Does Trump Want Us All To Die? Why Else Would Have He Put Pence In Charge Of The Coronavirus Pandemic?

Trump wants to prove he was right all along by banning travel into the U.S. from Mexico (to prevent coronavirus). As I was writing this the U.S.-- the world's example of how not to deal with a pandemic-- has 72 confirmed cases (probably closer to 72,000) while Mexico has 4 confirmed cases.

A group of 11 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives led by Chip Roy of Texas sent a letter on Friday to top Trump administration officials that pressed for details on the plan to contain the coronavirus at the border with Mexico.

“Given the porous nature of our border, and the continued lack of operational control due to the influence of dangerous cartels, it is foreseeable, indeed predictable, that any outbreak in Central America or Mexico could cause a rush to our border,” the lawmakers said.

A group of three Republican senators led by Martha McSally, of Arizona, sent a similar letter on Friday to the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

...The discussions over possible border restrictions remain in the preliminary phase, but the DHS has considered increased screening of people from certain countries based on that country’s medical capacity and volume of travelers to the United States, according to one of the officials.

“The issue of it in our hemisphere is something we are exploring,” said one of the officials. “We are all a little worried now that Mexico has its first cases.”

Sharon Lerner, writing for The Intercept over the weekend reminded everyone that Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, admitted that "a vaccine for the coronavirus might not be affordable for all Americans. 'We can’t control that price,' Azar told Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) during a congressional hearing about the virus... Azar, who served as the top lobbyist for Eli Lilly before becoming president of the drug company’s U.S. operations in 2012 and the secretary of Health and Human Services in 2018, knows of what he unthinkingly speaks. Exorbitant drug pricing often leaves life-saving treatment out of reach for the poorest Americans. And to the extent that Azar and the other businessmen who make up the majority of the president’s task force on the coronavirus have any experience with pharmaceuticals, one of the most profitable sectors of the economy, it’s been making money off the system that keeps them out of reach." If I didn't know better, I'd say Azar was doing a campaign ad for Bernie and his Medicare-for-All proposal.

Last week, writing for ProPublica, Caroline Chen, Marshall Allen, Lexi Chirchill and Issac Arnsdorf reported on the flawed coronavirus test designed by the the CDC. They wrote that "As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test... 'We’re weeks behind because we had this problem,' said Scott Becker, chief executive officer of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents 100 state and local public laboratories. 'We’re usually up-front and center and ready.'"

The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.

As a result, until Wednesday the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration only allowed those state labs to use the test-- a decision with potentially significant consequences. The lack of a reliable test prevented local officials from taking a crucial first step in coping with a possible outbreak-- “surveillance testing” of hundreds of people in possible hotspots. Epidemiologists in other countries have used this sort of testing to track the spread of the disease before large numbers of people turn up at hospitals.

...The CDC announced on Feb. 14 that surveillance testing would begin in five key cities, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. That effort has not yet begun.

On Wednesday, under pressure from health experts and public officials, the CDC and the FDA told labs they no longer had to worry about the portion of the test intended “for the universal detection of SARS-like coronaviruses.” After three weeks of struggle, they could now use the test purely to check for the presence of COVID-19.

It remains unclear whether the CDC’s move on Wednesday will resolve all of the problems around the test. Some local labs have raised concerns about whether the CDC’s test is fully reliable for detecting COVID-19.

In New York, scientists at both the city’s and state’s laboratories have seen false positives even when following the CDC’s latest directions, according to a person familiar with their discussions.

“Testing for coronavirus is not available yet in New York City,” city Department of Health spokeswoman Stephanie Buhle said in an email late Thursday. “The kits that were sent to us have demonstrated performance issues and cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate result.”

Until the middle of this week, only the CDC and the six state labs-- in Illinois, Idaho, Tennessee, California, Nevada and Nebraska-- were testing patients for the virus, according to Peter Kyriacopoulos, APHL’s senior director of public policy. Now, as many more state and local labs are in the process of setting up the testing kits, this capacity is expected to increase rapidly.

So far, the United States has had only 15 confirmed cases, a dozen of them travel-related, according to the CDC. An additional 45 confirmed cases involve people returning to the U.S. having gotten sick abroad. But many public health experts and officials believe that without wider testing the true number of infected Americans remains hidden.

“The basic tenet of public health is to know the situation so you can deal with it appropriately,” said Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He noted that Guangdong, a province in China, conducted surveillance testing of 300,000 people in fever clinics to find about 420 positive cases. Overall, Guangdong has more than 1,000 confirmed cases. “If you don’t look, you won’t find cases,” he said.

Janet Hamilton, senior director of Policy and Science at Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, said that with the virus spreading through multiple countries, “now is the time” for widespread surveillance testing.

“The disease,” she said, “is moving faster than the data.”

It remains to be seen what effect the delay in producing a working test will have on the health of Americans. If the United States dodges the rapidly spreading outbreaks now seen in Iran and South Korea, the impact will be negligible. But if it emerges that the disease is already circulating undetected in communities across the country, health officials will have missed a valuable chance to lessen the harm.

The need to have testing capacity distributed across local health departments became even more apparent Wednesday, when the CDC said it was investigating a case in California in which the patient may be the first infected in the United States without traveling to affected areas or known exposure to someone with the illness.

Doctors at the University of California, Davis Medical Center, where the patient is being treated, said testing was delayed for nearly a week because the patient didn’t fit restrictive federal criteria, which limits tests only to symptomatic patients who recently traveled to China.

“Upon admission, our team asked public health officials if this case could be COVID-19,” UC Davis said in a statement. UC Davis officials said because neither the California Department of Public Health nor Sacramento County could test for the virus, they asked the CDC to do so. But, the officials said, “since the patient did not fit the existing CDC criteria for COVID-19, a test was not immediately administered.”

After this case, and under pressure from public officials, the CDC broadened its guidelines Thursday for identifying suspected patients to include people who had traveled to Iran, Italy, Japan or South Korea.

The debate over whether federal, state and local officials should have already been engaged in widespread surveillance testing has become more heated as the virus has spread globally. The CDC had said the purpose of its five-city surveillance program was to provide the U.S. with an “early warning signal” to help direct its response. The cities were selected based on the likelihood that infection would be present, Hamilton said.

But Mark Pandori, director of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory, which began offering testing on Feb.11, said surveillance testing may not be the best use of resources right now. “A lot of people look at lab tests like they are magic,” Pandori said. “But when you run lab tests, the more chances you have for getting false answers.”

Steve McIntosh is president of the Colorado-based Institute for Cultural Evolution think tank, which focuses on the cultural roots of America's political problems. A couple of weeks ago he wrote a piece for RealClearPolitics, Progressives Can Show Evangelicals They Don't Need Trump. It doesn't factor in what's headed in the direction of the hard core Trumpists who believe him when he says coronavirus is just a hoax and that he 's got it all under control. A quarter of the population identify as evangelicals. They are Trump's base and over 70% still support him! "The disparity between Christian morality and Trump’s evident lack of personal virtue," he wrote, "has led to charges of hypocrisy from the larger culture. Feeling the sting of these charges, the minority of evangelicals who oppose Trump are increasingly worried that populist evangelical support for the president will discredit Christianity’s 'moral witness' in American society. This growing division among evangelicals has recently been brought to a head by Christianity Today’s forceful call to remove President Trump from office. Progressive media coverage of this cultural divide within evangelicalism has focused primarily on what can be done to encourage the further liberalization of Christian culture. But an unexamined piece of this puzzle is how progressives themselves can evolve their own culture to reduce evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the Trump presidency. According to poll analysis by FiveThirtyEight, many evangelical Christians feel alienated from the Democratic Party because of its perceived hostility toward religion."

To defeat Trump in November, and defeat Trumpism once and for all, progressives would do well to acknowledge their cultural victory and make peace with their Christian fellow citizens. Yet to become cultural peacemakers, progressives don’t need to move toward the middle, soften their political demands, or otherwise compromise their values. On the contrary, liberals and progressives can reduce the sense of alienation that drives support for Trump by extending their own inclusive values to encompass evangelicals, who are experiencing their own cultural marginalization. It is important to recognize that evangelicals feel “unsafe” and have elected Trump to serve as their cultural bodyguard. And when hiring a bodyguard, one may be inclined to overlook his arrest record.

Even as they oppose the politics of the religious right, progressives can make common cause with the many enduring values that traditional Christian culture continues to contribute to our society. These values include decency, loyalty, modesty, patriotism, and respect for rightful authority. The traditional reverence for family life can also be carried forward by progressives within their more inclusive understanding of family.

By tempering their self-sabotaging hostility toward Christianity in this way, progressives can atone for their own unwitting complicity in the rise of Trumpism. And by doing their part to make America’s political discourse more civil, and even welcoming, for ideologically diverse groups, progressives can sway the evangelical vote at the margins, which might be enough to prevent Trump’s reelection in November.

...Although evangelical support for Trump does constitute moral hypocrisy, progressives evince their own hypocrisy when it comes to their stated values of diversity and inclusivity. Progressives are keen to demonstrate cultural sensitivity toward Islamic traditionalists, for instance, despite Islamic homophobia and contempt for liberal freedoms. If progressives showed a similar degree of cultural sensitivity toward Christian traditionalists, even while opposing them politically, this would help ameliorate the hyper-polarization that led to the rise of Trumpism. Progressives may have won the culture war, but unless they are gracious in their victory, their cultural success will continue to result in their political defeat.

When it comes to American democracy, we’re all in this together. By simply acknowledging that conservative Christians “have a right to be who they are,” progressives can persuade a politically significant number of evangelical voters that they don’t need a cultural bodyguard.