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malaise

(296,199 posts)
14. We need to send these everwhere
Tue Mar 17, 2020, 01:20 PM
Mar 2020

Trump’s 7 worst statements on the coronavirus outbreak

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/13/21176535/trumps-worst-statements-coronavirus

ttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/14/tracking-trumps-false-or-misleading-coronavirus-claims/

Trump, however, told Fox viewers that the death rate was even lower — a “fraction of 1 percent” — based on his “hunch.” Here’s the rest of the quote:

Now, this is just my hunch, but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this and it is very mild... So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better and then, when you do have a death like you had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, I believe you had one in New York, you know, all of a sudden it seems like 3 or 4 percent, which is a very high number, as opposed to a fraction of 1 percent.

Trump may have sought to downplay the mortality risk of Covid-19 in order to reassure nervous Americans and a jittery economy, but instead created a much more dangerous situation where people weren’t taking the virus seriously enough. It’s true that the risk of dying is highest for elderly people and immunocompromised people (the US has plenty of both), but as Vox’s Dylan Scott and Eliza Barclay explained, “the speed at which the outbreak plays out matters hugely for its consequences”:

What epidemiologists fear most is the health care system becoming overwhelmed by a sudden explosion of illness that requires more people to be hospitalized than it can handle. In that scenario, more people will die because there won’t be enough hospital beds or ventilators to keep them alive.

So not taking the virus seriously — at the bureaucratic and individual levels — means fewer people taking suitable precautions, and possibly more cases and more deaths.

3) “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”
On February 28, Trump said that coronavirus will “disappear” like a “miracle” while speaking at a press conference for his coronavirus task force. On Tuesday, he told reporters on Capitol Hill that coronavirus “will go away.” In late February, he speculated that warm weather would kill the virus and stop its spread. None of these statements are backed by science or infectious disease experts within his own administration. (Though some diseases — like the seasonal flu — do diminish in warmer seasons, there is currently no evidence the novel coronavirus will behave this way.)


Experts all along have predicted that without drastic measures to prevent outbreaks from growing bigger or the rapid development of a vaccine, the novel coronavirus will likely continue spreading and become endemic, a regular disease like the common cold.

4) “Anyone who wants a test can get one”
On March 7 while visiting the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, Trump said that anyone who wants a test for Covid-19 can get one.

As countless viral Twitter threads, local news stories, and more have recounted, that promise has not rung true. Take the “Kafkaesque” story physician’s assistant Julie Eaker told Vox’s Brian Resnick and Dylan Scott about trying to get one patient tested in California:

First, Eaker called her local health department and was told her patient didn’t qualify for testing since they hadn’t traveled to China, per the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time. After the CDC relaxed its testing criteria, the patient was still sick, so Eaker called again. “I didn’t receive a phone call back,” she says.

The patient thought they had pneumonia and asked to be tested for peace of mind. Finally, last week, after Eaker ordered some test kits herself from a private lab, she got a call back. “The health department told me I was not allowed to use those test kits — that I ordered — without their permission!”

Eaker was horrified. So she called the CDC to confirm if the local health department was correct. “I did not get through,” she says. “I spent hours and hours and hours on hold. … So I thought I would just call the White House and talk to Vice President Pence, who is in charge of the coronavirus task force.“

She didn’t get Pence, but a White House switchboard operator told her to call the CDC.

“Somebody has got to help us,” she says, exasperated. “We’re out here on the front lines trying to take care of people.”

But the problem has been bigger than that. The administration had promised to quickly deliver 1 million testing kits to private labs. But on March 6, the White House announced that it would fall far short of that goal for testing kit distribution.

At first, Trump blamed an Obama-era FDA rule for its slow response in distributing test kits, but experts have since revealed that claim to be false.

5) The flu is worse
During that March 4 call with Hannity, Trump also compared coronavirus with the flu. He mentioned that the flu kills anywhere between 27,000 and 77,000 people every year, implying that coronavirus isn’t as serious of a threat to public health as Influenza.

Trump’s own infectious disease experts have said that idea is wrong. Dr. Fauci told Congress on March 11 that “the mortality of [Covid-19] is multiple times what the seasonal flu is.”



https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=103&v=P3nkxrECHKM&feature=emb_title

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