Somewhere, Charlton Heston is damning us all to hell.
Donald the Fabulist keeps trying to drive the message that “nobody” could have foreseen this virus coming into our heads with a ball peen hammer. COVID-19 “came out of nowhere,” he insists. Getting enough people to repeat that lie makes it true in some circles.
Yet, Business Insider chronicles multiple times the acting president “ignored multiple warnings about the prospect of a devastating pandemic that would overwhelm the country’s healthcare system” and did little to address it. History will judge him harshly. Probably more harshly than American voters who placed a pathological liar with no experience in government in charge of the world’s most powerful one.
Donald J. Trump will have less-prominent company:
Weeks after governors in over three dozen states issued stay-at-home orders, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced shelter-in-place orders Wednesday. Georgia’s will not go into effect until Friday and last only until April 13.
Amidst what amounts to a pandemic-driven national economic shutdown, there is good news and bad news. First, the bad.
Bloomberg Business reports:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has requested 100,000 body bags, known as Human Remains Pouches, through an interagency group that directed it to the Defense Department. The Pentagon is looking into buying more bags and will draw some initially from a stockpile of 50,000 it maintains, according to two people familiar with the request.
The Defense Logistics Agency’s Troop Support unit that typical supplies the green “pouches” to war zones has not made a formal order, but is planning for projections that as many as 200,000 Americans could die during the pandemic.
And no, it is not true no one could have foreseen this crisis coming. Days before Trump took office, an Obama administration team led incoming staffers through a pandemic response scenario as part of a set of legally required transition exercises.
Furthermore, the Pentagon was also preparing to meet a pandemic threat. The Nation has obtained its 103-page long pandemic response plan updated weeks ahead of Trump’s inauguration:
Titled “USNORTHCOM Branch Plan 3560: Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Disease Response,” the draft plan is marked “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY” and dated January 6, 2017. The plan was provided to The Nation by a Pentagon official who requested anonymity to avoid professional reprisal.
Denis Kaufman, who served as head of the Infectious Diseases and Countermeasures Division at the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2014 to 2017, stressed that US intelligence had been well-aware of the dangers of coronaviruses for years. (Kaufman retired from his decades-long career in the military in December of 2017.)
“The Intelligence Community has warned about the threat from highly pathogenic influenza viruses for two decades at least. They have warned about Coronaviruses for at least five years,” Kaufman explained in an interview.
“There have been recent pronouncements that the coronavirus pandemic represents an intelligence failure…it’s letting people who ignored intelligence warnings off the hook.”
Those would include the acting president and his lackeys. Intentional blindness kills.
If there is good news, patients exposed to smaller doses of the virus get less-severe cases of the disease. “Not all exposures to the coronavirus may be the same,” Princeton professor of chemistry and genomics Joshua D. Rabinowitz and research fellow Caroline R. Bartman explain:
Virus experts know that viral dose affects illness severity. In the lab, mice receiving a low dose of virus clear it and recover, while the same virus at a higher dose kills them. Dose sensitivity has been observed for every common acute viral infection that has been studied in lab animals, including coronaviruses.
Humans also exhibit sensitivity to viral dose. Volunteers have allowed themselves to be exposed to low or high doses of relatively benign viruses causing colds or diarrhea. Those receiving the low doses have rarely developed visible signs of infection, while high doses have typically led to infections and more severe symptoms.
Walking through a corridor just occupied by an infected person is not as risky as sitting next to one on the train for an hour.
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson observes that the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projection of how many hospital beds would be needed in New York state on April 1 is much lower than the actual numbers on record.
The problem with projections is the actual numbers change by the hour. It may not look like good news for New York for very long and occupied beds are approaching the number available, whatever projections say. The virus killed over 1,000 Americans yesterday, “more than double that of two of America’s most deadly illnesses – lung cancer and the flu.”
Stay home and stay safe.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.