Updated: 5/11/20
There is a dangerous pitch by right-wing media and earlier by others on FOX.attempting to play down the impact of COVID. No big deal " This COVID is just like any other flu pandemic such as HINI and so why the panic. COVID-19 must be being hyped because of liberal politics to make Trump look bad. " Go ahead and rally protest demonstrations against governor's stay at home orders the President urges on tweets. "Don't be ignorant. It would not be good for your health," is my answer to those who fall for it. Per Jerad Polis, Colorado Governor, on Colorado Public Radio May 11, " of seniors who get the virus, 3 or 4 will end up in the hospital; for non-seniors, the odds are one in ten. This is not like any other flu".
I got a vaccination for swine flu., HINI There is none for coronavirus yet. As a novel virus, no one has immunity. This virus is a different animal. It is more infectious, though it is so new, the estimates vary and they may vary from place to place. The reproduction number for swine flue, the number one person can infect is 1.75.(The R0 factor; pronounced R naught) With coronavirus, one carrier can infect more than 3.5, per some estimates. The CDC was on top of the swine flu that emerged in the US in April.2009..had treatment methods identified by May and a vaccine developed by September. All treatment drugs for COVID 19 none, but In clinical trials. Vaccine for COVID 19, a year and a half away. Swine flu timeline is from the CDC website.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-pandemic-timeline.html
https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/how-scientists-quantify-intensity-of-an-outbreak-like-covid-19 and the swine flu R0 factor is from Wikipedia with documented references. Any R0 factor under 1 means the virus is dying out.
The BS still being the spiel from Trump media is still COVID was not worse than flu. This from Scientific American: "If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse."
If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.
My family is a blessing; I have in my own immediate family, a team of experts helpful for writing my blog and columns. One daughter is an MBA in health administration and part of her curriculum was epidemiology. She took the threat of COVID -19 seriously and knew the death rate targeted older people like her mother. A son, Harvard MBA and Stanford economics, keeps me fact-checked and grounded in business and economics. Most of his consulting business clients are small business startups, many abroad. We have first cousins and a grandson in the New York area and he splits his time between Colorado and there. What goes on in New York and Connecticut is personal to us. Fortunately, he arrived in Colorado March 3 after two weeks of travel in Turkey, Spain, Germany, and Manhattan and we both went into quarantine for two weeks in our Winter Park home at daughter's insistence...and we practiced social distancing in the same home. He was exposed many times to COVID -19 in that February trip, but he wiped down everything he could, including airline seats and trays. We consider ourselves lucky. So far so good, and I have still not left the house. Mortality for COVID in my over 80 age group is 14%. 80% of those on ventilators die.
From my earlier blog posting in March.: We have heard of historical comparisons to COVID-19 to other mega pandemics. There are certain advantages of my living so long, but still vivid in my memory bank was the polio epidemic of the late 1940s when I was in elementary school and before Salk and his miracle vaccine freed us from fear. Like the 1940's polio, COVID- 19 has no vaccine and no medicines to stop its progression. We can only treat the symptoms and avoid those who are infected. We did not call it social distancing then, but we did it. It was not enforced by a government but by my parents. In sweltering summers of eastern Oklahoma, we were not able to go to swimming pools or to cool off in air-cooled movie theaters. We could only play with our neighborhood gang. We did not complain. We did not try to avoid the rules. One look at the pictures in Life Magazine of children lying in rows of iron lungs was enough to put the fear of God in us. It worked. Our neighborhood gang escaped the disease. The irony has not escaped me. As a child, I was the most vulnerable to polio; as a person well over 60, I am once again the most vulnerable to another deadly epidemic and I am socially distancing myself with a vengeance. March 26; https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-team-failed-nsc-pandemic-000023392.html There was a playbook to deal with a pandemic left by the Obama administration in the wake of other pandemics and ignored by Trump's. One more example of Trump's judgment and priority failures.
WELCOME TO THE BLOG This blog reflects my views of current political issues.. It is also an archive for columns in the Sky Hi News 2011 to November 2019. Winter Park Times 2019 to 2021.(paper publishing suspended in 2021) My Facebook page, the muftic forum, posts blog links, comments, and sharing. Non-political Facebook page: felicia muftic. Subscribe for free on Substack: https://feliciamuftic.substack.com Blog postings are continuously being edited and updated.
Showing posts with label polio epidemic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label polio epidemic. Show all posts
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Saturday, March 14, 2020
When reality collided with spin
: Published in the Winter Park Times March 20 2020
Updates March -April follow as well as links to bibliography....
April 29, 2020...an update May 22, 2020
From Trump the promoter in chief, in his happy talk spin, raised hydroxychloroquine as a preventative drug and a treatment. Trump said he had been taking it. What does he have to lose?, he asked. If he can convince voters that the cure to COVID 19 is right around the corner, then he may avoid a defeat in November due to his bungling his response to the pandemic. To answer what he had to lose, was possibly his life or heart problems. Per an authoritative study in the British Journal, The Lancet, even when combined with Z pack, the "A study of 96,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients on six continents found that those who received an antimalarial drug promoted by President Trump as a “game-changer” in the fight against the virus had a significantly higher risk of death compared with those who did not.What happens when reality and political spin collide? Thanks to modern media and the internet, events happen in warp time. We get whiplash as we are bombarded with conflicting messages and daily changing public policies. So it is with the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The results have been both comic and tragic. Many who believed the spinners who first downplayed the danger have failed to take the threat seriously enough to undertake personal precautions, gambling with their health, getting the affliction, and infecting the unaware. Others, driven by the fear of the unknown and without the availability of widespread testing, lose faith in the credibility and competence of the White House. They panic and hoard toilet paper.
What a difference a few weeks made. The unknown is fertile ground for spinners and there is plenty of unknown and misinformation to go around. In our bifurcated media world, those who exclusively listen to Fox and ilk or MSNBC or CNN and their ilk live on different planets. Stories they follow and the emphasis they give, opinions that are expressed by their pundits, are very different. The echo chambers that result, tweets retweeted, postings on social media and talking points voiced by their partisan politicians, are reflected in public polling. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reported March 15 that 68% of Democrats feared someone in their family would get the virus; only 40% of Republicans believed likewise. 80% of Democrats believed the crisis would get worse; only 40% of Republicans thought it would. In retrospect, what was reported by the liberal media for several weeks was a warning of what could happen in the US. A few weeks of denial later, Trump was reading from a teleprompter and declaring a national emergency.
It is not clear whether Trump's media friends had been echoing the President or were writing his talking points for him. In any case, we were getting an earful from the FOX folks that this virus was not a big deal, no worse than any other flu, people die from flu all the time, and the hype of the "liberal media" coverage was a hoax Democrats had cooked it up to hurt Donald Trump in his re-election campaign. This was in spite of knowing what other countries were going through. This flu 's death rate experienced elsewhere is on the average ten times more than other flu epidemics, ranging as high as 14% for those over 80 years old who get the virus. Unlike other pandemics and epidemics we have experienced recently, there is no vaccine and no effective way to stop it once a person is infected, and no widespread testing yet in the US to know how many are already sick from it. The Trump administration believed their own spin and at first paid little attention to the preparatory work that was needed. Trump dithered at first, said the numbers would go to zero, like a miracle it would go away in April, offered a happy talk on tests, made a happy talk on the outbreak, ignored scientists, made this all about himself and his re-election, and then finally declared a national emergency. In a press conference on March 13, Trump played his "buck does not stop here" card. He took had no responsibility for disbanding in 2018 the National Security mechanism for coordinating an early response to pandemics like Ebola. Voters may yet hold him responsible in November. for his misleading the public and his slow start. The newest forecast from the White House is the "crisis, may last into July or August".
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/trump-china-coronavirus-188736
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-coronavirus-disinformation-campaign-isn-003121699.html A poll conducted by the Daily Beast shows most people do not believe Trumps spin
March 19 update: Once again today, as yesterday, Trump refers to the Coronavirus as the Chinese virus. Hopefully, most Americans are mindful this is his way of saying "not my fault; I didn't cause it". The Chinese government also bears responsibility for attempting to suppress the threat. However, the knowledge that did emerge was in early February and the US was asleep at the wheel until mid-March.
What will be his fault will be the lies and spins and politically motivated denials that made us as prepared for the virus as Italy. Those who believed every word he uttered was true and the media and social postings who became his megaphone were part of the problem. His turn around once he figured the stock market was crashing regardless of his attempts to deny the threat may have caused the remarkable conversion. For that we can appreciate for once he listened to his experts and applied science.
Per the Washington Post March 21,
U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic
Officials reported that China appeared to be downplaying the outbreak and said swift action could be needed to contain the coronavirus.
From a recent Pew poll: https://www.journalism.org/2020/03/18/americans-immersed-in-covid-19-news-most-think-media-are-doing-fairly-well-covering-it/https://www.journalism.org/2020/03/18/americans-immersed-in-covid-19-news-most-think-media-are-doing-fairly-well-covering-it/ "One difference that stands out within party is based on the media diet, particularly on the right. Among 30 news outlets asked about in an earlier survey, Republicans who got political news only from outlets whose audiences lean right politically are more likely than Republicans with other media diets to think the news media have greatly exaggerated the risks associated with the virus and to think COVID-19 was created intentionally in a lab. (Details on the 30 news outlets and the audience compositions can be found here.) Some differences also emerge within Democrats based on media diet. Those who don’t get news from any outlets with left-leaning audiences in some cases stand part from Democrats with other media diets, including thinking the virus was created intentionally by humans."
Below: Published in the Winter Park Times March 20 2020
https://www.facebook.com/factcheck.org/videos/1366735383514511/UzpfSTEwMDAwMTA0MDY1NDg4MDoyMjYwMTE4ODU3NjI3Nzk2/ Factcheck.org videos of Trump's lies, spins and denials leading up to his declaration of a national emergency
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/14/21177509/coronavirus-trump-covid-19-pandemic-response
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/15/coronavirus-xi-jinping-chinas-incompetence-endangered-the-world/
https://www.facebook.com/factcheck.org/videos/1366735383514511/UzpfSTEwMDAwMTA0MDY1NDg4MDoyMjYwMTE4ODU3NjI3Nzk2/
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/coronavirus/article241229131.html
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/15/21180506/coronavirus-poll-democrats-republicans-trump
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/media/fox-new s-coronavirus/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0K5Jc2H0TCoF7fO_D1eCVgkclugOVrkdn9cl5eonucUl770VxiSoaafo
www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-h1n1-swine-flu-pandemic-spin/
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-h1n1-swine-flu-pandemic-spin/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social-pug&fbclid=IwAR1yAtMQcVMCjPXAw5Qt0zRWiy-kKuCWji49rogdqlGaueAIcX9Xn_TXh6E
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/coronavirus-video-trump-pandemic-team-cut-2018-a
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/pandemic-coronavirus-united-states-trump-cdc/608215/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3ZEfzzvP-qGeFx2gSClEXYhNi3oWZF4zdRXRIN0jAq44ddzCPDqnwpHhI
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/republicans-were-warned-yet-they-persisted-enabling-trumps-coronavirus-debacle/?fbclid=IwAR20HtRFiUgF3hnxR9NIgXM5Kdvc4hPnrMaLrSjUqtEHyq-KLTh0t74gS2c
In late January, Chuck Schumer and 31 Democrats wrote a letter warning about coronavirus. This was in the middle of the impeachment process.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/politics/fact-check-trump-coronavirus-march-31/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0JALd1mmiwBQfFRIO59mtD
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/07/timeline-trumps-coronavirus-response-is-increasingly-damning/?fbclid=IwAR0B-FgsPj939jZjan1RMUYYErt_kD4pur7vvgAoIs7zHl8UDC3CboPyKp8
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/16/if-trumps-coronavirus-finger-pointing-works-he-has-some-allies-fox-news-thank/?fbclid=IwAR007JHmbxgS1bsMmZCT8HdHpcksrYZyAb1UMMWyEM8im602bGFLWxTANdw&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
https://www.facebook.com/factcheck.org/videos/1366735383514511/UzpfSTEwMDAwMTA0MDY1NDg4MDoyMjYwMTE4ODU3NjI3Nzk2/ Factcheck.org videos of Trump's lies, spins and denials leading up to his declaration of a national emergency
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/14/21177509/coronavirus-trump-covid-19-pandemic-response
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/15/coronavirus-xi-jinping-chinas-incompetence-endangered-the-world/
https://www.facebook.com/factcheck.org/videos/1366735383514511/UzpfSTEwMDAwMTA0MDY1NDg4MDoyMjYwMTE4ODU3NjI3Nzk2/
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/coronavirus/article241229131.html
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/15/21180506/coronavirus-poll-democrats-republicans-trump
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/media/fox-new s-coronavirus/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0K5Jc2H0TCoF7fO_D1eCVgkclugOVrkdn9cl5eonucUl770VxiSoaafo
www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-h1n1-swine-flu-pandemic-spin/
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-h1n1-swine-flu-pandemic-spin/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social-pug&fbclid=IwAR1yAtMQcVMCjPXAw5Qt0zRWiy-kKuCWji49rogdqlGaueAIcX9Xn_TXh6E
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/coronavirus-video-trump-pandemic-team-cut-2018-a
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/pandemic-coronavirus-united-states-trump-cdc/608215/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3ZEfzzvP-qGeFx2gSClEXYhNi3oWZF4zdRXRIN0jAq44ddzCPDqnwpHhI
COVID-19 causes more severe disease than seasonal influenza.
While many people globally have built up immunity to seasonal flu strains, COVID-19 is a new virus to which no one has immunity. That means more people are susceptible to infection, and some will suffer severe disease.
Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.
Third, we have vaccines and therapeutics for seasonal flu, but at the moment there is no vaccine and no specific treatment for COVID-19.
From email distribution from the Washington Post. by line Amber Phillips, March 19, 2020, the five m inute fix:
"President Trump says daily that the coronavirus caught him and the world off guard. “It’s something that nobody expected,” he said last weekend.
That’s not true. And reporting on Thursday drove home that the warning signs were there, sometimes right in front of him.
- The New York Times reported that last year, the Health and Human Services Department performed startling government simulations to show how underprepared the United States was for such a pandemic. Nothing was done in response.
- As Trump was coming into office, the Times reports, “outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.” A year later, Trump disbanded the government’s pandemic-response team.
- NPR got an audio recording of the top senator on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), privately warning businesses in February that the virus, which was already in America, was going to be “aggressive” and “akin to the 1918 pandemic.” At the time, Trump was still comparing it to the flu."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)