Remove From Office: The Battle to Contain the Coronavirus Has Been Lost and Because of Trump, Infected Asymptomatic Carriers are Continuing to Expose Us
March 23 ,2020
BY MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
While Donald Trump has pulled another Houdini and diverted attention from the Corona infection and death catastrophe by focusing on a massive economic gift to corporations, we are all still being exposed to asymptomatic spreaders. That is because Trump has, as we all know by now, intentionally delayed COVID-19 testing until recently, but the current supply is much too small to test anyone who is not symptomatic (or an elite who gets to moved to the front of the line).
The apparent reason as documented by Seth Abramson, in a tweet, is that, as Trump said in relation to releasing infection-trapped passengers and crew on the Grand Princess, he did not want infection numbers to rise to keep the markets up (that obviously didn’t work) and to help him win re-election.
And like a magician who diverts the attention of an audience with a sleight of hand, Trump has kept the press from investigative reporting on how much peril we are still in.
However, The Washington Post admitted on March 21 in an article headlined: “In hard-hit areas, testing restricted to health care workers, hospital patients. Officials direct scarce resources where they are needed most to save people’s lives.”
The Post article begins:
Health officials in New York, California and other hard-hit parts of the country are restricting coronavirus testing to health care workers and the severely ill, saying the battle to contain the virus is lost and the country is moving into a new phase of the pandemic response. [bolded by BuzzFlash]
As cases spike sharply in those places, they are bracing for an onslaught and directing scarce resources where they are needed most to save people’s lives. Instead of encouraging broad testing of the public, they’re focused on conserving masks, ventilators and intensive care beds — and on getting still-limited tests to health-care workers and the most vulnerable. The shift is further evidence that rising levels of infection and illness have begun to overwhelm the health care system.
The result: thousands upon thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans are asymptomatic for Coronavirus but infected and are spreading the disease (a process known as shedding) in the same manner that Trump indifferently allowed to happen prior to the virus outbreak in Washington State.
The words from the Washington Post story should be the lead on every paper and every news program. To repeat: “the battle to contain the virus is lost and the country is moving into a new phase of the pandemic response.”
What this has resulted in is an ever-churning exponentially growing number of Coronavirus cases that will reach a peak far beyond what is necessary “to flatten the curve.” This will be a national carnage that could exceed the numbing numbers of dead from the 1918 Spanish Flu.
As a March 20 Forbes article noted in its headline: “Confirmed Coronavirus Cases Are Growing Faster In The United States Than Any Other Country In The World”:
As of today [March 20} the United States falls in last place with regard to limiting COVID-19 growth according to the number of confirmed cases. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the number of confirmed cases in the United States grew at a faster rate than any other country in the world yesterday.
That means that asymptomatic carriers, estimated to be 85% by the New York Times (some credible estimates are lower), are still infecting Americans that they encounter. Yes, quarantining and shelter-in-place keep one from being exposed, if consistently practiced, but the carriers will still be out there, and will reappear in vast numbers should the “mitigation” healthcare treatment and death model eventually subside.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that “lockdowns alone will not be sufficient” to flatten the curve.
A March 21 Dallas Morning News article reports:
Testing helps to understand the breadth of the new coronavirus, which public health experts say spreads “efficiently.” It also helps identify who should isolate to stop the spread.
Part of the reason why cities, counties and entire states are putting restrictions on movement and social gatherings is because there aren’t enough tests to identify everyone who is sick.
Screening in the Lone Star state should have ramped up here much sooner, said Dr. Robert Haley, a longtime epidemiologist and professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern.
“We're doing what we can,” he said. “We don't have enough test kits. They're still in short supply."
Trump’s diabolical failure to even now be fulfilling the needs of testing for Coronavirus is another sign that he does not care about our fate, as the COVID-19 churning continues in the US due to a continued lack of sufficient test kits.
Alarmingly, Trump posted a tweet around 12 AM on March 22 in which he implied that he might make shelter-in-place laws illegal so people would work and spend money again (to bolster his re-election chances, no doubt), and spread the Coronavirus.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In a March 21 Guardian article, a researcher stated: "In one Italian town, we showed mass testing could eradicate the coronavirus. By identifying and isolating clusters of infected people, we wiped out COVID-19 in Vò,” a town of 3,000 that experienced Italy’s first COVID-19 death. The researchers noted:
But in the last two weeks, a promising pilot study here has produced results that may be instructive for other countries trying to control coronavirus. Beginning on 6 March, along with researchers at the University of Padua and the Red Cross, we tested all residents of Vò, a town of 3,000 inhabitants near Venice – including those who did not have symptoms. This allowed us to quarantine people before they showed signs of infection and stop the further spread of coronavirus. In this way, we eradicated coronavirus in under 14 days.
In the first round of testing, 89 people tested positive. In the second round, the number had dropped to six, who remained in isolation. In this way, we managed to eradicate coronavirus from Vò, achieving a 100% recovery rate for those previously infected while recording no further cases of transmission.
We made an interesting finding: at the time the first symptomatic case was diagnosed, a significant proportion of the population, about 3%, had already been infected – yet most of them were completely asymptomatic. Our study established a valuable principle: testing of all citizens, whether or not they have symptoms, provides a way to control this pandemic.
Nonetheless, asymptomatic or quasi-symptomatic subjects represent a good 70% of all virus-infected people and, still worse, an unknown, yet impossible to ignore portion of them can transmit the virus to others. Full testing would.
Derek Cummings, an infectious disease epidemiologist, recently told Truthout:
I think the most effective responses to this outbreak have identified infected individuals by testing and isolating them. Testing people earlier in their infection and identifying a larger proportion of them before they can do more transmission has been a key response in other settings that have slowed transmission.
But Trump has not only ignited the initial infection rate beyond the likely chance to flatten the curve, his continued hampering of a rapid roll out of test kits has prevented the detection and quarantining of spreaders.
A March 19 CNN article by Elizabeth Cohen debunks the notion that positive asymptomatic Coronavirus individuals are not carriers:
"We now know that asymptomatic transmission likely [plays] an important role in spreading this virus," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Osterholm added that it's "absolutely clear" that asymptomatic infection "surely can fuel a pandemic like this in a way that's going to make it very difficult to control."
We thought three weeks ago, we would now have more than a million test kits and then some. Mike Pence promised, similar to the extremely vague promise by the FEMA director today that hospitals would have an adequate supply of PPE masks. Pence was not to be believed, nor is the head of FEMA.
But the unforgivable death and illness, of disastrous proportions, that Trump has intentionally precipitated beyond a manageable toll — and that he is still facilitating the spreading of the virus — should be grounds for his removal as unfit to serve as the President of the United States.
“Fourth member of same New Jersey family dies from coronavirus after they met up for dinner,” is the headline of a March 20 METRO article. Yesterday, I wrote a commentary, “This 39-Year-Old Woman Was Named Natasha Ott, and She Broke My Heart. Likely COVID-19 Victim.” Multiply their losses by tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. CNN reports, “a 12-year-old Atlanta girl with coronavirus is on a ventilator and fighting for her life.”
Trump doesn’t want you to know the countless stories of individuals suffering and dying. He doesn’t ever acknowledge them in his disinformation “briefings.” He wants the Coronavirus to remain an abstract enemy that he is going to vanquish with his sword of Lancelot. “It will all disappear, like a miracle.” But these are real Americans, with people who love them, with futures cut short, and Trump won’t even acknowledge them. We owe them a nation without the hollowed out soul of Donald J. Trump in the White House.
Without widespread testing, the Coronavirus will be an unending and unmanageable pestilence.
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