White House told federal health agency to classify coronavirus deliberations
mobile.reuters.com
mobile.reuters.com
It's really not looking good.
I'm still hopeful, though that's because it's the only thing I've got.
I think most people still don't grasp it here. Which is probably because the govt doesn't seem to be taking it seriously too.
There's the famous "would you take a million dollars, or a penny doubled every day for a month" question. People reliably make the wrong choice.
Cancelling everything and drastically reducing travel should slow down the spread significantly. We still desperately need wide-spread testing here. It seems crazy that this many weeks into it we still can't do that.
We really need massively expanded testing now, though we've known that for a while and somehow it hasn't happened yet.
Yikes.
All the West had to do was fuck up less than China and the CCP could have been gone for good. Now, the exact opposite has happened, any anti-CCP voices inside of China have completely lost their legitimacy as the West manifestly has handled the virus worse than China. At the end of this, Xi has basically cemented his status as dictator for life with unchecked power because he was the leader that saved China from the worst of the virus (even if it eventually spreads to China, everyone is much more prepared now and the death toll will be much lower).
Never mind that the best predictive factor of how well you handle COVID 19 was whether your country was traumatized by SARS. Never mind that democracies like Taiwan were arguably more effective. Nobody in China is going to want a "Western" style government for the next 100 years because of COVID 19.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370273563148697...
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370245512943820...
I'm amazed not only at these affirmations, but at the number of likes they get. Incredible.
This is the predictive infection rate vs the actual CDC daily report.
For all intents and purposes then, globally we're on a very aggressive path that's going to be almost impossible to stop.
But if you've been following Wuhan, Italy, Iran -- you already know this.
This model indicates a few percent drop in the worlds population by summer.
It's a tiny bit silly, this is not what happened in China, it's not what will happen in many places. It may be what happens in the US thou...
https://twitter.com/Journo_Christal/status/12378061673484369...
An interview might reveal that the traveler came from an affected region, but someone working to bypass border restrictions is probably less inclined to answer those questions honestly.
Couple that with the fact that traveling to a country with far fewer cases and is not under quarantine related lock-downs, and being sick in another country but getting treatment, even if it's expensive, might be a compelling option when people in your home country are dying because there aren't enough facilities to care for them.
It's a pretty shitty moral perspective, but it is a perfectly valid individual perspective. This is one of the reasons why the WHO pointed out early on that increased screening at borders was more effective, and why closing borders may actually accelerate the spread of the disease.
Closing the borders wasn't a strong action, it was a misguided action intended to look strong and play well with the Republican base, and was the first in a string of shitty mistakes that the US Government, and other organizations within the US have made in handling this crisis.
The WHO made an idiotic generalization based on theoretical assumptions that didn't even apply.
Even draconian lockdowns of people entering the country can only delay the inevitable. Now delays can be valuable. The slower the spread, the lower the peak strain on health services, but it cannot be stopped. How long is Israel going to do this, a week? A month? Six months? What about next year when there’s another outbreak? Maybe we’ll have a vaccine by then, but maybe not.
Now they simply have to apply constant mass testing to keep the outbreak under control.
The initial advice against the travel ban was quite political, but it's the classic case of a nonprofit needing to appease its donors. At any rate, I recall them saying that travel bans are ineffective against stopping viral spread (which has clearly been proven true). Their utility on slowing transmission is less clear, though I've read that travel controls have indeed proven helpful.
It's still incredible to me that local labs discovered community transmission and federal officials told them to immediately stop testing and effectively did nothing to further intervene:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
There's no way to win this. Going by public perception you either sound too early or too late - never "on time".
Edit: I'm looking at you, Santa Clara County Health department, for NOT doing enough.
Yes, but if they sound the alarm too frequently they'll get a reputation as "the boy who cries wolf." When there really is a wolf, their alarm needs to be believed for it to have any value.
What they have here is an unenviable balancing act. Sound the alarm too frequently, and the alarm is worthless. Sound the alarm too infrequently, and the alarm is worthless.
Edit: Blackwater rebrands itself to make itself more obscure, which runs precisely counter to the goal of spreading public awareness / sounding alarms.
Good behavior induced by fear is a real asset in pandemics so we need to not be hesitant to use it.
1. A.k.a. "The Blackwater Approach"
They didn't suddenly radically redefine “pandemic” to mean “likely near future pandemic”, but they didn't miss it. They were ignored by lots of governments, but that's the involved governments’ failure.
If they had credibility for being able to move quickly for something this widespread, or anything at all really, I think it was fiction in someones mind.
https://www.newsweek.com/californias-democrat-governor-prais...
There is no endorsement of the federal policy beyond the handling of that specific task.
It's politics - everyone else should be criticizing the white house in particular, but government officials really need to remain on the administration's good side.
"is a Presidential Directive establishing a comprehensive policy on the federal government structures and operations in the event of a "catastrophic emergency". Such an emergency is defined as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_and_Homeland...
It organizes the three branches under the President.
That is certainly true whether or not there is a pandemic. I don't think that inevitability really has anything to do with pandemics; they'd blame it on the phase of the moon if nothing else came to mind.
The bigger problem is really with the Democratic primary, which is happening now. A critical element of elections is that they have to not just be fair, but be seen to be fair. How is the primary going to be seen to be fair if some significant number of the delegates are elected from elections that occurred while the electing states are essentially locked down? No matter what you do, it will be seen as unfair somehow.
e.g. we happily accept some risk of being killed in an airplane or road traffic accident even though those things could almost certainly be made less risky than they are now. We're ok with some non-zero risk, provided it's reasonably constant and known.
I have to assume you don't mean "The Democratic National Committee infected people with COVID-19." But I don't think I can puzzle out what you mean.
I'm not saying any of that will happen, but you talk as if our social constructs and institutions are barriers that limit where we can go, when in actuality they're breadcrumbs that we choose to follow.
Societies have flipped out before.
The 20th Amendment: Section 1: The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January...
Section 3: If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.
If there's no election, he stops being President at noon on the 20th of January.
Reading over your quote, it actually seems that a simple law could keep the president in power as long as no President elect or Vice President elect exists. As it says, "the Congress may by law provide for the case", "declaring who shall then act". Nothing says it can't be the old president.
On 6 Jan 2021, the votes of the electoral college will be counted in a joint session of Congress. Disputes about the votes will be addressed, if they exist (and if no general election is held, I'd imagine there would be plenty!).
Once that ends, if nobody has an absolute majority of votes, the Nancy Pelosi-led House of Representatives immediately goes into session and votes for President (the Senate votes for Vice President).
President Trump needs to win a fair election to continue being President.
Also, does January 6th have to exist? By law, we could shorten January to just 5 days. We could compensate by lengthening March. There would never again be a January 6th.
Who knows what would happen after that, but it likely wouldn't be anything anybody wants.
And convincing the administration's detractors has never been a priority.
Like Paul Graham just tweeted:
"When you're dealing with exponential growth, the time to act is when it feels too early."
Social constructs are shared illusions that only work when we decide to adhere to them.
To my knowledge, it has not been tried.
I'd expect "the President" did not literally decide or not decide to classify this; it was probably driven by rules.
What's in the classified briefings isn't really the question; it's what's in the unclassified briefings and actions that are the question. That classified briefings are taking place is to be expected, as it will certainly be impacting classified things, along with all the other "pretty much everything" it will be impacting. I'm sure all the other countries are having classified briefings as well.
I assure you that these are hardly the only meetings taking place.
Does the President have the legal authority to just say "this thing is classified", and legally it is so?
Even if state and local officials are briefed by federal officials, they may not be able to talk about what they know or face possible legal repercussions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavir...
The spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRwAqp96T9sY...
It's not clear to me if this includes numbers from private labs. My kid's pediatrician now has access to a test from Quest Diagnostics and they can make their own determination as to whether testing is needed. They said that they can't use the local health department testing "for many reasons". I'm glad to hear that the private tests are rolling out, still concerned that it's so hard to get testing through public health labs.
> Robert Redfield, CDC Director, said there are no plans to set up drive through #COVID19 test centres because "We're tryinjg to maintain the relationship between individuals and their healthcare providers."
Bunch of ostriches with their heads in the sand.
... because drive-throughs and their lines and problems are visible to everyone, but visits and phone calls to doctors aren't so easy to see by the general public.
Lots of people in this article disagree:
> A high-level former official who helped address public health outbreaks in the George W. Bush administration said “it’s not normal to classify discussions about a response to a public health crisis.”
> Attendees at the meetings included HHS Secretary Alex Azar and his chief of staff Brian Harrison, the officials said. Azar and Harrison resisted the classification of the meetings, the sources said.
> One of the administration officials suggested the security clearances for meetings at HHS were imposed not to protect national security but to keep the information within a tight circle, to prevent leaks. “It seemed to be a tool for the White House - for the NSC - to keep participation in these meetings low,” the official said
Replace the cities or issue with anything you want. The point is, something has to be prioritized, and the ones who aren't prioritized could be seen as victimized.
However, no politician/official necessarily wants to be on record as making this kind of priority decision.
So if you insist on radical transparency in these situations, you're insisting on people being less effective.
But even if you assume that politicians have misaligned incentives because they care more about optics than saving lives, why reduce transparency? You're making the assumption there are more good decisions with bad optics than bad decisions with bad optics. Which seems like an unlikely assumption to be true.
Agreed. I was referring to the principle of the thing, not this specific instance.
> You're making the assumption there are more good decisions with bad optics than bad decisions with bad optics. Which seems like an unlikely assumption to be true.
I think it might be true in certain situations, e.g. emergency situations like we're in now.
==the last thing you would want is the public questioning every single thing. Because they will. If they don’t, the opposition party certainly will.==
And if you classify it wouldn't that also cause the public to question "every single thing" just the same? Seems like the case we have proves that to be true as they hid it and people are still questioning.
It is definitely not normal for public health emergency planning outside the military to be classified. If there is information in there whose public availability would cause serious harm to national security, something has gone terribly wrong — a far more likely explanation is that the classification decision is the kind of quotidian lie that undergirds the self-serving corruption that habitually ruins authoritarian societies.
Otherwise, meetings would have to be compartmentalized which would limit their usefulness.
There's the first para of the article which contradicts most of the arguments you're trying to make. This is according to officials dealing with this problem today.
kay from the cloak and dagger, memory-erasing men in black knew: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals"
We are what we think China is.
This sort of analysis always gets downvoted on HN, but it's true. In many ways we are further along in the direction of having an obedient population (compared to China) but we still have our own great firewall and social credit score systems in place to help keep everyone under control.
China is more overtly authoritarian than the modern US, which is actually an advantage* in fighting a pandemic. So ironically most of the criticisms of China (as hypocritical as they may be) give China a leg up in this kind of crisis.
* Note that I am not condoning authoritarian rule, just noting that it is in some cases effective.
China made some critical missteps early on in silencing doctors who spoke up about a novel virus. They also downplayed the crisis to avoid bad news around the New Years celebration (and kept the banquet in Wuhan that was a turning point in the explosive growth of the virus).
Once they mobilized, yes, it was impressive — and judging by their numbers today, it has been effective.
The US is also a mixed bag. There’s going to be _wide_ variation in the response at state and local levels. But something really stinks with the lack of testing. And despite having China and then Italy show us how seriously we needed to be taking this, we sleep-walked through a critical period and are now creating the top of the roller coaster.
Today they are saying they do not plan to mobilize drive-thru/mass testing because they don't want to get in the way of the relationship between a patient and provider, the same bullshit private-insurance talking point, now applied to an even more intense and immediate public health crisis.
edit to clarify:
1. I agree there are shades of grey here, but the US' shade regarding suppression of information is closer to China's than is being widely reported.
2. The US' patchwork, profit-driven health system and purposely-underfunded government agencies are completely incapable of mobilizing at the necessary scale, even if it somehow found the motivation for any greater good beyond the profits of the private insurance industry and the asset managers that are buying up and gutting hospital systems.
This is incompetence by design over many decades.
We are doing that too. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
> They also downplayed the crisis to avoid bad news around the New Years celebration (and kept the banquet in Wuhan that was a turning point in the explosive growth of the virus).
And we're downplaying the crisis to avoid bad news in an election year.
While the researches weren't arrested, they were obstructed and then prohibited from continuing to test even though they helped uncover a major outbreak.
There is no moral equivalence between these two things. Nobody is barred from expressing whatever knowledge they have of the outbreak by anything except their own professional agreements.
No reasonable parallel is drawn between the total suppression of independent expression about an outbreak, and a regulator inflexibly deciding that a clinical professional is not qualified to practice some field.
You're not conflating actions in US states as reflective of the US gov either are you?
No one has that opportunity in China when it comes to Xi Xinping's message, if they do, they're censored or get a visit to their home by the police.
I see Trump to some extent trying to negate a mass panic amongst the populace by downplaying it while the real decision makers look to the CDC to make decisions about what actions to take. At least the optimistic side of me believes that's how its working. Problem is its now backfiring and people are saying its just another flu, which curtails any advice the CDC has on cancelling events, limiting contact, etc.
Reuters reported today that Coronavirus briefings have been classified to limit information sharing [1]
They've blamed it on Mexicans running over the southern border [2]
They've called it "the flu"
They've kneecapped professionals at every turn (stopped the CDC from reporting how many people have been tested, tried to muzzle Nancy Messonnier for saying a Coronavirus outbreak was inevitable in this country, [3]
They're still asking for cuts to the CDC [4]
The president called the Governor of Washington "a snake" to cut down his credibility, cut off his head of HHS to lie to the public and say tests were available, he's most concerned that the US count of infections will go up if they let the cruise ship passengers on US soil, preferring, presumably, to let them die and infect each other [5]
They overrode CDC's plan to recommend that elderly people and fragile people not get on airplanes [6]
Generally, it is beyond clear that they are most concerned with not looking in control, and giving out mixed messages that will lead to death.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-secrec...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/cdc-director-border...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/07/trump-coronavirus-m...
[4] https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-administratio...
[5] https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-coronavirus-press-event-w...
[6] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/486475-trump-administr...
It is important to realize that Trump's comments about COVID-19 likely caused many people to defy their own common sense intuitions and do the opposite of what the experts have recommended.
In the US, direct censorship by government is not necessary. Voices that the government doesn't approve of are quickly censored/deplatformed by private sector firms, news feed algos are updated to suppress certain kinds of information, etc.
The extent to which firm authoritarian measures are necessary is determined by how compliant/obedient the citizens are. The Chinese government must be more heavy handed because there is an active culture of dissent, not because China is somehow innately more authoritarian.
He says the word salad, the sound bite is picked up as outrageous, and then when the tiny subset of his supporters who care to look carefully at it examine the transcript, they can vindicate him based on technicalities of the syntax he used.
But make no mistake, he intended to communicate that the virus was a hoax and he did so quite effectively, just as he intended to show support for the white nationalists in Charlottesville and intended to convey that he thinks many immigrants are rapists.
While I am not a partisan for either party and despise most of the major pols, one must admit that Trump is very good at politics, and this is a great example. Once called out, his supporters defend him by dissecting the word salad and finding a well meaning, thoughtful comment where none ever existed :)
In NYT, they featured this "opinion" piece:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/opinion/coronavirus-trump...
tldr; If you're sick with Corona virus, the blame lies entirely with Trump, not China for hiding it early on, not the WHO for recommending countries continue as normal and tried to downplay it, Trump, and we should call it the Trump virus (the new "thanks Obama" I guess).
Two days later in reaction to this, Trump called this kind of talk in the media and on Twitter by DNC pundits (who take their talking points from NYT) a hoax. Everyone at the rally he was talking to had seen that article, cause it was shared and mocked, talked about on Fox News, everyone there had the same context, its your lack of awareness that causes the context shift, and when the media reported on it they also conveniently left out that context, because they're lazy at best, trying to steer the narrative at worse. People see the misrepresentation and they believe the media even less. They realize the bias is both ways, the people who claim to be factual ignore facts that aren't convenient.
It is only word salad to you because you walked in half way into the conversation, and are happy to assume the worst (that he said the virus itself was a hoax) without doing some background on it.
Criticize, but do so with full understanding.
But, to your point, I strongly agree that the NYT has done a horrible job at journalism in the Trump era. Nearly every day there are headlines that focus on Trump's persona rather than the substance (or lack thereof) of his policies, and the paper seems to prefer to publish stories that appeal to its in-group rather than stories that report what happened and contextualize it over time. Often, nearly every single story on the front page starts with the word Trump, with a few left of center stories just to create the impression that the paper is not a right wing voice itself.
For instance, NYT readers likely do not know that Obama stared the tent camps for children of illegal immigrants who committed certain kinds of crimes, and that the audio of children crying was captured while Obama was in office.
To be clear, I have zero respect for Trump, and zero respect for the NYT. The article you linked is a shameful and unnecessary (and low quality) bit of drivel, meant only to secure more subscription fees from partisans. It doesn't add anything of value to the dialog.
I do think the word salad is a deliberate tactic used by Trump to achieve both a textual and subtextual outcome from his speech. He knows what will turn into a sound bite and tailors them to be the kinds of sound bites that will resonate both for him and against him. If you are skeptical of this point I will be happy to dig into it in more detail as it worked in his favor during the 2016 campaign.
This!
I just assume Trump can't talk, but apparently his supporters think he's talking off the cuff so he's just being authentic even if they wish he'd not do it so much or be so crass, which I guess to them is him being genuine or honest. Trump will openly admit the only reason we sell arms to Saudi Arabia is because of oil, where as every other President made excuses, that's weirdly more transparent. His misspellings etc on Twitter are people seeing someone tweet stream of conscious, not even taking the time to spell check or reword it, which is terrible for public office but things have gotten so bad with politics they see him as telling you exactly what he thinks even if its terrible.
I don't give him that much credit as far as tactics, I know he likes to troll the media, the media reacts predictably, and some of his supporters love to see the predictable reaction. The media has become addicted to it, and the ratings, the DNC listen and pander to fringe voices on Twitter mistaking them for average people. They've started focusing so hard on Trump they've gotten nothing done, their talking points are losing moderates. People remember Bush being called Hitler, now everyone is numb to it. People just expect news organizations who live in their own Twitter bubble and major blue cities who pretend to be impartial to shit all over the GOP and never give credit, and over look the same behavior when committed by their own side. People with center right positions on the political compass positions even Bernie Sanders supported, are called alt-right, people have just turned off to it. They routinely misrepresent their position, or setup a strawman in the headline and clarify in the bottom paragraph if at all. Nothing was learned from the last election. They pushed a man to the front of the line who wasn't polling well is just as bad with words but for different reasons, and cusses out union workers on the factory floor when they accurately describe his position he explained in a news interview.
This is exactly what I mean.
"It's the President's fault that I ignored what he was saying so that I could interpret it uncharitably, and share that interpretation without a second thought."
> he thinks many immigrants are rapists
You got this from... What? A speech talking up the border wall, a measure that by definition only pertains to a subset of illegal aliens, not "immigrants" broadly.
You are responsible for your own ludicrous interpretations of plain language. It is not anyone else's fault that you choose to believe something is meant that isn't said.
When the President continues to say things like “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally”, you can't credibly interpret that as an indictment of immigrants.
Many politicians have tried to rally support for border security by describing illegal immigration as a source of violent crime. Trump mentioned "rapists" in his remarks as a way of communicating that same narrative, albeit a bit more colorfully.
The word salads are very ingenious, as they are essentially two messages in one. The message "immigrants are rapists" gets through to some of his supporters (who are happy to hear it) and the more nuanced message gets through to those who read the transcript or who parse the words more carefully.
It's an added benefit that when the opposing party's media jumps all over the comment, some portion of Trump's supporters believe that they intentionally ignored the intent of Trump's statement and are unfairly characterizing him as racist. Yet to many of his supporters, the racism is a welcome change and a sign of honesty and courage.
Whether you personally agree with Trump or not, you must acknowledge the mechanism I'm describing. It's brilliant, and it is why Trump has been so successful. He's able to break through the wall of fake-sounding language that holds back much political speech and reap the benefits of a more raw and hostile form of speech, while still being viewed as having expressed a reasonable view by his more sophisticated supporters.
If you don't view them as deliberate word salad bombs, then they are gaffes, but there have now been way too many of them for it to be accidental. Trump understands how to speak both in text and subtext for maximum emotional impact.
So while I personally find Trump to be one of the most reprehensible characters ever to hold high office in the US (and also a big embarrassment), I do give him credit for being skilled at political rhetoric.
It is true that the subset of illegal aliens entering over the border (rather than overstaying visas) is very high in criminals. This subset is desperate, motivated, willing to break the law by definition; and most importantly, a large proportion of them enter this way because they don't qualify even to enter as tourists, because they have a criminal record of relevant offenses.
> If you don't view them as deliberate word salad bombs, then they are gaffes, but there have now been way too many of them for it to be accidental. Trump understands how to speak both in text and subtext for maximum emotional impact.
I agree that they are designed to be misinterpreted by some people, but the interpretation that manifests in the President's actions seems to be more the plain language one, rather than the "nefarious subtext" one. If the nefarious subtext were intended to be read by supporters rather than opposition, then it probably would be.
Because the nefarious subtext seems designed to enrage the opposition, or especially because some of it seems designed to make the President look bad, I sorta assume it was meant to be read by opposition, to enhance the team sport aspect of politics and give supporters a sense of camaraderie against the people who are controlled by the President's reverse-psychology.
I think Trump intends for the subtext aspect of his word salads to be consumed both by his opposition and by a small (but important) subset of his base. There are a lot of people in key voting districts who deeply resent immigrants because of competition for jobs, etc. For those voters, hearing politicians focus on things like latinx identity politics makes them feel alienated and resentful. In that context, Trump coming across as a bit biased against immigrants (if not outright racist) provides emotional proof that Trump is on their side, and lends credibility to his claims about returning America to its heyday when blue collar work offered a significantly higher standard of living than it does today.
Many modern politicians have done this. Some of Sanders' rhetoric from a few decades ago evokes xenophobic themes to underscore support for the working man, and nearly all serious presidential candidates from the Democratic party have found nationalistic language to communicate that rust belt workers will not be abandoned. Lots of this has been anti-trade, border security oriented, etc.
Worldwide, reductions in free trade are typically accompanied by nationalistic sentiments and political rhetoric. So it's all quite normal and to be expected.
But what I think sets Trump apart from the normal (and frankly already ugly) way that politicians try to do this is that his rhetoric is even more direct and the subtext hits on an even more direct emotional level. There are many ways to explain how someone from the GOP won over a lot of working class voters who had been loyal Democrats for years. It took this kind of extreme messaging.
Tangentially, Trumps tactic works because of how social media news feed algorithms work, since even old school media uses analytics that are heavily influenced by what spreads on social media. So all the efforts to police content and deplatform fringe voices are not going to make any difference in Trump's ability to use this technique, since the articles are written by the NYT and are seen by the target voters because one of their friends or family members in a blue state/district got riled up and shared it on social media.
Anyway, I find it very interesting and I appreciate your engagement with this discussion.
'this is their new hoax'
That's pretty incoherent (criticisms may be untrue, but they're never a hoax), but strongly hints he thought the virus unimportant in the most charitable interpretation, or the threat a complete fabrication from democrats.
He then went on to lie about the number of cases in the country and the likely impact and said it was less serious than flu.
Trump's ignorance is going to kill a lot of people in the US.
have you ever even been to china?
Here is another one to take a guess at:
https://media.tacdn.com/media/attractions-splice-spp-674x446...
On what planet is the US government as bad as the Chinese government?
Well, it is at least partly a function of that, no? If you aren't tested then your case may not be reported.
I'm staying home and self-quarantining, but am I being counted? No. I'm willing to bet there are thousands of others like me in the US in a similar situation.
What we have now is a president who comes from and exemplifies this culture so his administration absolutely reflects that. Jeff Sessions recusing himself on the Russia investigation instead of blocking it even if it cost him everything, personally, was an unforgivable sin to an absolute loyalist.
So I guarantee you that the prime consideration for this pandemic (which it now officially is, according to the WHO) in the US government is how this impacts the GOP in general and Trump's reelection in particular. Nothing else matters.
Go back to, say, the Watergate era and you had behaviour by a president that even his own party ultimately found unacceptable. If Watergate repeated today, it would be "fake news", painted as partisan Democratic slander aimed at the administration and defended beyond all reason.
The sad and scary part of this is that we now have 40% of the population who will absolutely eat this up and refuse to believe anything that makes the president look bad. To be fair, there are absolute devotees on the other side too but objectively we've seen nothing to the degree of GOP blind loyalism on from the Democrats (yet).
There was a time when our representatives held higher loyalties to the institutions they represent because undermining those is incredibly dangerous. Those days seem to be a distant memory as we have a mass organized effort to disenfranchise those who tend to vote Democrat (under the guise of removing "felons" from voter rolls), a refusal by the Senate to take up legislation that would pass at a completely unprecedented rate, a Senate whose only priority is filling lifetime judicial nominees with more loyalists and the refusal to even take up a president's Supreme Court nominee with flimsily-constructed justification you know for a fact wouldn't apply if the situation was reversed.
This is the trait of dictators and despots. Why do you think Trump admires Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un?
So yes, it should come as no surprise that the planning, messaging and response to this pandemic is being seen through the exact same filter: how does this help or hurt Trump?
And it will kill people. I don't wish ill on anyone here but it's hard not to see the irony that the most at-risk groups of death from Covid-19 are, well, Trump's core voters and Fox News's core target market for fearmongering and dog-whistle racism.
Classifying public health responses is unprecedented. Yet as long as Trump's base (40% of voters) don't hold the government to account absolutely nothing will change. And the only time that's happened that I recall is the family separation for detained illegal immigrants. Has there been any other reversal of policy like this?
We had the CDC take down the number of folks tested from their website because it was embarrassingly low and different then the Pence / Trump narrative of a million tests. [2]
We've had a weird / crazy argument being made by at least some at the top that masks don't help with transmission reduction of a viral disease. While not perfect, they are low cost, low impact and even surgical masks, while likely not used by doctors treating patients may help general population by reducing hand to mouth / nose transmission, transmission from sick to healthy and environment when sneezing and/or touching face mouth and then environment etc. Other countries are going the other way (masks distributed via post offices, mask wearing mandatory in high impact areas etc).
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/25/larry-kudlow-says-us-has-con...
[2] - https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1234536619270688768
[3] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662657/ - Adherence to mask use was associated with a significantly reduced risk of ILI-associated infection.
The book Superforecasting (2015) uses Larry Kudlow as an example of 'hedgehog forecaster' that is consistently wrong.
Not only is Kudlow consistently wrong in forecasting, he also fails nowcasting. When Financial crisis was unfolding Kudlow did not realize that something was going wrong.
>The National Bureau of Economic Research later designated December 2007 as the official start of the Great Recession of 2007–9. As the months passed, the economy weakened and worries grew, but Kudlow did not budge. There is no recession and there will be no recession, he insisted. When the White House said the same in April 2008, Kudlow wrote, “President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.”20 Through the spring and into summer, the economy worsened but Kudlow denied it. “We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession,”21 he wrote, a theme he kept repeating until September 15, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Wall Street was thrown into chaos, the global financial system froze, and people the world over felt like passengers in a plunging jet, eyes wide, fingers digging into armrests.
You can see how having this guy on TV re-assuring people starts to reduce confidence people have in "authoritative" news sources - and they end up on the internet reading conspiracy theories.
From the book:
> Not that being wrong hurt Kudlow’s career. In January 2009, with the American economy in a crisis worse than any since the Great Depression, Kudlow’s new show, The Kudlow Report, premiered on CNBC. That too is consistent with the EPJ data, which revealed an inverse correlation between fame and accuracy: the more famous an expert was, the less accurate he was. That’s not because editors, producers, and the public go looking for bad forecasters. They go looking for hedgehogs, who just happen to be bad forecasters. Animated by a Big Idea, hedgehogs tell tight, simple, clear stories that grab and hold audiences. As anyone who has done media training knows, the first rule is “keep it simple, stupid.” Better still, hedgehogs are confident. With their one-perspective analysis, hedgehogs can pile up reasons why they are right—“furthermore,” “moreover”—without considering other perspectives and the pesky doubts and caveats they raise. And so, as EPJ showed, hedgehogs are likelier to say something definitely will or won’t happen. For many audiences, that’s satisfying. People tend to find uncertainty disturbing and “maybe” underscores uncertainty with a bright red crayon. The simplicity and confidence of the hedgehog impairs foresight, but it calms nerves—which is good for the careers of hedgehogs.
South Korea went this route -> masks are in the post offices and other govt buildings to increase distribution.
> “We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,”
So... is there any justification for this? It sounds entirely political