The United States is at a breaking point

Manuel Castro Rodríguez

August 9

I am going blind; I can only see with great difficulty at a distance of less than two feet. But even the visually impaired we understand that under Trump, the United States is on course for disaster. President Trump said as early as February that the COVID-19 virus would “just disappear,” and it’s not nearly as serious as the common flu, but the pandemic has accelerated at times during the past five months. Lincoln’s homeland is the only developed country that has suffered a severe and sustained outbreak for more than five months, in the richest country mankind has ever known.

The United States has surpassed five million COVID-19 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University. Brazil ranks second, with three million. In cases per capita, the U.S. ranks eighth. In our country the infection total has more than doubled over the past two months. At least 162,400 people have died since the pandemic began.

Statistics do not tell you the whole story because infected people have had a wide range of symptoms reported. COVID-19 affects different people in different ways. Coronavirus can harm not only the lungs, but the kidneys, liver, heart, brain, gastrointestinal tract, and skin. Historical research on other coronaviruses like Middle East respiratory syndrome and severe acute respiratory syndrome shows that for some people, a full recovery might still be years off or even their lifetime.

However, President Trump is attempting to destroy the Affordable Care Act (ACA) again. Obamacare must “fall,” the Trump administration told Supreme Court. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States has exceptional levels of health-care expenditure and produces the worst outcomes. In contrast with Canada, Western Europe, and other countries, the United States does not construe economic rights as human rights.

When it comes to managing the spread of this coronavirus, some countries have been faring better than others. With coronavirus taking lives and shaking economies around the world, Germany proves its ability to effectively manage the pandemic crises. A May 6 The New York Times feature summarizes the German way as “a combination of cautious, science-led political leadership and a regime of widespread testing, tracing and social distancing.”

Germany has enforced strict lockdowns, tested systematically and based policy changes on clear, data-driven metrics such as R0, the effective reproduction rate of the virus as expressed by the estimated number of people one infected person subsequently goes on to infect. On May 6, German Chancellor Angela Merkel — who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry — announced that Germany could “afford a bit of courage” and start to reopen most parts of its economy and society. The reproduction rate in Germany was at 0.76.

Merkel’s explanation of the scientific basis behind her government’s lockdown exit strategy, had all the calm confidence expected of a former research scientist. This is an excellent example of the use of science in political decisions. Conventional accounts of the relationship between expertise and politics have assumed the validity of a division of labor, in which experts provide a neutral assessment of the facts, while citizens and their representatives supply the values necessary for political decisions.

President Trump is at the opposite pole to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Scientific evidence demonstrates that end of April and start of May Florida could have averted the serious crisis in which we find ourselves, if Trump’s GOP did not prioritize political gains over human life, just as Communist dictators do.

Since a month ago, Florida has more Covid-19 than most countries in the world. What should be a booming tourist destination this time of year is now riddled with coronavirus, dwarfing entire countries in some metrics. Florida had more new cases in 1 day than the entire United States did in about 2 months

Florida reported its highest number of COVID-19 cases in one day — 15,300 on July 11, according to Johns Hopkins University. That is a new record for the most new cases in a single day from any state — including New York state earlier in the pandemic. It took the entire United States 59 days to top 15,000 combined cases — from January 21 to March 20. It also took the entire United States more than two months from the start of the outbreak to top 15,000 new cases in a single day. That happened on March 26, when the U.S. had 18,036 new cases in a single day, according to Johns Hopkins University.

According to the Florida Department of Health, 25,221 under the age of 14 has seen confirmed cases, of which 3 have died. However, President Trump continues to lie about it,

If you look at children, children are almost — I would almost say definitely — but almost immune from this disease. So few — they’ve gotten stronger. Hard to believe. I don’t know how you feel about it, but they have much stronger immune systems than we do, somehow, for this. And they don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem.

Public health experts say the United States is not doing enough to contain Covid-19. Experts have warned that the actual number of people infected is far greater. In the past week, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida had the most new cases relative to population.

Yet after a recent slate of surges, the United States has entered a lull. Daily tallies have leveled off in 26 states and territories, and new cases and new hospitalizations have both stabilized — though at the worrying levels of 50,000 to 60,000 per day, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

The U.S. has reached a similar plateau before. The nation’s outbreak had grown exponentially during March, until settling into 20,000 to 30,000 new cases per day by the beginning of April. The national tally surpassed 50,000 cases per day just before July 4, and the U.S. smashed its record for daily cases on July 17, with more than 75,000 new incidents reported. Since then, new cases have flattened to about 65,000 per day as the outbreak’s growth has reached equilibrium in places such as Arizona.

The seven-day average daily death toll is hovering around 1,000. That is down from a peak of more than 2,200 on a single day in mid-April, when bigger cities like New York and Seattle were hit the hardest. The most deadly single day was April 15, with 2,752.

But the seven-day average daily death toll is now significantly higher than it was in early July, when it was around 500. Cases have surged since then — particularly in the Sun Belt states and in communities where officials moved quickly to reopen. Many of the places with the most cases per capita have been smaller cities and rural communities in the South and the Midwest.

The U.S. reported its millionth case on April 28, more than three months after the first reported case. The country passed two million cases on June 10, three million on July 7 and four million on July 23.

On April 16, was published The spies who predicted COVID-19. Kent Harrington, a former senior CIA analyst, who served as national intelligence officer for East Asia, chief of station in Asia, and the CIA’s director of public affairs, says (emphasis mine),

Intelligence agencies are used to making headlines when they fail to do their job. But after months of President Donald Trump ignoring their warnings about COVID-19, and after years of his administration discounting their alerts about the danger of a pandemic more generally, it is time that intelligence professionals receive the credit they deserve.

It should come as no surprise that Trump repeatedly dismissed intelligence about the threat of the coronavirus throughout January and February. Trump has long made clear that he has no patience for those who don’t pander to his views. When intelligence leaders contradicted him on several issues in their annual briefing to Congress last year, he told them to “go back to school.”

This year, the bill for Trump’s war on intelligence is coming due in the form of lost lives and overwhelmed health-care systems. U.S. intelligence agencies had sounded the alarm and even provided the enemy’s battleplan, detailing precisely how a novel coronavirus pandemic would unfold. Still, the wannabe wartime president did nothing. Res ipsa loquitur — the negligence speaks for itself.

It is very clear that many COVID-19 deaths and cases would have been prevented. Experts predict more than 230,000 U.S. coronavirus deaths by November.

On July 21, while leaders of the 27-nation European Union agreed on a groundbreaking plan to jointly borrow €750 billion ($862 billion) to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 135,000 people around the bloc, Trump said he fears COVID-19 in the U.S. “will get worse before it gets better” — a marked departure from his insistence since the start of the pandemic, when he repeatedly said that the virus will “just disappear.”

In fact, Trump recognized his incompetent response to COVID-19 pandemic, the same day that the United States recorded more than 1,000 daily deaths from the coronavirus for the first time since May. Trump made the admission in his first briefing on the subject since April, when he suggested that injecting disinfectant could help fight infection. 

America is at a breaking point

Robert Reich

August 3, 2020

The spies who predicted COVID-19

Kent Harrington*

April 16, 2020

Trump’s war on the ‘deep state’ of the intelligence community is costing American lives

Intelligence agencies are used to making headlines when they fail to do their job. But after months of President Donald Trump ignoring their warnings about COVID-19, and after years of his administration discounting their alerts about the danger of a pandemic more generally, it is time that intelligence professionals receive the credit they deserve.

It should come as no surprise that Trump repeatedly dismissed intelligence about the threat of the coronavirus throughout January and February. Trump has long made clear that he has no patience for those who don’t pander to his views. When intelligence leaders contradicted him on several issues in their annual briefing to Congress last year, he told them to “go back to school.”

This year, the bill for Trump’s war on intelligence is coming due in the form of lost lives and overwhelmed health-care systems. U.S. intelligence agencies had sounded the alarm and even provided the enemy’s battleplan, detailing precisely how a novel coronavirus pandemic would unfold. Still, the wannabe wartime president did nothing. Res ipsa loquitur — the negligence speaks for itself.

Most Americans will never see the raw intelligence and in-depth analysis that the president receives every day, nor can anyone who is not on the front lines appreciate the sheer breadth of national-security challenges that intelligence analysts and officers must follow. That is why the public briefings by intelligence leaders are so important, especially when they expose the president’s own willful ignorance.

Public warnings

Obviously, public briefings cannot lay out every detail about the issues the intelligence community tracks. But as someone who worked on dozens of unclassified briefings at the CIA, I know that professional analysts do their utmost to portray classified findings accurately, even as they protect their sources and methods.

Consider the annual threat briefing to Congress, which has been postponed indefinitely for this year. In delivering the assessment, the director of national intelligence offers a unified perspective drawn from a wide array of agencies whose primary job is to find facts and track their implications. In the 2019 briefing that so upset Trump, then-DNI Dan Coats reaffirmed the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, and warned that Trump’s bromance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had not diminished that country’s nuclear ambitions.

More to the point, the DNI’s annual briefing has repeatedly warned about the risk of a global pandemic.

The intelligence community first raised the alert immediately after President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, when then-DNI Dennis Blair testified that, “The most pressing transnational health challenge for the United States is still the potential for emergence of a severe pandemic, with the primary candidate being a highly lethal influenza virus.”

Following the 2009 H1NI (swine flu) outbreak, Blair doubled down in 2010, highlighting the potential for a pandemic to disrupt the economy. A “lack of consistent surveillance and diagnostic capability for diseases in animals,” he said, “undermines the United States’ ability to identify, contain, and warn about local outbreaks before they spread.”

Blair’s successor, James Clapper, delivered the same message in March 2013, but also refined the U.S. assessment of the threat with prescient detail. Pointing to the growing danger posed by zoonotic viruses, he warned that “an easily transmissible, novel respiratory pathogen that kills or incapacitates more than 1% of its victims is among the most disruptive events possible. Such an outbreak would result in a global pandemic.”

‘U.S. vulnerable to pandemic’

In foretelling the COVID-19 pandemic exactly, Clapper made clear that, “This is not a hypothetical threat.”

Trump received the same message in May 2017, when Coats highlighted a World Bank assessment predicting that a pandemic would cost the world around 5% of gross domestic product.

Coats then issued the same warning in 2019, testifying that, “The United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”

Is anyone surprised that Coats’s successor isn’t bothering with a briefing this year?

But the DNI’s annual assessments aren’t the only unclassified briefings that show the extent of Trump’s negligence in the face of the pandemic. Every four years, the National Intelligence Council, the U.S. intelligence community’s senior analytical body, produces Global Trends, a forecast of the forces likely to shape the decades ahead. The timing isn’t coincidental: the strategic outlook appears when administrations change, offering presidents a long-term international perspective with which to fashion or refurbish their national-security goals.

Trump has described the COVID-19 pandemic as an “unforeseen problem” that “came out of nowhere.” The authors of the past three Global Trends reports would beg to differ, as would the hundreds of experts whom they consult in constructing their analyses.

Spells it out clearly

Consider the 2008 report, “Global Trends 2025,” which was all but oracular. “The emergence of a novel, highly transmissible, and virulent human respiratory illness for which there are no adequate countermeasures could initiate a global pandemic,” the authors warned. The threat, they added, would likely emerge “in an area marked by high population density and close association between humans and animals, such as many areas of China and Southeast Asia.” Even with limits placed on international travel, “travelers with mild symptoms or who were asymptomatic could carry the disease to other continents.”

From peddling disinformation about the virus to disbanding the National Security Council directorate overseeing pandemic threats, Trump has squandered multiple opportunities to get ahead of the COVID-19 crisis. The health and economic consequences that we are now experiencing have long been predicted.

U.S. intelligence analysts were warning about precisely this scenario for at least 12 years. But even they could not foresee that America would end up with a president willing to sacrifice so many lives on the altar of his ego.

*Kent Harrington, a former senior CIA analyst, served as national intelligence officer for East Asia, chief of station in Asia, and the CIA’s director of public affairs.

The lost days of summer:

How Trump struggled to contain the virus

August 8, 2020

A politics-first, science-second attitude has become pervasive inside the White House — championed first and foremost by the president — as the pandemic rages out of control.

link to original article

Trump spinning virus failure as a win again

by celebrating 'encouraging' progress

Stephen Collinson

August 4, 2020

Every time President Donald Trump and his political team claim great progress in the pandemic it's a dangerous sign: things are likely about to get worse.

link to original article

Why the U.S. is on course for disaster

Manuel Castro Rodríguez

July 22, 2020

Sen. Rubio,

As you know, I am going blind; I can only see with great difficulty at a distance of less than two feet. But even the visually impaired we understand that under Trump, the United States is on course for disaster. With the exception of the U.S., the developed world has controlled the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, what happened yesterday?

While leaders of the 27-nation European Union agreed early Tuesday on a groundbreaking plan to jointly borrow €750 billion ($862 billion) to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 135,000 people around the bloc, Trump said he fears COVID-19 in the U.S. “will get worse before it gets better” — a marked departure from his insistence since the start of the pandemic, when he repeatedly said that the virus will “just disappear.”

In fact, Trump recognized his incompetent response to COVID-19 pandemic, the same day that the United States recorded more than 1,000 daily deaths from the coronavirus for the first time since May. Trump made the admission in his first briefing on the subject since April, when he suggested that injecting disinfectant could help fight infection.

Six months after the virus was first diagnosed in the U.S. and the damage is already done — COVID-19 has killed more than 142,000 people and has infected more than 3,902,200 — Trump said, “We are in the process of developing a strategy”, while Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp, and the CDC all continued to warn that the speed and spread of COVID-19 remains a hurdle.

In fact, Trump acknowledged that Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is right when he says (emphasis mine), “The US is flying blind in our effort to curb the spread of COVID-19.”

Many COVID-19 deaths and cases would have been prevented, but

“President Trump has repeatedly lied about the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s preparation for this once-in-a-generation crisis.” It is “an unfinished compendium of Trump’s overwhelming dishonesty during a national emergency.”

Trump has lost credibility, not only because of more than 20,000 false or misleading claims since taking office. As of April 2, were reported more than 5,400 deaths. On April 16, after a near-total shutdown, President Trump said that some states could start reopening “literally tomorrow.” As of May 31, there were least 103,500 deaths.

In other words, fatalities increased twenty times in less than two months, because President Trump ignored warnings that the numbers would continue to drop only if social distancing was kept in place, rushing instead to restart the economy and tend to his battered re-election hopes. According to CNN,

President Donald Trump's continuing erosion among well-educated voters looms as perhaps the most imposing headwind to Republican hopes of recapturing the House of Representatives in November -- or even avoiding further losses in the chamber.

In 2018, a suburban revolt against Trump powered Democrats to sweeping gains in white-collar House districts from coast to coast. The backlash left the GOP holding only about one-fourth of all House districts that have more college graduates than the national average, down from more than two-fifths before the election, according to a new CNN analysis of census data.

Trump recognized his incompetent response to COVID-19 pandemic, the same day that the United States recorded more than 1,000 daily deaths from the coronavirus. But statistics do not tell you the whole story because,

1- You have got to keep in mind that the mortality rate is always going to lag significantly behind the infection rate, and the hospitalization rate will always lag significantly behind the infection rate.

2- COVID-19 affects different people in different ways. Coronavirus can harm not only the lungs, but the kidneys, liver, heart, brain, nervous system, skin, and gastrointestinal tract.

Infected people have had a wide range of symptoms reported. People are spending months recovering from a fairly mild dose and some people have issues resulting from strokes, scarred lungs, etc., that will last for decades or even their lifetime. But Trump’s GOP wants to repeal Affordable Care Act (ACA, Obamacare).

Under Obamacare, insurers that set their premiums too high paid a percentage of their excess profits to the government. And insurers who set their premiums too low are reimbursed a percentage of their losses. That way, insurers enjoy some cushion against catastrophic loss if they set premiums too low.

As Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) knows,

More than 20 million Americans gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, Obamacare).

Black Americans,children and small-business owners have especially benefited.

Thirty-seven states have expanded Medicaid, deepening their pool of eligible residents to those who live at or below 138% of the federal poverty level.

As a result of the increased access to health care, it is estimated that more than 19,000 lives have been saved.

However, beginning in 2013, Sen. Marco Rubio began pushing for legislation to end the risk corridor payments. Eventually, Congress enacted a provision in its appropriations bills for 2014, 2015, and 2016 — known as a “rider” — seeking to prevent the federal government from making most of the payments it owes under the risk corridors program.

Less than a month ago, on June 26, Trump administration asks Supreme Court to invalidate Obamacare. Sen. Marco Rubio defended accepting contributions from the National Rifle Association, while wants to repeal Obamacare during a pandemic. Sen. Rubio should explain what is his concept of human rights.

Sincerely,

Manuel Castro Rodríguez

7333 Carlyle Ave, Apt. 1A, Miami Beach, Florida 33141