PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “crews arrive at a hospital with a patient suspected of having COVID-19, the hospital may have a physical bed open for them, but not enough nurses or doctors to staff it.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
POST 57. November 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Deborah Birx: the US is entering its “most deadly phase” yet, one that requires “much more aggressive action,”
POST 58. November 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language…”
POST 59. November 5, 2020. Coronavirus. “The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began..
“One of the first states to receive rapid, low-cost coronavirus tests from the U.S. government is cautioning against their use in asymptomatic people, a group that were hoped to benefit most from the technology.”
How Johns Hopkins tracks Coronavirus cases: “ systems engineering, a modernized approach to civil engineering for the complex, interconnected world.”
“The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began, bursting past a grim threshold even as the wave of infections engulfing the country shows no sign of receding.
The total count of new infections on Wednesday was more than 107,800, according to a New York Times database. Twenty-three states have recorded more cases in the past week than in any other seven-day stretch.
Five states — Maine, Minnesota, Indiana, Nebraska and Colorado — set single-day case records. Cases were also mounting in the Mountain West and even in the Northeast, which over the summer seemed to be getting the virus under control.
North and South Dakota and Wisconsin have led the country for weeks in the number of new cases relative to their population. But other states have seen steep recent increases in the last 14 days.
Daily case reports in Minnesota, on average, have increased 102 percent over that time, while those in Indiana have risen 73 percent. For months, Maine had among the lowest levels of transmission anywhere in the country, but new cases there have more than tripled. In Wyoming, new cases are up 73 percent, while in Iowa they have more than doubled.
Deaths related to the coronavirus, which lag behind case reports, have increased 21 percent across the country in the last two weeks.
Hospitals in some areas are feeling the strain of surging caseloads. More than 50,000 people are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 across the country, according to the Covid Tracking Project, an increase of roughly 64 percent since the beginning of October.” (A)
“One of the first states to receive rapid, low-cost coronavirus tests from the U.S. government is cautioning against their use in asymptomatic people, a group that were hoped to benefit most from the technology.
Antigen tests like one from Abbott Laboratories that look for telltale viral proteins may miss some infections that can be picked up by costlier gold-standard assays, and can incorrectly return positive results. The rapid tests aren’t recommended for people without symptoms who haven’t been exposed to a Covid-19 patient, and those who undergo one should be informed of the limitations, the Louisiana Department of Health said in guidance issued last week.
The recommendations highlight issues with tests like Abbott’s $5 BinaxNOW that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is spending $750 million on and were used in the White House. State health officials are increasingly concerned that people without symptoms should be screened with more costly but more reliable polymerase chain reaction assays because of worries about the rapid tests’ performance, according to Jeff Engel, a senior adviser at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.
HHS “made this purchase without any studies on the novel use in which they’re deploying these tests,” Engel said. “I think that’s careless.”
HHS is providing antigen tests for use in symptomatic and asymptomatic people, said Mia Heck, an agency spokeswoman, in an email. Widespread, affordable rapid antigen testing helps slow the virus’s spread, and tests like BinaxNOW, when used as intended, can detect those most likely to be infectious, Abbott said in an email. Its shares gained 3.6% at 12:51 p.m. in New York.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also issued an alert on antigen tests, warning on Tuesday that they can produce incorrect positive results. Problems are more likely in populations with low virus prevalence, or when the test is improperly performed, the FDA said in a statement.” (B)
“Less than a month into 2020, Ensheng Dong heard the news. A new viral contagion, SARS-CoV-2, had begun to spread in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei Province. Dong, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, was thousands of miles away from the outbreak’s epicenter, but he had studied epidemics and knew how fast they can spread.
Taiyuan, another provincial capital and Dong’s hometown, is 600 miles from Wuhan. That’s not exactly next door—it’s the same distance that separates New York City and Detroit—but Dong felt concerned for his family’s safety.
On January 20, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed in Washington state. Suddenly, the coronavirus—for Dong—seemed that much closer.
The following day, Dong met with his faculty adviser, Lauren Gardner, co-director of the school’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering. They discussed the emerging epidemic and decided it was worth a closer look.
Gardner suggested that Dong use a geographic information system (GIS) to construct an online dashboard, a visualization tool that uses maps and data to monitor unfolding events.
Dong nodded. “That’s my plan.”
Dong, 30, studies systems engineering, a modernized approach to civil engineering for the complex, interconnected world.”
“The emphasis is on civilization engineering,” Dong said. “It’s basically about the interaction of people with the built environment.” For Dong, the discipline allows him to explore ways to combine the objectivity of numeric data with the subjectivity of data visualization.” (C)
PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “crews arrive at a hospital with a patient suspected of having COVID-19, the hospital may have a physical bed open for them, but not enough nurses or doctors to staff it.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
POST 57. November 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Deborah Birx: the US is entering its “most deadly phase” yet, one that requires “much more aggressive action,”
POST 58. November 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language…”
Mr. Trump will still have control of the nation’s health apparatus and the bully pulpit that comes with the Oval Office until Jan. 20, as infections approach 100,000 a day and death rates begin to rise as hospitals are strained to their breaking points.
But the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language, telling voters that the country is “rounding the corner” in the fight against the virus that has claimed nearly a quarter of a million lives.
He has stopped listening to Alex M. Azar II, his health secretary; Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; and Dr. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general. On Monday, the president lashed out at Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease specialist, hinting that he may fire Dr. Fauci after the election — though it would be extremely difficult for him to do so…
The adviser Mr. Trump does listen to is Dr. Scott Atlas, a former Stanford neuroradiologist and late addition to the coronavirus task force who has dismissed the efficacy of mask wearing, suggested that the pandemic should be left largely to run its course — and last week parroted the president’s views on RT, the Russian television network forced to register as a foreign agent.” (A)
The dire warning from Birx, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, is at odds with public comments made by President Donald Trump in the closing days of the presidential election, who is falsely claiming the US is “turning the corner” on the pandemic while pressuring Democratic governors to “open” their states despite surging cases nationwide.
“We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic … leading to increasing mortality,” Birx wrote in an internal report Monday, obtained by the Post. “This is not about lockdowns — It hasn’t been about lockdowns since March or April. It’s about an aggressive balanced approach that is not being implemented.” “ (A)
“All pretense of Donald Trump getting along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has advised six presidents in his nearly four decade tenure as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is gone after the president hinted that he may fire the long-serving official after the November 3 election at a rally Sunday.
At a packed Florida rally late Sunday night, the president’s fifth in as many states that day, Trump told supporters chanting “fire Fauci” to “wait until a little bit after the election,” hinting that he would soon fire the long-serving official.” (B)
“President Trump’s repeated assertions the United States is “rounding the turn” on the novel coronavirus have increasingly alarmed the government’s top health experts, who say the country is heading into a long and potentially deadly winter with an unprepared government unwilling to make tough choices.
“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, said in a wide-ranging interview late Friday. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”” (C)
I’m old enough to remember the polio epidemic of the late 1940’s when Americans came fully together until a vaccine ended the public health crisis.
At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio would paralyze or kill over half a million people worldwide every year. (R)
In 2009, a new H1N1 (“swine flu) influenza virus emerged, causing the first global flu pandemic in 40 years.
From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, the CDC estimates there were 60.8 million cases, 274,304 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths in the United States due to the virus.
By April 21, 2009, CDC had begun working to develop a virus that could be used to make a vaccine to protect against the new virus. Following preparation for distribution beginning in June, the first doses were administered in October 2009. (S)
Again we all listened to the public health experts.
With the ominous threats of ZIKA and EBOLA , we were guided by the experts.
But with Coronavirus its politics v. science and if politics prevails or it becomes too late for science we will achieve herd immunity with terrifying consequences.
Here’s what the “battle” looks like today.
___________
“In a taped interview on April 18, Kushner told legendary journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was “getting the country back from the doctors” in what he called a “negotiated settlement.” Kushner also proclaimed that the U.S. was moving swiftly through the “panic phase” and “pain phase” of the pandemic and that the country was at the “beginning of the comeback phase.”
“That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work,” Kushner said. “Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.” The statement reflected a political strategy. Instead of following the health experts’ advice, Trump and Kushner were focused on what would help the president on Election Day. By their calculations, Trump would be the “open-up president.”” (A)
__________
“More than one-third of healthcare workers hospitalized for COVID-19 were nurses, underscoring the need for continued infection prevention and control practices.
During the early months of the pandemic, nurses and nursing assistants were hit particularly hard, accounting for a large percentage of healthcare workers hospitalized with COVID-19, according to an analysis released by the CDC.
The CDC says it examined 6,760 adult hospitalizations from COVID-19 in 13 states from March to May and found that nearly 6% were healthcare workers.
Of those, 36% were in nursing-related occupations. Nearly 28% of hospitalized healthcare workers were admitted to an intensive care unit, 16% required invasive mechanical ventilation, and 4% died.
Ninety percent of healthcare workers hospitalized had at least underlying condition, according to the analysis.” (B)
“Healthcare workers and their families account for a sixth (17%) of hospital admissions for COVID-19 in the working age population (18-65 years), finds a study from Scotland published by The BMJ today.
Although hospital admission with COVID-19 in this age group was very low overall, the risk for healthcare workers and their families was higher compared with other working age adults, especially for those in “front door” patient facing roles such as paramedics and A&E department staff, say the researchers.
As such, they say these findings have implications for the safety and wellbeing of healthcare workers, and their households.
Many healthcare staff work in high-risk settings for contracting COVID-19 and transmitting it to their household, workplace contacts, or both. Yet the extent of these risks are not well understood, as studies are lacking or have been beset by quality issues…
However, patient-facing healthcare workers were three times more likely to be admitted to hospital for COVID-19, while members of their households were nearly twice as likely to be admitted to hospital for COVID-19 than other working age adults.
Those working in “front door” roles, such as paramedics and A&E department staff, were at the highest risk of hospital admission for COVID-19…” (C)
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“Doctors, nurses and caregivers at smaller and poorer hospitals and medical facilities across the country are still struggling to obtain the protective gear, personnel and resources they need to fight the coronavirus despite President Donald Trump’s repeated assertions that the problems are solved.
Health care workers at all types of facilities scrambled for scarce masks, gloves and other life-protecting gear at the beginning of the pandemic. The White House was letting states wage bidding wars against one another, rather than establish a central national manufacturing, supply and distribution chain.
But now, health care workers say a clear disparity has emerged and persisted. Larger and richer hospitals and practices outbid their smaller peers, sometimes for protective gear, sometimes to fill in staffing gaps. And some of those having the hardest time are precisely where the virus is spreading….
Months ago, city hospitals were fighting over essential medical supplies as Covid cases surged. That’s not happening anymore. But doctors, nurses and caregivers say they’re still struggling with resources.
Health care administrators say the smaller and poorer facilities are also being outbid in the labor market, as providers compete for a limited pool of trained nurses and specialists who can care for Covid-19 patients amid chronic staff shortages and pandemic-induced industry upheaval. Their descriptions illustrate the shortcomings of a federal response that was initially focused on major hospitals while scores of smaller providers fell through the cracks.
The resulting disparities, especially among long-term care providers who often continue to care for patients after they leave the hospital or whose patients don’t require hospitalization but are still infectious, puts an asterisk on Trump’s claim that “they’re very much stocked up, they’re in great shape,” as he put it at one of his recent briefings.
“There’s not a single building I work in that has adequate Covid-19 supplies,” said a nursing home worker in Colorado, who requested anonymity.
The challenges may persist. On Friday, the FDA included surgical gowns, gloves, masks, certain ventilators and various testing supplies on its list of medical devices in shortage, based on manufacturer reports. The agency has required companies to report potential supply disruptions since May under the CARES Act.
The shortages of personal protective gear, or PPE, has taken a toll. Without adequate protection against a contagious pathogen, thousands of health workers have fallen ill, and at least 922 have died, according to a 50-state tracking project by Kaiser Health News and the Guardian…
Health care leaders said these shortages stem from a mismatch of resources, as well as the pandemic’s shifting nature. While Congress made available $175 billion in coronavirus relief payments to help hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other care providers, much of the initial funding went to well-resourced hospital systems regardless of need, with more targeted funding rounds coming later.
“Unfortunately, at every level of government, there has not been a coordinated response,” said Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of the American Health Care Association (AHCA) and National Center for Assisted Living. “And there have been some public health mistakes that were made. Early on, everyone thought that every hospital in the country was going to be overrun with Covid. So the decision was made to put all the resources in the hospitals.”
That’s not to say PPE shortages are completely resolved in hospitals. Some front-line workers, even at well-resourced hospitals, say ongoing shortages have forced them to clean and reuse masks and gowns that were intended for single use.” (D)
“For weeks, U.S. government officials and hospital executives have warned of a looming shortage of ventilators as the coronavirus pandemic descended.
But now, doctors are sounding an alarm about an unexpected and perhaps overlooked crisis: a surge in Covid-19 patients with kidney failure that is leading to shortages of machines, supplies and staff required for emergency dialysis.
In recent weeks, doctors on the front lines in intensive care units in New York and other hard-hit cities have learned that the coronavirus isn’t only a respiratory disease that has led to a crushing demand for ventilators.
The disease is also shutting down some patients’ kidneys, posing yet another series of life-and-death calculations for doctors who must ferry a limited supply of specialized dialysis machines from one patient in kidney failure to the next. All the while fearing they may not be able to hook up everyone in time to save them.
It is not yet known whether the kidneys are a major target of the virus, or whether they’re just one more organ falling victim as a patient’s ravaged body surrenders. Dialysis fills the vital roles the kidneys play, cleaning the blood of toxins, balancing essential components including electrolytes, keeping blood pressure in check and removing excess fluids. It can be a temporary measure while the kidneys recover, or it can be used long-term if they do not. Another unknown is whether the kidney damage caused by the virus is permanent….
Outside of New York, the growing demand nationwide for kidney treatments is fraying the most advanced care units in hospitals at emerging hot spots like Boston, Chicago, New Orleans and Detroit.
Kidney specialists now estimate that 20 percent to 40 percent of I.C.U. patients with the coronavirus suffered kidney failure and needed emergency dialysis, according to Dr. Alan Kliger, a nephrologist at Yale University School of Medicine who is co-chairman of a Covid-19 response team for the American Society of Nephrology…
The shortages involved not only the machines, but also fluids and other supplies needed for the dialysis regimen. Having enough trained nurses to provide the treatment has also been a bottleneck. Hospitals said they have called on the federal government to help prioritize equipment, supplies and personnel for the areas of the country that most need it, adding that manufacturers had not been fully responsive to the higher demand…
Some hospitals are also struggling to find enough nurses and technicians to provide dialysis, especially after some who were most skilled at providing the therapy fell sick with the virus themselves. “We did lose nurses to illness,” Dr. Murphy of Mount Sinai said. “We’re just getting some of those nurses back, but it’s been a challenge. We’ve exhausted every avenue that we have within the state with regards to being able to increase nursing.” (E)
“An ICU nurse in Las Vegas said that staffing levels at her small hospital fell noticeably while elective procedures were paused, and did not fully rebound when they resumed. She described the harrowing experience of caring for multiple unstable patients in the dead of night without the ability to call for backup because of thin staffing.
“The feeling you have when no one shows up to help you, it’s like ice in your veins, you never forget it,” she said. She added that while other nearby hospitals had bolstered nursing staff with $1,000 hiring bonuses, her workplace has not.
Adequate nurse staffing was already a contentious issue before the pandemic — for years, nursing unions have pushed for policies that mandate a minimum ratio of nurses-to-patients. California was the only state to enact such a mandate, but hospitals in the state since March have been able to apply for temporary waivers excusing them from the requirement…
Many hospitals that did have funds to hire nonetheless struggled to find staff with specialist training and experience dealing with a highly contagious respiratory disease.
“You have people going there that in many cases had literally no idea what they are doing,” said Sunny Jha, an anesthesiologist at the University of Southern California. “They’ve never worked in an ICU, they’ve never worked in a disaster field, they had never worked with Covid patients, and in some cases they had never worked period — this was their first job out of school.”” (F)
‘New Mexico hospitals face staffing shortages as COVID hospitalizations continue to rise
“What I’m told by the leaders of the university, Presbyterian, Lovelace, St. Vincent is that they really are facing staffing challenges right now,” Dr. Srase said.
Dr. Scrase said nursing staff levels dropped in late summer, but did not specify by how much.
“We all know that almost 1,000 New Mexicans have died, and most of them have died on the watch of these what I would call health care heroes in intensive care units, hospital floors that are taking care of these people— so, that takes a toll,” he said.
Dr. Scrase said he does not want to use field hospitals or the old Lovelace Hospital on Gibson because of staffing difficulties.
Amid the challenges at hospitals, Dr. Scrase also said New Mexico is seeing a record number of new cases across all age groups
“That’s particularly worrisome because it’s the 50 and older group that has a much higher hospitalization rate, and that’s where pressure comes in on hospital beds, ICU beds and staffing,” he said.” (G)
“COVID-19 cases are surging in rural places across the Mountain States and Midwest, and when it hits health care workers, ready reinforcements aren’t easy to find.
In Montana, pandemic-induced staffing shortages have shuttered a clinic in the state’s capital, led a northwestern regional hospital to ask employees exposed to COVID-19 to continue to work and emptied a health department 400 miles to the east.
“Just one more person out and we wouldn’t be able to keep the surgeries going,” said Dr. Shelly Harkins, chief medical officer of St. Peter’s Health in Helena, a city of roughly 32,000 where cases continue to spread. “When the virus is just all around you, it’s almost impossible to not be deemed a contact at some point. One case can take out a whole team of people in a blink of an eye.”
In North Dakota, where cases per resident are growing faster than any other state, hospitals may once again curtail elective surgeries and possibly seek government aid to hire more nurses if the situation gets worse, North Dakota Hospital Association President Tim Blasl said.
“How long can we run at this rate with the workforce that we have?” Blasl said. “You can have all the licensed beds you want, but if you don’t have anybody to staff those beds, it doesn’t do you any good.”
The northern Rocky Mountains, Great Plains and Upper Midwest are seeing the highest surge of COVID-19 cases in the nation, as some residents have ignored recommendations for curtailing the virus, such as wearing masks and avoiding large gatherings. Montana, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin have recently ranked among the top 10 U.S. states in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents over a seven-day period, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Such coronavirus infections — and the quarantines that occur because of them — are exacerbating the health care worker shortage that existed in these states well before the pandemic. Unlike in the nation’s metropolitan hubs, these outbreaks are scattered across hundreds of miles. And even in these states’ biggest cities, the ranks of medical professionals are in short supply. Specialists and registered nurses are sometimes harder to track down than ventilators, N95 masks or hospital beds. Without enough care providers, patients may not be able to get the medical attention they need.
Hospitals have asked staffers to cover extra shifts and learn new skills. They have brought in temporary workers from other parts of the country and transferred some patients to less-crowded hospitals. But, at St. Peter’s Health, if the hospital’s one kidney doctor gets sick or is told to quarantine, Harkins doesn’t expect to find a backup.
“We make a point to not have excessive staff because we have an obligation to keep the cost of health care down for a community — we just don’t have a lot of slack in our rope,” Harkins said. “What we don’t account for is a mass exodus of staff for 14 days.”
Some hospitals are already at patient capacity or are nearly there. That’s not just because of the growing number of COVID-19 patients. Elective surgeries have resumed, and medical emergencies don’t pause for a pandemic.
Some Montana hospitals formed agreements with local affiliates early in the pandemic to share staff if one came up short. But now that the disease is spreading fast — and widely — the hope is that their needs don’t peak all at once.
Montana state officials keep a list of primarily in-state volunteer workers ready to travel to towns with shortages of contact tracers, nurses and more. But during a press conference on Oct. 15, Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock said the state had exhausted that database, and its nationwide request for National Guard medical staffing hadn’t brought in new workers…
Back in Helena, Harkins said St. Peter’s Health had to close a specialty outpatient clinic that treats chronic diseases for two weeks at the end of September because the entire staff had to quarantine.
Now the hospital is considering having doctors take turns spending a week working from home, so that if another wave of quarantines hits in the hospital, at least one untainted person can be brought back to work. But that won’t help for some specialties, like the hospital’s sole kidney doctor.
Every time Harkins’ phone rings, she said, she takes a breath and hopes it’s not another case that will force a whole division to close.
“Because I think immediately of the hundreds of people that need that service and won’t have it for 14 days,” she said.” (H)
“The healthcare industry, long challenged by a shortage of physicians, nurses and other well-qualified staff, is facing even more of a dire need to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A new challenge are disruptors that are looking at the same pool of talent. Companies that formerly represented no competition to healthcare organizations, such as Amazon, Uber and Apple, are now well integrated into the industry, and they’re targeting both future and current employees.
“This is why it’s imperative for organizations to create a culture and employee experience that negates expensive and time-consuming tasks that push your company out of the market,” said Chas Fields, a human capital management strategic advisor at Kronos in the HIMSS20 Digital session, “HCM for the modern workforce: Becoming the employer of choice.”
To prevent employee turnover and improve their commitment to the workplace, organizations must curate an exceptional employee experience, Fields said.
To do this, four challenges need to be addressed: the talent shortage, competition among workplaces, creating a culture that matters and disruptors to the industry.
Talent shortages are especially prevalent among nurses and physicians. In fact, 40% of registered nurses are over the age of 50, meaning they will soon retire. Many physicians are also close to retirement age, which adds to the shortage among workers.” (I)
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“Health policy specialists questioned White House officials’ claim that federal rules on essential workers allow Vice President Mike Pence to continue to campaign and not quarantine himself after being exposed to the coronavirus.
Campaigning is not an official duty that might fall under the guidelines meant to ensure that police, first responders and key transportation and food workers can still perform jobs that cannot be done remotely, the health experts said.
A Pence aide said Sunday that the vice president would continue to work and travel, including for campaigning, after his chief of staff and some other close contacts tested positive. Pence tested negative on Sunday and decided to keep traveling after consulting White House medical personnel, his aides said.
Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, was among those who tested positive. President Donald Trump, said early Sunday that Short was quarantining.
That usually means isolating oneself for 14 days after exposure in case an infection is developing, to prevent spreading the virus to others.
Pence was holding a rally Sunday in North Carolina, events in Minnesota and Pennsylvania on Monday and more events in North Carolina and South Carolina on Tuesday. The most recent numbers show COVID-19 cases are rising in 75% of the country.
On Sunday, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien told reporters that Pence “is following all the rules” from federal health officials. He called Pence “an essential worker” and said, “essential workers going out and campaigning and voting are about as essential as things we can do as Americans.”
However, the guidelines on essential workers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are aimed at folks like police, first responders and key transportation and food workers.
The Department of Homeland Security spells out 16 categories of critical infrastructure workers, including those at military bases, nuclear power sites, courthouses and public works facilities like dams and water plants.
“I don’t see campaigning on the list,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice at Johns Hopkins University and former Maryland state health department chief. “Anything that does not have to be done in person and anything not related to his job as vice president would not be considered essential.”..
If Pence’s official work as vice president was considered essential, the CDC guidelines say he should be closely monitored for COVID-19 symptoms, stay at least 6 feet from others and wear a mask “at all times while in the workplace.” (J)
“A man in the United States has caught Covid twice, with the second infection becoming far more dangerous than the first, doctors report.
The 25-year-old needed hospital treatment after his lungs could not get enough oxygen into his body.
Reinfections remain rare and he has now recovered.
But the study in the Lancet Infectious Diseases raises questions about how much immunity can be built up to the virus.
The man from Nevada had no known health problems or immune defects that would make him particularly vulnerable to Covid…
Scientists say the patient caught coronavirus twice, rather than the original infection becoming dormant and then bouncing back. A comparison of the genetic codes of the virus taken during each bout of symptoms showed they were too distinct to be caused by the same infection.
“Our findings signal that a previous infection may not necessarily protect against future infection,” said Dr Mark Pandori, from the University of Nevada.
“The possibility of reinfections could have significant implications for our understanding of Covid-19 immunity.”
He said even people who have recovered should continue to follow guidelines around social distancing, face masks and hand washing.
Scientists are still grappling with the thorny issue of coronavirus and immunity.
Does everyone become immune? Even people with very mild symptoms? How long does any protection last?
These are important questions for understanding how the virus will affect us long-term and may have implications for vaccines and ideas such as herd immunity.” (K)
“Cases of patients testing positive for both flu and COVID-19 have emerged in California and Tennessee as experts warn of a “twindemic” this winter….
In California, Solano County announced Thursday that its first resident had tested positive for COVID-19 and seasonal influenza at the same time. The patient is under age 65, the county said in a news release.
The case appears to be one of California’s first reported flu and COVID-19 co-infections this flu season.
Information about the interplay between influenza and COVID-19 remains limited because the latter is a novel virus, but both are respiratory diseases that weaken the immune system, especially in older adults, and each can result in hospitalization in severe cases.” (L)
“The shortage of medical equipment, including gowns and gloves, triggered by the coronavirus outbreak may be helping to spread dangerous germs within health care facilities, according to officials who warned of a potentially deadly fungus in a Los Angeles County health care facility.
L.A. County officials are warning about multiple reports of the fungus, known as Candida auris, in health care facilities; there is also an increase in reports of the fungus in Orange County.
At least one outbreak has been identified at a facility in L.A. County, according to an advisory, intended for health care professionals, issued by the Department of Public Health.
C. auris is a fungus that was first identified in 2009 in Japan but since has been declared by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a “serious global health threat.” The yeast “can cause bloodstream infections and even death, particularly in hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems,” the CDC said, noting that the fungus causes death in more than 1 in 3 patients who suffer from an invasive infection, such as one affecting the blood, heart or brain.
C. auris is considered particularly dangerous because antifungal medications are often ineffective against it. The fungus can live on surfaces for several weeks and can spread through hospitals and nursing homes by contact with infected people and contaminated surfaces and equipment.
The fungus can survive many routinely used disinfectants, county officials said.” (M)
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“Trump first said in a virtual Nevada tele-rally on Aug. 31 that the U.S. was “rounding the final turn” on the virus, repeating the line again at a Sep. 3 Pennsylvania rally “we are rounding that turn, and vaccines are coming along great.”
The biggest gap came when Trump contracted the virus himself at the beginning of October and briefly receded from public view, though he began saying it once again on Oct. 8.
“I say that all the time,” Trump said of the line earlier this month, calling those who disagree “cynics and angry partisans and professional pessimists,” and later declaring the U.S. is “rounding the turn with or without the vaccine,” even as the country reported a daily record of over 85,000 cases that day.
Trump has said the phrase every day for the last 15 days, even as daily average cases of the virus have risen sharply over the same period, hitting new records beyond the previous peak in July.
“Until November 4th., Fake News Media is going full on Covid, Covid, Covid,” Trump tweeted early Tuesday morning, adding “We are rounding the turn. 99.9%,” an incorrect reference to the survival rate of people who have contracted the disease, which has killed over 225,000 Americans, according to the CDC.
Trump has taken issue with using cases as a measure of the pandemic’s severity, arguing that increased testing accounts for the spike despite U.S. testing lagging compared to cases and deaths ticking up by 14% over the last 14 days, according to the New York Times.
The U.S. has since logged more than 43,000 deaths from the virus since Trump began saying the U.S. is “rounding the final turn” on Aug. 31, according to data from Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center.
Trump has readily admitted his willingness to play down the realities of the pandemic to avoid panic, even if it means concealing the truth about its severity. After telling Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in February the virus is “deadly stuff,” Trump nonetheless told him in March, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” (N)
“White House coronavirus coordinator Dr Deborah Birx has reportedly boycotted Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force due to misinformation.
The leading physician was said to have walked out of a meeting of the White House coronavirus task force this summer, and decided never to return again.
CNN reported that Dr Birx, who advised the US president over many months, decided to deliver messages directly to the public, in part due to the appointment of Dr Scott Atlas.
She told colleagues that she would side-step any meetings with Dr Atlas, a controversial White House adviser without any background in infectious diseases or public health.
Mr Trump appointed him to the coronavirus taskforce in August, after appearing on Fox News for several months to challenge lockdowns, masks and other preventative measures.
“I hate to use the term doctor shopping, but it almost feels like if this is what President Trump did until he found someone in the medical field that agrees with him,” said CNN’s Kate Bennett on the report.
Dr Atlas had suggested last week that masks did not work to control the coronavirus’s spread, in a Twitter post that was censored as misinformation.
He also previously said there was “zero reason to panic” when Mr Trump was hospitalised with Covid-19, and pushed a herd immunity approach to end the pandemic – in what experts predict would cause an exceptionally high death toll…
Dr Birx has reportedly travelled more than 20,000 miles and visited 40 states since August, conducting meetings with local health officials to advise on how to combat the pandemic.” (O)
“Dr. Deborah Birx emerged from a meeting at the White House one day in late summer with a new resolution: Never again would she sit in a meeting with Dr. Scott Atlas and listen to him pontificate on the pandemic. CNN’s Kate Bennett reports.” (P)
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“Hospitals in Utah are full and poised to start rationing care. They’re also filling up in Montana and Idaho. Colorado is trying to avoid those states’ fate.
As new COVID-19 cases surge across the country, hospitals in Rocky Mountain states are among those struggling to keep up. In Utah, hospital leaders have told the governor they’re on the cusp of rationing access to intensive care beds. Idaho and Montana doctors are having trouble finding places to treat infected patients. John Daley, reporter at Colorado Public Radio, is watching this unfold from Denver, joins us now to explain. And, John, I want to get right into that warning from Utah, which I think is very striking for people. What does it mean for hospitals to consider rationing care?
JOHN DALEY, BYLINE: Well, Audie, in Salt Lake, that means they’re approaching that point where the number of patients simply overwhelms the ability of providers to care for them as they normally would. The hospitals there say they’ve prepared what are called crisis standards of care. This is essentially an emergency triage type of posture where tough decisions would have to be made about who gets care. In practical terms, that’s essentially a system of grading patients, of rationing care based on things like age, overall health and ability to survive. Doctor Estelle Harris at the university hospital said Utah’s hospitals are now seeing five or six times more COVID-19 patients than a few months ago.
ESTELLE HARRIS: I do think that although we currently are operating over 100% capacity of our normal ICU beds with COVID, we do have some good plans in place if we have to use them. But that will come with an enormous strain on the COVID care providers.” (Q)
O.White House coronavirus adviser Dr Birx boycotting Covid task force over misinformation, by Gino Spocchia, https://www.bing.com/search?q=White+House+coronavirus+adviser+Dr+Birx+boycotting+Covid+task+force+over+misinformation&form=ANNNB1&refig=eadc81cd62f148108b8e558218acd80f&sp=-1&pq=&sc=8-0&qs=n&sk=&cvid=eadc81cd62f148108b8e558218acd80f
PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “crews arrive at a hospital with a patient suspected of having COVID-19, the hospital may have a physical bed open for them, but not enough nurses or doctors to staff it.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
