The Coronavirus - a virus from eating bats, an accident or something sinister gone wrong?

[gonzoron]

6 hours ago, Howe said:

BARRYOSAMA and gonzoron reacted with the "disdain" function within 60 seconds of each other no less than four times during the past 2 hours.

1.  
   gonzoron and BARRYOSAMA reacted to a post in a topic The Democrat's roster for a Trump - beater in 2020
   30 minutes ago
2. 
   gonzoron and BARRYOSAMA reacted to a post in a topic The Coronavirus - a virus from eating bats, an accident or something sinister gone wrong?
   31 minutes ago
3. 
   BARRYOSAMA and gonzoron reacted to a post in a topic The Democrat's roster for a Trump - beater in 2020
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   BARRYOSAMA, Muda69 and gonzoron reacted to a post in a topic The Coronavirus - a virus from eating bats, an accident or something sinister gone wrong?
   2 hours ago

                                                                                                              

[gonzoron]

1 hour ago, TrojanDad said:

coming from a dude that has to sit when he pees.....😝

[Muda69]

Don't let yourself be muzzled, Mr. Fauci says so himself:  http://nomasks.org

 

[Muda69]

[Muda69]

Some See Plot To Create 'World Government' In Coronavirus Restrictions

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/08/853110793/some-see-plot-to-create-world-government-in-coronavirus-restrictions

Quote

The conservative argument that stay-at-home orders by government authorities reflect a dictatorial impulse seems to be gaining momentum.

In the latest example, a manifesto promoted by conservative Catholics alleges that the Covid-19 pandemic is being used as a "pretext" to deprive citizens around the world of their fundamental freedoms and promote "a world government."

The appeal, led by Archbishop Carlo Viganò, a former apostolic nuncio to the United States, was released Thursday in Rome and includes the signatures of at least two cardinals and a U.S. bishop, Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, as well as anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy. The manifesto cites "growing doubts ... about the actual contagiousness, danger, and resistance of the virus."

"We have reason to believe," the manifesto continues, "that there are powers interested in creating panic among the world's population with the sole aim of permanently imposing unacceptable forms of restriction on freedoms, of controlling people, and of tracking their movements. The imposition of these illiberal measures is a disturbing prelude to the realization of a world government beyond all control."

One reported signatory, Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, head of the Vatican's liturgy department, later claimed he had not signed the petition, despite sharing "some questions or preoccupations raised regarding restrictions on fundamental freedom." Viganò in turn insisted that Sarah had indeed endorsed the appeal.

Among the other signatories are dozens of Catholic and non-Catholic intellectuals, doctors and journalists, most of them from Italy.

Similar, if less extreme, arguments have been gaining strength in the United States. The orders by some government authorities to restrict church gatherings has repeatedly been portrayed as an assault on religious freedom and spurred numerous lawsuits.

Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, joined the debate this week with a tweet claiming, "It's becoming more obvious to people that the response of some in the government is not just about protecting lives, but it's about control."

Other conservatives are tying the debate to the presidential campaign. CatholicVote.Org, which has been highly supportive of President Trump, tweeted this week, that the coronavirus response is becoming "the defining issue of the election." While Trump's position, the organization said, is to "cautiously reopen," former Vice President Joe Biden stands for "forced reliance on government handouts" and a "police state, no jobs, no school, no church."

There are a few here on the GID who I think would welcome a World Government............

 

[gonzoron]

1 hour ago, Muda69 said:

There are a few here on the GID who I think would welcome a World Government............

Yep, all the Reagan Worshipers. They've wanted it since the 80's and strived to achieve it.

[Muda69]

11 minutes ago, gonzoron said:

Yep, all the Reagan Worshipers. They've wanted it since the 80's and strived to achieve it.

? Please elaborate.

 

[DanteEstonia]

1 hour ago, Muda69 said:

Some See Plot To Create 'World Government' In Coronavirus Restrictions

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/08/853110793/some-see-plot-to-create-world-government-in-coronavirus-restrictions

There are a few here on the GID who I think would welcome a World Government............

 

I feel like I lose brain cells when I read this crap. 

[Muda69]

Just now, DanteEstonia said:

I feel like I lose brain cells when I read this crap. 

But it's NPR, one of your liberal champions.  And why do you hate the Catholic church?

 

 

[DanteEstonia]

5 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

But it's NPR, one of your liberal champions.  And why do you hate the Catholic church?

1. It still doesn’t mean that it’s not crap

2. Where do you want to start?

[Muda69]

24 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

2. Where do you want to start?

[Muda69]

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki Creates A “Trump Death Clock,” Targeting White House Over Pandemic Response

https://deadline.com/2020/05/coronavirus-donald-trump-death-clock-eugene-jarecki-1202927456/

Quote

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki has created a “Trump Death Clock,” a way to highlight the number of lives he has determined to be lost because of President Donald Trump’s delayed response to the coronavirus crisis.

“Accountability needs a brand, and the National Debt Clock is a helpful precedent,” Jarecki wrote in The Washington Post on Wednesday. “It demonstrates how to plant a symbolic flag in the numbers — one that can’t be knocked over by bluster or misleading campaign videos. This pandemic is ongoing, and the lives already unnecessarily lost demand we seek more responsible crisis leadership. Just as the names of fallen soldiers are etched on memorials to remind us of the cost of war, quantifying the lives lost to the president’s delayed coronavirus response would serve a vital public function.”

Jarecki wrote that his team set up a counter to estimate the death toll “of the White House’s delayed response.”

“The site displays both the number of people who have died in the country from covid-19 and an estimate of that portion whose lives would have been saved had the president and his administration acted just one week earlier,” he wrote. He said that it was based on the findings of leading epidemiologists. It is restricted to a one week period from March 9 to March 16, which he says would have made a difference had the administration implemented social distancing and other mitigation measures. The White House guidelines were issued on March 16.

Trump has defended his administration’s response to the crisis, often pointing to his decision in late January to restrict travel from China, where the outbreak originated. But that was not a complete ban, as Americans still return from visits to the country.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

What is that about hindsight?

Total TDS.

 

[swordfish]

I thought the term "target" wasn't supposed to be used since the Palin/Giffords incident.......

BTW - How are we supposed to trust any numbers out there anymore?

https://www.businessinsider.com/deborah-birx-cdc-comments-coronavirus-task-force-meeting-2020-5

The White House's coronavirus task force response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, said in a recent meeting that "there is nothing from the CDC that I can trust," The Washington Post reported on Saturday.

 

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House's coronavirus task force response coordinator, blasted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during a discussion on COVID-19 data in a recent meeting, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.

"There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust," she told CDC Director Robert Redfield, two people familiar with the meeting told the newspaper.

The Post reported that Birx and others feared that the CDC's data-tracking system was inflating coronavirus statistics like mortality rates and case numbers by up to 25%.

Birx later told The Post in a statement that "mortality is slowly declining each day."

[DanteEstonia]

3 hours ago, Muda69 said:

Do you want to discuss the Catholic Church's actions in Ireland, Quebec, or Mexico first?

[Muda69]

1 hour ago, DanteEstonia said:

Do you want to discuss the Catholic Church's actions in Ireland, Quebec, or Mexico first?

Whichever you prefer.

 

[gonzoron]

5 hours ago, Muda69 said:

But it's NPR, one of your liberal champions.  And why do you hate the Catholic church?

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Muda69 said:

 

3 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Whichever you prefer.

 

What relevance does any of this have to Coronavirus? 

[Muda69]

Does Questioning Official COVID-19 Statistics Make This Doctor a 'Denialist'?

https://reason.com/2020/05/11/does-questioning-official-covid-19-statistics-make-this-doctor-a-denialist/

Quote

Are COVID-19 deaths undercounted? Yes, especially if people with other illnesses die at home and are never tested for the virus that causes the disease. Are COVID-19 deaths overcounted? Probably also yes, especially when physicians try to compensate for the lack of testing by inferring that COVID-19 caused a death without laboratory confirmation, but also when they assume that the disease killed someone who tested positive, even if the actual cause might have been something else.

Judging from excess mortality in places hit hard by the epidemic, the first problem is bigger than the second problem, although those figures are ambiguous, may be incomplete, and so far are limited to relatively brief periods of time. In principle, the accuracy of COVID-19 death tallies is an empirical question, albeit one that may never be conclusively answered. But like virtually every other pandemic puzzle, it is also a political question, as illustrated by a recent New York Times story that charges Scott Jensen, a Minnesota family doctor and Republican state legislator, with aiding and abetting right-wing "denialists" who think all the hoopla about COVID-19 is a conspiracy cooked up by Donald Trump's enemies.

The Times piece portrays confirmation bias and motivated reasoning as problems that afflict only one side of the debate about COVID-19 control measures. In the paper's telling, lockdown skeptics, whom it conflates with "the virus 'truther' movement," let their ideology influence the way they interpret and present information, while lockdown supporters are interested only in discovering and disseminating the facts.

In covering Jensen's controversial comments about COVID-19 death tallies, the Times focuses on their political utility rather than their validity. "The claim was tailor-made for President Trump's most steadfast backers," write Matthew Rosenberg and Jim Rutenberg. Here is how they summarize Jensen's argument: "Federal guidelines are coaching doctors to mark Covid-19 as the cause of death even when it is not, inflating the pandemic's death toll."

That gloss implies that Jensen thinks federal officials are deliberately encouraging overdiagnosis. But that is not what Jensen says. Rather, he argues that some deaths may be misclassified based on guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concerning "probable" or "presumed" COVID-19 cases in patients who were never tested for the virus. That is a potentially significant problem when such cases account for a substantial share of reported deaths—more than a quarter in New York City, for example.

"In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID-19 cannot be made," the CDC says, "but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as 'probable' or 'presumed.' In these instances, certifiers should use their best clinical judgment in determining if a COVID–19 infection was likely. However, please note that testing for COVID–19 should be conducted whenever possible."

During an April 9 interview on Fox News, Jensen called the CDC's advice "ridiculous" and contrary to usual medical practice. "The idea that we're going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue, because we're going to undermine the [public] trust," he said. "And right now, as we see politicians doing things that aren't necessarily motivated [by] fact and science, the public is going to—their trust in politicians is already wearing thin."

You can surmise from Jensen's framing that he is not a fan of lockdowns. But contrary to what Rosenberg and Rutenberg seem to think, that does not necessarily mean he is wrong.

In the case of a fragile, elderly patient with a cough and fever who happens to die during an influenza outbreak, Jensen said, "I wouldn't put influenza on the death certificate. I've never been encouraged to do so. I would put, probably, respiratory arrest [on] the top line, and the underlying cause…would be pneumonia, and under 'contributing factors,' I might well put in 'emphysema' or 'congestive heart failure.' But I would never put influenza down as the underlying cause of death. Yet that's what we're being asked to do here."

Jensen conceded that other doctors might take a less conservative approach. "Some physicians really have a bent toward public health, and they will put down 'influenza,' or whatever, because that's their preference," he said. "I try to stay very specific, very precise. If I know I've got pneumonia, that's what's going on the death certificate. I'm not going to add stuff just because it's convenient."

Even when someone dies after testing positive for the COVID-19 virus, Jensen added, it is not safe to assume the disease killed him. He asked viewers to imagine a patient who goes to the hospital with a collapsed lung after "getting hit by a bus" and tests positive for COVID-19. "They die 20 minutes later because of their collapsed lung," he said. "We're going to put that down as COVID-19? That doesn't make any sense."

While that example is fanciful, Jensen's underlying point is valid. So is his warning that deaths of people who were never tested for the virus may be erroneously attributed to it, especially in light of the CDC's guidance.

More controversially, Jensen suggested that hospitals have a financial incentive to overdiagnose COVID-19. "Any time health care intersects with dollars, it gets awkward," he said. "Right now Medicare has determined that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital, you'll get paid $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000—three times as much. Nobody can tell me, after 35 years in the world of medicine, that sometimes those kinds of things [don't] impact on what we do."

That claim gave rise to memes like this one, suggesting that financial incentives are driving up COVID-19 death counts:

FactCheck.org found that Jensen's estimate of Medicare reimbursements was reasonable. It noted that "the government will pay more to hospitals for COVID-19 cases in two senses: By paying an additional 20% on top of traditional Medicare rates for COVID-19 patients during the public health emergency, and by reimbursing hospitals for treating the uninsured patients with the disease (at that enhanced Medicare rate)." But it said "the fact that government programs are paying hospitals for treating patients who have COVID-19 isn't on its own representative of anything nefarious."

Jensen told FactCheck.org he did not mean to suggest that hospitals are deliberately padding their numbers. But he did imply that money tied to COVID-19 has an influence on diagnoses.

Is that plausible? "There's an implication here that hospitals are overreporting their COVID patients because they have an economic advantage [in] doing so, [which] is really an outrageous claim," Gerald Kominski, a senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told FactCheck.org. Kominski interpreted Jensen as suggesting that patients are put on ventilators when it is not medically appropriate, which "is basically saying physicians are violating their Hippocratic Oath….It would be like [performing] heart surgery on someone who doesn't need it."

But that does not seem to be what Jensen is suggesting. In an April 15 Facebook post, Jensen argued that "increasing the number of COVID-19 deaths may create an avenue for states to receive a larger portion of federal dollars." He elaborated on his argument in an April 19 video, saying: "Hospital administrators might well want to see COVID-19 attached to a discharge summary or a death certificate. Why? Because if it's a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for—if they're [on] Medicare—typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000. But if it's COVID-19 pneumonia, then it's $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000."

Under these circumstances, Jensen says, it is reasonable to think that doctors might feel pressure to diagnose COVID-19 in ambiguous cases. He emphasizes that he is not accusing doctors of lying, just recognizing that they operate within an institutional framework that can be affected by financial considerations. "I am not saying physicians in the emergency room are…gaming the system," he says. "But we do have a variety of players in the system" who may encourage doctors to note COVID-19 as a cause of death.

USA Today asked Marty Makary, a surgeon and professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, about Jensen's claim. "What Scott Jensen said sounds right to me," Makary replied in an email, although he declined to elaborate.

Jensen's general take on the accuracy of COVID-19 death tallies is also more nuanced than it has been widely portrayed. "Do I think there's undercounting of COVID deaths?" he says in his video. "Yeah, for sure. A state like ours, we're probably going to undercount, because we don't have all these people who may have died of a COVID-19-related disease tested. So we may undercount." But in New York City, which last month began reporting "probable" COVID-19 deaths alongside "confirmed" COVID-19 deaths, "they sure could be overcounting….There's a lot of variety and a lot variability to what's going on here."

Instead of assessing the strength of Jensen's arguments, the Times immediately links him to the most disreputable lockdown opponents. "His assertions were picked up by Infowars, the conspiracy-oriented website founded by Alex Jones," Rosenberg and Rutenberg note in the third paragraph of their story. "They were shared by followers of Qanon, who subscribe to a web of vague, baseless theories that a secret cabal in the government is trying to take down the president."

More generally, Rosenberg and Rutenberg say, Jensen's critique is useful to Trump supporters, and you know that can't be good. "Since the outset of the crisis," they write, "elements of the right have sought to bolster the president's political standing and justify reopening the economy by questioning the death toll. Climate-change skeptics have employed techniques perfected in the fight over global warming to raise doubts about the deadliness of the virus. Others, including Mr. Trump's media allies as well as some in the anti-vaccine movement, have repurposed fringe theories about 'deep state' bureaucrats undermining the president to argue that the official numbers should not be trusted."

The implication is that anyone who wonders about the accuracy of COVID-19 death counts—even someone like Jensen, who suggests deaths may be underreported in some parts of the country and overreported in others—should be taken as seriously as someone who denies the human contribution to climate change or thinks vaccines cause autism. Likewise anyone who "raise doubts about the deadliness of the virus"—an issue that remains scientifically unsettled, mainly because a dearth of testing means we do not know the true number of infections, a fact that is crucial in estimating what share of people who catch the virus will be killed by it.

The Times also looks askance at anyone who "question the [epidemiological] models," which rely on assumptions about unknown variables and generate a wide range of projections that are often inconsistent with each other and with what has actually happened. "Even under the best circumstances," Rosenberg and Rutenberg concede in the 26th paragraph, "modeling how a pandemic will play out, like modeling the pace and impact of climate change, is an imperfect science. And there is indeed great uncertainty about what the death toll is now—and what it will be—given limited data about the new coronavirus and the different counting methods jurisdictions are using."

Still, Rosenberg and Rutenberg aver, "The lines of attack against the conclusions of health experts are familiar to those who have studied the climate-change denial movement." Never mind that "health experts" disagree with each other about crucial facts such as the prevalence, lethality, and transmissibility of the virus. As far as the Times is concerned, highlighting these areas of uncertainty makes you a misinformed "Covid skeptic," if not an outright "virus 'truther.'"

To clinch their case that Jensen is a crank who should be ignored, Rosenberg and Rutenberg close their story by noting that the legislator recently "plugged into a remote State Senate hearing on easing restrictions on telemedicine for addiction disorders while playing a round of golf, without a mask." While local criticism of that incident focused on whether Jensen was paying proper attention to the hearing (he says he was), the Times wants you to know he was not wearing a mask. Despite Jensen's M.D. and 35 years of practicing family medicine, readers are invited to conclude, he does not even seem to be aware that COVID-19 is contagious.

You might think that going maskless is not necessarily reckless behavior in an open outdoor space like a golf course, where it is easy to maintain appropriate distance from others. But if that's what you think, you had better keep your opinion to yourself—unless you feel comfortable being lumped in with the "denialists."

 

[Muda69]

Federal and State Governments Have Less Control Over Shutdowns Than They Think

https://reason.com/2020/05/11/federal-and-state-governments-have-less-control-over-shutdowns-than-they-think/

Quote

On April 16, President Donald Trump and the White House's COVID-19 task force outlined a three-step process for states to begin unwinding their economic shutdowns. The plan was contingent on ramping up testing and slowing the spread of new cases, and it likely would have taken months to progress from phase one to phase three.

Just three weeks later, a growing number of states have largely discarded the federal plan in favor of their own efforts aimed at restarting their shattered economies.

On April 22, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf outlined a three-step process for reopening regions of his state, with counties progressing from "red" to "yellow" to "green." Counties can be fully reopened when there are fewer than 50 cases per 100,000 residents over two weeks. The state has cleared 37 counties (out of 67) to move to the "yellow" stage on May 15.

Less than three weeks later, officials in six Pennsylvania counties that have yet to meet that threshold have declared their intention to reopen anyway, and sheriffs in two other counties say they will not issue citations to businesses that open in defiance of the state's shutdown order. Although the county commissioners acted independently from one another, all make more or less the same argument: The state-mandated economic shutdown has been ruinous, the vast majority of coronavirus deaths in Pennsylvania have been in nursing homes, and the 50-in-100,000 threshold will take too long to reach.

The response to the coronavirus pandemic may appear to have been directed by government edict. State governments ordered people to stay home and forced businesses to close, and the White House had daily press briefings to prescribe courses of action. Frustrated residents of various states have directed their outrage towards governors by staging protests at state capitols.

But the weekslong shutdowns that some parts of the country continue to endure were never enforceable from the White House or from any state capitol. They always depended on voluntary compliance from residents. Indeed, most state-level stay-at-home orders came days or even weeks after most Americans were already staying home, as research from FiveThirtyEight pretty conclusively shows.

That compliance is now fraying in many places. And that's why governments cannot fully control the economic reopening. It's not a few dozen protesters who will end the quarantines; it's the millions of other people who have simply started going about their lives again.

Officials need to recognize the limits of their authority. Federal, state, and county authorities can provide guidelines to individuals and businesses about the best ways to protect public health. They can, for example, encourage people to wear face masks in public. But they must also recognize that enforcing those rules with the threat of arrest is counterproductive. Similarly, a prohibition on large-scale public gatherings is much more enforceable than trying to control the behavior of every business in the state.

In trying to enforce overly broad and sometimes arbitrary bans on economic activity, federal and state authorities have lost some of the public trust that's essential to fulfilling the role that government actually can fulfill right now: giving people advise on what's safe and what isn't.

"Total shutdowns cannot be expected to last for weeks or months," I wrote in March. "An equilibrium will be found—either purposefully and orderly by official policy, or haphazardly when people simply can't take it anymore."

The White House has more or less given up on trying to force states to stick to the three-step process outlined last month. Whether that's because the Trump administration realizes it has lost control of the situation or because the president is happy to have someone else to blame if things go poorly, well, you decide.

But in Pennsylvania, Wolf appears prepared to drop the hammer on counties that attempt to buck his orders. In a series of tweets on Monday afternoon, the governor threatened to withhold funds from counties that reopen without state approval. Businesses that open without his say-so could risk their liability insurance and the loss of state-issued licenses, including liquor licenses for restaurants and bars.

...

There is, of course, a difference between the federal-state relationship and the state-county relationship. Counties and municipalities are, legally, the creations of the state government and do not have the same degree of independence as the states do from the federal government.

Still, it will be instructive to see whether Wolf's heavy-handed approach works or simply spurs more opposition. Pennsylvania has been at the forefront of the civic battles over COVID-19. It was one of the first states to order businesses to close, and it was one of the first states to see a huge spike in pandemic-era unemployment. It makes sense that it would be one of the places where resistance to the shutdowns—organized resistance within various levels of government, not simply angry mobs outside the capitol—would occur.

"This is not a time to give up," Wolf said in a tweet, after outlining how he planned to keep counties in line. "I intend to keep fighting."

One might wonder whether he is fighting the virus or his fellow Pennsylvanians—and whether winning one battle will require losing the other.

 

[swordfish]

1 hour ago, Muda69 said:

Federal and State Governments Have Less Control Over Shutdowns Than They Think

https://reason.com/2020/05/11/federal-and-state-governments-have-less-control-over-shutdowns-than-they-think/

 

In the end - freedom of the people must win......

[swordfish]

https://nypost.com/2020/05/10/cuomo-was-wrong-to-order-nursing-homes-to-accept-coronavirus-patients/?fbclid=IwAR39rtyrAcnbcAJhwRhkX88f-wvKKs9VBRz03jGPW7yoPaf44dn_521bHEI

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has finally admitted — tacitly and partially, anyway — the mistake that was state health chief Howard Zucker’s order that nursing homes must admit coronavirus-positive patients.

On Sunday, Cuomo announced a new regulation: Such patients must now test negative for the virus before hospitals can return them to nursing homes. Yet the gov also admitted that COVID-19 cases might still go to the facilities via other routes, and didn’t explicitly overrule Zucker’s March 25 mandate that homes must accept people despite their testing status — indeed, couldn’t even require a test pre-admission.

The gov’s people say that a home that simply can’t accommodate coronavirus patients never had to take them — though they are obliged to help those people find a place that will, with help available from the state if needed. That is: Zucker’s mandate was never more than a “don’t discriminate” rule.

But Zucker publicly presented it as “must accept” — and Cuomo’s remarks regularly implied there must be something wrong with a home that couldn’t handle corona patients.

So, while the gov’s people imply that some homes simply misunderstood the rules, the real message to operators was that declaring themselves overwhelmed would put their licenses at risk.

Notably, the chief of one Cobble Hill facility not only had his request for PPE denied, he got turned down cold when he then asked to transfer patients.

Then, too, Zucker’s Department of Health has issued other heartless orders during this crisis — the now-rescinded “don’t even try to resuscitate” mandate to EMTs for cardiac-arrest cases, as well as telling at least one home it was OK to keep staffers on the job after they’d tested positive.

Also telling: The gov has ordered an investigation that’s plainly supposed to pin all the blame on nursing and adult-care facilities: It’s led by state Attorney General Tish James, who got her job with Cuomo’s crucial assistance — and it’s only looking at what homes did wrong.

We’re sure James will uncover plenty of real horrors: Everyone (who cared to know) has long been aware that many New York nursing homes leave a lot to be desired. But that was all the more reason for Zucker & Co. to focus on policing and assisting these facilities from the start — rather than issuing edicts that led to repeated and needless tragedies.

The holy Governor needs to begin moving the public's focus on this error away from him personally (one of many tactical errors) if he has any chance of replacing the former VP as the Democrat candidate for President....Which he could be successful at doing since the country appears to have moved past his pleading and begging that resulted in a huge surplus of ventilators, the Comfort ship has left NYC, the beds in the Javits Center are being quietly removed.......

 

[swordfish]

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients?fbclid=IwAR1U2PXAzK3aNIY8iFvC1fwDwplSn5dpl-4rtcXBMkZyLikR2ZUm4EH2Ki0

U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients

Enlarge this image

Construction at the COVID-19 field hospital at McCormick Place in Chicago on April 10. The city pared back plans for a 3,000-bed temporary hospital at the nation's largest convention center as infection numbers decreased.

Nam Y. Huh/AP

As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country.

The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records.

But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven't treated a single patient.

Public health experts said this episode exposes how ill-prepared the U.S. is for a pandemic. They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished.

"It's so painful because what it's showing is that the plans we have in place, they don't work," said Robyn Gershon, a professor at New York University's School of Global Public Health. "We have to go back to the drawing board and redo it."

But the nation's governors — who requested the Army Corps projects and, in some cases, contributed state funding — said they're relieved these facilities didn't get more use. They said early models predicted a catastrophic shortage of hospital beds, and no one knew for sure when or if stay-at-home orders would reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

"All those field hospitals and available beds sit empty today," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said last month. "And that's a very, very good thing."

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said: "These 1,000-bed alternate care sites are not necessary; they're not filled. Thank God."

Senior military leaders also said the effort was a success — even if the beds sit empty. Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked at a news conference if it bothered him to see the field hospitals go unused.

"For gosh sakes, no," Hyten said. "If you see beds full, that means the local capacity of the local hospitals to handle this [has] been overwhelmed. And now we're into an emergency situation."

The Army Corps started building more than 30 field hospitals, retrofitting convention centers and erecting climate-controlled tents, in mid-March. Agency officials pushed to get these facilities done fast — limiting the bidding process and often negotiating directly with contractors they knew could deliver on time.

"I tell our guys, you have three weeks," Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, said at a Pentagon news briefing in March. "You get as much as you can [get] done in three weeks. And then the mission is complete. We have a narrow window of opportunity. If we don't leverage that window of opportunity, we're gonna miss it."

At Chicago's McCormick Place, workers scrambled in April to transform the convention center into a massive temporary hospital with 3,000 beds — more than the biggest hospital in Illinois.

"This was an empty convention hall," Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said during a news conference while flanked by construction workers in hard hats and bright yellow vests. "Monumental, round-the-clock dedication is what got this done before we need it, preparing for saving lives in the event that things become as bad as some have predicted."

But just as construction got underway, states were issuing stay-at-home orders. And the spread of the coronavirus eventually began to slow.

Work on the field hospitals continued, though some projects were scaled back — including McCormick Place. The field hospital opened with one-third of the beds originally planned, and it closed its doors a few weeks later after treating fewer than 40 patients.

The same story is playing out across the country. In fact, most Army Corps field hospitals haven't seen a single patient.

In many parts of the U.S., hospitals were able to expand their capacity to keep up with the surge of coronavirus patients. But in New York, hospitals were overwhelmed, and local officials pleaded with the public to save hospital beds for people who needed them most.

"The mantra was, 'Don't come to the hospital, don't go to the doctor, stay home, stay home till your lips turn blue,' " said Gershon of NYU's School of Global Public Health. "Well, we now know that was a crazy set of advice."

Gershon said she worries that a lot of people followed that advice and that some may have died because of it — including a cousin of hers on Long Island. He stayed at home as he got sicker, Gershon said, and later died on a ventilator in the hospital.

Contractors built two field hospitals on Long Island, on the campuses of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and SUNY Old Westbury, at a total cost of more than $270 million.

The Army Corps limited the competition in awarding the projects to speed the process, which usually takes six to nine months, according to agency documents. Officials noted they were able to complete the contract award for the Stony Brook project in a "little more than three days."

"This time savings was critical in order for construction to begin as quickly as possible, supporting the unusual and compelling nature of the urgency of this procurement and the national emergency," the document said.

The two Long Island field hospitals were completed in late April. They never opened to the public and didn't treat any patients.

"That's outrageous," Gershon said. "That's completely crazy. I hope they didn't take them down."

The temporary hospitals in New York haven't been taken down. They're on hold in case they need to be reopened in the future, according to a state health department spokesman.

New York has "so far avoided the worst-case scenario we were preparing for," the spokesman said in a statement. "There has been a reduced need for hospital beds, and as of now we are not moving forward on purchasing supplies and equipment or securing staff for these sites."

Even in New York City, where the Army Corps field hospital did treat COVID-19 patients, it never reached full capacity.

"There are a lot of losers in it and not a lot of winners," said Dario Gonzalez, an emergency doctor with the New York City Fire Department who helped lead the medical response at the temporary hospital at the Javits Center in Manhattan.

"It was very disappointing," Gonzalez said. "Everybody was here, ready to work, ready to get patients in."

The plan was for the Javits Center to take patients from overwhelmed hospitals in the city. But in practice it wasn't that easy. Some hospitals complained that the intake process was too complicated. And they sent few patients to Javits — even as they resorted to treating patients in the hallways.

During the three weeks it was open, the Javits field hospital treated about 1,100 patients. Gonzales said it could have handled a lot more.

"We all could have done a much better job," Gonzalez says. "And we've got to really get it together to get that right the next time."

Officials in other states such as Illinois and Michigan also said field hospitals can be quickly reopened if there's an increase in coronavirus cases.

"We really wanted to make sure that we were maintaining some of the physical infrastructure that has been built there. So that should we need it, it doesn't take us a long time to potentially turn that back on," said Allison Arwady, the public health commissioner in Chicago.

She said officials there are keeping a close eye on the number of COVID-19 patients in local hospitals.

"We watch it really closely every day," Arwady said. "And certainly if we start to see any direction that things are not going the right way, we stand ready in case that needs to be reassessed."

 

Public health experts said this episode exposes how ill-prepared the U.S. is for a pandemic. They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished.

 

Not enough planning?  SF is pretty happy these hospitals weren't needed........

 

[swordfish]

From 2017......

https://www.healio.com/infectious-disease/emerging-diseases/news/online/{85a3f9c0-ed0a-4be8-9ca2-8854b2be7d13}/fauci-no-doubt-trump-will-face-surprise-infectious-disease-outbreak

Fauci: ‘No doubt’ Trump will face surprise infectious disease outbreak

January 11, 2017

 

Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said there is “no doubt” Donald J. Trump will be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency.

Fauci has led the NIAID for more than 3 decades, advising the past five United States presidents on global health threats from the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s through to the current Zika virus outbreak.

 

Anthony S. Fauci

During a forum on pandemic preparedness at Georgetown University, Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.

“The history of the last 32 years that I have been the director of the NIAID will tell the next administration that there is no doubt they will be faced with the challenges their predecessors were faced with,” he said.

While observers have speculated since his election about how Trump will respond to such challenges, Fauci and other health experts said Tuesday that preventing disease pandemics often starts overseas and that a proper response means collaboration between not only the U.S. and other countries, but also the public and private health sectors.

“We will definitely get surprised in the next few years,” he said.

‘Risks have never been higher’

Trump, the real estate developer-turned-Republican politician, has worried some infectious disease experts with controversial and sometimes unclear views on certain health issues.

[gonzoron]

13 hours ago, swordfish said:

IN THE MIDDLE OF A PANDEMIC!!!

True dat. They just SAT THERE and enjoyed the song. Later that day, they all had a sing a long about how they didn't give a damn about what the U.S. was fighting for. 

The protests, then and today, come from the far right-wing nut jobs who still want to send this exact same generation of Americans(now 80-90 years old)off to die in the name of the almighty dollar. Not a damn thing has changed.

[gonzoron]

30 minutes ago, TrojanDad said:

yea...majority Vietnam War protests came from right wing nut jobs.....

Maybe you were in diapers TrojanDouche and don't remember when the right wing went nuts protesting the National Anthem as played by Jimi Hendrix. They sure weren't cheering it in a meme.

[swordfish]

So who is overtly and proudly protesting the National Anthem today?