R_P wrote: 
Seriously...There you have it in a nutshell.

 black321 wrote:

 

 ColdMiser wrote:
 
the gov has to do a better job timing these announcements. i know many can give a s#$t about the financial markets, but these major news announcements should be moved to non-trading hours.

Governor Cuomo just shut down the State of New York with surrounding states expect to follow suit. No more fooling around. 

 kcar wrote:  My whole point was Trump is absolutely irrelevant and so is anyone else for that matter.  You can keep dwelling on that or facing the future.  I could give a rat's ass what Trump does or doesn't do, he is responsible for the rest of the world's outbreak as well?  Your obsession with Trump, politics and the government does not serve you or anyone else well in true crisis situations, but you go ahead and dwell on that I have much more important things on my mind.

 sirdroseph wrote:
 

Yea-ah...but no.

I can't quite join you on that comparison of "the prepper community" to multiple government-wide scenario exercises based on historical evidence, statistics, epidemiology, etc.

And no, I don't think there's going to be widespread revisionist thinking on gun control. Don't think we're in "Walking Dead" territory yet.

But one of the article's big takeaways is that top Trump officials (John Kelly and Rex Tillerson) were briefed on Crimson Contagion. The Obama administration also briefed incoming Trump people on the lack of national preparedness for a pandemic.

So Trump's administration was well aware of this looming crisis but it did not work to address this problem. And Trump was once again in his own fantasy world until Tucker Carlson talked to him and made Trump understand how big this crisis is.

But nice try on changing the subject away from Trump's complete incompetence and addiction to lying.

 miamizsun wrote:
 

boy, the hydroxychloroquine is now hitting the media hard. nice job miami.

 R_P wrote:
 

Here's a good question you nor anyone else will ever be able to answer.  How many died due to Chinese government response to the virus and not the virus itself?

 kcar wrote:
 

Funny how you guys are now talking about stuff that the prepper community has been on to for over 50 years now.   It's almost like you are alluding to that there could be societal breakdown and hoards of panicking people looking for something to eat or even visions of governments going from house to house dragging out the dead and contaminated.   I am willing to bet there will be some introspection and different thoughts on gun control or at least you will certainly think of it less now as more pressing items come to the forefront.  When we come out of this, there will be many perspective changes about a lot of things as human nature is revealed.......

 R_P wrote: 

The Epic Failure of Coronavirus Testing in America
China and South Korea offer lessons in how to curb this pandemic.

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The coronavirus pandemic has claimed the lives of an infant and a teenager
The coronavirus outbreak has largely spared children, but two new medical reports document the first infant and first teenager to die of COVID-19.

The New York Times has published a great and informative article. Even if you don't have a subscription to the New York Times, you should be able to access it because the Times has dropped its paywall for articles dealing with the pandemic. 

The Trump and Obama administrations have run scenarios that predicted many of the problems and deficiencies that the US is seeing right now. The latest exercise, Crimson Contagion, accurately predicted in 2019 the rapid and wide spread of disease as well as the confusion and lack of organized response from all levels of government and  many companies. Crimson Contagion also predicted the country's inability to quickly ramp manufacturing of vital medical supplies. 

Congress was briefed on the Crimson Contagion outbreak exercise in December 2019.

Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded

Government exercises, including one last year, made clear that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic like the coronavirus. But little was done.

(A) scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.

Crimson Contagion predicted that "110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead."

...

The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.

The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.

Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.

In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.

The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement on Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.

...

Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”

The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.



Crimson Contagion, the exercise conducted last year in Washington and 12 states including New York and Illinois, showed that federal agencies under Mr. Trump continued the Obama-era effort to think ahead about a pandemic.

But the planning and thinking happened many layers down in the bureaucracy. The knowledge and sense of urgency about the peril appear never to have gotten sufficient attention at the highest level of the executive branch or from Congress, leaving the nation with funding shortfalls, equipment shortages and disorganization within and among various branches and levels of government.

...


The Obama administration grappled with the swine flu, caused by the H1N1 virus: 



The virus turned out to be less deadly than first expected. But it was a warning shot that officials in the Obama administration said they took seriously, kicking off a planning effort that escalated in early 2014, with the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa and ensuing fear that it could spread to the United States.

...

Christopher Kirchhoff, a national security aide who moved from the Pentagon to the White House to deal with the Ebola crisis, was given the job of putting together a “lessons learned” report, with input from across the government.

The weaknesses Mr. Kirchhoff identified were early warning signals of what has unfolded in the past three months.

(The Times article contains this link to Kirchoff's report, dated 7/11/16).

...

On the plus side, the Obama White House had created an Ebola Task Force, run by Ron Klain, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s former chief of staff, before a single case emerged in the United States. Congress allocated $5.4 billion in emergency funding to pay for Ebola treatment and prevention efforts in the United States and West Africa.

The money helped fund a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services in charge of preparing for future contagious disease outbreaks, the same office that in 2019 ran the Crimson Contagion exercise and other similar events in the years since.

...

What is striking in reading Mr. Kirchhoff’s account today, however, is how few of the major faults he found in the American response resulted in action — even though the report was filled with department-by-department recommendations.

There were deficiencies “in personal protective equipment use, disinfection” and “social services for those placed under quarantine.”

There was confusion over travel restrictions, and the need “for a smoother sliding scale of escalation of government response, from local authorities acting on their own to local authorities acting with some federal assistance” to the full activation of the federal government.

The report concluded that “a minimum planning benchmark might be an epidemic an order of magnitude or two more difficult than that presented by the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, with much more significant domestic spread.”


...

But one big change did come out of the study: The creation of a dedicated office at the National Security Council to coordinate responses and raise the alarm early.

“What I learned most is that we had to stand up a global biosecurity and health directorate, and get it enshrined for the next administration,” said Lisa Monaco, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser.




After Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Monaco arranged an extensive exercise for high-level incoming officials — including Rex W. Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state; John F. Kelly, designated to become homeland security secretary; and Rick Perry, who would become energy secretary — gaming out the response to a deadly flu outbreak.

She asked Tom Bossert, who was preparing to come in as Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, to run the event alongside her.

“We modeled a new strain of flu in the exercise precisely because it’s so communicable,” Ms. Monaco said. “There is no vaccine, and you would get issues like nursing homes being particularly vulnerable, shortages of ventilators.”



But by the time the current crisis hit, almost all of the leaders at the table — Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Perry among them — had been fired or moved on.

In 2018, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John R. Bolton, ousted Mr. Bossert and eliminated the National Security Council directorate, folding it into an office dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in what Trump officials called a logical consolidation.

Asked about that shift on March 13, Mr. Trump told a reporter that it was “a nasty question,” before adding: “I don’t know anything about it.” Writing on Twitter the next day, Mr. Bolton lashed out at critics who said the shift had reflected disinterest in pandemic threats.

...



But in testimony to Congress last week, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested that ending the stand-alone directorate was ill-advised. “It would be nice if the office was still there,” he said.

On Feb. 10, nearly three weeks after the first coronavirus case was diagnosed in the United States, Mr. Trump submitted a 2021 budget proposal that called for a $693.3 million reduction in funding for the C.D.C., or about 9 percent, although there was a modest increase for the division that combats global pandemics.

...

The Crimson Contagion planning exercise run last year by the Department of Health and Human Services involved officials from 12 states and at least a dozen federal agencies.

The war game-like exercise was overseen by Robert P. Kadlec, a former Air Force physician who has spent decades focused on biodefense issues.

...

“He recognized early that we have a big problem and we needed much bigger budgets to prepare,” said Richard Danzig, the secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, who had worked with Mr. Kadlec.

...



Many of the moments during the tabletop exercise are now chillingly familiar.

In the fictional pandemic, as the virus spread quickly across the United States, the C.D.C. issued guidelines for social distancing, and many employees were told to work from home.

But federal and state officials struggled to identify which employees were essential and what equipment was needed to effectively work from home.

There also was confusion over how to handle school children.


Confusion emerged as state governments began to turn in large numbers to Washington for help to address shortages of antiviral medications, personal protective equipment and ventilators. ...leading to bureaucratic chaos. 

...

But the problems were larger than bureaucratic snags. The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded.



Congress was briefed in December on some of these findings, including the inability to quickly replenish certain medical supplies, given that much of the product comes from overseas.

Swampy
Senator Dumped Up to $1.6 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness

just drove to my office, about 8 miles away in a local industrial park. traffic was light, but not unusually light and local grocery lot full.  Most parking lots in the industrial park were at least 50% full...probably closer to 75% full. I hope this is not all for naught.

Yes, Young People Are Falling Seriously Ill From Covid-19

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Younger adults are large percentage of coronavirus hospitalizations in United States, according to new CDC data

 Proclivities wrote:
 
The point of spring break (so I've been told) is negative distance.

There are a lot of people with vacation homes who have reasonably decided "why not be there for a few weeks?".  The problem is that the seasonal infrastructure can't support hoarding, let alone support an influx of those who are normally someplace else.  

Doing things outside...with reasonable space...it a good thing.  Golfing, walking on a beach, hiking in the woods are all fine.  Where outdoor activities aren't good is when they have the potential to require medical/emergency attention from others.  Rock climbing, surfing (?), riding a bike (road bike, group cycling, racing)...they all include risks that should be avoided if the goal of our isolation is to reduce the strain on the medical community.

 black321 wrote:
 
Yes, if I lived near a beach I would go out there and walk around or swim, and keep my distance if there were others out there.  I just would not drive many hours or fly to get there, especially a crowded spot.

 cc_rider wrote: 
You're not the boss of me!

 black321 wrote:
The beach sounds like a great place to be, if you're not in a crowd. But yeah, go outside, walk the dogs, play golf*, whatever.

*Don't let anyone touch your ball(s)...  sorry, couldn't resist.
c.