World looks on in horror as Trump flails over pandemic despite claims US leads way

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

25 minutes ago, PTakacs said:

Let me point to my favorite non-home country again: Taiwan. 26M population, 440 cases, 7 deaths so far. They even had hundreds of thousands returning from China in January! The numbers can be controlled if you implement  real lock downs, quarantines, or screenings early enough (that is, in January). 

I repeat, 440 cases and 7 deaths out of 26M people. 

I agree, but thats not what China did, they ignored/suppressed it for months. Look what the spread is in other countries that ignored it, US and UK are the perfect cases in point. The UK has what, 1/20th the population, and much less density, than China yet their case load and reported deaths are much higher than China. The US has 1/4 the population of China and much less density yet the reported deaths/cases are obviously much higher. All 3 ignored the problem to one extent or another, China, with the highest population and density, ignored the issue the longest yet their case/death load is a fraction of US/UK? Common man.

Edited May 19, 2020 by Strangelovesurfing

[PTakacs + 59]

29 minutes ago, Strangelovesurfing said:

I agree, but thats not what China did, they ignored/suppressed it for months. Look what the spread is in other countries that ignored it, US and UK are the perfect cases in point. The UK has what, 1/20th the population, and much less density, than China yet their case load and reported deaths are much higher than China. The US has 1/4 the population of China and much less density yet the deaths/cases are obviously much higher. All 3 ignored the problem to one extent or another, China, with the highest population and density, ignored the issue the longest yet their case/death load is a fraction of US/UK? Common man.

No, what you said does not make sense at all. There are lots of Taiwanese travelling between China and Taiwan, much more so than those between UK/US and China. If the virus was already spreading wildly in China earlier last year, Taiwan would have been severely affected. Same with SKorea and HK. Did they report many cases or deaths? No. Check out HK -- with SO MANY protesters gathering in close quarters in as late as January 2020, did you see an explosion of cases or deaths? No, not even close.

None of the East Asian countries started real quarantines, screenings, or lock downs until January, but what they did uniformly worked. Waiting for that one extra month or two to act was deadly for us Western countries. It was/is as simple as that. 

Western exceptionalism may have worked in many situations, but not against a virus.

Edited May 19, 2020 by PTakacs

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

17 minutes ago, PTakacs said:

No, what you said does not make sense at all. There are lots of Taiwanese travelling between China and Taiwan, much more so than those between UK/US and China. If the virus was already spreading wildly in China earlier last year, Taiwan would have been severely affected. Same with SKorea and HK. Did they report many cases or deaths? No. Check out HK -- with SO MANY protesters gathering in close quarters in as late as January 2020, did you see an explosion of cases or deaths? No, not even close.

None of the East Asian countries started real quarantines, screenings, or lock downs until January, but what they did uniformly worked. Waiting for that one extra month or two to act was deadly for us Western countries. It was/is as simple as that. 

I'm not going to pretend I have retort to you points, since I don't. South Korea did an amazing job so far also with many Chinese visitors. I'm just highlighting some odd data points. Like why with only ~4,000 deaths did the CCP move in 5-10 mobile cremation facilities to Wuhan? Why were tens of thousands of extra urns produced and used if the death rate wasn't much more than a normal winter?

Edited May 19, 2020 by Strangelovesurfing

[PTakacs + 59]

8 minutes ago, Strangelovesurfing said:

I'm not going to pretend I have retort to you points, since I don't. South Korea also did an amazing job so far also with many Chinese visitors. I'm just highlighting out some odd data points. Like why with only ~4,000 deaths did the CCP move in 5-10 mobile cremation facilities to Wuhan? Why were tens of thousands of extra urns produced and used if the death rate wasn't much more than a normal winter?

They built a hospital for thousands in days. Now the hospital has been abandoned/emptied out/decommissioned -- I guess that's how they do things -- big and strong, for all the propaganda videos. I don't know about any concrete evidence proving tens of thousands urns were actually used, each for a dead body. Again, I look at Taiwan, HK, SKorea, and Japan. They all managed the virus well, and none started doing anything until January. Unless you believe the conspiracy that the virus specifically targets only Chinese, it is very much manageable, if you act early.

Edited May 19, 2020 by PTakacs

[Hotone + 412]

On 5/18/2020 at 6:53 AM, Dan Warnick said:

Told you it would work this way.  It is the only small "victory" the governors can claim: We/I ordered the people into lockups (I'm changing the term) out of an abundance of caution, for their own safety!  It is not an easy job but I made the hard calls.  Please vote for me."  But the votes will not be forthcoming.  Governors that continued the lockups and delayed reopening will be voted out of office.  I suspect more than a few "firebrands" will win governorships in the next elections.  And they will go on a rampage to reverse the catastrophe that is our State Governments.

It was a LOCKUP, not a lockdown, and they miscalculated.  The deplorables did not act as ignorants.  Many Lefties will also migrate to the Right and the losses to the Democrat Party will be devistating indeed.

It will depend on what is the outcome of the 'breakout' in terms of hospitalisations and deaths. Hopefully, going into summer weather, and with awareness of social distancing, it won't be bad. I suppose we will know very soon.  

 

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

I'm not a foil hat guy, I just follow the data points. Excluding government ineptitude, how is it that in every other country soon as it hit, it was spreading fast but not China? There were ~10,000 infections in NY before they even realized it arrived for what I've read. You have an asymptomatic virus that has a robust infection rate that took off like a rocket in many places with high population density.

Why haven't other East Asian countries had the same problem? It could have may factors or might just be the quick govt. response like you say. The Japanese are probably the most hygienic people in the world. South Korea is a peg or two lower in hygiene but still super clean IMO. I don't know enough about Taiwan to say. That could be part of it. Studies will be done in the future and i'm sure a holistic judgement will be decided upon then.

 

[PTakacs + 59]

1 minute ago, Strangelovesurfing said:

I'm not a foil hat guy, I just follow the data points. Excluding government ineptitude, how is it that in every other country soon as it hit, it was spreading fast but not China? There were ~10,000 infections in NY before they even realized it arrived for what I've read. You have an asymptomatic virus that has a robust infection rate that took off like a rocket in many places with high population density.

Why haven't other East Asian countries had the same problem? It could have may factors or might just be the quick govt. response like you say. The Japanese are probably the most hygienic people in the world. South Korea is a peg or two lower in hygiene but still super clean IMO. I don't know enough about Taiwan to say. That could be part of it. Studies will be done in the future and i'm sure a holistic judgement will be decided upon then.

 

The Chinese hard quarantined 50M in January. Their quarantine is perhaps the harshest among all countries. That would have done it, even if the virus started there. 

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

5 minutes ago, PTakacs said:

The Chinese hard quarantined 50M in January. Their quarantine is perhaps the harshest among all countries. That would have done it, even if the virus started there. 

Yes, but by that point they had ignored it for months. The other thing about China that's a giant ??? Is why did they suppress all information coming out of Wuhan? Not even Russia completely blocked all information in and out of the country. They just throw bad doctors out the window!

Edited May 19, 2020 by Strangelovesurfing

[PTakacs + 59]

4 minutes ago, Strangelovesurfing said:

Yes, but by that point they had ignored it for months. The other thing about China that's a giant ??? Is why did they suppress all information coming out of Wuhan? Not even Russia completely blocked all information in and out of the country. They just through bad doctors out the window!

No, if the virus was already spreading wildly in China early last year, HK (with all those protesters protesting in January), Taiwan, Japan, and SKorea would have been severely affected by the end of last year. To say it differently, it is not a feasible situation where China is somehow severely infected but HK, Taiwan, and other East Asian countries are not. A virus does not work that way unless it only targets mainland Chinese (i.e., not even HK Chinese or Taiwan Chinese). That's a bit crazy, right? 

I mean, we had all of our journalists in China until what month? The EU journalists are still there. If the situation was so out of control in China in, say, November of last year, wouldn't our journalists have said something? Wouldn't the HK protesters have mentioned something? Are they all in this together to suppress information? 

The virus started in December-ish, the Chinese warned the WHO and CDC on 12/31, all the HK protesters were still fired up and healthy in January, all the East Asian countries then started to act in late January, and by early March things in Asia were already under control. That's the timeline. To say that the virus was out of control in China earlier last year while all other Asian countries were unaffected and unaware of anything, is rather illogical to me, especially if the "crisis" involves a transportation hub like Wuhan.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

1 hour ago, PTakacs said:

There are lots of Taiwanese travelling between China and Taiwan, much more so than those between UK/US and China.

3,000,000 / 12 = 250,000/month

https://qz.com/1780709/taiwan-tourism-hits-record-high-despite-china-boycott/

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

35 minutes ago, PTakacs said:

No, if the virus was already spreading wildly in China early last year, HK (with all those protesters protesting in January), Taiwan, Japan, and SKorea would have been severely affected by the end of last year. To say it differently, it is not a feasible situation where China is somehow severely infected but HK, Taiwan, and other East Asian countries are not. A virus does not work that way unless it only targets mainland Chinese (i.e., not even HK Chinese or Taiwan Chinese). That's a bit crazy, right? 

I mean, we had all of our journalists in China until what month? The EU journalists are still there. If the situation was so out of control in China in, say, November of last year, wouldn't our journalists have said something? Wouldn't the HK protesters have mentioned something? Are they all in this together to suppress information? 

The virus started in December-ish, the Chinese warned the WHO and CDC on 12/31, all the HK protesters were still fired up and healthy in January, all the East Asian countries then started to act in late January, and by early March things in Asia were already under control. That's the timeline. To say that the virus was out of control in China earlier last year while all other Asian countries were unaffected and unaware of anything, is rather illogical to me, especially if the "crisis" involves a transportation hub like Wuhan.

Again, I don't pretend to have all the answers. I never said the virus was out of control earlier last year than your timeline, except for Nov. being the start. That still leaves Dec and Jan for it to spread, in all other countries it was rip roaring by that point. HK had almost no mainland visitors for the last half of 2019 because of the protestors. The CCP tries to control all the information that emanates out of China. Why do you assume the reporting is able to tell the whole story? I don't think there's some giant media conspiracy. I do think a decent number of those 50 million under lockdown died in their apartments.

Edited May 19, 2020 by Strangelovesurfing

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

1 hour ago, PTakacs said:

They built a hospital for thousands in days. Now the hospital has been abandoned/emptied out/decommissioned -- I guess that's how they do things -- big and strong, for all the propaganda videos. I don't know about any concrete evidence proving tens of thousands urns were actually used, each for a dead body. Again, I look at Taiwan, HK, SKorea, and Japan. They all managed the virus well, and none started doing anything until January. Unless you believe the conspiracy that the virus specifically targets only Chinese, it is very much manageable, if you act early.

One thing about that hospital which is indicative of everything else I've been writing, it wasn't constructed in days. The photo you saw was a propaganda shot of another location inside China. When they did actually finish the hospital it was no better than the field hospitals we set up here in the US, it was just made more expensive stuff they then had to tear down, also typical of China. I say it's no better than the field hospitals because it's a quick slap-together modular construction building that isn't rated to be a real hospital. If China was sensible they would have set up a tent, but a field tent isn't impressive for propaganda purposes. That hospital in a way is a metaphor for China over-all.

Edited May 19, 2020 by Strangelovesurfing

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

1 hour ago, PTakacs said:

No, if the virus was already spreading wildly in China early last year, HK (with all those protesters protesting in January), Taiwan, Japan, and SKorea would have been severely affected by the end of last year. To say it differently, it is not a feasible situation where China is somehow severely infected but HK, Taiwan, and other East Asian countries are not. A virus does not work that way unless it only targets mainland Chinese (i.e., not even HK Chinese or Taiwan Chinese). That's a bit crazy, right? 

I mean, we had all of our journalists in China until what month? The EU journalists are still there. If the situation was so out of control in China in, say, November of last year, wouldn't our journalists have said something? Wouldn't the HK protesters have mentioned something? Are they all in this together to suppress information? 

The virus started in December-ish, the Chinese warned the WHO and CDC on 12/31, all the HK protesters were still fired up and healthy in January, all the East Asian countries then started to act in late January, and by early March things in Asia were already under control. That's the timeline. To say that the virus was out of control in China earlier last year while all other Asian countries were unaffected and unaware of anything, is rather illogical to me, especially if the "crisis" involves a transportation hub like Wuhan.

Wasn't spreading "early" last year. Wasn't spreading in October, barely was spreading in November. 40,000 families eating together in a massive shared meal for Chinese New Years did the trick, this weeks after they knew they had a major problem, but economics or stupidity won the day. 

New York started from one lawyer and a bar mitzva event with about 50 attending. Singapore deaths were almost all caused by two "tourists" from Wuhan who just happened to visit the two largest churches there on the same day even though they're miles apart. 

The difference in the Asian countries mentioned is they do not have automatic rights like Americans so they can indeed do an unreasonable search and seizure. Their contact tracing is off the charts. Furthermore Taiwan has automatic quarantine for new arrivals, period. The big mistake the US government did was bring people in the state department knew were infected while doing nothing to isolate them. That's 100% on State, or should I just call them by their proper name, Deep State. 

[0R0 + 6,251]

On 5/17/2020 at 6:57 PM, Dan Warnick said:

Its about time. They have gobs of Dem (and some Rep) afficionados to prosecute under title 18. If they want to make it into a political bloodbath of the Dem governors they can do it. The "arbitrary and capricious" actions under color of law, acting outside the legal boundaries of their own state constitutions making law without their legislators.

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

54 minutes ago, Ward Smith said:

New York started from one lawyer and a bar mitzva event with about 50 attending. Singapore deaths were almost all caused by two "tourists" from Wuhan who just happened to visit the two largest churches there on the same day even though they're miles apart. 

I had no idea about Singapore. Is there a known reason they went to separate churches? Is it suspected they knew each other?

Edited May 19, 2020 by Strangelovesurfing

[0R0 + 6,251]

2 hours ago, PTakacs said:

No, what you said does not make sense at all. There are lots of Taiwanese travelling between China and Taiwan, much more so than those between UK/US and China. If the virus was already spreading wildly in China earlier last year, Taiwan would have been severely affected. Same with SKorea and HK. Did they report many cases or deaths? No. Check out HK -- with SO MANY protesters gathering in close quarters in as late as January 2020, did you see an explosion of cases or deaths? No, not even close.

None of the East Asian countries started real quarantines, screenings, or lock downs until January, but what they did uniformly worked. Waiting for that one extra month or two to act was deadly for us Western countries. It was/is as simple as that. 

Western exceptionalism may have worked in many situations, but not against a virus.

That was being worked out on a different basis. Namely, they were mostly going to go the Swedish route till the Nial Furgesson paper came out and scared everyone with what turned out to be wildly out of what projections and mortality rates way off reality. The bulk of the infected had nearly nothing. The symptomatics showing up for testing turned out to be a minor fraction of the infected. Prevalence rates are one to two orders of magnitude above comfirmed cases. It was known from contact tracing stats from Taiwan S Korea and Japan during Feb. But the relatively small numbers they had precluded a definitive statistical evaluation. But the order of magnitude of mortality and % symptomatic was known and far smaller than any number Furgesson used.

One large difference is what happened when you were tested positive in Japan Taiwan or S Korea. You didn't go back home but stayed at a hotel till you were clear. I don't know why in the US and Europe nobody made such arrangements. Considering that transmission statistics indicate 74% of cases were contracted within the household.. And there was no end of empty hotel rooms.

But the US had two major issues. First was that there were no tests and the CDC and FDA made sure there were none. So there were no confirmations to tell the public to be careful. There was state level contact tracking of incoming travelers  from China but it was useless because no tests were available. Finally, there is a high transmission correlation with population density (NYC) and younger populations (Detroit, New Orleans at Mardi Gras, Florida in spring break). The main transmission in NYC was the subway. The MIT study on the issue is very strong. That transmission mode is exacerbated by crowded elevators both in office towers and residential high rises. It apparently made for very powerful initial loads of virus upon infection, that resulted in more severe cases than elsewhere, and affected more younger people. Young people at parties and bars were the other main transmission, made clear by the enormously fast rise in infections in Florida during Spring break (Kinsa temperature data) and its sudden drop after they were booted out to go back home - where in such student children households they progressed infections to their parents. Manhattan shows an infection spurt in the temp. data when spring breakers returned despite the shutdonw of NY 3-5days earlier, Queens Bronx and Brooklyn showed no such problem. Florida shows a rapid fall off in the same time. .

The US also suffered from "Italian administrative syndrome" meaning that infected patients were returned to nursing homes. Same as was done in Milan and Bergamo, and apparently in the UK and Spain, don't know about France. Practically everywhere, no protections were implemented in nursing homes till it was too late. Even where there were no deaths, infection rates of 70-80% of patients are common.

On the other side of it. is the prevalence in middle class suburban people turned out surprisingly low considering the high prevalence among working class and the poor. The MLB prevalence tests (about 1/2 of 10k employees returned swabs for testing) gave 0.7%, a surprisingly low number.

[0R0 + 6,251]

37 minutes ago, Strangelovesurfing said:

I had no idea about Singapore. Is there a known reason they went to separate churches? Is it suspected they knew each other?

It is viewed as a specific mission from the CCP to send infected people to particular destinations.

[0R0 + 6,251]

2 hours ago, PTakacs said:

I mean, we had all of our journalists in China until what month? The EU journalists are still there. If the situation was so out of control in China in, say, November of last year, wouldn't our journalists have said something? Wouldn't the HK protesters have mentioned something? Are they all in this together to suppress information? 

It was under control AFTER they quarantined cumulatively 780 million people all over the country. Including entire apartment blocks in Beijing and Shanghai. The policy was to lock down the travelers from Wuhan and Hubei and then from Guangdong too. If a building had more than two apartments in quarantine, they locked down the entire building. More  than two buildings got the entire neighborhood locked down.

They had particularly horrible hospitalization practices that assured people would never recover as they were put together in the same air space without sufficient ventilation  so that patients could not be rid of their virus because of a constant supply of fresh virus from the air . As pointed out by someone else, there were extra mobile crematoria sent to Wuhan and they operated the existing ones 24/7 through February. That is about 6X the cremations in prior years.  Urns were ordered for 5X more people than usual deaths in the city for those months.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

2 hours ago, Strangelovesurfing said:

One thing about that hospital which is indicative of everything else I've been writing, it wasn't constructed in days. The photo you saw was a propaganda shot of another location inside China. When they did actually finish the hospital it was no better than the field hospitals we set up here in the US, it was just made more expensive stuff they then had to tear down, also typical of China. I say it's no better than the field hospitals because it's a quick slap-together modular construction building that isn't rated to be a real hospital. If China was sensible they would have set up a tent, but a field tent isn't impressive for propaganda purposes. That hospital in a way is a metaphor for China over-all.

Or, like other countries, simply commandeered already existing, suitable structures such as libraries, schools and sports arenas which already had power, water and sewage facilities.

This whole ‘hospital in a week’ was simply propaganda for the masses.

[Jim Profit + 46]

On 5/17/2020 at 2:55 AM, Ward Smith said:

But yeah, mine's bigger than yours @Jee, or should I say @Jim Profit or should I say @frankfurter? Always the same modus operandi, always following the wumaodang playbook. Like cockroaches, disappearing when the light comes on, then sneaking back into the kitchen later

Of course anybody opposing you narrative is part of a concerted effort ..🤦‍♂️

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

No way do cockroaches have a GQ coif like Jim!

[Sparklander7 + 1]

On 5/15/2020 at 3:10 PM, Yoshiro Kamamura said:

World looks on in horror as Trump flails over pandemic despite claims US leads way

The president’s outlandish behavior as Americans suffer has inspired horror and confusion while alienating allies

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the US is “leading the world” with its response to the pandemic, but it does not seem to be going in any direction the world wants to follow.

Across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, views of the US handling of the coronavirus crisis are uniformly negative and range from horror through derision to sympathy. Donald Trump’s musings from the White House briefing room, particularly his thoughts on injecting disinfectant, have drawn the attention of the planet.

“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

The US has emerged as a global hotspot for the pandemic, a giant petri dish for the Sars-CoV-2 virus. As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way.

None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money” to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the US.

The president’s abrupt decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization last month also came as a shock. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, wrote on Twitter: “There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.”

A poll in France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader. Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.

A survey this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters.

Dacian Cioloș, a former prime minister of Romania who now leads the Renew Europe group in the European parliament, captured a general European view this week as the latest statistics on deaths in the US were reported.

“Post-truth communication techniques used by rightwing populism movements simply do not work to beat Covid-19,” he told the Guardian. “And we see that populism cost lives.”

Around the globe, the “America first” response pursued by the Trump administration has alienated close allies. In Canada, it was the White House order in April to halt shipments of critical N95 protective masks to Canadian hospitals that was the breaking point.

The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, who had previously spoken out in support of Trump on several occasions, said the decision was like letting a family member “starve” during a crisis.

 

“When the cards are down, you see who your friends are,” said Ford. “And I think it’s been very clear over the last couple of days who our friends are.”

In countries known for chronic problems of governance, there has been a sense of wonder that the US appears to have joined their ranks.

Esmir Milavić, an editor at Bosnia’s N1 TV channel, told viewers this week: “The White House is in utter dysfunction and doesn’t speak with one voice.”

Milavić said: “The vice-president is wearing a mask, while the president doesn’t; some staffers wear them, some don’t. Everybody acts as they please. As time passes, White House begins to look more and more like the Balkans.”

After Trump’s disinfectant comments, Beppe Severgnini, a columnist for Italy’s Corriere della Sera, said in a TV interview: “Trying to get into Donald Trump’s head is more difficult than finding a vaccine for coronavirus. First he decided on a lockdown and then he encouraged protests against the lockdown that he promoted. It’s like a Mel Brooks film.”

In several countries, the local health authorities have felt obliged to put out statements to counter “health advice” coming from the White House, concerning the ingestion of disinfectant and taking hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug found to be ineffective against Covid-19 and potentially lethal.

The Nigerian government put out a warning that there is no “hard evidence that chloroquine is effective in prevention or management of coronavirus infection” after three people were hospitalised from overdosing on the drug in Lagos. It was not enough to prevent a fivefold increase in the price of the drug, which is also used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

Trump’s decision not to take part in a global effort to find a vaccine, and his abrupt severance of financial support to the WHO at the height of the pandemic, added outrage and prompted complaints that the US was surrendering its role of global leadership.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/15/donald-trump-coronavirus-response-world-leaders

 

 

[Sparklander7 + 1]

I don't see trump as "flailing" as the posted article states.

He is simply doing what he promised the American voters, that is to implement a policy of America First from his administration.

The European leaders and others, for decades have always looked for an American bail-out when they are in trouble can either get to work and solve their own problems or look elsewhere for a hand-out.

As an American Tax Payer, I whole heartily agree with Trump.. Let the EU and their supporters POUND SAND!

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

Two things that don't add up. 

The WHO won't allow Taiwan to participate. Taiwan has the best results on the planet.

So naturally the mouth breather who wrote the Guardian article and the usual morons in the MSM can't criticize Trump enough for backing away from the World Health Organization. The same WHO that has clearly failed miserably. But yeah, Trump bad 

Edited May 19, 2020 by Ward Smith

[SUZNV + 1,197]

I think  this can is the other side of the story and exposed mainstream tactics for misleading. What the current administration's actions has been under covered and while they are working on it, the others just criticize. 
Source:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-massive-trump-coronavirus-supply-effort-that-the-media-loves-to-hate/
The Massive Trump Coronavirus Supply Effort that the Media Loves to Hate

By RICH LOWRY

May 18, 2020 2:36 PM

President Donald Trump, joined by members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, listens to a reporter’s question at a coronavirus briefing at the White House, March 22, 2020. (Tia Dufour/White House)
The administration has used deft improvisation to secure huge supplies of PPE.
There is a new cardinal rule in journalism — never write anything favorable about the Trump administration’s coronavirus response, even about its successes.
 

It’s why the story of how the administration handled the potential ventilator crisis has gone almost entirely untold, and why its effort to secure supplies of personal protective equipment, or PPE, has been gotten largely skeptical or hostile coverage.

Any government response to a once-in-a-generation crisis is going to be subject to legitimate criticism, and there’s no question that almost every major government in the Western world, including ours, should have acted sooner. But to read the press, there is basically nothing good that the Trump administration has done over the last three months.

This is manifestly false. In a briefing for reporters last week on FEMA’s work securing PPE, FEMA administrator Peter Gaynor laid out the raw numbers: FEMA, HHS, and the private sector have shipped or are currently shipping 92.7 million N95 respirators, 133 million surgical masks, 10.5 million face shields, 42.4 million surgical gowns, and 989 million gloves.

According to Admiral John Polowczyk, head of the supply-chain task force at FEMA, we manufactured roughly 30 million N95 respirators domestically a month before the COVID-19 crisis. He says we are on a path now to ramp up to 180 million N95 respirators a month.

None of this happened by accident. At a time of unprecedented stress on the supply chain and a yawning gap between supply and demand in the market, it required considerable clever improvisation and determined hustle. This was not your average bureaucratic response. It was a partnership between the public and private sector to get supplies to the United States on an urgent basis and ship them to the places that needed them most, and then begin to ramp up manufacturing here at home.

A team around White House adviser Jared Kushner and the supply-chain task force under Admiral Polowczyk worked to fly supplies from overseas to the U.S. quickly, to vet leads for additional PPE (the work of volunteers from the business world mustered by Kushner’s team), and to build a cooperative relationship with 3M, the country’s most important manufacturer of N95 respirators.
The story of what they’ve done is a key part of the administration’s response, even if it has been obscured by a press that has an allergy to anything that has worked.
 

Kitchen-Sink Attacks

The initiative to secure PPE has been the subject of constant criticism, whether it makes much sense or not.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has repeatedly said that the president needed a military leader to take charge of the supply chain — when Admiral Polowczyk, the vice director of logistics for the joint chiefs, was already in charge.

The administration has been urged over and over again to invoke the Defense Production Act — when it has indeed used this act many times to prod and guide the supply chain, just not to take over industries wholesale.

Stories in the press have tended to relay complaints that FEMA has “commandeered” supplies headed for states or other entities. According to FEMA, this is erroneous. After looking into supposed instances of commandeering, Gaynor says, FEMA believes that shady brokers have been using this line an excuse for their own failures. “FEMA has become a convenient scapegoat for malicious actors who are unable to deliver on the promises they had made or are engaging in illegal activity,” he says.

They might make promise to various potential buyers and then pull the rug out from under them when they get a higher bid, explaining that the situation is out of their control because FEMA swooped in and took the material. Gaynor is emphatic that “FEMA does not have the authority to conduct seizures.”
 

A typical journalistic tack has been to find someone who had a frustrating experience with the administration and make him representative of the entire effort.

A large, quintuple by-lined New York Times feature on Kushner’s volunteers was a particularly egregious example of the genre. It found a doctor named Jeffrey Hendricks who approached the federal government with information that he had “longtime manufacturing contacts in China and a line on millions of masks from established suppliers.”
 

This wasn’t earth-shattering information, given that many tipsters said exactly the same thing. According to the Times, Hendricks was disappointed when it took weeks to act on his request before a site visit was finally set up to inspect the masks.
After the story appeared, Hendricks said it “did not fully reflect my experience.”
 

The Times cited other examples of the effort supposedly gone awry. “At least one tip the volunteers forwarded turned into an expensive debacle,” the report said. The administration passed along procurement papers to senior officials in New York from “Yaron Oren-Pines, a Silicon Valley engineer who said he could provide more than 1,000 ventilators.”
 

New York went ahead and awarded him a nearly $70 million contract and got exactly nothing for it. This is indeed a story of haste making waste — although one that implicates New York State, not the federal government.
 

A senior administration official scoffs at how the Times blamed the Trump administration for New York’s screw-up. “I saw the email that was sent” to New York, he says, noting that it was from a federal-government employee, not a volunteer. The employee had just seen coverage of the governors of New York and New Jersey’s need for ventilators and simply forwarded it “because she wasn’t sourcing ventilators and wanted to help. ‘Hey, take a look.’ That was it.”

Another passage in the Times piece related the story of “Dr. Albert Hazzouri, a Pennsylvania dentist and visitor of Mar-a-Lago.” According to the Times, he “repeatedly pressed FEMA officials to buy from his associates, after being referred by Rep. Brian Babin, a Texas Republican and fellow dentist.” It seemed that the story was leading up to a gross instance of cronyism, and then it ended with a whimper: “None of his tips resulted in FEMA supply deals.”
Oh.
Don’t Nationalize Companies, Work with Them
 

A couple of insights guided the effort.
 

Right from the beginning, everyone realized that the strategic stockpile alone couldn’t possibly cover what we needed in the crisis, and that the most sought-after supplies were overseas. “We had outsourced most of the medical supply chain to Asia,” as Polowczyk puts it.

At the outset, HHS was the lead agency but, as a White House official notes, it is more of a policy than an implementing agency. The supply-chain effort would be moved to FEMA, which is routinely involved in execution. States are also used to dealing with it.

It wasn’t considered feasible to nationalize the entire supply chain under the Defense Production Act. We’d “have to figure out where every single piece of equipment is going to go, and where every single thing is going to be distributed,” a HHS official explains. “So the amount of information that you would need and the amount of judgment you would have to be making about where things were needed was going to be exceptionally high.”

Besides, the market players were hardly recalcitrant.  “Nobody needed coercion,” the White House official says. “Everyone was willing to step up and do what was right.”

The Defense Production Act has still come into play; it’s been invoked 14 times, according to Gaynor, for PPE and other equipment. “Our goal,” he says, “has always been to supplement not to supplant America’s PPE supply chain.”
This pointed to a cooperative arrangement with companies, using their existing operations, knowledge of the market, and real-time data, while at the same time redirecting supplies to hot spots — and doing it as quickly as possible.
 

The PPE Airlift

Project Airbridge was one result.

The impetus for the initiative was simple: Supplies we needed right away were in Asia, and it would take it them three weeks to get here via ship, the standard means of transport.

A senior administration official recalls everyone thinking at the time, “We’ve got all these things that have been procured by distributors, but they’re going by boat, and we need them today.”

The answer was flying them instead, cutting the transit time from more than 30 days to less than two.
FEMA worked with the top six medical distributors — Cardinal Health, Owens & Minor, Henry Schein, McKesson, Medline, and Concordance — covering about 90 percent of facilities in the country. It contracted with FedEx and UPS for the flights. “We made FedEx and UPS our Air Force,” says the White House official. FEMA didn’t actually purchase the materials, but allocated 50 percent of it to the places that needed it most (the other 50 percent fed facilities elsewhere, which still needed the gear for more routine work and to prepare for COVID-19).
The government-driven allocation was important. Distributors were feeling pressure to send stuff to their largest customers, which weren’t necessarily in the hardest-hit areas.

To get visibility into the supply chain, FEMA mustered the data of the companies. Polowczyk says FEMA fashioned “six disparate business systems into one visualization tool to make data-informed allocation decisions.” According to Polowczyk, FEMA can track material as it comes in from suppliers, what’s being held in inventory, and what’s being delivered, down to the county and the customer level.
FEMA also has its own metrics, drawing on FEMA, HHS, and CDC data streams, for where the PPE is needed most. It has concentrated the allocation on roughly the 100 hardest-hit counties.

Since March 29, there have been 139 Project Airbridge flights, bringing in a mountain of material.
A number of criticisms are lodged at the project. One is that the federal government is subsidizing the distributors by paying their transit costs. But another way of looking at it is the government got an enormous amount of PPE where it wanted it to go, without actually buying it — just paying to fly it here.

It’s also said that Project Airbridge should have used Department of Defense planes. “When you use a DOD plane, it’s super expensive and slow,” the senior administration official explains. “You generally don’t want to use military aircraft unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

A Washington Post story somewhat bizarrely, noted that many counties it contacted didn’t know whether they had received Project Airbridge supplies or not. But the material doesn’t come specially marked (this is a classic Catch-22 — if there were fanfare about Project Airbridge deliveries, the administration would surely be accused of politicizing the supply effort).

A critical NBC News story highlighted the example of DuPont. It noted how DuPont gets Tyvek material sewn together into body suits in Vietnam and how it takes months to ship it back and forth. The federal government agreed to pay for chartered flights to reduce the total transit time to about a week and a half. “For some government officials familiar with the supply-chain end of the coronavirus fight,” according to the report, “it was yet another example of Trump’s task force serving industry.”

But what was the alternative? To let desperately needed gowns take months to get here from Vietnam? To wait until DuPont relocated its entire supply chain in the United States, obviating any need to grapple with shipments to and from Asia?
If the government wasn’t going to nationalize the supply-chain — for understandable reasons — it wasn’t an alternative to let companies operate under standard procedures either.

The senior administration official considers the counterfactual of leaving the companies to fend for themselves. “What would have happened is you have these distributors that sourced all these supplies; they were theirs,” he says. “They all would’ve come over by boat, and it would have taken three weeks to get here, and then they would just be distributed to hospitals based on their customer relationships.”
The administration settled on a path between full nationalization, with the potential disruption that would have brought, and business as usual.

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
Meanwhile, hundreds of leads were coming into the government for PPE. They came in from all over the world, with prices 14 to 15 times higher than usual, and from brokers new to the medical supplies. Kushner had a team of people drawn from business — the volunteers — comb through them.

Sifting through the leads was a gargantuan task, given the sheer volume and how many were dubious. “There was a lot of messy stuff there — a lot,” says the senior administration official.

One main line of attack against the volunteers is that they were inexperienced. Obviously, they weren’t experts in government procurement. But, largely drawn from the world of consulting and investing, they had done relevant work performing due diligence on businesses.
 

The HHS officials says that it was “very similar to the work they were doing in the private sector,” comparable to kicking the tires on early-stage companies — “figuring which ones are legitimate, which ones have legitimate management teams, legitimate customers.”
It wasn’t as though the volunteers examined and adjudicated every lead on their own, either. They’d do the initial vet — asking, for instance, if the broker knew what manufacturing facility the material was coming from. If the answer was “no,” it was a sign that the broker wasn’t what he seemed.

If a lead passed muster, then it went through a series of hoops before anything happened.

Someone from the FDA would make sure that the product could be used in America. Someone from the State Department would check to see if it could be exported from the country that it was in. Then, using the existing network of distributors overseas, a site visit would take place to examine the materials and make sure they were as advertised.

Only after those four steps would the information be packaged together and sent over to FEMA for the final procurement decision.
“Without doing thorough vetting,” says the HHS official, “we would have ended up in a place that many other folks have ended up in, of purchasing low-quality goods, which I don’t think has really happened.”
Stories in the press routinely allege political favoritism. If a lead came in from, say, a member of Congress, he or she would be apprised of where it stood (if this hadn’t happened, the critique would have been that the administration wasn’t communicating). If any lead was ultimately forwarded on to FEMA, the volunteers would check on where it stood. But officials involved in the effort insist that every lead went through the same funnel and was evaluated the same way.

The New York Times says that Fox News personality Judge Jeanine Pirro made the case to get PPE for an unspecified hospital, and it indeed got supplies. If it was a New York City–area hospital, it’s hard to see how it wouldn’t be getting additional supplies regardless.

What no one has pointed to is any case where the volunteers and FEMA gave a contract to someone not genuinely suited to deliver quality product. Indeed, one of the administration’s most significant actions has involved forging a close relationship with the very opposite of a fly-by-night operator, the multinational conglomerate 3M.

From Shanghai to U.S. Hospitals

After a public spat with President Trump at the outset — culminating with the president invoking the Defense Production Act in early April to get 3M to make more respirators — 3M and the government have worked together to massively scale up the company’s production and import respirators here from overseas.

3M is the only significant domestic manufacturer of N95 respirators. It had relatively recent experience with what a pandemic does to a supply chain during the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. The company had surge manufacturing capacity that it turned on as the coronavirus crisis developed, maxing out at about 100 million N95 respirators per month in mid-February, double its usual global output.
Seeking to get more masks into the health sector, the company flipped its production entirely over to medical needs, whereas it usually produces for both medical and industrial users. Meanwhile, the FDA issued a so-called emergency use authorization to allow different types of respirators to be used in a hospital setting.

From early on, 3M embedded a contact with FEMA to facilitate the relationship and provide expertise on the masks.

Typically, 3M sells almost all its respirators produced in the U.S. to American distributors, and all of its respirators in China to Chinese distributors. The respirators in its Shanghai factory could have possibly become another source of supply to the U.S., but Beijing had been requisitioning all that production. 3M on its own got China to allow 10 million to be brought to the United States.

That was just a start. More ambitiously, as the White House official explains, “we signed a contract with them for those [Shanghai] masks, and then we went to the Chinese government and said, ‘We have a contract with the company.’”

This opened the spigots. The deal would secure 166.5 million respirators for the U.S. in the course of April, May, and June. “That’s more than anyone has sourced ever,” says the senior administration official.

The procedure is that FEMA takes custody of the material in China and becomes the importer of record, flying it back to the United States. Initially, it took the company and FEMA three hours over the phone to work out the finer points of the logistics of these flights. Now, it has become so routine that coordinating each flight takes more like 10 minutes.

According to FEMA administrator Gaynor, over last month 42 flights carrying nearly 44 million FEMA-procured masks and respirators from 3M have landed in the U.S.

Meanwhile, 3M has been ramping up domestic production even further, on the strength of orders from the federal government. 3M is slated to produce 50 million respirators in June, up from 22 million a month prior to the crisis. Then it will produce 74 million in July and 94 million a month by October 1
This is a signal contribution to what Admiral Polowczyk calls the “expansion” phase of the supply effort, enhancing the U.S. manufacturing capacity for the long haul.

Credit Where It’s Due?

There’s no doubt that some hospitals, especially public hospitals, lacked the gear they needed at the outset of the crisis, and even those that didn’t have shortages felt as though they were living on the edge.

Polowczyk says that he believes every place that needed PPE got it, although he had “the unenviable job of managing scarcity as we went through March into April and now May, where the volume of supplies has increased.”

He explains that during the worst period, “people, hospitals, point-of-care, were getting supplies on the numbers-of-days amounts instead of, ‘Hey, I want like a month, two months.’”  He says he can understand how this just-in-time allocation method “would make you feel uncomfortable,” adding that as supplies were focused on hot spots, “other areas of the country that did not have such significant COVID outbreaks certainly got less of an allocation and were fed as needed.”

How the administration worked through this and got to a better place would seem an interesting story, if the press weren’t too vehemently opposed to Trump to even consider occasionally giving some credit where it’s due.
 

Edited May 19, 2020 by SUZNV
space added