Coronavirus News (2)

The Trump Presidency Is Over When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump ........ Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office....... it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter....... Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. ........ the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump......... the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity...............

“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness”

.......... “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that.......... We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.) ........ The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that.......... We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.) .........

the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen..... Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. ...... the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both .... “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”

....... this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been......... a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president” ....... The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation. ......

The Trump presidency is over.

Worst-Case Estimates for U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Projections based on C.D.C. scenarios show a potentially vast toll. But those numbers don’t account for interventions now underway. ........ four possible scenarios — A, B, C and D — based on characteristics of the virus, including estimates of how transmissible it is and the severity of the illness it can cause. ........ the worst-case figures would be staggering if no actions were taken to slow transmission. ...... Between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to one projection. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die. ......... 2.4 million to 21 million people in the United States could require hospitalization,

potentially crushing the nation’s medical system

, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. .......... testing for the virus, tracing contacts, and reducing human interactions by stopping mass gatherings, working from home and curbing travel...... “You can’t win. If you overdo it, you panic everybody. If you underdo it, they get complacent. You have to be careful.” ..... Studies of previous epidemics have shown that the longer officials waited to encourage people to distance and protect themselves, the less useful those measures were in saving lives and preventing infections. ........ “A fire on your stove you could put out with a fire extinguisher, but if your kitchen is ablaze, that fire extinguisher probably won’t work” ...... They variously assume that each person with the coronavirus would infect either two or three people; that the hospitalization rate would be either 3 percent or 12; and that either 1 percent or a quarter of a percent of people experiencing symptoms would die. ........ Even severe flu seasons stress the nation’s hospitals to the point of setting up tents in parking lots and keeping people for days in emergency rooms. Coronavirus is likely to cause five to 10 times that burden of disease ...... some 96 million people in the United States would be infected. Five out of every hundred would need hospitalization, which would mean close to five million hospital admissions, nearly two million of those patients requiring intensive care and about half of those needing the support of ventilators...... suggested 480,000 deaths, which he said was conservative. By contrast, about 20,000 to 50,000 people have died from flu-related illnesses this season.......

Unlike with seasonal influenza, the entire population is thought to be susceptible to the new coronavirus.

......... an estimate from the attending physician of Congress that the United States could have 70 million to 150 million coronavirus cases. ...... The most lethal pandemic to hit the United States was the 1918 Spanish flu, which was responsible for about 675,000 American deaths ...... the new coronavirus is roughly equally transmissible as the 1918 flu, and just slightly less clinically severe, and it is higher in both transmissibility and severity compared with all other flu viruses in the past century. ....... The world population is about triple the size it was the year before the 1918 flu, with 10 times as many people over 65 and 30 times as many over 85. These groups have proven especially likely to become critically ill and die in the current coronavirus pandemic. ...... Singapore and Hong Kong .... school closures, eliminated mass gatherings, required work from home, and rigorously decontaminated their public transportation and infrastructure. .. widespread testing.

“This feels much worse than 2008”: Obama’s chief economist on coronavirus’s economic threat Coronavirus could do more economic damage than the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession. ........ this feels much worse than 2008. Lehman Brothers was quite bad, but it was the culmination of a sequence of things that had happened over 14 months. This hit all at once....... If two months from now we go back to normal, I think we’d be okay. If this lasts six months or longer — and I think that’s the more likely scenario — all of that just compounds. Even if you discover a cure in December, you still have people out of jobs, broken balance sheets, bankrupt companies that won’t be particularly eager to hire.......

There’s only one equilibrium: It’s economic inactivity until the danger passes.

....... get people cash. .....