It would be imprecise to say COVID-19 hit NYC overnight. It was a slowly building menace, spreading though the community. But as these new numbers from FDNY show, the gathering threat hit the fire department like a tsunami at the beginning of the fourth week of March. The fire department was suddenly flooded with cases involving deaths at home or on the streets. Take a look.
In the last couple days the President has started itching again open up the economy again in the near future. So there’s more chatter about setting a date. We’ve also seen continuing bottlenecks and debates about the quality and availability of testing. But both of these discussions miss the reality of the situation we’re in and what we need to focus on right now. So I want to return to some points I made at dinner time last night on Twitter. Put simply, we won’t be able to get back to even a semi-normal social and economic life until we have a system in place that will prevent us from rapidly falling right back into a cycle of more outbreaks, lockdowns, deaths in the tens of thousands and economic shocks.
A robust system of testing is the critical necessary condition for that. But in itself it’s not at all sufficient. We will need a system of mass surveillance testing to give us real time visibility into the current prevalence of the disease and keep numbers low enough to make contact tracing at a vast scale possible. Without this kind of data and early warning system our society will be like a plane flying in a cloud bank with all the instruments on the blink.
With that happy image let’s define a few terms and concepts.
Some of President Trump’s closes allies would like him to stop talking now.
And they’re saying it publicly.
This is very, very strange. As we’ve reported on the seemingly ubiquitous seizures and reroutings of purchases of medical supplies, FEMA has always appeared to be at the heart of it, even though the targeted buyers are seldom given much information about who took their supplies. But now FEMA is denying that it is requisitioning or confiscating supplies anywhere within the United States, except in cases where they suspect criminal activity.
Earlier today we put up a new page at TPM: our coronavirus community resource hub. It gathers together all of our latest coverage, along with some valuable resources that have informed our reporting.
Particularly interesting, for me, is a map showing various emails we’ve received from our readers — across America and around the world. These emails give first-hand accounts of what was happening on the ground as the coronavirus spread — first in China, then in Italy, then in Washington state, and now everywhere. Read More
One of the big questions hovering over this medical supply and PPE shortage story is how much of this is just chaos and mismanagement versus some sort of more organized bad acting. It’s simply not clear. This morning I heard from a board member of a regional private hospital system who said these seizures aren’t just happening. They’re commonplace. Seemingly bordering on routine. To paraphrase this person’s account it’s searching high and low everywhere to find supplies and on those rare occasions when you strike gold the feds are likely to jump in and grab your stuff anyway. Hearing this my sense – not the source’s words – is that it’s almost like FEMA and whatever other agencies are doing this are using these desperate buyers as their involuntary lead generators. Let them find the stuff and when you see a shipping order surface, grab it.
As we work to find out the scope and goals of the White House’s seizure of medical goods across the United States, a simpler pattern is coming into view: the White House seizes goods from public officials and hospitals across the country while doling them out as favors to political allies and favorites, often to great fanfare to boost the popularity of those allies. The Denver Post today editorialized about one of the most egregious examples. Last week, as we reported, a shipment of 500 ventilators to the state of Colorado was intercepted and rerouted by the federal government. Gov. Jared Polis (D) sent a letter pleading for the return of the equipment. Then yesterday President Trump went on Twitter to announce that he was awarding 100 ventilators to Colorado at the behest of Republican Senator Cory Gardner, one of the most endangered Republicans on the ballot this year. As the Post put it, “President Donald Trump is treating life-saving medical equipment as emoluments he can dole out as favors to loyalists. It’s the worst imaginable form of corruption — playing political games with lives.”
We’ve known for some time that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has a soft spot for protecting whistleblowers. That affection apparently extends to inspector generals as well.
I’m very proud that our team has been early on the federal governments seizures of medical supply shipments around the country. We continue to work major leads on this front. If you didn’t read it yet be sure to read Josh Kovensky’s look at the range of powers the federal government can use to seize medical supplies during a public health national emergency. Tonight I wanted to flag your attention to this story published yesterday by The Los Angeles Times on this evolving story.
Yesterday I noted an emerging debate within the critical care community of whether at least some critical COVID-19 cases are significantly different from standard Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and require a different treatment protocol. Since posting that piece I’ve found more evidence that this is a rapidly emerging discussion among critical care doctors and perhaps even some emerging consensus about how critical COVID-19 cases are different from ARDS.
First here’s an update from TPM Reader WC (not their actual initials), a critical care doctor on the West Coast who our team has been in touch with since early in the crisis …