James.galbraith

The Department of Homeland Security stopped updating its annual models of the havoc that pandemics would wreak on America’s critical infrastructure in 2017, according to current and former DHS officials with direct knowledge of the matter.

From at least 2005 to 2017, an office inside DHS, in tandem with analysts and supercomputers at several national laboratories, produced detailed analyses of what would happen to everything from transportation systems to hospitals if a pandemic hit the United States.

But the work abruptly stopped in 2017 amid a bureaucratic dispute over its value, two of the former officials said, leaving the department flat-footed as it seeks to stay ahead of the impact the COVID-19 outbreak is having on vast swaths of the U.S. economy. Officials at other agencies have requested some of the reports from the pandemic modeling unit at DHS in recent days, only to find the information they needed scattered or hard to find quickly.

And while department leaders dispute that, others say the confusion is just the latest example of the Trump administration’s struggle to respond to an outbreak that has sickened more than 50,000 Americans and threatens to overwhelm hospitals and other health care providers. Officials are now scrambling to secure enough masks, respirators and ventilators to meet the rapidly exploding need. Doctors and nurses are reusing their protective gear as supplies dwindle; governors are begging the administration for federal help that has been slow to arrive.

The models — primarily computer simulations that seek to anticipate the interaction of millions of Americans and U.S. infrastructure systems — were overseen by the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center, a program that has been run by a shifting alphabet soup of agencies within DHS, reflecting the continual bureaucratic reshuffling that has plagued the department since its inception in 2002.

Some of the modeling unit’s analyses looked at what would happen if a large portion of the U.S. workforce — say, 40 percent — got sick or couldn’t show up at work to maintain and operate key aspects of the national infrastructure, such as the systems that keep planes flying safely. The reports were meant to guide policymakers toward areas that would demand their attention in the event of an outbreak.

One 2015 DHS report, based partly on data produced by NISAC, warned that America’s public and private health systems might “experience significant shortages in vaccines, antivirals, pharmaceuticals needed to treat secondary infections and complications, personal protective equipment (PPE), and medical equipment, including ventilators.”

Juliette Kayyem, a senior DHS official in the Obama administration, praised the quality of the NISAC reports she received when she was at the department, and criticized DHS for being “singularly focused on border enforcement” under Trump at the expense of properly planning for other threats, like a pandemic.

“We should not be surprised that a department that has for the last 3½ years viewed itself solely as a border enforcement agency seems ill-equipped to address a much greater threat to the homeland,” she said.

In recent days, as the government raced to address the growing demands, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services asked their counterparts at DHS to dig up some of the old reports and analyses, according to two former DHS officials. The request came from within HHS’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, which works to ensure that the country has enough medical equipment and drugs to deal with public health emergencies and everyday health needs.

But Homeland Security officials initially had trouble finding some documents related to planning for a pandemic, including 2007 and 2009 pandemic reports, as well as a report produced for a 2014 exercise held by senior policymakers, according to the former officials — although some were eventually found and put in a ZIP file sent to HHS.

“Nobody even knew where any of the documents were anymore,” one of the former officials said. “It’s really just a source of frustration.”

The former DHS officials said if the pandemic models had been maintained properly, the administration might have had an earlier understanding of where shortages might occur, and acted accordingly to address them.

“A lot of what we’re doing now is shooting in the dark, and there’s going to be secondary impacts to infrastructure that are going to be felt in part because we didn’t maintain these models,” said one of the former DHS officials. “Our ability to potentially foresee where the impacts are or may manifest is a result of the fact that we don’t have the capabilities anymore.”

The pandemic models emerged as part of a broader shift in the federal government’s thinking after Hurricane Katrina, when DHS and FEMA came under heavy criticism for their response to the disaster.

With those searing lessons still fresh, DHS broadened its focus from a narrow set of issues — primarily terrorist attacks within the United States — to preventing and preparing for all types of emergency events. The department began modeling and analyzing how severe events, including a pandemic, could affect critical infrastructure and hit supply chains.

Some of the predictions in the July 2015 DHS report were eerily prescient about the kinds of issues that the U.S. has faced in recent weeks because of the coronavirus; the report said that “a severe influenza pandemic could overwhelm the Healthcare and Public Health Sector in as little as 3-6 weeks” and warned that healthcare facilities in cities could be swamped.

The report also warned that basic medical supplies for emergency services could be at risk because they’re dependent on “just-in-time” deliveries of health care supplies, and a big increase in demand during a pandemic would make it harder for them to get what they need.

Much of the blame for the switch in focus at DHS, according to two of the former officials, falls on longtime DHS employee Robert Hanson, who became division director of prioritization and modeling at the department’s Office of Cyber and Infrastructure Analysis in May 2016.

When he was elevated to that job, Hanson wanted to focus more on visualizations of events like hurricanes and “going down rabbit holes that really didn’t need to be done,” according to one of the former officials. He also wanted to focus more on elections and cybersecurity because “cyber is the magic word to attract money,” said the other former official.

“They’ve allowed a lot of capability to decay, including the pandemic models and transportation models and a whole bunch of other stuff in favor of chasing the soccer ball on different cyber things,” including trying to use machine learning and AI in work on cybersecurity, this person said.

In an interview, Hanson acknowledged reallocating some funding away from pandemic modeling to other topics of research because he had “been given direction by my leadership at the time to reprioritize a lot of the projects,” and he agreed it was necessary. He also said when he took over the modeling program, it was considered “ineffective” by DHS leadership and by executive branch overseers.

Hanson thought, too, that pandemic modeling was best done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the former DHS officials said, although the CDC’s mandate is different and researchers there don’t focus on how a pandemic could affect infrastructure not related to health care.

After an uprising by staff last year who complained about what they called his abusive management style and lack of leadership, Hanson was removed as the assistant director of analysis at the National Risk Management Center, OCIA’s successor organization, according to the two former DHS officials. Hanson and his deputy, Carmen Zapata, were detailed elsewhere within DHS.

Explaining his departure, Hanson said he “had made such fundamental changes to the program that some of the staff were unhappy with me and were going to see me as an object of ire so I decided to leave.”

NISAC, the DHS office that oversaw the models, began as a partnership between the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in 1999 but in 2003 was folded into DHS by the USA Patriot Act and in 2014 put under OCIA, which has listed analyzing “pandemic influenza” as a top priority.

The program’s costs were considerable: The government had to regularly purchase data sets to keep the models current, while also paying for coding, operations and maintenance, along with the original development costs. From six and 10 people at Los Alamos were focused on pandemics and a total of 60 to 70 people at DHS and the national labs had some role in the models, according to one of the former officials.

Beginning under the George W. Bush administration, all critical infrastructure in the U.S. was segregated into different categories, which now comprise 16 sectors. DHS was made a lead agency for 10 of them, including IT, communications, critical manufacturing and commercial facilities.

The DHS models were designed to look at the impacts of a pandemic on the different sectors within the department’s bailiwick, as well as other sectors that touched on homeland security. For instance, one report NISAC worked on for a table-top exercise looked at how to combat a hypothetical epidemic in Southeast Asia, what travel restrictions to put in place and how to design social distancing to stop the epidemic inside the United States.

The simulations the modeling unit produced also helped the department understand the impact a pandemic might have on its own workforce. More than 9,700 DHS employees are quarantined or self-monitoring because of the virus, and 73 employees were confirmed or presumed COVID-19 positive as of Monday, according to a person familiar with the numbers.

The modeling unit’s work also addressed real-life impacts to infrastructure due to smaller-scale outbreaks, including the H5N1 bird flu in 2007, H1N1 in 2009, Ebola in 2014 and the Zika virus in early 2016.

During the Ebola outbreak, the Obama White House asked the unit to support its decision-making on deliberations about banning travel from certain countries based on risk, whether to close any borders and how to spend money on airport screening, according to one of the former DHS officials.

Reports based on the models were usually emailed to DHS leadership and sometimes officials in the White House. There were also about 20,000 people on the distribution list, including a wide group of critical infrastructure owner-operators and state officials. Some of the papers ran to 150 pages.

It wouldn’t be easy for DHS to rebuild its capacity to model pandemics, given the brain drain within the department: Many of the people who worked on the models have now scattered across the government or left government service altogether, one of the former officials said.

“There’s no institutional memory whatsoever,” this person said.

NISAC was “really, really good” about studying the impacts of pandemics, a former Trump official said, but there’s been “so much turnover that people just don’t know that [their work] exists and there’s been very poor work to catalogue and keep lessons learned.”

Hanson insisted that DHS maintained the capability at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and that the system is still being used today by DHS to inform decisions on the coronavirus across the federal government, but he couldn’t recall the full name of the PNNL staffer he said was in charge of the model now.

Meanwhile, current officials are left essentially to reinvent the wheel in the middle of a pandemic that has already claimed more than 600 American lives.

Bob Kolasky, director of the National Risk Management Center, OCIA’s successor organization within DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, recently told employees to write a plan for how to respond to the virus by early this week, but some employees aren’t confident that any plan they come up with will actually be used, according to one of the former DHS officials.

Asked for comment, Kolasky said his division of DHS “has been out front and actively working with partners to provide guidance as they make risk-based decisions during the COVID 19 response. The National Risk Management Center continues to use NISAC, along with other government and private sector resources, to provide valuable insight and assessments to our stakeholders.”

“I’ve heard people say it’s a black swan. It’s not a black swan,” said one of the former DHS officials. “This is the whitest of white swans. This was absolutely inevitable, and the fact is we didn’t even maintain the capacity that we had or even the records of what we had done so that information could be quickly located and turned over to people who are making the critical operations right now.”

Betsy Woodruff Swan contributed to this report.

Impeached president Donald Trump is taking his war on blue states to a new level. He has declared California, New York, and Washington state coronavirus disaster areas, but has so far refused to release a key part of that designation: unemployment assistance.

That's specific, disaster-related unemployment insurance to go to workers who aren't eligible for traditional UI, like gig economy workers. Under the program, they can receive 26 weeks of benefits if their job loss is a result of the disaster, either because their position has been eliminated or they can't get to their job site. When the disaster was declared—March 20 in New York and March 22 in California and Washington—the Federal Emergency Management Agency said that "federal emergency aid has been made available." The unemployment funds, however, have not been released.

Politico reports that the only aid the administration has released to the three states has been for "crisis counseling," and that a "senior administration official said the administration is holding off on approving requests for disaster unemployment assistance because it anticipates Congress will provide similar protections in the coronavirus stimulus package under negotiation." Given the flux we've seen in the last five days on that legislation, that's a bullshit excuse.

"We appreciate that the federal government has recognized the severity of the public health emergency," Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said; however, that declaration did not "unlock many forms of federal assistance we have requested to help workers." Jack Sterne, a spokesperson for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, added, "It is time for the federal government to provide Disaster Unemployment Assistance to New Yorkers."

Inslee and three other governors—Mike Dunleavy (R-Alaska), Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), and J.B. Pritzker (D-Illinois)—wrote to Trump on Tuesday, urging him to free up the funds and move faster in declaring disasters for all their states. "Even as states enact policies to flexibly provide unemployment insurance to those in need," the governors wrote, "we are still leaving many hourly and independent workers behind who desperately need assistance during this crisis."

The administration's recent actions look deeply suspect.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks ushered in a new era of changes that linger to this day—from taking off our shoes at airport security checkpoints, to tolerating an erosion of civil liberties and government intrusion in our lives. We are deeply in debt from the resulting (and unnecessary) wars and hyper militarization of our budget. Republicans reaped electoral benefits, branding themselves as the party that “keeps you safe.” 

COVID-19 promises a dramatic reshaping of American society. Here’s at least ten ways our lives will change. Feel free to speculate about others. 

1.) Government is here to help. Ronald Reagan famously quipped, “the most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” That ushered in two generations of Republican nihilism, with relentless focus in slashing and cutting government in all areas except for defense. Well, it turns out government is the only thing that can help in a global disaster, and even Republicans have stepped up to pour trillions into the economy and directly in the hands of individuals. Meanwhile, the vaunted free market, supposed solution to all of society’s ills, is sitting helplessly begging for handouts. 

2.) Wall Street will face further restrictions. Wall Street faced increased regulation in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. It’ll only get worse, as bans on corporate stock buybacks and other limits will become increasingly popular. Tolerance for corporate tax evasion will erode further, particularly among companies that receive any kind of federal bailout money. 

3.) Security is more than just thwarting terrorists. The Trump administration, freshly elected, gleefully disbanded the nation’s pandemic preparedness talk force. The last competent administration foresaw the possibility of a pandemic creating havoc in this country, but the incompetent Republican did not, and most people were blissfully unaware of the danger. No longer. This has consequences not just at the federal and state budget levels, but in how corporations plan for a rainy day (like Apple, with its $245 billion cash hoard), and how we individuals interact. We have a lot to learn from Asia—from contact-less greetings (would be so hard for me!), to greater use of face masks and general acceptance of our responsibilities to help keep others from getting sick. 

4.) We are in this together, as a society. Supply hoarding and profiteering and selfish jackasses hanging out in crowds in restaurants or beaches show us the worst parts of individualistic thinking—they want their “freedom” and fuck everyone else, including grandma. But the rest of us look on in horror and disgust because this is one crisis that can’t be solved by rugged individualism. It requires collective action. That’s why it’s been so hard for Republicans to adapt. Their usual solutions—demagoguery, militarism, and macho posturing aren’t working. Trump can be a racist with his “China virus” shit all day long, and the virus will continue to ravage through the population unchecked. A newfound respect for acting as collective society, as much as it chafes conservatives, will have a huge impact on public policy for a generation or two. 

5.) Working from home is actually okay! Some jobs need to take place in physical offices. Many don’t. The continued adoption of work-from-home jobs will accelerate, proving beneficial to the environment and overcrowded transportation systems (both roads and public transit). And while some people desperately need an office environment to be productive, many more will realize the joys of working from home (from more “life” time without a commute, to enjoying, er, casual attire).

6.) Distance learning will gain popularity. The little ones need to go back to physical school. But more college classes can be taught remotely, lessening demands for colleges and universities to expand physical facilities in a time of growing enrollment. (My local University of California, Berkeley, is bursting at the seams.) 

7.) Globalism will take a hit. What happens when medical equipment and supplies are all being made in a single country, itself shut down from disaster? We just found out. And we didn’t even need the pandemic to realize it. Impeached president Donald Trump’s own stupid trade war with China had already exposed that single-point of failure. That means corporations will develop more diversified supply chains, but might perhaps spur greater manufacturing back home—particularly for items deemed of particular strategic value (like medical supplies). 

8.) Government-supplied health care will receive a boost. If predictions come to pass, and we do reach 30% unemployment, a lot of people will be losing their health care at perhaps the worst time possible to do so. Many more under-insured, or on the Obamacare exchanges, will feel the pressures of getting sick without added coverage. The solution is obvious, and wouldn’t just be a boon to the general populace, but taking healthcare costs off the books of corporations would be the biggest corporate welfare program in history. It would literally free up billions annually for corporations like GM. There’s a reason why posters instructing workers how to sign up for government benefits are posted in Walmart break rooms and other low-wage outposts. Just go whole-hog, government takes it on. Taxes go up to pay for it. But corporations have less pressures to survive, particularly in times of high economic stress like today. 

9.) Trump doesn’t survive. Trump is experiencing a bit of a popularity bump right now in a bit of rally-around-the-flag effect, but the worse is yet to come, and he owns this tragedy, every second of it. It’ll be practically impossible for him to survive the double whammy of a deep recession or even depression, along with an unspeakable body count. Not only will the seven key presidential states fall to the Democrats: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, but several other states may flirt with competitiveness, including Iowa, Ohio, Texas, and … call me crazy because I probably am, but ALASKA could edge closer to contention.

10.) The Senate turns blue. This won’t just have repercussions at the top, but also for the Senate, improving dramatically our chances to not just win the Senate, but do so with a cushion. Our top targets will be easier to win: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia (both seats), Maine, Montana, and North Carolina. Meanwhile, our second-tier races become real dogfights: Iowa, Kentucky, and Texas. The House stays easily Democratic, with Team Blue maybe even gaining sets ahead of the 2020 reapportionment process. 

11.) We can tackle the big issues. We will survive this, and we’ll emerge knowing that we truly can solve our biggest issues if we muster the political will to do so. Obama’s $900 billion stimulus package was insanely controversial during a time of global economic collapse, yet here we are talking multiple trillions of dollars. This newfound will can pay dividends as we tackle the next predictable global calamity—climate change. Enacting a Green New Deal will require political will and sacrifice, including changes in how we live our lives. But hey, if we can do it to survive a pathogen, we can do it to prevent the death of our planet (or at least our ability to survive in it).

What else do you see changing in the years ahead? 

Cody Pfister, a 26-year-old Missouri man, was arrested and charged with making a terrorist threat after posting a video to social media in which he licked a row of toiletries at a store after saying, “Who’s afraid of the coronavirus?”

Ok time to ID this twit, let the doxxing begin. pic.twitter.com/wEzIq34a4C

— Duff (@jim_duffus) March 22, 2020

Pfister’s video went viral, and he was soon outed.

The City of Warrenton, Missouri police department announced: “A local resident who took a video of themselves licking the merchandise after making a “Corona Virus” statement at Walmart and posting it to social media has been taken into custody. Charges will be pending through the Warren County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. This particular video, which won’t be shared here, has gained some international attention and we have received numerous reports about the video from locals, nearby residents, as well as people from the Netherlands, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. We take these complaints very seriously and would like to thank all of those who reported the video so the issue could be addressed.”

The Riverfront Times reports: “The video appears to have been filmed on March 11 at the Warrenton store, according to court records. Pfister was taken into custody this week, and Warren County prosecutors charged him today. The charge is a low-level felony. Bizarrely, he’s not the first person to get in trouble with police for licking surfaces as public health officials beg people to wash their hands, keep at least six feet apart and avoid touching their faces in hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19. The manager of a grocery store in Wisconsin called police after a woman licked the door handle to a freezer, reportedly to protest the virus, while a manager was disinfecting the store, Newsweek reported.”

Pfister has previous convictions for burglary, theft of a firearm, drug possession and driving while intoxicated, according to the paper.

The post Man Charged with ‘Terrorist Threat’ After Licking Walmart Toiletries in Coronavirus Video: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Hey everyone! How’s your pandemic going? Good? Good.

If you’re freaking out, like I am, take a stroll through the archives and take your mind off of the current tragedy by enjoying some humor about previous tragedies.

In a Monday evening briefing, President Donald Trump stupefied the White House press corps and the nation with a dramatic about-face decision. He said he was ready to overrule the advice of administration doctors like Anthony Fauci, scientists, public health officials and others about tamping down the coronavirus pandemic by maintaining social distancing and keeping businesses shuttered. Then he kept going on Tuesday: “We have to go back to work, much sooner than people thought,” Trump said during a Fox News Channel interview, adding that he was looking toward Easter, April 12.

Arguing that the economy could not endure an extended lockdown, Trump said on Monday that we “cannot” let the cure be worse than the problem itself.” He added that when the 15-day period of social distancing he originally ordered expired on March 30, he would make a decision about “essentially reopening the country.”

Trump floated this balloon even though the speed with which the contagion is ripping through the U.S. population rivals what Italy, Iran, France and other exposed developed countries have experienced. Should Trump execute this move, the spike in cases could deluge hospitals well beyond their capacity and push the U.S. death toll beyond the 2.2 million predicted in the widely cited Imperial College coronavirus model. To fill the streets with sick people, overload the hospitals with patients it can’t treat, and feed the cemeteries with a bumper crop of corpses will only damage the economy more than the current containment policies, say the health professionals.

What on earth is the president doing? One possibility is that he’s not really serious about lifting the restrictions, and is just blowing hot air to make sure the stock markets don’t get scared downward any further. Trump is known for his short-term thinking, responding to even complex issues with improvised day-to-day or minute-by-minute antics. Maybe that’s what’s happening here, too.

But maybe he’s serious. If so, here’s a modest proposal: As an example to his followers, Trump and his entire White House team can go first.

To really boost confidence, Trump could go big and bold, temporarily relocating White House operations and personnel to the hottest coronavirus spot in the country, New York City, and relax restrictions in a place where all can see. He could move his Resolute desk into his Trump Tower office and could instruct his White House staff to take the elevator down at lunchtime to patronize food carts and restaurants, take the subway and buses to work, and play pick-up games of basketball.

To further demonstrate his sincerity, Trump should also order his entire family to break out of their life-support cocoons to take jobs as cashiers, deliverymen, nursing home janitors, bus drivers, EMT assistants and other positions that require regular contact with potentially infected people.

Of course, Trump won’t do any such thing. He’s a germaphobe whose prize possession is his family. But his love of family makes it fair to ask why he seems so eager to sacrifice other people’s families while offering no corresponding sacrifice of his own. (Is he really advocating getting-coronavirus-to-own-the libs?)

There’s also something exploitative about how he has relied on his loyal followers at Fox News Channel to downplay the danger of the coronavirus outbreak. Fox, whose virus commentaries were cavalier until recent days, obviously knew better weeks ago. Even as Fox anchors were dismissing the virus as an unnecessary panic, the people who own and control the network were acting differently. As the New York Times columnist Ben Smith reported Tuesday, the big 89th birthday party planned for Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch was canceled on March 8 because such a large gathering posed a threat to his health.

To be fair to Trump, he isn’t the only one talking about lifting restrictions. America’s shadow president, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who, unlike Trump, has been serving accurate medical information in his pressers, likewise conceded on Monday that the economy can’t remain on shutdown forever. But heeding scientific advice instead of rejecting, Cuomo doesn’t anticipate opening the window for many weeks or months, favoring the “surgical” approach of restarting parts of the economy in stages while protecting the vulnerable.

If Trump were to conduct a coronavirus experiment on himself, he wouldn’t be the first medical thinker to expose himself to danger to prove a theory. There’s a long tradition of self-experimentation by doctors and researchers who have made themselves guinea pigs. If Trump is as medically savvy as he claimed to be while touring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta earlier this month—“I like this stuff. I really get it,” he said—and it’s as epidemiologically sound as he makes it out to be to abandon the current restrictions, Trump can show us the way. All we should request in return is his promise to refuse a ventilator should he get sick enough to need one.

Your move, Mr. President.

******

I made a home ventilator out of a Mighty Mite vacuum cleaner and a long length of garden hose. Send your disaster blueprints to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts tried to kill my Twitter feed for drinking the last beer in the refrigerator. My RSS feed promises all who subscribe to it everlasting life.

President Donald Trump at a White House press briefing about the coronavirus pandemic on March 24, 2020. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Experts are clear: Pulling back early could lead to more infections and more deaths.

President Donald Trump seems determined to end social distancing efforts by Easter (April 12), reiterating his plan at Tuesday’s press briefing to relax his administration’s guidelines in the next few weeks — even as experts continue to warn that efforts against the coronavirus could require months.

“What a great timeline that would be,” Trump said.

In recent days, Trump has been walking back previous suggestions from public officials — including his own remarks at earlier press briefings — that social distancing will be required for months. He said on Monday, “America will, again, and soon, be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. Lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”

But experts are clear about the massive risk that ending social distancing early — in weeks instead of months — could pose.

“Everybody living through this wants to not be in this situation,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “But the call to end it soon — and saying that’s his intention — is not based on public health. There’s nothing to suggest that ending it soon will have any good impact at all.”

Instead, ending social distancing prematurely could cause more deaths. “More people will become infected. More people will get sick. More people will die,” Kates said.

Epidemiological models back this up. They indicate that coronavirus cases will rise if social distancing measures are relaxed, potentially causing hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the US alone.

Trump, however, seems increasingly concerned about the damage to the economy that social distancing efforts are causing as restaurants, stores, and other businesses close or scale down and as Americans are told to stay home as much as possible.

Of course, hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying would be bad, too — a fact Trump acknowledged. “Above all, we know that the best thing for our economy is a very powerful victory over the virus,” he said.

When pressed on the Easter timeline, Trump suggested it was based on a gut feeling, not on hard data. Easter “is a beautiful time,” Trump said. “It would be a beautiful timeline.”

It’s unclear just how much say Trump has on this. While the White House’s and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines are helpful to the public, officials, and health care providers, much of the actual policy change — from lockdowns to curfews — happens at the local and state level, where Trump has little control.

But to the extent state, local, and private leaders follow Trump’s lead, there is a giant risk here.

People will die if we end social distancing prematurely

There’s good historical evidence for the risk of ending social distancing too soon.

In 1918, the world was ravaged by a horrible flu pandemic, which was linked to as many as 100 million deaths globally and about 675,000 deaths in the US. In response, cities across America adopted a variety of social distancing measures to combat the spread of disease. Based on several studies of the period, these measures worked to reduce the death toll overall.

But many cities, also worried about the effects of social distancing on normal life and the economy, pulled back their social distancing efforts prematurely. When they did, they saw flu cases — and deaths — rise again.

Consider St. Louis. The city is now heralded as an example of how to do social distancing right because it took an aggressive and layered response to the flu pandemic early on. But as a 2007 study published in JAMA found, St. Louis in 1918 pulled back its social distancing efforts prematurely — and that led to a spike in deaths.

Here’s how that looks in chart form, with the line chart representing excess flu deaths and the black and gray bars below showing when social distancing measures were in place. The highest peak comes after social distancing measures were lifted, with the death rate falling only after they were reinstituted.

JAMA

This did not just happen in St. Louis. Analyzing data from 43 cities, the JAMA study found this pattern repeatedly across the country. Howard Markel, an author of the study and the director of the University of Michigan’s Center for the History of Medicine, described the results as a bunch of “double-humped epi curves” — officials instituted social distancing measures, saw flu cases fall, then pulled back the measures and saw flu cases rise again.

Notably, the second rise in deaths only appeared when cities removed social distancing measures, the JAMA study found: “Among the 43 cities, we found no example of a city that had a second peak of influenza while the first set of nonpharmaceutical interventions were still in effect.”

Another 2007 study, published in PNAS, looked at 17 US cities and found the same trend: “[N]o city in our analysis experienced a second wave while its main battery of [nonpharmaceutical interventions] was in place. Second waves occurred only after the relaxation of interventions.”

A lot has changed in medicine since 1918, with knowledge of viruses and the widespread use of vaccines and other medications to combat all kinds of diseases. But we still need to rely on nonpharmaceutical interventions, like social distancing, to combat epidemics and pandemics when we don’t have a vaccine. And since we likely won’t have a vaccine for the novel coronavirus for another year or so, we’ll need social distancing for, potentially, months.

As the PNAS study concluded: “In practice, and until emergency vaccine production capacity increases, this means that in the event of a severe pandemic, cities will likely need to maintain [nonpharmaceutical interventions] for longer than the 2–8 weeks that was the norm in 1918.”

We’re still in a very bad place

One of the reasons we likely need social distancing efforts for some time: There’s no sign that the coronavirus epidemic in the US is ending soon.

As of March 24, the US has more than 53,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, with nearly 700 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. America’s confirmed cases continue to rise exponentially, with no sign yet of a flattened curve. (It’s unclear how much of this rise is due to more testing versus more spread, but it’s not a good sign either way.)

Meanwhile, experts and public health officials continue to complain that the country has botched its response. There still isn’t enough testing, with people still complaining on social media that they can’t access tests even when they have symptoms. Health care providers still say they don’t have access to protective equipment, such as face masks, that they need to take care of patients. At least until recently, most Americans didn’t appear to take calls to social distance very seriously.

Simply put, there’s no sign coronavirus is subsiding yet. As experts previously told me, it could take two months or more of social distancing before the US starts to turn the corner.

“To pick an arbitrary time when we haven’t ramped up testing and we haven’t shored up the hospital supply issues … could really lead to a disaster,” Kates explained.

Trump, however, seems very eager to end social distancing as soon as possible. Even while other experts at the briefing talked down at the idea — Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautioned “flexibility” on the timeline — Trump continued to play up the idea of ending social distancing guidelines by Easter.

“I would love to see it come even sooner,” Trump said, “but I think that would be a beautiful timeline.”

Neither of North Carolina's two Republican senators fared well in the latest PPP survey, with a majority saying one senator should resign and the other senator garnering a dismal 26% job approval rating.  

Following revelations that Sen. Richard Burr unloaded up to $1.7 million in stock after a private coronavirus briefing, 50% of Tar Heel voters say Burr should resign, including 63% of Democrats, 53% of independents, and 31% of Republicans. Burr’s seat is up in 2022, but he had said he would not seek reelection even before news of the stock scandal surfaced last week.

However, the state's other GOP senator, Thom Tillis, is running for reelection this year and is underwater by 21 full points: 26-47%. Tillis is famous in the state for opposing the idea of requiring restaurant employees to wash their hands. This declaration from several years ago isn't aging well as the nation grapples with a deadly pandemic in which rigorous hand-washing has become one of the key antidotes to spreading the disease. "In the current crisis, 76% of voters say that Tillis’ comments on this issue give them ‘very serious’ concerns about him, which includes 84% of Democrats, 77% of independents, and 66% of Republicans," writes PPP. At least Tillis has succeeded in uniting voters across party lines. 

State voters also give Donald Trump and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper very different grades for handling of the crisis, with 63-19% approving of Cooper's job performance while just 49-45% approve of Trump's handling of the coronavirus. Presidents usually get a bit of bump in times of crisis, but that has not proven true in any sense for Trump. His overall job approval in North Carolina is slightly underwater at 47-48%. 

Sign and send the petition to Congress: Ban the practice of government officials trading stocks while in office.

Carola Holzner, senior physician in charge of the central emergency room at the University Hospital, is wearing a face mask. | Marcel Kusch/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

His day starts at 6:30 am, and Dr. Craig Spencer knows the symptoms by heart because everyone he sees has them.

The key to weathering the coronavirus pandemic will be to utilize social distancing and other techniques to “flatten the curve” and keep the health care system from becoming too overwhelmed at any one moment.

Except, in some places — including in the US — those systems already are.

Hospitals have only a limited number of ICU beds with which to treat patients with Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and hospital systems were generally unprepared for the pandemic. Policymakers have started to try to increase capacity to handle the oncoming surge of cases, but a total collapse of the system is still very possible.

And it’s not just equipment that’s in short supply — health care workers themselves are spread thin and overwhelmed.

In Italy, doctors have had to choose between patients for who gets put on a ventilator. Elsewhere, medical personnel are begging for personal protective equipment like masks, face-shields, and gloves to treat the onslaught of infectious patients.

While we know what we need to do to support doctors, nurses, and other health care workers to adequately deal with the pandemic, the everyday reality of caring for so many patients at once is sometimes difficult to report.

But in a viral tweet thread Tuesday, one emergency room doctor shed light on what is happening inside America’s hospitals and why it’s so important to follow the rules of social distancing in the first place.

Craig Spencer is the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital. He mentions that he worked during an Ebola outbreak in West Africa several years ago (he was then isolated and treated for disease in the US) and yet coronavirus scares him. He’s been working around the clock treating patients in New York City, which is one of the hardest-hit cities in the US so far. And he described a typical day as an ER doctor in the age of coronavirus in a recent viral tweet thread.

It starts, he says, when you walk in at 8 am and the previous shift hands off their cases to you, including one patient they’re “really worried about,” who is “very short of breath, on the maximum amount of oxygen we can give, but still breathing fast”:

You immediately assess this patient. It’s clear what this is, and what needs to happen. You have a long and honest discussion with the patient and family over the phone. It’s best to put her on life support now, before things get much worse. You’re getting set up for that, but...

You’re notified of another really sick patient coming in. You rush over. They’re also extremely sick, vomiting. They need to be put on life support as well. You bring them back. Two patients, in rooms right next to each other, both getting a breathing tube. It’s not even 10am yet.

He talks about how doctors and staff have become intimately familiar with the symptoms of Covid-19 — cough, shortness of breath, fever — and he wonders about what happened to the heart attack cases he used to see before the pandemic. You should read his thread in full:

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The story in the swing counties has been remarkably consistent.

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At this point in the coronavirus pandemic, everything from kindergarten to graduate school is changing for people across the nation. What place of higher education is apparently ready to welcome thousands of students back to campus and into residence halls with open arms? One of the largest Christian colleges in the nation: Liberty University. 

For those unfamiliar with it, Liberty is a private, evangelical Christian school located in Lynchburg, Virginia. To give you an idea of the price point, undergraduate education comes in at more than $20,000 in tuition and fees per year. You might recall that last year, Mike Pence gave a commencement speech at the school, warning graduates that they may be “shunned” because of their Christian faith. Donald Trump has also given a commencement speech at the university.

As reported by The News & Advance, Liberty president Jerry Falwell Jr.—a major Trump supporter—let residents know they can come back to the dorms. How many residents? Oh, it could be up to 5,000. Mind you, whether faculty come to campus to hold office hours or not, the courses will still be mostly online. And if students choose to come back to the dorms, they’ll also do their coursework online.

“I think we, in a way, are protecting the students by having them on campus together,” Falwell said on the decision as reported by the outlet.

What else is frightening about this? Liberty is returning from its spring break. While everyone spends that time off differently, plenty of students across the country choose to travel, either to go home or to go on vacation. Remember the spring breakers flocking to Florida’s beaches? Imagine those people flying back to live among 5,000 other people in close quarters.

On that note, Liberty will have its gym, library, and academic buildings open as well as the residence halls. Some changes are reportedly happening: in efforts to comply with Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s order, the classes, like labs, that will continue to meet face-to-face will have to stay under the 10-person limit. Similarly, the dining halls will be to-go only. Those shifts are better than nothing, but while the nation slowly shuts down, they’re far from enough.

“99% of them are not at the age to be at risk and they don’t have conditions that put them at risk,” the university president said. Though initial reports suggested that only older people and people with compromised immune systems were at risk of serious illness or death (and that’s a big enough deal in itself), as time goes on, research suggests otherwise. Even still, it’s impossible to know someone’s health status just by looking at them—someone could easily have a life-threatening chronic illness that you can’t see. Not to mention that exposed people can then expose others who may not be able to fight off the virus.

Falwell stated to the outlet, "I think we have a responsibility to our students—who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here—to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they've already paid for and to not interrupt their college life.” While understandably disappointing for many, a global pandemic is among the biggest reasons to interrupt college life. 

As Daily Kos reported earlier this month, when universities began sending residents out of the dorms, people had mixed feelings. Campuses, what with dining halls, gyms, libraries, and the dorm rooms themselves, very well could be breeding grounds. On the other hand, not everyone else has another home to go to—some students are estranged from their families while others simply live too far away to be able to get home (assuming border closings haven’t already interfered).

As social media got wind of vulnerable students suddenly becoming homeless, schools made policies for extenuating circumstances known at varying levels of detail. Amherst College, for example, specified that students who did not travel during spring break were allowed to apply to stay on campus. Harvard, on the other hand, suggested that concerned students talk to their residence hall adviser. Some schools, like St. John’s University, noted that visitors and guests will not be allowed in the dorms. 

In pretty much all of these cases, students are still doing coursework online. Gyms, dining halls, libraries, and other communal spaces are closed. The idea is that if you have absolutely nowhere safe you can go (or afford), you may stay on your campus. It’s not a party or a free-for-all. 

One staff member at Liberty, English professor Marybeth Davis Baggett, wrote a powerful op-ed for Religion News Service that was republished at The Washington Post in which she points out that the campus is not a self-isolated community. “Liberty is not a bubble,” she argues, “where the virus would be contained. Instead, its population comes into regular contact with those in the Lynchburg community, putting their health and lives at risk as well.”

While health care workers struggle to save lives among dwindling supplies, the very least people can do is practice social distancing and stay home whenever possible. For some students in special circumstances, home may still be a dorm room, but that should clearly be the exception, not the norm. 

Despite social distancing measures, spring breakers flocked to Florida beaches, including Pompano Beach, pictured in this March 17 photo. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) later shut down bars and some beaches for 30 days. | Julio Cortez/AP

As a few cling to old mottos of patriotism and perseverance in the face of the coronavirus crisis, one expert warns it could be a “formula for disaster.”

The world has officially separated into two camps: the rule followers, observant of social distancing and hopeful of flattening the curve; and the risk-takers, who have been storming the world’s beaches, bars, and burger joints in spite of the coronavirus — and government and public health efforts to curtail its spread.

The new virus has pushed dozens of countries to implement strict isolation methods to prevent a global health crisis. In China, coronavirus measures were hard to evade, as authorities sealed apartment buildings and scanned millions for rising body temperatures. But in the United States, Australia, and much of Europe, these restrictions are harder to devise and enforce, mostly because democratic norms and a strong sense of individual liberty prevail. And so the crisis has also revealed humanity’s tendency to flout the rules.

In recent weeks, people swarmed beaches around the world, from Florida to Bondi Beach in Australia. “If I get corona, I get corona,” one spring breaker told Reuters. “At the end of the day, I’m not gonna let it stop me from partying.”

Washington, DC, Metro officials practically begged riders not to visit the city’s iconic cherry blossoms, which they did anyway, in droves. Brits took to crowded pubs to chant “f*** coronavirus!” And one woman went viral when she tweeted about her defiant trip to a crowded Red Robin restaurant. “It was delicious,” she tweeted, “and I took my sweet time eating my meal. Because this is America. And I’ll do what I want.”

Many companies have held on, too, seemingly convinced of their own necessity. Starbucks kept its doors open even as employees organized to protect their health. “Coffee is not essential at all,” one barista told Vice. “Starbucks is not essential.” (The company has since shifted to drive-thru and delivery only.) WeWork, the coworking behemoth, is still open — and charging its members rent — even as several of its facilities were linked to confirmed coronavirus cases. “[W]e have an obligation to keep our buildings open,” company chair Marcelo Claure and CEO Sandeep Mathrani wrote in a memo.

The poor reaction of a small segment of people to ever-stricter quarantine policies comes as no surprise to psychologists, sociologists, and public health experts. No one alive today has experience with a pandemic of this severity, catching even the most experienced researchers off-guard, not to mention the average person sorting through their Facebook feed. Conflicting government messaging has only exacerbated the widespread confusion.

And the prevailing public health advice around coronavirus counters the long-held wisdom that we must “carry on” in a crisis: For at least a century, citizens have believed that in the midst of a disaster, their job is to go on with their daily lives as best they can — otherwise, the enemy will win. Now, the government is telling people the best strategy is to upend their lives entirely.

“We feel like we have to do something,” said Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University and author of Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats. But without a good frame of reference for the present crisis, we’ve looked to lessons learned from past calamities, including natural disasters, terrorism, war, and economic collapse, to guide us. “We’re a little bit like generals fighting the last war,” he said.

But the old rules no longer apply. Planetary problems such as a pandemic or climate change are different, said Amy Fairchild, a public health ethicist and the dean of Ohio State University’s College of Public Health. “In this moment in time, ‘carry on’ could be a formula for disaster.”

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When the coronavirus first arrived in the United States, people cast about for comparisons. “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu,” President Trump tweeted on March 9. “It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

Experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a regular at the White House’s coronavirus press briefings, debunked the comparison. “The flu has a mortality of 0.1%,” he told Congress on March 11. “This has a mortality rate of 10 times that.” But the analogy — intended to make an extraordinary threat look like ordinary — persists.

In reality, the coronavirus has no clear analogue. “The normal mechanisms we’re using to predict things don’t work,” said Tali Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University College London who studies human motivation. “Actually, nothing else that has happened before in our lifetimes is relevant or helpful here.”

Many contemporary disaster mantras emerged in past wars, and they often contain a kernel of a consumerist message. At the outset of World War I, British politicians such as Winston Churchill encouraged “business as usual,” suggesting that both companies and citizens should continue to behave just as they did in peacetime. But the status quo eventually gave way to a coordinated defense effort when the state realized it would need to control manufacturing, trade, and commerce to win the war.

Twenty years later, in World War II, the British government coined “Keep Calm and Carry On” to boost morale in anticipation of a Nazi invasion. But it quickly pulped the test posters; other campaigns about courage in a crisis provoked public outcry, as many people found the messages tone-deaf. After half a century, however, the phrase was exhumed — in part as a message to those weathering the Great Recession.

In times of crisis, Americans have borrowed English idioms, and coined a few of their own homespun mottos for personal and economic perseverance. During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made an enemy of an emotion, telling the public, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush gave this famed aphorism a consumerist spin when he told airline employees, “When [the terrorists] struck, they wanted to create an atmosphere of fear. And one of the great goals of this nation’s war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry. It’s to tell the traveling public: Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida.”

“Get down to Disney World” was probably never meant to apply to the people who actually traveled to the Magic Kingdom earlier this month amid public health warnings to avoid crowds. But that hasn’t stopped some politicians from applying this logic to the coronavirus. In a White House press briefing, President Trump said, “America will again and be soon open for business,” despite expert predictions that social distancing rules may need to last three or more months.

Hours before California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) shut down restaurants and bars to slow the spread of the virus, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) told the American public, “It’s a great time to go out” and support the local economy. In Philadelphia, organizers of the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which typically draws 20,000 participants and even bigger crowds, resisted pulling the plug until a few days before the event. “The fact is we have to continue as a population to go on with our lives,” Michael J. Bradley Jr., the parade’s grand marshal, told PBS.

“It’s almost like we don’t want the virus to win, so we’re going to go out drinking, go to parties, go out to the beach,” Wuthnow said. But these are risky responses when the enemy is not a person or a bad year for the stock market, but a virus — one that can be transmitted asymptomatically.

Humans are generally terrible at assessing risk. But it’s proven especially true in the case of the coronavirus. “It’s about our risk to others, and that might make it a little more difficult to understand,” said Cynthia Rohrbeck, an associate professor in clinical and community psychology at George Washington University. People are used to talking with their doctors about their personal health, but taking responsibility for the health of others comes up only infrequently, often in public discourse around smoking, drinking and driving, and vaccines.

Our judgment could be clouded by optimism bias, the tendency to believe you are less likely than others to experience something negative. In late February, researchers polled 4,348 people in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland and found half of them believed they were less likely to get the coronavirus than others, sans real evidence. Another poll, conducted in mid-March on more than 800 people from the US, the United Kingdom, and Germany, suggested this optimism was bolstered by people’s belief that they had fewer human interactions than their peers, making their risk of contracting the virus inherently lower.

These biases can even be institutionalized — and create confusion as the science, and related policy, evolves. Early reports suggested the virus was the biggest threat to people over age 60 or those with underlying conditions. On March 12, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson championed a “herd immunity” strategy, which seemed to encourage young people to go about their business and contract Covid-19. But as the risk became clearer (in the United States, for example, 38 percent of people who are sick enough to be hospitalized are under age 55, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Johnson reversed course and shut down social gatherings.

When countries finally began to roll out isolation measures, they encountered additional obstacles. “One of the most important things for people is to have a sense that they are in control of their own life, that they have agency,” Sharot said. In a recent paper in The Lancet, researchers reviewed 24 past publications on the psychological effects of quarantine and found it can cause post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger.

But the desire for agency can have an ideological component, too. In China, the authoritarian government has wide latitude to control the behavior of its citizens. But in the United States, few Americans have experienced government-imposed restrictions on when they can go out and whom they can see.

Many politicians have criticized the rules as an infringement on people’s freedom, not to mention a disaster for the economy. Arizona state Rep. Anthony Kern (R) and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) both tweeted (and deleted) defiant photos from crowded restaurants. “We can’t all just shut ourselves and stay home,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The economy has to move forward.”

“Me, personally, I just refuse to live my life in fear,” said Katie Williams, the 30-year-old Las Vegas resident who went viral for her Red Robin tweet. “As Americans, we typically do what we want. It’s kind of that attitude we’ve always had,” she added. “I think if we’re going to start pressuring people that they have to stay home, or publicly shaming them like pariahs, I think we’re just starting to lose a little bit of our sense of country and our sense of rights.”

Fairchild, the public health ethicist, said she understands these concerns. But there are other rights to consider. “As an individual, I have a right not to be infected by somebody who is not paying attention,” she said.

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The coronavirus isn’t the only global disaster humanity is up against. While the pandemic will eventually end, climate change is an existential crisis that keeps on giving. Neither disaster will allow us to carry on, said Susan Michie, a health psychologist and the director of the Center for Behavior Change at the University College London. “I think what this [pandemic] is showing is that collectivism is absolutely necessary,” she said. “Both in a pandemic and the climate emergency, no one can go away and protect themselves. It’s not like that anymore.”

People may bristle at being told what to do — especially when European and American coronavirus quarantine strategies look superficially similar to those used by authoritarian nations such as China or Singapore. But Michie saw it another way: “We elect people to [make] decisions at a national level to look after ourselves. That’s not authoritarianism, that’s democracy.”

DC can close its streets and lifeguards can kick surfers and suntanners out of Bondi Beach, but officials are largely dependent on the public’s compliance in a crisis. “This is not something we are doing because we are the fun police,” an Australian official said in a press conference as he implored people to stay home. “This is about saving lives.” To convince people to cooperate, Michie said politicians need to communicate a clear sense of urgency, while providing support for everyone who is forced indoors. “We’re interconnected,” Michie said, and the coronavirus proves it.

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Eleanor Cummins reports on the intersection of science and popular culture. She’s a former assistant editor at Popular Science and writes a newsletter about death. She previously wrote about the “death-positive generation” for The Highlight.

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Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.

Updated at 2:20 p.m. ET on November 2, 2020.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly lied about the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s preparation for this once-in-a-generation crisis.

Here, a collection of the biggest lies he’s told as the nation endures a public-health and economic calamity. This post will be updated as needed.

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On the Nature of the Outbreak

When: Friday, February 7, and Wednesday, February 19
The claim: The coronavirus would weaken “when we get into April, in the warmer weather—that has a very negative effect on that, and that type of a virus.”
The truth: When Trump made this claim, it was too early to tell whether the virus’s spread would be dampened by warmer conditions, though public-health experts and epidemiologists were immediately skeptical of Trump’s comment. But the spring and summer have passed, and the pandemic is still raging.

When: Thursday, February 27
The claim: The outbreak would be temporary: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
The truth: Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned days later that he was concerned that “as the next week or two or three go by, we’re going to see a lot more community-related cases.” He was right—the virus has not disappeared.

When: Multiple times
The claim: If the economic shutdown continues, deaths by suicide “definitely would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about” for COVID-19 deaths.
The truth: More than 200,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. But the number of people who died by suicide in 2017, for example, was roughly 47,000, nowhere near the COVID-19 numbers. Estimates of the mental-health toll of the Great Recession are mixed. A 2014 study tied more than 10,000 suicides in Europe and North America to the financial crisis. But a larger analysis in 2017 found that although the rate of suicide was increasing in the United States, the increase could not be directly tied to the recession and was attributable to broader socioeconomic conditions predating the downturn.

When: Multiple times
The claim: “Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere,” and cases are “coming way down.”
The truth: When Trump made these claims in May, coronavirus cases were either increasing or plateauing in the majority of American states. Over the summer, the country saw a second surge even greater than its first in the spring.

[Juliette Kayyem: The emotionally challenging next phase of the pandemic]

When: Wednesday, June 17
The claim: The pandemic is “fading away. It’s going to fade away.”
The truth: Trump made this claim ahead of his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when the country was still seeing at least 20,000 new daily cases and a second spike in infections was beginning.

When: Thursday, July 2
The claim: The pandemic is “getting under control.”
The truth: Trump’s claim came as the country’s daily cases doubled to about 50,000, a higher count than was seen at the beginning of the pandemic, and as the number continued to rise, fueled by infections in the South and the West.

When: Saturday, July 4
The claim: “99%” of COVID-19 cases are “totally harmless.”
The truth: The virus can still cause tremendous suffering if it doesn’t kill a patient, and the WHO has said that about 15 percent of COVID-19 cases can be severe, with 5 percent being critical. Fauci has rejected Trump’s claim, saying the evidence shows that the virus “can make you seriously ill” even if it doesn’t kill you.

When: Monday, July 6
The claim: “We now have the lowest Fatality (Mortality) Rate in the World.”
The truth: The U.S. had neither the lowest mortality rate nor the lowest case-fatality rate when Trump made this claim. As of July 13, the case-fatality rate—the ratio of deaths to confirmed COVID-19 cases—was 4.1 percent, which placed the U.S. solidly in the middle of global rankings. At the time, it had the world’s ninth-worst mortality rate, with 41.33 deaths per 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University.

When: Multiple times
The claim: Mexico is partly to blame for COVID-19 surges in the Southwest.
The truth: Even before Latin America’s COVID-19 cases began to rise, the U.S. and Mexico had jointly agreed in March to restrict nonessential land travel between the two countries, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection says illegal border crossings are down compared with last year. Health experts say blaming Mexican immigrants for surges is misguided, especially when most of the individuals crossing the border are U.S. citizens who live nearby.

When: Multiple times
The claim: Children are “virtually immune” to COVID-19.
The truth: The science is not definitive, but that doesn’t mean children are immune. Studies in the U.S. and China have suggested that kids are less likely than adults to be infected, and more likely to have mild symptoms, but can still spread the virus to their family members and others. The CDC has said that about 7 percent of COVID-19 cases and less than 0.1 percent of COVID-19-related deaths have occurred in children.

When: Thursday, August 27
The claim: The U.S. has “among the lowest case-fatality rates of any major country anywhere in the world.”
The truth: When Trump said this, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and India all had lower case-fatality rates than the U.S., which sat in the middle of performance rankings among all nations and among the 20 countries hardest hit by the virus.

When: Thursday, August 27
The claim: Trump “launched the largest national mobilization since World War II” against COVID-19, and America “developed, from scratch, the largest and most advanced testing system in the world.”
The truth: These claims are incorrect and misleading. The federal government’s coronavirus response has been roundly criticized as a failure because of flawed and delayed testing, entrenched inequality that has amplified the virus’s effects, and chaotic federal leadership that’s left much of the country’s response up to the states to handle. Trump vacillated on fully invoking the Defense Production Act in March, set off international panic when he mistakenly said he was banning all travel from European nations, and was slow to support social-distancing measures nationwide. Widespread use of the DPA was still rare in July, despite continued shortages of medical supplies.

Another claim: Trump celebrated a gain of 9 million jobs as “a record in the history of our country” and said that the United States had experienced “the smallest economic contraction of any major Western nation.”
The truth: The country did gain 9 million jobs from May to July—after losing more than 20 million from February to April, during the pandemic’s first surge. And more than a dozen developed countries have recorded smaller economic contractions than America’s recession.

When: Multiple times
The claim: America is “rounding the corner” and “rounding the final turn” of the pandemic.
The truth: Trump made these claims before and after the country registered 200,000 coronavirus deaths. As the winter approaches, the number of coronavirus cases is increasing in almost every state; in the last week of October, cases rose faster than reported tests in 47 of the 50 states, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

When: Multiple times
The claim: The media is overblowing fears about the virus ahead of Election Day.
The truth: There is no media conspiracy to hype up the virus threat. Cases and hospitalizations are rising across the country, and America set and broke multiple daily case records during the last week of October, nearing 100,000 cases in a single day on Friday.

When: Multiple times
The claim: "What happens is, you get better” after being sick with COVID-19. “That's what happens: You get better.”
The truth: While most cases of COVID-19 are mild, that doesn’t negate the risk the virus poses. As of the beginning of November, it has killed more than 220,000 Americans.

Another claim: “You get better and then you’re immune.”
The truth: Although similar viruses provide some short-term immunity after recovery, doctors don’t yet know how long COVID-19 immunity lasts, especially given anecdotal reports of reinfection. Trump’s claim also ignores the long-term side effects of contracting COVID-19 that so-called long-haulers have reported.

When: Multiple times
The claim: A CDC study shows that “85 percent of the people wearing masks catch” the virus.
The truth: The CDC study that the president cited in interviews does not suggest that people who wear masks get the virus at higher rates than those who don’t, CNN reported. The lie also distorts the purpose of mask-wearing, which is chiefly to protect other people from the virus, not to protect only the mask-wearer herself.

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Blaming the Obama Administration

When: Wednesday, March 4
The claim: The Trump White House rolled back Food and Drug Administration regulations that limited the kind of laboratory tests states could run and how they could conduct them. “The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing,” Trump said.
The truth: The Obama administration drafted, but never implemented, changes to rules that regulate laboratory tests run by states. Trump’s policy change relaxed an FDA requirement that would have forced private labs to wait for FDA authorization to conduct their own, non-CDC-approved coronavirus tests.

When: Friday, March 13
The claim: The Obama White House’s response to the H1N1 pandemic was “a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now.”
The truth: Barack Obama declared a public-health emergency two weeks after the first U.S. cases of H1N1 were reported, in California. (Trump declared a national emergency more than seven weeks after the first domestic COVID-19 case was reported, in Washington State.) While testing is a problem now, it wasn’t back in 2009. The challenge then was vaccine development: Production was delayed and the vaccine wasn’t distributed until the outbreak was already waning.

When: Multiple times
The claim: The Trump White House “inherited” a “broken,” “bad,” and “obsolete” test for the coronavirus.
The truth: The novel coronavirus did not exist in humans during the Obama administration. Public-health experts agree that, because of that fact, the CDC could not have produced a test, and thus a new test had to be developed this year.

[Read: Joe Biden’s invisible pandemic expert]

When: Multiple times
The claim: The Obama administration left Trump “bare” and “empty” shelves of medical supplies in the national strategic stockpile.
The truth: The 2009 H1N1 outbreak did deplete the N95 mask supply and was never replenished, but the Obama administration did not leave the stockpile empty of other materials. While the stockpile has never been funded at the levels some experts have requested, its former director said in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, that it was well-equipped. (The outbreak has since eaten away at its reserves.)

When: Sunday, May 10
The claim: Referring to criticism of his administration’s response, Trump tweeted: “Compare that to the Obama/Sleepy Joe disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu. Poor marks ... didn’t have a clue!”
The truth: It is misleading to compare COVID-19 to H1N1 and to call the Obama administration’s response a disaster, as my colleague Peter Nicholas has reported. In 2009, the CDC quickly flagged the new flu strain in California and began releasing antiflu drugs from the national stockpile two weeks later. A vaccine was available in six months.

Another claim: Trump later attacked “Joe Biden’s handling of the H1N1 Swine Flu.”
The truth: Biden was not responsible for the federal government’s response to the H1N1 outbreak, as Nicholas has also explained.

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On Coronavirus Testing

When: Friday, March 6, and Monday, May 11
The claim: “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. We—they’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful” and “If somebody wants to be tested right now, they’ll be able to be tested.”
The truth: Trump made these two claims two months apart, but the truth was the same both times: The U.S. did not have enough testing.

When: Wednesday, March 11
The claim: In an Oval Office address, Trump said that private-health-insurance companies had “agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments, and to prevent surprise medical billing.”
The truth: Insurers agreed only to absorb the cost of coronavirus testing—waiving co-pays and deductibles for getting the test. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the second coronavirus-relief bill passed by Congress, later mandated that COVID-19 testing be made free. The federal government has not required insurance companies to cover follow-up treatments, though some providers announced in late March that they will pay for treatments. The costs of other non-coronavirus testing or treatment incurred by patients who have COVID-19 or are trying to get a diagnosis aren’t waived either. And as for surprise medical billing? Mitigating it would require the cooperation of insurers, doctors, and hospitals.

[Read: The dangerous delays in U.S. coronavirus testing haven’t stopped]

When: Friday, March 13
The claim: Google engineers are building a website to help Americans determine whether they need testing for the coronavirus and to direct them to their nearest testing site.
The truth: The announcement was news to Google itself—the website Trump (and other administration officials) described was actually being built by Verily, a division of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The Verge first reported on Trump’s error, citing a Google representative who confirmed that Verily was working on a “triage website” with limited coverage for the San Francisco Bay Area. But since then, Google has pivoted to fulfill Trump’s public proclamation, saying it would speed up the development of a new, separate website while Verily worked on finishing its project, The Washington Post reported.

When: Tuesday, March 24, and Wednesday, March 25
The claim: The United States has outpaced South Korea’s COVID-19 testing: “We’re going up proportionally very rapidly,” Trump said during a Fox News town hall.
The truth: When the president made this claim, testing in the U.S. was severely lagging behind that in South Korea. As of March 25, South Korea had conducted about five times as many tests as a proportion of its population relative to the United States. For updated data from each country, see the COVID-19 Tracking Project and the database maintained by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When: Monday, May 11
The claim: America has “developed a testing capacity unmatched and unrivaled anywhere in the world, and it’s not even close.”
The truth: At the time, the United States was still not testing enough people and was lagging behind the testing and tracing capabilities that other countries had developed. The president’s testing czar, Brett Giroir, and Fauci confirmed the need for more testing at a May 12 Senate hearing.

Another claim: The United States has conducted more testing “than all other countries together!”
The truth: By May 18, when Trump last made this claim, the U.S. had conducted more tests than any other country. But it had not conducted more tests than the rest of the world combined. (As of May 27, more than 14 million tests have been administered in America.)

When: Multiple times
The claim: “Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country.”
The truth: COVID-19 cases were not rising because of “our big-number testing.” Outside the Northeast, the share of tests conducted that came back positive was increasing in the summer, with the sharpest spike happening in southern states. In some states, such as Arizona and Florida, the number of new cases being reported was outpacing any increase in the states’ testing ability. And as states set new daily case records and reported increasing hospitalizations, all signs pointed to a worsening crisis.

When: Multiple times
The claim: “The Cases are up because TESTING is way up”
The truth: The president made this claim multiple times during the summer surge of the pandemic, and is repeating that lie now as the country experiences a third surge. In reality, positive cases are outpacing tests around the country, the COVID Tracking Project reports, following a similar trajectory as the summer surge.

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On Travel Bans and Travelers

When: Wednesday, March 11
The claim: The United States would suspend “all travel from Europe, except the United Kingdom, for the next 30 days,” Trump announced in an Oval Office address.
The truth: The travel restriction would not apply to U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, or their families returning from Europe. At first, it applied specifically to the 26 European countries that make up the Schengen Area, not all of Europe. Trump later announced the inclusion of the United Kingdom and Ireland in the ban.

Another claim: In the same address, Trump said the travel restrictions would “not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo but various other things as we get approval.”
The truth: Trump followed up in a tweet, explaining that trade and cargo would not be subject to the restrictions.

When: Thursday, March 12
The claim: All U.S. citizens arriving from Europe would be subject to medical screening, COVID-19 testing, and quarantine if necessary. “If an American is coming back, or anybody is coming back, we’re testing,” Trump said. “We have a tremendous testing setup where people coming in have to be tested … We’re not putting them on planes if it shows positive, but if they do come here, we’re quarantining.”
The truth: Testing was already severely limited in the United States when Trump claimed this in the spring. It was not true that all Americans returning to the country were being tested, nor that anyone was being forced to quarantine, CNN reported.

[Read: Trump’s European travel ban doesn’t make sense]

When: Tuesday, March 31
The claim: “We stopped all of Europe” with a travel ban. “We started with certain parts of Italy, and then all of Italy. Then we saw Spain. Then I said, ‘Stop Europe; let’s stop Europe. We have to stop them from coming here.’”
The truth: The travel ban applied to the Schengen Area, as well as the United Kingdom and Ireland, and not all of Europe as he claimed. Additionally, Trump is wrong about the United States rolling out a piecemeal ban. The State Department did issue advisories in late February cautioning Americans against travel to the Lombardy region of Italy before issuing a general “Do Not Travel” warning on March 19. But the U.S. never placed individual bans on Italy and Spain.

When: Multiple times
The claim: “Everybody thought I was wrong” about implementing restrictions on travelers from China, and “most people felt they should not close it down—that we shouldn’t close down to China.”
The truth: While the WHO did say it opposed travel bans on China generally, Trump’s own top health officials have made clear that the travel ban was the “uniform” recommendation of the Department of Health and Human Services. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the coronavirus task force, both praised the decision too.

When: Multiple times
The claim: The Trump administration’s travel restrictions on China were a “ban” that closed up the “entire” United States and “kept China out.”
The truth: Nearly 40,000 people traveled from China to the United States from February 2, when Trump’s travel restrictions went into effect, to April 4, The New York Times reported. Those rules also do not apply to all people: American citizens, green-card holders and their relatives, and people on flights coming from Macau and Hong Kong are not included in the “ban.”

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On Taking the Pandemic Seriously

When: Tuesday, March 17
The claim: “I’ve always known this is a real—this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic … I’ve always viewed it as very serious.”
The truth: Trump has repeatedly downplayed the significance of COVID-19 as outbreaks began stateside. From calling criticism of his handling of the virus a “hoax,” to comparing the coronavirus to a common flu, to worrying about letting sick Americans off cruise ships because they would increase the number of confirmed cases, Trump has used his public statements to send mixed messages and sow doubt about the outbreak’s seriousness.

When: Thursday, March 26
The claim: This kind of pandemic “was something nobody thought could happen … Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.”
The truth: Experts both inside and outside the federal government sounded the alarm many times in the past decade about the potential for a devastating global pandemic, as my colleague Uri Friedman has reported. Two years ago, my colleague Ed Yong explored the legacy of Ebola outbreaks—including the devastating 2014 epidemic—to evaluate how ready the U.S. was for a pandemic. Ebola hardly impacted America—but it revealed how unprepared the country was.

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On COVID-19 Treatments and Vaccines

When: Monday, March 2
The claim: Pharmaceutical companies are going “to have vaccines, I think, relatively soon.”
The truth: The president’s own experts told him during a White House meeting with pharmaceutical leaders earlier the same day that a vaccine could take a year to 18 months to develop. In response, he said he would prefer that it take only a few months. He later claimed, at a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, that a vaccine would be ready “soon.” Many months later, this is still not true.

When: Thursday, March 19
The claim: At a press briefing with his coronavirus task force, Trump said the FDA had approved the antimalarial drug chloroquine to treat COVID-19. “Normally the FDA would take a long time to approve something like that, and it’s—it was approved very, very quickly and it’s now approved by prescription,” he said.
The truth: FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, who was at the briefing, quickly clarified that the drug still had to be tested in a clinical setting. An FDA representative later told Bloomberg that the drug has not been approved for COVID-19 use, though a doctor could still prescribe it for that purpose. Later that same day, Fauci told CNN that there is no “magic drug” to cure COVID-19: “Today, there are no proven safe and effective therapies for the coronavirus.”

When: Friday, April 24
The claim: Trump was being “sarcastic” when he suggested in a briefing on April 23 that his medical experts should research the use of powerful light and injected disinfectants to treat COVID-19.
The truth: Trump’s tone did not seem sarcastic when he made the apparent suggestion to inject disinfectants. Turning to Birx and a Department of Homeland Security science-and-technology official, he mused: “I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? … It would be interesting to check that.” When he walked this statement back the next day, he added that he was only asking his experts “to look into whether or not sun and disinfectant on the hands [work].”

When: Friday, May 8
The claim: The coronavirus is “going to go away without a vaccine … and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”
The truth: Fauci has repeatedly said that the coronavirus’s sudden disappearance “is just not going to happen.” Until the country has “a scientifically sound, safe, and effective vaccine,” Fauci said in May, the pandemic will not be over.

[Read: Why does the president keep pushing a malaria drug?]

When: Multiple times
The claim: Taking hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 is safe and effective. “I happen to be a believer in hydroxy. I used it. I had no problem. I happen to be a believer,” Trump said on one occasion. “It doesn’t hurt people,” he commented on another.
The truth: Trump’s own FDA has warned against taking the antimalarial drug with or without the antibiotic azithromycin, which Trump has also promoted. Several large observational studies in New York, France, and China have concluded that the drug has no benefit for COVID-19 patients, and Fauci and Trump’s testing czar, Brett Giroir, have also cautioned against it as the president has repeated this claim in recent months.

Another claim: “One bad” study from the Department of Veterans Affairs that found no benefit among veterans who took hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 was run by “people that aren’t big Trump fans.” The study “was a Trump-enemy statement.”
The truth: There’s no evidence that the study was a political plot orchestrated by Trump opponents, and it reached similar conclusions as other observational reports. The VA study was led by independent researchers from the University of Virginia and the University of South Carolina with a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Another claim: Many frontline doctors and workers are taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19.
The truth: Multiple trials are under way to determine if health-care workers should take the drug as a preventative. But there are no conclusive numbers for how many workers are taking the drug outside of those studies.

When: Thursday, August 6
The claim: A coronavirus vaccine could be ready by Election Day.
The truth: The timeline Trump proposes contradicts health experts’ consensus that early 2021 is likely the soonest a vaccine could be widely available.

When: Tuesday, September 29
The claim: “We’re weeks away from a vaccine,” Trump said at the first debate.
The truth: Redfield has said a COVID-19 vaccine may not be widely available to the American public until the summer of next year. Two of the three drug companies working on a vaccine have said they hope to have only initial clinical-trial results by the end of this year.

When: Multiple times
The claim: A CDC study shows that “85 percent of the people wearing masks catch” the virus.
The truth: The CDC study that the president cited in interviews does not suggest that people who wear masks get the virus at higher rates than those who don’t, CNN reported. The lie also distorts the purpose of mask-wearing, which is chiefly to protect other people from the virus, not to protect only the mask-wearer herself.

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On the Defense Production Act

When: Friday, March 20
The claim: Trump twice said during a task-force briefing that he had invoked the Defense Production Act, a Korean War–era law that enables the federal government to order private industry to produce certain items and materials for national use. He also said the federal government was already using its authority under the law: “We have a lot of people working very hard to do ventilators and various other things.”
The truth: Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Peter Gaynor told CNN on March 22 that the president has not actually used the DPA to order private companies to produce anything. Shortly after that, Trump backtracked, saying that he had not compelled private companies to take action. Then, on March 24, Gaynor told CNN that FEMA plans to use the DPA to allocate 60,000 test kits. Trump tweeted afterward that the DPA would not be used.

[Jane Chong: How to actually use the Defense Production Act]

When: Saturday, March 21
The claim: Automobile companies that have volunteered to manufacture medical equipment, such as ventilators, are “making them right now.”
The truth: Ford and General Motors, which Trump mentioned at a task-force briefing the same day, announced earlier in March that they had halted all factory production in North America and were likely months away from beginning production of ventilators, representatives told the Associated Press. Since then, Ford CEO James Hackett told CNN that the auto company will begin to work with 3M to produce respirators and with General Electric to assemble ventilators. GM said it will explore the possibility of producing ventilators in an Indiana factory. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose company Trump highlighted in a tweet, has said that the company is “working on ventilators” but that they cannot be produced “instantly.”

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On States’ Resources

When: Tuesday, March 24
The claim: Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York passed on an opportunity to purchase 16,000 ventilators at a low cost in 2015, Trump said during the Fox News town hall.
The truth: Trump seems to have gleaned this claim from a Gateway Pundit article. That piece, in turn, cites a syndicated column from Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, which includes a figure close to 16,000. The number comes from a 2015 report from the state’s health department that provided guidance for how New York could handle a possible flu pandemic. The report notes that the state would need 15,783 more ventilators than it had at the time to aid patients during “an influenza pandemic on the scale of the 1918 pandemic.” The report does not include a recommendation to Cuomo for additional purchases or stockpiling. Trump “obviously didn’t read the document he’s citing,” a Cuomo representative said in a statement.

Another claim: Trump also repeated a claim from the Gateway Pundit article that Cuomo’s office established “death panels” and “lotteries” as part of the state’s pandemic response.
The truth: The 2015 report and the accompanying press release announced updated guidelines for hospitals to follow to allocate ventilators. The guidelines “call for a triage officer or triage committee to determine who receives or continues to receive ventilator therapy” and describes how a random lottery allocation might work. (Neither should be the first options for deciding care, the report notes.) Cuomo never established a lottery.

When: Sunday, March 29
The claim: Trump “didn’t say” that governors do not need all the medical equipment they are requesting from the federal government. And he “didn’t say” that governors should be more appreciative of the help.
The truth: The president told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Thursday, March 26, that “a lot of equipment’s being asked for that I don’t think they’ll need,” referring to requests from the governors of Michigan, New York, and Washington. He also said, during a Friday, March 27, task-force briefing, that he wanted state leaders “to be appreciative … We’ve done a great job.” He added that he wasn’t talking about himself, but about others within the federal government working to combat the pandemic.

When: Sunday, March 29, and Monday, March 30
The claim: Hospitals are reporting an artificially inflated need for masks and equipment, items that might be “going out the back door,” Trump said on two separate days. He also said he was not talking about hoarding: “I think maybe it’s worse than hoarding.”
The truth: There is no evidence to show that hospitals are maliciously hoarding or inflating their need for masks and personal protective equipment when reporting shortages in supplies. Although Cuomo reported anecdotal stories of thefts from hospitals early in March, he was referring to opportunists trying to price-gouge early in the pandemic. Reuters has reported a handful of stories of nurses hiding masks to conserve supplies amid shortages, but not wide-scale thefts as Trump claimed.

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On China

When: Tuesday, April 14
The claim: Asked about his past praise of China and its transparency, Trump said that he hadn’t “talk[ed] about China’s transparency.”
The truth: Trump lauded the country in tweets he sent in late January and early February. In one, he highlighted the Chinese government’s “transparency” about the coronavirus outbreak.

[Read: How China is planning to win back the world]

When: Friday, May 29
The claim: The WHO ignored “credible reports” of the coronavirus’s spread in Wuhan, the Chinese city that first reported the new virus, including those published in The Lancet medical journal in December.
The truth: The Lancet said it did not publish such reports in December. Its first reports on the virus’s spread in Wuhan were published on January 24.

Another claim: Taiwanese officials had warned the WHO about human-to-human transmission of a new virus by December 31.
The truth: Taiwan did not cite “human to human” transmission in the communications Trump referenced, but it did ask for more information and compared the virus to SARS.

Another claim: In mid-January, the WHO said the coronavirus could not be transmitted between humans.
The truth: The WHO did say on January 12 that early investigations by China could find “no clear evidence” of human-to-human transmission in Wuhan, but it did not rule such transmission out. Two days later, a WHO official said during a press conference that “it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission” among families, and warned hospitals around the world to prepare for a greater outbreak.

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On Democrats

When: Multiple times
The claim: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged people to attend “parties” and a parade in San Francisco’s Chinatown to “show that this thing doesn’t exist.”
The truth: Pelosi did visit San Francisco’s Chinatown in late February to encourage residents not to fear the coronavirus in the city. “Precautions have been taken” and the city was “on top of the situation,” she said. But Pelosi did not urge people to attend a parade or parties. San Francisco reported its first case of COVID-19 on March 5, a week later, and the Bay Area ordered residents to shelter in place three weeks after the speaker’s visit.

Another claim: Pelosi was “dancing in the streets of Chinatown, trying to say, ‘It’s okay to come to the United States. It’s fine. It’s wonderful. Come on in. Bring your infection with you,’” Trump said in May.
The truth: Trump is embellishing his original lie: Pelosi was not dancing in Chinatown or urging sick people to bring the coronavirus to the United States.

When: Thursday, August 27, and Tuesday, September 29
The claim: Joe Biden wants an economic shutdown: “He wants to shut down this country, and I want to keep it open,” Trump claimed at the first presidential debate.
The truth: Biden never said this. He has said repeatedly that he plans to “listen to the scientists” when deciding on policies to control the virus. When asked by ABC’s David Muir in August if he would support an economic shutdown, Biden said he “would be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives.” But in September, he was more specific, saying, “There is going to be no need, in my view, to be able to shut down the whole economy.”

Another claim: Biden wants to “delay the vaccine.”
The truth: Though Biden has claimed that Trump has put political pressure on scientists to accelerate the approval and rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine, the former vice president has never expressed a desire to delay it. He has asked for “total transparency” from drug companies and scientists at the FDA and the CDC about any vaccine, and has called for independent verification of the vaccine’s efficacy.

[Read: Joe Biden doesn’t have a plan for that]

When: Multiple times.
The claim: Biden called Trump “xenophobic” after the president announced travel restrictions on China in January.
The truth: Biden did refer to the president’s “record of hysteria and xenophobia—hysterical xenophobia—and fearmongering” during a campaign stop on the same day Trump announced his restrictions, but he did not refer to Trump’s announcement specifically. Biden’s campaign told The Washington Post that he was not criticizing Trump’s travel policies, but rather reiterating an argument against Trump’s record that he’d made before.

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On Protests

When: Sunday, April 19 and Tuesday, April 21
The claim: Protesters who gathered in a handful of states over the weekend to oppose social distancing were “doing social distancing” themselves and “were all six feet apart.”
The truth: Protesters have clogged streets in at least seven states after an April 15 demonstration at the Michigan state capitol grabbed national attention. In California, Colorado, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, demonstrators did not seem to be following the CDC’s safety guidelines, local news outlets reported, and photos and videos from the ground show tightly packed protests.

Another claim: Racial-justice protests and demonstrations fueled a surge in coronavirus cases.
The truth: There is no evidence to support Trump’s claim, though epidemiologists did fear at first that protests would trigger more infections. A recent study by Northeastern, Harvard, and Northwestern suggests that widespread mask wearing and the outdoor nature of the protests mitigated the spread. Some economists have argued that the protests in more than 300 U.S. cities might have actually encouraged more Americans to stay home during the civil unrest.

As a rescue package nears completion, the GOP is perturbed.

Fox News anchors have run with misinformation about the coronavirus that has been embraced by President Trump. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham served up a triple shot of absurdity.

First, Fox downplayed the coronavirus threat for weeks. Then, two weeks ago, their anchors abruptly pivoted. But on Monday night, the network’s coverage of the crisis slid back off the rails in spectacular fashion.

All three of the shows making up the network’s top-rated primetime lineup — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — featured segments about the coronavirus that ran with misinformation President Trump has embraced, from advocating that people start thinking about heading back to work even if it could leave more people dead to promoting unproven and potentially dangerous drugs as coronavirus cures.

Trump and his high-profile backers are struggling to come to grips with the reality that there are no shortcuts back to normalcy. And now shows watched by millions could put a lot of people’s health and lives in danger.

“Those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country.”

Tucker Carlson’s Monday night broadcast came on the heels of Trump’s marathon news conference — one in which he insisted that he plans to reopen the American economy next week even though 138 Americans died from the coronavirus on Monday, the most on a single day yet.

Carlson, however, didn’t seem particularly bothered by Trump’s position that trying to revive the economy is just as important as saving lives through social distancing. And during his interview with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), the quiet part was said loudly.

“My heart is lifted tonight by what I heard the president say,” Patrick said. “My message is, let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it. And those of us who are 70-plus [years old], we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country.”

“So you’re basically saying that this disease could take your life, but that’s not the scariest thing to you. There’s something that would be worse than dying?” Carlson asked.

“Yeah,” Patrick replied.

Patrick’s position, in short, is that after just a week of social distancing measures, older Americans like him — the demographic experts believe are most at risk of dying due to Covid-19 — should be willing to risk death to get the economy going again. And in that respect, his thinking echoed the president’s, who claimed on Monday that keeping the economy shut down “causes other problems, and maybe it causes much bigger problems than the problem we’re talking about now.”

The choice that Trump and Patrick alluded to between trying to get the coronavirus under control or restoring the economy is a false one. In reality, there will be no economic recovery until the number of coronavirus cases in the country stabilizes and the pressure on the health care system is relieved.

Hannity pushes quackery

On the heels of Carlson’s show, Sean Hannity hyped a shortcut that he thinks might take care of both problems at the same time.

During an interview with Vice President Mike Pence, Hannity read a letter “from a doctor in the New York area” recommending an unproven drug “regimen” involving the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine that supposedly treats Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus:

This is what he has seen: Him and his team have now treated about 350 patients ... and another 150 patients in other New York areas. His results — “We have had zero deaths, zero hospitalizations, zero incubations.”

Beyond the dubiousness of a doctor who discovered a miracle coronavirus drug immediately reaching out to Hannity of all people, the “regimen” he talked about is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Taking drugs for unapproved usages is risky, but Trump has promoted part of that treatment — hydroxychloroquine taken with azithromycin — repeatedly and against the advice of his experts. And that rhetoric has already had tragic results: On Tuesday, NBC broke news about an Arizona man who died after listening to Trump tout the unproven coronavirus treatments and decided to take a similar substance (chloroquine phosphate, from a fish treatment) in an effort to protect himself from the coronavirus.

From NBC:

The man’s wife told NBC News she’d watched televised briefings during which President Trump talked about the potential benefits of chloroquine. Even though no drugs are approved to prevent or treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, some early research suggests it may be useful as a therapy.

“We were afraid of getting sick.”

Ingraham touts unproven drugs as well

But Hannity wasn’t the only Fox News host to push medical quackery on Monday. Immediately following his show, Laura Ingraham interviewed a coronavirus patient named Rio Giardinieri, who not only attributed his recovery to an unproven hydroxychloroquine treatment but also gave Ingraham direct credit for the fact that he’d heard about it in the first place.

As my colleague Umair Irfan has detailed, despite Trump’s public enthusiasm for the drug, hydroxychloroquine is unproven and “right now, the evidence for its effectiveness is sparse.” And while it’s good that the man Ingraham interviewed is recovering, it’s unclear what role, if any, hydroxychloroquine actually played.

Lots of people watch Fox and take Hannity and company seriously

The triple hit of absurdity during Fox News’s primetime programming on Monday demonstrated how the network continues to struggle to cover the pandemic, even if its hosts are no longer dismissing it as the “coronavirus impeachment scam” and framing criticism of the federal response as just another attempt to take down the president.

As I detailed last week, this sort of coverage has consequences. In 2019, Fox News’s primetime averaged 2.5 million viewers, and polling indicates that when it comes to the coronavirus, its viewers are less likely than others to be worried about the virus and more likely to believe that other media sources are overplaying the dangers.

People who tuned in on Monday may have been convinced that exchanging humans lives for better GDP and jobs numbers is a reasonable trade-off for policymakers to consider, or that unproven drugs can save them if they get sick. As the man in Arizona has shown, buying into this sort of rhetoric can lead to high-risk behavior at worst. And at best, viewers don’t end up more informed about how they can protect themselves and their families from a pandemic that experts — including those in the Trump administration — say will get worse before it gets better.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

Team Trump is rushing to rewrite the early narrative about the president’s response to coronavirus.

Faced with endless video clips of Donald Trump downplaying the escalating outbreak, Trump aides and allies are working furiously to instead highlight the president’s recent actions and comments.

Their effort comprises three tactics: Blanket supporters with detailed timelines of every action the Trump administration took. Amplify praise of those actions. And forcefully push back against anyone who criticizes those actions.

Just over seven months from the November election, Trump’s aides and allies realize the president’s campaign for a second term has been completely transformed in a matter of weeks. It will now come down to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his response to a devastated economy, according to seven people familiar with the situation, including four who speak directly with the president.

“The president and his performance is the campaign. It’s the only thing that matters,” said Scott Jennings, who worked for President George W. Bush and is close to the Trump White House. “There is nothing to do if you are the sitting president of the United States but to get it right. If you get it right, what better argument for reelection than this unprecedented crisis?”

The Trump campaign had wanted to focus on a long list of other issues as the president launched a general election race against Democrat Joe Biden: the president’s impeachment acquittal, Biden’s acuity and overseas actions by Biden’s son, Hunter.

Instead, it has shifted almost entirely to rehabilitating Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

“The watchword from here has to be action,” said a Republican who speaks to Trump. “Checks on the way. Treatments being tried. Travel bans in place. Information conveyed, in real time.”

Trump allies who were confident about the president’s reelection prospects just weeks ago — thanks to a strong economy and record stock market — have begun to fret as they see him being blamed by state and local leaders, members of Congress and public health officials for failing to quickly test patients and distribute masks, ventilators and other supplies. The number of confirmed cases in the U.S. stood at nearly 50,000 by the end of Tuesday with more than 600 deaths — and the worst has yet to come.

Already, Trump critics are blasting Trump for his handling of the crisis. Priorities USA, the Democrats’ leading super PAC, is launching a $6 million ad campaign on Tuesday in the battleground states of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Republicans for the Rule of Law, conservatives who oppose Trump, aired its first ad on coronavirus last week.

Still, there’s some indication the Trump team’s efforts are working. Fifty-five percent of Americans approve of his management of the coronavirus outbreak, compared to 43 percent who disapprove, according to a ABC/Ipsos poll released late last week. The numbers were nearly reversed the week before when 43 percent approved and 54 percent disapproved.

Trump has been fighting back through his now-daily news conferences at the White House, boasting his administration has done an “extraordinary” and “incredible job” while falling back on a familiar tactic of blaming the media.

Trump allies said the campaign had no choice but to do what it always does when a crisis engulfs the presidency, from impeachment to the threat of war with Iran: quickly and quietly follow the president’s lead — pushing out new talking points, buying new Facebook ads and lining up voices to defend the president forcefully.

“I think the president's people are adjusting their campaign very quickly,” said a Republican who is a friend of the president.

The Trump campaign and RNC have scrapped MAGA campaign rallies and other events, shifting training and other events online, including last week’s national day of action and national week of training. But their main task these days is coronavirus.

They‘ve been sending rapid-response emails to reporters, firing off emails and text messages to millions of supporters, issuing daily talking points to surrogates, posting social media messages and booking surrogates on TV and radio, according to a RNC official.

“The American people have seen President Trump respond to this crisis with bold leadership and decisive action, and he will emerge from this with a strong record of results, putting him in a stronger position than any Democrat candidate,” RNC National Press Secretary Mandi Merritt said.

The Trump campaign’s rapid response team has churned out hundreds of tweets in recent weeks — noting that Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York praised Trump, blasting congressional Democrats for holding up an economic rescue package, accusing the “liberal media” of spreading lies for reporting on Trump’s infamous “hoax“ comment at a rally less than a month ago — when the president called Democrats‘ criticism of his coronavirus response “their new hoax,” likening it to impeachment and the Russia investigation.

“They want to try to control that narrative as much as possible,” said a Republican who speaks to Trump. “It’s irresponsible to do anything else.”

The campaign also released a detailed list of nearly 80 actions by the Trump administration to fight the virus since Jan. 6, a week after China reported the discovery of the coronavirus to the World Health Organization.

“President Trump is fighting for Americans every day!” it wrote in a recent post. “His second coronavirus relief law provides free testing to all Americans, and makes sure families, workers, and businesses impacted by the Chinese virus are taken care of.”

Conservative groups, including America First Policies, which supports Trump’s policies, and Tea Party Patriots, are amplifying Trump’s message and actions and fact-checking the media through media appearances and social media, the groups said.

Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, said Americans can tell Trump took the coronavirus situation seriously because his administration announced restrictions on travel from China in late January. “That was a sign that President Trump was taking the potential threat the coronavirus posed to America very seriously,” she said. “At the time, many Americans kind of scoffed at that drastic action and yet now worldwide we’re seeing that same exact action happening in country after country worldwide.”

Trump supporters hope they can counter statements from the president himself during the same period dismissing the threat. A week before the travel restrictions, Trump said “we have it totally under control. ... It’s going to be just fine.” Just a day before the travel move, Trump said the “very little problem” was under control and maintained “we think it’s going to have a very good ending for it.”

Several Trump allies said the president and his campaign must convey that the economy will rebound from coronavirus in part because it had a strong foundation due to the president‘s actions over the last three years.

“For our campaign, it will be key to convey to the people that America entered this crisis with enormous advantages and economic momentum,” one of the Republicans said.

The campaign is also attempting to drag Biden into coronavirus, though it doesn’t appear to have garnered much attention — accusing him of “plagiarizing” Trump‘s plan to combat the coronavirus, defending China (where the virus first emerged) and confusing this virus with Ebola, which the Obama administration fought while Biden was vice president.

“Joe Biden sows fear and division as President Trump conveys optimism and hope,” the campaign wrote in one email.

Michael Caputo, who served as a campaign adviser in 2016, said he worries Biden can blame Trump for his response to coronavirus while having to take no responsibility himself because he’s not in office. “They can criticize him for every move he makes,” he said of Biden’s team.

An outside adviser said he has urged the campaign to return to discussing other issues, including Joe and Hunter Biden, to take the attention off Trump’s response to coronavirus and the tanking economy. “I don’t think those issues will ever be gone,” the person said.

Should the elderly be willing to sacrifice their lives for a possibly better economy?

An Arizona man is dead and his wife in critical condition after they drank water laced with chloroquine phosphate meant for use as a parasitic treatment for their fish tank.

NBC News reports: “The man’s wife told NBC News she’d watched televised briefings during which President Trump talked about the potential benefits of chloroquine. Even though no drugs are approved to prevent or treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, some early research suggests it may be useful as a therapy. The name “chloroquine” resonated with the man’s wife, who asked that her name not be used to protect the family’s privacy. She’d used it previously to treat her koi fish. ‘I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?””

The couple mixed the substance with water believing it would protect them from coronavirus, began vomiting, and called 911. The man later died.

Trump has been pushing chloroquine, in a tablet form as a malaria drug, as a possible treatment for COVID-19.

Said Trump this week: “The nice part is it’s been around for a long time. If things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody.”

Pres. Trump touts chloroquine, an old malaria drug, that doctors say may help treat novel coronavirus, claims it will be available "almost immediately."

Read more about chloroquine: https://t.co/cYt0fxdlfB pic.twitter.com/9oPsMSD3HV

— ABC News (@ABC) March 19, 2020

In another press briefing, Trump said, “It may work, it may not work. I feel good about it. That’s all it is, just a feeling. … It’s not a drug that you have a huge amount of danger with. It’s not like a brand new drug that’s just been created that may have a monumental effect, might kill you. We’re gonna know very soon. …. In terms of malaria, if you want it, you can have a prescription. And by the way, it’s very effective, it works. … Let’s see what happens. We have nothing to lose.”

“What do you say to Americans who are scared?” Trump was asked.

“I say that you’re a terrible reporter. I think it’s a very nasty question.”

Pres. Trump pressed on chloroquine, a malaria drug he claimed yesterday might be available soon, but which the FDA says needs further study.

"It may work and it may not work," he said in an exchange that ended with Trump calling a reporter "terrible." https://t.co/lrydsTpOIr pic.twitter.com/6ceLP5VhdK

— ABC News (@ABC) March 20, 2020

2 days after Trump says hydroxychloroquine was the “biggest game changer in the history of medicine”, a person died of chloroquine poisoning. pic.twitter.com/k3hmWQ5KGE

— Jason Westin, MD (@DrJasonWestin) March 23, 2020

The post Man Dies After Self-Medicating for COVID-19 with Chloroquine, Which Trump Has Pushed as a Potential Treatment: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

There is no crisis so great that Donald Trump won’t try to exploit it to increase the racial divisions and hate that helped propel him to power. That means coronavirus, too, and Trump’s use of “China virus” or “Chinese virus” for COVID-19 is having the intended effect: whipping up hatred against not just Chinese people but Asian people more generally.

Hate crimes against Asian people are on the rise. A study by researchers in the San Francisco State University Asian American Studies program found that “Coronavirus discrimination news increased by 50% from 93 articles in week 1 to 140 stories in week 4.” Lead researcher Russell Jeung told The New York Times that this was “the tip of the iceberg,” since the study tracked only incidents serious enough to draw media coverage.

Jeung set up a website to track incidents and has gotten 150 responses in just days. Similarly, “We’ve never received this many news tips about racism against Asians,” the founder of Asian American news site NextShark told The Times. “It’s crazy. My staff is pulling double duty just to keep up.”

This is not some kind of problem of red states and small towns, either. Tzi Ma, a star of Mulan and The Farewell, was told “You should be quarantined” outside a Whole Foods in Pasadena, California. In New York, the head of a hospital emergency department was harassed while he was at Home Depot buying protective gear for his staff.

It’s not all verbal harassment, either. A teenage boy in California’s San Fernando Valley had to go to the emergency room to be checked for a concussion after an attack, and at least two people in New York City have been assaulted while waiting for trains or buses.

But don’t expect Donald Trump to stop promoting this kind of vicious bigotry. It’s his go-to political strategy, and the crisis—not the public health one, but his personal political one—will only make him cling more tightly to what’s worked in the past.

As some of my newspaper clients are shrinking or shutting down right now, please consider joining the Sorensen Subscription Service!

Follow me on Twitter at @JenSorensen

President Donald Trump speaks at a daily coronavirus briefing at the White House on March 23, 2020, touting his “15-day challenge” to get the public to social distance. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Trump wants to send American back to work in a matter of weeks, despite efforts to curb the spread of coronavirus.

President Donald Trump is getting impatient with the coronavirus.

At his daily briefing on Monday, Trump started talking about getting Americans back to work — eight days into his “15-day” challenge to get the public to social distance.

“This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down,” Trump said. “America will, again, and soon, be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. Lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”

Trump’s daily press conferences have shifted in tone almost daily: Early on, he seemed skeptical of the severity of the situation, then he pivoted to calling himself a “wartime president,” and now he seems antsy to return to normalcy — so much so he’s dismissing his own health advisors’ advice and talking longingly about treatments as if they were ready for mainstream use.

In just one briefing, Trump gave at least six reasons that would make anyone following the coronavirus wary of his judgment.

1) Trump admits he ignores expert advice

Trump is beginning to agitate for a return to normalcy, first tweeting the idea Sunday that workers should get back to work next week and then retweeting the idea Monday.

When asked during the press conference about whether he’s listening to his health advisors on whether that’s the best course, he responded:

“If it were up to the doctors, they’d say let’s shutdown the entire world because again you’re up to 150 countries,” Trump said. “And when we shut it down that would be wonderful and let’s keep it shut for a couple of years. You can’t do that to a country, especially the No. 1 economy in the world by far.”

No doctor has gone this far. It’s a strawman argument to support Trump’s rejection of health experts’ recommendations as over the top.

However, many experts have said that to effectively “flatten the curve” of daily new infections, social distancing should last months to over a year. That’s how long it could take to develop and distribute a vaccine or establish herd immunity without severely overwhelming health systems.

Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, did not rule out a three- to four-month shutdown in certain parts of the country. She said that the pandemic has progressed much more quickly in Washington state, which is about two weeks ahead of New York state in terms of the increase in the rate of new infections.

2) Trump is primarily concerned about the economy

Trump has been preoccupied by the economic impact of coronavirus — which, to be fair, has already been catastrophic. The stock market has had the fastest 30 percent sell-off ever and industries from airlines to restaurants are pleading for bailouts. It could plunge the US into a depression and leave many workers unemployed.

Trump has promised publicly that the stock market will bounce back once the crisis passed, but privately, he has reportedly expressed anger that warnings from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have scared the markets.

Trump has tried to tie his hopes for the economy to his 2020 reelection prospects. As my colleague Aaron Rupar writes:

On Monday, the president followed up on his previous-night’s tweet by retweeting a number of accounts with sketchy handles like @steph93065 that urged him to get people back to work — not only for the sake of the economy, but for his reelection hopes as well.

“15 days. Then we isolate the high risk groups and the rest of us get back to work before it’s all over for everyone!! #Landslide2020,” wrote @FedupMil in a post that was retweeted by the president.

Officials will have to reckon with the tradeoffs of reopening the economy and slowing the spread of the virus through social distancing at some point. But most public health experts say that it’s simply premature to talk about returning to normalcy in a few weeks.

3) Trump is pushing untested treatments

Trump continues to tout hydroxychloroquine, a common anti-malaria drug, coupled with the antibiotic azithromycin, also known as “Z-Pak,” as a potential treatment for the virus despite the fact that it hasn’t been tested and could have adverse side effects.

“At my direction, the federal government is working to help obtain large quantities of chloroquine,” he said. “We think tomorrow, pretty early, the hydroxychloroquine and the Z-Pak I think is a combination is looking very, very good and it’s going to be distributed.”

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has previously said that he has no data to rely on that the drug is safe for people who’ve tested positive for coronavirus, nor any data that proves it is effective.

Meanwhile, Americans appear to be listening to Trump. BuzzFeed reports that a man died after self-medicating with a fish tank treatment related to the drug. Other reports suggest there’s a run on the drug itself, with some even crossing the border to buy it from Mexican pharmacies, making it harder for people who need it to access it.

4) Trump thinks coronavirus is like the flu or car accidents

For weeks, Trump has tried to claim that the coronavirus is like the flu, and he returned to that on Monday:

“We have a very bad flu season, on top of everything else,” he said. “It’s very bad. It looks like it could be over 50,000 [deaths]. And certainly, this [pandemic] is going to be bad. And we’re trying to make it so that it’s much, much less bad.”

But coronavirus is far more contagious — and more deadly. Here’s one chart that explains the difference.

Trump also compared the pandemic to car accidents, insinuating that pandemic deaths are equivalent.

“You look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we’re talking about,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to tell everybody, ‘No more driving of cars.’”

The car accident comparison has come up before: On Friday, Fauci criticized the idea, calling it “false equivalence.” Then, at least, Trump seemed to agree with Fauci, saying, “You could be talking about millions of lives.”

5) Trump thinks he can turn the economy on and off (he can’t)

Trump might want to send workers back to work, but it’s really not up to him.

Trump can’t unilaterally reopen the economy — that power lies with states and localities, many of which have imposed “shelter in place” policies that have resulted in the closure of non-essential businesses where people typically congregate, such as bars and restaurants. In hotspots of infection and areas where the rate of new daily infections hasn’t yet peaked, that could mean social distancing could prevail for much longer than just a few weeks.

But Trump can advise states to reopen for business as usual, and at least some of them will likely heed his advice, despite what medical professionals may say. Lifting the social distancing restrictions prematurely could place vulnerable populations at risk by allowing the virus to spread too quickly and overwhelming the resources of the medical system, leading to preventable deaths.

6) Trump claims a recession is more deadly than the virus

Trump has been claiming for days that the economy would improve after the virus has been controlled. But on Sunday night, he changed tack, suggesting on Twitter that the economic toll of sending workers home could have a more devastating effect than letting the virus rip through the US population unchecked by social distancing:

He reiterated that argument during his press conference on Monday, claiming that stifling the economy could be deadly in and of itself.

“We have people with tremendous anxiety and depression, and you have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies,” he said. “[Death] would be in far greater numbers than the numbers we’re talking about with regard to the virus.”

The toll that isolation takes on people is real. So is the toll of unemployment — one reason Congress is considering a relief package. Studies have found that suicide rates do increase during economic downturns.

But it’s not clear what, if anything, backed up Trump’s assertion that social distancing would be more deadly. Research suggests some past recessions have lowered overall death rates. It’s true that the suicide rate jumped during the Great Recession from 2008 to 2010, but not in the kind of numbers that would outpace the projected death toll of coronavirus. Roughly 10,000 suicides were traced to the recession. In the worst-case scenarios without social distancing, coronavirus would kill millions.

Meanwhile, experts’ advice hasn’t changed

The advice from public health experts remains the same: practice good hygiene and social distancing, refrain from traveling, and consult a medical provider if you develop symptoms of Covid-19. Scientists estimate this could be our new normal for a year or more.

The virus is primarily spread through droplets from coughing or sneezing. The CDC consequently recommends that people wash their hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, disinfect frequently touched objects and avoid touching their face, where the virus can enter through the eyes, nose and mouth.

People should also avoid face-to-face interactions with people outside of their households. Many states have already adopted “shelter in place” policies that have shut down all but essential businesses. But this kind of social distancing even extends to small gatherings of friends and going for walks at popular times of day.

If you do develop symptoms, which typically include a fever and coughing, then you should contact a health care provider, who may recommend that you self-monitor at home or that you be tested for the virus (though there remains a shortage of available testing kits.)

Donald Trump is losing patience with the White House’s most credible infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci because the NIAID director has contradicted him too many times on the COVID-19 response and provided fuel for the president’s critics.

The NYT reports: “Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has grown bolder in correcting the president’s falsehoods and overly rosy statements about the spread of the coronavirus in the past two weeks — and he has become a hero to the president’s critics because of it. And now, Mr. Trump’s patience has started to wear thin. So has the patience of some White House advisers, who see Dr. Fauci as taking shots at the president in some of his interviews with print reporters while offering extensive praise for Mr. Trump in television interviews with conservative hosts.”

Science doesn’t fly in the White House.

In an interview with Science, Fauci was asked how he can stand there when Trump says things that aren’t factual, and Fauci responded, “The next time they sit down with him and talk about what he’s going to say, they will say, ‘By the way, Mr. President, be careful about this and don’t say that.’ But I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down. OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.”

Fauci also made a splash on social media after he put his hand over the face after Trump referred to the “deep state department.” Fauci has been missing from the podium since then.

Here’s the video of Dr Fauci’s reaction to Trump’s “Deep State Department” jab.

It’s even better pic.twitter.com/zIwzw6lyk4

— Jason K. Morrell (@CNNJason) March 20, 2020

The post Trump Losing Patience with Dr. Fauci: REPORT appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

As the Trump administration leans more and more into the idea that hundreds of thousands of American deaths may be worth it, the Republican Party’s most sycophantic death cultists have begun to disseminate this madness into the public. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, best known for blaming everything except guns for gun deaths, went on Tucker Carlson’s ministry of information entertainment show on Monday evening to plead with the Democratic Party to allow elderly Americans out into public, along with the rest of the American consumers, to risk their lives for capitalism. Lt. Gov. Patrick wants to protect the American way of life—even if that means killing yourself and creating a historic crisis to our healthcare infrastructure.*

DAN PATRICK: And you know Tucker, no one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, ‘Are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America [sic] loves, for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.

Holy cow, that’s low. Because I’ll tell you this—you know who isn’t going to be outside shaking seniors’ hands as they save capitalism during this pandemic? Do you know who isn’t going to be visiting the potentially hundreds of thousands of dying grandparents in their ICU tents to say “Thank you for saving the America that all America loves?” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Patrick proceeded to explain that this didn’t make him “noble” or “brave.” No, Dan, none of us think it does. It makes you possibly a sociopath, but not noble or brave. Patrick then continued his bizarre guilt trip of American grandparents saying that he, Dan Patrick, has a brood of grandkids too and he doesn’t want to “sacrifice” America just because he’s in a demographic most susceptible to the worst outcomes of the COVID-19, coronavirus. Forget about the fact that people between the ages of 25-55 are also ending up in critical condition, spending long periods in ICUs around the world as a result of this virus.

Patrick finished by saying his message was “Let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it, and those of us that are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country.” Actually Dan, you won’t take care of yourselves. If you get sick, nurses and doctors and orderlies and whoever is healthy enough to take care of you will be breaking their necks to make sure your sorry, corrupt, confused soul stays in this plane of existence. But, if you really believe all that, why don’t you start us off, take a trip to one of your city’s ICU units, shake some hands, but be smart! Don’t touch that stupid face of yours! And then you can just ride out into the sunset knowing you saved your America.

*Which, ironically, would destroy this mythical America Patrick loves so very much.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: President Donald Trump is considering easing health directives that prevent the spread of the coronavirus in an attempt to contain economic fallout. A new analysis suggests that those measures are helping to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Economists led by Northwestern University's Martin Eichenbaum wrote that keeping social-distancing measures in place before the number of new virus cases declines -- in other words, before a peak in the infection rate -- could limit infections and prevent as many as 600,000 additional U.S. deaths. While the economic damage is deeper when optimal health measures are taken, a recession is unavoidable even without them, as infected people would stay at home to recover and millions die, the report shows. Under a worst-case scenario, with stores remaining open and no social isolation policies, as many as 215 million Americans could become infected and 2.2 million could die from the spread of the virus, the economists' data shows. That's based on an estimate from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that up to 70% of that country's population could become infected without a vaccine. It also matches the worst-case global estimate from Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wow...these are some anxious times for everyone. I’m fortunate enough to have a day job. It doesn’t come close to covering my bills, but damn, others are in a much tougher situation. But Trump and the GOP will save us with their newly-discovered socialism, right? Right?

A few weeks ago, socialism was the number one threat to America. Now, they suddenly want to give everyone free money. 

Maybe if they hadn’t squandered gazillions on tax cuts for the rich, we would be in a better position to deal with this. Instead, the irresponsible jackasses have blown the deficits wide open. They need Democratic votes to pass anything. And they have the moral authority to ask, since they were there to help to help Obama with the post-2008 financial crisis stimulus, right? Um, no. Lord, I loath Republicans. They put party over country every time. But the Dems can’t follow suit, because it could be even more devastating for the country.

They don’t have a deal yet, but something will have to be worked out. There’s only one party interested in responsible governance in this country. Unfortunately, there are too many moron voters, and they keep electing the moron party to govern, or at least, obstruct. 

Also, If you’re concerned about the current state of editorial cartooning, consider supporting my work on my Patreon Page for as little as $1 a month. You can also buy some merchandise like T-shirts with my cartoons on them here (I’ve added new cartoons), including some of my most famous cartoons ever.

By inadvertently spreading the coronavirus around the U.S. Capitol for at least a week, Rand Paul has turned the world’s greatest deliberative body into the nation’s highest-profile vector for the spread of the pandemic.

The senator from Kentucky was worried enough about being exposed to the virus that he got a still-hard-to-obtain test for it. But while he was waiting for the results, he decided to keep showing up to the Senate. He went to group lunches with his Republican colleagues, took the Capitol elevators, talked with reporters, and worked out in the somehow-still-open Senate gym. Yesterday morning, he was doing laps in the pool there.

By yesterday afternoon, Paul had announced that he had tested positive. Graciously, he said that he would start self-quarantining.

Paul is exactly what we’ve been told to worry about. For all the laughing and hate-tweeting directed at spring breakers saying they don’t think the coronavirus is a big deal, they’re at worst dumb, selfish, underinformed 20-somethings. Paul is a medical doctor (he worked as an ophthalmologist before first being elected in 2012). He is a senator. He is an elected official. People look to him for leadership.

In the Senate, the average age is 62.9. There are five senators in their 80s—and there will soon be six, when Vermont’s Patrick Leahy has his birthday at the end of the month. There are mothers and fathers of young children in the chamber. There are senators who have close family members with conditions that make them especially susceptible to the virus, such as Utah’s Mitt Romney, whose wife has MS.

[Read: What you need to know about the coronavirus]

Then there is Paul, whose office claims that he was being extra careful by deciding to get tested (he had a procedure last year to remove a damaged part of his lung), and that he “only got tested because of his insistence.” But Paul’s attitude seems to have boiled down to some version of Too bad for you if I’m infected and I come into contact with you.

He is infected. He came into contact with a lot of people. And now, at a crucial moment in American history, when the entire country is counting on Washington’s response, Paul has single-handedly given senators reason to worry that they are risking their health by showing up to vote.

None of this explains how Paul got tested at all. People across the country are having trouble breathing and running fevers but being told that they have to wait for a test. Paul was asymptomatic, but did attend an art-museum fundraiser in Kentucky on March 7 with two people who later tested positive for COVID-19 (Paul says he never interacted with either of the people in question). Other people at the event, including the local mayor, have tested positive, and Paul seems to have decided that attending the fundraiser was enough reason to ask for a test. How he jumped the line for one is a mystery. America doesn’t have anywhere near enough tests for those who need them, despite Donald Trump saying at the beginning of the month that anyone who wanted a test could get one, and Vice President Mike Pence saying on March 10 that there would be an additional 4 million tests “before the end of this week.” That was two weeks ago today.

Importantly, Paul has no idea where or from whom he contracted the virus. He could have gotten it and then spread it at all sorts of places he hasn’t considered.  Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, who was at the same museum fundraiser, announced on March 15 that he’d taken a test and the results had come back negative. Still, Yarmuth tweeted, “I plan to continue working from home and will avoid going out in order to do my part as we all work to practice safe and precautionary distancing to help defeat this pandemic.”

Other senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, preemptively self-quarantined after learning that they could have been exposed. Cruz had no symptoms either. Paul’s office argued that he got the test “out of an abundance of caution due to his extensive travel and events.” But if traveling between Kentucky and Washington is all that is required to get a test, a lot more people should be able to receive immediate testing.

They can’t, of course. There’s no question that Paul got special treatment. He got a test that others want and can’t get, and he got it despite having no symptoms—something the president has explicitly said people shouldn’t be doing. He got it as a United States senator, which means that he got it on a taxpayer-funded government health-care plan. Everyone else, including those who might be fighting for a ventilator in the coming weeks, can wait.

[Read: Can Rand Paul learn to tell the truth?]

All last week, while he was deciding that he wanted to be tested, getting that specially obtained test, and waiting for the results, Paul was at work in the Senate. He was holding up, then voting against, then blasting in a floor speech the first major coronavirus-response bill, which includes a provision to make testing, once it becomes more readily available, free for whoever wants it.

Paul got a test that he voted against everyone else being able to get. He slowed the passage of the bill to make a principled stand against the enormous deficit spending involved. He did not mention, as he criticized young people for not taking the virus seriously while in almost the next sentence raising doubts that it is worse than the swine flu, that he was concerned enough about himself to get tested. “Modern man has become accustomed to the idea that life is relatively safe, that a long life is to be expected. Consequently, any re-eruption of diseases beyond our control paralyzes us with fear,” he said, urging people to get their worries under control. He mentioned that his parents remember the polio scares, and that they lived through those well into their 80s.

One of those parents is Ron Paul, the former congressman from Texas and presidential candidate who helped mainstream a version of libertarianism that his son is clearly inspired by, though the elder Paul is a separate political figure and not formally affiliated with his son except by biology. But here’s what Ron Paul, who also began his professional life as a doctor (an obstetrician) wrote in a commentary published on March 16: “People should ask themselves whether this coronavirus ‘pandemic’ could be a big hoax, with the actual danger of the disease massively exaggerated by those who seek to profit—financially or politically—from the ensuing panic.” The same day, Rand Paul’s chief political strategist, Doug Stafford, tweeted mockingly about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio taking a midday break from dealing with the pandemic response to go to a gym in Brooklyn: “So people can’t eat out but can go to the gym where they expel bodily fluid and touch things other people just touched. Ok.” His boss, he would later find out, was doing those things all week.

Here are some of the questions I sent Paul’s spokesman this morning:

• When did the senator decide to get tested? Why did he wait, when Congressman Yarmuth, who was at that same museum fundraiser, got tested a week earlier?
• Why did he not inform anyone in the Senate that he was concerned enough to get tested and/or self-quarantine?
• How did the senator obtain a test so quickly, when others have been waiting (including others who likewise have conditions that have them on high alert)?
• Was the test covered under his Senate health insurance? If not, how was it paid for?

The only response I received pointed me to the statements that Paul has put out over the past day, which don’t address these questions. Paul’s office released an emailed statement from him this afternoon, calling for “more testing immediately, even among those without symptoms.” He argued, “The nature of COVID-19 put me—and us all—in a Catch-22 situation. I didn’t fit the criteria for testing or quarantine. I had no symptoms and no specific encounter with a COVID-19 positive person. I had, however, traveled extensively in the U.S. and was required to continue doing so to vote in the Senate. That, together with the fact that I have a compromised lung, led me to seek testing.”

He turned his scolding toward anyone questioning how he’s behaved, holding himself up as an exemplar because he went out of his way to get tested, even though he kept it secret, and even though he got a test others can’t get.

“For those who want to criticize me for lack of quarantine, realize that if the rules on testing had been followed to a tee, I would never have been tested and would still be walking around the halls of the Capitol,” the statement reads. “Perhaps it is too much to ask that we simply have compassion for our fellow Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so.”

I hope the senator makes a full recovery. Many Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so won’t get the same compassion or access to treatment that he did.