Tag: COVID-19

Pence Will Control All Coronavirus Messaging From Health Officials

New York Times logoThe White House’s attempt to impose a more disciplined approach to communications about the virus was undermined by President Trump, who complained the news media was overstating the threat.

WASHINGTON — The White House moved on Thursday to tighten control of coronavirus messaging by government health officials and scientists, directing them to coordinate all statements and public appearances with the office of Vice President Mike Pence, according to several officials familiar with the new approach.

But on a day that the White House sought to display a more disciplined strategy to the administration’s communications about the virus, Mr. Trump used an evening event honoring African-American History Month to rail against the news media, claiming it is overstating the threat, and to congratulate himself for keeping the number of cases low.

“I think it’s an incredible achievement what our country’s done,” Mr. Trump said, noting that he had moved quickly to ban travel from China after the emergence of the virus. Even though a total of 60 people infected with the coronavirus are in the United States, he ignored all but the 15 who did not initially contract it overseas. Continue reading.

Stocks fall 4% as sell-off worsens

Axios logoStocks fell more than 4% on Thursday, extending the market’s worst week since the financial crisis in 2008 following a spike in coronavirus cases around the world.

The big picture: All three indices are in correction, down over 10% from recent record-highs, amid a global market rout. It’s the S&P 500’s quickest decline into correction territory in the index’s history, per Deutsche Bank. View the post here.

California undertakes extensive effort to trace contacts of woman with coronavirus

Washington Post logoVACAVILLE, Calif. — California has launched a far-reaching effort to find anyone who might have come in contact with a new coronavirus patient infected despite having no known link to others with the illness, as federal officials tried Thursday to fix the faulty testing process that has hamstrung their ability to track how widely the disease is spreading.

U.S. officials raced to meet the daunting new challenge of a virus that could be spreading through a Northern California community, even as the covid-19 virus continued its relentless march around the globe. Stock markets continued to plunge, Japan initiated a weeks-long school closure and an Iranian lawmaker contracted the infection. From the Middle East to South Korea to parts of Europe, the number of deaths and infections continued to grow.

In Washington, Vice President Pence convened his first meeting as the new head of the task force battling the virus. On the other side of the country, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and state health officials sought to reassure jittery residents that public health officials would be able to handle the first U.S. case of community transmission. Continue reading.

Republican response to potential pandemic aims at protecting Trump with cowardice, hypocrisy and outright lies

AlterNet logoThe last time a deadly virus spread quickly across continents, Republicans in Congress ramped up xenophobic rhetoric to fear-monger ahead of the 2014 midterm elections. Echoing Donald Trump, who at the time hosted a weekly “Fox & Friends,” Republicans called for a travel ban and spread misinformation. “[President] Obama should apologize to the American people & resign!” Trump tweeted in October of 2014. Public polls right before the midterm elections showed that nearly 80% of Republicans thought the U.S. government should quarantine people who had recently been in a West African country with a major Ebola outbreak and nearly 50% worried they would be exposed to the Ebola virus. It was a catastrophic election for Democrats, with Republicans winning nine Senate seats and 13 House seats.

Six years later, President Trump continues to overhype the threat of the Ebola virus — this time in an effort to obscure his bungled response to a global health pandemic under his watch. Republicans in Congress are again spreading misinformation — this time in an overt attempt to defend Trump from criticism over his incompetent response.

As both Trump and his White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow appeared before cameras on Tuesday to claim that the coronavirus — and COVID-19, the disease it causes — are “well under control” and “contained,” the Dow Jones Industrial tumbled 1,000 points. On Wednesday, it fell almost another 900 points. Trump insisted on Twitter, “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” Continue reading.

NYT reporter rNYT reporter reveals the stunning reason Trump believed coronavirus would disappear next month

AlterNet logoOn CNN Thursday, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman revealed that President Donald Trump is angry about his administration’s coronavirus response — in part because he misunderstood what the experts told him about the disease and thought they meant it was going to go away soon.

“The president has been very frustrated with the public messaging of this from his administration, but not for the reasons that people necessarily think,” said Haberman. “It’s because there were experts who were saying one thing from the CDC, which was that there is this problem growing, and then he was trying to tamp this down in his own comments, and he keeps saying something that, as I understand it, is a misinterpretation of what he was told in a briefing, which was that viruses tend to decrease in numbers in terms of spread during warmer weather. He has taken that and put his own spin on it which is, it’s going to stop by April. He’s been telling people that for a while.”

“He was very concerned when he was in India, as he was watching the stock market fall,” added Haberman. “He was calling aides, wanting them to say something public that was going to try to quell the nerves. That obviously didn’t happen, or didn’t happen to the degree he wanted.” Continue reading.

Wall Street Is (Finally) Waking Up to the Damage Coronavirus Could Do

New York Times logoThe financial world is realizing how different this is from a trade war or other recent economic hiccups.

For weeks, there has been a strange divergence among those trying to predict what coronavirus might mean for financial markets and the world economy.

People in the trenches of global commerce — supply chain managers, travel industry experts, employers large and small — warned of substantial disruptions to their businesses. And public health authorities feared that the disease could spread far beyond Wuhan in China.

Yet financial markets and most economic forecasters projected the virus outbreak wouldn’t do much harm to the economy and corporate profits — at the least, nothing that an interest-rate cut or two from the Federal Reserve couldn’t fix. The S&P 500 hit a new high last Wednesday. Continue reading.

Right-Wing Media Claim CDC Hypes Coronavirus To Harm Trump

Dr. Nancy Messonnier is the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Her impressive bio lists a number of top positions that she has held in the CDC, and it also notes that she has received multiple awards.

In recent days, Messonnier has taken a leading role in warning the public about the threat that the novel coronavirus strain known as COVID-19 poses to the United States. The Wall Street Journal noted that Messonnier said it was just a question of when coronavirus will circulate in the U.S. The Daily Beast quoted her as saying, “We expect to see more cases of person-to-person spread among close contacts. … The goal here is to slow entry of this virus into the United States.” CNBC quoted her calling for schools to divide students into smaller groups or to close entirely and conduct courses online. Many other outlets have quoted her as well.

But right-wing media have begun to coalesce around a conspiracy theory that Messonnier’s warning should be disregarded because she is the sister of former Trump appointee Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein was a frequent target of pro-Trump propagandists for appointing Robert Mueller as a special counsel in the Russia investigation. Continue reading.

Could coronavirus really trigger a recession?

Fears are growing that the new coronavirus will infect the U.S. economy.

A major U.S. stock market index posted its biggest two-day dropon record, erasing all the gains from the previous two months; companies including Apple and Walmart have been warning of potential sales losses from COVID-19 and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans to prepare for the outbreak to spread to the United States, with unknown but potentially “bad” consequences.

Lately, many people have asked me, as an economist, a question I haven’t heard in years: Could a virus really send the global and U.S. economies into recession – or worse? Put more pertinently, will COVID-19 trigger an economic meltdown? Continue reading.

U.S. postpones military exercises with South Korea in nod toward North Korea

Defense Secretary Mark Esper says it is part of “a good-faith effort” to lessen tensions.

BANGKOK — U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Sunday the United States and South Korea have indefinitely postponed a joint military exercise in an “act of goodwill” toward North Korea.

The move comes even as Japan’s defense minister, whose country feels threatened by repeated North Korean missile launches, told Esper “no one could be optimistic about” changing the North’s behavior.

The statement by Japan’s defense chief, Taro Kono, was a stark illustration of the difficulties facing the U.S. and its international allies and partners as they struggle to get North Korea back to negotiations to eliminate its nuclear weapons and missiles. Talks launched by President Donald Trump in 2018 have stalled with no resumption in sight. Continue reading.

Live updates: Fears grow of a coronavirus pandemic as markets stumble again; Japan shuts schools

Washington Post logoU.S. markets fell sharply Thursday after the first coronavirus case in the United States that could not be linked to foreign travel was confirmed.

The state of California is calling the case, first reported by The Washington Post, its first instance of community transmission. The hospital is monitoring the health of scores of staff members who may have come in contact with the patient.

The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus also raised the specter of a global pandemic as governments ramped up their emergency responses and international financial markets slumped again Thursday, despite signs that the outbreak may be easing in China. Continue reading.