Regardless of what Dear Leader may want his government organs to say to the public about how everything's fine with Wuhan coronavirus and the danger is passed, the few actual scientists that have yet to be purged from the regime are now openly warning Americans to get ready for a major national pandemic.
Trump administration health officials urged the public Tuesday to prepare for the “inevitable” spread of the coronavirus within the United States, escalating warnings about a growing threat from the virus to Americans’ everyday lives.
The urgent new tone from leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health came in response to a rapid surge in cases in new locations outside mainland China in the past several days, including new cases without a known source of exposure in Hong Kong, Iran, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. It came as stock markets dived for the second straight day on fears of the virus spreading.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said officials cautioned during a closed-door briefing with senators that there was a “very strong chance of an extremely serious outbreak of the coronavirus here in the United States.”
Separately, on a conference call with reporters, public health officials repeated dire warnings.
“Ultimately we expect we will see community spread in the United States. It’s not a question of if this will happen, but when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Messonnier said evidence of so-called “community spread” far beyond mainland China is triggering new strategies to blunt the impact of illness and slow the spread of the respiratory virus. There is growing evidence that efforts to contain the spread of the virus outside of China have failed. There are now almost 1,000 cases in South Korea, at least 15 people have died in Iran, and cases were reported for the first time in Switzerland, Austria, and at a luxury resort in Spain.
The CDC said the agency would be focusing on containing the spread of the virus in the United States, as well as warning people to prepare. Health officials are urging businesses, health-care facilities and even schools to plan now for ways to limit the impact of the illness when it spreads in the community.
Businesses need to consider replacing in-person meetings with telework. Schools should consider ways to limit face-to-face contact, such as dividing students into smaller groups, school closures and Internet-based learning. Local officials should consider modifying, postponing or canceling large gatherings. Hospitals should consider ways to triage patients who do not need urgent care and recommend patients delay elective surgery.
School closures may be among the most effective ways to limit person-to-person spread, which is the main way coronavirus is transmitted. But it is also the one likely to cause the most unwanted consequences and disruptions from missed work and loss of income, Messonnier said.
“Disruptions to everyday life may be severe, but people might want to start thinking about that now,” she said. She said parents may want to call their local school offices to see what kinds of plans they have in place and consider what they would do if they had no child care. Messonnier added that she called her children’s superintendent office to find out what plans the school system had. These kinds of questions will help everyone be better prepared, she said.
The Dow Jones average has lost more than 1,800 points this week alone, or well over six percent in two days, and when the CDC is openly saying "yeah, you might want to check on your company's plans for working at home" and prepping kids staying home from school for a while, this isn't just idle chatter.
Meanwhile, Congress is grilling the DHS on what the federal government actually does plan to do, and even GOP lawmakers are coming away scared and pissed off at the coming disaster.
The Department of Homeland Security is coordinating the U.S. government’s response to the increasing threat of the novel coronavirus. The agency has also been under the control of acting head Chad Wolf for more than four months, with no full-time replacement selected.
And Wolf gave a performance Tuesday morning that wasn’t exactly confidence-inspiring — particularly for one GOP senator.
Appearing in front of a Senate appropriations subcommittee, Wolf was on the receiving end of a brutal line of questioning from Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.). Throughout the exchange, Wolf struggled to produce basic facts and projections about the disease. Perhaps most strikingly, the performance came at a time of heightened fears about the disease, with the stock market plunging over new estimates about its spread into the United States. It’s a moment in which you’d expect such things to be top of mind for someone in Wolf’s position.
Wolf got started on the wrong foot almost immediately, when Kennedy asked him how many cases of the coronavirus there were in the United States. Wolf stated there were 14 but was uncertain about how many cases had been repatriated back to the United States from cruise ships, placing the number at “20- or 30-some-odd.”
Asked how many DHS was anticipating, Wolf didn’t have an answer and suggested this was the Department of Health and Human Services’ territory. “We do anticipate the number will grow; I don’t have an exact figure for you, though,” Wolf said.
“You’re head of Homeland Security, and your job is to keep us safe,” Kennedy responded, asking him again what the estimates might be. Wolf talked around the question, which led Kennedy to say, “Don’t you think you ought to check on that, as the head of Homeland Security?”
In an ideal world, Kennedy would come out and say that there would be no more rubber stamp approvals of massively unqualified Trump cronies to Senate confirmation-level positions like Homeland Security Secretary. Wolf was confirmed for a DHS undersecretary job back in November on a 54-41 vote, where he almost immediately became acting head of the agency just hours later. Senate Republicans were well aware of this, and Kennedy of course voted yes anyway.
But now of course it actually matter what DHS does as far as the continued safety of the American people. (It always did of course, that's the rub.) Suddenly having an acting DHS head with no business dealing with a crisis of this magnitude is a political problem for Republicans as well as an existential problem for the American people, and only now is Wolf being asked tough questions by Republicans.
The coronavirus outbreak is going to be bad. Trump's cronyism and purge of competent government people who will be on the front lines fighting it will make it exponentially worse. He will be blamed when things go wrong and thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people die.
And he knows it.
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