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In response to:

Trump Criticizes WHO And Threatens To Pull U.S. Funding

April 7, 20207:43 PM ET

Laurel Wamsley at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C.,
November 7, 2018

In a White House press briefing on Tuesday, President Trump criticized the World Health Organization's coronavirus response and threatened to cut its funding.

President Trump assailed the World Health Organization on Tuesday, and indicated that he will consider putting a hold on funding it.

In a media briefing at the White House, Trump twice stated that the United States funds the majority of the organization's budget. According to the WHO, the United States provided 14.67% of its funding in 2018-2019.

The WHO has been the most prominent global organization leading the strategy to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

But on Tuesday, Trump criticized the WHO as slow to respond to the crisis, and repeatedly said the organization has been "China-centric." He complained that the WHO "receives vast amounts of money from the United States" and that the organization "called it wrong."

"They could have called it months earlier," he said. "They would have known and they should have known and they probably did not. So we'll be looking into that very carefully."

Trump at one point said "we're gonna put a hold on money spent to the WHO," before backtracking later in the briefing and saying "we're going to take a look at it."

Trump was asked what he meant by calling the WHO "China-centric."

"I don't know, they seem to come down on the side of China," Trump replied. "'Don't close your borders to China,' they don't report what's really going on. They didn't see it, and yet they were there, they didn't see what was going on in Wuhan. They didn't see it. How do you not see it? They didn't report it. They must have seen it, but they didn't report it."

The WHO has opposed travel bans, mainly due to the economic damage they cause.

The U.S. is the single largest contributor to the WHO. Its assessed contribution is 22% of the total members' assessed contributions. The U.S. pays considerably more than the assessed contributions in additional voluntary contributions. That 22% assessed contribution has been stable for many years, but the voluntary contributions have fluctuated depending on health crises and U.S. political priorities.

The WHO is funded not only by nations, but also nonprofit organizations, foundations, companies, universities and governmental alliances. After the U.S., the next three largest WHO funders in 2018-2019 were the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the GAVI Alliance, and the United Kingdom.

In response to:

It’s a ‘false hope’ coronavirus will disappear in the summer like the flu, WHO says

Published Fri, Mar 6 202011:57 AM ESTUpdated Fri, Mar 6 20208:15 PM EST

Berkeley Lovelace Jr.
Noah Higgins-Dunn

World leaders should not assume COVID-19 will be seasonal and subside in the summer, like the flu, the World Health Organization said Friday.

“We have to assume that the virus will continue to have the capacity to spread,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. “It’s a false hope to say, yes, that it will disappear like the flu.”

“We hope it does. That would be a godsend,” he added. “But we can’t make that assumption. And there is no evidence.”

Earlier in the outbreak, U.S. health officials said there was a hypothesis among mathematical modelers that the outbreak “could potentially be seasonal” and relent in warmer conditions.

“Other viral respiratory diseases are seasonal, including influenza and therefore in many viral respiratory diseases we do see a decrease in disease in spring and summer,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on a Feb. 25 conference call. “And so we can certainly be optimistic that this disease will follow suit.”

Earlier Friday, the total number of COVID-19 cases surpassed 100,000 worldwide. The majority of the cases are in mainland China, followed by South Korea, Iran and Italy. In the United States, 233 cases have been confirmed, including 14 deaths, according to John Hopkins University.

During a press briefing Monday, WHO officials said they don’t know how COVID-19 behaves, saying it’s not like influenza. They added that while much is known about the seasonal flu, such as how it’s transmitted and what treatments work to suppress the disease, that same information is still in question when it comes to the coronavirus.

“This is a unique virus, with unique features. This virus is not influenza,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “We are in uncharted territory.”

World health officials say are “deeply concerned” about the increasing number of countries reporting cases, especially those with weaker health-care systems.

Tedros said Friday that health officials are also concerned about hospitals, which have been running very “lean and mean.”

“When I say lean and mean, making it very close to what they need during normal times the number of beds they need and so on,” he said. “And that’s why we see some surprise in high-income countries and when emergencies actually arrive, triggering or expanding that lean and mean system becomes a bit difficult and at times taxing.”

He said that may force some countries to discharge patients early because the system “is adapted to lean and mean approach.”

“OK, running hospitals in a lean and mean fashion could be OK during regular times, but how can we expand the capacity in a few hours when the need comes?” he said. “It’s not COVID only by the way. It could be an earthquake, or it could be a tsunami or another disaster, whether it’s man-made or natural.”

In response to:

Sen. Rand Paul tests positive for coronavirus

by Zachary Basu

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has tested positive for the coronavirus, his office announced on Twitter Sunday.

Why it matters: He's the first U.S. senator to test positive. According to his office, Paul is asymptomatic and was not aware of making direct contact with an infected person.

Paul, a licensed physician and notorious deficit hawk, was the only senator to vote against a bipartisan $8 billion deal to provide emergency coronavirus funding earlier this month.

He sought to introduce an amendment that would take the funding from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, but it was voted down 80-16.

Paul may be considered a high-risk patient for coronavirus.
In August 2019, the senator tweeted that he had part of his lung removed during surgery after it was damaged in a 2017 assault by his neighbor.

In response to:
Trump has completely mishandled the coronavirus response and should resign

By Robert Weissman

In a time when protecting the nation’s public health demands clear, truthful and compassionate leadership, President Donald Trump has offered exactly the opposite. He is a clear and present danger to the nation’s public health, and he should resign immediately.

Trump has dissembled about the seriousness of the coronavirus epidemic, either because he refuses to accept the truth or fears the effect on his political fortunes, or both. Months too late, he has finally started to acknowledge that the crisis is real, serious and likely to persist. Even so, as late as March 15, he untruthfully claimed that the U.S. government has the virus under “tremendous control.”

Trump repeatedly has refused to make science-based recommendations (e.g., older people should avoid cruise ships and plane travel) or to declare a public health emergency, reportedly out of fear about the effect on the stock market. It turns out that denying the truth visible to all doesn’t fool the market; and, in fact, when Trump did finally declare a public health emergency, markets reacted positively.

Trump has presided over an administration that inexplicably has failed to deliver vitally needed coronavirus tests to health care providers around the country and then repeatedly lied to or misled the American public about remedying the problem. Instead of taking responsibility for the problem and fixing it, Trump has bizarrely blamed it on his predecessor, Barack Obama. “No, I don’t take responsibility at all,” says Trump.

This testing failure may be the single most consequential human factor responsible for the spread of the disease. It has been impossible for public health authorities to calibrate appropriate responses without a clear understanding of COVID-19 incidence in the United States. Even now, public health experts are merely guessing about the actual extent of disease spread in the United States. Nearly two months into the start of the disease in the United States, South Korea is testing 161 times more people per capita than the United States.

Beyond the testing debacle, there has been a shocking lack of leadership from the federal government under Trump. Governors and local authorities have stepped into the gap, but they are all clear that they are desperate for federal leadership. It has not been forthcoming. With states seeking federal assistance in providing the equipment needed to treat COVID-19 patients, Trump replied, “Try getting it yourselves.”

Even for Trump, this Marie Antoinette response was shocking.

Crisis moments typically give rise to inspirational words from our leaders. Whether naturally gifted orators or not, they typically rise to the moment. They understand the need to share the truth with their compatriots. They understand the need both to calm and galvanize the nation in the face of fear and great challenges. And they understand the need to bring people together for shared national purpose, to spark kindness and solidarity.

Leaders do these things because they care about their people and their country — and because they understand that honesty, calm, shared purpose and solidarity are necessary to meet fearsome national challenges.

That Trump is doing the opposite of all this is not just a shortcoming or just another example of his boundless self-absorption.

Trump’s failings have nothing to do with political ideology or legitimate areas of policy disagreement. They are intolerable failures of leadership in a time of national crisis that have endangered the lives of all Americans. Trump should step down immediately.

In response to:

Is the new coronavirus like flu? No. It kills 26 times more – Portugal

March 6, 2020

The Director-General of Health, Graça Freitas, compared the appearance of the new coronavirus subtype, Covid-19, to the outbreak of a common flu, saying that the Directorate-General for Health would be working withwith a scenario identical to that which existed in 2009, when influenza A – also known as Influenza A / H1N1. The pandemic took less than a month to arrive in Portugal and caused 122 deaths in the country, with 166,922 cases registered until August 2010 – when the end of the pandemic was declared.

The data say, however, that the new type of coronavirus is not only a disease that spreads faster than common flu or influenza A, but is also a more lethal virus.

Three times more viral than a common flu



A common flu has a transmissibility of 1.3 points, which means that every 10 infected people pass the disease to 13 people. The number is used to measure the potential of an epidemic, translating the degree of reproduction of the disease: the higher the number, the greater the degree of exposure and threat of the disease.

In 2009, the H1N1 pandemic had a transmissibility of 1.5 and could not be contained, with estimates suggesting that 11–21% of the world's population has been infected. Initial studies on the new coronavirus, Covid-19, pointed to a 2-3 point transmissibility, more than double the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which today is just one of the four types of common flu.

A graph showing the evolution of COVID-19 and H1N1 in its first 31 days shows that three times more cases of the new coronavirus have been confirmed in relation to influenza A in the first 31 days.




But the latest mathematical model by researchers at Xiamen University in China, published in the scientific journal Infectious Diseases of Poverty points to estimates of transmission of isolated surfaces in humans of 2.3 and 3.58 in person-to-person transmissions – which explains the dizzying rise in the number of cases of infection.

This last number, the most worrying, translates into a transmissibility almost three times greater than a common flu and concerns the introduction of an affected individual in susceptible environments: closed spaces, with a large population or without ventilation. For comparison, common flu infected 20 to 30 million people in the European Union last year.

In comparison with known outbreaks of other coronavirus subtypes, the transmissibility of Covid-19 in environments is greater than that seen in 2012 with the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), from 0.8 to 1.3, but less than that recorded in 2002 with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), 2.9 points.

Covid-19 is 26 times more deadly than a common flu



Although H1N1 affected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people, its mortality rate was, for the proportion of the disease, relatively low: between 0.01 and 0.08%, with estimates of 150 to 575 thousand deaths. In relation to the peak of H1N1, which had mortality rates of 0.4% in its early stages, the new coronavirus is seven times more deadly, with mortality rates of 2.5% in the first 31 days.

In response to:

Updated March 11, 2020, 12:05 PM EDT

The United States now has more than 1,000 people infected with coronavirus — but testing in the U.S. is still ramping up, meaning that number could continue to climb.

Meanwhile, the governor of New York has questioned the number of people who have been tested for the virus in the U.S.

“When they do the retrospective on this one, they are going to say, 'Why did it take the Unites States so long to bring up the testing capacity?'” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on TODAY on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Cuomo announced that he was implementing a "containment area" around a one-mile radius in the city of New Rochelle, home to the largest cluster of coronavirus cases in the country.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said that more than 8,500 specimens have been tested for the coronavirus across the U.S. Because multiple specimens are required from each individual, the number of actual patients who have been tested is likely far lower.