Category Archives: Public Safety

California governor unveils roadmap for relaxing coronavirus lockdowns

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https://www.axios.com/california-newsom-coronavirus-restrictions-3195f1b4-cbf8-4205-aeda-500d1e965486.html

California governor unveils roadmap for relaxing coronavirus ...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom released a roadmap on Tuesday that will guide how he will make the decision to relax the stay-at-home policies his state implemented to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

The big picture: While there is no timeline for modifying the stay-at-home order, Newsom’s office said California would use a “gradual, science-based and data-driven framework” to determine when it would be safe to do so. Newsom indicated efforts to flatten the curve in California “have yielded positive results.”

  • California had 24,421 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Tuesday afternoon, per the LA Times.
  • On Monday, Newsom announced California would create a task force with Oregon and Washington to coordinate the reopening of the regional economy. Northeastern states have announced a similar plan.

Details: Newsom said California would use six indicators to determine when to relax social distancing measures:

  1. “The ability to monitor and protect our communities through testing, contact tracing, isolating, and supporting those who are positive or exposed.”
  2. “The ability to prevent infection in people who are at risk for more severe COVID-19.”
  3. “The ability of the hospital and health systems to handle surges.”
  4. “The ability to develop therapeutics to meet the demand.”
  5. “The ability for businesses, schools, and child care facilities to support physical distancing.”
  6. “The ability to determine when to reinstitute certain measures, such as the stay-at-home orders, if necessary.”

Newsom’s roadmap also notes that life will be different even after stay-at-home orders are eased. For example, restaurants will likely reopen with fewer tables and face coverings will be more common in public.

What he’s saying: “While Californians have stepped up in a big way to flatten the curve and buy us time to prepare to fight the virus, at some point in the future we will need to modify our stay-at-home order,” Newsom said.

  • “As we contemplate reopening parts of our state, we must be guided by science and data, and we must understand that things will look different than before.”
  • “There is no light switch here. Think of it as a dimmer. It will toggle between less restrictive and more restrictive.”

 

 

 

 

We can’t just flip the switch on the coronavirus

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https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-slow-recovery-econony-deaths-27e8d258-754e-4883-bebe-a2e95564e3b6.html

The end of the coronavirus lockdown won't be like flipping a ...

It feels like some big, terrible switch got flipped when the coronavirus upended our lives — so it’s natural to want to simply flip it back. But that is not how the return to normalcy will go.

The big picture: Even as the number of illnesses and deaths in the U.S. start to fall, and we start to think about leaving the house again, the way forward will likely be slow and uneven. This may feel like it all happened suddenly, but it won’t end that way.

What’s next: Nationally, the number of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. is projected to hit its peak within the next few days. But many big cities will see their own peaks significantly later — for them, the worst is yet to come.

  • The White House is eyeing May 1 as the time to begin gradually reopening the economy. But that also will not be a single nationwide undertaking, and it will be a halting process even in the places where it can start to happen soon.
  • “In principle it sounds very nice, and everyone wants to return to normalcy. I think in reality it has to be incredibly carefully managed,” said Claire Standley, an infectious-disease expert at Georgetown University.

The future will come in waves — waves of recovery, waves of more bad news, and waves of returning to some semblance of normal life.

  • “It’s going to be a gradual evolution back to something that approximates our normal lives,” former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said.

What the post-lockdown world will look like:

  • Some types of businesses will likely be able to open before others, and only at partial capacity.
  • Stores may continue to only allow a certain number of customers through the door at once, or restaurants may be able to reopen but with far fewer tables available at once.
  • Some workplaces will likely bring employees back into the office only a few days a week and will stagger shifts to segregate groups of workers from each other, so that one new infection won’t get the whole company sick.
  • Large gatherings may need to stay on ice.

And there will be more waves of infection, even in areas that have passed their peaks.

  • “Everything doesn’t just go down to zero” once a city or region gets through its initial crush of cases, said Janet Baseman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington.
  • This is happening now in Singapore, which controlled its initial outbreak more effectively than almost any other country in the world but is now seeing the daily number of new cases climb back up.

This is all but inevitable in the U.S., too, especially as travel begins to pick back up. Some places may need to shut down again, or at least tighten back up, if these new flare-ups are bad enough.

  • Part of the reason to lock down schools, businesses and workplaces is to prevent an outbreak from overwhelming the local health care system. If new cases start to pile up too quickly, leaders may need to pump the brakes.
  • “If you go back to normal too fast, then cases start to go up quickly, and then we end up back where we started,” Baseman said.
  • The good news, though, is that hospitals should have far more supplies by the fall, thanks to the coming surge in manufacturing for items like masks and ventilators.

What we’re watching: We’ll still need a lot more diagnostic testing to make this process work. Public health officials need to be able to identify people who might be spreading the virus before they begin to feel sick, and then identify the people they may have infected.

  • Most of the U.S. does not seem prepared for that undertaking, at least on any significant scale.
  • Another kind of test — serology tests, which identify people who have already had the virus and may be immune to it — will also help. We can’t test everyone, but identifying potential immunity could be important in knowing who can safely return to work in high-risk fields like health care.

The real turning point won’t come until there’s a proven, widely available treatment or, even better, a widely available vaccine.

  • A vaccine is still about a year away, even at a breakneck pace and if everything goes right. A treatment isn’t likely to be available until the fall, at the earliest.
  • In the meantime, all we can do is try to manage a slow recovery, using a less aggressive version of the same tools that are in place today.

The bottom line: “I’m not going back to Disneyland, I’m not going to take a cruise again, until we have a very aggressive testing system or we have very effective therapeutics or a vaccine,” Gottlieb said.

 

 

 

 

COVID-19 fatality rates vary widely, leaving questions for scientists

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COVID-19 fatality rates vary widely, leaving questions for scientists

Coronavirus death toll: Americans are almost certainly dying of ...

The COVID-19 outbreak that has infected more than half a million Americans is killing people or causing them to become seriously ill at vastly different rates in different states, baffling scientists who are still learning about the coronavirus that causes the illness.

The virus so far has killed at least 23,529 people in the United States, a case fatality rate of just over 4 percent.

But the true mortality rate of COVID-19 is almost certainly much lower. Studies have showed that many infected with the virus show no symptoms, or nothing worse than a common cold, suggesting that the actual number of people who have contracted the virus is much larger than the 579,390 who had tested positive as of Tuesday morning.

The worst outcomes have come in states with the highest number of cases. Experts said that is likely a function of state rules that govern who is eligible to get one of the limited number of tests available: Only those who are sickest, and thus most likely to die from the disease, are tested, while those who are likely to make a speedy recovery are sent home to convalesce.

“In lots of places that are hard hit, what they have to do is limit testing to those who have symptoms, and sometimes pretty severe symptoms,” said Amira Roess, an epidemiologist and global health expert at George Mason University’s College of Health and Human Services.

“Different states are having to make testing decisions. They’re having to change their testing policies as they move through the epidemic.”

In Michigan, where 25,635 people have tested positive, the case fatality rate stands at 6.3 percent, the highest level in the country. New York, the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States, has recorded 10,056 deaths out of 195,031 cases, a fatality rate of 5.1 percent. And in Washington, where an early outbreak claimed dozens of lives at a nursing home, the case fatality rate stands at 5 percent.

Connecticut and New Jersey also have high case fatality rates amid outbreaks that are concentrated in the New York City suburbs.

Other states near the top of the list have large numbers of residents who suffer from the underlying conditions that seem to exacerbate the coronavirus. Kentucky, Oklahoma and Indiana all have relatively high case fatality rates, even though their number of confirmed cases is lower than in other states; they are among the states with higher-than-average obesity, diabetes and smoking rates.

“If you’re having a large number of elderly or people with underlying conditions getting infected, then you’re going to have a higher case fatality rate,” Roess said.

On the other end of the spectrum are smaller rural states that have seen relatively few cases so far, and where geography or population density have created a sort of built-in social distancing.

Wyoming on Monday became the last state in the union to report a death from the coronavirus. It has only reported 275 confirmed cases. Utah and South Dakota both have case fatality rates under 1 percent, though the number of cases in South Dakota has risen rapidly for such a small state in recent weeks.

West Virginia, Montana, Hawaii and Idaho all have case counts under 2 percent. So does North Carolina, a larger state but one with a substantial rural population.

The United States is trending better than the global average case fatality rate, according to data compiled by the European Centers for Disease Control. Worldwide, COVID-19 has killed a little more than 6 percent of confirmed cases. The rates are much higher in places like Italy and Spain, where health systems were overwhelmed by a huge explosion of cases in early March and where fatality rates stand north of 10 percent.

But the United States is faring worse than places like Germany and South Korea, where aggressive testing regimes have identified more people with the coronavirus — and therefore, more people who show few if any symptoms and are most likely to recover. The case fatality rate in Germany is about 2.4 percent, while it stands at just 2.1 percent in South Korea.

In Iceland, where huge teams of contact tracers have fanned out across Reykjavik and the country’s rural communities in what may be the world’s most ambitious testing regime, the case fatality rate stands at 0.5 percentage points.

Case fatality rates in countries like China and Iran are unclear, as scientists raise questions about the accuracy and transparency of the data those nations have made public.

Epidemiologists say they will earn a better understanding of the true toll of COVID-19 once they are able to do broader studies, randomized tests — like a public opinion poll, but with blood samples — to see just how many people in society at large have been infected by the virus, including the asymptomatic cases who might never know anything is wrong with them.

“We don’t have infection rates. We haven’t done a very simple test in epidemiology, which is to try to randomly sample a population in an overall area,” said Jennifer Prah Ruger, director of the Health Equity and Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. “We don’t know how many people have been infected, have already recovered.”

Case fatality rates can change over time, and experts said they are already seeing a difference in states that promoted or enforced social distancing policies early on. The fast start to the outbreak in Washington state meant the fatality rate there was among the highest in the world in its earliest days — at one point in early March, nearly a third of the confirmed COVID-19 patients had died.

But as the state enforced distancing rules, and as the virus spread outside of the nursing home at its epicenter, the case fatality rate has dropped steadily. California, too, acted aggressively to ban large gatherings and encourage people to work from home, efforts that have paid off.

“The early social distancing has had a huge effect on mortality, which is what we’re really trying to do. We may be closer to being able to come out of shelter in place than other locations,” said George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California-San Francisco.

In states that waited longer to implement strict measures, the fatality rate may be on the rise — and the number of cases is growing quickly. Southern states like Florida, Alabama and Georgia have seen their case counts rising in recent days, after governors in those states were slow to take steps like closing beaches, restaurants and bars.

“They’ve come to the party late in terms of social distancing, and there may still be a price to be paid,” Rutherford said.

 

 

 

Trump sparks GOP backlash with claim of ‘total’ power to reopen the country

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Constitution, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Governance, Health Policy, Leadership, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, State Governors, System of Checks and Balances, Total Authority • Leave a comment

Trump sparks GOP backlash with claim of ‘total’ power to reopen the country

Yes, Undocumented Students Have Rights Under the U.S. Constitution ...

President Trump‘s claim that he has “total” authority to decide when and how to reopen parts of the country shuttered by the coronavirus is sparking congressional backlash, including from members of his own party.

Trump, speaking during a White House press briefing Monday, said he has the “authority” to force governors, who have been issuing the stay-at-home orders, to reopen schools, businesses and other institutions in their state.

But GOP lawmakers, as well as Democrats, fired back Tuesday, sending a warning shot to Trump that under the Constitution he does not have unlimited powers. They also warned against overreaching.

“The constitution doesn’t allow the federal gov’t to become the ultimate regulator of our lives because they wave a doctor’s note,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted Tuesday.

“Powers not delegated are RESERVED to states & the PEOPLE. If we dispense with constitutional restraints, we will have more to worry about than a virus,” added Paul, who has also been critical of governors he views as going too far during the pandemic.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said that while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the White House would be providing guidelines, the Constitution and “common sense” dictate that decisions about when to reopen shuttered parts of the country are made at the state level.

“It’s going to be the governors that are going to make decisions about when certain activities are allowed. …That is the appropriate place where I think some of these orders will begin to be modified,” Rubio said, adding that the federal guidance would be “influential.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) didn’t directly mention Trump but tweeted on Monday night that “the federal government does not have absolute power.”

Republicans were joined by Democrats, and some governors, as well as Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), who left the Republican Party last year.

Amash and Democratic Reps. Tom Malinowski (N.J.) and Dean Phillips (Minn.) unveiled a one-page resolution on Tuesday that states “when someone is the president of the United States, their authority is not total.”

“State governments are not local branches of the federal government; they have different powers and functions. Putting one government in charge of everything does not strengthen our system; it weakens our system and makes everyone more vulnerable to serious errors,” Amash added in a tweet.

When, and how, to reopen shuttered parts of the country has emerged as a key point of debate within the government.

Trump has appeared eager to reopen the country sooner rather than later as the coronavirus has wrecked havoc on the U.S. economy months before the 2020 election.

He’s expected to announce a panel on Tuesday that will be tasked with determining the criteria for lifting coronavirus restrictions.

Governors of six northeast states announced on Monday they were forming a group to create joint recommendations on how to reopen their economies.

Democratic senators are planning to introduce legislation to create a 10-15 member panel that would be responsible for coming up and implementing a plan to reopen closed parts of the country.

 

 

 

 

Truth dies in silence. Sadly, so do people.

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Employee Morale, Employee Protections, Fear, Fear of Punishment, Freedom of the Press, Healthcare Providers, Leadership Cares, Leadership Culture, Leadership Intent, Leadership Trust, Misleading, Nurses, Pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Physician, Public Health, Public Safety, Punishment, Silence, Silencing Speech, Transparency, Trust, Truth, Veil of Silence, Worker Rights • Leave a comment

https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2020/04/truth-dies-in-silence-sadly-so-do-people.html

UNESCO launches “Truth Never Dies” campaign to tackle crimes ...

I have been writing columns for physicians for twenty years.  And year after year, I have had physicians say this: “I’m glad you said what you did. If I said it, I’d be fired.” There are variations on the theme, but they’re much the same.  Twenty years, and far more than 20 years, during which the alleged health care leaders in America have been routinely muzzled because they aren’t supposed to speak the truth.  Open discussions shut down because they might embarrass someone or upset an administrator. Because it might, heaven forbid, shine a light on a genuine problem.

Some years ago, as the mental health crisis was gathering steam across the emergency departments of the land, I was contacted by a news show in France.  The producers wanted to come to South Carolina and follow me on some shifts in my ED. They wanted to see how mental health was working out here. “We have socialized care, but mental health is also a huge problem in our country,” the producer said.

I dutifully, and appropriately, went to administration. “No, we can’t do that,” I was informed. I was given this explanation when everyone knew the mental health system was at the breaking point: “What if they uncover a problem?” Here was a chance for publicity, for potential grant money or to demonstrate that a political solution was in order.  How dare we let in fresh air? How dare we suggest that things were not perfect?

The same thing is happening in the midst of the pandemic.  Physicians, nurses, and other assorted health care professionals are being threatened for wearing masks.  Administrators say, “They make the patients nervous.” Also likely, administrators have realized they don’t have adequate equipment.  Facilities and systems with enormous budgets caught unprepared in a pandemic.

I see the stories of these professionals as I follow online forums.  Physicians, nurses, and others, threatened with firing because they dared to speak out on the issue of PPE (personal protective equipment).

Like police officers without ballistic vests, these physicians don’t want to go into the rooms of COVID-19 patients without the masks and respirators, gloves, gowns, and face shields that will keep them safe. The equipment that will allow them to return home to their loved ones and prevent them from infecting their families.  This isn’t a good look.  A hospital that refuses to acknowledge the concerns and safety of its professionals is a hospital that ultimately doesn’t deserve them.

The same veil of silence pervades dialogue on the treatment of coronavirus.  When I follow discussions, I see a lot of shaming. “There just isn’t enough evidence to try hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax, convalescent plasma, an untried vaccine, HIV drugs, etc.” Those who suggest we might try are considered reckless or ignorant.  As the battle rages and lives are lost, innovation and risk are viewed with disdain.  And our medical establishment is locked into the paradigm of double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies involving tens of thousands of people and lasting years. Here’s a view of the same from the U.K. Unfortunately, to suggest that we may need to react faster is only met with ridicule, and often tied to political views instead of expediency. Worse,  it ignores the deep, fundamental need to offer hope, any hope, to hundreds of millions of professionals and citizens who are living in fear.

There is a tragic irony here; a painful coincidence.  Physicians silenced. Let’s see.  Where did we see that sort of thing resulting in a worldwide pandemic?  Does China come to mind? The Chinese Communist Party threatened (and who knows what else) physicians who dared to speak out about coronavirus, even when they knew its danger.  Even when they knew how easily and widely it spread.

They continued to soft-peddle numbers about total cases and case fatality.  The party continued to allow travel to and from China long after the problem was known. They even suggested that Italians have a “hug a Chinese person” campaign to combat alleged racism; a charge delightfully accepted and repeated by gullible Western journalists in pursuit of a narrative.

Truth dies in silence.  Sadly, so do people.  And certainly when we tell dedicated health care professionals to keep their mouths shut when they have identified problems, offered solutions and simply asked for help.  Whether it’s a private business, a totalitarian government, or anything in between, we should insist that the truth be spoken; freely and without fear of punishment.

Because, for the foreseeable future, lives will depend on it.

 

Cartoon – Thanks to Everyday Heroes

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No photo description available.

For all the nurses, doctors, EMS, cops, firefighters, truckers, grocery store workers and everyday heroes. THANK YOU!!! ❤️🙏❤️🇺🇸❤️

Fauci at center of conservative storm

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Communication, Coronavirus, Credibility, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Emergency Preparedness, Failure, Health Policy, Honesty, Indecision, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Integrity, Misleading, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, Social Distancing, Transparency, Trust, Truth, World Health Organization (WHO) • Leave a comment

Fauci at center of conservative storm

Health Official condemns Senator Ron Johnson's false equivalency ...

Criticism of Anthony Fauci from the right has picked up in recent days, with some conservatives calling for Trump to dump the infectious disease expert after he made comments about how imposing social distancing rules earlier could have slowed the spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States.

Fauci has become a national name with his regular presence at the daily coronavirus task force briefings and in other media appearances, and poll numbers show he’s trusted by a majority of Americans. It would set off a political storm if Trump were to sideline him in the middle of a pandemic.

Yet the criticism of Fauci by two conservative lawmakers in a Saturday op-ed and Trump’s own retweet of a conservative’s call to “#FireFauci” were unmistakable signs that the public health official is coming under pressure from some on the right to be loyal to the president. 

Tensions between Fauci and Trump have been evident at times in recent weeks. The doctor put his head in his hand at one March briefing where the president quipped about the “Deep State Department,” and Trump stepped in at a briefing this month before Fauci could give his opinion on hydroxychloroquine.

The president had publicly praised Fauci as “extraordinary” and dismissed speculation about a rift between the two, joking on Friday that Fauci is so popular he could run against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and “win easily.” For the most part Fauci has seemed to successfully walk the line between contradicting Trump without outright criticizing him. 

But Trump’s tweet on Sunday marked a shift and coincided with a fresh groundswell of conservative push-back toward the doctor as Trump comes under intense criticism for his slow response to the virus.

Some of the more pointed criticism of Fauci came after he said on CNN Sunday that more lives could have been saved if stay-at-home measures were implemented earlier than mid-March.

The comments irked Trump allies who viewed them as revisionist history given how Fauci’s own public statements evolved throughout January and February as scientists learned more about the virus and it spread through the U.S.

Jason Miller, a former Trump adviser who now hosts a radio show focused on the pandemic, said Fauci must be careful with how he talks about the crisis, but also described “finger pointing” as media chatter seeking to pull the administration apart.

“This talk of potential removal from the team is unnecessary media chatter trying to draw a divide where one doesn’t exist,” Miller said.

“I think what this is about is about the accuracy with which Dr. Fauci is communicating with both the president and the American people,” he added. “It’s critical as the lead scientist and health expert advising the president on the coronavirus pandemic that he be spot on with his details. I think the recent finger pointing and revisionist history whether intentional or accidental doesn’t help anybody.”

One source close to the administration said, while some inside would like to see Fauci gone, most recognize there is more value to keeping him on.

“I don’t sense there’s a monolithic view,” the person said. “There are some who dislike him and want him out of the [administration] but I think most recognize it’s better for him to be in the tent than outside of it.” 

Fauci’s CNN remarks followed a New York Times article detailing how Trump ignored early warnings about the virus and initially resisted recommendations to implement social distancing recommendations, reporting that Trump has dismissed as “fake.”

One of Trump’s many tweets Sunday night defending his response quoted a former GOP congressional candidate who said it was “time to #FireFauci,” citing his Feb. 29 comments that there was not yet a need for Americans to alter their day-to-day lives.

Fauci has been clear that his realm of expertise is public health, and he has suggested at times that social distancing guidelines will be needed for weeks or months to limit the spread of the virus.

Others inside and outside the administration are advocating that it take steps to open up the economy soon, and emphasizing that health experts can’t be the only voices involved in the decision.

“Anthony Fauci should be deferring to the President when answering questions about timing of economic reopening,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted on Sunday.

Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Ken Buck (R-Colo.) penned an op-ed in the Washington Examiner over the weekend arguing that Fauci should not be a primary voice speaking on the coronavirus outbreak after the public health official late last month described social distancing as an “inconvenient” from societal and economic standpoint.

The criticism of Fauci comes amid a concerted effort among Trump and his supporters to shift blame away from the White House for its handling of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 557,000 people in the U.S. and killed more than 22,000 in the country. The president has at various points blamed governors for failing to prepare for the pandemic, deflected criticism toward the World Health Organization (WHO) and accused Democrats of using impeachment as a distraction.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has been a ubiquitous presence during the coronavirus outbreak, appearing on political talk shows, sports podcasts and Instagram live chats.

He has emerged as something of a beacon for liberals in particular for his willingness to gently correct Trump on matters like a timetable for a vaccine and the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug the president has touted as a potential treatment for the coronavirus.

But his prominence has made him a target of criticism, so much so that he was given added security at the end of March.

One feature of Trump’s presidency has been his distrust of long-time government officials, particularly those who have served in previous administrations. Another has been Trump’s tendency to tire of aides and advisers who garner more of a spotlight than he does, putting Fauci in a precarious position even at a time when his expertise is most relevant.

Trump would have difficulty firing Fauci, who is not a political appointee, without cause. Attempting to do so would cause a firestorm among even some Republicans who have urged the president to listen to his health experts.

But one former administration official suggested Fauci could see his influence reduced. The official likened it to the way Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar has been diminished after he warned Trump in January and February about the threat of a pandemic but was dismissed as too alarmist.

“What happens when somebody repeatedly tells the president something he doesn’t want to hear?” said the former administration official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “He won’t fire [Fauci], but he’ll just sideline him.”

But doing so could risk damaging public confidence in the administration’s response to the virus. 

A Monmouth University poll released last week found that 35 percent of Americans named Fauci when asked who they trust the most among public officials who discuss the outbreak on television, whereas 20 percent named Trump. 

“Regardless of the issue, [Trump is] not always his most disciplined messenger,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye. “The more that he’s able to rely on the expertise of scientists, the more credibility that it gives him in this entire process.”

 

 

 

 

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 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.”

 

 

 

 

The Costly Toll of Not Shutting Down Spring Break Earlier

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Blame, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Communication, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Excuses, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Mislead, Misleading, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, Trust, Truth, Uncertainty, World Health Organization (WHO) • Leave a comment

https://www.yahoo.com/news/costly-toll-not-shutting-down-161107861.html

The Costly Toll of Florida Not Shutting Down Spring Break During ...

You could find Beatriz Diaz at this spring’s Winter Party Festival in Miami Beach, giving out hand sanitizer.

It was early March. She knew the coronavirus was beginning to make its way around the world, but she figured if she kept her hands clean and avoided sweaty people, she would be safe.

“I was thinking, ‘OK, well, hold on, the government did not cancel it, so it should be fine,’” she said.

Within days, reports started popping up on Facebook about a DJ and several partygoers who were suddenly terribly ill. By the end of the month, two people who attended the festival had died.

As of last week, 38 people had reported that they were symptomatic or had tested positive for the coronavirus in the weeks following the event, according to the organizer, the National LGBTQ Task Force. Diaz was among them.

Weeks before Florida ordered people to stay at home, the coronavirus was well into its insidious spread in the state, infecting residents and visitors who days earlier had danced at beach parties and reveled in theme parks. Only now, as people have gotten sick and recovered from — or succumbed to — COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has the costly toll of keeping Florida open during the spring break season started to become apparent.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has blamed travelers from New York, Europe and other places for seeding the virus in the state. But the reverse was also true: People got sick in Florida and took the infection back home.

The exact number of people who returned from leisure trips to Florida with the coronavirus may never be known. Cases as far away as California and Massachusetts have been linked to the Winter Party Festival, a beachside dance party and fundraiser for the LGBTQ community held March 4-10. Another California man died after going to Orlando for a conference and then to a packed Disney World. Two people went to Disney and later got relatives sick in Florida and Georgia.

Slow action by Florida’s governor left local leaders scrambling to make their own closure decisions during one of the busiest and most profitable times of the year for a state with an $86 billion tourism economy. The result was that rules were often in conflict, with one city canceling a major event while a neighboring city allowed another event to continue.

The governor, who did not order people to stay home until April 1, has said the state supported local governments that ordered event cancellations and beach closures but that it was not his role to step in first.

“Let’s have tailored approaches, surgical approaches, that are going to work best for those regions,” DeSantis said at a news conference March 24. “These blunt measures — you wouldn’t want to do them on a community where the virus hasn’t spread.”

With little testing available, local officials made decisions blindly. Data that suggested looming trouble, such as rising fever readings from internet-connected thermometers, were ignored, a spokeswoman for Kinsa Health, the company that produces the thermometers, has said.

Only later did the effects become apparent.

Florida has confirmed more than 17,500 coronavirus cases and nearly 400 deaths, with the epidemic still expanding in the state.

A video by data analytics and visualization company Tectonix showed how cellphones that were on one Fort Lauderdale beach at the beginning of March spread across the country — up the Eastern Seaboard and further West — over the next two weeks.

“At the time, there was still this debate: Should we close public beaches? Should we shut down these big public events?” said Mike DiMarco, the company’s chief marketing officer. “When you actually see it visually on a map like that, it brings a ton of awareness to what that really looks like.”

The first festivalgoer to die was Israel Carrera, a 40-year-old Lyft and Uber driver who spent several days in the hospital in Miami Beach before his death March 26. His boyfriend, who also attended, got mildly sick and is now making plans to deliver Carrera’s ashes to his surviving family in Cuba.

Ron Rich, a 65-year-old festival volunteer, died over the weekend of March 28.

The decision to hold the festival five weeks ago came at a different point in the crisis, before a single person had tested positive in Miami-Dade County, said Rea Carey, executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force. The event ended the day before the World Health Organization declared the virus a pandemic.

“It points to what we didn’t know at the time,” she said. “If we had had the information that is available now, the information that has become available after Winter Party as this pandemic has played out, we would have made a different decision.”

Photos of the festival show hundreds of people crammed in front of a stage under neon lights, dancing, hugging and practicing little social distancing.

Diaz, 42, got a fever March 15. The next day her girlfriend was also sick. By the time Diaz was confirmed positive for COVID-19, she had been grocery shopping, gone to the pharmacy and spent time with her employer’s 80-year-old father and 14-year-old daughter.

“I understand that was my choice to be there; I take full responsibility for that,” Diaz, who lives in Wilton Manors, Florida, said of the Winter Party Festival, which drew about 5,500 people and has been a fixture in the LGBTQ community for more than 25 years.

“I am really upset for the way it was handled,” she said.

Loc Nguyen, a software developer, felt exhausted from the time he returned home to Los Angeles from the festival March 9. He went to work the next day but had to call in sick after that, feeling shortness of breath and such terrible shivers that he wrapped himself in three winter jackets to go to the doctor.

“You’re coughing and gasping for air,” Nguyen said. “You are scared. You can’t breathe.”

His friend who went to the festival with him also tested positive. A third friend got sick but was unable to get a test.

Nguyen knew the risk of attending but said he did not want to lose the money he had spent on tickets. He did not blame organizers for holding the festival and pointed to mixed messages from local officials.

“If one city closes and one city is open, it’s not consistent,” he said. “And therefore you can’t stop this pandemic.”

On March 6, the city of Miami, which is separate from Miami Beach, canceled the Ultra Music Festival, a marquee electronic dance music event that draws tens of thousands of people. Other local leaders criticized the action as too drastic: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was not yet recommending mass closures. Florida announced its first confirmed coronavirus case March 1, but it was in the Tampa area.

“We should live our lives normally,” with public health safeguards in place, Mayor Carlos Gimenez of Miami-Dade County said March 5.

By March 12, he had reversed course and canceled the Miami Open tennis tournament and the county youth fair. The fairgrounds now house a field hospital.

“We did what we thought — and I’m sure all cities did what they thought — was the right thing to do at the right time,” Gimenez said last week. “It’s called novel coronavirus for a reason. We don’t really know how it acts.”

Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, one of the first elected officials in the country to test positive for the coronavirus, said other jurisdictions’ decisions to keep events going proved costly.

“That ended up as a national embarrassment, when you saw what happened with the spring breakers and what happened unfortunately, tragically, with the music festival,” he said, referring to the Winter Party.

Further north, near Orlando, people streamed into the six Disney World theme parks before they closed March 15. Courtney Sheard recalled that the weather was beautiful and that a new ride at Hollywood Studios, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, was especially crowded.

After she got back home to Naples, Florida, on March 12, she awoke with a terrible headache and a sore throat. Her 3-year-old daughter, Journey, ran a fever and vomited.

By the time she received a positive test result, Sheard, 30, had been around her sister, her sister’s children, a friend, her parents, beachgoers and diners at a Bonefish Grill.

When Sheard learned that Jeffrey Ghazarian, 34, had died March 19 in California after visiting the theme park, she figured that the coronavirus had been circulating in Disney while he, and then she, were there.

“Think of all the people from around the world, from around the country, that were in Disney and then went home,” she said.

Officials at Walt Disney World did not respond to a request for comment.

Mayor Jerry Demings of Orange County, home to Orlando, said local officials had insufficient guidance to act consistently to slow the spread.

“We were left to our own devices to come up with strategies ourselves because of the lack of direction from the federal government and governor’s office,” he said.

Nicholas Hickman started feeling ill three or four days after returning home to Ringgold, Georgia, on March 11. He had spent five days at Disney with friends who were on spring break. They were also celebrating Hickman’s 20th birthday.

Back home, Hickman came down with a fever, chills and chest pains but struggled to get tested because no one else in his county had received a coronavirus diagnosis.

Hickman has since recovered, but only after getting his mother, and likely his father, sick. He does not blame Disney for his infection.

“If we would have been told not to go to Disney and just avoid going, we would not have gone,” he said. “There’s no way we would have gone.”