response has been notably apolitical. The center-right National Party has clearly made a decision not to criticize the government’s response, and in fact to help it.

These efforts appear to be paying off.

After peaking at 89 on April 2, the daily number of new cases ticked down to 67 on Monday and 54 on Tuesday. The vast majority of cases can be linked to international travel, making contact tracing relatively easy, and many are consolidated into identifiable clusters.

Because there is little evidence of community transmission, New Zealand does not have huge numbers of people overwhelming hospitals. Only one person, an elderly woman with existing health problems, has died.

The nascent slowdown reflected “a triumph of science and leadership,” said Michael Baker, a professor of public health at the University of Otago and one of the country’s top epidemiologists.

“Jacinda approached this decisively and unequivocally and faced the threat,” said Baker, who had been advocating for an “elimination” approach since reading a World Health Organization report from China in February.

“Other countries have had a gradual ramp-up, but our approach is exactly the opposite,” he said. While other Western countries have tried to slow the disease and “flatten the curve,” New Zealand has tried to stamp it out entirely.

Some American doctors have urged the Trump administration to pursue the elimination approach.

In New Zealand’s case, being a small island nation makes it easy to shut borders. It also helps that the country often feels like a village where everyone knows everyone else, so messages can travel quickly.

New Zealand’s next challenge: Once the virus is eliminated, how to keep it that way.

The country won’t be able to allow people free entry into New Zealand until the virus has stopped circulating globally or a vaccine has been developed, said Baker. But with strict border control, restrictions could be gradually relaxed and life inside New Zealand could return to almost normal.

Ardern has said her government is considering mandatory quarantine for New Zealanders returning to the country post-lockdown. “I really want a watertight system at our border,” she said this week, “and I think we can do better on that.”