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Tag: coronavirus
Trump says he can bring in coronavirus experts quickly. The experts say it is not that simple.
The White House official charged with leading the U.S. response to deadly pandemics left nearly two years ago as his global health security team was disbanded. Federal funding for preventing and mitigating the spread of infectious disease has been repeatedly threatened since President Trump’s election.
Despite the mounting threat of a coronavirus outbreak in the United States, Trump said he has no regrets about those actions and that expertise and resources can be quickly ramped up to meet the current needs.
Former federal officials and public-health experts argue that an effective response to a epidemiological crisis demands sustained planning and investment. While the administration’s response to coronavirus has been criticized in recent weeks as slow and disjointed, people in and outside the White House have warned for years that the nation is ill prepared for a dangerous pandemic. Continue reading.
Trump Administration Faces Economic Test as Coronavirus Shakes Markets
If the virus spreads in the United States, the Federal Reserve might have to cut rates. But how fiscal policymakers respond is likely to be even more important.
WASHINGTON — The global spread of the deadly coronavirus is posing a significant economic test for President Trump, whose three-year stretch of robust growth could be shaken by supply chain delays, a tourism slowdown and ruptures in other critical sectors of the American economy.
The outbreak of the virus in China has already disrupted global trade, sending American companies and retailers that rely on Chinese imports scrambling to repair a temporary break in their supply chains. Its spread to South Korea, Italy and beyond has hindered global travel. Economic forecasters say that the effects will hurt growth in the United States this year even if they do not intensify — and that if the virus becomes a global pandemic, it could knock the world economy into recession.
Stock markets have plunged this week on fears about the virus, with companies such as Apple and Microsoft among the most prominent businesses that have warned that supply chain disruptions could slow sales. Analysts said this week’s declines were on track to be the steepest since the 2008 financial crisis. Continue reading.
U.S. Health Workers Responding to Coronavirus Lacked Training and Protective Gear, Whistle-Blower Says
Team members were not properly trained, lacked necessary gear and moved freely around and off military bases where Americans were quarantined, a complaint says.
WASHINGTON — Federal health employees interacted with Americans quarantined for possible exposure to the coronaviruswithout proper medical training or protective gear, then scattered into the general population, according to a government whistle-blower who lawmakers say faced retaliation for reporting concerns.
The team was “improperly deployed” to two military bases in California to assist the processing of Americans who had been evacuated from coronavirus hot zones in China and elsewhere, according to a portion of a narrative account shared with Congress and obtained by The New York Times ahead of a formal complaint to the Office of the Special Counsel, an independent government agency that handles federal whistle-blower complaints.
Staff members from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families were sent to Travis Air Force Base and March Air Reserve Base in late January and early February and were ordered to enter quarantined areas, including a hangar where coronavirus evacuees were being received, the complaint said. They were not provided safety-protocol training until five days into their assignment, said the whistle-blower, who is described as a senior leader at the health agency. Continue reading.
Pence Will Control All Coronavirus Messaging From Health Officials
The White House’s attempt to impose a more disciplined approach to communications about the virus was undermined by President Trump, who complained the news media was overstating the threat.
WASHINGTON — The White House moved on Thursday to tighten control of coronavirus messaging by government health officials and scientists, directing them to coordinate all statements and public appearances with the office of Vice President Mike Pence, according to several officials familiar with the new approach.
But on a day that the White House sought to display a more disciplined strategy to the administration’s communications about the virus, Mr. Trump used an evening event honoring African-American History Month to rail against the news media, claiming it is overstating the threat, and to congratulate himself for keeping the number of cases low.
“I think it’s an incredible achievement what our country’s done,” Mr. Trump said, noting that he had moved quickly to ban travel from China after the emergence of the virus. Even though a total of 60 people infected with the coronavirus are in the United States, he ignored all but the 15 who did not initially contract it overseas. Continue reading.
Stocks fall 4% as sell-off worsens
Stocks fell more than 4% on Thursday, extending the market’s worst week since the financial crisis in 2008 following a spike in coronavirus cases around the world.
The big picture: All three indices are in correction, down over 10% from recent record-highs, amid a global market rout. It’s the S&P 500’s quickest decline into correction territory in the index’s history, per Deutsche Bank. View the post here.
California undertakes extensive effort to trace contacts of woman with coronavirus
VACAVILLE, Calif. — California has launched a far-reaching effort to find anyone who might have come in contact with a new coronavirus patient infected despite having no known link to others with the illness, as federal officials tried Thursday to fix the faulty testing process that has hamstrung their ability to track how widely the disease is spreading.
U.S. officials raced to meet the daunting new challenge of a virus that could be spreading through a Northern California community, even as the covid-19 virus continued its relentless march around the globe. Stock markets continued to plunge, Japan initiated a weeks-long school closure and an Iranian lawmaker contracted the infection. From the Middle East to South Korea to parts of Europe, the number of deaths and infections continued to grow.
In Washington, Vice President Pence convened his first meeting as the new head of the task force battling the virus. On the other side of the country, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and state health officials sought to reassure jittery residents that public health officials would be able to handle the first U.S. case of community transmission. Continue reading.
Republican response to potential pandemic aims at protecting Trump with cowardice, hypocrisy and outright lies
The last time a deadly virus spread quickly across continents, Republicans in Congress ramped up xenophobic rhetoric to fear-monger ahead of the 2014 midterm elections. Echoing Donald Trump, who at the time hosted a weekly “Fox & Friends,” Republicans called for a travel ban and spread misinformation. “[President] Obama should apologize to the American people & resign!” Trump tweeted in October of 2014. Public polls right before the midterm elections showed that nearly 80% of Republicans thought the U.S. government should quarantine people who had recently been in a West African country with a major Ebola outbreak and nearly 50% worried they would be exposed to the Ebola virus. It was a catastrophic election for Democrats, with Republicans winning nine Senate seats and 13 House seats.
Six years later, President Trump continues to overhype the threat of the Ebola virus — this time in an effort to obscure his bungled response to a global health pandemic under his watch. Republicans in Congress are again spreading misinformation — this time in an overt attempt to defend Trump from criticism over his incompetent response.
As both Trump and his White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow appeared before cameras on Tuesday to claim that the coronavirus — and COVID-19, the disease it causes — are “well under control” and “contained,” the Dow Jones Industrial tumbled 1,000 points. On Wednesday, it fell almost another 900 points. Trump insisted on Twitter, “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” Continue reading.
NYT reporter rNYT reporter reveals the stunning reason Trump believed coronavirus would disappear next month
On CNN Thursday, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman revealed that President Donald Trump is angry about his administration’s coronavirus response — in part because he misunderstood what the experts told him about the disease and thought they meant it was going to go away soon.
“The president has been very frustrated with the public messaging of this from his administration, but not for the reasons that people necessarily think,” said Haberman. “It’s because there were experts who were saying one thing from the CDC, which was that there is this problem growing, and then he was trying to tamp this down in his own comments, and he keeps saying something that, as I understand it, is a misinterpretation of what he was told in a briefing, which was that viruses tend to decrease in numbers in terms of spread during warmer weather. He has taken that and put his own spin on it which is, it’s going to stop by April. He’s been telling people that for a while.”
“He was very concerned when he was in India, as he was watching the stock market fall,” added Haberman. “He was calling aides, wanting them to say something public that was going to try to quell the nerves. That obviously didn’t happen, or didn’t happen to the degree he wanted.” Continue reading.
Wall Street Is (Finally) Waking Up to the Damage Coronavirus Could Do
The financial world is realizing how different this is from a trade war or other recent economic hiccups.
For weeks, there has been a strange divergence among those trying to predict what coronavirus might mean for financial markets and the world economy.
People in the trenches of global commerce — supply chain managers, travel industry experts, employers large and small — warned of substantial disruptions to their businesses. And public health authorities feared that the disease could spread far beyond Wuhan in China.
Yet financial markets and most economic forecasters projected the virus outbreak wouldn’t do much harm to the economy and corporate profits — at the least, nothing that an interest-rate cut or two from the Federal Reserve couldn’t fix. The S&P 500 hit a new high last Wednesday. Continue reading.