What Else is Happening?
By: Terry Schwadron
Tags: Nursing Homes, Government, Trump Administration, Social Media, Health

Terry H. Schwadron

March 23, 2020

Offices, schools, restaurants and gyms are closing for a coronavirus hiatus, public health officials are trying to control fear as well as disease, and Donald Trump and the country are facing an economic miasma at the same time.

Public health officials are particularly worried about the elderly and nursing homes as incubators of the disease, they say, and everyone else is worried about straight scientific information.

In that light, here are a view reports of other things going on at the exact same time:

— Tracking the phones of infected.

Days after Israel started tracking the cell phones of individually infected patients, the U.S. government apparently is in talks with Facebook, Google and a tech companies and health experts about how they can use aggregated location data from Americans’ phones to combat coronavirus, including tracking whether people are keeping one another at safe distances to stem the outbreak. Public health experts clearly are interested in this information, and tech companies apparently are arguing that they could organize the data in anonymous, aggregated form. That could be used to map the spread of the infection, according to a report in the Seattle Times. It is unclear to what degree these parties are reflecting any discomfort on how it’s implemented, given the sensitivity when it comes to details about their daily whereabouts. Facebook executives said the government is interested in the patterns rather than the individual contacts, which is what the Israelis had said they were seeking.

— Relaxing regulations for nursing homes.

Even as public health is targeting nursing homes as particularly dangerous, the Trump administration apparently is working to lift regulations governing nursing homes, including rules meant to curb deadly infections. The New York Times reported that the effort has been under way since last summer, long before the current virus. It would eliminate rules from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid that require infectious disease specialists on staff, or that would enforce certain periodic inspections . The centers oversee rules for nursing homes housing 2.5 million elderly patients.

The Times said the proposed change, which the centers had sought to allow nursing homes to operate with fewer burdensome regulations, followed a lobbying campaign by the nursing-home industry, according to public records and interviews. The coronavirus has killed 13 residents at a nursing home in Washington State and dozens more residents and employees there have fallen ill.

Attorneys general in 17 states have called the proposed rules overly vague and a threat to “the mental and physical security of some of the most vulnerable residents of our states.” At this point, the change is still a proposal.

— Federal vaccine sites not working.

A decade ago, the federal government wanted to address unpreparedness for pandemics and biomedical attacks, in part, by setting up four federal vaccine development sites in Florida, Texas, North Carolina and Maryland. Now we have a pandemic, and we’re seeking a vaccine. But, The Washington Post tells us, none of the sites have developed or are close to delivering medicines to counter this outbreak. Two of the sites are taking no role, and the other two expect to conduct small-scale testing of potential coronavirus vaccines. Instead, the government is hiring private contractors and labs to do this work.

In 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Pentagon awarded contracts worth $670 million beginning to build or expand the four manufacturing complexes. The idea was to meet the military’s or government’s needs with “capabilities to rapidly respond” to “emerging and genetically engineered infectious disease outbreaks.’’ The facilities were structured to handle laboratory tasks for both government and commercial clients. Nevertheless, the results have fallen short, sqid the Post report. One critic is Robert Kadlec, Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, who has found problems since 2017.

— Leaping to the Trump defense.

Despite any number of public reports that showed errors and contradictions in Donald Trump’s statements to the nation over coronavirus, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has gone out of his way to assure that Trump made no errors. At a time when the nation craves straight talk about disease control, Trump, of course, continues to make remarks that contained errors that had to be repaired. Nevertheless, as an example, Mnuchin said that Trump hadn’t actually messed up. “I don’t think he got things wrong at all,” Mnuchin said. That kind of rollback has come from the medical experts, governors,

Whatever “misinterpretation” had come from the president’s own lips, of course.

Mistakes have reflected policies of the government and the availability of various medical materials or testing or vaccines.

As Mnuchin maintains, it’s our fault for reading the president’s words literally.

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