–As Expected, Easter Reopen Forgotten; Stay-at-Home Guide To Apr 30
–Confirmation That Worst-Case Virus Scenario Sees 2.2 Million US Fatalities
–US Virus Cases 142,004; Fatalities 2,484
By Denny Gulino
WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The worsening of the virus spread and intensity is a treacherous path that is finally heading toward an intersection with a more promising U.S. response Sunday, very late but finally getting underway.
Not that the next two weeks and maybe longer won’t be very grim. A chastened President Trump told his Sunday night briefing audience that after hearing that U.S. virus fatalities could be as numerous as 2.2 million he took the advice of his medical professional advisers. He’s extending stay-at-home guidance until April 30. The best-case level is now 100,000 fatalities or more.
“Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won” Trump said.
No more Easter reopening. No more blithely dismissive remarks about the severity of the outbreak. President Trump told of seeing that video of big refrigerator trucks full of body bags at Elmhurst Hospital Center, near the Queens neighborhood where he grew up. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
Governors who took time to comment Saturday and Sunday told interviewers they were not likely to relax their own stay-at-home orders regardless of what Trump chose to do.
On the positive news side, an explosion of testing with far faster turnaround times is now about to happen around the country. Particularly promising is the “five-minute” test by Abbott Labs previously described by the Corona Virus Task Force’s response coordinator, Deborah Birx and cited by the president Sunday night.
The long-delayed test expansion phase finally is beginning to provide a way to get an accurate ratio of asymptomatic to symptomatic virus victims. At last, instead of just reacting to virus spread by unwitting carriers, the spread can more and more be discovered not weeks too late, but just days after infection. Further spread can be neutralized through isolation. At least that’s the plan.
While the virus medical response is growing, the human response has provided thousands of examples of people reaching out in concrete ways to one another, creating inspiring videos and initiatives, delivering food, organizing socially-distanced morale building in an epic outpouring of caring.
The economic response, based on the measures that worked in the financial crisis in 2008-09, is light years ahead of the medical response. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin keeps insisting he’ll have money in bank accounts in three weeks.
President Trump said that if state unemployment offices aren’t up to the task of distributing the generous four months of $15-an-hour benefit checks, plus $600 over the former salary, he’ll have the federal government take over. Phase 1, 2 and 3 benefits of one kind or another will cover 176 million Americans.
Promised progress on many fronts didn’t change the picture of advancing peril, in the view of former Trump FDA Commissioner Scott Gottleib on CNN, for Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Philadelphia, Colorado’s ski country and other areas. They are bracing to follow New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and New Orleans to earn the title no one wants, of being an “epicenter.” They will, he said, be following New York to that other uncomfortable status, the “apex.” They all hope to avoid Italy’s apex.
As the government’s preeminent virus specialist has said over and over, the virus, not the humans, sets the timeline.
The NIH’s Tony Fauci also said something Sunday that seemed to strip away all assertions that it’s all going to all right any time soon. That was many hours before President Trump said Americans in non-essential jobs should continue staying at home out of the workplace for another month.
In a quote that bounced around in so many Twitter and Instagram accounts, Fauci had told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Looking at what we’re seeing now, I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 cases. But I don’t want to be held to that – excuse me, deaths. I mean, we’re going to have millions of cases.”
President Trump, Fauci and Birx confirmed those numbers in the briefing. Fauci again cautioned that models are based on assumptions which could prove to be wrong, for better or worse.
The scientist should “not ignore models,” Fauci said, “but say look at the data as it’s evolving and do everything you possibly can to mitigate that instead of getting overly anxious about the extremes.”
Trump still avoided declaring a formal national stay-at-home order nor did he mention a national supply allocation strategy, two presidential moves many private experts say remain long overdue.
Nitpickers might quarrel with Trump’s Sunday night comments that enraged the medical establishment by implying some hospitals are stealing masks, something “worse than hoarding.” In the process he attacked two reporters for even asking about his past comments. Last week he questioned, in a Fox network interview, whether New York is exaggerating the need for ventilators.
Trump said “something’s going on” when a hospital that prior to the outbreak was using up to 20,000 masks suddenly needed 300,000. He wondered if they were going out “the back door.” Nurses and doctors have to use so many masks because the absence of enough testing so far forces them to treat every patient as a potential virus victim. That means every procedure and room visit means discarding the old protective gear.
In the big picture, however, the briefing showed a different president, clearly shaken by the worst-case scenarios. It showed a vast national response mechanism finally getting organized to supply enough medical gear to where it’s needed and to soon be ramping up tests in numbers much closer to adequate.
Talking about the Elmhurst Hospital Center video produced by a nurse, a hospital he said he knows so well from his childhood, Trump suggested the scene there made a deep impression.
“When I see the trucks pull up to take out bodies,” Trump said, “and these are trucks that are as long as the Rose Garden and they’re pulling up to take out bodies and you look inside and you see the black body bags. You say, what’s in there? It’s Elmhurst hospital, must be supplies. It’s not supplies, it’s people.”
As important as more testing are the testing results. Not only those results collected by publicly funded state and university laboratories but also by the commercial labs now have to be reported to the Corona Virus Task Force. That’s a crucially important new breakthrough requirement thanks to a directive included in the Phase 3 congressional package just signed into law, as recounted in Friday’s Washington Watch. It could by itself make a big difference.
Together, increased testing and reporting, combined with a new wave of Public Health Service contact tracing to locate the carriers who are as yet exhibiting no symptoms, has reset the federal effort, now in a sense, only at Day 3 – since the $2 trillion Phase 3 that contains much more than money became law.
The turnaround to an aggressively implemented national response still has a long way to go, but now a lot of those steps are just days away, not many weeks. Some hospitals still see diminishing supplies. Many who need testing can’t get it. Still, now there’s a chance the medical system – and the White House – can start to catch up.
President Trump, as has been noted many times, can be persuaded not to follow his instincts, which in some eyes is a virtue, to others, a disability. Whichever, “intense discussions” took place Saturday afternoon in the White House that persuaded him that another idea – a federally enforced no-travel zone to include New York City, parts of New Jersey and Connecticut – would cause more problems than it might help solve.
Asked in the briefing if he was just trying to frighten New Yorkers Trump said no, that it seemed a good idea when he first mentioned it as a possibility Saturday in a tweet and in several sets of comments through his appearance at Naval Station Norfolk to see the USNS Comfort hospital ship leave for New York.
Late Saturday, another tweet took it back off the table. Instead the Centers for Disease Control issued a non-mandatory advisory against travel to areas with less virus reported than the tri-state.
In the old-news category, how many experts does it take to make the point the U.S. was too late with containment, and so now mitigation is the only defense for the current epicenters? As N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saturday, “We’ve been behind on this virus since Day One.”
Cuomo is a Democrat, snarled some social media posters. Fauci, they said on twitter accounts, is part of the “deep state” which wants to damage President Trump’s prospects. Having become addicted to attacking the libs, or fighting those who are fighting the so-called liberal elite, it is hard to break the habit even if someone were so inclined.
Until, that is, something very new happens. The nation is seeing Trump-loving health care workers side by side with Trump-hating health-care workers, risking their lives to save others. Nurses and doctors, thousands of them now volunteers, are not subjecting each other to ideological screening. They have more important things to do.
To see Trump preoccupied with bashing the “lamestream” media and touting the high ratings for his virus briefing with seven tweets in 50 minutes at one point Sunday morning, or to see him proclaim the U.S. will not pay for Harry and Meghan’s security in Los Angeles shortly after is to confirm for many people that his priorities are still not aligned with the dire circumstance.
Yet for many others, his performance Sunday night was convincingly focused. Overall in their eyes he has been the kind of crockery smashing chief executive that at some level they believe is exactly what the country needs to escape stifling ossification. Some deeply hope his anti-abortion stance is God-given. Others think his pro-military stance is the bottom line.
Whatever, whether this administration reacted quickly and effectively enough to the virus, whether its performance was the worst of any possible administration, or whether it fumbled just as any other administration might have is unknowable. In the face of a marauding virus, the controversy seems to be beginning to wear a little thin, perhaps beginning to seem to many largely irrelevant.
That’s the new meme bubbling up from the attack and counterattack, the confusion, the blaming and the fear all of which pale compared to what’s become the main point, to survive.
No one need worry that history’s backward record someday will fail to note the plusses and minuses of past performance. N.Y. Gov. Cuomo amplified the whispering new theme Sunday as he quoted FDR during the Great Depression. “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.”
Cuomo could have added another relevant FDR quote: “Let us not be afraid to help each other- let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.”
There’s another emerging meme that is in an ever broader context. Is it any surprise, it suggests, that an American culture inured to massive debt, accustomed to decades of consuming more than the economy produces, indifferent to years of sputtering labor and capital productivity that is the key to prosperity, can take a while to push a president to come to grips with an immediate urgent emergency?
That was then, the old apathy and indifference era. The “now” is scary death tolls getting ever worse and everyone paying close attention as if their life depended on it. As the Daily Mail noted, someone who lives in the New York area dies of the virus every nine minutes.
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Contact this reporter: denny@macenews.com