Comments by "wily wascal" (@wilywascal2024) on "Tapper: How many lives affected by Trump's 'false sense of security'" video.

  1. Atlanta and Vancouver residents cheering on healthcare workers from their apartment balconies amid the coronavirus crisis!
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  2. Contrary to Trump’s Claim, A Pandemic Was Widely Expected At a White House briefing March 19, President Donald Trump said, “Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion.” But that’s simply not the case. Among others, the U.S. intelligence community warned in its annual threat report for 2019 that “that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death.” [Also, U.S. Intelligence reports to White House contained five-alarm flashing warnings about covid-19 pandemic in January and February of 2020, when Trump and his administration were downplaying the threat.] The president made his remarks at a coronavirus task force press briefing. Trump deflected the blame when asked about the lack of coronavirus tests and medical supplies to deal with the pandemic. Trump, March 19:  "They had an obsolete system, and they had a system, simultaneously, that was not meant for this.  It wasn’t meant for this. Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion.  Nobody has ever seen anything like this before." But experts have warned for years about the danger of a major, potentially catastrophic outbreak of global disease, and some have sounded the alarm that the United States was not prepared to cope with it. “The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern,” Luciana Borio, then-director of Medical and Biodefense Preparedness Policy at the National Security Council, said at a symposium at Emory University in Atlanta in 2018 marking the 100th anniversary of the devastating flu outbreak  of 1918. “Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.” Jennifer Horney, professor and founding director of the epidemiology program at the University of Delaware, told CNN, “we’ve been planning for and anticipating a global event like this” at least since the 2005 avian influenza outbreak. After the novel coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China, last December and spread around the world, Trump consistently sought to downplay the danger to the United States, likening coronavirus to the flu and expressing confidence that it could go away once the weather warmed up. (See our story, “Trump’s Statements About the Coronavirus.”) Only recently has the president begun referring to it as a major problem for the U.S. “This is a pandemic,” he said at a March 17 press conference. “I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiology professor at Harvard University, told us that there was plenty of evidence that a disease of this kind posed a serious threat and that the notion that it could not be foreseen is off base. “Three years ago, experts were saying that bat coronaviruses could become a new pandemic,” he said in an email. “Almost two months ago, experts were saying that the new virus in Wuhan was potentially a global threat. One month ago, experts were saying that it was likely to be pandemic, and the White House’s response was that this was under control, despite the fact that the US’s lack of testing was demonstrably giving a false picture of the extent of infection. This was foreseeable, and foreseen, weeks and months ago, and only now is the White House coming out of denial and heading straight into saying it could not have been foreseen.” The likelihood of a pandemic has been clear to experts for quite some time. Back in 2012, the RAND Corp. issued a report called “Threats Without Threateners? Exploring Intersections of Threats to the Global Commons and National Security.” That report focused on five risks — nuclear proliferation, conflict in the Middle East, water scarcity, pandemics and climate change. Of the five, it said, “In current circumstances, only pandemics seem to be an existential threat, capable of destroying America’s way of life.” The report said that “a future pandemic may be virtually certain,” adding, “its timing and severity are not.” To underscore the need to focus on the subject right away, the document said, “Pandemics are a real possibility in the here and now; there is nothing future about them.” A week before the Trump administration took office in January 2017, Obama administration officials focused on the dangers of a pandemic in a briefing for top Trump aides, according to Politico. One of the possible scenarios sketched out included a fast-spreading global disease leading some countries to impose travel bans. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck/contrary-to-trump-s-claim-a-pandemic-was-widely-expected-at-some-point/ar-BB11tTHl?pfr=1
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  3. Trump needs governors to reopen the economy. Even Republican ones aren’t on board. Aaron Blake -- Washington Post -- 03/25/20 Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) caused a stir Monday night by going on Fox News and suggesting older people like him needed to “take a chance” with their lives in the name of reopening the economy during the coronavirus outbreak. The man in charge of making that decision in Texas, though, has a very different take. As he confronts imposing even stricter measures for the Lone Star State, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) responded Tuesday to a question about Patrick’s comments. “I will base my decision as governor of the state of Texas on what physicians say,” Abbott said. “If the goal is to get the economy going, the best thing we can do to get the economy going is to get covid-19 behind us.” President Trump has leaned hard into the idea of reopening the economy in recent days, but as has been noted, he only has so much power to do so. It’s the governors who issue stay-at-home orders and decide what opens and what doesn’t in their states. Few of them are echoing Trump right now, which suggests that even if Trump decides he wants to reopen things — on Tuesday, he set a target date of Easter, April 12 — he won’t be able to do it in any large measure. Another Republican governor, Maryland’s Larry Hogan, had some choice words for Trump’s idea on Tuesday, referring to an “imaginary clock.” “We don’t think that we’re going to be in any way ready to be out of this in five or six days, or whenever this 15 days is up from the time that they started this imaginary clock,” Hogan said on CNN. “Most people think that we’re weeks away from the peak, if not months.” South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), whose state matches the description of less-affected areas that Trump has suggested could see reopenings in relatively short order, also indicated that she’s looking at a longer time frame. “This situation is not going to be over in a week,” said Noem, whose state has just over two dozen cases. “… We have another eight weeks until we see our peak infection rate.” She added, “Any changes we make for how we conduct our daily lives have to be sustained.” Democrats had even more choice words for Trump’s proposal, with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker saying Trump was “not taking into account the true damage that this will do to our country if we see truly millions of people die.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Trump’s “off-the-cuff statements are really going to undermine our ability to protect people.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he and Trump are “clearly operating under a different set of assumptions.” New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said: “If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest. No American is going to say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life. Job one has to be save lives. That has to be the priority.” But plenty of Republicans also made their differences rather clear. “The truth is that protecting people and protecting the economy is not mutually exclusive,” said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R). “In fact, one depends upon the other. The fact is we save our economy by first saving lives, and we have to do it in that order.” DeWine added, “When people are dying, when people don’t feel safe, this economy is not coming back.” DeWine, though, maintained that he was generally “aligned” with Trump on coronavirus, and he wasn’t the only one declining to completely distance himself from the president. Democratic Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said she felt she understood Trump’s inclination. “I am not interested in unnecessarily closing down businesses and taking jobs if we don’t need to do that,” said Brown, who issued tough restrictions on Monday. “The goal of my executive order was to balance those competing demands. … While I don’t agree with what the president said and how he said it, I think that’s what he was trying to say.” Brown added: “When I was on the phone with him earlier this week, he clearly said that these difficult decisions are in the hands of governors. So I would expect that it to stay that way.” That’s the key takeaway. However much Trump wants to reopen the country, he’ll need governors to cooperate with that. The governors listed above represent five of the seven biggest states and more than 40 percent of the U.S. population, and they’re just the ones who have weighed in so far. Most of the other biggest states are also run by Democrats, who wouldn’t be as inclined to align themselves with Trump on a controversial proposal. As president, Trump can change the federal guidance, but it’s just that: guidance. Experts say he doesn’t have many legal tools to override the precautions taken by state and local officials. These governors also have to deal with problems on a more micro level and are more directly held responsible for what happens in their states. Any of them who would begin opening things up would put themselves in line for whatever criticism might follow from the fallout, and it would be much easier to readily quantify the effects of those decisions in their states — particularly if they can be compared with other states that took tougher stances. If Trump truly wants to set the ball in motion on this, he’s got about 50 people he should be talking to about it. Right now, they seem pretty skeptical. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-needs-governors-to-reopen-the-economy-even-republican-ones-aren-t-on-board/ar-BB11GF6z
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  4. Fact checking Trump's claim of 'suicide by the thousands' if shutdown continues ABC News -- 03/25/20 As some in President Donald Trump's inner circle push for loosening social distancing guidelines amid economic fallout from the novel coronavirus outbreak, he has predicted "tremendous death" and "suicide by the thousands" if the country isn't "opened for business" in a matter of weeks. While public health officials warn that dropping social guidelines to boost the economy could quickly overload hospital systems, costing more money and more lives, the president has claimed several times this week that the number of suicides specifically would "definitely" be greater than the death toll from the virus itself as he pointed to people returning to work as a remedy. "You're going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression." Trump said Tuesday in a Fox News town hall. "You're going to lose people. You're going to have suicides by the thousands." One night before, at a coronavirus task force briefing, the president said, "I'm talking about where people suffer massive depression, where people commit suicide, where tremendous death happens… I mean, definitely would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we're talking about with regard to the virus." A scientific report released March 16 by an epidemic modeling group at Imperial College London, found that without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of COVID-19, 2.2 million people in the U.S. could die -- not accounting for the negative effects of health care systems being overwhelmed. There's no way to predict the exact impact of an unprecedented pandemic, but experts also say that there's no evidence to suggest that the suicide rate will rise dramatically due to social distancing measures or that the death toll would surpass potential coronavirus deaths. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide mortalities have gone up every year since 1999, but it's still "selective" for the president to latch onto that, says Richard Dunn, associate professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of Connecticut who has studied the connection between markets and depression. "The general fact that President Trump cited is, in fact, true that when economies contract suicides do go up," Dunn said, acknowledging how the financial crisis of the early 2000s triggered more suicides, "but that is not the only cause of death that responds to economic downturn." "If you were to look across all the current causes of death in a recession, you would see that the number of deaths actually declines. Heart deaths from heart disease fall. Deaths from motor vehicle accidents crashes fall," Dunn added. "One of the few activities that we have left to us in many parts of the country is to go out for a walk, so physical activity tends to go up." "So we actually see overall that there are fewer deaths in economic downturn -- but suicide is the one major cause of death that does not follow that pattern," Dunn said. While the global reported death toll for COVID-19 is nearly 20,000 people at this time, the CDC reports that 47,173 Americans died by suicide in 2017 alone and the number is on track to grow in coming years -- but experts still caution pairing the mortality rate to that of the current pandemic. Timothy Classen, an associate professor of economics and dean at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University, notes that in the years since the Great Recession, unemployment numbers have recovered from roughly 10% to 4% -- yet suicides mortalities have continued to increase. "That contradicts the notion that as unemployment increases, that's going to increase suicide rates," Classen said. [See also: Record number of US police officers died by suicide in 2019] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/record-number-us-police-officers-died-suicide-2019/story?id=68031484 Classen also notes that while "of course" one individual's suicide has consequences to others, it does not transmit itself like a virus, adding to the difficulty in predicting either death toll, albeit comparing them through sound science. When it comes to next steps, former Trump administration homeland security adviser -- and now ABC News Contributor -- Tom Bossert cautions that allowing the disease to spread without making an effort to mitigate would still take a "devastating" toll on the country. "I think everybody shares his [President Trump's] frustration and his hope -- but what he needs to do is avoid second waves and reinfections," Bossert said. "At this stage we've paid a very heavy cost in our economy and in our lives. To lose the benefit of it at this point by not sticking to our guns would be a really devastating decision." https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/fact-checking-trump-s-claim-of-suicide-by-the-thousands-if-shutdown-continues/ar-BB11HLFi
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  5. One third of humanity under virus lockdown AFP -- 03/25/20 More than one billion Indians went into lockdown Wednesday, leaving a third of the planet now under orders to stay at home, as the United States vowed to spend $2 trillion to counter the economic harm of the coronavirus. Europe remains at the heart of the epidemic, with first Italy and now Spain's death toll overtaking that of China, while Britain's Prince Charles became the latest prominent figure to test positive for the COVID-19 disease. Coronavirus cases are also spreading in the Middle East, where Iran's death toll topped 2,000 on Wednesday, and in Africa, where Mali joined all seven of its neighbours in declaring its first cases -- two nationals who arrived home recently from France. Government policies and the capacity for virus testing vary widely around the world, so the true extent of the pandemic is difficult to estimate, but more than 404,000 cases have been declared in 175 countries and territories since the epidemic first emerged in China in December. What is in less doubt is the number of deaths, with more than 19,000 attributed to the new coronavirus strain since the outbreak began. India ordered its 1.3 billion people -- the world's second-biggest population -- to stay at home for three weeks. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "total lockdown" call doubled the number of people around the globe under some form of movement restriction to more than 2.6 billion people. "To save India, to save its every citizen, you, your family... every street, every neighbourhood is being put under lockdown," Modi said in a televised address. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/one-third-of-humanity-under-virus-lockdown/ar-BB11Fk7V
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