Thad
04-19-2020, 09:28 AM
<header class="caas-title-wrapper">The Guardian: Operation reopen America: are we about to witness a second historic failure of leadership from Trump? (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/18/operation-reopen-america-are-we-about-to-witness-a-second-historic-failure-of-leadership-from-trump)
</header>Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe in New York
The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/international)<time class="caas-attr-meta-time caas-attr-seperator" datetime="2020-04-18T10:00:06.000Z">April 18, 2020, 3:00 AM PDT</time>
<svg width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24"></svg> (https://www.tumblr.com/widgets/share/tool/preview?shareSource=legacy&canonicalUrl=&posttype=link&url=https://news.yahoo.com/operation-reopen-america-witness-second-100006662.html&title=Operation reopen America: are we about to witness a second historic failure of leadership from Trump?)<svg width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 32 32"></svg> (https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=458584288257241&link=https://news.yahoo.com/operation-reopen-america-witness-second-100006662.html&tsrc=fb)<svg width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 32 32"></svg> (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Operation reopen America: are we about to witness a second historic failure of leadership from Trump?&url=https://news.yahoo.com/operation-reopen-america-witness-second-100006662.html&tsrc=twtr)<svg width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 512 512"></svg><article role="article" tabindex="-1">On Thursday evening, Donald Trump took to the dais in the White House press briefing room and declared that he was leading America in a “historic battle against the invisible enemy” that amounted to the “greatest national mobilisation since world war two”.
Warming to his theme (https://www.c-span.org/video/?471257-1/trump-administration-issues-guidelines-reopen-economy), the US president said the country was now ready to move to the next phase in the war against coronavirus. It was time, he said, “to open up. America wants to be open, and Americans want to be open”.
Unveiling new guidelines (https://www.whitehouse.gov/openingamerica/) for the loosening of the lockdown, he committed his administration to a “science-based reopening”. He added: “We are starting our life again, we are starting rejuvenation of our economy again, in a safe and structured and very responsible fashion.”
Beyond the cloistered confines of the White House an alternative interpretation of events was gathering force. On a day in which the US suffered its highest death toll (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/apr/17/coronavirus-us-live-trump-reopening-plan-states-governors-latest-updates) from Covid-19, with a total of more than 680,000 confirmed cases (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html) and 34,000 deaths, public health experts were scrutinising the president’s new guidelines and coming to rather different conclusions.
“This isn’t a plan, it’s barely a PowerPoint,” spluttered Ron Klain on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RonaldKlain/status/1250911264152354824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1250911264152354824&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.motherjones.com%2Fcoronavirus-updates%2F2020%2F04%2Fdonald-trump-went-on-tv-and-tried-to-blame-his-own-failures-on-everyone-else-it-didnt-go-well%2F). Klain, the US government’s Ebola tsar during the last health crisis to test the White House, in 2014, said the proposals contained “no provision to ramp up testing, no standard on levels of disease before opening, no protections for workers or customers”.
On 28 March the Guardian exposed the missing six weeks (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster) lost as a result of Trump’s dithering and downplaying of the crisis when the virus first struck. Jeremy Konyndyk, another central figure in the US battle against Ebola, told the Guardian that the Trump administration’s initial response was “one of the greatest failures of basic governance and leadership in modern times”.
Now that the US is contemplating a shift into the second phase of the crisis – a tentative reopening of the economy – scientists and public health officials are agreed that three pillars need to be put into place to manage the transition safely. They are: mass testing to identify those who are infected, contact tracing to isolate other people who may have caught Covid-19 from them, and personal protective equipment (PPE) to shield frontline healthcare workers from any flare-up.
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster)
A chorus of expert voices has also begun to be heard warning that those three essential pillars remain in critically short supply throughout the US. Less than a month after the Guardian’s exploration of the missing six weeks, the chilling recognition is dawning that the country is heading for a second massive failure of governance under Trump, this time on an even bigger scale.
Unless testing capability is dramatically ramped up and a giant army of health workers assembled to trace the contacts of those infected – right now – the consequences could be devastating.
“I’m fearful,” said Dr Tom Frieden, the former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Testing remains scarce in many parts of the country and it’s slow to scale up – we are weeks if not months away from having enough test capacity.”
Frieden, who now heads the global health initiative Resolve to Save Lives (https://resolvetosavelives.org/about), told the Guardian in an interview conducted shortly before Trump released the new reopening guidelines that time was being wasted. The federal government’s misplaced insistence in February that its China travel ban would be enough to make the virus go away had “lost precious weeks” in tackling the first wave of coronavirus.
We wasted February, and I’m worried we’re about to waste April too
<cite>Jeremy Konyndyk, key figure in Ebola fight
</cite>
Now, as the US contemplates reopening, Frieden said he was afraid a repeat performance was imminent.
“I fear there’s an analogous mistaken belief that sheltering in place will make this virus go away, that we can then choose a date and all come out. It’s not about the date, it’s about data and building a national response at scale.”
In a series of tweets (https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1251007626848190464) posted in reaction to the new White House guidelines, Konyndyk echoed the anxiety about more lost weeks. He said the Trump administration had “wasted February, and the White House guidance on ‘opening up’ leaves me worried that we’re about to waste April too”.
Konyndyk said that for states to reopen before they were ready “would be a disaster. It’s no great insight to say we need more testing, tracing, PPE [protective gear for health workers] – it’s been obvious for a month and a half. But each of those face huge bottlenecks and the document doesn’t acknowledge them, much less propose how to resolve them.”
Continues here (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/18/operation-reopen-america-are-we-about-to-witness-a-second-historic-failure-of-leadership-from-trump)
</article>
</header>Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe in New York
The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/international)<time class="caas-attr-meta-time caas-attr-seperator" datetime="2020-04-18T10:00:06.000Z">April 18, 2020, 3:00 AM PDT</time>
<svg width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24"></svg> (https://www.tumblr.com/widgets/share/tool/preview?shareSource=legacy&canonicalUrl=&posttype=link&url=https://news.yahoo.com/operation-reopen-america-witness-second-100006662.html&title=Operation reopen America: are we about to witness a second historic failure of leadership from Trump?)<svg width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 32 32"></svg> (https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=458584288257241&link=https://news.yahoo.com/operation-reopen-america-witness-second-100006662.html&tsrc=fb)<svg width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 32 32"></svg> (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Operation reopen America: are we about to witness a second historic failure of leadership from Trump?&url=https://news.yahoo.com/operation-reopen-america-witness-second-100006662.html&tsrc=twtr)<svg width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 512 512"></svg><article role="article" tabindex="-1">On Thursday evening, Donald Trump took to the dais in the White House press briefing room and declared that he was leading America in a “historic battle against the invisible enemy” that amounted to the “greatest national mobilisation since world war two”.
Warming to his theme (https://www.c-span.org/video/?471257-1/trump-administration-issues-guidelines-reopen-economy), the US president said the country was now ready to move to the next phase in the war against coronavirus. It was time, he said, “to open up. America wants to be open, and Americans want to be open”.
Unveiling new guidelines (https://www.whitehouse.gov/openingamerica/) for the loosening of the lockdown, he committed his administration to a “science-based reopening”. He added: “We are starting our life again, we are starting rejuvenation of our economy again, in a safe and structured and very responsible fashion.”
Beyond the cloistered confines of the White House an alternative interpretation of events was gathering force. On a day in which the US suffered its highest death toll (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/apr/17/coronavirus-us-live-trump-reopening-plan-states-governors-latest-updates) from Covid-19, with a total of more than 680,000 confirmed cases (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html) and 34,000 deaths, public health experts were scrutinising the president’s new guidelines and coming to rather different conclusions.
“This isn’t a plan, it’s barely a PowerPoint,” spluttered Ron Klain on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RonaldKlain/status/1250911264152354824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1250911264152354824&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.motherjones.com%2Fcoronavirus-updates%2F2020%2F04%2Fdonald-trump-went-on-tv-and-tried-to-blame-his-own-failures-on-everyone-else-it-didnt-go-well%2F). Klain, the US government’s Ebola tsar during the last health crisis to test the White House, in 2014, said the proposals contained “no provision to ramp up testing, no standard on levels of disease before opening, no protections for workers or customers”.
On 28 March the Guardian exposed the missing six weeks (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster) lost as a result of Trump’s dithering and downplaying of the crisis when the virus first struck. Jeremy Konyndyk, another central figure in the US battle against Ebola, told the Guardian that the Trump administration’s initial response was “one of the greatest failures of basic governance and leadership in modern times”.
Now that the US is contemplating a shift into the second phase of the crisis – a tentative reopening of the economy – scientists and public health officials are agreed that three pillars need to be put into place to manage the transition safely. They are: mass testing to identify those who are infected, contact tracing to isolate other people who may have caught Covid-19 from them, and personal protective equipment (PPE) to shield frontline healthcare workers from any flare-up.
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster)
A chorus of expert voices has also begun to be heard warning that those three essential pillars remain in critically short supply throughout the US. Less than a month after the Guardian’s exploration of the missing six weeks, the chilling recognition is dawning that the country is heading for a second massive failure of governance under Trump, this time on an even bigger scale.
Unless testing capability is dramatically ramped up and a giant army of health workers assembled to trace the contacts of those infected – right now – the consequences could be devastating.
“I’m fearful,” said Dr Tom Frieden, the former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Testing remains scarce in many parts of the country and it’s slow to scale up – we are weeks if not months away from having enough test capacity.”
Frieden, who now heads the global health initiative Resolve to Save Lives (https://resolvetosavelives.org/about), told the Guardian in an interview conducted shortly before Trump released the new reopening guidelines that time was being wasted. The federal government’s misplaced insistence in February that its China travel ban would be enough to make the virus go away had “lost precious weeks” in tackling the first wave of coronavirus.
We wasted February, and I’m worried we’re about to waste April too
<cite>Jeremy Konyndyk, key figure in Ebola fight
</cite>
Now, as the US contemplates reopening, Frieden said he was afraid a repeat performance was imminent.
“I fear there’s an analogous mistaken belief that sheltering in place will make this virus go away, that we can then choose a date and all come out. It’s not about the date, it’s about data and building a national response at scale.”
In a series of tweets (https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1251007626848190464) posted in reaction to the new White House guidelines, Konyndyk echoed the anxiety about more lost weeks. He said the Trump administration had “wasted February, and the White House guidance on ‘opening up’ leaves me worried that we’re about to waste April too”.
Konyndyk said that for states to reopen before they were ready “would be a disaster. It’s no great insight to say we need more testing, tracing, PPE [protective gear for health workers] – it’s been obvious for a month and a half. But each of those face huge bottlenecks and the document doesn’t acknowledge them, much less propose how to resolve them.”
Continues here (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/18/operation-reopen-america-are-we-about-to-witness-a-second-historic-failure-of-leadership-from-trump)
</article>