Expect to see more major events and conferences canceled due to COVID-19 in the months ahead like this year's SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.
South by Southwest — the tech, music, and film conference held every year in Austin, Texas, and which drew more than 73,000 people last year — is officially canceled.
The reason that the event, which was set to take place from March 13-22, has been nixed this year should come as no surprise. Austin city officials remain concerned about the spread of coronavirus, and a lengthy statement has been issued explaining the decision, which you can read below.
This is a major blow to the city, where the conference last year brought in a few hundred million dollars. The cancellation was announced during a Friday afternoon press conference, at which city mayor Steve Adler added that he’d declared a “local disaster” in Austin as a result of the continued spread of the virus.
Rescheduling is going to be a tough road, I think. COVID-19 is going to be with us for months. Everyone badly underestimated what would have been needed to contain the virus in a country like the United States, most of all that failure lies on the shoulders of Donald Trump.
Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.
To arrive at our estimate, we contacted the public-health departments of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We gathered data on websites, and we corresponded with dozens of state officials. All 50 states and D.C. have made some information available, though the quality and timeliness of the data varied widely. Some states have only committed to releasing their numbers once or three times a week. Most are focused on the number of confirmed cases; only a few have publicized the number of people they are capable of testing.
The Atlantic’s numbers reflect the best available portrait of the country’s testing capacity as of early this morning. These numbers provide an accurate baseline, but they are incomplete. Scattered on state websites, the data available are not useful to citizens or political leaders. State-based tallies lack the reliability of the CDC’s traditional—but now abandoned—method of reporting. Several states—including New Jersey, Texas, and Louisiana—have not shared the number of coronavirus tests they have conducted overall, meaning their number of positive results lacks crucial context.
The net effect of these choices is that the country’s true capacity for testing has not been made clear to its residents. This level of obfuscation is unexpected in the United States, which has long been a global leader in public-health transparency.
The figures we gathered suggest that the American response to the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has been shockingly sluggish, especially compared with that of other developed countries. The CDC confirmed eight days ago that the virus was in community transmission in the United States—that it was infecting Americans who had neither traveled abroad nor were in contact with others who had. In South Korea, more than 66,650 people were tested within a week of its first case of community transmission, and it quickly became able to test 10,000 people a day. The United Kingdom, which has only 115 positive cases, has so far tested 18,083 people for the virus.
Normally, the job of gathering these types of data in the U.S. would be left to epidemiologists at the CDC. The agency regularly collects and publishes positive and negative test results for several pathogens, including multiple types of the seasonal flu. But earlier this week, the agency announced that it would stop publishing negative results for the coronavirus, an extraordinary step that essentially keeps Americans from knowing how many people have been tested overall.
Read: What you can do right now about the coronavirus
“With more and more testing done at states, these numbers would not be representative of the testing being done nationally,” Nancy Messonnier, the chief CDC official for respiratory diseases, said at the time. “States are reporting results quickly, and in the event of a discrepancy between CDC and state case counts, the state case counts should always be considered more up to date.”
Then, last night, the CDC resumed reporting the number of tests that the agency itself has completed, but did not include testing by state public-health departments or other laboratories. Asked to respond to our own tally and reporting, the CDC directed us to Messonnier’s statement from Tuesday.
Our reporting found that disorder has followed the CDC’s decision not to publish state data. Messonnier’s statement itself implies that, as highly populous states like California increase their own testing, the number of people the CDC reports as having been tested and the actual number of people tested will become ever more divergent. The federal tally of positive cases is now also badly out of date: While the CDC is reporting 99 positive cases of the coronavirus in the United States, our data, and separate data from Johns Hopkins University, show that the true number is well above 200, including those on the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
The White House declined to comment.
The haphazard debut of the tests—and the ensuing absence of widespread data about the epidemic—has hamstrung doctors, politicians, and public-health officials as they try to act prudently during the most important week for the epidemic in the United States so far.
Please remember that Donald Trump knows exactly what he's doing.
President Trump likes to say that he fell into politics almost by accident, and on Friday, as he sought to calm a nation gripped with fears over coronavirus, he suggested he would have thrived in another profession — medical expert.
“I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump boasted to reporters during a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he met with actual doctors and scientists who are feverishly scrambling to contain and combat the deadly illness. Citing a “great, super-genius uncle” who taught at MIT, Trump professed that it must run in the family genes.
“People are really surprised I understand this stuff,” he said. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”
He's lying. He can't control it, just like he can't control his malignant narcissism. He doesn't know a damn thing. He;s silencing the experts on purpose to contain panic.
And absolute panic is necessary right now.
More below the fold.
The Republican party has made sure that the US government has been so broken at the federal level that it can no longer do the basic job that you see in other "less developed" countries. South Korea has drive-thru COVID-19 testing stations. We can't get our act together long enough to test more than 0.00001% of the population, and it costs $3,200 per test.
And I don't fear this might be happening on purpose, we know it is. The GOP has said as much. All my life, from Reagan's "Government is not the solution to out problem, government is the problem" to Grover Norquist's "A government so small we can drown it in a bathtub" to Dubya's "Heckuva job, Brownie" to Trump's "Drain the swamp" and "Deep State" ramblings, this was always the case.
The experts, the real experts, are saying to prepare for casualties ten times that of a regular flu season.
American Hospital Association "Best Guess Epidemiology" for #codiv19 over next 2 months:— Seth Bannon 👨🔬 (@sethbannon) March 7, 2020
96,000,000 infections
4,800,000 hospitalizations
1,900,000 ICU admissions
480,000 deaths
vs flu in 2019:
35,500,000 infections
490,600 hospitalizations
49,000 ICU admissions
34,200 deaths pic.twitter.com/GDAADwmg4n
Understand that COVID-19 is almost certainly out of containment. Containment was an option in January. Cases will double every week or so as a result. What was a few dozen cases in January, unreported of course, became a few hundred cases last month. That was when containment was still an option. Containment failed weeks ago. When the Trump regime says the virus is contained, they are 100% lying to you.
We're now seeing cases here in Kentucky, arguably one of the least equipped areas in America to try to contain and treat the virus. If it's here, it's already near you, or will be before the end of the month. I guarantee it.
The problem isn't the number of reported cases. The problem is the number of unreported cases. Assume there's at least ten times the number of unreported cases out there. That means there's now a couple thousand cases in March. There are far, far more cases out there then reported because testing was months behind, containment was months behind, emergency measures were months behind.
That means there will be tens of thousands cases in April, hundreds of thousands in May, and millions in June and July. Our healthcare system will be overwhelmed long before June. Our economy will be overwhelmed as well. Trump will unleash the full power of the federal government to react. It will be breathtaking and awful.
If COVID-19 is as bad as the virologists, pathologists, and health experts say, then we're in for a crushing blow in this country. Every fiber of my being tells me that Trump will use the coming chaos to his permanent advantage, an event that results in martial law or worse. It will be a nightmare.
I'm at a loss. I know House Democrats don't want to make the situation worse with dire pronouncements of doom and gloom, but the situation is real. We'll find out months from now how badly Trump dropped the ball during the first two months of the year, but like everything else, it won't matter much in the end. We'll be too busy dealing with the reality of life under the virus by then.
And folks, it's not going to end well. This is *bad*. History tells us that once an autocrat has assumed extraordinary powers in a crisis like this, those powers are never surrendered willingly. It's too late now. The fires will burn. The country will burn. And Trump will assume "emergency powers" and never relinquish them without a fight.
It will only get worse, and soon. This is the nightmare scenario. It is happening now.
And there's no way to stop it.
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