Coronavirus/Covid-19 Post for 3/27/2020
Hope everyone is staying in and staying safe.
Latest news at time of posting:
- USA now has more total cases than any other country.
- USA #6 in total deaths.
- UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tested positive for cornavirus after displaying minor symptoms.
- The US House is expected to vote on stimulus bill this morning. The president has said previously that he will sign the bill when it gets to him.
Wash your hands, stay at home, and GO BLUE!
March 27th, 2020 at 10:09 AM ^
I would strongly disagree with this. She seems to be following what other governors are doing , only doing it too late. Ohio had cases before we did, they closed their schools before we did, they called for stay at home before we did. Now they have fewer cases and fewer deaths. Whitmer complained about no federal aid and then it had to be pointed out to her that Michigan hadn’t requested aid. She is leading from behind and not getting out in front of it. She is doing (or not doing) all the things she is accusing Trump of.
March 27th, 2020 at 10:27 AM ^
Ohio has been ahead in measures taken, but light years behind Michigan in terms of executing testing. Ohio has been awful at testing. They opened drive thru testing sites and then closed them in the same week (might have even been 2 damn days later). That part has been a disaster, and as a result any data reported for Ohio is horseshit.
March 27th, 2020 at 10:49 AM ^
I agree. Unfortunately a positive test doesn’t do much outside of add to the numbers. Unless your deathly ill there’s not much you can do outside of self treat.
March 27th, 2020 at 11:08 AM ^
That's absolutely not true. Testing is key to identifying where outbreaks are happening. That info is crucial to keeping this thing under control.
March 27th, 2020 at 11:31 AM ^
I'm the designated shopper in my house, because I have the most life insurance. I could easily be an asymptomatic carrier infecting people at the grocery store. If we want this thing to end, we should be testing as many people as possible, including those without symptoms.
March 27th, 2020 at 12:14 PM ^
If people want to get back to normal (or as close as we can realistically get), then a significant increase in testing with targeted quarantines and moderate social distancing is how we do it. There is no way to stop the spread without quarantines, but testing lets you open the country back up a bit to let life go on.
just guessing, but it's pretty easy to get test samples; much harder to actually test the sample. the country was baglogged with tests and only processing very sick people at first. if ohio had few "sick" cases, it's possible their tests got sent to the end of the line. so they stopped taking samples. just guessing from afar.
March 27th, 2020 at 10:27 AM ^
Ohio also doesn’t have any tests so those numbers are very misleading. Ohio also has a medical director who said we’d see 100k cases the first week (didn’t happen), which is good. Then yesterday she said at the peak there’d be 6-8k new cases a day. Living in Ohio I can say I’m really getting tired of Mike DeWine and his improv press conferences everyday. It’s grading on lots of people. At least Whitmer gets it over and done and talks facts. Hospitals should indeed be concerned but the whole (were all gonna die) thing is getting old.
March 27th, 2020 at 11:10 AM ^
You're contradicting yourself directly in your first two sentences.
March 27th, 2020 at 10:35 AM ^
She truly doesn't understand federalism and state sovereignty. She'd rather be sucking off the federal teat than leading.
March 27th, 2020 at 10:53 AM ^
There is significant debate about federal vs state roles in a whole range of areas. Because someone has a different opinion about how strong a state role vs federal role should be could be not understanding the roles or it could be they just have a different opinion than you. Many governors (both republican and democrat) seem to think their should be a stringer role. Other governors and the president have a different opinion.
March 27th, 2020 at 11:16 AM ^
with all due respect, St. Joe, that's a woefully misguided opinion. When you have a national public health emergency, the feds need to step in to coordinate response, so that supplies are delivered most efficiently to targeted areas. You can't leave states to fend for themselves in a situation like this (much less not implement the DPA) because then you have them competing against each other for critical supplies. Everything should be coordinated by the feds in this crisis, via regularly updating dashboard and database, so that logistics experts can do what they do best.
Simply put, Trump is either unwilling or unable to lead.
March 27th, 2020 at 12:51 PM ^
It's not a national public health emergency. It's a series of localized health emergencies that are spread across the nation. Does West Virginia need the same federal response that New York City needs? In fact, does upstate NY even need the same assistance that NYC needs? No to both questions.
The Federal government stated from the beginning that they're counting on leadership at local and state levels to tell them where they need to provide assistance. Why would the feds monitor situations to that level when the state and local governments are already in place to do that? The state governors were told to maintain contact with the feds and they will get what they ask for. Gretchen would rather be told by the feds what to do rather than figure it out herself and ask them for the assistance that the state of Michigan needs. She's not a leader.
That's absurd. I'm not even going to bother with the semantics of your first two sentences, but the rest of your first paragraph proves my point. You target supplies where needed. You need a what's the phrase... oh yeah, PANDEMIC RESPONSE TEAM... to make sure that things are delivered in the sequence they're needed. Upstate NY and West Virginia will inevitably have their own crises. It's just a matter of time. Viruses are not subject to interstate commerce clauses.
State and local governments don't have the wherewithal to dictate mass production of PPE. That's why the DPA exists. I'm not sure from whence your animus of Whitmer stems, but your contentions are not borne out by the facts on the ground. What exactly do you think a federal government is for???
How does the federal government target supplies where they're needed? They need the state governors to tell them what they need. Instead, Gretchen has gone on Sunday morning talk shows complaining that the federal government hasn't told her what to do. IT'S NOT UP TO THEM!!! IT'S UP TO HER TO TELL THEM WHAT WE NEED!!!
Governor Cuomo asked the feds for help with NYC. They sent a Navy hospital ship. Gretchen asks where the federal aid is. Then someone reminds her that she needs to ask for it. That's where my animus comes from. She's not a leader. She's an incompetent boob.
Saint Joe, you’re basically saying that the federal government can’t step up and lead. That of course is contradicted by the many things across the nation that the federal government has stepped up to lead. The truth is that the federal government in this case, and one person in particular, is not willing to step up and lead because of the risk of being blamed for the outcome. It’s an example of the general in the midst of a fire fight not willing to take the hill. And it’s disappointing that smart people buy the excuses.
I've refrained from posting because I realized its fairly pointless as we have no data that is reliable, but let's be real for a second:
The pandemic response team didn't even bother to have the N95 reserves re-stocked under the last administration after Swine Flu:
"But after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply."
I mean, we've heard of all the value that this team would have brought to the table...and they didn't even have the ability to make sure this vital supply was re-stocked for the next pandemic. And they had at least 6 years to do so.
Also, do Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, France, UK, Belgium, Holland, etc. have pandemic response teams? If so, are things really working out superbly for them? Do they have fewer cases per capita than us? What moves did their teams make and how early did they make them?
A. i would agree with you that the failure to maintain an adequate supply in the national stockpiles was a failure of both parties. It is however probably worth noting that President Trump as been in office for three years and he has not done anything to restore the stockpiles either.
B. I don’t care what you call it, but a partial list of things I personally think the federal government could and should have done:
1) in January start stockpiling key supplies like masks,
2) As soon as they realized they were having trouble with testing allowed others to step up (state labs, research hospitals etc). They did this in late February and it is why we are now a world leader in testing. It could have been done much earlier. Had it been, we would have been in much better shape
3) started moderate social distancing much earlier. Rather than downplaying the threat, they should have been encouraging companies that could to maximize work from home snd minimize un-neccesary travel. This should have been mandatory for the federal government.
Yes, we all wish that things had been done differently, but that isn't the point.
I'm talking about a very specific idea that has been pounded into our brains by the media: The Pandemic Response Team was disbanded and had they not been disbanded, they would have helped us prevent this situation or at least manage it more efficiently.
I question this because:
We have a concrete data point that the PRT didn't even have the ability to re-stock (or convince anyone to re-stock) our supply of masks despite having 6-7 years to do so under two administrations...immediately following a pandemic which showed the need for that supply.
I haven't heard anything about the work done by other such teams in other Western nations. In fact, it appears that most such countries are in fairly similar situations with varying degrees of severity.
I’d feel better about your assertion of a concrete data point if you actually provided some information about what they did or did not do. The team is clearly not the only one with responsibility for restocking.
I would presume it would cost significant money to restock the supply. i would also assume that would have to be in the budget. Was it in any budget requests? I don’t know, but maybe you are aware of a cite where someone who has looked into this more closely?
Not playing this game. The burden of proof is on those who claim it was a big deal to disband the team to provide evidence of the value of said team.
I'm not so sure about that. I think when you disable a pandemic response team and a year later a pandemic hits, the default conclusion is that it was a bad move.
Cool, so why didn't the pandemic response team have the supply of masks re-stocked?
If my entire job revolved around responding to pandemics, preparedness for pandemics seems like a fairly big deal.
Under your rules, isn’t the burden of proof on you for this assertion?
‘We have a concrete data point that the PRT didn't even have the ability to re-stock (or convince anyone to re-stock) our supply of masks despite having 6-7 years to do so under two administrations...immediately following a pandemic which showed the need for that supply. “.
The only part that is wrong in that statement is the 6-7 years (I swear I had read it was formed after the Swine Flu). It was formed in 2015. So 3 years and two administrations. Also, hilariously here is a description of the unit:
"The Global Health Security and Biodefense unit — responsible for pandemic preparedness"
So it was responsible for preparedness, but did not have us prepared during its entire existence.
Okay now you go: Explain to me why this was such a big loss when they failed the most basic test?
No country keeps millions and millions of masks, as they expire in 3 years. The time to do this wasn't last year, it was January, February, and early March of this year.
I agree we have been woefully unprepared for awhile but a few points.
(1) N-95 masks have a shelf life of 5 years roughly.
(2) There has not been enough money for preparedness because it has not been appropriated.
(3) We do not have domestic supply to rely on when the supply chain faces a double whammy of every country trying to get the same supplies at the same time, and also China's factories essentially shut down for a prolonged period of time.
Hindsight is 20/20, but squeezing public health funding at the federal and state level greatly exacerbated the crisis. I hope that we learn some valuable lessons from this experience.
St Joe Blues
you should read this. It may help you understand why many people think federalism failed here and why it wasn’t the fault of the states
https://apple.news/AXTZAaxWTTp-7e9RiZ3xGUw
From its biggest cities to its smallest towns, America’s chance to contain the coronavirus crisis came and went in the seven weeks since U.S. health officials botched the testing rollout and then misled scientists in state laboratories about this critical early failure. Federal regulators failed to recognize the spiraling disaster and were slow to relax the rules that prevented labs and major hospitals from advancing a backup.
In our federal system our federal government has an important role to play. Public health crises that affect the entire nation are one of those circumstances where you need a strong response. Meanwhile understaffed and underfunded public health departments around the country struggle to deal with the problem. This crisis is the result of many people making shortsighted decisions that are now biting us in the ass.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-20/coronavirus-pandemi…
This is a simple to me. Are we one country, or a loose federation of independent states? We're a country.
When there's a crisis that affects a large number of citizens, it should not matter if those citizens are in 1, a few, or all states.
I care every bit as much about an American in New York or Kansas as I do a fellow Californian.
This is a major national crisis - it's absolutely the responsibility of our federal government and its officials to provide assistance and resources, manage, coordinate - to lead.
Why is this even a question?
March 27th, 2020 at 11:19 AM ^
Leading from behind is still leading, even if its a day late. At least she's listening to the doctors. Trump is going on personal hunches - his latest hunch is that nobody will need as many ventilators as they're asking for. What the administration is saying flies directly in the face of every scientist, epidemiologist, doctor, and hospital administrator is saying. Personally, I'd rather follow someone that believes what his subject matter experts are telling him, rather than some jabroni that cares about something completely different (politics vs health).
March 27th, 2020 at 11:25 AM ^
100% agree that Gov Whitmer has been acting way too late, especially considering DTW was among the first to reopen international travel.
A surge in cases on Thursday 3/20 and Friday 3/21, and she said that she wasn’t considering stay-at-home, which likely created a false sense of security over the weekend. By Monday 3/23 she had to announce stay-at-home, but the virus had already spread significantly further
March 27th, 2020 at 11:29 AM ^
I would also like to add that many others, including the federal government have said things to create a false sense of security, but I am responding here only to my opinion of Gov Whitmer’s response
We've been behind IL and OH by, what? 1 or 2 days? We're also way ahead on testing. The feds are weeks and months late in their response. It's not even close to being the same level.
March 27th, 2020 at 11:29 AM ^
Also strongly disagree. Watch NY gov Cuomo press conference on what NY is DOING and planning and then Whitmer’s presentation. All she has done so far is complain that the federal government “isn't telling us what to do” and isn’t proving supplies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlHlx1ONcZU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX3FVsajlsk
Whitmer FINALLY got the message and was able (Since Monday) to secure 13,000,000 N95 masks and other PPE/equipment. Welcome to the party Gretchen!
Cuomo also outlines aPLAN, Whitmer’s “plan” is non-existent. She is in WAY over her head.
She needs to shut her manpleaser for a second and realize that she has one state to run... he has 50.
Poor guy, you sound triggered.
I don't know how much the Ohio and Michigan governments talk, but it's probably been good for both states that they're putting similar restrictions in place. And with the restrictions from Canada, I believer we're fully surrounded by "shelter-in-place" states.
FYI - For tobacco shops to stay open, they probably need to start selling juice and milk and say they're providing a social benefit or something.
March 27th, 2020 at 10:58 AM ^
I don’t smoke, but can’t you buy tobacco at grocery stores or carry outs?
Some additional items of note to add some context:
1. While the numbers out of others countries are hard to find, we likely lead the world in testing at this point which would drive up the known case number.
2. I haven’t done the calculation in about a week, but we had the lowest deaths per capita. Not sure what it’s like this week, but I’d guess we’re still one of the lowest.
It's not the most reliable source but its very close to what the Johns Hopkins interactive model has been saying but with country-by-country info on number of cases, new cases per day, new deaths per day, and overall deaths. Also gives the total cases and deaths per 1 million population. At the very least it is interesting.
As to your second point, my NP friend says that a bunch of people at her hospital have died of "pneumonia" within the past several weeks. She didn't say exactly how many, but way more than typical for this time of year. And none of them were tested.
Our death rate will go up once we run out of ventilators.
Pnuemonia is the natural side effect of being on your back for long periods of time. Hospital patients, bed bound in homes and nursing/rehab facilities... As my mom became bed bound while in (at home) hospice care, pnuemonia was the big worry about immediacy, rather than the lung cancer that was ravaging her insides.
Generally speaking, if someone dies of pnuemonia, that someone had something else going on that involved respiratory illness.
Generally, yes. Now? A lot of hotspots basically assume COVID-19 when a patient reports pneumonia symptoms now. COVID-19 kills by primary (virus-caused, not a result of being on one’s back and developing a bacterial infection) pneumonia.
March 27th, 2020 at 10:13 AM ^
Ventilator production is in overdrive, including from non-healthcare companies like GM, Dyson etc.
We should (and I’ll emphasize should) have upwards of 50k new ventilators in the coming weeks which should be enough for this pandemic in the US.
March 27th, 2020 at 12:24 PM ^
I see lots of different press on this, some much more optimistic and some much more pessimistic about how quickly these ventilators will be available. Fo you have a source for the 50k and what does coming weeks mean? One or two weeks? Eight weeks?
March 27th, 2020 at 12:39 PM ^
Guess who is attacking GM and Ford on twitter instead of invoking the Defense Production Act?
"As usual with “this” General Motors, things just never seem to work out. They said they were going to give us 40,000 much needed Ventilators, “very quickly”. Now they are saying it will only be 6000, in late April, and they want top dollar. Always a mess with Mary B. Invoke “P”."
"General Motors MUST immediately open their stupidly abandoned Lordstown plant in Ohio, or some other plant, and START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!!!!!! FORD, GET GOING ON VENTILATORS, FAST!!!!!!"
1. Lordstown was sold months ago. GM doesn't own it anymore.
2. The Government can make them do it, via the Defense Production Act.
Leader of the free world. Jesus Christ.
Yet the fuckwit minions will just eat this shit up. I'm getting more frustrated by the day with just how dumb our society really is. And I don't reserve that for folks on one side of the political spectrum at all, but one side is showing infinitely more avarice and crushing stupidity.
Never again will my vote go to that party. Never. Again.
edit: that's assuming I survive
Independent here, but I’ll admit the hammer hangs slightly left of center. I can’t believe the hypocrisy of the right with this and other policies. It’s mind blowing and contradictory most of the time...but I digress. Stay healthy everyone.
We have more people than many countries (and people are free to doubt the numbers coming from the biggest country, China), so it is reasonable that we would have literally more cases than smaller countries. However, I was not under the impression we were doing some super bang up job on testing. Like you, after a ten second Google search, I am unable to find good, current information on the number of tests administered relative to other countries.