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Kim Jong-un: fragile and under pressure but he won’t give up
The Observer The North Korean leader’s surprise freeze of his nuclear programme is less a genuine move than a diplomatic manoeuvre,...
Friday, 3 April 2020
America’s emergency stockpile is almost empty. Nobody knows what happens next.
Few cars occupy the Arroyo Seco Parkway toward downtown Los Angeles during rush hour on April 2, 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic. | AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill
The Trump administration apparently wants states to take care of themselves before bugging the federal government.
The Strategic National Stockpile, which is a relatively obscure office in the federal government that manages the country’s emergency medical supplies, exists to respond to a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic.
As the United States faces hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 cases, a widespread shortage of medical supplies is reaching a critical point. States lacking essential equipment like ventilators and masks need relief quickly. But as President Trump struggles to coordinate a cohesive response to the pandemic and fights with state governors over how these supplies will be distributed, the stockpile is becoming a source of controversy. It’s also starting to run out of supplies.
That’s why Senior advisor to the president Jared Kushner prompted controversy when he made a rare public appearance at the April 2 coronavirus task force briefing and commented on the federal stockpile. When asked about states’ needs for supplies, Kushner said that the stockpile was “supposed to be our stockpile.” The president’s son-in-law added, “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.” Then, the following morning, the Strategic National Stockpile website had been changed to de-emphasize its commitment to helping states and to downplay the size of its inventory. This particular description online now refers to the federal stockpile as “a short-term stopgap buffer.”
Part of this new definition of the Strategic National Stockpile does reside in the general vicinity of reality. The stockpile is running low. The Trump administration admits it. And no, this is not the states’ fault. But it’s not entirely clear what will happen when it’s emptied out.
What is the Strategic National Stockpile anyway?
The United States’ Strategic National Stockpile, like its nuclear arsenal, is something the US hoped it would never need to use. Formed in 1999 as anxiety over Y2K mounted, this federal stockpile was designed to prevent an interruption to hospital supply chains, if all the computers ended up melting down on New Years Eve. That never happened, but because biological attacks were becoming a growing threat, the US government outfitted the stockpile in the interest of national security. If a bioweapon struck an American city, for example, officials could quickly access vaccines and antitoxins to fight back against nerve agents or diseases like small pox.
These biological countermeasures still exist and are stored in six warehouses located in strategic, undisclosed locations across the country, where they are maintained by a staff of about 200. The exact inventory of the Strategic National Stockpile is classified, though journalists have reported that it contains over 1,000 categories of drugs and medical items worth about $8 billion. In the 20 years since the stockpile was established, it was first mobilized after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed. Later, the US government deployed it in response various major hurricanes, as well as the H1N1 pandemic, during which the stockpile sent flu medication to all 50 states.
Since then, the Strategic National Stockpile has been preparing for the next outbreak, though it obviously didn’t know when or what it would be. With an annual budget of about $600 million, the stockpile has maintained a large supply of personal protective equipment, including N95 masks, face shields, and surgical gowns, as well as medical equipment like the ventilators that hospitals so urgently need now to treat Covid-19 patients.
A significant challenge is that many of these items have a shelf life.
“Part of stockpiling is not just accruing the necessary equipment, but also maintaining it and replacing it as needed,” Andrew Lakoff, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California who studies health preparedness, told Recode. “So it’s sort of an ongoing, indefinite process that takes a lot of resources that may or may not prove to be necessary.”
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Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
While the Strategic National Stockpile was originally part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Trump Administration moved it to a different part of the Health and Human Services Department in 2018. At the time, this concerned certain experts and lawmakers, who worried that the move could disrupt the delicate process of managing the stockpile. As The Washington Post reported at the time, some even worried then that the Trump administration’s plan would “politicize decision-making about products bought for the stockpile.”
It’s important to note that the mission of the Strategic National Stockpile is ultimately of limited scope. As spelled out in the law that established it, the federal stockpile is intended “to provide for and optimize the emergency health security of the United States.” The word “emergency” does a lot of work in that sentence.
Richard Branson, a respiratory care specialist and professor at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center who advises the federal government on ventilator supplies, explained to Recode that the federal stockpile was designed to meet initial needs in a crisis, until industry could ramp up production. Because ventilators are such specialized pieces of equipment with parts sourced from all over the world, quickly manufacturing more is a uniquely difficult challenge.
“This is the first time in 20 years ventilators from the stockpile have been used,” Branson told Recode. “If last year, you had known that fact and there were 80,000 ventilators in the stockpile that had never been deployed, you would be asking me why this money was wasted while people went without healthcare.”
But there aren’t actually 80,000 ventilators in the federal stockpile. As of early March, the Strategic National Stockpile only had 16,600 ventilators. It has even fewer now: On April 3, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) told Recode that the federal government has just 9,800 ventilators available. There are 9,054 remaining in the Strategic National Stockpile, and the Department of Defense has 900.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that just his state, which is the epicenter of the pandemic, will need as many as 37,000 ventilators at the peak of the outbreak. After waiting for relief from the Trump administration, Cuomo ultimately enlisted the National Guard to relocate ventilators from upstate facilities to New York City. As far as the rest of the country’s concerned, it’s safe the say that the Strategic National Stockpile isn’t even close to meeting the overall demand that’s expected during the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s Like Being on eBay With 50 Other States”
Besides ventilators, the Strategic National Stockpile is running low on other urgently needed supplies as well. On April 1, the Washington Post reported that the federal stockpile’s stock of personal protective equipment, including N95 masks, was almost depleted. A Department of Homeland Security official told the paper that the stockpile was only “designed to respond to a handful of cities,” pointing to a global shortage of these products.
And experts and lawmakers are concerned that the Trump administration’s uneven distribution of supplies is driven by political goals. In early March, when Washington State requested 233,000 N95 respirators and 200,000 surgical masks, the Strategic National Supply sent them less than half that amount. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maine also said they received fractions of what they requested from the federal government. But on March 10, after Washington’s request, Florida asked for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, and other equipment. The full order arrived three days later. One anonymous official told The Washington Post, “The president knows Florida is so important for his reelection… He pays close attention to what Florida wants.”
Trump’s brazen behavior isn’t going unnoticed. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said that in the distribution of medical supplies there should be “no favoritism in terms of political allies, no discrimination against states or governors based on lack of presidential flattery.” Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado sent a letter to the Health and Human Services inspector general requesting an investigation into the Strategic National Stockpile’s supply of ventilators. Gardner told Politico that “any kind of mismanagement or abuse needs to be rooted out and those responsible held accountable.” And Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont called the state of the stockpile “disturbing.”
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Win McNamee/Getty Images
After President Trump declared a national emergency over the novel coronavirus crisis on March 13, he told states to order their own medical supplies, kicking off a process that has led to governors entering bidding wars with each other and even with the federal government over essential goods like ventilators and N95 masks. “It’s like being on eBay with 50 other states, bidding on a ventilator,” Gov. Cuomo said in a daily press briefing at the end of March.
“What we’re seeing now is a sort of competition on the open market among states trying get ahold of stuff that the stockpile doesn’t have enough of — or is running out of,” said Lakoff, the USC professor. “Everyone’s scrambling to try to figure out how to get ahold of this stuff.”
What happens when the stockpile is emptied
We don’t really know what happens when the Strategic National Stockpile runs out of essential supplies. But we might learn soon enough.
“FEMA planning assumptions for COVID-19 pandemic response acknowledged that the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) alone could not fulfill all requirements at the state and tribal level,” a FEMA spokesperson told Recode. “Therefore, the federal government will exhaust all means to identify and attain medical and other supplies needed to combat the virus.” The agency added that it would meet additional demand through the private sector or the Pentagon.
This effort includes a public-private partnership called Project Airbridge which will include 20 flights transporting supplies from Asia to various cities in the United States in early April. FEMA says these flights are transporting masks, gloves, goggles, and surgical gowns, all of which go first to medical distributors and then to hospitals and health care facilities. President Trump has also invoked the Defense Production Act to order GM to begin producing ventilators and 3M to produce more N95 masks domestically, as well as ordering 3M to cease exports of these products. (3M, for what it’s worth, has warned that ceasing exports will actually make the mask shortage in the US worse.)
Meanwhile, private corporations and everyday Americans have been making an enormous effort to fill in the gaps that the government has failed to close. Elon Musk has promised that his companies, Tesla and Space X, will start building ventilators. Hobbyists are coming up with new designs for cheap breathing machines that can be built out of simple materials. Automotive parts factories have changed their workflows to start producing face shields and other supplies, and a movement of people sewing face masks out of leftover fabric is taking the country by storm. Put quaintly, everybody is doing their best.
The federal government, on the other hand, seems to be getting worse at dealing with the Covid-19 crisis. After spending the first two months of the year denying the severity of the coronavirus outbreak, it’s now clear that the Trump Administration has settled on deflecting blame and settling into the posture of unaccountability. As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias puts it, the “federal government, led by Donald Trump, has essentially abdicated its traditional role of spearheading a coordinated response.” Coming up with a response, it seems, is the states’ problem.
This is what makes the shifting role of the Strategic National Stockpile so frustrating for so many people right now. Before Kushner’s appearance at the coronavirus task force briefing, the stockpile’s website said the “Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.” The following morning it read, “The Strategic National Stockpile’s role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies.”
So that stockpile that was designed to help the entire nation in an emergency is now a backup plan. Also, it’s basically gone. What Kushner said about the federal government not being there to help out with supplies? Unfortunately, that’s true. The states are on their own, and that reality is starting to sink in.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/3/21206170/us-emergency-stockpile-jared-kushner-almost-empty-coronavirus-medical-supplies-ventilators
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Shocking unemployment graph and GameCube's intro music fit together perfectly
A graph tracking unemployment in the United States somehow works with the iconic GameCube intro music. And seems to highlight our current state of dread with a surreal flair.
Last week, 6.6 million Americans, a 3000 percent increase, filed for unemployment as the coronavirus pandemic continued to devastate the economy. On Thursday, evolutionary anthropologist Dorsa Amir tweeted an animated graph that shows the massive jump alongside data from 1965 to earlier in the year. She also posted it on a data appreciation subreddit.
"We're dealing with truly staggering numbers here," Amir tweeted, emphasizing the jaw-dropping increase in unemployment so far. Read more...
More about Gaming, Viral Videos, Coronavirus, Culture, and Web Culturefrom Mashable https://mashable.com/video/unemployment-graph-coronavirus-gamecube/
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“We’re gonna find out”: Amid coronavirus crisis, Trump admits New York may not have ventilators it needs
Trump speaks during the White House briefing on Friday. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
“We have a lot of states that have to be taken care of. Some much more so than others.”
President Donald Trump acknowledged on Friday that in the days to come New York may not have enough ventilators to treat all the coronavirus patients who need them.
Asked by ABC’s Jon Karl during the White House press briefing if he can assure New Yorkers that they’ll have all the ventilators they need, Trump flatly replied “no.”
“They should’ve had more ventilators at the time. They should’ve had more ventilators,” Trump said. “They were totally under-serviced. We are trying to do — we are doing our best for New York. You know, we have, ah, we have states, we have a lot of states — we have territories too — but we have a lot of states that have to be taken care of. Some much more so than others.”
“We happen to think that [Cuomo’s] well-served with ventilators. We’re gonna find out,” continued Trump.
.@jonkarl: Cuomo says NY may be days away from running out of ventilators. Can you assure NY that they will have the ventilators they need?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 3, 2020
TRUMP: "No. They should've had more ventilators at the time. They should've had more ventilators." pic.twitter.com/j2I94iiXas
Nearly 3,000 people have already died from Covid-19 (the disease caused by the novel coronavirus) in New York, and more than 136,000 in the tri-state area have the virus. Sadly, the worst is likely yet to come.
Both Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill Di Blasio said on Friday that if current trends hold, New York City will run out of ventilators next week. That will likely cause coronavirus deaths to spike as patients are unable to get the care they need to stay alive. Cuomo on Friday tried to address the situation by authorizing the National Guard to take ventilators from hospitals outside the New York City area that don’t need them to places that do, but he’s previously indicated federal help is necessary for him to meet the demand.
CUOMO: "How can we be in a position where you can have New Yorkers possibly dying because they can't get a ventilator, but a federal agency saying 'I'm going to leave the ventilators in a stockpile.' I mean, have we really come to that point?" pic.twitter.com/8XqAh99Bka
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 24, 2020
Trump, however, has been reluctant to pull out all the stops. Last week, he told Sean Hannity he had “a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being in said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be. I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.” Since then, Trump has repeatedly attacked state officials in New York and elsewhere for not doing more on their own to acquire ventilators.
But while Trump thinks the states should’ve done more to prepare for a pandemic, he apparently doesn’t feel his administration had the same obligation. Asked on Friday about why he didn’t do more to acquire the necessary medical gear, Trump absurdly tried to shift blame to “previous administrations,” ignoring that he was president for three full years before the coronavirus hit.
ACOSTA: Why don't we have enough masks or equipment?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 3, 2020
TRUMP: "Previous administrations gave us very little ammunition for the military and very little shelf space."
(Trump was president for 3 years before the coronavirus hit.) pic.twitter.com/vuugvWItYR
The federal government reportedly has a stockpile of roughly 8,000 functional ventilators, but the Trump administration doesn’t seem keen to deploy them to New York.
Asked Friday by CBS’s Weijia Jiang to explain comments Jared Kushner made the day before about how the federal stockpile is purportedly “not supposed to be states’ stockpiles,” Trump unloaded on Jiang (“you oughta be ashamed of yourself”) and then argued he has an obligation to save some of them for other states that could face crises on the level of New York in the future.
“Frankly, many of the states were totally unprepared for this,” Trump said, adding: “We have a stockpile. It is a federal stockpile. We can use it for states, or we can use it for ourselves. We do use it for the federal government. We have a very big federal government.”
Wow. Trump unloads on a reporter who dared to ask him about Kushner saying on Thursday that the federal ventilator stockpile is "our" stockpile & not the states'.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 3, 2020
"When he says 'our,' he's talking about our country ... it's such a basic, simple question. You oughta be ashamed." pic.twitter.com/HWWkTWs00e
Trump’s comments likely won’t come as a surprise to Gov. Cuomo, who said on Thursday that “I don’t think the federal government is in a position to provide ventilators to the extent the nation may need them ... our attitude here is that we are on our own.”
Still, it’s jarring to hear the President of the United States basically admit he’s leaving the state hardest-hit by the worst pandemic the country has experienced in a century to fend for itself — especially in a circumstances where the federal government is in possession of resources that could save American lives.
Trump, however, seems to think the best course of action is to save them for a future circumstance where other states (perhaps ones more crucial to his reelection hopes) are in need.
The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/2020/4/3/21207650/trump-coronavirus-press-conference-new-york-ventilators-cuomo
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Thursday, 2 April 2020
Seth Meyers mocks Trump's plan to slow coronavirus with scarves
This week the global number of confirmed coronavirus cases climbed toward one million, with the U.S. accounting for the highest number of infections in the world. As Late Night host Seth Meyers noted on Thursday, other countries such as Taiwan and South Korea have been much more successful at slowing the spread, their governments executing quick and decisive plans to minimise infections.
Meanwhile, U.S. president Donald Trump recommended people use scarves as makeshift masks on Tuesday.
"Oh great, so now the president is Martha Stewart," quipped Meyers, recording from the confines of his home. "'Using a blanket, a bike helmet, and some Saran Wrap, you can make your own hazmat suit, homemade. Pretty great.'" Read more...
More about Donald Trump, Seth Meyers, Late Night With Seth Meyers, Coronavirus, and Covid 19from Mashable https://mashable.com/video/seth-meyers-coronavirus-donald-trump-response-scarves/
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Adam Sandler's new song is a hilarious tribute to doctors, nurses, and being sick of your family
Adam Sandler's as well known for his deceptively simple, twisted comedy songs as for his filmography full of screeching manchildren, and on Thursday he dropped in on his old friend and fellow Saturday Night Live alum Jimmy Fallon to debut a new one.
Over video chat, the Sandman treated the Tonight Show host and audience to a new song, title unknown, celebrating the brave healthcare workers in America and around the world on the frontlines of the fight against coronavirus — and the exasperated parents social distancing with their entire families.
"We gotta build some ventilators and get them more masks, we gotta do it now so let's all come together," he sings in his trademark sorta-Springsteen growl. "I'm teaching math to my kids, and that can't be good for America." Read more...
More about Adam Sandler, Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Coronavirus, Entertainment, and Talk Showfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/video/coronavirus-adam-sandler-song-jimmy-fallon/
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New top story on Hacker News: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
7 by jacobedawson | 1 comments on Hacker News.
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7 by jacobedawson | 1 comments on Hacker News.
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