I just watched today's press conference and briefing from President Trump and his corona virus team. The news isn't great, but the needed measures seem to be going ahead at rather impressive speed.
While I watched the briefing, I kept picturing how it would be going if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. My guess is that not much of what has been done would have been accomplished. As if to emphasize that thought, I got a tweet from Hillary herself in which she comments on the handling of the virus. Hillary's focus was on denouncing the use of the term "Chinese virus". That's all; she's against calling it the "Chinese virus" cause that might be taken as racist.
It's hard to imagine how irrelevant the name of the virus actually is. I remember the Hong Kong flu some years ago. Was that racist? No, it came originally from Hong Kong. How about MERS? Remember that? MERS is the acronym for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. It first appeared in 2012 in Arabia. Some people even call it the camel flu. Is that racist? When the Obama administration discussed MERS, were they causing a threat to all the Arab Americans in our country? Of course not. (And by the way, MERS is also caused by a corona virus just like COVID 19).
Despite the great many important questions about handling the virus, the President and his team got three questions from the media about using the term Chinese virus. Don't these reporters have brains?
Despite the virus name nonsense, there was a lot of important information that came to the fore. For example, there was the first clear explanation I heard that squares the statements that there are plenty of tests available and the constant refrain in some media that no one is being tested. We learned from the virus team that there are indeed test kits in great numbers around the country now. Those were distributed first to locations with the most cases. That means that in the past week, there were test kits in Washington state and New York etc. The analysis was done county by county. In other words, people in counties with few cases weren't getting the test kits as quickly as those in hard hit locales. The goal was to identify as many people as possible with the virus so as to stop the spread. Now, though, there are test kits across the country. The problem, however, has been the bottleneck for getting results. Because of new testing procedures that have been developed in the last few weeks, the number of tests that can be processed each day has risen 100 fold and will continue to go higher. The testing bottleneck should be resolved.
It's also worth noting that with the end of the slow testing regime, we will see a major spike in cases combined with a fall in the mortality rate. Over the next two days or so, we will see something like ten days of results released. That doesn't mean the virus is spreading faster; it only means that the wave of new results will all come almost at once. Meanwhile, as wider testing discloses many people who have the virus with few or no symptoms, the percentage of the ill who die from the disease should drop. If 3% of those diagnosed are dying now, and if the number diagnosed suddenly includes huge numbers of people with mild or no symptoms, the percentage of those diagnosed who die will go down.
The President also announced that the border with Canada has been closed. It won't affect trade or essential travel (undefined), but it will stop casual trips. This should cut down on the spread of the virus as well.
More detail was given on a huge stimulus package that is being put together. Trump said there was good bipartisan work involving most (sadly not all) of the Congress and Senate. No need to comment on this package until the actual details are released.
We have a long way to go in this fight against the virus. We have to fight it together. Right now, the best thing we can do is to follow the guidelines to reduce the spread.
While I watched the briefing, I kept picturing how it would be going if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. My guess is that not much of what has been done would have been accomplished. As if to emphasize that thought, I got a tweet from Hillary herself in which she comments on the handling of the virus. Hillary's focus was on denouncing the use of the term "Chinese virus". That's all; she's against calling it the "Chinese virus" cause that might be taken as racist.
It's hard to imagine how irrelevant the name of the virus actually is. I remember the Hong Kong flu some years ago. Was that racist? No, it came originally from Hong Kong. How about MERS? Remember that? MERS is the acronym for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. It first appeared in 2012 in Arabia. Some people even call it the camel flu. Is that racist? When the Obama administration discussed MERS, were they causing a threat to all the Arab Americans in our country? Of course not. (And by the way, MERS is also caused by a corona virus just like COVID 19).
Despite the great many important questions about handling the virus, the President and his team got three questions from the media about using the term Chinese virus. Don't these reporters have brains?
Despite the virus name nonsense, there was a lot of important information that came to the fore. For example, there was the first clear explanation I heard that squares the statements that there are plenty of tests available and the constant refrain in some media that no one is being tested. We learned from the virus team that there are indeed test kits in great numbers around the country now. Those were distributed first to locations with the most cases. That means that in the past week, there were test kits in Washington state and New York etc. The analysis was done county by county. In other words, people in counties with few cases weren't getting the test kits as quickly as those in hard hit locales. The goal was to identify as many people as possible with the virus so as to stop the spread. Now, though, there are test kits across the country. The problem, however, has been the bottleneck for getting results. Because of new testing procedures that have been developed in the last few weeks, the number of tests that can be processed each day has risen 100 fold and will continue to go higher. The testing bottleneck should be resolved.
It's also worth noting that with the end of the slow testing regime, we will see a major spike in cases combined with a fall in the mortality rate. Over the next two days or so, we will see something like ten days of results released. That doesn't mean the virus is spreading faster; it only means that the wave of new results will all come almost at once. Meanwhile, as wider testing discloses many people who have the virus with few or no symptoms, the percentage of the ill who die from the disease should drop. If 3% of those diagnosed are dying now, and if the number diagnosed suddenly includes huge numbers of people with mild or no symptoms, the percentage of those diagnosed who die will go down.
The President also announced that the border with Canada has been closed. It won't affect trade or essential travel (undefined), but it will stop casual trips. This should cut down on the spread of the virus as well.
More detail was given on a huge stimulus package that is being put together. Trump said there was good bipartisan work involving most (sadly not all) of the Congress and Senate. No need to comment on this package until the actual details are released.
We have a long way to go in this fight against the virus. We have to fight it together. Right now, the best thing we can do is to follow the guidelines to reduce the spread.
No comments:
Post a Comment