April 6, 2020: Trump and the Nation Face a Pearl Harbor Moment

 

4/6/20: At this point, it seems clear. U.S. Surgeon General Vice Admiral Jerome Adams warned Sunday that this week would be bad. And he said it on Fox News, where Happy Talk regarding all things Trump is the rule.

 

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“This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized.”

 

U.S. Surgeon General Vice Admiral Jerome Adams

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“Well, it’s tragically fitting that we’re talking at the beginning of Holy Week because this is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives,” Adams explained. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”

 

There were, however, encouraging signs. Adams pointed to two states where Democratic governors had done a good job, flattening the curve and getting control of the spread of the virus: Washington and California.

 

And the Fox News host didn’t cut him off!

 

Oh, wait…the host was Chris Wallace…not one of the Trump shills.

 

*

 

THIS WEEKEND, if you couldn’t stand to watch the president brag and attack others during his daily press conferences, you missed Trump at his loose-cannon best. When asked Saturday about governors complaining they were running low on supplies, the Narcissist-in-Chief insisted health experts he talked with were “really thrilled to be where they are.”

 

The American Hospital Association, which represents thousands of hospitals across the nation, made it abundantly clear on Sunday. Member institutions were not thrilled. Not even a little.

 

“Not a day goes by where we don’t hear from hospitals and health systems across the country that are concerned about shortages of PPE [personal protective equipment] for their heroic front line caregivers,” said a senior vice president for communications. “The AHA continues to urge that all levers be used by both the government and private sector [emphasis added unless otherwise noted] to ensure those on the front lines have the resources and support they need to care for their patients and communities.”

 

The president’s Sunday press conference was no better. Asked again about governors’ complaints that states were competing against each other and against the federal government for critical supplies and equipment, you knew Trump wouldn’t take even a hint of criticism without lashing out.

 

So he did:

 

There is a governor, I hear him complaining all the time, Pritzker. He is always complaining. I just said, “Give me a list of a couple of the things we’ve done in Illinois.” We’re building a 2,500-bed hospital in McCormick Place, that’s a big convention center in Chicago. We’re helping to staff it and probably will end up staffing it because he’s not able to do what he’s supposed to be able to do as the governor.

 

He has not performed well.

 

Jeremy Diamond, a reporter from CNN, decided to ask Trump a question about a new drug cocktail he keeps touting – as if this unproven treatment might be the secret to stopping the spread of COVID-19.

 

Trump said, as he has several times, that he has a hunch hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, might be the ticket to saving us all.

 

He spread his hands wide and poked them in the reporter’s direction, a habitual gesture, as if to say, look, I’m being totally honest here and I mean what I say. He said he thought the drug might work against the coronavirus, even though it has never been tested for such use. “What have you got to lose,” he added rhetorically. “I’ve seen things that I like,” the president added. “What do I know? I’m not a doctor. I’m not a doctor, but I have common sense.”

 

Trump then proved that he doesn’t.

 

He suggested that doctors might sample the drug, themselves, before treating infected persons.

 

In case you are interested (and you would think the president would be) some side effects of this particular drug include increased chance of cardiac arrest and possibly fatal toxicities if mixed with common drugs used to treat diabetes. Hydroxychloroquine can cause  permanent eye damage, permanent hearing loss, unusual bleeding, hair loss, rapid swelling of the skin, blue-black skin discoloring, suicidal thoughts, and may be fatal to children if they swallow even a few pills.

 

(The president doesn’t have time to study the situation because on April 4, he was busy tweeting 70 times.)

 

Diamond tried to follow up by asking Dr. Anthony Fauci what he thought of the drug. Dr. Fauci is, as you probably know, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He’s a key member of the administration’s fight against COVID. 

“Would you also weigh in on this issue of hydroxychloroquine?” Diamond asked. “What do you think about this?” 

“Didn’t you just ask that question…Fifteen times?” Trump snapped. 

“He’s a doctor,” Diamond responded. 

“You don’t have to answer the question,” Trump, the man with the hunch, told the man with the medical expertise. “I answered that question 15 times.” 

Stupidly, all fifteen times.

 

*

 

MONDAY MORNING, when the blogger set to work updating his posts, the bad news was already piling up like bodies in a morgue. A quick check of the Johns Hopkins University website showed: 337,971 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the United States. By evening, a second check of the Worldometers website indicated that the virus was still spreading widely. That site gave the following totals: 366,906 Americans infected, 10,868 dead.

 

The following graph, from earlier in the day, was also of interest:

 

 

That tiny sliver of red, to the lower left of the orange band representing Portugal, is the percentage of cases, outside of China, in South Korea (0.82), where the government ramped up testing from the start.

 

Again, we keep pointing this out. On March 17, South Korea had 8,320 confirmed cases, more than the U.S.A.

 

The South Koreans were serious about efforts to control the disease, whereas Trump was busy tweeting, holding big rallies and farting around.

 

As of this evening, states hardest hit:

 

New York  131,900 cases

New Jersey  41,100

Michigan  17,200

California  16,000

Louisiana 14,900

Massachusetts  13,800

Florida  13,600

Pennsylvania  13,100

Illinois  12,300

(South Korea: 10,331)

Washington  8,300

Texas  8,100

Georgia  7,300

Connecticut  6,900

 

To understand the threat we face, we should remember that when March began Louisiana hadn’t identified a single case of the virus. Mardi Gras went on as planned. Now 512 people have died and the governor is warning that New Orleans could run out of ventilators. Even rural areas may be unsafe. The county with the most cases per 100,000 residents (outlined in red, below) is Blaine in Idaho, with 410 cases in a population of 22,000.

 

 

 

“Widespread shortages of PPE put staff and patients at risk.”

 

President Trump, of course, wants us all to believe he’s doing a fantastic job. But Monday morning the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services dropped a flaming bag of dog poop on the White House porch, rang the doorbell, and ran. In a survey of 323 hospitals, carried out March 23-27, the IG found that “severe shortages of testing supplies,” delays of up to seven days in getting test results, and “widespread shortages of PPE put staff and patients at risk.”

 

“The level of anxiety among staff is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” a hospital administrator explained. 

 

“Hospitals often stated that they were in competition with other providers for limited supplies,” the IG found, “and that government intervention and coordination could help reconcile this problem at the national level [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] to provide equitable distribution of supplies throughout the country.”

Even basics, the report found, were running low:

 

Hospitals reported needing items that support a patient room, such as intravenous therapy (IV) poles, medical gas, linens, toilet paper, and food. Others reported shortages of no-touch infrared thermometers, disinfectants, and cleaning supplies. Isolated and smaller hospitals faced special challenges maintaining the supplies they needed and restocking quickly when they ran out of supplies.

 

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NOR HAD THE TRUMP ADIMINSTRATION been quick to grasp the danger or take action. According to a detailed examination of purchasing orders, the Associated Press has concluded, 

After the first alarms sounded in early January that an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China might ignite a global pandemic, the Trump administration squandered nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal  stockpile of critically needed medical supplies and equipment.

 

A review of federal purchasing contracts…shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.

 

Naturally, when asked about the delays, Trump responded angrily, “FEMA, the military, what they’ve done is a miracle. What they’ve done is a miracle in getting all of this stuff. What they have done for states is incredible.” 

His feelings bruised, Trump ended the briefing, left the podium, and disappeared out the side door.

* 

HE WAS ASKED again about the report on Monday. This time, he blasted several reporters in sequence for bringing it up. 

Then he insinuated that the IG was a holdover from the Obama administration and couldn’t be trusted any farther than Trump could throw a box of N95 masks – assuming he could find one. 

The Associated Press had also discovered in examining records, that in January, Team Trump had only 13 million N95’s, critical for hospital staff and first responders who need to protect themselves from infection. Not till March 4 did Health and Human Services wake up and announce it would order an additional 500 million. 

And who did Trump blame for the delay?

 

April 13, 2020: Federal Deficit Explodes - COVID Spreading

 

4/13/20: The staggering economic damage from the coronavirus outbreak continues to mount.

 

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The federal deficit for Fiscal Year 2020 is expected to rise to $3.8 trillion.

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An added worry Monday: A red ink tsunami. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the federal deficit for Fiscal Year 2020 will rise to $3.8 trillion.

 

The deficit for FY 2021 will likely exceed $2.1 trillion.

 

We can also expect state and local governments to be battered by huge unemployment payouts and sagging tax receipts. Most states must, by statute, balance their budgets. So they end up cutting jobs and services, not the kind of tonic needed when an economy is struggling.

 

 

*

 

THE NUMBER of confirmed cases of the coronavirus and the number of deaths continue to rise by the hour. A check at 4:30 p.m. Monday shows the U.S. has 583,411 confirmed cases and 23,462 Americans dead.

 

President Trump continued yesterday to defend his lame ass response to the coronavirus outbreak, insisting we are the best country in the world when it comes to testing to find out who might be sick and who might not.

 

He’s wrong, for sure. Or he’s lying again. We have done the most tests of any country, although we stumbled badly at the start, and we’ve never been able to do anything since but chase the spread of COVID-19. That means another 1,357 Americans died in the last twenty-four hours. In Germany, which has about one-fourth of the number of cases of the virus, but where they have tested at nearly double the U.S. rate, only 21 patients succumbed during the same period.

 

South Korea continues to be the model of what might have been, had Trump focused from the start. Again, we note that South Korea had more confirmed cases on March 17 than the United States. But active testing was already halting the spread.

 

At the risk of repeating ourselves (“myself,” really, since I’m just a lonely blogger, tapping away on my keyboard for fun), South Korea now has 10,537 cases.

 

That’s an increase of 26.6%.

 

The increase in this country, from 4,661 on March 17, would be 12,417%.

 

*

 

Trump seems to be going for a “Grapes of Wrath” vibe.

 

IF YOU HAVE any doubt about what can happen when people fail to “socially distance” themselves, or aren’t in a position where they can, look no further than the situation involving the officers and crew of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. The first infected sailor died Monday and 585 crewmen and women have tested positive for COVID-19.

 

Or consider the outbreak of coronavirus at a pork packing plant in Sioux Falls, S.D. Smithfield Foods has announced it is closing the mammoth facility after 293 employees out of a workforce of 3,700 tested positive. That would represent 40% of all the cases reported in South Dakota to this point.

 

Perhaps even more ominously, for the country, Kenneth Sullivan, CEO of Smithfield Foods, warned,

 

The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge [emphasis added] in terms of our meat supply. It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running. These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nation’s livestock farmers.

 

Then again, you can’t say Team Trump isn’t adept at coming up with novel new ways to make matters worse.

 

If you missed the story last week, the White House is considering rule changes to allow farmers to reduce the pay of roughly 250,000 “guest workers” who come to this country on special visas, so they can pick the strawberries and pluck the apricots and pull up the lettuce that we like to see in our grocery stores every week. Farmers are already reeling in the wake of Trump’s tariff wars with China – which struck back by refusing to buy tens of billions of dollars in American farm products. Now, Trump seems to be going for a “Grapes of Wrath” vibe.

 

Screw the people who truly toil.

 

And, hey…who thinks Trump is crazy to let all those immigrants loose in our orchards and fields with sharp cutting tools?

 

Didn’t he make it clear from the start of his run for office that people who come into this country from places like Mexico just want to rape and kill?

 

Well, and harvest crops for minimum wages!

 

And now, perhaps, for even less.

 

*

 

SUNDAY, the president retweeted a post by a failed Republican candidate for Congress who included the hashtag “#fireFauci.” Today, the White House had to spend time explaining that Trump was not going to fire Dr. Fauci. But we all know the truth. If Trump thought he could fire anyone – for any reason – and it would make him look good, he would. 

He’d throw Fauci into shark-infested waters if he thought it would raise his approval rating a point. 

Canada is pressuring 1,600 Ontario nurses, who travel every morning to work in hospitals in the Detroit area, to stay home.

 

Canada has 23,430 confirmed cases of the virus – has been testing more aggressively than the U.S. – and, if we adjust for population would have a third as many confirmed cases as the United States.

 

Justin Trudeau – good job!

 

In South Dakota, a 2,000-patient trial of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine has begun, with the medical experts urged on by Gov. Kristi Noem. President Trump has touted the potential of the untested drug to halt the spread of COVID-19. Noem wants to  help out.

 

If this trial proves a success, you know he’s going to claim he came up with the idea all by himself.

 

If it fails, he’ll blame Obama or some other predecessor, Warren G. Harding, or Calvin Coolidge, possibly.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court will be holding oral arguments via teleconference in May, which is expected to slow the wheels of justice. Finally, President Trump catches a break! At issue in one case: Can Congress demand to see his tax returns?

 

And be honest – with the deficit exploding like a cigar in Bugs Bunny’s face – wouldn’t it be nice to know if the Narcissist-in-Chief was paying his share of all the unexpected bills this great nation faces?

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/15/21): South Dakota Gov. Noem proves to be a giant suck-up to the president.

 

Alas, the test of hydroxychloroquine fizzles by June 2020, when Sanford Health experts, who had been expected to conduct the South Dakota trial read a newly-released study by the University of Minnesota. That study found that there was no more health benefit from hydroxychloroquine than you would expect from any placebo.

 

“After closely reviewing the new research, our clinical trial team determined that the South Dakota study is unlikely to see different results,” Dr. Susan Hoover, Sanford Health infectious disease doctor and principal investigator of the study, told reporters. “We’re focused on our goal of advancing the science around this disease and will continue to pursue other COVID-19 research.”

 

In August 2020, Admiral Brett Giroir, of the U.S. Public Health Commissioned Service is asked if he can recommend hydroxychloroquine. 

“At this point in time,” he tells NBC’s Chuck Todd, “there’s been five randomized-controlled, placebo-controlled trials that do not show any benefit to hydroxychloroquine, so at this point in time, we don’t recommend that as a treatment.” 

He pauses a moment, and then adds, “Right now, hydroxychloroquine, I can’t recommend that.”  

People like Gov. Noem and the president, who were pushing hydroxychloroquine were, to put it plainly, putting people’s health at risk.

April 23, 2020: The Windmill Party and the "Four Corners of Deceit."

 

4/23/20: Time to face a simple truth. Trump is now the leader of the newly formed Windmill Party. The GOP is extinct. He can tell the rank and file anything and they will swallow his sentences whole. If he says windmill noise causes cancer, they won’t blink. If he says climate change is a “hoax,” they will nod. If scientists at NASA and NOAA are sounding alarms, they tune them out. If they believe wholeheartedly in Donald J. Trump, there’s no need to think for themselves.

Rush Limbaugh taught the ill-informed to trust science.

(He will later receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

 

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“Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.” 

Dr. Rick Bright, head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority

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Not to deny that the Windmill Party includes many fine folks. Some of this blogger’s friends, neighbors, and even favorite relatives have been known to vote the Windmill Party line. 

That doesn’t mean this party isn’t chock full of nuts. Unfortunately, those nuts usually drive party policy. You have Alex Jones, peddler of both absurd conspiracy theories and expensive coronavirus-curing toothpaste, for one. In this alternative denier universe, Barack Obama was never born in America. The slaughter at Sandy Hook was a “false flag.” The massacre of first graders and teachers wasn’t the work of a screwed up 15-year-old armed with his mother’s AR-15. It was pulled off by the government, so Obama could have an excuse to seize all of our guns. 

Now we find ourselves swamped by trouble, in large part due to President Trump’s ability to ignore science. The Windmill faithful believed him when he claimed COVID-19 was like the flu. Their hero promised when it got warmer in April the virus would go away. They believed Trump and the other loudest deniers. They listened when Rush Limbaugh said the coronavirus was “the common cold, folks.” They believed because Rush had warned them about the “four corners of deceit” for years. Those four: government, academia, science, and media.

 

On an almost daily basis, Limbaugh and others worked to fire up the Windmill base. And the base believed. They listened when Laura Ingraham and Ainsley Earhardt and that whole goofy Fox News crew said there was no need to be alarmed. They took comfort knowing the virus was no threat. The president was nonchalant about taking action to address the spread. Party members assumed the nation was in good hands because they didn’t believe the media if they said we were not. The nation wasn’t in good hands. The president was a bumbling buffoon. 

The four corners of “truth” for Trump and the Windmill Party turned out to be superstition, simplification, bullsh*t, and lies.

 

* 

Fired for refusing to bend science to fit the president’s whims. 

NOTHING this president or any other did could have kept our country from suffering serious pain. But there was a chance to blunt the spread and limit that pain in the first weeks of the crisis. 

That chance was thrown away. 

The science was ignored. Now we pay an astronomical price. Today, we learned that 4.4 million more Americans had filed for unemployment. That brings the total for five weeks to 26.5 million. 

That is what happens when you compare a virus with some of the characteristics of SARS and MERS (my daughter, who works in infectious diseases at the CDC, just explained the similarities in a phone conversation) to “the common cold, folks.” You don’t act with the urgency you should. 

And you pay and pay and pay.

Frontline nurses aren't messing around with this "flu."

 

WE HAD fresh evidence again yesterday of the damage that can result when deniers lead us in reverse. 

Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the federal agency working on a vaccine to fight the virus, released a letter, announcing he had been fired. He said he refused to bend science to fit the president’s whims. 

If you haven’t been paying attention, because you’ve been busy trying to figure out how to pay last month’s bills, let alone the bills for this month, you may not realize the president has been touting an almost magical cure for COVID-19. The drug has never been tested for the purpose, but Trump says hydroxychloroquine could be “a gift from god.” He had “a hunch,” he has said, it could work to fight off the virus and he has been pushing hard for its use.

 

The problem was that the Windmill Party folks were sold. Ingraham made it clear on her nightly show that the drug would be a “game changer” and we could all thank Donald J. Trump. Hannity touted the drug. Tucker Carlson invited a guest on his show who swore that hydroxychloroquine had a “100 percent” cure rate in a clinical trial conducted by Stanford University. (See: 4/19/20.) 

Behind the scenes, Dr. Bright was making it clear he believed the drug would not work and might well do harm. 

What, then, was the sin for which he was fired? Dr. Bright says he was shunted aside because of his “insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit [emphasis added].” 

Bah! The Windmill crowd doesn’t trust science! Science is one of the “four corners” of deceit. 

In his statement, delivered by his lawyers, Bright said he was “speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science – not politics or cronyism – has to lead the way. Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths,” he added. “Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.”

 

* 

FOR NOW, we live in a free country, where Dr. Bright can publish his statement and employ the word “trump” in unsubtle fashion. We still enjoy free speech. The New York Times can pick up the story. We still have freedom of the press. Trump might not like it, nor his most avid fans. We don’t live in China. (Yet.) In China they silenced whistleblowers who warned COVID-19 was a threat. 

In this country, a reporter – a person President Trump would tell his followers was an “Enemy of the People” – inquired  during the daily press conference: Was Dr. Bright fired for taking a stand? 

In this country, the leader of the Windmill Party could only respond, “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t; I don’t know who he is.”