Transisition Delays Will Hurt the Country, Especially Regarding the Pandemic

[homersapien 11,393]

1 hour ago, Grumps said:

So the point of this thread is that if anything bad happens with COVID after Biden takes office then it's all Trump's fault. Shocker!

 

Well, Trump is still POTUS at the moment and here is where we are:

 

More than 3 million people in U.S. estimated to be contagious with the coronavirus

By

Joel Achenbach

November 18, 2020 at 8:36 a.m. EST

The vast — and rapidly growing — pool of coronavirus-infected people poses a daunting challenge to governors and mayors in hard-hit communities who are trying to arrest the surge in cases. Traditional efforts such as testing, isolation of the sick and contact tracing can be overwhelmed when a virus spreads at an exponential rate, especially when large numbers of asymptomatic people may be walking around without even knowing they are infectious.

To put the 3 million-plus figure in perspective: It is close to 1 percent of the population. It is about equal to the number of public school teachers in the entire country, or the number of truck drivers. If the University of Michigan’s football stadium were packed with a random selection of Americans, about a thousand of them would be contagious right now.

Columbia University epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman said his team’s model estimated that 3.6 million people are infected and shedding enough virus to infect others. That’s a 34 percent week-to-week increase that followed a 36 percent increase in the previous seven-day average, he said.

The estimate does not include an approximately equal number of latent infections among people who caught the virus in recent days and can’t pass it on yet because it is still incubating.

“It’s bad; it’s really, really bad,” Shaman said. “We’re running into Thanksgiving now and that’s only going to make it worse. We’re going to go through a lot of people being infected between now and the end of the year, unfortunately.”

Separately, modelers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated Tuesday that approximately 3.2 million people have been infected just since Election Day, Nov. 3, a figure significantly larger than the approximately 1.95 million official cases tracked over the same period by The Washington Post through reports from state health departments.

The IHME model forecasts continued daily increases for a month and a half, estimating that 245,000 people would become newly infected on Tuesday alone.

“When do you want to hit the brakes? That’s the question,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at IHME who is among many scientists and doctors urging action by the government and general public to reverse the trend lines. “When you have a fire, you send the firetruck. You don’t wait and say, ‘Okay, let me wait a little bit, maybe that fire isn’t going to spread that much’ … We already moved into exponential growth. Just hit the brakes as soon as you can.”

This fall wave of infections and hospitalizations is different in several ways from the one last spring. The outbreaks are widespread now, with 49 states showing rising coronavirus hospitalizations, in contrast to the spring’s concentration of cases in the Northeast and a few large cities. Doctors are better at treating severe cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and so it is less likely to be fatal.

But the biggest difference is that this fall wave is still swelling, and is probably many weeks from cresting. This pandemic is following the seasonal pattern of the 1918 influenza pandemic, the worst such plague in U.S. history, in which the autumn wave was worse than the first one in the spring of that year. Even after more than 11 million confirmed infections since early in the year, more than 8 in 10 people in the United States remain susceptible to the coronavirus, experts estimate.

The non-tested cohort includes people who have no symptoms, but will in coming days. It also includes people who will never develop symptoms. And it includes people who have symptoms but don’t want to deal with the consequences of a positive test, such as being forced to miss work or become isolated from their social network.

What happens next depends on public awareness of the reality of the emergency and the willingness of state and local officials to respond in a manner commensurate with the crisis while also acceptable to people suffering from pandemic fatigue.

Despite lower mortality rates, the dramatic rise in infections that began in September has seen a delayed echo in the rise of the death toll. More than a thousand people are dying daily on average, and the country is nearing 250,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

Although the surge of infections this fall has in some measure been due to colder weather and people congregating indoors, it has also been because of human behavior — specifically, the willingness of millions of people in the United States to ignore public health guidelines on facial coverings and social distancing. What is happening across the country is not inevitable, experts say.

Local and state leaders know they have to act, and those actions will be unpopular with many people. There is little appetite for severe shutdowns and closures, but the current trends in infections and hospitalizations suggest that incremental measures may simply be too little too late.

The fall surge also is happening in a transition period in which there is no clear national leadership on how to respond.

President Trump, who refuses to concede that he lost the election, remains the point man for a largely hands-off approach to the contagion. Trump has embraced the view of his adviser Scott Atlas, a radiologist, that it is better to focus on protections for highly vulnerable people and otherwise allow the virus to spread among the rest of the population to hasten herd immunity.

The nation’s leading infectious-disease experts say that strategy will lead to many tens of thousands of avoidable deaths because it is impossible to separate the most vulnerable from the rest of society.

“This nonsense of herd immunity means we give up,” Mokdad said. “It’s unethical. It means we let people die. That’s not acceptable.”

On Sunday, Atlas took to Twitter to urge residents in Michigan to “rise up” against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s new restrictions designed to control the contagion. Many Trump supporters have also bought into his argument that the pandemic has been exaggerated by the news media and scientists as a way of hurting his reelection chances.

Before the election, Trump predicted that news coverage of the pandemic would end on Nov. 4. The opposite has been true — the pandemic remains on the front pages of newspapers and leads the nightly news broadcasts. But the cultural divide remains, with the wearing or non-wearing of masks seen as a political identifier.

The current strategy in many states — patchwork restrictions, combined with widespread public disregard of public health guidelines — portends a brutal winter for the country in which hospitals could be strained to their limits or beyond, something that is already happening in the Dakotas and other communities of the Upper Midwest and Great Plains, as well as El Paso.

“We’re getting the herd immunity strategy whether we want it or not,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine. “We have a totally out- of-control epidemic and we are taking baby steps.”

The only period comparable to the current one in terms of the size of the infected cohort was in late March and early April. Tests were hard to come by early in the pandemic. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimated that the number of infected people was 10 times the official count.

Now the multiplier is surely lower — the model developed by Columbia University researchers uses 5.5. By that measure, as many as 10 million people in the United States have been infected in the past two weeks.

Researchers at IHME estimate the number of daily new infections by working backward from the known numbers of deaths. The institute relies on an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.6 percent across all populations, Mokdad said.

These are models, and they rely on a series of assumptions about a virus for which much remains unknown — including how long, exactly, a person who is infected will remain contagious.

But the big picture is clear.

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” Shaman said.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/covid-3-milliion-plus-infected/2020/11/18/d9f079a8-2849-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html

 

And to my point in the OP,   Trump is hindering the transition, which will impede Biden's plan to respond.

[homersapien 11,393]

Another accelerant could fan COVID-19 surge: Donald Trump

The actions — or inaction — of the lame duck president may further the spread of the pandemic

By Mark Kreidler

November 18, 2020

If you were to choose a single word to describe the effect of Donald Trump's presidency on the state of health care in America, that word might be "devastating." From undermining faith in established experts and best practices to his failure to follow even basic protocols amid a global pandemic, Trump has led a freewheeling attack on medical science. It could take years to undo some of the worst effects.

Still, Trump's term in office ends on Jan. 20, 2021. How much more damage can he really do?

"That's a great question – one I worry about myself," said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who heads the COVID-19 response unit at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center emergency department. "Hopefully there are not several more landmines that will explode between now and January."

That sense of worry consistently emerges in interviews and email exchanges with medical, science and policy experts. Here are some of the concerns over ways Trump could still affect health care in the U.S. before his administration's run comes to an end.

Distribution of a vaccine. On November 12 President-elect Joe Biden's incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, told MSNBC that Trump's ongoing refusal to acknowledge the election results may hamper the new Biden administration's ability to hit the ground running with a national vaccination plan in January.

The New York Times reported that Biden advisers know very little about Warp Speed, the Trump administration's program to get a vaccine distributed to Americans once it's approved. Under a normal presidential transition of power, Biden staffers would have access to details and documents about such programs.

"Right now – right now – there are officials inside the Department of Health and Human Services who are busy planning a vaccination campaign for the months of February and March, when Joe Biden will be president," said Klain. "The sooner we can get our transition experts into the meetings with the folks who are planning the vaccination campaign, the more seamless the transition."

Administrative havoc. Trump toyed publicly with the idea of firing Dr. Anthony Fauci, perhaps the most trusted voice on COVID-19 messaging, before the election. If he decides to follow through, even just for spite, it could prompt a massive rift at the National Institutes of Health during a period in which U.S. infection rates have soared to all-time highs.

Technically, Trump can't fire Fauci, so he'd have to get the director of the NIH, Francis Collins, to do it. Collins has said several times that he will neither fire nor demote Fauci, whose constantly sought advice on mask wearing and social distancing irritates the safety defiant Trump. To get to Fauci, Trump might first have to fire Collins and install a puppet interim director, which would throw the institutes into open chaos at a time when a coordinated national policy is desperately needed.

It's also possible that Food and Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn's days are numbered, again without an obvious successor. The Washington Post reported that the White House was upset with Hahn for allowing FDA staff-written guidance on vaccine policy to go forward; the guidance, which included a careful timetable for vaccine approval, made it all but impossible for a COVID vaccine to be approved by Election Day.

Ongoing equipment shortages. As the country attempts to manage the massive spike in virus cases, its health providers in some areas once again find themselves on the brink of crisis when it comes to having sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) for their doctors, nurses and patients. Trump, unfortunately, retains the capacity to inflame that crisis.

"U.S. and global demand for PPE continues to far exceed supply for the entire industry," a spokesperson for 3M Company told CBS. The company is the leading manufacturer of the N95 masks that are preferred at most hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and the like.

In such emergencies, state and local health officials often look to the government for relief. But according to the New York Times, the Trump administration's Strategic National Stockpile has amassed only 115 million N95 masks — far short of the 300 million officials had said they planned to place in reserve. And Trump, by all accounts, will continue to refuse to invoke the Defense Protection Act to ramp up production.

COVID money for private schools. Politico reported that among the 15 or so moves Trump might make via executive order before leaving office, one would seek to allocate COVID-19 school relief money directly to parents, a sort of end-around the CARES Act that would allow the money ultimately to flow to private schools instead of the public school systems for which it was intended.

It's a stunt that Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos, already has attempted several times, to no avail. Most recently, a federal court judge blocked private schools from accessing the $13 billion set aside for K-12 education in the CARES Act and nullified rules DeVos had tried to impose to facilitate that access.

The ruling said that the COVID school money included in the relief package was clearly and unambiguously meant to be disbursed with a focus on low income students. DeVos had tried to steer it to private and parochial schools on the basis of their total populations instead.

Even if Trump signs an executive order, it's not clear how much weight it would carry. Traditionally, E.O.s are seen as more symbolic than legally binding. Still, undoing it would be a time-consuming task for Joe Biden and his staff, and it couldn't happen until Jan. 20 at the earliest.

Dangerous COVID-19 messaging. Although Trump will only be in office about nine weeks longer, they could be disastrous weeks for the country with regard to the virus, in part because he will continue to refuse to observe social distancing or wear a mask – or urge others to do so.

"Mask wearing is as effective as a vaccine, statistically speaking," said Dr. Noble. "If people would wear them universally, that brings a reduction in transmission of around 70% to 80%, which is on par with a really effective vaccine. It's sad, because that has been at our disposal – and we've been encouraging mask use since March."

But despite his own White House being all but on fire with infection, Trump continues to demur. "He can't back off now," said a New York-based physician. "He's put too much into that to back off."

Refusal to transfer power. Well beyond being a self-serving publicity stunt, Trump's continued intransigence means that Biden cannot access vital government agencies, officials and information. That includes everything the White House is doing – and not doing – to contain the pandemic or address any of the other health issues facing Americans.

While that process plays itself out, physicians around the country go about their jobs – but they also know that time is wasting. "This is just going to make it that much more difficult [for Biden's health administration] to get up and running," said Dr. Jorge Nieva, of the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine. "It's just very unfortunate."

 

https://www.salon.com/2020/11/18/another-accelerant-could-fan-covid-19-surge-donald-trump_partner/

[Grumps 3,704]

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

Well, Trump is still POTUS at the moment and here is where we are:

 

More than 3 million people in U.S. estimated to be contagious with the coronavirus

By

Joel Achenbach

November 18, 2020 at 8:36 a.m. EST

The vast — and rapidly growing — pool of coronavirus-infected people poses a daunting challenge to governors and mayors in hard-hit communities who are trying to arrest the surge in cases. Traditional efforts such as testing, isolation of the sick and contact tracing can be overwhelmed when a virus spreads at an exponential rate, especially when large numbers of asymptomatic people may be walking around without even knowing they are infectious.

To put the 3 million-plus figure in perspective: It is close to 1 percent of the population. It is about equal to the number of public school teachers in the entire country, or the number of truck drivers. If the University of Michigan’s football stadium were packed with a random selection of Americans, about a thousand of them would be contagious right now.

Columbia University epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman said his team’s model estimated that 3.6 million people are infected and shedding enough virus to infect others. That’s a 34 percent week-to-week increase that followed a 36 percent increase in the previous seven-day average, he said.

The estimate does not include an approximately equal number of latent infections among people who caught the virus in recent days and can’t pass it on yet because it is still incubating.

“It’s bad; it’s really, really bad,” Shaman said. “We’re running into Thanksgiving now and that’s only going to make it worse. We’re going to go through a lot of people being infected between now and the end of the year, unfortunately.”

Separately, modelers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated Tuesday that approximately 3.2 million people have been infected just since Election Day, Nov. 3, a figure significantly larger than the approximately 1.95 million official cases tracked over the same period by The Washington Post through reports from state health departments.

The IHME model forecasts continued daily increases for a month and a half, estimating that 245,000 people would become newly infected on Tuesday alone.

“When do you want to hit the brakes? That’s the question,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at IHME who is among many scientists and doctors urging action by the government and general public to reverse the trend lines. “When you have a fire, you send the firetruck. You don’t wait and say, ‘Okay, let me wait a little bit, maybe that fire isn’t going to spread that much’ … We already moved into exponential growth. Just hit the brakes as soon as you can.”

This fall wave of infections and hospitalizations is different in several ways from the one last spring. The outbreaks are widespread now, with 49 states showing rising coronavirus hospitalizations, in contrast to the spring’s concentration of cases in the Northeast and a few large cities. Doctors are better at treating severe cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and so it is less likely to be fatal.

But the biggest difference is that this fall wave is still swelling, and is probably many weeks from cresting. This pandemic is following the seasonal pattern of the 1918 influenza pandemic, the worst such plague in U.S. history, in which the autumn wave was worse than the first one in the spring of that year. Even after more than 11 million confirmed infections since early in the year, more than 8 in 10 people in the United States remain susceptible to the coronavirus, experts estimate.

The non-tested cohort includes people who have no symptoms, but will in coming days. It also includes people who will never develop symptoms. And it includes people who have symptoms but don’t want to deal with the consequences of a positive test, such as being forced to miss work or become isolated from their social network.

What happens next depends on public awareness of the reality of the emergency and the willingness of state and local officials to respond in a manner commensurate with the crisis while also acceptable to people suffering from pandemic fatigue.

Despite lower mortality rates, the dramatic rise in infections that began in September has seen a delayed echo in the rise of the death toll. More than a thousand people are dying daily on average, and the country is nearing 250,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

Although the surge of infections this fall has in some measure been due to colder weather and people congregating indoors, it has also been because of human behavior — specifically, the willingness of millions of people in the United States to ignore public health guidelines on facial coverings and social distancing. What is happening across the country is not inevitable, experts say.

Local and state leaders know they have to act, and those actions will be unpopular with many people. There is little appetite for severe shutdowns and closures, but the current trends in infections and hospitalizations suggest that incremental measures may simply be too little too late.

The fall surge also is happening in a transition period in which there is no clear national leadership on how to respond.

President Trump, who refuses to concede that he lost the election, remains the point man for a largely hands-off approach to the contagion. Trump has embraced the view of his adviser Scott Atlas, a radiologist, that it is better to focus on protections for highly vulnerable people and otherwise allow the virus to spread among the rest of the population to hasten herd immunity.

The nation’s leading infectious-disease experts say that strategy will lead to many tens of thousands of avoidable deaths because it is impossible to separate the most vulnerable from the rest of society.

“This nonsense of herd immunity means we give up,” Mokdad said. “It’s unethical. It means we let people die. That’s not acceptable.”

On Sunday, Atlas took to Twitter to urge residents in Michigan to “rise up” against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s new restrictions designed to control the contagion. Many Trump supporters have also bought into his argument that the pandemic has been exaggerated by the news media and scientists as a way of hurting his reelection chances.

Before the election, Trump predicted that news coverage of the pandemic would end on Nov. 4. The opposite has been true — the pandemic remains on the front pages of newspapers and leads the nightly news broadcasts. But the cultural divide remains, with the wearing or non-wearing of masks seen as a political identifier.

The current strategy in many states — patchwork restrictions, combined with widespread public disregard of public health guidelines — portends a brutal winter for the country in which hospitals could be strained to their limits or beyond, something that is already happening in the Dakotas and other communities of the Upper Midwest and Great Plains, as well as El Paso.

“We’re getting the herd immunity strategy whether we want it or not,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine. “We have a totally out- of-control epidemic and we are taking baby steps.”

The only period comparable to the current one in terms of the size of the infected cohort was in late March and early April. Tests were hard to come by early in the pandemic. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimated that the number of infected people was 10 times the official count.

Now the multiplier is surely lower — the model developed by Columbia University researchers uses 5.5. By that measure, as many as 10 million people in the United States have been infected in the past two weeks.

Researchers at IHME estimate the number of daily new infections by working backward from the known numbers of deaths. The institute relies on an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.6 percent across all populations, Mokdad said.

These are models, and they rely on a series of assumptions about a virus for which much remains unknown — including how long, exactly, a person who is infected will remain contagious.

But the big picture is clear.

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” Shaman said.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/covid-3-milliion-plus-infected/2020/11/18/d9f079a8-2849-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html

 

And to my point in the OP,   Trump is hindering the transition, which will impede Biden's plan to respond.

I think it is really smart for you to start now with the excuses.

[homersapien 11,393]

9 minutes ago, Grumps said:

I think it is really smart for you to start now with the excuses.

Excuses for what?  The science of epidemiology?

 

[homersapien 11,393]

Grump's idea of leadership:

Trump coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas urges Michigan to 'rise up' against new Covid-19 measures

Washington (CNN)White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Scott Atlas criticized Michigan's new Covid-19 restrictions in a tweet shortly after they were announced Sunday evening, urging people to "rise up" against the new public health measures.

"The only way this stops is if people rise up," Atlas said. "You get what you accept. #FreedomMatters #StepUp"

 

His message -- which runs counter to the consensus of public health officials -- is likely to fuel new tension between the White House and Michigan

Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom federal and state officials announced last month was the target of an alleged domestic terrorism kidnapping plot.

Responding to Atlas' tweet Sunday evening, Whitmer told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "We know that the White House likes to single us out here in Michigan, me out in particular. I'm not going to be bullied into not following reputable scientists and medical professionals."

Instead, Whitmer said, she consults "people that actually have studied and are well respected worldwide on these issues, not the -- not the individual that is doing the President's bidding on this one."

 

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel echoed that message in a pair of tweets Sunday evening, casting Atlas' posting as, "disappointing, irresponsible, and the reason why the United States finds itself in such desperate circumstances regarding COVID-19."

 

"I look forward to a new federal administration that works cooperatively with our state government to protect Michigan residents," Nessel, a Democrat, said.

"A patriot," she continued, "is one who protects America from its enemies, both foreign and domestic."

 

"COVID-19 is the enemy, not each other. Stop pitting Americans against each other and start supporting policies proven to effectively fight the virus."

Whitmer announced in a news conference earlier Sunday that Michigan will begin a "three-week pause targeting indoor social gatherings and other group activities" to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.

 

"If everyone does their part, we will see a big benefit from it," she told Blitzer of the new measures. "But we'll be assessing it every step of the way."

 

Throughout the pandemic, Whitmer has been the focus of extreme vitriol from far-right groups. The alleged scheme to kidnap her included plans to overthrow several state governments that the suspects "believe are violating the US Constitution," according to a federal criminal complaint.

 

Still, she joins a slate of officials who are tightening their restrictions as coronavirus cases continue to soar.

 

The United States surpassed 11 million coronavirus cases on Sunday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The latest milestone comes just six days after the US recorded 10 million cases.

 

It was the fastest the US has added one million new cases since the pandemic began.

 

Unlike the government medical experts who advised Trump in the early months of the pandemic, Atlas has adopted a public stance on the virus much closer to the President's -- including decrying the idea that schools cannot reopen this fall as "hysteria" and pushing for the resumption of college sports.

"He's working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus," Trump said in August. "And he has many great ideas. And he thinks what we've done is really good, and now we'll take it to a new level."

 

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/15/politics/scott-atlas-coronavirus-michigan/index.html

 

 

[homersapien 11,393]

Trump administration has 'checked out' as Covid-19 surges, experts say

New Covid-19 diagnoses and hospitalizations are continuing to rise sharply across the US, with deaths following behind, in the worst outbreak of the entire pandemic.

Experts say the federal government, led by the lame duck president Donald Trump, has “checked out”, weeks away from what would be early vaccine approvals.

On Tuesday, a coronavirus taskforce update from the office of Mike Pence made no mention of transition efforts involving the president-elect, Joe Biden, as Trump has refused to concede defeat. Last weekend, leading public health expert Dr Anthony Fauci said Trump had not attended a taskforce meeting in five months.

“We should not find ourselves in this position,” Dr Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s school of public health, told NBC on Tuesday. “We’re 10 months into this pandemic, everybody knew this was coming, and again our federal government just didn’t prepare in the last couple months.

“It has decided to completely check out.”

According to Johns Hopkins University, 166,045 cases were recorded in the US on Monday, with 995 deaths. It was the 14th day in a row with more than 100,000 cases.

The latest increase comes ahead of one of the most important holidays in the American calendar, Thanksgiving, which experts have repeatedly warned could lead to a “chain reaction” of super-spreader events as families celebrate indoors.

Experts have said Americans should wear masks, social distance, avoid indoor gatherings and not gather members of different households together. Jha said his own family had canceled traditional Thanksgiving plans, which usually involve his elderly parents.

“We’re so close to a vaccine rollout, this is not the time to start making bad choices,” he said.

Meanwhile, medical experts advising the president-elect, Joe Biden, on the pandemic fear that the federal government’s delay in recognizing Biden’s election victory could be compromising the US response to the virus, the experts said on Tuesday.

Vivek Murthy, co-chair of Biden’s Covid-19 taskforce, said the experts had not been able to speak to current administration officials dealing with the virus, even as infections surge in many parts all across the nation.

And that could damage the incoming administration’s ability to distribute a vaccine, for example, Murthy said.

“We need to talk to those individuals, we need to work together with them,” Murthy said on a call with reporters.

The Biden team were unable to access real-time data, including on hospital bed capacity and the amount of drugs and equipment in government stockpiles, said Murthy, a former US surgeon general.

American doctors and nurses, in a letter published on Tuesday, urged the Trump administration to share detailed information.

“Real-time data and information on the supply of therapeutics, testing supplies, personal protective equipment, ventilators, hospital bed capacity and workforce availability to plan for further deployment of the nation’s assets needs to be shared to save countless lives,” said the letter, signed by the leadership of the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association and the American Hospitals Association.

In the last week, the US has recorded on average 150,000 new coronavirus cases a day, according to the Covid Tracking Project. During a summer peak in southern and western states, positive tests reached a high of about 70,000 a day.

Hospitalizations have also reached an all-time high. More than 73,000 Americans are currently hospitalized, compared with roughly 60,000 in summer peaks. The pandemic has also reached a wider area, worsening nursing shortages.

Deaths are expected to rise. They are considered a “lagging indicator”, because it often takes several weeks for people to die after contracting Covid.

The worst death rates from Covid-19 happened in the spring in north-eastern states. With hospitals overwhelmed, more than 2,000 people died per day. Today, more than 1,000 a day are dying and the number is rising.

Governors and mayors are taking measures to curb the pandemic but the restrictions are markedly different from those imposed across the board this spring.

In Michigan, the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, placed restrictions on restaurants, casinos, sporting events, gyms and in-person classes for high school and college students. However, young children are still in school, an acknowledgment that they are both less likely to spread the disease, and of the need to maintain childcare.

“You don’t need a national lockdown, what you need is targeted, focused efforts on the things we know really are spreading the disease,” said Jha. “It’s good to see some states doing it, and I wish other states would follow suit quickly.”

A vaccine rollout is inching closer. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have announced early data which showed their vaccines could be more than 90% effective. This is far better than experts’ early expectations.

However, advisers to Biden emphasized data must be independently analyzed before vaccine approval can be given. Furthermore, the two promising vaccines are also the most logistically difficult to distribute, because they require extreme cold storage.

“There’s a lot of work still in front of us to make sure these vaccines are still available to all Americans,” said Dr Rick Bright, a former head of US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

Bright became a whistleblower during the Trump administration, and has since been appointed to Biden’s coronavirus advisory board.

“It’s important that the new team has all the information the current team has,” he said about the transition, which has been held up by Trump’s refusal to concede defeat.

“Lives are at stake here.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/17/trump-coronavirus-response-checked-out-say-experts

 

Still got plenty of time to play golf though.

[jj3jordan 2,056]

48 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Trump administration has 'checked out' as Covid-19 surges, experts say

New Covid-19 diagnoses and hospitalizations are continuing to rise sharply across the US, with deaths following behind, in the worst outbreak of the entire pandemic.

Experts say the federal government, led by the lame duck president Donald Trump, has “checked out”, weeks away from what would be early vaccine approvals.

On Tuesday, a coronavirus taskforce update from the office of Mike Pence made no mention of transition efforts involving the president-elect, Joe Biden, as Trump has refused to concede defeat. Last weekend, leading public health expert Dr Anthony Fauci said Trump had not attended a taskforce meeting in five months.

“We should not find ourselves in this position,” Dr Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s school of public health, told NBC on Tuesday. “We’re 10 months into this pandemic, everybody knew this was coming, and again our federal government just didn’t prepare in the last couple months.

“It has decided to completely check out.”

According to Johns Hopkins University, 166,045 cases were recorded in the US on Monday, with 995 deaths. It was the 14th day in a row with more than 100,000 cases.

The latest increase comes ahead of one of the most important holidays in the American calendar, Thanksgiving, which experts have repeatedly warned could lead to a “chain reaction” of super-spreader events as families celebrate indoors.

Experts have said Americans should wear masks, social distance, avoid indoor gatherings and not gather members of different households together. Jha said his own family had canceled traditional Thanksgiving plans, which usually involve his elderly parents.

“We’re so close to a vaccine rollout, this is not the time to start making bad choices,” he said.

Meanwhile, medical experts advising the president-elect, Joe Biden, on the pandemic fear that the federal government’s delay in recognizing Biden’s election victory could be compromising the US response to the virus, the experts said on Tuesday.

Vivek Murthy, co-chair of Biden’s Covid-19 taskforce, said the experts had not been able to speak to current administration officials dealing with the virus, even as infections surge in many parts all across the nation.

And that could damage the incoming administration’s ability to distribute a vaccine, for example, Murthy said.

“We need to talk to those individuals, we need to work together with them,” Murthy said on a call with reporters.

The Biden team were unable to access real-time data, including on hospital bed capacity and the amount of drugs and equipment in government stockpiles, said Murthy, a former US surgeon general.

American doctors and nurses, in a letter published on Tuesday, urged the Trump administration to share detailed information.

“Real-time data and information on the supply of therapeutics, testing supplies, personal protective equipment, ventilators, hospital bed capacity and workforce availability to plan for further deployment of the nation’s assets needs to be shared to save countless lives,” said the letter, signed by the leadership of the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association and the American Hospitals Association.

In the last week, the US has recorded on average 150,000 new coronavirus cases a day, according to the Covid Tracking Project. During a summer peak in southern and western states, positive tests reached a high of about 70,000 a day.

Hospitalizations have also reached an all-time high. More than 73,000 Americans are currently hospitalized, compared with roughly 60,000 in summer peaks. The pandemic has also reached a wider area, worsening nursing shortages.

Deaths are expected to rise. They are considered a “lagging indicator”, because it often takes several weeks for people to die after contracting Covid.

The worst death rates from Covid-19 happened in the spring in north-eastern states. With hospitals overwhelmed, more than 2,000 people died per day. Today, more than 1,000 a day are dying and the number is rising.

Governors and mayors are taking measures to curb the pandemic but the restrictions are markedly different from those imposed across the board this spring.

In Michigan, the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, placed restrictions on restaurants, casinos, sporting events, gyms and in-person classes for high school and college students. However, young children are still in school, an acknowledgment that they are both less likely to spread the disease, and of the need to maintain childcare.

“You don’t need a national lockdown, what you need is targeted, focused efforts on the things we know really are spreading the disease,” said Jha. “It’s good to see some states doing it, and I wish other states would follow suit quickly.”

A vaccine rollout is inching closer. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have announced early data which showed their vaccines could be more than 90% effective. This is far better than experts’ early expectations.

However, advisers to Biden emphasized data must be independently analyzed before vaccine approval can be given. Furthermore, the two promising vaccines are also the most logistically difficult to distribute, because they require extreme cold storage.

“There’s a lot of work still in front of us to make sure these vaccines are still available to all Americans,” said Dr Rick Bright, a former head of US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

Bright became a whistleblower during the Trump administration, and has since been appointed to Biden’s coronavirus advisory board.

“It’s important that the new team has all the information the current team has,” he said about the transition, which has been held up by Trump’s refusal to concede defeat.

“Lives are at stake here.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/17/trump-coronavirus-response-checked-out-say-experts

 

Still got plenty of time to play golf though.

Safest sport to play with Covid running rampant. No worries though Joe says he will"shut down the virus" once he gets in there.  Then all will be good.

[homersapien 11,393]

13 minutes ago, jj3jordan said:

Safest sport to play with Covid running rampant. No worries though Joe says he will"shut down the virus" once he gets in there.  Then all will be good.

Trump has already been infected.  He needs to spend more time serving the country instead of participating in safe sports.  After all, that's the primary job of the POTUS.

I haven't heard where Biden claimed he will "shut down the virus".  He has said that addressing the pandemic will be his first priority. 

What do you reckon Trump's first priority is?

[jj3jordan 2,056]

27 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Trump has already been infected.  He needs to spend more time serving the country instead of participating in safe sports.  After all, that's the primary job of the POTUS.

I haven't heard where Biden claimed he will "shut down the virus".  He has said that addressing the pandemic will be his first priority. 

What do you reckon Trump's first priority is?

Biden stated emphatically "we aren't going to shut down the country, we are going to shut down the virus". Hard to believe you aren't aware of that. Normally you are better prepared.  Wait..so now you actually WANT Trump to do something for the country?   We talking about the narcissistic delusional lying raping racist mass murdering orange man?  So if he did something you approve of you would give him props?

[RunInRed 16,434]

 

[homersapien 11,393]

20 minutes ago, RunInRed said:

 

Facts mean absolute nothing to these people, and even less to their cult followers.