With the elegant poise of a much over stacked dunghill, Disaster Central is slashing costs for the CDC, testing, National Institutes of Health, and the State Department. To describe this as “false economy” barely covers the scope of this mindless, self-destructive, exercise.
This horrendous move comes just after the even more irrational move to bypass the CDC and send all hospital data to the White House. Exactly what the White House is equipped to do with this massive tonnage of data is unknown. Perhaps the pandemic stats could be used as graphics for golfing ensembles for hopeless losers. Perhaps they could be turned into a statue somewhere.
What’s absolutely certain is that the White House can’t do a better job of managing or analysing that data. It’s an absolutely pointless exercise. There is no reason to believe that Little Donny Delirious Aged Two and A Half or his geriatric glee club of sycophants can do a better job than an agency full of Ph.Ds. Neither he nor they are in any way trained in any of the relevant areas, to my knowledge. Nor do they have any experience whatsoever at this level.
Perhaps the only truly consistent pattern of this alleged presidency is that whenever raw numbers are around, those numbers get moved around, a lot. Trump recently made an infamously stupid remark to the effect that if there was less testing, there’d be fewer people with the virus. Whether it was what he meant or not, that was the outcome of that statement.
Let’s start with the basics of this issue, because it reflects directly on the imbecilic cuts to health the Senate GOP is babbling with.
• Every person testing positive represents a 100% risk of further infections.
• The pandemic is being sustained by these new infections.
• If you don’t even know how many people are infectious, you have no idea how to manage the situation, assess future risks, or allocate resources.
It’s that simple.
The US economy isn’t going to be doing too well if the entire workforce or any significant part of it is unable to work for 6 weeks per person. That’s the new recovery time estimate which is seeping in to media awareness. It also just happens to blow previous estimates out of the water by about 200% given that 2 weeks was supposed to be the recovery time. Recovery is also showing some serious issues in terms of complications, many of which relate to truly grim medical conditions.
This is what analysis does – It pins down the critical but thankless facts. It takes experts to do it and understand the risks.
Try this for an example – If one infected person can infect two other people:
• In the US there are currently 3 million infected people. (It’s actually 3.6 million, but let’s keep it easy to read.)
• Infections can happen at any time in any environment.
• In a week, it could be 6 million people. Two weeks, 12 million. At that rate, in 4 weeks, it could be 96 million people, and the entire population of the United States in a month or so.
Please note: Current estimate of the infection rate is around one or a bit above, but that still means an ongoing average of 3 million people and more infected.
That’s without even needing to do any sort of advanced calculation. Now, add this little china hutch ornament of issues:
• Every single one of those people will require 4-6 weeks to recover, assuming no complications.
• They’ll obviously need to be in some form of quarantine.
• They need to be monitored and registered to track infection risks, as done in Australia and elsewhere, to shut down local outbreaks.
The United States pandemic is by far the worst in the world. Cutting funding can only make it much worse, and likely to get worse a lot faster.
An irony or so
What I really don’t get is why the White House or the GOP wanted anything to do with managing this train wreck. It could have been a rather grim fender-bender, but now it’s an all-out catastrophe in progress, and getting worse. This is the classic case of when to avoid political risks. Any experienced politician knows that any crisis is when the experts take the blame.
Walking straight into the furnace wearing a few cans of political gasoline doesn’t make any sense. Cutting funding is the authentic Jonestown solution to the political issues. This administration is about to prove beyond any possible doubt that it has failed completely. Hundreds of thousands more people could die. Many more will be in a very bad way for a long time to come. Millions of people will be affected directly, and many more indirectly. This is Trump’s “No we can’t!” moment come to life.
