You're short a few 'yeahs' because every part of i
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Posted On: 02/24/2021 10:19:15 PM
You're short a few 'yeahs' because every part of it was accurate, as is true for the following.....
A YEAR AFTER TRUMP SAID CORONAVIRUS WAS "UNDER CONTROL," A LOOK BACK AT THE FIRST NEWS STORIES
By Philip Bump
Feb. 24, 2021
It was one year ago Wednesday that President Donald Trump offered words of assurance about the novel coronavirus, which had only recently been detected in the United States.
“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” he tweeted. “We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
That last bit was probably the focus of his comments. Feb. 24, 2020, was a Monday; by the time markets closed that day, the Dow Jones industrial average had dropped 4 percent since the prior Wednesday.
As the months passed, though, it was the first sentence that frequently came back to haunt Trump. The virus was very much not under control, and it would remain out of control through the rest of the year.
That era seems almost infinitely long ago, given all that’s happened since. Over the course of a few weeks from late February to early April, our expectations about everyday life were upended. At the time, it seemed to happen slowly, marked by incidents or discoveries in which the scale of the problem became increasingly apparent.
People or locations would suddenly emerge as harbingers of the not-yet-a-pandemic and then fade from attention as something else rose to replace it.
We thought it might be interesting to check in on those previews of what was to come. So we did.
Tom Hanks: The Oscar-winning actor and his wife, Rita Wilson, were the first international celebrities to announce that they had contracted the virus. The news became public on March 11, at which point there were only about 2,400 cases nationally. Hanks, though, didn’t contract the virus in the United States. He was on location in Australia.
Luckily, Hanks and Wilson experienced relatively mild symptoms.
“Our discomfort because of the virus was pretty much done in two weeks and we had very different reactions, and that was odd,” Hanks told the Guardian in July. “My wife lost her sense of taste and smell, she had severe nausea, she had a much higher fever than I did. I just had crippling body aches, I was very fatigued all the time and I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than about 12 minutes.”
By early April, Hanks was well enough to host — remotely — the first “Saturday Night Live” to air after stay-at-home orders went into effect nationally. The movie he was filming in Australia, a biopic about Elvis Presley, comes out next year.
NBA star Rudy Gobert: At first, the Utah Jazz center didn’t take the coronavirus threat very seriously. During a media event in early March, he went out of his way to touch each microphone or voice recorder being used by the journalists present, his way of indicating that he wasn’t concerned about the highly infectious bug.
On March 11 — the same day Hanks’s diagnosis was revealed — the NBA suspended its season indefinitely after Gobert tested positive for the virus. That diagnosis itself triggered some outrage: Testing was in very limited supply, but the Jazz managed to gin up 58 tests to detect the virus among its players and staff.
“Being the first professional NBA player testing positive brought a lot of thoughts in my mind,” he said late last year. “It was, you know, just looking at stuff and wondering if you’re going to be okay, if you’re not going to be okay. Thinking about my family that wasn’t able to be with me. It was a lot to process at the time.”
The NBA resumed its season from within a contained environment in July. The Jazz were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. In December, Gobert signed a five-year, $205 million contract with the Jazz and, on Tuesday, was named to the NBA all-star team.
The Grand Princess: Two cruise ships in the Princess Cruise Lines fleet became early coronavirus hot spots. The Diamond Princess was quarantined in Asia in early February, with more than 700 of its 3,700 passengers testing positive for the virus after eventually being evacuated from the ship.
The Grand Princess had a similar fate. It was cruising near California in late February when it was announced that passengers on a prior voyage had contracted the virus. The vessel was ordered to drop anchor off the coast near San Francisco while testing supplies were brought onboard. By March 5, 21 positive tests had been returned.
The following day, Trump was touring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta when he suggested that he’d rather not evacuate the ship.
“I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” he said. “And it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship either, okay? It wasn’t their fault either, and they’re mostly Americans. So, I can live either way with it. I’d rather have them stay on, personally.”
His concern, in other words, was that evacuating the several hundred passengers might lead to a spike in case totals in the United States. (During a news conference on Feb. 26, he had similarly argued that the country’s numbers shouldn’t include Diamond Princess passengers evacuated to the United States.) The number of coronavirus cases soon doubled anyway.
After briefly being taken out of rotation, both the Diamond Princess and the Grand Princess are preparing for upcoming cruises. You can embark on an eight-day trip out of Tokyo on the Diamond Princess in July, or a seven-day trip along the West Coast on the Grand Princess in September. That trip does include a stop in San Francisco, should you be wondering.
Life Care Center nursing home in Kirkland, Wash.: The danger of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, was reinforced by news from a small nursing home in Washington state. During the early months of the pandemic, more than 40 people at Life Care Center died of covid-19 before there was broad understanding of how to stop the spread of a disease that’s proved particularly dangerous for older Americans.
On Feb. 29, the CDC announced that the first recorded death caused by covid-19 had occurred in Washington as it also announced the first reported case in a health-care worker: a staffer at Life Care Center. By March 3, the nursing home had locked down, asking its residents to stay in their rooms.
The scene was grim, as reported by California Sunday magazine.
“Since there were so few remaining staff members — by then, more than a third of Life Care’s staff had called out sick — some residents had not been showered or helped out of bed in days,” Katie Engelhart reported.
“Many of Life Care’s residents had spent that Tuesday watching their wall-mounted TVs,” Engelhart wrote. “From the news channels, they had learned about the coronavirus and how their nursing home was the first in the country to be infected by it — how Life Care was, in fact, ‘the epicenter’ of the coronavirus in the United States.
On that very day, three residents had died of the virus, bringing the facility’s death count to seven and the national death count to nine. But other residents had not watched the news or were confused by the keyed-up chatter of the network correspondents. They understood nothing, beyond that their children had stopped visiting.”
On Dec. 28, 300 days after that lockdown, the facility began vaccinating its patients against the virus.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt: Capt. Brett Crozier had been in command of the aircraft carrier for a few months when sailors began exhibiting symptoms of the virus. The beginning of March was spent in a desperate effort to stop the virus from spreading among the thousands of men and women packed onboard. This, too, was early enough in the pandemic that the focus was on widespread cleaning — “bleach-a-palooza” — instead of limiting airborne transmission.
On March 30, with 100 cases among his crew, Crozier sent an urgent email to Navy officials asking for facilities where sick crew members could be evacuated. Social distancing was impossible given the “warship’s inherent limitations of space.”
“Removing the majority of personnel from a deployed U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier and isolating them for two weeks may seem like an extraordinary measure,” the message read, according to a copy obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle. “Keeping over 4,000 young men and women on board the TR is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care.”
“We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die,” he wrote at another point. “If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors.”
After the message became public, Crozier was relieved of his command. (Trump himself had lashed out at the captain, saying he “shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter.”) Eventually, more than a quarter of the ship’s crew — 1,271 people — tested positive for the virus. Another 60 exhibited symptoms consistent with covid-19. Twenty-three sailors were hospitalized, and one died.
Crozier’s termination was later reviewed by the Navy and ultimately upheld. (Crozier “did not do enough, soon enough, to fulfill [his] primary obligations,” Adm. Mike Gilday told reporters in June.) He is still in the Navy and holds the rank of captain but now has a staff job in San Diego. The Theodore Roosevelt is in service, stationed near the Philippines.
Last week, The Washington Post reported that there had been another outbreak of the virus onboard.
Nancy Messonnier: One of the first public warnings from the government about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic came in a conference call with reporters on Feb. 25.
“Disruption to everyday life might be severe,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said. She told reporters that she’d spoken with her children about the situation and told them that “while I didn’t think they were at risk right now, we as a family ought to be preparing for significant disruption to our lives.”
At the time, this seemed like an outlier position or, perhaps, a worst-case scenario. That it came from Messonnier, a senior government official, jolted the country’s understanding of the risk. Stocks plunged following the news conference, infuriating a president reportedly concerned about the economic risk of the pandemic as his reelection contest loomed.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump called Messonnier’s boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and threatened to fire her. Instead, he shifted responsibility for managing the crisis to Vice President Mike Pence, giving himself more control over the response.
Donald Trump: On Nov. 3, Americans went to the polls to decide whether Trump should have a second term in office. They decided he shouldn’t. An analysis conducted by a Trump pollster found that his response to the pandemic played a significant role. In states that flipped from red to blue since 2016, voters were far more critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
Trump is now a private citizen in Florida, having himself contracted the virus in October.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/...s-stories/
A YEAR AFTER TRUMP SAID CORONAVIRUS WAS "UNDER CONTROL," A LOOK BACK AT THE FIRST NEWS STORIES
By Philip Bump
Feb. 24, 2021
It was one year ago Wednesday that President Donald Trump offered words of assurance about the novel coronavirus, which had only recently been detected in the United States.
“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” he tweeted. “We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
That last bit was probably the focus of his comments. Feb. 24, 2020, was a Monday; by the time markets closed that day, the Dow Jones industrial average had dropped 4 percent since the prior Wednesday.
As the months passed, though, it was the first sentence that frequently came back to haunt Trump. The virus was very much not under control, and it would remain out of control through the rest of the year.
That era seems almost infinitely long ago, given all that’s happened since. Over the course of a few weeks from late February to early April, our expectations about everyday life were upended. At the time, it seemed to happen slowly, marked by incidents or discoveries in which the scale of the problem became increasingly apparent.
People or locations would suddenly emerge as harbingers of the not-yet-a-pandemic and then fade from attention as something else rose to replace it.
We thought it might be interesting to check in on those previews of what was to come. So we did.
Tom Hanks: The Oscar-winning actor and his wife, Rita Wilson, were the first international celebrities to announce that they had contracted the virus. The news became public on March 11, at which point there were only about 2,400 cases nationally. Hanks, though, didn’t contract the virus in the United States. He was on location in Australia.
Luckily, Hanks and Wilson experienced relatively mild symptoms.
“Our discomfort because of the virus was pretty much done in two weeks and we had very different reactions, and that was odd,” Hanks told the Guardian in July. “My wife lost her sense of taste and smell, she had severe nausea, she had a much higher fever than I did. I just had crippling body aches, I was very fatigued all the time and I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than about 12 minutes.”
By early April, Hanks was well enough to host — remotely — the first “Saturday Night Live” to air after stay-at-home orders went into effect nationally. The movie he was filming in Australia, a biopic about Elvis Presley, comes out next year.
NBA star Rudy Gobert: At first, the Utah Jazz center didn’t take the coronavirus threat very seriously. During a media event in early March, he went out of his way to touch each microphone or voice recorder being used by the journalists present, his way of indicating that he wasn’t concerned about the highly infectious bug.
On March 11 — the same day Hanks’s diagnosis was revealed — the NBA suspended its season indefinitely after Gobert tested positive for the virus. That diagnosis itself triggered some outrage: Testing was in very limited supply, but the Jazz managed to gin up 58 tests to detect the virus among its players and staff.
“Being the first professional NBA player testing positive brought a lot of thoughts in my mind,” he said late last year. “It was, you know, just looking at stuff and wondering if you’re going to be okay, if you’re not going to be okay. Thinking about my family that wasn’t able to be with me. It was a lot to process at the time.”
The NBA resumed its season from within a contained environment in July. The Jazz were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. In December, Gobert signed a five-year, $205 million contract with the Jazz and, on Tuesday, was named to the NBA all-star team.
The Grand Princess: Two cruise ships in the Princess Cruise Lines fleet became early coronavirus hot spots. The Diamond Princess was quarantined in Asia in early February, with more than 700 of its 3,700 passengers testing positive for the virus after eventually being evacuated from the ship.
The Grand Princess had a similar fate. It was cruising near California in late February when it was announced that passengers on a prior voyage had contracted the virus. The vessel was ordered to drop anchor off the coast near San Francisco while testing supplies were brought onboard. By March 5, 21 positive tests had been returned.
The following day, Trump was touring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta when he suggested that he’d rather not evacuate the ship.
“I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” he said. “And it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship either, okay? It wasn’t their fault either, and they’re mostly Americans. So, I can live either way with it. I’d rather have them stay on, personally.”
His concern, in other words, was that evacuating the several hundred passengers might lead to a spike in case totals in the United States. (During a news conference on Feb. 26, he had similarly argued that the country’s numbers shouldn’t include Diamond Princess passengers evacuated to the United States.) The number of coronavirus cases soon doubled anyway.
After briefly being taken out of rotation, both the Diamond Princess and the Grand Princess are preparing for upcoming cruises. You can embark on an eight-day trip out of Tokyo on the Diamond Princess in July, or a seven-day trip along the West Coast on the Grand Princess in September. That trip does include a stop in San Francisco, should you be wondering.
Life Care Center nursing home in Kirkland, Wash.: The danger of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, was reinforced by news from a small nursing home in Washington state. During the early months of the pandemic, more than 40 people at Life Care Center died of covid-19 before there was broad understanding of how to stop the spread of a disease that’s proved particularly dangerous for older Americans.
On Feb. 29, the CDC announced that the first recorded death caused by covid-19 had occurred in Washington as it also announced the first reported case in a health-care worker: a staffer at Life Care Center. By March 3, the nursing home had locked down, asking its residents to stay in their rooms.
The scene was grim, as reported by California Sunday magazine.
“Since there were so few remaining staff members — by then, more than a third of Life Care’s staff had called out sick — some residents had not been showered or helped out of bed in days,” Katie Engelhart reported.
“Many of Life Care’s residents had spent that Tuesday watching their wall-mounted TVs,” Engelhart wrote. “From the news channels, they had learned about the coronavirus and how their nursing home was the first in the country to be infected by it — how Life Care was, in fact, ‘the epicenter’ of the coronavirus in the United States.
On that very day, three residents had died of the virus, bringing the facility’s death count to seven and the national death count to nine. But other residents had not watched the news or were confused by the keyed-up chatter of the network correspondents. They understood nothing, beyond that their children had stopped visiting.”
On Dec. 28, 300 days after that lockdown, the facility began vaccinating its patients against the virus.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt: Capt. Brett Crozier had been in command of the aircraft carrier for a few months when sailors began exhibiting symptoms of the virus. The beginning of March was spent in a desperate effort to stop the virus from spreading among the thousands of men and women packed onboard. This, too, was early enough in the pandemic that the focus was on widespread cleaning — “bleach-a-palooza” — instead of limiting airborne transmission.
On March 30, with 100 cases among his crew, Crozier sent an urgent email to Navy officials asking for facilities where sick crew members could be evacuated. Social distancing was impossible given the “warship’s inherent limitations of space.”
“Removing the majority of personnel from a deployed U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier and isolating them for two weeks may seem like an extraordinary measure,” the message read, according to a copy obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle. “Keeping over 4,000 young men and women on board the TR is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care.”
“We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die,” he wrote at another point. “If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors.”
After the message became public, Crozier was relieved of his command. (Trump himself had lashed out at the captain, saying he “shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter.”) Eventually, more than a quarter of the ship’s crew — 1,271 people — tested positive for the virus. Another 60 exhibited symptoms consistent with covid-19. Twenty-three sailors were hospitalized, and one died.
Crozier’s termination was later reviewed by the Navy and ultimately upheld. (Crozier “did not do enough, soon enough, to fulfill [his] primary obligations,” Adm. Mike Gilday told reporters in June.) He is still in the Navy and holds the rank of captain but now has a staff job in San Diego. The Theodore Roosevelt is in service, stationed near the Philippines.
Last week, The Washington Post reported that there had been another outbreak of the virus onboard.
Nancy Messonnier: One of the first public warnings from the government about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic came in a conference call with reporters on Feb. 25.
“Disruption to everyday life might be severe,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said. She told reporters that she’d spoken with her children about the situation and told them that “while I didn’t think they were at risk right now, we as a family ought to be preparing for significant disruption to our lives.”
At the time, this seemed like an outlier position or, perhaps, a worst-case scenario. That it came from Messonnier, a senior government official, jolted the country’s understanding of the risk. Stocks plunged following the news conference, infuriating a president reportedly concerned about the economic risk of the pandemic as his reelection contest loomed.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump called Messonnier’s boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and threatened to fire her. Instead, he shifted responsibility for managing the crisis to Vice President Mike Pence, giving himself more control over the response.
Donald Trump: On Nov. 3, Americans went to the polls to decide whether Trump should have a second term in office. They decided he shouldn’t. An analysis conducted by a Trump pollster found that his response to the pandemic played a significant role. In states that flipped from red to blue since 2016, voters were far more critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
Trump is now a private citizen in Florida, having himself contracted the virus in October.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/...s-stories/
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