Day 29

13/04/2020 Monday, Cloudy

It's Easter Monday. After the weekend's burning sun rays, it feels chilly today.

It seems the coronavirus case curves have been flatterned in both US and europe. And people start to reflect.

According to NY Times:

Mr. Fauci, during an appearance on CNN on Sunday, was careful to say that many factors went into government decision-making, and he was at pains to stay focused on the science rather than the politics when asked if stay-at-home measures could have prevented deaths had they been put in place in February, instead of mid-March.

“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Mr. Fauci said. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those decisions is complicated.”

“If we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different,” he said. “But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”

The president privately has been irritated at times with Dr. Fauci, but the retweet was the most explicit he has been about those feelings.

More from the NY Times:

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus

An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.

From the Washington Post:

The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged

From the Oval Office to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded through the system and opportunities to mitigate the pandemic were lost.

From the Guardian:

Coronavirus is the greatest global science policy failure in a generation

Richard Horton

The warnings of doctors and scientists were ignored, with fatal results

China, by contrast, was scarred by its experience of Sars. When the government realised that a new virus was circulating, Chinese officials didn’t advise hand washing, a better cough etiquette and disposing of tissues. They quarantined entire cities and shut down the economy. As one former secretary of state for health in England put it to me, our scientists suffered from a “cognitive bias” towards the milder threat of influenza.

Perhaps that is why the key government committee, the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group (Nervtag), concluded on 21 February, three weeks after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency of international concern, that they had no objection to Public Health England’s “moderate” risk assessment of the disease to the UK population. That was a genuinely fatal error of judgement.

 At every press conference, the government spokesperson always includes the same line: “We have been following the medical and scientific advice.” It’s a good line. And it’s partly true. But the government knew the NHS was unprepared. It knew it had failed to build the necessary intensive care surge capacity to meet the likely patient demand. As one doctor wrote to me: “It seems that nobody wants to learn from the human tragedy that happened in Italy, China, Spain … This is really sad … Doctors and scientists who are not able to learn from one another.”

 
Remember this day: 2020/01/30

Coronavirus declared global health emergency by WHO