Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: The White House official charged with leading the U.S. response to deadly pandemics left nearly two years ago as his global health security team was disbanded. Federal funding for preventing and mitigating the spread of infectious disease has been repeatedly threatened since President Trump’s election. Despite the mounting threat of a coronavirus outbreak in the United States, Trump said he has no regrets about those actions and that expertise and resources can be quickly ramped up…

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The Washington Post reports: California has a second case of community transmission of the coronavirus, a 65-year-old resident of Santa Clara County who has no known history of travel to countries hit hard by the outbreak, people familiar with the case said Friday. There is also no apparent connection between the new patient and anyone else with the disease caused by the virus, covid-19. On Wednesday, health authorities revealed the nation’s first case of community transmission, a woman in Solano…

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By Caroline Chen, Marshall Allen, Lexi Churchill and Isaac Arnsdorf, ProPublica, February 28, 2020 As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test. The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out…

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Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a special adviser to the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), speaking on MSNBC’s Hardball: "I found most of what he said incoherent." — Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel on Trump's press conference regarding the coronavirus. #Hardball pic.twitter.com/HIHxYLS1E5 — Hardball (@hardball) February 27, 2020 The New York Times reports: When Hurricane Dorian crashed into the Atlantic Coast in September, President Trump assumed a take-charge role in response. But he undermined his own effectiveness after it became apparent that…

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The Daily Beast reports: President Donald Trump is frantically trying to quell criticism that he and his team were caught off guard by the growing number of coronavirus cases worldwide, fearful that a narrative of dysfunction could complicate his reelection bid. Advisers to President Trump have for weeks tried to gather data about how quickly the virus spreads, how it can be stopped, and how to contain an outbreak in the future. But those efforts have largely remained behind closed…

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Politico reports: With the possibility of a U.S. outbreak growing by the day, Trump allies and advisers have grown increasingly worried that a botched coronavirus response will hit the U.S. economy. Even Donald Trump Jr. has mused to associates he hopes the White House does not screw up the response and put the president’s best reelection message at risk, said two individuals with knowledge of his comments. “Trump’s reelection effort is so closely tied to the strength of the stock…

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The New York Times reports: Religious pilgrims, migrant workers, businessmen, soldiers and clerics all flow constantly across Iran’s frontiers, often crossing into countries with few border controls, weak and ineffective governments and fragile health systems. Now, as it struggles to contain the spread of the coronavirus, Iran is also emerging as the second focal point after China for the spread of the disease. Cases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates — even one in Canada…

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Watch: Video shows the Iranian deputy minister for health sweating and coughing during a press conference held one day before he announced he tested positive for #coronavirus. #COVID-19https://t.co/t49nL7i9va pic.twitter.com/GY4DbrQY9p — Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) February 25, 2020 The Guardian reports: Fears are growing across the Middle East that coronavirus has infiltrated a main pilgrimage route, which could lead the deadly pathogen to vulnerable refugee populations, causing perhaps unprecedented public health crises across the region. Concern is centred on the Iranian…

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Laurie Garrett wrote last month: When Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared the Wuhan coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern on Thursday, he praised China for taking “unprecedented” steps to control the deadly virus. “I have never seen for myself this kind of mobilization,” he noted. “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.” The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting…

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Peter Nicholas writes: When a senior White House aide would brief President Donald Trump in 2018 about an Ebola-virus outbreak in central Africa, it was plainly evident that hardships roiling a far-flung part of the world didn’t command his attention. He was zoning out. “It was like talking to a wall,” a person familiar with the matter told me. Now a new coronavirus that originated in China is confronting him with a potential pandemic, a problem that Trump seems ill-prepared…

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