As President Donald Trump promised during Monday’s Coronavirus Task Force briefing, Tuesday’s session would have math, statistics, and charts.
The 2-hour briefing offered highly detailed information on the modeling that the federal Task Force is using to make decisions and inform the states. As is often the case, the most crucial portion may have been the media exchange that occurred after the initial presentation.
It appears that the new media trope, which is also a Democratic Party talking point, is that Trump did not establish restrictions and guidelines soon enough. For example, CNN gadfly Jim Acosta asked Coronavirus Task Force member, Dr. Antony Fauci, if social distancing should have happened earlier.
Fauci robustly pushed back on that speculation, reminding the media that China was less than forthcoming with critical data.
Another point Fauci made, which is nearly as critical, is that without antibody testing, there is no way to determine if social distancing would have worked any sooner because there is no way to ascertain if the virus was even present in the country.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator, also gave the American media a stark reminder that the information provided by China on any aspect of this pandemic is unreliable.
Therefore, Birx indicated that the medical community misjudged this early in the outbreak as a SARS-like virus, based on the data China was providing at the time. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome pathogen hit Asia in 2003 but disappeared relatively quickly not to be seen again.
As the elite media will push the big numbers given out of this briefing: 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. But the media is trimming out an essential part of the entire answer by Fauci when discussing the models:
Asked if Americans should be prepared for 100,000 Americans to die from COVID-19, Fauci said point-blank, “The answer is yes.””As sobering a number as that is, we should be prepared for it,” Fauci continued. “Is it going to be that much? I hope not. And I think the more we push on the mitigation the less likelihood it would be that number — but being realistic we need to prepare ourselves that that is a possibility that that is what we will see.”
Personally, I am concerned that the Task Force is using the numbers for New York to project onto the rest of the country. I suspect the number of fatalities related to COVID-19 will be much smaller than feared.
I am going to predict that when this crisis ends, the media will add its coverage of the coronavirus pandemic to its roster of reporting shame that has been exponentially expanding since Trump began his campaign for the presidency.
Obama accused Trump of “climate denial.”
Obama weighed in on the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak in the context of warning about the impact of Trump’s decision to ease up on fuel-efficiency standards the Democratic president had put in place to combat climate change.”We can’t afford any more consequences of climate denial. All of us, especially young people, have to demand better of our government at every level and vote this fall,” he added, linking to an article announcing the rollback of environmental mileage standards put in place by Obama in 2012.
China has been a bad actor during the pandemic in more ways than one.
Hundreds of thousands of masks sent to Dutch hospitals have been recalled after tests showed they failed to protect the face or had defective filters. The Netherlands recently bought 1.3 million masks from China.The Dutch government has ordered a recall of around 600,000 masks out of a shipment of 1.3 million from China after they failed to meet quality standards.The defective masks had already been distributed to several hospitals currently battling the COVID-19 outbreak, news agency AFP and Dutch media reported. The Dutch Health Ministry has kept the rest of the shipment on hold.An inspection revealed that the FFP2 masks did not protect the face properly or had defective filter membranes. The fine filters stop the virus from entering the mouth or nose. The masks failed more than one inspection.
The test kits China supplies are also defective.
After Spain, the Czech Republic has reported that the majority of coronavirus test kits provided by China are faulty.Up to 80 per cent of the 150,000 portable, quick coronavirus test kits China delivered to the Czech Republic earlier this month were faulty, National Review reported citing local Czech news site Expats.cz.The test can produce a result in 10- 15 minutes but are really less accurate than other tests.Because of the high error rate, the country will continue to rely on conventional laboratory tests, of which they perform about 900 a day.
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