Trump's role as Liar-in-Chief and the viral disinformation he continues to spread about COVID-19 and the "White House response" that amounts to hoping corporate America will do Trump's job for him is now well past the point of being a national public health crisis.
In the small town of Jonesborough, Tenn., nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, the Parent Teacher Association group text chat normally lights up with news of school dances and car-pooling schedules. Its main focus now is a global pandemic.
Kerrie Aistrop, a 39-year-old mother of two, and her fellow moms exchange death-toll updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, thought-provoking tweets and a bit of gallows humor. “After seeing how the public panics over coronavirus, I can see why the government would never tell us about Aliens,” reads one shared post.
As people in the group have taken an all-or-nothing approach to the virus, either stocking up on toilet paper or writing the epidemic off entirely, Ms. Aistrop, a Republican and pharmaceutical sales representative, has struggled to find a middle ground for news on the ongoing crisis. And so she is relying on her go-to trusted source: President Trump.
Unlike many in the G.O.P., Ms. Aistrop doesn’t wholly subscribe to the notion of the mainstream news media being out to antagonize the president. When her town’s state House G.O.P. representative, Micah Van Huss, filed a resolution in January to officially recognize CNN and The Washington Post as “fake news,” she was “embarrassed.”
But in this moment, even she doesn’t feel that she can trust the media to present the pandemic’s full picture.
“No matter what outlet you go to about this,” she said, “somebody is always taking a side.”
Much of Mr. Trump’s success has been fueled by his supporters’ distrust of career government officials. Yet as coronavirus cases multiply, many of those same supporters find themselves placing their faith in institutions like the C.D.C. — confident for perhaps the first time in Mr. Trump’s tenure that the experts on call aren’t out to sabotage the president.
In conversations over the course of the past week, as the news and administration action on the virus moved quickly, Mr. Trump’s supporters overwhelmingly have said they trust the president and they trust whom he trusts. They are not, in large part, completely dismissive of the virus, the way some right-wing media outlets have been. But they are comforted because they see the president as a bulwark against outright panic, working with business leaders and experts from within a bureaucracy that both the president and many Republicans still distrust.
“I feel like sometimes the decisions he makes are for his voters, and now it’s about what’s best for the American people,” Ms. Aistrop said. “I think he’s really looking to our government agencies to take the lead on this, he’s listening to them on what to do, and his No. 1 goal is to keep us safe.”
While polling indicates that most Democrats take a sharply negative view of the president and his handling of the virus, and that some Republicans share concerns about Mr. Trump’s performance as well, there are no signs at this point that the epidemic has cut deeply into the bedrock support that he enjoys among his base, even in places where infection rates are high and populations are most at risk.
More after the jump, a lot to cover again this weekend.
Tens of millions of Americans have been programmed to hate the media and openly distrust it. They either think COVID-19 is something that won't affect them personally, or that Trump has it under control and that it'll blow over. They're furious that schools are closing. They blame the media and Democrats for "ruining their vacations" or even threatening their jobs as they work to find ways to care for kids home from school for weeks starting Monday.
Either way, the response ranges from mass hoarding "to show those liberals who's boss" or changing nothing about social gatherings "to show those liberals who's boss".
COVID-19 can be spread long before you show symptoms of the disease.
Several experts interviewed by CNN said while it's unclear exactly what percentage of the transmission in the outbreak is fueled by people who are obviously sick versus those who have no symptoms or very mild symptoms, it's become clear that transmission by people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic is responsible for more transmission than previously thought.
"We now know that asymptomatic transmission likely [plays] an important role in spreading this virus," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Osterholm added that it's "absolutely clear" that asymptomatic infection "surely can fuel a pandemic like this in a way that's going to make it very difficult to control."
In an article two weeks ago in the New England Journal of Medicine, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, expressed concern about the spread of the disease by people who haven't yet developed symptoms, or who are only a bit sick.
"There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or even presymptomatic. That means COVID-19 will be much harder to contain than the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which were spread much less efficiently and only by symptomatic people," he wrote, using the scientific word for the disease caused by the virus.
So yeah, people are out partying this weekend for St. Patrick's Day. How many of them are spreading COVID-19 we don't know. But tens of millions of Americans are convinced there's nothing wrong, and no reason to change behavior, because Donald Trump has the problem solved already.
Meanwhile the most vulnerable among us, the elderly in nursing home facilities, are being sacrificed by this regime in the name of profit.
The Trump administration has been working to relax regulations governing America’s nursing homes, including rules meant to curb deadly infections among elderly residents.
The main federal regulator overseeing nursing homes proposed the rule changes last summer, before the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of nursing homes to fast-spreading diseases. The push followed a spate of lobbying and campaign contributions by people in the nursing-home industry, according to public records and interviews.
The coronavirus has killed 13 residents at a nursing home in Washington State; dozens more residents and employees there have fallen ill. Seeking to prevent further contagion, some states, including New York, have banned most nonmedical personnel from setting foot inside nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, which nationally have about 2.5 million residents.
Last July, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., set in motion a plan to weaken rules imposed by the Obama administration that required every nursing home to employ at least one specialist in preventing infections. The proposed rules — which the agency is completing and has the power to enact — eliminate the requirement to have even a part-time infection specialist on staff. Instead, the Trump administration would require that anti-infection specialists spend “sufficient time at the facility.”
Critics say the proposed requirement is so vague that it would be essentially meaningless — and dangerous.
“It adds up to less time, less infection control,” said Anthony Chicotel, a staff lawyer for California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. He said the proposed change was “alarming.”
Attorneys general in 17 states have called the proposed rules a threat to “the mental and physical security of some of the most vulnerable residents of our states.”
The White House referred questions to the Medicare and Medicaid agency. In an interview on Saturday, the agency’s administrator, Seema Verma, said the proposed rule changes were not about easing up on nursing homes but “about not micromanaging the process.” The proposed changes to the infection-prevention rules, she said, could actually result in a “higher level of staffing.”
“We have to make sure that our regulations are not so burdensome that they hurt the industry,” she said.
Because the nursing home industry is the big concern here, right? We don't need infection control specilists in nursing homes right now, do we?
Well, we're all about to find out if they are right or not. If they're right, things will get back to normal in a few weeks.
If they are not, and odds are pretty much assured that they are in fact breathtakingly and dangerously wrong judging by places like Italy, now reporting hundreds of death from the virus per day?
Well, those scenarios are bad. Very bad.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said Sunday that schools may remain closed through the end of the year as the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread.
Ohio is among a handful of states that announced it would be closing schools for a few weeks.
CNN's "State of the Union" host Brianna Keilar asked DeWine if he anticipates the state may close schools for the rest of the year.
"Absolutely," DeWine responded.
"Going by what medical experts are telling us, [the outbreak] may not peak until the latter part of April or May," he added. "We've informed superintendents while we've closed schools for three weeks, odds are we will go on a lot longer."
DeWine said it will "not surprise" him if schools don't open again this year.
We're about to find out.
The hard way.
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