Corona Virus (Covid 19) -- My Recent Thinking
Panic seems to be the word of the week on Wall Street, in the grocery stores, in the White House, in Congress. Partially, this seems to be a response to the Trump Administration’s fumbling of testing and the President’s extremely poor performance in his televised efforts to calm and lead the nation.
Yesterday, I listened to the Daily’s Podcast, explaining how China and South Korea successfully slowed the virus and how and why Italy and the US have failed. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/podcasts/the-daily/coronavirus-pandemic.html Basically China and South Korea did very widespread testing and then quarantined those who had the virus. In Italy and the US, there was no sense of urgency, no testing, and in Italy a health system that became overwhelmed by the crisis of so many patients in such dire straits.
In the United States, we have been flying blind, as the tests were not available, the tests were flawed, critical reagents were missing, and the criteria for testing were too restrictive. This has allowed transmission to spread unimpeded, and we could not track the infected or identify who was infected ‘til they showed up in extremis. The vaunted CDC failed, and no one knew about it. We will later need to find out how and why.
The President needed to be a communicator of truth. That is a mission for which he is singularly poorly equipped. As Peter Wehner writes in the Atlantic “The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.
Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.”
So now it’s up to all of us to pick up the pieces. Speaker Pelosi has crafted a measure that will help the laid off or sick worker to replace lost income and pay their bills and will compensate the small businesses that had made no provision for employee sick leave. It will also help the flex or gig or self employed worker who lacks such protections. It will ban insurer copays or deductibles on testing and help the uninsured to get tested at no cost as well; it does not curtail copays and deductibles on essential follow up treatment (including sequestered quarantines) for those who become seriously ill. She has successfully negotiated this with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin for the Trump Administration, but it still needs to clear the Senate and survive the mercurial moods of President Trump. For the details, see https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/14/21179651/coronavirus-house-pelosi-aid-testing Next steps are to develop agreements on some concrete actions to mitigate the oncoming recession on people’s lives and the nations economic activity.
Ohio’s top health official estimated the state has 100,000 infected individuals, and Republican Governor Mike DeWine closed the schools for three weeks and banned gatherings of 100 or more persons. By contrast, CDC reports the state has 5 infected individuals based on the confirmed tests to date. Eight states such as Oregon, Ohio, Michigan, Maryland have ordered all schools closed. Just today LA’s school system joined the list. Over 6 million students are for now out of school due to the fears of virus transmission. Kentucky’s new Governor is doing an excellent job in combating the epidemic in a state where the prior Governor was prone to delusional conspiracies about the value of vaccines. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kentucky-trump-beshear-coronavirus_n_5e6c04adc5b6bd8156f749ea
The Federal Reserve has injected $1.5 trillion to keep markets liquid one day after a market meltdown of historic proportions. The President has declared a national emergency, which will allow him to access $50 billion to be administered through FEMA. Markets responded positively.
So far in the US, there have been only 40 deaths attributed to Corona virus. In Italy where the epidemic gained an earlier foothold, over 1200 have died. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/ In China where the virus originated, there have been over 5,000 deaths. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ The death rate for those over 80 is 15%, while for teenagers it is 0.2%. For those in their 70’s, the death rate is 8%, as compared to 0.2% for those in their 20’s. The death rate is much higher for men than women. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ Buzzfeed News has compiled and summarized the charts as follows, which helps put our nation’s panic in a far more understandable context . https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lamvo/coronavirus-death-rates-age-charts-us-china In terms of potential fatalities, we should be most concerned about the elderly in nursing homes or those already in frail or compromised health.
We will likely be in these woods for at least the next 2 months, maybe more and it could be recurring, and it may well provoke a recession in the US and globally.
Politically, the President is terrified this will doom his re-election prospects, and he will likely be willing to do anything necessary to secure his own re-election. It is possible that the epidemic will abate with the change in the seasons, and the President will seek to claim that it was his magical leadership that prevailed. To date, he has shown no capacity to lead or to calm the nation’s fears in the face of the virus. He speaks like someone over his head seeking to cast blame everywhere else while projecting an image of infallibility and omniscience that rings hollow in the face of the fundamental facts of this pandemic facing all of us. That could change, and he could surprisingly rise to the challenges that the nation faces, or he could hearken to the nativist, isolationist demagogue within, echoes of which pervaded his speech on Wednesday night and are playing out with some of the Fox News commentators.
The Corona crisis has exposed the inadequacies of our nation’s health system in ways we could not have anticipated and has exposed the inadequacies of our President in ways that are hardly a surprise to too many of us. It makes the case for universal coverage, for building on the ACA, for eliminating those copays and deductibles that block patients’ access to essential treatments, for well-organized systems of care, for stronger interfaces between medical care and public health, for better coordination among local, state and federal authorities .
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 3/13/20