I wanted to flag your attention to this oped in the Times, now a couple weeks old. It notes that other countries in Europe are not seeing the scale of job loss that we are in the US, even though they’re shutting down their economies just as much. It’s from March 30th. So it’s from eons ago in COVID terms. But it holds up pretty well. There are two points I want to focus on.
On Friday I noted news reports that claimed US military intelligence was warning as far back as late November of a possible new virus in China with a possible global impact. The problem is that these US intelligence reports would predate by weeks our earliest understanding of when the first cases emerged and well before the Chinese themselves knew they had a new disease on their hands. That chronology of the outbreak comes from news reports from major dailies in the United States and Hong Kong. But there’s another body of evidence which points to a similar and more definitive timeline. That’s hidden in the COVID-19 genome itself.
All month we’ve been talking about Project Air Bridge, the federal government organized airlift of medical supplies which are then handed over to private sector distributors to distribute around the country. A few media reports have suggested, often on the basis of unnamed sources, that there is a 50-50 deal. The distributors agree to route 50% of the supplies to hotspots as defined by FEMA while the other 50% they can sell on an ordinary commercial basis. But we don’t have to rely on these reports. An April 8th FEMA bulletin, flagged to me by TPM Reader GG, lays it all out pretty clearly. There’s even a handy graphic.
To quote the April 8th bulletin: “Per agreements with distributors, 50 percent of supplies on each plane are for customers within the hotspot areas with most critical needs. The remaining 50 percent is fed into distributors’ normal supply chain to their customers in other areas nationwide. HHS and FEMA determine hotspot areas based on CDC data.”
The Washington Post has a new story out about the chaotic and overlapping efforts to acquire and distribute medical supplies across the country. We get yet more evidence that FEMA is routinely jumping into private transactions, either at the front end of overruling a purchase or seizing it when it’s being transported to whatever hospital or state purchased it. As my hospital system board member source told me a couple days ago this isn’t just happening it’s pervasive.
Here is a true sign of the times story. In late March the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (part of SEIU) announced that they’d discovered a stockpile of 39 million n95 masks. They proceeded to arrange for different hospitals in the region to purchase allotments from the cache. There were viral pressure campaigns launched against hospitals who didn’t rush forward to purchase. There were even bogus claims that the union had been caught ‘hoarding’ the masks.
What did happen is that the news got FEMA interested in seeing if they could seize the mask motherlode for the federal government – yet another part of the still murky confiscated supplies story. But this time things turned out differently. The US Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Scott Brady, got involved because the broker who had located the masks for the union was based in Pittsburgh. But while Brady’s office and FBI agents were seeing whether they could seize the masks they discovered that the whole thing was a scam.
You likely saw this ABCNews report from Wednesday evening that US military intelligence was sending out alerts as far back as November about a novel disease in Wuhan that could produce “cataclysmic” results for US military troops in Asia and countries around the world. The intelligence report was reportedly from National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), an arm of US defense intelligence. After ABC published its report the Director of the NCMI released a statement in which he said reports of a “product/assessment in November 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists.”
But there is something wrong with this ABC story. The timeline does not make sense. Either that or our understanding of the chronology of the origins of this disease is very flawed.
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.