Ignore the Rules: No Social Distancing and No Masks
(Your mask production is great just as I planned)
The story from the Liar-in-Chief (LINC)
from Politico
with this headline:
As Trump Touted Reopening, Privately, his Team Sounded Alarms
Trump
boasted (as usual) on May 1 that his success in responding to the coronavirus
pandemic has made ventilator, test kits, and mask shortages a thing of the
past, and that much of the country is ready to quickly send people back to
work, saying: “We’ve ensured a ventilator
for every patient who needs one. The testing and the masks and all of the
things, we’ve solved every problem. We solved it quickly.”
But (also as
usual), and on that very same day, his own health and emergency management
officials were privately warning that states were still experiencing shortages
of masks, gowns, and other PPE medical gear.
Note: That
according to a recording of an interagency meeting between FEMA and HHS
officials all across the country via a conference call which was also obtained
by POLITICO.
Trump’s
federal “Stay at Home” guidelines had quietly expired the night before, leaving
states to manage the pandemic as they saw fit. The officials also expressed
concern that governors moving to reopen their economies while cases were still
prevalent threatened to plunge the nation into a new and potentially deadlier
chapter of the outbreak.
For example, Daniel
Jernigan, Director of the CDC’s influenza division said bluntly: “The
numbers of deaths definitely will be high.”
Then just a few minutes later, another official underscored
the risk facing the U.S. saying that if all the states moved to lift their
social distancing restrictions, hospitals nationwide could see a surge of new
coronavirus cases, creating the potential for severe ventilator shortages
within weeks, and he added: “If, at the end
of stay-at-home orders, you were to lift everything and go back to normal
business, and not have any community mitigation, you would expect to see in the
second week in May we begin to increase again in ventilator uses. That means
cases increase, and by early June, we surpass the number of ventilators we currently
have.”
Those internal anxieties came as dozens of states
prepared to reopen their economies over the coming weeks, a push that won’t
immediately return the nation to business as normal yet that’s still occurring
against the advice of many public health experts.
Trump himself, who encouraged states to move fast, has
now finally acknowledged the pace will likely lead to a greater death toll.
But the
daily “HHS/FEMA Interagency” conferences also served as a counterpoint — one
the public did not hear — to the different story that Trump has sought
to selling this line: My swift and
effective response that’s so successfully cleared the path for a restart of the
economy that the task force managing the crisis may no longer be needed (sic).
Note: But a single day later he (again as
usual) reversed that and said not doing away with the task force, just
redesigning it.
POLITICO
obtained audio recordings of three conference-call meetings held between April
24 and May 1 that were designed to keep a wide range of federal agencies
apprised of the government’s coronavirus response. The meetings included
updates from internal task forces focused on various elements of the
response — like data and analytics, testing sites and community mitigation
efforts — as well as from regional FEMA and HHS leaders in offices around the
nation.
In those
calls, officials in Washington and their regional counterparts were blunt about
their struggle to keep pace with a flood of requests from governors for more
medical equipment, even as the president touted the administration’s actions to
secure sufficient gear from foreign and domestic producers.
Past boasting from
Trump e.g., during an April press briefing he said: “The federal government loaded up
hospitals with things to take care of people. We have millions and millions of
masks”
Then on May 1 he again
bragged: “That was something, four weeks ago, was
difficult, and now we have millions of masks coming in and already here.”
Despite
steps the administration has taken to buy and distribute millions of masks and PPE, etc., health care workers across the country continued to report shortages in recent weeks that put
both them and their patients at risk of infection.
In a meeting on April 24,
administration officials noted ongoing shortages of hospital gowns, predicting
it would be a “significant challenge in
the days and weeks ahead” and warning that a plan was needed to come up
with “alternatives that can be used in
this period of sparse numbers of gowns.”
Officials again flagged the gown shortages on multiple
subsequent calls about the flow of personal protective equipment, known as PPE
and one FEMA official in Region 4 (the Southeast) on May 1 told participants: “PPE shortfalls will continue to be along the
lines of gloves and gowns. I know everyone is working hard on that.”
Officials on an April 28 call said they also briefed
the leaders at CDC and HHS’ preparedness and response agency “on the need for cloth masks in nursing homes
and outpatient settings.”
Federal officials assigned to FEMA’s Mid-Atlantic
region said on April 24 that their member states were worried that a PPE fact sheet FEMA sent out that week encouraged
critical infrastructure operators to contact their states if they were unable
to obtain masks and other protective gear through their normal suppliers added
one official: “Some of the states are a
little torqued about that because PPE is very limited. Given the other
priorities, they feel it's put them in a bad spot.”
Other regions reported on that call that dental offices
and food and agricultural facilities in states moving now to reopen have
complained that they can’t access masks, gloves and other PPE from their normal
suppliers and have pleaded for government assistance.
Summary: As
the Trump administration moved earlier this month to distribute more protective
gear to nursing homes that have seen staggering death tolls over the last few
months, little has been done for the millions of patients who
receive home health services, clinics, and other community-based health providers,
outside of hospitals, plus the officials
on the calls said they were still struggling to understand what is needed.
CDC epidemiologist Captain John Redd on the May 1 call said: “We don’t have full visibility on health care
settings outside of hospitals and nursing homes, and we don’t have baseline
data to understand what ’normal’ looks like.” (Note: Redd did not respond
to an emailed request for comment).
However, the White House touted the administration’s efforts to ensure health care providers get the
supplies they need to manage the pandemic (as usual) saying in part: “The president has been clear that when the
need for PPE arises the administration has developed an historic public-private
partnership designed to secure and deliver these critical supplies to everyone
who needs them in record time”
My 2 cents based on the
above: What a crock.
But, it is so standard Trump: Blame all others, deflect the facts and truth,
and keep buttering his own up failures somehow as success, or as Kushner said
recently: “We have had great success.”
Related here on Kushner's dismal failures.
Shame on them.
Thanks for stopping by.
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