Latest Coronavirus - Yikes

#67,380
#67,380
utvols88 said:
I think Hog and I agree on this. That private businesses can make it a requirement but the government should not mandate it.
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I get it. I guess my question is, at what level of risk to the general population, would a Gov mask mandate be reasonable?

I know hardliners might say, it's never reasonable, but I don't think that reflects reality.
 
#67,381
#67,381
Stew Cook said:
I get it. I guess my question is, at what level of risk to the general population, would a Gov mask mandate be reasonable?

I know hardliners might say, it's never reasonable, but I don't think that reflects reality.
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Never.

Just give the public all of the facts and let them decide. When mandatory evacuations are ordered because of a hurricane the police don't issue citations or arrest people refusing to evacuate, they just tell them we aren't coming to rescue you if you get in trouble. They also don't forcibly close down the small businesses and let WalMart stay open.
 
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#67,383
#67,383
hog88 said:
Never.

Just give the public all of the facts and let them decide. When mandatory evacuations are ordered because of a hurricane the police don't issue citations or arrest people refusing to evacuate, they just tell them we aren't coming to rescue you if you get in trouble. They also don't forcibly close down the small businesses and let WalMart stay open.
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Yes they do. Have you ever heard of the health department? They will close you down if they find rat feces on the floor or in food. Do you like rat crap in your food or are you fine if they let them seasons your burger with it?
 
#67,384
#67,384
Mick said:
Yes they do. Have you ever heard of the health department? They will close you down if they find rat feces on the floor or in food. Do you like rat crap in your food or are you fine if they let them seasons your burger with it?
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Apples to Oranges Mick
 
#67,385
#67,385
Rickyvol77 said:
Yes, except elective surgeries were cancelled for a month and a half and hospitals are now doing something completely different
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There would need to be an (Very sizable) increase in unreported negatives since June to explain the disparity. The circumstances you’re relying on to make excuses predate the spike existed in May. They are not related.

Rickyvol77 said:
What “government resources“ would have prevented the spread of it?
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So it’s a straw man that people are saying he did a good job, but you’re contesting the assertion that he didn’t do a good job? Makes perfect sense.

There are three primary failings of Trump’s response: failure to be prepared, failure to communicate effectively, and failure to respond to facets of the problem that the federal government was best suited to handle.

Failure to be prepared

In 2014, based on its experience with pandemics and flu-like diseases, the obama administration created overlapping workgroups at DHS and NSC to monitor threats and assist in response to contagious diseases. The groups were intended to be permanent, but in 2018, Trump repositioned these groups to a posture that emphasized chemical weapons rather than contagious diseases.

He also did not seek to renew the Predict program, another public health/infectious disease research program dealing with respiratory illnesses and it was eliminated in fall 2019.
These administrative moves and the administration’s overall lack of emphasis on scientific expertise contributed to a government brain drain, leading to the departure of expert talent like Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb. These two in particular were some of the first experts publicly calling for many of the policies listed below, as early as January 28. Many other countries implemented the policies advocated by Borio and Gottlieb on a national level and did so sooner than we did, which is why they have had a more effective response.
Furthermore, the elimination of or reprioritization of these groups turned off a lot of the safeguards that might have clued us in for the need to prepare a response prior to 12.31 when China notified the WHO about the spread of a Novel Coronavirus.
These groups also could have outlined the response and begin developing decision making criteria with minimal oversight, once the need became obvious. Certainly, Gottlieb and Borio were sounding the alarm before Fauci, assuming Fauci’s early public statements reflect his actual counsel and were not merely public soothing.

The outgoing Obama Admin and DHS both war gamed pandemic responses with the Trump Admin. So clearly the potential threat posed by respiratory diseases in the US was known prior to 2019.
However, reports are that the administration did not take the first exercise seriously. Whether or not you believe that, the DHS exercise was memorialized in a report, which showed poor communication was a failing of the response. This compounds the magnitude of the administration’s failure to communicate during the actual Trump Virus outbreak.

Had the administration placed due emphasis on pandemic preparedness, we might have had a heads up before the WHO was notified on December 31. We certainly would have had a more effective task force staffed with more and better medical experts in addition to Fauci. The response would have been more timely because there would have been a collaborative team working on the response while Trump was ignoring warnings.

The untimeliness of the response is the chief complaint that we should all have. More action in January and February to implement effective border screenings, procure PPE, develop accurate tests, and develop a strategy for their distribution and administration would have paid dividends down the road by slowing the spread of the virus, thus increasing public faith that the administration had it under control, reducing onset of panic, and allowing for a more measured and controlled response.
Instead, even as late as mid-late January, Trump was ignoring warnings from people like Peter Navarro and Tom Cotton. He finally stopped some travel from China, but still had no apparent plan for how to execute the federal response and maybe not even a plan of what that response would be.
Failure to Communicate

Trump has routinely failed to use consistent verbiage when discussing the virus with the Public. Throughout March, he compared the Trump Virus to the flu and has routinely downplayed its seriousness, likely contributing to the partisan split over whether to take it seriously.

His discussion of plans have been haphazard and unsupported by any type of science or evidence based reasoning. (See e.g. “I don’t see why we can’t be open by Easter.”)

He has undermined CDC guidance at every turn.

He failed to use federal experts to develop and disseminate decision making metrics or guidelines. This was particularly necessary once it became clear that other nations were using stay-at-home quarantines. Trump doesn’t have the authority to order such a quarantine, but he does have the best resources to provide guidance to governors on how to do it well. As a result of his failure, Governors treated places like Anderson County the same as Davidson County, when it came to stay at home orders. We diminished rural America’s capacity to self-isolate without any meaningful impact on the virus in those locations. That’s partly a failing of the federal government and the Trump administration because that infrastructure was set up under their authority for the express purpose of avoiding the type of piecemeal response we have had.
He nationalized the issue of reopening and put political leverage on governors to reopen nonessential businesses. This was in contradiction of his own government experts and has led to the ongoing increase in cases and deaths.

He also failed communicate effectively with state leaders about the nature of the federal government’s planned response. The federal government is the largest government with the most funding and thus had the most well-developed apparatus for understanding and combatting Trump Virus. States looked to the federal government on issues like testing. Trump’s confusing, self-serving, and self-aggrandizing rhetoric left many states in the lurch.
He apparently failed to communicate the methods by which the federal government would distribute from its stockpile of resources and dispensed some of those resources based on patronage rather than need.

Failure of the Federal Response

He failed to effectively lobby China to get our researchers on the ground to get more info as early as possible.

He failed to put leverage on the WHO to do the same, before they flubbed it. He’s used them as a scapegoat, but he failed to staff American positions at the WHO, which might have maintained a greater degree of US, as opposed to Chinese influence on the organization.
He failed to remove restrictions that prevented private test development, which would have mitigated the CDC’s mistake.

Once a successful test was developed, it should have been mass produced and used it for contact tracing. This should have been done early before things got out of control. This is what Fauci, Gottlieb, and Borio were all advocating for in February and early March. This is a process for which the resources of the federal government are best suited. It was not accomplished until maybe May, when the number of cases was beyond effective contact tracing.
When the CDC test failed, he failed to effectively collaborate with friendly foreign governments to expedite development of a new test.
He did not centralize PPE procurement and competent distribution beginning in January so that the states weren’t bidding against each other and the federal government and then having their resources taken by the federal government when they did manage to procure some. Again, to avoid lack of confusion, bidding wars among states, and to take advantage of economies of scale, this is a federal issue.
He failed to implement effective border screening or quarantine travelers originating from areas with high likelihood of exposure. CBP would have been perfectly suited to this task.
______________________________

Time was of the essence in a response to a disease that spreads as rapidly as this one was known to spread. The failure to be prepared and failure to communicate delayed responses, if they ever occurred. It killed our ability to stop Trump Virus before it became too widespread, and forced us to this posture of a controlled burn. With that controlled burn comes a heightened need for everyone to row in the same direction with respect to social distancing etc. Instead, President’s rhetoric has downplayed the seriousness and has suggested that it will just magically disappear.
He’s failed relative to most other presidents’ responses to contagious diseases and he has failed compared to other world leaders’ effectiveness at combatting this virus. There is no metric that I’m aware of by which we are doing well relative to the rest of the world. The variable that best explains that failure is the anemic response from our centralized government of which Donald Trump is now almost solely in charge.

I’m sure there’s more, but typing it all out was a chore without looking for more. Happy to provide links, just please clearly identify the factual assertion you’d like to see proof of.
 
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#67,386
#67,386
Mick said:
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say if a hospital brings in a freezer truck for bodies, it's not normal.
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Knoxville had set aside the expo center..... Kentucky did 1,000,000 dollars renovations on a building.....New York was sent a naval ship...... our hospital cleared off two wards including developing a secondary unit for emergencies...... most of those were never used and some barely used..... they are planning ahead but want to know what the numbers are currently telling us.
 
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#67,389
#67,389
hUTch2002 said:
I understand what you’re saying here and no there isn’t any evidence that the rate of underreporting negative tests changed. Like way too many things related to this virus, we just don’t know. About the only thing we do know is we don’t know the true impact due to shenanigans all the way around. Trump certainly hasn’t done everything correctly, no POTUS would in his shoes, and he certainly can share in some blame for things that haven’t gone as well as they could have but it isn’t just Trump. Local and state leaders share in that as well.
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I agree with all of this. I said as much about state leaders in posts about Cuomo.

However, the tl;dr version of that wall of text is essentially that a lot of local failures could have been ameliorated by a more prepared federal government that hadn’t undergone a brain drain and administrative restructuring away from pandemic preparedness.

If the NSC or DHS had put out guidelines to governors saying “we recommend a piecemeal shelter-in-place targeting locations that feed hospitals with x rate of spread that are at y% of ventilator capacity” or something of that sort I think most governors would have welcomed that, assuming Trump had stfu.
 
#67,391
#67,391
volfanhill said:
Just to be clear, are you suggesting Trump is in some way responsible for the actions of Cuomo’s underling? I just want to make sure I understand your argument.
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Let’s try it in the form of an analogy:

Player runs the wrong play. Team loses. Is the head coach directly responsible for actions of the player? Is he ultimately responsible for the loss?
 
#67,392
#67,392
RockyTop85 said:
Let’s try it in the form of an analogy:

Player runs the wrong play. Team loses. Is the head coach directly responsible for actions of the player? Is he ultimately responsible for the loss?
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Well first we have to know what x and y equals and where each fall on the continuum before the question can be answered.
 
#67,393
#67,393
volbeast33 said:
Knoxville had set aside the expo center..... Kentucky did 1,000,000 dollars renovations on a building.....New York was sent a naval ship...... our hospital cleared off two wards including developing a secondary unit for emergencies...... most of those were never used and some barely used..... they are planning ahead but want to know what the numbers are currently telling us.
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Seems like you're in the know and should have the information you seek. Is there an increase in hospitalizations over this time last year?
 
#67,394
#67,394
RockyTop85 said:
Let’s try it in the form of an analogy:

Player runs the wrong play. Team loses. Is the head coach directly responsible for actions of the player? Is he ultimately responsible for the loss?
Click to expand...


Let's add to your analogy that:

1) in the past the current head coach has vigorously criticized the prior head coach for exactly the same thing.

2) That the head coach has said that he, and he alone, can prevent the very problem. But when it happens, he literally blames everyone else.

3) The head coach says we need less video taping of games because that's the only way anyone realizes how putrid and incompetent a coach he actually is.
 
#67,395
#67,395
RockyTop85 said:
Let’s try it in the form of an analogy:

Player runs the wrong play. Team loses. Is the head coach directly responsible for actions of the player? Is he ultimately responsible for the loss?
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What happens when the coach can't bench, cut, or fire the "player" when he sucks?
 
#67,396
#67,396
utvols88 said:
I think Hog and I agree on this. That private businesses can make it a requirement but the government should not mandate it.
Click to expand...
So you preferred to be governed by businesses? Of course, why not? Maybe a mask free business would do great.
 
#67,397
#67,397
lawgator1 said:
Let's add to your analogy that:

1) in the past the current head coach has vigorously criticized the prior head coach for exactly the same thing.

2) That the head coach has said that he, and he alone, can prevent the very problem. But when it happens, he literally blames everyone else.

3) The head coach says we need less video taping of games because that's the only way anyone realizes how putrid and incompetent a coach he actually is.
Click to expand...

judges when they see you or Rocky on the docket.

Agravated.gif
 
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#67,398
#67,398
BeecherVol said:
What happens when the coach can't bench, cut, or fire the "player" when he sucks?
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That’s a remedial action, it doesn’t prevent the broken play. Trump’s not responsible for failing to remedy the employment of the guy who made that call. But he is one of the people ultimately responsible for the outcome.
 
#67,400
#67,400
lawgator1 said:
Let's add to your analogy that:

1) in the past the current head coach has vigorously criticized the prior head coach for exactly the same thing.

2) That the head coach has said that he, and he alone, can prevent the very problem. But when it happens, he literally blames everyone else.

3) The head coach says we need less video taping of games because that's the only way anyone realizes how putrid and incompetent a coach he actually is.
Click to expand...
tl;dr
 
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