“Over the past couple of weeks, the United States has seen significant improvements not just with the raw number of Covid-19 tests but also with other metrics experts use to gauge the scope of the US’s coronavirus outbreak and its testing capacity.
During the week of May 5, the US averaged nearly 300,000 new coronavirus tests a day, according to the Covid Tracking Project. That’s nearly double the roughly 150,000 daily tests performed in early April, although it still falls short of the number of new tests a day experts say is needed to fully control the outbreak — a number that ranges from 500,000 on the low end to tens of millions on the high end, depending on which plan you’re reading.”
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“Over much of April, testing numbers stagnated due to supply shortages for swabs, reagents, and other materials needed to collect samples and run coronavirus tests.
Experts have said that the federal government, led by President Donald Trump, should lead national efforts to boost testing. But Trump’s “blueprint” for testing explicitly leaves the problem to the states and private sector, saying the federal government will only act as a “supplier of last resort.””
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” With overall cases, the country as a whole has seen its daily new reported Covid-19 cases drop in May. But much of that decrease originated in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York — the three states included in the New York City metro area, which suffered the worst outbreak. When those three states are excluded, the US has seen daily new Covid-19 cases at best start to drop only in recent days — far from the two weeks of decreases that experts recommend.”
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“Some of the upward trend in Covid-19 cases outside Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York in recent weeks is likely due to increased testing.”
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“Taken together, these figures suggest that the majority of states are not ready to start to reopen just yet. While America has made decent progress throughout May in confronting the challenge of this pandemic, there’s still a bit more work to be done.”
“At the time, I didn’t find this quote particularly earth-shattering. It seemed like a reasonable concern, but not newsworthy. After all, Americans have lived through multiple pandemic scares — SARS, MERS, swine flu — and we largely dodged each bullet. This part of the interview was off-topic for the series I was making, and I left it on the cutting room floor.
Reading the transcript almost a year later, I am struck by how clearly Fauci described this current pandemic. Our nation’s top public health officials have known that this outbreak, or something like it, was a serious possibility, and they haven’t been keeping this information to themselves. But it’s hard to find the collective will to prepare for — and stop — a theoretical threat. COVID-19 may be unprecedented, but it wasn’t unpredictable.”
“experts in contact tracing, and also in infectious disease, have forever believed and argued that contact tracing does not work with a respiratory disease. And the reason experts told us that contact tracing would not work with respiratory diseases is that respiratory diseases spread too easily — air is a lot easier to come into contact with than someone else’s blood — and that they also spread too quickly. So from the get-go, this country has not even attempted to do serious contact tracing. We didn’t try it in the first cases in the state of Washington. We didn’t try it after cases appeared in California, [we] certainly have not tried it since cases appeared on the East Coast. And in addition, contact tracing is immensely laborious. You need an army of thousands of people to do it.”
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“In South Korea, in particular, in Singapore, both of which had very, very early cases, not surprising given their proximity to China, that’s what they did. Those countries did contact tracing. It worked. And suddenly that opened the eyes of experts who said, no, no, it could never be done.”
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” You know, just as with the recognition that face masks actually can help, all sorts of assumptions about respiratory diseases are being rewritten and, in fact, overturned as a result of what we’re seeing in this pandemic.”
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“we can have an exit from the very strict social distancing [and] physical distancing that we’ve had for the last month and a half. You know, whether it’s the governors talking about how to figure this out, testing and contact tracing is at the center of all of those plans. And the sequence is, test, in other words, you have to identify people who carry the virus, trace their contacts, you isolate people, and you hope that works.”
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“there’s not going to be a vaccine in this calendar year.”
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“here’s the problem. As we were saying earlier in the experts’ objection to contact tracing for a respiratory virus, it has to be done fast. On average, to identify a person’s contacts — just to identify them, let alone to track them down — takes something like 12 hours of asking, “Where were you? What were you doing? What was it like there?” So that’s an average.”
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“The estimates are that the United States would need at least 100,000 tracers, possibly as many as 300,000. And, of course, we’re going to pay these people and value them and encourage them. So, you know, you’re probably looking at … upwards of 3.6 billion … dollars just to do that. And absolutely, it’s worth it. But that’s the order of magnitude that you’re talking about in terms of effort.”
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“The technology that’s being discussed can be basically instantaneous. The way many of these systems would work is, again, you opt-in. And the opting in means that … you would … get an alert saying, “Yes, you came into close contact with someone. We think you should now isolate yourself for 14 days.” If you can get through those two weeks without symptoms, then that casual passing by the person did not infect you. That can be done virtually, instantaneously — certainly, you know, faster than human contact tracers. And the hope is that by doing it that quickly, you can snuff out any transmission chains that might crop up.”
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“Singapore, South Korea, they used everything from security camera footage to smartphone tracing. Israel rolled out a system like this. What’s important to remember is that success does not mean zero cases. Success means that we do not have another instance where we overwhelm our hospitals and have the horrible situations that we’ve all seen, in especially New York hospitals. Bottom line, you can have way, way less than 100 percent opt-in and still have a really good chance of catching any incipient new infections after we’re over the current wave.”
“So why, in the midst of grappling with an out-of-control pandemic and an economy in free fall, would Tehran devote time and money to fighting the US? The answer, at least in part, is that the Iranian government believes the United States is particularly weak right now, too.
With Washington’s ineptitude on full display in its domestic response to the coronavirus, few people outside of a select group of Iran hawks — which includes Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — have much of an appetite for continued clashes with Iranian proxies in Iraq or incidents with the IRGC in the Persian Gulf right now.
The United States is also a convenient scapegoat and distraction that the Iranian regime regularly uses to deflect attention from its own failures.
Facing growing criticism at home and abroad for their abysmal response to the Covid-19 outbreak, Iranian leaders have tried to shift the blame to the US — particularly the stringent economic sanctions Washington has placed on the country, which Iranian leaders say (not entirely unfairly) are hampering the country’s ability to respond to the pandemic.”
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“The US assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3, 2020, was intended to not only take Iran’s most capable military figure off the battlefield but also to “reestablish deterrence” — that is, to raise the stakes so that Iranian-backed militias in Iraq would think twice about attacking US forces in the country going forward.
However, a series of recent attacks shows that far from being cowed, these militias appear to have been emboldened. In all likelihood, Iran is only in the nascent stages of responding to the death of Soleimani.”
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“The coronavirus pandemic sweeping throughout the world has led the United States to draw down its forces, repositioning soldiers within Iraq and consolidating troops to fewer bases. US special forces soldiers have been withdrawn from some of the world’s most dangerous active conflict zones, leaving local host-nation forces to contend with an array of well-equipped and battle-hardened terrorists, insurgents, and militias.
This has presented Iran with a unique opportunity to expand and consolidate its control in Iraq and push the US entirely out. And the country’s leaders aren’t going to squander their chance.”
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” From Tehran, the United States looks at its weakest in years. The country is struggling to formulate a coherent and effective response to Covid-19. The divisions between the United States and its traditional allies are glaring. In terms of US-Iran tensions, US allies in Europe place much of the blame on America, not the Islamic Republic.”
“Trump’s approach to the pandemic has been to crow about his administration’s imaginary successes while blaming governors for everything that’s gone wrong.
On Friday, he escalated his message, endorsing the anti-stay-at-home protests cropping up across the country — specifically the protests in battleground states run by Democratic governors.
Moments after Fox News aired a segment on the rallies, Trump tweeted their rally cry against their governors: “LIBERATE.””
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“Fox News is trying to convince Americans that there’s a groundswell of opposition to these important measures, attempting to make small rallies look big and fringe attitudes look mainstream.
On air, they’ve displayed images that make the protests seem significant. A first glance at the map below makes it look like a huge number of rallies have already happened, but they haven’t. It’s a double-whammy: The movement looks large and Fox encourages viewers to join.”
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” The same images were used in the early days of the Tea Party, when Fox trumped up the rallies, describing them as part of a “revolution” and urging viewers to join.”
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“Conservative groups are playing an important part, too. Three pro-gun groups are behind the largest Facebook group encouraging the protests, according to an investigation by the Washington Post.
In Michigan, a group funded by Trump ally Education Secretary Betsy DeVos helped get out the word.
And the same Tea Party groups that were successful a decade ago are eager to join in. “
“If states and cities began to invest in quarantine facilities — like by buying out hotels, which are currently hurting for lack of customers — opening them up on a voluntary basis could do an enormous amount of good. But especially for jurisdictions with smaller caseloads that are eager to “open up,” it’s really worth thinking harder about what the plan is when new cases pop up.
Strict centralized isolation measures would likely ultimately be cheaper and less invasive than ping-ponging in and out of lockdown. It’s what the most successful coronavirus-fighting countries are doing. And since the US has already turned almost every aspect of daily life upside down, it should think about trying a similar strategy, too.”
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“the “isolation” part of the strategy is important. If you test people and keep them trapped inside with their families, you’re not accomplishing nearly as much as you would if you actually isolated them.”