Are not most Hospitals private? Can they choose to send or not send data? Or to where or to whom?
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Ha, no problem, they’re going to send in the National Guard to take the information at gunpoint.
No, really.
Trump and the Greater Rot
July 14, 2020 1:27 p.m.
This story about sending the National Guard into hospitals is bizarre and telling about our national situation. Six months into this crisis the canonical sources of data on the COVID epidemic in the US are one data project run out of The Atlantic (The COVID Tracking Project) and another run out of Johns Hopkins University. The federal government isn’t really even in the game. These are glorious, impressive, dedicated works of public service and data science. But the fact that they need to exist is, frankly, a disgrace.
Now the Trump administration has decided that hospitals are being lax about reporting data on COVID cases. It appears likely that most hospitals are doing just what they’re told and that the problem is disorganized and inconsistent guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services.
The administration’s response is to take the CDC out of the process entirely ( bizarre ) and send National Guard troops into the hospitals to collect the data, which will then be reported to states or a federal contractor. Again, the CDC is being taken out of the equation entirely. They’re literally talking about sending citizen soldiers into these hospitals with laptops and iPads and clip boards.
This amounts to a parody of the administration’s penchant to militarize every problem – or more specifically, every situation it can’t manage to handle competently by normal means. The idea that National Guard soldiers have any experience, competence or organizational capacity to manage medical data collection is simply absurd. Think about it. Absurd.
The White House seems to have moved off making this mandatory and is now framing it as a suggestion. But that appears to be because the press got on to them as they were trying to put the plan into execution.
More
We know that the clearest and overwhelming reason for the country’s catastrophic COVID response is the President of the United States. Rather than mount a response he has spent six months in an argument with the country in which he has variously claimed COVID doesn’t exist, will soon disappear, isn’t so bad and from every perspective is in no way his fault . To the extent he has spoken about the issue at all or done anything it has been to serve one of these claims.
And yet this is not the totality of the situation. At the very least we lacked robust institutions that could compensate for his awfulness as President. Certainly we had a whole political party and Senate leadership that reflexively underwrote his failures. There is some deeper institutional rot we have accepted and even glorified as a country. We are literally doing worse at this than any other affluent and industrialized country on the globe. And not ‘worse’. A lot worse. And let’s be honest, when was the last time you saw a global statistic in which the US was ranked first outside of aggregate wealth and military power?
Yes, Trump has taken us from suboptimal to catastrophic. Absent federal leadership or basic competence, the states are left largely to fend for themselves. They are simply not capable of doing so. They’re not designed to do so. Those with good leadership do better than those with poor leadership. But it’s bad all around.
Trump has driven us into the abyss. But any recovery from Trumpism will require some national commitment to actually doing things well – to having a genuinely world class public health system, regulatory agencies that actually protect the public rather than being captured by the industries they regulate. We are like a failing person driven to complacency by past successes.
Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) is editor and publisher of TPM.
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I have lizards in my wood pile who could run this country better. And work 7 days a week.
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And, presumably, guns?
Screwed, we are so…
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White House coronavirus vaccine advisor Moncef Slaoui to divest $12.4 million of Moderna holdings
or did he?
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Almost all hospitals, including private ones, get at least some money from governmental agencies, which means there are hoops they have to jump through or else lose that funding. Trump is just adding more hoops.
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A bit more info on Moderna’s claim:
Dow up 300 and the rich get richer.
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Phase 3 is where most vaccine trials trip up, but it’s still hopeful news.
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This campaign is called “Find Something New”. This is not an article from The Onion.
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We’re working on that. For you.
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This story is from today, not 3 months ago.
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Four months in, and I still cant go to the store and find an N95 mask so I can replace old insulation. I havent seen hand sanitizer or bleach wipes in the same period.
In WW2, the Japanese feared that the Pearl Harbor attacks had merely awakened a sleeping giant, knowing the USA’s industrial capability. I think we are seeing the sleeping giant rolling over and going back to sleep.
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In my area I’ve seen hand sanitizer by the truck load but disinfectant wipes are still quite hard (but not impossible) to find as is isopropyl alcohol.
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I’ve been able to find hand sanitized (our local target had a bunch last week… not sure where you are, but maybe give that a shot), but no bleach wipes in a while for where we are. We’ve tried going at different times of the day, different stores, etc. No luck.
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Good lord… did… he already die of Covid?
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Lots of hand sanitizer (see my note about that nasty tequila stuff above), wipes are rare, gloves were hard at first but better now. But who knows! Frankly I hope we’re back to hording and shortages because that would suggest that we had shut down again.
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Did it ever really live?
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Probably not. No.
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