Tag: Trump mishandling pandemic crisis

Trump blasts health adviser: ‘Fauci has nothing to do with NFL Football’

The Hill logoPresident Trump pushed back on comments his top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, made about the risks of an NFL season on Friday, indicating he wants the season to go forward.

“Tony Fauci has nothing to do with NFL Football,” Trump tweeted. “They are planning a very safe and controlled opening. However, if they don’t stand for our National Anthem and our Great American Flag, I won’t be watching!!!”

Trump’s tweet was in reference to comments Fauci made to CNN on Thursday, when the doctor said it would be “very hard” for the NFL to have a season safely without having players in a “bubble,” which the league currently does not have plans for. Continue reading.

 

In countries keeping the coronavirus at bay, experts watch U.S. case numbers with alarm

Washington Post logoAs coronavirus cases surge in the U.S. South and West, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored.

“It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the past three weeks and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus routines.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it’s unsafe,” Wiles said of the U.S.-wide economic reopening. “It’s hard to see how this ends. There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It’s heartbreaking.” Continue reading.

Viruses like the one that causes COVID-19 have long been Dr. Anthony Fauci’s ‘worst nightmare’

For years, viruses like the one that causes COVID-19 has been the stuff of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s nightmares.

Speaking to a digital version of an annual conference of biotechnology executives, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said Tuesday he long expected – and hoped against – the arrival of a new respiratory virus that jumped from animals, was highly contagious, and potentially lethal.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, he said, has more of those factors than any other disease he’s seen in his lifetime.

Trump-fueled promotion of unproved coronavirus drug generated spike in prescriptions, study finds

Washington Post logoPatients who need chloroquine for treatment of other illnesses may be cut off

Publicity about a small study of a potential covid-19 treatment was enough to create a 200 percent increase in hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine prescriptions in March. Although the biggest surge was short-lived, almost a half million extra prescriptions were filled over a 10-week period studied by researchers, according to the resultspublished yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The national study found that hydroxychloroquine/chloroquine prescriptions were increasing slowly when the pandemic was declared, but shot up after publicity about a non-randomized study of 19 Chinese patients on March 17. Although that study has been widely criticized, Fox News personalities and President Trump promoted the potential cure.

The week before the publicity, prescriptions were 31 percent higher than normal, but over the next week, the prescriptions shot up 214 percent above normal, said the researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the Boston Veteran’s Administration Healthcare System and GoodRx. Continue reading.

Rising ICU bed use ‘a big red flag’

States proceed with reopening plans despite warnings local hospitals may struggle to handle a new coronavirus outbreak.

Intensive care units in Montgomery, Ala., are overflowing with Covid-19 patients, pushing them into emergency departments that are not primed to care for them. And Alabama’s capital city could be a harbinger for other parts of the country.

ICU beds are also starting to fill up in places like Minnesota’s Twin Cities; Omaha, Neb.; and the entire state of Rhode Island, according to local health officials and epidemiologists tracking such data, a warning sign of possible health care problems down the road. The availability of ICU beds is one measure of a hospital’s ability to care for its most vulnerable patients — people with severe illness who require more staff to treat them and may need life-support equipment such as a ventilator to breathe. And it’s served as a metric for whether the local health care system is able to handle a coronavirus outbreak, albeit a constantly shifting one.

Some state leaders deny there are problems, saying they are prepared to convert regular hospital beds to ICU beds, if necessary. In the meantime, they are pressing ahead with reopening plans. Continue reading.

White House and CDC remove coronavirus warnings about choirs in faith guidance

Washington Post logoThe Trump administration with no advance notice removed warnings contained in guidance for the reopening of houses of worship that singing in choirs can spread the coronavirus.

Last Friday, the administration released pandemic guidance for faith communities after weeks of debate flared between the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those guidelines posted on the CDC website included recommendations that religious communities “consider suspending or at least decreasing use of choir/musical ensembles and congregant singing, chanting, or reciting during services or other programming, if appropriate within the faith tradition.”

It added: “The act of singing may contribute to transmission of Covid-19, possibly through emission of aerosols.” Continue reading.

Administration initially dispensed scarce covid-19 drug to some hospitals that didn’t need it

Washington Post logoOfficials describe early missteps that delayed treatment to critically ill patients

The Trump administration mishandled the initial distribution of the only approved coronavirusmedication, delaying treatment to some critically ill patients with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to nine current and former senior administration officials.

The first tranche of 607,000 vials of the antiviral medication remdesivir, donated to the government by drugmaker Gilead Sciences, was distributed in early May — in some cases to the wrong hospitals, to hospitals with no intensive care units and therefore no eligible patients, and to facilities without the needed refrigeration to store it, meaning some had to be returned to the government, said the officials familiar with the distribution effort.

Demand for remdesivir soared after the National Institutes of Health announced on April 29 that a clinical trial had shown that hospitalized patients with advanced covid-19 who received the experimental drug recovered faster than similar patients who received a placebo. Two days later, the Food and Drug Administration, citing those results, approved the drug to treat severely ill patients. Continue reading.

For a numbers-obsessed Trump, there’s one he has tried to ignore: 100,000 dead

Washington Post logoPresident Trump has spent his life in thrall to numbers — his wealth, his ratings, his polls. Even during the deadly coronavirus pandemic, he has remained fixated on certain metrics — peppering aides about infection statistics, favoring rosy projections and obsessing over the gyrating stock market.

But as the nation reached a bleak milestone this week — 100,000 Americans dead from the novel coronavirus — Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet. His public schedule this week contains no special commemoration, no moment of silence, no collective sharing of grief.

Trump’s most direct comments earlier in the week came in a pair of tweets Tuesday, amounting to a preemptive rebuttal. “For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number,” he wrote. “That’s 15 to 20 times more than we will lose.” Continue reading.

Report reveals an Obama-era idea to protect medical workers in a pandemic was thwarted under Trump

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that his Democratic predecessor in the White House, Barack Obama, left him ill-prepared to handle a major health crisis when, in fact, Obama’s administration left behind a comprehensive pandemic game plan that included a 69-page playbook. But Trump’s administration abandoned those Obama-era recommendations. On top of that, National Public Radio’s Brian Mann is reporting that Trump’s administration, in 2017, “stopped work on new federal regulations that would have forced the health care industry to prepare for an airborne infectious disease pandemic such as COVID-19.”

David Michaels, who headed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under Obama, told NPR, “If that rule had gone into effect, then every hospital, every nursing home would essentially have to have a plan where they made sure they had enough respirators and they were prepared for this sort of pandemic.”

Trump has often touted his deregulatory efforts as a major success of his administration. But this example shows just one way of many in which these policies can go wrong with disastrous consequences. Many of these negative consequences may not emerge until years later. Continue reading.