StrangeSox

I remember having a similar discussion re: Woodward back when his first Trump book was coming out. Dude's been covering for those in power for decades. More infuriating news about how badly the White House has politicized our national response to a public health emergency. A Trump administration appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to prevent Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, from speaking about the risks that coronavirus poses to children. Emails obtained by POLITICO show Paul Alexander — a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, HHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs — instructing press officers and others at the National Institutes of Health about what Fauci should say during media interviews. The Trump adviser weighed in on Fauci’s planned responses to outlets including Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and the science journal Cell. Alexander’s lengthy messages, some sent as recently as this week, are couched as scientific arguments. But they often contradict mainstream science while promoting political positions taken by the Trump administration on hot-button issues ranging from the use of convalescent plasma to school reopening. The emails add to evidence that the White House, and Trump appointees within HHS, are pushing health agencies to promote a political message instead of a scientific one. “I continue to have an issue with kids getting tested and repeatedly and even university students in a widespread manner…and I disagree with Dr. Fauci on this. Vehemently,” Alexander wrote in one Aug. 27 email, responding to a press-office summary of what Fauci intended to tell a Bloomberg reporter. And on Tuesday, Alexander told Fauci’s press team that the scientist should not promote mask-wearing by children during an MSNBC interview. “Can you ensure Dr. Fauci indicates masks are for the teachers in schools. Not for children,” Alexander wrote. “There is no data, none, zero, across the entire world, that shows children especially young children, spread this virus to other children, or to adults or to their teachers. None. And if it did occur, the risk is essentially zero,” he continued — adding without evidence that children take influenza home, but not the coronavirus. In a statement attributed to Caputo, HHS said that Fauci is an important voice during the pandemic and that Alexander specializes in analyzing the work of other scientists.

When Woodward spoke to Trump on February 7, two days after he was acquitted on impeachment charges by the Senate, Woodward expected a lengthy conversation about the trial. He was surprised, however, by the President's focus on the virus. At the same time that Trump and his public health officials were saying the virus was "low risk," Trump divulged to Woodward that the night before he'd spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping about the virus. Woodward quotes Trump as saying, "We've got a little bit of an interesting setback with the virus going in China." "It goes through the air," Trump said. "That's always tougher than the touch. You don't have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that's how it's passed. And so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus." But Trump spent most of the next month saying that the virus was "very much under control" and that cases in the US would "disappear." Trump said on his trip to India on February 25 that it was "a problem that's going to go away," and the next day he predicted the number of US cases "within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero." By March 19, when Trump told Woodward he was purposely downplaying the dangers to avoid creating a panic, he also acknowledged the threat to young people. "Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It's not just old, older. Young people too, plenty of young people," Trump said. Publicly, however, Trump has continued to insist just the opposite, saying as recently as August 5 that children were "almost immune." Even into April, when the US became the country with the most confirmed cases in the world, Trump's public statements contradicted his acknowledgements to Woodward. At an April 3 coronavirus task force briefing, Trump was still downplaying the virus and stating that it would go away. "I said it's going away and it is going away," he said. Yet two days later on April 5, Trump again told Woodward, "It's a horrible thing. It's unbelievable," and on April 13, he said, "It's so easily transmissible, you wouldn't even believe it." Good Lord edit: kinda wanna say "What the hell, Woodward??" for sitting on this tape for months as hundreds of thousands of Americans died and millions more became infected.

heck of a stretch there

So how much did Foles cost them again

Welp RIP uiuc's plans, I guess. Is there any more arrogant group of professors than physicists? edit: perfect encapsulation of physicists' reduction of reality to models

Yikes

And an update from UIUC's testing: https://www.news-gazette.com/coronavirus/after-uptick-in-cases-ui-stepping-up-enforcement-asking-students-to-limit-in-person-gatherings/article_a231c4bb-a380-5bba-affb-d69ca8e5ae31.html Finding a lot of new cases initially, as was expected.

A few not-good-news studies on longer term heart impacts https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/01/coronavirus-autopsies-findings/ Coronavirus autopsies: A story of 38 brains, 87 lungs and 42 hearts

I think I heard a week or two back on WGN (Dr. Murphy from Northwestern) saying that Illinois hospitalizations had been steadily increasing so we could expect deaths to start climbing in a few weeks. Same trend as Texas, Florida and Arizona over the summer. Case counts climb, a couple of weeks later hospitalizations climb, a couple of weeks after that deaths climb. We went from a 7-day rolling average of new daily deaths of 14 at the end of July to 19-20 now. Illinois has been in a weird trend of slow-but-steady increasing cases and now deaths rather than the more rapid swings we've seen elsewhere. Our positivity rates have been climbing steadily since the end of June as well, when the state ignored the Phase 4 contact tracing requirements.

I guess the IDPH's daily data doesn't include these? Otherwise we'd be seeing a lot more tests in the data. Not great news today. Highest number of deaths since late June, testing dropped so we have a one-day positivity rate of 6.5%.

Really cool video, thanks for posting.

NBA Playoffs will resume tomorrow.

Something I heard the other day is that while the marginal cost of those tests may be $10, the total cost could be say $50-100 per test depending on how much new equipment you need to buy upfront. A big thing too is how heavily they can be automated. If it's a lot of manual work, the labor costs add up and can become bottlenecks as you try to really scale up. Multiple medical organizations have come out against the CDC's new guidance. Well, really, it was the White House Coronavirus taskforce absent Dr. Fauci that pushed this new guidance on the CDC rather than any scientific experts. The entire plan now is to insist that this is all in the past, we don't need testing, we don't need relief, we don't need PPE. Shut up and get back to work/school, we don't care how many of you suffer or die. e: relevant UIUC testing volume: This is one (albeit large) state university, and just them doing the minimum amount of testing to *possibly* safely reopen is accounting for a decent amount of our entire national testing. If just the flagship university of every state did the same amount of testing, we'd more than double our current national testing capacity.

Everyone is being tested twice a week I think?

e: wildcat strike by the NBA players

NYT reporting that these new guidelines came from the White House rather than the CDC. To illustrate how stupidly dangerous and deadly this is:

It's pretty awful that they've managed to seriously damage the credibility of both the FDA and CDC in such a short amount of time.

UIUC now accounts for 1-2% of all testing in the entire country every day. https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/1990170345

People want to vote by mail much moreso this year thanks to COVID as well.

Perhaps opening up colleges was actually dumb and irresponsible. Too bad nobody predicted that ahead of time.

People are relying a lot on the mail for things right now thanks to COVID, including vital things like medication, as mentioned in my post.

Tropical storms? Godzilla?