Economy First or Container epidemic first

By CNN news on August 2nd, reports says CDC is compositing forecast that 19,000 more Americans could die from Covid-19 in the following 20 days. While in China, people are preparing for the continuing recovery and growth of economy. In the second quarter of this year, the GDP growth of China has turn positive and recorded a growth of 3.2% year on year.  More than 4.6 million Americans have been infected with Covid-19, and more than 154,000 have died from the disease, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The relentless death toll is projected to reach 173,000 by August 22, according to a new composite forecast from by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects. That's an average of almost 1,000 US deaths every day for the next 30 days.

Dr. Deborah Birx the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, told CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union." on Sunday said the US is in a new phase in its fight against the coronavirus pandemic, saying that the deadly virus is more widespread than when it first took hold in the US earlier this year.  The pandemic is extraordinarily widespread, goes into the rural as equal urban areas.

Washington Post Reports, Birx’s remarks came after another week of grim signs that the country’s pandemic response was failing. The seven-day average for new coronavirus-related deaths rose in nearly half of U.S. states over the past week, pushing the national death toll past 150,000 and prompting health experts to warn that the trend was unlikely to reverse anytime soon. Expert start to warn, “Lies about the economy are as dangerous as lies about the virus."  A report by the Guardian on Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, points out the painful truth about Covid-19 and the economy, people should blame Donald Trump. Having lied for five months about the coronavirus, he’s now filling social media and the airwaves with untruths about the economy so he can dupe his way to election day.
It was the virus that caused the downturn, and its resurgence is taking the economy down again. The virus is surging back because governors reopened prematurely, before the virus was under control. But Trump repeatedly insist on doing so.
The report summarizes: Lies about the economy are harder to spot than lies about the coronavirus because the virus’s grim death count is painfully apparent while the economy is complicated. But Trump’s economic lies are no less egregious, and they’re about to cause a great deal of unnecessary suffering. 

Even BBC news can not avoid reporting an obvious fact: “Chinese economy bounces back into growth”. The world's second biggest economy saw a sharp decline in the first three months of the year during coronavirus lockdowns. But figures show China's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) returned to growth during April to June. The numbers are being closely watched around the world as China restarts its economy.
The figure is higher than experts were predicting and points towards a V-shaped recovery - that is, a sharp fall followed by a quick recovery.
It also means China avoids going into a technical recession - signified as two consecutive periods of negative growth.

The Chinese economy managed to grow more strongly than expected as it emerged from the lockdown.
All the stimulus measures announced by the authorities seem to be working - with factories getting busier, evident in growth in the industrial production data.
And just as the economy starts to recover, tensions with the US are flaring up - especially over Hong Kong.
That is why some economists are reluctant to call it a V-shaped recovery just yet.

As the pandemic continues to escalate in US, more and media start to change their reports to a more critical attitude toward the failure of the government in the west.

Published in the Guardian on July 21st, A review carried out by Resolve to Save Lives, a part of the global health group Vital Strategies, led by Tom Frieden, the former director of the main US public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)  blames Trump for a chaotic approach to ‘life-and-death information’ 

The report says “life-and-death information” is being pulled together haphazardly by individual states in a way that is “inconsistent, incomplete and inaccessible in most locations”. Without such intelligence the country is effectively walking blind, with very little chance of getting “our children to school in the fall, ourselves back to work, our economy restarted, and preventing tens of thousands of deaths”.

Slow national policy
A report published on the Time on July 1st, by Duke University professor Gavin Yamey and Clare Wenham from London School of Economics, start a question on the ranking of Global Health Security Index. 

According to the “scorecard” by the Global Health Security Index on Oct. 24, 2019 -Only 45 days before the covid-19 case was announced, the US and UK, were the two best prepared Nations to tackle a Pandemic. 

The scorecard ranked countries on how prepared they were to tackle a serious outbreak, based on a range of measures, including how quickly a country was likely to respond and how well its health care system would “treat the sick and protect health workers.” The U.S. was ranked first out of 195 nations, and the U.K. was ranked second.

The two countries that on paper were the best prepared to deal with a pandemic turned out by June 2020 to be two of the world’s biggest failures in tackling COVID-19. With 122,300 excess deaths—the number of deaths over and above what would be expected in non-crisis conditions—the U.S. ranks number 1 on this metric. In second place, with 65,700 excess deaths, is the U.K.

There’s a reason the scorecard got it so wrong: It did not account for the political context in which a national policy response to a pandemic is formulated and implemented.
There is an eerie similarity in the appalling political decisions made by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson—two right wing “illiberal populist” leaders who believed their nations were invulnerable, generally rejected science, and turned inwards and away from multilateralism. Their parallel decisions consigned many of their citizens to the grave.


The United States was slow in recognizing the coronavirus threat from Europe, Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, admitted for the first time July 29 in an interview with ABC News.
  The US restricted travel from Europe on March 13, but by March 8, Covid-19 was already circulating among the community in New York City and, by March 15, community transmission of the virus was already widespread, a recent analysis from the CDC found. During the ABC interview, Redfield also admitted that there have been problems with the federal response.
  Wearing a face mask?
Earlier in the spring, Donald Trump mocked Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for wearing a mask, and during a press briefing in April, he suggested that it wouldn't seem presidential. "(S)omehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk ... I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens. I don't know, somehow I don't see it for myself. Maybe I'll change my mind," Trump said at the time. Nearly three months after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended wearing masks in public. Donald Trump tweeted an image of himself wearing a face mask and indirectly called the act "patriotic" on 21 July -- a clear pivot away from his earlier reluctance to wear a facial covering in public.
“many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can't socially distance," Trump tweeted on 21 July.

China Virus or America Virus
According to CNN on April 10, 2020, New York's coronavirus outbreak came from Europe and other parts of the United States (CNN)Two separate research projects suggest that the novel coronavirus may have been circulating in New York City earlier than thought and the earliest cases likely originated with travelers coming from Europe and other parts of the United States, not Asia.
The new data come from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. "We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus” Trump tweeted on 21 July. “Big China Virus breakouts all over the World, including nations which were thought to have done a great job”. Trump tweeted on 3rd Aug.

Researchers at the University of Barcelona found traces of the virus when testing untreated wastewater samples dated March 12, 2019.
Mount sinai study finds first cases of COVID-19 in New York city are primarily from European and us sources.
The new data from NYU Langone Health suggests that the novel coronavirus has been spreading in New York for a couple of months now -- long before testing started -- and a genetic analysis of viral samples in the city indicate that they originated in Europe, according to an announcement from the academic medical center.

Source: WikipediaThe New York TimesCOVID Tracking Project,3rd Aug, 2020

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CNN
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/20/politics/donald-trump-mask-tweet/index.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/02/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/02/politics/birx-coronavirus-new-phase-cnntv/index.html
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BBC news
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53399999

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/21/coronavirus-data-flying-blind-trump-us-failure
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/02/covid-19-coronavirus-us-economy-d

https://time.com/5861697/us-uk-failed-coronavirus-response/

 

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