There have been so many viruses out there ...that came from a few country's becouse of one thing or another over the years ... know since playing the blame game... is not fair to anyone ... helping and stopping this Covid 19 should be the only thing on the minds of mature & knowledgeable people that can handle what is to come ... and getting what ever is needed for the states ... this will not be the last virus... we will ever get ... and I sure hope those for their children are able to get what they need now and in the future that only our governments can get like the kits... I would ck all of those kids coming back from spring break ... if flying ...
thank goodness for the people that are doing and helping those with Ideas apposed to just the negative politics... you are darn right this will go down in history in science and medical books ... how this was handle as what not to do ...
The reason why they did not want the covid19 kits from the world health org
was becouse it was not free to anyone ...they did not want to pay for it... for the peoples of the United States ... they spend trillions + some of $ on war and helping other country's but do not want to help the American Public...
Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded
Government exercises, including one last year, made clear that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic like the coronavirus. But little was done.
That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion,” was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.
The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.
Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.
In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.
The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement on Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.
What the scenario makes clear, however, is that his own administration had already modeled a similar pandemic and understood its potential trajectory.
The White House defended its record, saying it responded to the 2019 exercise with an executive order to improve the availability and quality of flu vaccines, and that it moved early this year to increase funding for the Department of Health and Human Services’ program that focuses on global pandemic threats.
But officials have declined to say why the administration was so slow to roll out broad testing or to move faster, as the simulations all indicated it should, to urge social distancing and school closings.
Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”
The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.
Crimson Contagion, the exercise conducted last year in Washington and 12 states including New York and Illinois, showed that federal agencies under Mr. Trump continued the Obama-era effort to think ahead about a pandemic.
But the planning and thinking happened many layers down in the bureaucracy. The knowledge and sense of urgency about the peril appear never to have gotten sufficient attention at the highest level of the executive branch or from Congress, leaving the nation with funding shortfalls, equipment shortages and disorganization within and among various branches and levels of government.
The October 2019 report in particular documents that officials at the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and even at the White House’s National Security Council, were aware of the potential for a respiratory virus outbreak originating in China to spread quickly to the United States and overwhelm the nation.
“Nobody ever thought of numbers like this,’’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, at a news conference.
In fact, they had.
From Ebola, Lessons Learned
As early as the George W. Bush administration, homeland security and health officials focused on big gaps in the American response to a biological attacks and the growing risk of pandemics. The first test came in April 2009, just a few months after the start of President Barack Obama’s first term. A 10-year-old California girl was diagnosed with a contagious disease that would be called swine flu or H1N1, the first flu pandemic in more than 40 years.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that ultimately there were about 60.8 million cases in the United States, along with 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths associated with H1N1.
The virus turned out to be less deadly than first expected. But it was a warning shot that officials in the Obama administration said they took seriously, kicking off a planning effort that escalated in early 2014, with the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa and ensuing fear that it could spread to the United States.
Ebola was less contagious than the flu, but far more deadly. It killed 11,000 people in Africa. But it could have been far worse. The United States sent nearly 3,000 troops to Africa to help keep the disease from spreading. While the containment effort was considered a success, inside the White House, officials sensed that the United States had gotten lucky — and that the response had revealed gaps in preparedness.
Christopher Kirchhoff, a national security aide who moved from the Pentagon to the White House to deal with the Ebola crisis, was given the job of putting together a “lessons learned” report, with input from across the government.
The weaknesses Mr. Kirchhoff identified were early warning signals of what has unfolded in the past three months.
His report concluded that the United States assumed more ability on the part of the World Health Organization than the agency actually had.
The United States had its own issues. There was no airplane in the U.S. fleet capable of evacuating an American doctor who was infected while treating patients in Liberia. The Pentagon was largely unprepared for the intervention that Mr. Obama ordered.
While the United States rapidly developed a way to screen air passengers coming into the country — borrowing from intelligence tools developed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to track possible terrorists — Mr. Kirchhoff found deficiencies in even measuring how fast the virus was spreading.
On the plus side, the Obama White House had created an Ebola Task Force, run by Ron Klain, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s former chief of staff, before a single case emerged in the United States. Congress allocated $5.4 billion in emergency funding to pay for Ebola treatment and prevention efforts in the United States and West Africa.
The money helped fund a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services in charge of preparing for future contagious disease outbreaks, the same office that in 2019 ran the Crimson Contagion exercise and other similar events in the years since.
After a man named Thomas Duncan, a Liberian citizen, became the first person given a diagnosis of Ebola on American territory in September 2014, errors resulted in the infection of two nurses and fear of a wider spread in the United States. (Mr. Duncan died, but the two nurses recovered.)
What is striking in reading Mr. Kirchhoff’s account today, however, is how few of the major faults he found in the American response resulted in action — even though the report was filled with department-by-department recommendations.
There were deficiencies “in personal protective equipment use, disinfection” and “social services for those placed under quarantine.”
There was confusion over travel restrictions, and the need “for a smoother sliding scale of escalation of government response, from local authorities acting on their own to local authorities acting with some federal assistance” to the full activation of the federal government.
The report concluded that “a minimum planning benchmark might be an epidemic an order of magnitude or two more difficult than that presented by the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, with much more significant domestic spread.”
But one big change did come out of the study: The creation of a dedicated office at the National Security Council to coordinate responses and raise the alarm early.
“What I learned most is that we had to stand up a global biosecurity and health directorate, and get it enshrined for the next administration,” said Lisa Monaco, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser.
Getting the Trump Team’s Attention
After Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Monaco arranged an extensive exercise for high-level incoming officials — including Rex W. Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state; John F. Kelly, designated to become homeland security secretary; and Rick Perry, who would become energy secretary — gaming out the response to a deadly flu outbreak.
She asked Tom Bossert, who was preparing to come in as Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, to run the event alongside her.
“We modeled a new strain of flu in the exercise precisely because it’s so communicable,” Ms. Monaco said. “There is no vaccine, and you would get issues like nursing homes being particularly vulnerable, shortages of ventilators.”
Ms. Monaco was impressed by how seriously Mr. Bossert, her successor, appeared to take the threat, as did many of the 30 or so Trump team members who participated in the exercise, details of which were reported by Politico.
But by the time the current crisis hit, almost all of the leaders at the table — Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Perry among them — had been fired or moved on.
In 2018, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John R. Bolton, ousted Mr. Bossert and eliminated the National Security Council directorate, folding it into an office dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in what Trump officials called a logical consolidation.
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Asked about that shift on March 13, Mr. Trump told a reporter that it was “a nasty question,” before adding: “I don’t know anything about it.” Writing on Twitter the next day, Mr. Bolton lashed out at critics who said the shift had reflected disinterest in pandemic threats.
“Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false,” Mr. Bolton tweeted. “Global health remained a top NSC priority.”
In a statement, the National Security Council said it “has directors and staff whose full-time job it is to monitor, plan for, and respond to pandemics, including an infectious disease epidemiologist and a virologist.”
But in testimony to Congress last week, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested that ending the stand-alone directorate was ill-advised. “It would be nice if the office was still there,” he said.
On Feb. 10, nearly three weeks after the first coronavirus case was diagnosed in the United States, Mr. Trump submitted a 2021 budget proposal that called for a $693.3 million reduction in funding for the C.D.C., or about 9 percent, although there was a modest increase for the division that combats global pandemics.
‘Crimson Contagion’
The Crimson Contagion planning exercise run last year by the Department of Health and Human Services involved officials from 12 states and at least a dozen federal agencies. They included the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Security Council. Groups like the American Red Cross and American Nurses Association were invited to join, as were health insurance companies and major hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.
The war game-like exercise was overseen by Robert P. Kadlec, a former Air Force physician who has spent decades focused on biodefense issues. After stints on the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Council and the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was appointed assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response.
“He recognized early that we have a big problem and we needed much bigger budgets to prepare,” said Richard Danzig, the secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, who had worked with Mr. Kadlec.
The exercise played out in four separate stages, starting in January 2019.
The events were supposedly unspooling in real time — with the worst-case scenario underway as of Aug. 13, 2019 — when, according to the script, 12,100 cases had already been reported in the United States, with the largest number in Chicago, which had 1,400.
The fictional outbreak involved a pandemic flu, which the Department of Health and Human Services says was “very different than the novel coronavirus.” The staged outbreak had started when a group of 35 tourists visiting China were infected and then flew home to Australia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Thailand, Britain and Spain, as well as to the United States, with some developing respiratory symptoms and fevers en route.
A 52-year-old man from Chicago, who was on the tour, had “low energy and a dry cough” upon his return home. His 17-year-old son on that same day went out to a large public event in Chicago, and the chain of illnesses in the United States started.
Many of the moments during the tabletop exercise are now chillingly familiar.
In the fictional pandemic, as the virus spread quickly across the United States, the C.D.C. issued guidelines for social distancing, and many employees were told to work from home.
But federal and state officials struggled to identify which employees were essential and what equipment was needed to effectively work from home.
There also was confusion over how to handle school children. The C.D.C. recommended that states delay school openings — the exercise took place toward the end of the summer. But some school districts decided to go ahead with the start of school while others followed the federal advice, causing the same types of confusion and discrepancies that have marked the response to the coronavirus.
The exercise from last year then went on to predict how the situation on the ground in the United States would worsen as the weeks passed.
Confusion emerged as state governments began to turn in large numbers to Washington for help to address shortages of antiviral medications, personal protective equipment and ventilators. Then states started to submit requests to different branches of the federal government, leading to bureaucratic chaos.
Friction also emerged between the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is traditionally in charge of disaster response, and the Department of Health and Human Services, another scenario playing out now.
But the problems were larger than bureaucratic snags. The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded.
Congress was briefed in December on some of these findings, including the inability to quickly replenish certain medical supplies, given that much of the product comes from overseas.
These concerns turned more urgent at a hearing last Thursday on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers peppered officials with the Department of Health and Human Services with questions that sounded almost as if they had read the script from the fictional exercise, reflecting the shortage of respirators and protective gear
Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said last week that he blamed Congress and prior administrations for not increasing stockpiles of this type of equipment.
“That is an area we ought to consider making an investment in,” he added, making a point, apparently unknown to him, that the administration’s own simulation had made clear five months earlier.
The Coronavirus Outbreak
How Is the U.S. Being Affected?
Updated March 19, 2020
The coronavirus has now been identified in all 50 U.S. states, with more than 10,000 people infected and more than 149 deaths in the country. We are tracking every case.
The census has announced a two-week suspension of training and outreach. The stop imperils the success of a national head count whose meticulous plans took years to prepare.
Janitors are going into offices to battle the invisible germs that threaten public health, sometimes without adequate protection or information about what they are facing.
Immigrants are afraid to seek medical care for the coronavirus. That could hamper efforts to contain the epidemic.
Florida has an aging population, and lots of young visitors. And testing for the coronavirus has been slow.
For small-business owners across the country, the past week has brought a sinking feeling of catastrophe.
College students are being sent home. Graduation is cancelled. Some students are taking it into their own hands.
The coronavirus has descended on a rural town in Kentucky. Six residents are sick. bullet: In jails and prisons across the country, concerns are rising of a coronavirus outbreak behind bars.
Doctors are worried about bringing the coronavirus home with them.
In the face of sweeping restrictions being imposed to stem the spread of the coronavirus, some are asking what may feel like a taboo question: “Are we overreacting?”
As coronavirus anxiety spreads, gun shops and ammunition dealers have seen a surge in sales.
Six Americans who have tested positive spoke to The Times about their experiences.
Airports have been reeling as new coronavirus screenings have gone into effect.
For centuries, the United States has resisted a centralized public health policy. This week, as protective measures against the coronavirus varied county to county, Americans saw the cost.
Puerto Rico has ordered one of the most serious U.S. crackdowns yet over Covid-19, with the governor ordering most businesses on the island to shut down.
Across the country, churches have been working around the coronavirus.
Sick people across the country say they are still being denied the coronavirus test.
If police officers get the coronavirus, who will patrol the streets? Some are concerned the criminal justice system may not be ready for a major outbreak.
Early in the outbreak of the coronavirus, the U.S. missed key opportunities to test for the disease widely. Now, "it's just everywhere already."
Medical researchers say the half-million homeless people across the United States have a heightened vulnerability to the coronavirus.
Facing the threat of the coronavirus, schools are trying distance learning on a massive scale. We followed a town in the Seattle area that was the first to move all of its classes online.
I want you to know ...I am in the same place with this virus as most are ...
so the sooner we get a handle on this an rid of it the better ...for the world also...
Edited by
mysticalview21
on Thu 03/19/20 01:22 PM
country had a earthquake... believe Puerto Rico ... it took the united states a long time to help them + they never regain the manufacturing plant that had made 
then start outside UG ... 
... wash your hands and all those other precautions stuff ... 
.
