Negligent Manslaughter: Trump Is Culling the Herd, Increasing Infection and Deaths, by Still Slow-Walking the COVID-19 Test Kits. Asymptomatic Spread Continues to Take Its Toll.
March 26, 2020
Donald Trump, guilty of negligent homicide. People are already dying from his failure to act. (Gage Skidmore)
BY MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
“What’s vital to recognize now is that asymptomatic Coronavirus carriers do not even know they have the virus and, therefore, would not even know to quarantine themselves. Estimates vary from 35% - 85% as to how many asymptomatic carriers can transmit the virus.”
Did you realize that when you read there are 65,000 plus Coronavirus cases in the US (to grow exponentially in the next three weeks) or 75,000 in Italy, these are enormous under counts of the actual infections. It may be tens of thousands, perhaps many millions, or more Americans who are infected with COVID-19 (remember that 80% experience only mild symptoms or are asymptomatic) compared to the “official” count. Why the misrepresentation of infected cases? Because only a relatively small number of Americans who have Coronavirus are tested (approximately 350,000 as of March 24) and those found positive become a “confirmed infection.”
Earlier this week, I stated the need for mass COVID-19 testing in the United States to begin to significantly flatten the curve and dramatically reduce infections. It is so important that I am offering more background to why this is essential to a manageable tapering down of infections and loss of life. (This assumes that Trump can be removed from office or sidelined as far as Coronavirus to prevent him from continuing to worsen the crisis.)
So, in the US (and around the world), a person is only confirmed when they receive a Coronavirus test that has a positive result. Because Trump didn’t use a World Health Organization (WHO) test kit that was offered weeks ago, and because he didn’t make it a priority for the US medical agencies to develop a working, mass-produced test kit, the US lost the war against the Coronavirus for the foreseeable future. (Only sheltering-in-place, for the time being, will reduce the carnage.) Yes, somewhere more than 350,000 individuals have been tested in the US, but there are severe restrictions on who gets tested depending upon the area in the country.
In general, only persons who have three of the primary symptoms for COVID-19 — a persistent dry cough, a high fever and shortness of breath — will even be considered for a test (because of continued shortage in test kits and other medical items needed to complete the test). This is all due to Trump’s complete shut down of pandemic planning. his continued refusal to aid states whose hospitals are experiencing third world conditions, and the still — relative to the population of 330 million people in the US — sputtering pace at which test kits are being produced.
Trumped never wanted “the numbers” to go up because it would damage the economy, so he ensured that relatively few test kits would be produced initially and then delayed wider production and authorization of private labs to conduct tests. He thought that he could “hide” the widely predicted projections of hospitalizations that would break the system, result in shortage of protective equipment and ventilators, and end in unnecessary deaths.
Why is widespread testing for the Coronavirus so important? We would know the number of totally infected people that need to quarantine and make national pandemic decisions accordingly.
In fact, if every person in the United States were tested — and yes, I know many biotechnology experts would say that is impossible, but so it seemed was going to the moon in 1960 — we could assign trackers to find out with whom a Coronavirus infected person has been in contact as the testing proceeds. This requires an enormous infrastructure of specialists and public health professionals, but that is what we lost when Trump shut down our pandemic planning and monitoring capabilities. We, the American people working with medical and social worker professionals, can achieve this.
The lack of universal testing prevents us from effectively controlling the transmission of the disease without sheltering-in-place, which is only partially effective, but essential at this time. However, the number one obstructor of universal testing is the sociopathological person in the White House who believes that elderly and the weak are disposable. He and his pathological Wall Street Journal and economic staff supporters openly support trading perhaps millions of lives for dreams of a reborn economy which will end up in the dust bin because of quickly infected workers and the population at large.
What’s vital to recognize now is that asymptomatic Coronavirus carriers do not even know they have the virus and, therefore, would not even know to quarantine themselves. Estimates vary from 35% - 85% as to how many asymptomatic carriers can transmit the virus. In a brilliant New York Times chronological map that shows how the outbreak in Wuhan reached the United States, it states “About 85 percent of infected travelers went undetected, researchers believe. But they were still contagious.” (The map also debunks Trump’s claims that stopping flights to China on January 31 made him a hero, because the Chinese spread had already irreversibly begun. “It was too late. Outbreaks were already growing in over 30 cities across 26 countries, most seeded by travelers from Wuhan.” Furthermore, many people from other nations infected by Chinese virus carriers flew to the US where they became spreaders.) (It should be noted that most experts consider persons with symptomatic Coronvirus to be relatively more infectious than those with asymptomatic COVID-19)
Again, right now the CDC, which has been mysteriously missing from Trump’s “Task Force Campaign Briefings” and as a vocal source of truthful Coronavirus information, is flying blind about the spreaders who are the main concern that is causing quarantining. Furthermore, given the insufficient supply of testing, there are untold numbers of people with the disease who can’t get tested for any number of reasons in most areas of the nation. They are obviously the most direct threat to infecting others, but the Trump administration is not capable of fully testing for infected Coronavirus individuals.
A haunting example of this infected but not tested sprawling group who are likely infecting people, mostly out of ignorance that they are infected is in this March 25 NBC report: “Georgia hospital worker with Coronavirus found dead at home with her child by her body: Diedre Wilkes was a mammogram technician at a Coweta County, Georgia hospital. Her body was found in the living room of her home in the Atlanta area.”
What is startling is that only when her corpse was tested was it determined that she had COVID-19. This means she was unwittingly and likely spreading it to many people with whom she came into contact.
Only then,
The hospital said that out of an abundance of caution it contacted employees and patients Wilkes may have had contact with.
"Piedmont is providing these individuals with detailed information for self-monitoring and will offer COVID-19 testing to those who request it," the statement read.
What about if the deceased had been tested, quarantined and the people she contacted notified before she was tested postmortem?
The article states Georgia has 1000 confirmed cases of Coronavirus infection, but an untold number of infected and mildly symptomatic people and completely asymptomatic people. These individuals are all spreaders.
In my March 23 commentary, I noted:
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]
I also noted:
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."
On her March 25 program, Rachel Maddow revealed that Iceland is testing everyone in the nation and half of the positive results are turning out to be from asymptomatic individuals.
A March 23 Yahoo News article quoted Dr. David L. Heymann, who chairs an expert panel advising the World Health Organization on emergencies: “You can contain clusters [this is evidenced in the successful New Rochelle, NY, intervention]. You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”
Meanwhile, the article noted how bereft of testing ability Trump has put the nation in with this example: “On Friday, New York City limited testing only to those patients requiring hospitalization, saying the system was being overwhelmed.”
As long as Trump is running a huckster and mentally unhinged sadistic daily Coronavirus task force campaign rally “briefing” and pathological presidency we will not get the testing that will rein in the virus. He must be immediately removed from any decision-making regarding the pandemic. He already has blood on his hands, and it is only increasing.