Fumbling in the Face of Coronavirus Could Lose Trump the Election

Someone has to be the bearer of evil tidings. Shoot me if you want, but the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus threat could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in November. This is Donald Trump’s election to lose — he has a strong track record and faces pathetic opponents — but fumbling in the face of a public health crisis could sink him. I’m an Always Trumper and want him to be re-elected, so I’m saying this as a supporter.

Below, I crosspost a new article at Asia Times.

Panic returned to the US stock market on Thursday as the federal government fumbled in the face of a health crisis of unknown proportions, and President Donald Trump appeared to downplay the scale of the problem in a Fox News interview. Someone should tell the president that reality shows don’t go as scripted when the studio is on fire.

Meanwhile, no one in the United States knows how fast Covid-19 has spread, where it is spread, or how it is spreading. The nationwide shortage of test kits has become an election-year issue, with Democratic officials denouncing the Trump Administration, and President Trump blaming regulatory decisions by the Obama Administration. That is a fight that the incumbent president only can lose: the incumbent president always will take the fall for a perceived fumble in a national emergency. The Obama-era policy, which required hospitals and private laboratories to submit test procedures to lengthy Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review, was an obstacle to rapid testing. But it wasn’t rescinded until February 29, six weeks after Washington State authorities believe that the first case appeared in that state.

Federal officials, meanwhile, are backtracking on promises of a rapid response.

Earlier this week FDA chief Stephen Hahn told Congress that a million test kits would be in use by Friday, but Republican senators warned Thursday that it would take much longer for testing to get underway. “There won’t be a million people to get a test by the end of the week,” Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida told Bloomberg News. “It’s way smaller than that. And still, at this point, it’s still through public health departments.”

Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma told Bloomberg, “By the end of the week they’re getting them out to the mail. It’s going to take time to be able to get them, receive them, re-verify them and then be able to put them into use.”

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today announced that it is no longer reporting the number of individuals tested for Covid-19 infection, because state and local governments have taken over most of the testing. As of March 5 the CDC reported just 49 cases under investigation, explaining on its website, “CDC is no longer reporting the number of persons under investigation (PUIs) that have been tested, as well as PUIs that have tested negative. Now that states are testing and reporting their own results, CDC’s numbers are not representative of all testing being done nationwide.”

The US agency added, “In the event of a discrepancy between CDC cases and cases reported by state and local public health officials, data reported by states should be considered the most up to date.”

The CDC added that it has no up-to-date national statistics on coronavirus infections. “State and local public health departments are now testing and publicly reporting their cases. In the event of a discrepancy between CDC cases and cases reported by state and local public health officials, data reported by states should be considered the most up to date,” the agency said.

According to the website ProPublica, the CDC made matters worse by insisting on developing its own test kit, rather than use kits from Europe – and then producing a test kit that didn’t work. “As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test,” the website reported February 28.

WHO guidelines

Even worse, “The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.”

Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, told ProPublica, “The basic tenet of public health is to know the situation so you can deal with it appropriately. If you don’t look, you won’t find cases.” Lipsitch noted that in China’s Guangdong Province, health authorities tested 300,000 people in fever clinics in order to identify only 420 positive cases.

President Trump meanwhile appeared to dismiss public concerns about the epidemic in a March 4 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

“Well, I think the 3.4% [mortality rate] is really a false number,” the president said. “Now, and this is just my hunch, and – but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot [of] people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor. You never hear about those people. So you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu and – or virus. So you just can’t do that. So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work – some of them go to work but they get better.”

He continued, “When you do have a death – like you had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, believe you had one in New York – you know, all of a sudden, it seems like 3 or 4%, which is a very high number, as opposed to a fraction of 1%,” Trump added. “But again, they don’t know about the easy cases because the easy cases don’t go to the hospital. They don’t report to doctors or the hospital, in many cases. So I think that that [death rate] number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1%.”

President attacked

News commentators attacked the president for appearing to encourage people with mild symptoms to go to work. Trump retorted in a March 5 tweet, “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work. This is just more Fake News and disinformation put out by the Democrats, in particular MSDNC. Comcast covers the CoronaVirus situation horribly, only looking to do harm to the incredible & successful effort being made!”

Short of test kits, Washington State health authorities have asked people with mild symptoms not to come to public clinics, because there is nothing that the clinics can do for them immediately. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have told their Seattle-area employees to work from home.

Lack of basic information, hesitant action, conflicting statements and the failure to acknowledge previous blunders contribute to the panic registered on the US equity market. In an election year, it really doesn’t matter whose fault it was. The buck stops at the president’s desk, in Harry Truman’s celebrated saying – but never more so than during a public health crisis.

Here’s the editor of China’s Global Times calling for a quarantine of all Americans traveling to China.

US CDC’s passive attitude in tallying/disclosing infection number, and Trump administration’s attempt to downplay the epidemic is disturbing. I have called on Chinese local governments to implement 14-day quarantine for all people coming from the US.

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) March 5, 2020

Earlier this week, I reported exclusively on China’s massive Big Data/Artificial Intelligence approach to identifying likely coronavirus victims.

China used locational and other data from hundreds of millions of smartphones to contain the spread of Covid-19, according to Chinese sources familiar with the program.

In addition to draconian quarantine procedures, which kept more than 150 million Chinese in place at the February peak of the coronavirus epidemic, China used sophisticated computational methods on a scale never attempted in the West.

With more than 80,000 cases registered, China reported only 126 new cases yesterday, compared to 851 in South Korea and 835 in Iran, out of a total of 1,969 new cases worldwide. Chinese sources emphasize that the artificial intelligence initiative supplemented basic public health measures, which centered on quarantines and aggressive efforts to convince Chinese citizens to change their behavior.

Chinese government algorithms can estimate the probability that a given neighborhood or even an individual has exposure to Covid-19 by matching the location of smartphones to known locations of infected individuals or groups. The authorities use this information to use limited medical resources more efficiently by, for example, directing tests for the virus to high-risk subjects identified by the artificial intelligence algorithm.

All smartphones with enabled GPS give telecom providers a precise record of the user’s itinerary. Smartphone users in the United States and Europe can access their own data, but privacy laws prevent the government from collecting this data. China has no such privacy constraints, and telecom providers have used locational data for years for advertising.

A Chinese bank executive reports that his company purchases locational data from telecom providers. “If you have walked by an auto dealership three times in the last few weeks, we send you a text advertising an auto loan,” the executive said. “We wouldn’t be allowed to do that in the West.

It is not known how long China has been able to crunch the massive amount of locational data generated by smartphones. In 2015 I toured Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, and saw a 12-by-12-foot map of Guangzhou City with countless small lights. Each of these denoted a smartphone, a Huawei official explained, and the company’s data scientists could tell you the foot traffic at the site of a prospective new fast-food restaurant.

China also uses electronic records of medicine purchases to identify sick individuals who may have attempted to flee quarantine.