A plan to defeat coronavirus finally emerges, but it's not from the White House

[riversedge]

Source: msn.com



Lena H. Sun, William Wan 4 hrs ago



A national plan to fight the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and return Americans to jobs and classrooms is emerging — but not from the White House.

Instead, a collection of governors, former government officials, disease specialists and nonprofits are pursuing a strategy that relies on the three pillars of disease control: ramp up testing to identify people who are infected. Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before. And focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.

But there is no evidence yet the White House will pursue such a strategy.

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Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, say the White House has made a deliberate political calculation that it will better serve Trump’s interest to put the onus on governors — rather than the federal government — to figure out how to move ahead.

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On Wednesday, former president Barack Obama weighed in, tweeting: “Social distancing bends the curve and relieves some pressure. … But in order to shift off current policies, the key will be a robust system of testing and monitoring — something we have yet to put in place nationwide.”.........................................

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-plan-to-defeat-coronavirus-finally-emerges-but-its-not-from-the-white-house/ar-BB12rUrj?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=msn360

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testing testing. lets get on with now.

[Autumn]

1. That's a good thing, the White House has already proved they won't do anything.

[cstanleytech]

2. If the steps outlined like this had been in the first place we might not be in the situation

we are currently in.

[MyOwnPeace]

3. Can you imagine......

if a group of governors, doctors, and influential politicians put together a plan and were able to enact it and left IQ45 standing on the podium watching it all come down around him, leaving him there claiming his "greatness" while the world left him behind?

How great would that be!!!!!

[DarthDem]

9. Good plan!

[Talitha]

16. That brings to mind a photo of him at one of the international conferences.

Everyone else was very friendly towards one another, socializing in the background - while he sat all alone with that 'angry frog' look on his mug.

[MyOwnPeace]

18. The embarrassment!

To think that that horse's ass represents US when he goes out into the world. "The Ugly American" comes to life.

[bucolic_frolic]

4. Trump's relevance is dissolving

His claims of victory and competence are hollow as a decaying pumpkin

[keithbvadu2]

5. Won't work because it's not first designed to benefit Trump?

Won't work because it's not first designed to benefit Trump?

[MissMillie]

6. ahem....

the White House has made a deliberate political calculation that it will better serve Trump’s interest to put the onus on governors — rather than the federal government — to figure out how to move ahead.

Then he's not a wartime president

[Talitha]

17. THIS!!!!!!

[Igel]

7. No point yet.

You have 500,000 people to employ contact tracing with. That we know of.

You'll need 1,000,000 trained people, because it has to be done quick. Each of the people those 500,000 came into contact would be contagious within 2 days, then you have to trace all the people *they* came into contact with.

And you'll need 10 million tests. Meaning we'd better open up another 50,000 lab facilities--oh, wait, we need to train another 100k lab technicians.

Except it's likely there are 9 cases for every 1 we know about. So multiply all of that by 10.

Plans are good. I used to have plans for the Enterprise NCC-1701. Never could figure out how to build a nacelle in my back yard. I figured the warp cores would be a snap when I was ready for building them. College and all.

Until the number of active cases declines to a manageable number, contact tracing isn't a no-brainer, it's a non-brainer. Not helping things in the least is that the "active case" number is a mess. If you're discharged from the hospital, you're delisted as active--but if you're given a test, it's positive, and you're sent home and it's been 4 weeks, are you delisted? Anybody checking? Get the new cases down to near zero, and then start. Might be worth it--there might be some business bigger than a family and smaller than 10,000 employees still out there.

Even some knowns are sprouting question marks. See the recent NYT article claiming that closing schools really has pretty much no effect on curve flattening? 4/6, I think it was. Big deal for the Spanish flu. For COVID-19, not much.

In June when we're in the thin end of the tail, the very thin end, if there is one, we can talk. That's two months away. Until then, pass the subspace phase inverter.

[DarthDem]

10. Love the Star Trek references! :)

I am pretty much in agreement with you, but I think the idea is that we start planning the South Korea/Taiwan model now, and then we can put it into place when ready, which as you say might not be for some weeks yet. There's really no reason to delay and I think it's pretty clearly the way out.

[mwooldri]

13. About those 100k lab techs...

There appears to be some slack in the system. While the big private labs (Quest, LabCorp, etc) probably have their big labs running overtime to process Covid-19 cases, smaller labs that normally process routine bloodwork and do not have Covid-19 testing capabilities have seen a vastly reduced demand for their services. So you got lab techs sitting and waiting and wanting to do Covid-19 testing but cannot. Some of these lab techs have been asked to reduce their hours - take voluntary leave.

The tests need to be made simpler so they can be ran on equipment that already exists in the smaller labs. The 15 minute antibody tests that require no lab processing - needs to be made more available.

Also Apple and Google seem to be cooperating on some kind of initiative that allows for some kind of contact tracing. That could help.

[Journeyman]

8. Well, we can expect intense nationwide testing to begin maybe in February . . .

[AlexSFCA]

11. if everyone is required to wear masks - transmissions will further drop

simple to implement. Contact tracing of millions of people will be hard. We have exceeded 0.5M infected so we are accelerating towards millions more within weeks. Watch out for Florida.

[Nacht Owl]

12. Of Course Not

Nothing helpful or positive comes out of this Administration!

[iluvtennis]

14. Today in the Covid-19 presser, trumpty dumpty announced the creation of a "how do we re-open

the country" task force.

This is so he can have increase these inane pressers from 2 hours (yep, they're currently 90 minutes to 2 hrs) to 4 hours.

The new task force will just take credit for what the governors, disease specialists, etc are doing...just like trump/pence currently do.

[bringthePaine]

15. Question: how does a cowering idiot sociopath lead a pandemic response?

Answer: that's a bad question and you're a terrible person! go ask a governor...

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

19. It sounds like a "deep state" is forming.

And not a moment too soon.