As of this moment there is only one highly effective measure that can be taken to combat the COVID-19 threat, and that is to test everyone, not just those with symptoms as we are doing now. Asymptomatic, but infected, individuals are spreading the virus as effectively as those with symptoms. The only thing that limiting testing to those with symptoms -- dry cough and fever of at least 100.4 deg -- does is prevent a small number of false positive diagnoses based on symptoms. To stop this virus everyone must be tested. The excuse is being made that we do not have enough certified lab capacity to carry out that many tests. That's right we don't. So one would think we would quickly ramp up capacity to do the RT-PCR needed, just as other countries have done. Instead the U.S. approach is to "shelter in place" to slow the spread of COVID to produce new infections at a rate compatible with hospital bed availability. We could stop this disease cold by Fall if we tested everyone. This is possible; yet we are going to stick with our insane piecemeal approach as though we were fifty, independent little countries. We have no real leadership from the top, and that is going to kill us. Hope alone, even with luck on our side, will not stop the virus. Since we have no vaccine and no effective drug as of yet, we should use the one effective weapon we have. We must test everyone; not just those with symptoms, as we are doing now. This was in Bloomberg today: Virus Pandemic Exercise Got One Thing Wrong: the U.S. Response By Nick Wadhams and Iain Marlow March 18, 2020, 1:35 PM CDT 2019 drill forecast a coronavirus killing 3% of those infected Trump pressed back on notion he didn’t take virus seriously Health care workers stand outside a drive-through testing facility in New Rochelle, New York, on March 13. Photographer: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg Last October, about 50 national security experts gathered in Washington to role-play a global response to a frightening scenario: a pandemic sparked by a mysterious new coronavirus ravages the world, hitting North Asia, Europe and the U.S. especially hard. The exercise got a lot right about the pandemic now sweeping the globe. It concerned a virus that’s “highly transmissible via direct person-to-person contact,” overwhelms available resources and kills more than 3% of those infected, roughly equivalent to the current rate, with a workable vaccine trial many months away. One thing it got badly wrong: Those involved -- a mix of professors, international-relations theorists, intelligence experts and others -- assumed the U.S. would lead the global response. Even after almost three years living under President Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine, few in the scenario predicted the U.S. would initially play down the threat, refuse for weeks to heed lessons learned by other nations struggling with the outbreak and treat institutions guiding the response -- like the World Health Organization -- with suspicion and scorn. “What’s happening now is much worse in the sense that the U.S. response has been even more ineffective than we would have assumed,” said Sam Brannen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program, who helped lead the exercise. “The president undercutting his own officials and his messaging -- I’m stunned by the scale of it.” What You Need to Know About the Coronavirus Pandemic: QuickTake The coronavirus pandemic is unlike any global crisis the modern world has seen, with millions of people going into isolation, millions more at risk of losing their jobs, stock markets posting the steepest declines in decades and health-care systems overwhelmed. The response is entirely different, too -- instead of cooperating from the start, an environment of mistrust and disinformation has seen some countries not only closing borders to each other but trading accusations over how others have handled the crisis. Trump has been criticized for downplaying the early warnings and treating outside advice with hostility until the virus got a foothold. What was also missing until recent days, according to experts, was a sense of a unified response by governments acting in concert to address a common threat. Trump speaks during a televised address in the Oval Office on March 11. Photographer: Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg Trump’s March 11 speech to the nation, in which he banned most travel from Europe, was a distillation of that: Rather than seeking to rally the world, he portrayed the U.S. as a victim of hostile outside forces, while his decision to impose the travel restrictions -- called for by many senior health experts -- was done without warning or regard for allies, who were caught blindsided. Where Are We in Quest for Coronavirus Drugs, Vaccine?: QuickTake “Usually, when we see a global crisis like this you would expect there to be more international cooperation, more collaboration,” said Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. “That kind of spirit of collaboration I found was shockingly lacking in the current Covid-19 outbreak.” The president’s approach stems in part from a distrust of multilateral institutions that’s seen Trump try to slash funding to the United Nations and its agencies. During this pandemic, his ire and distrust have also been directed at the WHO, which some administration officials regard as moving too slowly, even though it has consistently urged the U.S. to do more to fight the virus. After playing down the threat for weeks, Trump got serious this week. On Monday he advised Americans against gathering in groups of more than 10 people and said they should stop eating out at restaurants and going to bars. Travel restrictions along the U.S.-Canada border were coordinated with Ottawa, a sharp contrast with the move against Europe. Central banks around the world have stepped up their response as well, slashing rates, boosting purchases of government bonds and vowing to use all the power in their monetary arsenal to ameliorate the economic slowdown in an echo of the 2008 financial crisis. And the U.S. president’s tone has become far more sober, even as he’s disputed the notion that he didn’t take the outbreak seriously from the start. “It’s bad,” Trump said at a March 16 briefing. “We’re going to hopefully be a best case and not a worst case.”
Great article if you like to complain with no content. I am clearly no journalist but where were the guts of the article. Who, How what why where when. Why would testing everyone be superior to telling everyone to stay home. How would we test everyone at once? To be effective we would have to test them everyday for a few weeks at least? How many billions of tests would that be? How many test providers? How were we supposed to have these tests ready when the disease was new? Regarding U.S. leadership.. Trump led... shut down travel from China. Delayed the outbreak significantly compared to Italy and I am sure you whether you posted here or not and the rest of soros posting team and many democrat leaders called him a racist and a xenophone. So... you just did not like the way he led. . IMO, His major fault was playing it down in public in the beginning. He did not want the stock market to tank on his watch. Vanity got him and may cost him.
Please listen to Omar. She loves Trumps handling of the Corona Virus! https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...-response-to-coronavirus-pandemic/ar-BB11oy7x
I can only assume that she is trying to get Trump to intervene in the DOJ investigation of her immigration fraud.