DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Covid-19: The Pandemic Where Facts are Political

Not going away...120,000 dead American’s under trump’s watch. Millions still out of work. Unemployment at 20%. Thousands of small businesses closed for good. Second wave of COVID starting to spike. 20 states including Oklahoma recorded the highest single day total in cases. Enjoy your trump rally. Pffft trump supporters. The walking plague.

Trump is a moron and he has handled this virus as if it is an inconvenient speed bump to his re-election. He's lied and made dozens of ill conceived statements - many of which have had consequences.

But the country would be in virtually the same place no matter who was in charge. In the big picture, Trump's idiocy made a very small difference. I hate trying to paint everything about CV-19 at his feet.

I don't agree.. I think a quicker response and acknowledgement of the virus may have saved lives.

Of course we'll never know for sure, but it's my belief that if you waste time, you could be wasting lives..

They LIED! Discuss...

The thing is, it was an obvious lie to anyone who paid attention. People could see news footage from all over the globe, many who had already dealt with pandemics before, who were ALL wearing masks.

This is what happens when people blindly believe the government, no matter who is in charge, and refuse to think for themselves. Our government has either been lying or hiding the truth from us since the beginning. Just look at a high school American History book and see what's "not in there".

Probably - and every life matters - but it's a small difference. Putting the entire CV-19 mess and impact all on Trump is wrong.

I've said the same thing before. I think you can certainly look at the delayed response, the crazy, stupid comments he said as a clear sign he's not prepared to handle a national crisis. But how many deaths could have been prevented by addressing it earlier is something we'll never know for a fact.

22 January: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

24 February: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

25 February: “CDC & my administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus” and “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away. They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

26 February: “We’re going very substantially down, not up” and “The 15 [cases] within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero”

27 February: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”

2 March: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?” and “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

6 March “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down”
“Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. And the tests are beautiful. They are perfect just like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good”

“I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president”

8 March: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on Coronavirus”

9 March: “This blindsided the world”

13 March: “I am officially declaring a national emergency”

I won't even get into the idea of injecting disinfectant.

Trump says he thinks some Americans are wearing masks to show they disapprove of him and not as a preventive measure during the pandemic

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-am...UJZgzIfl21u8-0Q

It’s always about him. Everything is. Always.
Narcissism is his leading trait.

j/c

Nebraska governor threatens to withhold coronavirus relief funds from counties that require masks

By Jason Silverstein

June 19, 2020 / 12:36 PM / CBS News

The governor of Nebraska has threatened to withhold millions of dollars in coronavirus relief funds from counties that require people to wear masks. The order contradicts advice from the state's health officials and even the governor himself, who has publicly implored the public to wear masks when they go to stores.

"If they don't want to follow the guidelines, they won't be eligible for the CARES Act money," Governor Pete Ricketts, a Republican, said at a press conference about the pandemic response. "But that's certainly their prerogative to do that."

A spokesman for Ricketts told the Omaha World-Herald that counties requiring masks risk losing the funds provided for them in the federal government's CARES Act. The legislation gave Nebraska about $1 billion in relief funds, including $100 million for counties, cities and utilities. Ricketts is in charge of distributing that money.

"Counties are not prohibited from requiring masks, but if they want CARES Act money, they have to be fully open, and that means they cannot deny service for not wearing a mask," Ricketts spokesman Taylor Gage told the newspaper.

CBS News has reached out to Gage for comment.

Ricketts has regularly urged Nebraskans to wear masks in public during his coronavirus press conferences. At the same time, he has said businesses can only encourage customers to wear face coverings, and are not allowed to deny services to people who don't.

Meanwhile, physicians and health officials advising Ricketts on the state's coronavirus response say Nebraskans should be wearing masks in public to contain the spread of the virus.

Some county officials also lamented losing control over how they handle the pandemic.

"We know best what is happening in our counties," Deb Schoor, a district commissioner in Lancaster County — which includes the capital and second-largest city, Lincoln — told CBS Lincoln affiliate 1011 Now. "We're working with our health directors, our health officials. But yet realizing our governor is in control of these funds, and we will make sure we will do everything that we can."

Nebraska has confirmed more than 17,400 coronavirus cases, and 240 deaths, as of Friday, according to the state health department. Its daily confirmed cases peaked in late April and early May, with some days seeing more than 500 new cases. Several days this past week, the state saw nearly 200 new cases confirmed.

Ricketts is the one of few governors who held off on issuing a statewide stay-at-home order when the pandemic hit, even as the virus spread to nearly every county. Ricketts said that other governors had urged him to put out a statewide order, but he believed a county-by-country approach was better.

Ricketts appeared at the White House Thursday for a governors roundtable, where he praised President Trump's handling of the pandemic. "We really appreciate your efforts, your leadership and that of your team to be able to help us through this pandemic and give us the tools to be able to manage it," he told the president.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nebraska-go...n0Dz92Bfdm3Lt_U

So let me see if I get this straight. If you're doing all you can to combat Covid 19 by listening to the health experts, we're going to cut off your finding to combat Covid 19?

Murica!

j/c

200 workers test positive for coronavirus at Dole plant in Ohio

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/20...Z8SmxtgirvVppuY

"You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,”

j/c...

Under his watch. That’s the standard. What happens under your watch and how you deal with it. Your legacy. It’s all on trump.

Ya baby....Need to get a mask bong now.

Trump Inherited More Ventilators Than Have Been Distributed
By D'Angelo Gore

Posted on June 22, 2020

Contrary to President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that he inherited a Strategic National Stockpile with “empty” or “bare” cupboards, the federal government had more ventilators in stock than it ended up distributing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, FactCheck.org has learned.

The SNS had 16,660 ventilators “immediately available for use” when the federal government began deploying the breathing machines to states to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients in March, according to a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson.

None of those ventilators was bought by the Trump administration, the spokesperson told us.

In a separate email to us on June 17, another HHS spokesperson said the federal government has distributed 10,640 ventilators during the pandemic.

Both HHS representatives said we could attribute their responses to an “HHS spokesperson.”

That affirms what we previously wrote in early May: that there were “likely thousands” of ventilators in the federal stockpile of emergency medicines and equipment that Trump inherited from his predecessor.

We could not provide the exact numbers – until now.

In defending his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has frequently made the false claim that, when he took office, the SNS was “bare,” or “empty,” and lacked ventilators, which help individuals breathe when they can’t do so on their own. He has also taken credit for preventing deaths by refilling the stockpile.

On April 30, Trump falsely claimed, “We had a ventilator problem that was caused by the fact that we weren’t left ventilators by a previous administration.”

Most recently, at a June 18 roundtable with governors about the reopening of U.S. small businesses, the president said: “[W]hen we came here, you had very few ventilators in this country. And by the time we started, not one person that needed a ventilator didn’t get it. So everybody that needed a ventilator got a ventilator. … [W]e stocked up those shelves. The cupboard was empty, and we filled up the cupboards.”

In March, there was concern about whether or not the country would have enough ventilators to meet the needs of the health crisis. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo publicly asked the federal government for thousands more than it had provided, and Trump criticized Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic.

Vice President Mike Pence appeared to recently acknowledge that the Trump administration inherited ventilators. In a June 16 op-ed, Pence wrote that the SNS “hadn’t been refilled since the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, and it had only 10,000 ventilators on hand” in March.

It’s true that the SNS, which holds a variety of medical supplies that states can request to use during a public health crisis, was not fully replenished after millions of N95 respirators, masks, gloves and other protective items were distributed during that 2009 pandemic. But there were even more ventilators available in March than Pence said.

In an email to FactCheck.org, an HHS spokesperson told us:

HHS spokesperson, June 20: [T]here were 16,660 ventilators in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) inventory immediately available for use when the SNS began deploying ventilators in March 2020 in support of the COVID-19 response. All of these ventilators were serviced, recertified and operable. An additional 2,425 ventilators were in maintenance at that time as part of the normal and routine maintenance process. Every ventilator and resupply kit in the SNS is serviced regularly by a contracted commercial vendor to meet or exceed the manufacturer’s recommended maintenance schedule. In general, prior to March of this year, the SNS stored approximately 19,000 ventilators in its inventory for many years, and this number fluctuated on any given day depending on the number of ventilators in scheduled maintenance. … [I]n January 2017 the total number of ventilators in the SNS inventory immediately available for use would not have been much different than what the SNS had immediately available for use in March 2020.

Importantly, the spokesperson added, “the stock of 16,660 ventilators … did not include any acquired by the current administration.”

We also now know that the SNS had more ventilators in March than it ended up distributing amid the current pandemic.

In an email to us on June 17, another HHS spokesperson said: “Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic response, the federal government has deployed 10,640 ventilators from the SNS to public health jurisdictions nationwide. At this time, the SNS has fulfilled all requests for ventilators and has not experienced a shortage of ventilators to support public health and healthcare facilities treating COVID-19 patients.”

At least 7,920 of those 10,000-plus ventilators went out by April 6, according to an HHS document released that month by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. That was before April 8, when HHS announced the first of nine different contracts for companies, such as General Motors and General Electric, to produce new ventilators under the Defense Production Act. The White House announced April 2 that Trump was invoking that 1950 law to increase output of the life-saving devices.

HHS told us those contracts are expected to produce more than 180,000 ventilators to be added to the stockpile. That doesn’t include additional ventilators that states purchased directly from private companies when states couldn’t get the number of machines they expected to need from the federal supply.

The SNS currently has approximately 24,000 ventilators available for deployment, an HHS spokesperson said.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/trump-inherited-more-ventilators-than-have-been-distributed/

smh, he gets caught in lies about stupid stuff far too often.

Didn’t trump say they’d put out fires as they occur? ‘When Corona hot spots crop up we’ll put them out.”

Lies all lies. States have out of control COVID outbreaks. trump is awol. Like toilet paper, nowhere to be seen. Pfft trump.

The WHO is no longer a credible organization and should not be relied upon for ANY information.

They lied about wearing masks and they're literally in bed with China.

They meant n95 masks and surgical masks due to the panic buying that would siphon many away from medical professionals.

This has been posted a few times here.

facts don't matter. GOPers are just trying to distract from today's scandal. So they are taking shots at everyone. Some of the FB memes are ridiculous.

I agree. However, your side is just as bad. Look at the Bubba Wallace thread.

I seriously want to know why so many of you on both sides are so intent on championing hate? What in the world do you have against us uniting? Serious question. I am not being mean. I just don't get why people are so hateful and divisive.

What gives you the authority to tell a woman how to think about the virus?

LOL.................sound familiar?

They are all nuts.

That's a big bed!

Getting a bit crazy in Houston... Texas medical center is at 97 percent capacity for ICU beds... my hospital.. Texas children's...is taking adult Covid patients....

https://abc13.com/health/gov-abbott-hints-at-need-for-local-restrictions-in-texas/6264929/

Since when did the USA ever rely on the WHO for accurate public health information when we have 10 times the ability of the WHO.

The WHO follows the USA, not the other way.

Please state or show where I told a woman how to feel about a virus. Nor did I go off about something about "their efforts further the divide" or whatever your current rallying cry is.

Also, you should really think about coming at me. You usually look like a fool when you try to take me down.

Here's a haymaker for you.

Want to know how I feel about women's rights? I walk my talk. My wife and I discussed the best way for us to walk our talk, so I took her last name rather than her taking mine when we got married.



Next time you try and make some silly point, I hope you don't miss like you just did.

Call me old school, but I don't think that admitting you've been demasculinized is a mic drop situation.

What has dudes last name got ANYTHING to do with masculinity? smdh. Here I thought we were in 2020

Zero. I think jfanet was in a rush to put down Rocket's ridiculous post and got sloppy.


For me, I would've pointed out the irony of a "mic drop" post featuring a gif of THE DORKIEST, WHITEST GUY IMAGINABLE trying to be cool (not Cranston, he's the man). Seriously... denim shirt under a sweater.

...and I said call me old school. He relinquished a traditional male role and I didn't see it as a mic dropping situation. What are you shaking your head about?

Dragging women back to the cave used to be a traditional male role too. I mean since you're old school and all.

I am shaking my head at the notion that adopting your wife's name has any relationship to or bearing on masculinity. That's 'old school' in the same way that saying you think the world is flat is old school.

White House ordered NIH to cancel coronavirus research funding, Fauci says
The research was the target of a conspiracy theory about the origin of the new coronavirus.
BETH MOLE - 6/24/2020, 7:

Enlarge / Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wears a Washington Nationals protective mask after a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, June 23, 2020.
Getty | Bloomberg
237
WITH 131 POSTERS PARTICIPATING

The National Institutes of Health abruptly cut off funding to a long-standing, well-regarded research project on bat coronaviruses only after the White House specifically told it to do so, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fauci made the revelation Tuesday at a Congressional hearing on the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is caused by a coronavirus that is genetically linked to those found in bats. Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas) asked Fauci why the NIH abruptly canceled funding for the project, which specifically worked to understand the risk of bat coronaviruses jumping to humans and causing devastating disease.

Fauci responded to Veasey saying: “It was cancelled because the NIH was told to cancel it.”

“And why were they told to cancel it?” Veasey pressed.

“I don’t know the reason, but we were told to cancel it,” Fauci said.

After the hearing, Fauci clarified to Politico that it was the White House that told the NIH to cancel the funding. An unnamed White House official told Politico that the White House did encourage the funding cut, but ultimately it was the Department of Health and Human Services—of which the NIH is a part—that made the final decision. An HHS spokesperson said only that the funding was cut because "the grantee was not in compliance with NIH's grant policy."


In an emailed statement to Ars Wednesday, the NIH did not respond to questions about the cancellation, saying only that “NIH does not discuss internal deliberations on grant terminations.”
Politics and conspiracies
The involvement of the White House is a new wrinkle in a story that has appalled and angered scientists. Since the grant was nixed in late April, scientists had speculated that politics and a conspiracy theory played a role in canceling funding for the research, which was in good scientific standing and seen as critical work. The grant, titled “Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence,” was originally funded by the NIH in 2014 and renewed for another five years in 2019 after receiving an outstanding peer-review score.

The research is run by EcoHealth Alliance Inc., a nonprofit based in New York, but it collaborates with a virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, who works with bat coronaviruses. The WIV became the center of a conspiracy theory that suggested that the pandemic coronavirus originated in or escaped from a lab at the institute.

On April 17, a reporter brought up that conspiracy theory and EcoHealth’s grant to President Trump during a press conference. The reporter asked: “Why would the US give a grant like that to China?” Trump responded that “We will end that grant very quickly.”

In an email to EcoHealth on April 19—two days later—Dr. Michael Lauer, NIH deputy director for Extramural Research, reportedly wrote:

The scientific community believes that the coronavirus causing COVID-19 jumped from bats to humans likely in Wuhan where the COVID-19 pandemic began. There are now allegations that the current crisis was precipitated by the release from Wuhan Institute of Virology of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. Given these concerns, we are pursuing suspension of Wuhan Institute of Virology from participation in federal programs.

The funding was terminated on April 24. In a termination letter to EcoHealth, the NIH wrote: “At this time, NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities.”

Shoddy truth
Following Dr. Fauci’s revelations Tuesday, EcoHealth President Peter Daszak tweeted that it was an “obvious case of political interference.”

“Eventually, we’ll all know the shoddy truth of how a conspiracy theory pushed by this administration led @NIHDirector to block the only US research group still working in China to analyze COVID origins,” he wrote. “Thanks to this China can now do the research, we can’t!”

Scientists, meanwhile, have roundly refuted claims that the WIV was the source of the new coronavirus, noting that natural spillover from animals is the most likely source.

In an April 18 comment to ScienceInsider, the WIV virologist working with EcoHealth—Shi Zhengli—also disputed the link, saying that “the closest progenitor of COVID-19 virus is still mysterious and it’s definitely not from my lab or any other labs... It’s a shame to make the science so complicated.”

Scientists also continue to express dismay at the apparent political interference. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) released a statement Wednesday saying that such orders to cancel funding “will undermine the integrity of science funding and public trust. We urge Congress to use its oversight authority to ensure that the integrity of government science agencies is not compromised.”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/...ing-fauci-says/

Texas pauses reopening as hospitals inundated with 'explosion' of COVID-19 cases
“The last thing we want to do as a state is go backwards and close down businesses," Gov. Greg Abbott said.



Its looking to get real ugly quick in Texas

US coronavirus cases hit new record for a single day; Texas ICUs near capacity
JUNE 25, 202001:53
June 25, 2020, 12:04 PM EDT / Updated June 25, 2020, 12:23 PM EDT
By Corky Siemaszko
The governor of Texas hit the brakes on reopening his state Thursday as hospitals were inundated with “an explosion” of new COVID-19 cases and officials warned there might not be enough beds available.

“The last thing we want to do as a state is go backwards and close down businesses," Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement. "This temporary pause will help our state corral the spread until we can safely enter the next phase of opening our state for business."

Abbott urged "all Texans to do their part to slow the spread of COVID-19 by wearing a mask, washing their hands regularly and socially distancing from others."

"The more that we all follow these guidelines, the safer our state will be and the more we can open up Texas for business,” he said.

The surprise statement from Abbott came shortly after he issued an executive order designed to free up more beds in the state’s four biggest counties by postponing “all surgeries and procedures that are note immediately medically necessary.”

But the grim news was not just limited to Texas as the U.S. saw a record number of new coronavirus cases in a single day, with 45,557 reported Wednesday, according to a tally by NBC News.

Many were in Southern and Western states like Texas, Arizona and Florida that began aggressively reopening around Memorial Day and are now seeing staggering spikes that make clear the deadly virus is showing no sign of going away, as President Donald Trump has repeatedly predicted.


Overnight, Florida added 5,004 new COVID-19 cases and the state’s death toll climbed to 3,327. Arizona reported 3,056 new cases and 27 additional deaths Thursday.

“We reopened against the backdrop of a lot of persistent spread in those states, so it’s inevitable that cases were going to go up,” former federal Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I think they’ve gone up more than most people expected, and I’ve certainly been surprised by the acceleration in the cases as well. I think most of us were.”

In Texas, Dr. Faisal Masud, medical director of critical care medicine at the Houston Methodist hospital system, said they were managing for now, “but if this trajectory is what it was the last 10 days when we literally had a tripling of our cases --- we can’t do that for a couple weeks at all.”

“This is not good,” he told NBC News. “The explosion of patients all across, that explosion has to slow down."


In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo insisted Thursday he was serious about enforcing the two-week quarantine that he and the governors of New Jersey and Connecticut want all visitors from current coronavirus hot-spot states like Texas, Florida and Alabama to follow.



CORONAVIRUS
Gov. Ron DeSantis says Florida can host Republican National Convention
“The law is if you come in from another state you have to self-quarantine for 14 days,” Cuomo said on CNN. “If you don't, and you get caught, you will have violated the law, you can be fined.”

“If you fly in to New York, we'll have your name, we'll know where you're supposed to be staying. There will be random checks,” he added.

But public health and policing experts told NBC News they have serious doubts about whether such a requirement can be enforced, while one pundit suggested Cuomo’s move was political payback against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had called for New Yorkers to self-quarantine for two weeks in March when coronavirus cases were spiking in New York.

Much of the country had to be shut down to stop the spread of the coronavirus and the roaring economy that began under President Barack Obama and continued under Trump was brought to an abrupt halt in February by the pandemic.

The effects of that were evident Wednesday when the Department of Labor reported that some 1.48 million people filed for unemployment benefits last week. It was the 14th straight week that states processed over one million first-time applications.

Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, conceded in an interview Thursday with Fox Business Network that “there are spikes in hot spots, there's no doubt about that, and there will be some shutdowns, in individual places.”

But Kudlow said he believes that by the end of the year the unemployment rate will go below 10 percent, and “it's going to be a steady drum with higher jobs and lower unemployment.”

The current national unemployment rate is 13.3 percent, according to the Labor Department.

I'm proud to be the man of the house. If you guys want to give up your sacks it's none of my business. I apologize.

Wow! I think you need a new tape measure. It appears you must be measuring your sack wrong.

Not sure how a last name does anything regarding masculinity or testicles.