TRUMP WHITE HOUSE HAS NO CLUE FOR DEALING WITH THE PANDEMIC

…Dr. Deborah Birks the White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator

To date, more than 69,000 Americans have died.  The task force says there will be thousands more before it’s over.

I am so sick of the president trying to down play the Covid-19 pandemic.  Trump has changed his predictions of Covid-19 American deaths, 5 times in 2 weeks.

From day one, he has been totally dishonest as to what his own Coronavirus Task Force says about the anticipated number of deaths from the disease.

Just this week he casually went from 65,000 American deaths, to a possible 80,000 to 90,000 deaths.

Dr. Birks, the White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator said on Fox News that the real estimates of American deaths have never changed from 100,000 to 240,000 Americans.

The draft of a government report projects Covid-19 infection cases will surge to about 200,000 per day by June 1.  That’s a staggering jump that would be accompanied by more than 3,000 deaths each day.

Of course, the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have disavowed the report.  But the report’s slides do carry the CDC’s logo….?   The creator of the model for the report said the numbers are unfinished projections that were shown to the CDC as a work in progress.

The work contained a wide range of possibilities according to Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who created the model.

He said he didn’t know how the update was turned into a slide-deck by government officials and was shared with news organizations. This data was first reported by the New York Times.  “I had no role in the process by which that was presented and shown,” Lessler said.

Lessler said that while the exact numbers and charts in the CDC document may differ from the final results, they do show accurately how Covid-19 cases could spiral out of control.  He said 100,000 cases per day by the end of the month is within the realm of possibility. Much depends on political decisions being made by the president and the White House today.

The document predicts a sharp increase in both cases and deaths beginning about May 14, according to a copy shared with The Washington Post. The forecast stops at June 1, but shows both daily cases and deaths on an upward direction at that point.

“There are reopening scenarios where it could get out of control very quickly,” Lessler said

One federal official said the data was presented at a recent briefing for the National Response Coordination Center, a part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), that coordinates federal support during major incidents and emergencies. The official, as usual, was not authorized to discuss internal government briefings, and like many of the Trump administration, he only spoke on condition of anonymity.

It was not immediately clear whether the projections, which also carry logos of the Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, are based on ramped up testing, the attempt to reopen some states, the time lag between a rise in cases and deaths or some combination of those factors.

The White House issued a statement that “this is not a White House document, nor has it been presented to the Coronavirus Task Force or gone through interagency vetting. This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force, or data that the task force has analyzed.”

The following was a quote that I seriously have a problem in believing is true: “The President’s phased guidelines to open up America again are a scientific driven approach that the top health and infectious disease experts in the federal government agreed with. The health of the American people remains President Trump’s top priority, and that will continue as we monitor the efforts by states to ease restrictions.”

As expected: “A spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency did not issue the projections.”

As usual, the forecast is counter to the remarks made by President Trump, who said the United States could eventually suffer as many as 100,000 deaths. At 3,000 deaths per day and rising, the national total would quickly outstrip that number if the new report is correct.

As a senior White House official said, “The document will not change the White House planning on reopening the nation.”

That, I believe, and because of Trump wanting to re-open the nation too soon, we may have to start all over again with shutting the country down.

Researchers at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota issued a report Thursday that suggested the pandemic would last 18 to 24 months, reappearing in waves of varying intensity.

Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus had helped, but did not succeeded in quelling its spread. He said on CBS’s Face the Nation that the United States faces the possibility of “persistent spread” of the virus that could spark a significant outbreak at any time if schools and workplaces “let down their guard.”

“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected. We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point, and we’re just not seeing that,” Gottlieb said.

The largest number of deaths in the United States in a single day since the pandemic began occurred on April 21, when 2,874 people died.

To date, 1.16 million people have been infected by Covid-19 and more than 69,000 have died. Both figures are widely believed to under-count the actual totals.

Copyright G. Ater 2020