US Navy called a ‘disgrace’ for dismissing captain after letter begging for help for sick crew went publicPOLITICAL PURGE TO SAVE FACE FOR BONE-SPURS TRUMP
April 2, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris

The captain of the nuclear aircraft carrier the USS Theodore Roosevelt begged for help while the coronavirus quickly spread among his crew. While Capt. Brett Crozier may have been on track to be an Admiral, he’s now been relieved of command.

It prompted outrage online as people demanded he be reinstated. Many noted that the captain only received help after the letter was released to the public. Amid the chaos of the crisis, the White House, Pentagon and Trump government has been caught flat-footed as they scramble to make up for lost time.

The White House is pushing back against criticism saying that they founded the coronavirus task force at the end of January. It begs the question then why the task force didn’t work on the shortage of ventilators and personal protective equipment then or why they didn’t usher in a shutdown then.

Some noted that Capt. Crozier was trying to save lives, where Eddie Gallagher, who was convicted of war crimes, was pardoned by the president.

You can see the outrage about Capt. Crozier below:

Can’t have a Captain speaking truth. That doesn’t make the WH look good.

—

Rob Anderson for Louisiana (@RobAnderson2018) April 2, 2020

All of these things happening is on you Trumpsters, all of it! in your hands!
— ellie gamble (@GambleNini) April 2, 2020

Why, cause saving lives to prevent this serious outbreak from being swept under the rug is NOT how this admin works?
— Anne T. (@at_lv61) April 2, 2020


Sounds like some China shit
— chandler hart (@chan_man36) April 2, 2020



We have to take our country back from this tyrannical government who hates truth. This move by the @USNavy is disgusting.
— Dragon Fire (@dawnndragonfire) April 2, 2020


Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher was pardoned and reinstated by Trump despite being found guilty of war crimes by a jury of his peers. U.S. Navy Captain Brett Crozier was removed from his command for sounding the alarm on COVID danger to sailors under his authority. Trump's military.
— Lady Charlotte Clymer

(@cmclymer) April 2, 2020


This sounds like…China:
“The Navy is expected to announce it has fired the captain who sounded the alarm about an outbreak of COVID-19 aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.” https://t.co/Y7bchQ9JwE
— Amy Siskind

(@Amy_Siskind) April 2, 2020


ABJECT STUPIDITY! @SECNAV @USNavyCNO @NavyMCPON. You had better drop your anchors on this one. This “sailors first” admiral may be Secretary of the Navy next Jan. He should be because he cares more about my beloved Navy than you do. https://t.co/13jk4AHfXI via @nbcnews
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) April 2, 2020

This is an absolute disgrace.
This captain should be honored for saving lives and caring for our service people in ways @realDonaldTrump and the @GOP never will.#MAGA, indeed.https://t.co/U0Wyk9QHf0
— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) April 2, 2020

The captain of an aircraft carrier warned that action was needed to keep sailors from dying. With actual lives at stake, the Navy acted swiftly to…dismiss the captain because his letter went public https://t.co/YeMKQmkbkc
— Mark Berman (@markberman) April 2, 2020


The Trump administration rewards war criminals like Eddie Gallagher & fires a Captain advocating for the health & welfare of his crew. #Navy #TrumptheWorstPresidentEVER
— JJ MendIovitz (@jaybirdsatx) April 2, 2020

Sad to hear that the Navy has fired the Captain of the USS Roosevelt because he informed them of sailors with the virus… #USSTheodoreRoosevelt
— coffee-talk (@coffeet90685829) April 2, 2020

Captain Brett Crozier pleaded for help as #coronavirus cases increased aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt. The Navy relieved him of command.
“Sailors do not need to die… We are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our sailors.” #COVID19https://t.co/k1897webuY pic.twitter.com/SbqNzg3JmW
— Bryan Dawson (@BryanDawsonUSA) April 2, 2020

Navy Captain Brett Crozier was removed from the USS Theodore Roosevelt I’m sure because he wrote a letter to his superiors imploring them for help. In my mind as a former Navy wife (husband USN/Ret) he’s a hero! #NavyHero
— DoodleMom (@SnowflakePeg) April 2, 2020


@JoeBiden Since I'm sure that you will be our next president (Thank God!), 1 of your 1st acts should be the restoring of Captain Brett Crozier as commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Or how about Sec of the Navy? A captain who safeguards his sailors should't lose his command. pic.twitter.com/RhFh9r3eyj
— A Horse With No Name (@b111861) April 2, 2020

More than 100,000 Americans are expected to die after a slow initial government response to the coronavirus pandemic and the first person to be fired is … the aircraft carrier captain who pleaded for help for his stricken crew. ⁦@ckubeNBC⁩ https://t.co/guDOImfekb
— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) April 2, 2020

If a single sailor dies, this will be Trump’s Benghazi. #USSTheodoreRoosevelt https://t.co/EfSocqhqi5
— j.jo. (@tickedoffJJ) April 2, 2020


@USNavyCNO God bless Capt. Brett Crozier who thought more of his crew than you & Donald Trump.

Capt Crozier did the right thing. His sailors, & the American people, thank him, salute him, & we’ll never forget him.#USSTheodoreRoosevelt #COVID19 #USNavy #KAG #TrumpVirusCoverup https://t.co/Tnvj8OUwoD
— Smiling_Lillie

 

(@lillie_randolph) April 2, 2020


So USS Navy Commander is scapegoat & been relieve of his duty because his letter got leak or release to the media – That's just BullShxt#Dems #BlueWave @TheDemocrats #USNavy #USSTheodoreRoosevelt #Navy
— Steph Banatte (@bana2166) April 2, 2020

This is reprehensible. If anything, an officer should be commended for trying to save the lives of those who serve with him. #USSTheodoreRoosevelt https://t.co/7UxXfsCgaj

—

Rosemary McLaughlin (@RosemaryMcL) April 2, 2020


.@EsperDoD you clearly don’t give rats ass abt soldiers/sailors/airmen under your command by letting @SECNAV relieve #CaptBrettCrozier of #USSTheodoreRoosevelt command. @realDonaldTrump Admin’s incompetence & lack of care for men/women under its command > its lack of decency.
— DM VOTE BLUE (@dceagle11) April 2, 2020

No one. Not one American should ever wonder how the Nazis intimidated, took over Germany, and murdered millions.
Trump and all his lackeys, including the spineless DODers, are trying to destroy our republic.
What are we prepared to do?#USSTheodoreRoosevelt #Crozier https://t.co/R2SscF01tn
— Rachel Cunningham (@RCHanoi) April 2, 2020

WATCH: Devastating supercut video blows up Pence’s defense of Trump’s handling of coronavirus

April 2, 2020 By Travis Gettys


Vice President Mike Pence insisted President Donald Trump had never “belittled the threat of the coronavirus,” but video evidence proves him wrong.

The vice president defended Trump during an interview Wednesday with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, but a devastating supercut posted online by a group supporting Joe Biden blows holes in Pence’s claim

The video compiled by the pro-Biden Unite the Country super PAC shows Trump repeatedly dismissing the coronavirus outbreak, which he predicted would simply disappear “like a miracle.”

Mike Pence today said Donald Trump has never belittled the threat of the #coronavirus.
Well, we have the receipts. pic.twitter.com/WAnC9ghzJC
— Unite the Country (@UniteCountryPAC) April 1, 2020

‘Nightmare scenario that everyone predicted’: As millions struggle to meet basic needs, Trump organization requests financial relief

April 2, 2020 By Common Dreams


“I’d be interested in knowing what help Trump and Jared are extending to their tenants as they ask for help themselves.”

While millions of Americans face uunemployment, the loss of health coverage, and difficulty affording necessities over the coming months as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump’s business empire is reportedly seeking relief from outstanding debt and loans.

Trump signed a bill last week approving a one-time, means-tested $1,200 direct payment to some American workers amid the economic crisis that’s resulted from the national public health emergency that has seen more than 236,000 people in the U.S. sickened by the coronavirus. According to NBC News, those payments may not get to some households for up to five months from now, and the sum is only expected to support many recipients for about two weeks—once it arrives.

While millions of Americans struggle to pay rent and bills in the coming weeks and with little assistance being offered across-the-board by the federal government, an increasing number of U.S. residents fear they will be unable to make payments as they wait to return to work.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, the Trump Organization has asked its largest creditor, Deutsche Bank, if it can postpone the repayment of some of its loans. The company also requested relief from its monthly payments to Palm Beach County, Florida, for the land on which one of the president’s golf courses sits—citing the pandemic.

According to the Times, the president’s son, Eric Trump expressed hope that the county and the bank would work with the Trump Organization, which Eric—along with Donald Trump Jr.—has helped run since Trump took office.

“These days everybody is working together,” Eric Trump told the Times. “Tenants are working with landlords, landlords are working with banks. The whole world is working together as we fight through this pandemic.”

While the federal government passed a moratorium on evictions for select homeowners and renters as part of the CARES Act, relief has varied from state to state, even though residents of a majority of states have been ordered to stay at home to slow the spread of the virus.

“It’s not fair—everything is shut down, you can’t work. Our mayor says, ‘Stay home, don’t go outside,’ but we’re expected to pay the cost of subsidizing” landlords, Atlanta-based restaurant cook Casey James told the Washington Post Wednesday. “If we’re really in this disaster, everything should be frozen.”

Special treatment regarding Trump’s company’s payments while millions of Americans will be expected to fulfill their financial obligations in the coming weeks is “the nightmare scenario that everyone predicted when Trump refused to divest from his assets,” Mother Jones reporter Russ Choma tweeted

Podcast host Joe Lockhart wondered on Twitter whether Trump’s company would allow its own tenants to skip rent payments as a result of the pandemic.

I’d be interested in knowing what help Trump and Jared are extending to their tenants as they ask for help themselves. https://t.co/mCJxUoDr1m
— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) April 2, 2020

“We have to pay Donald Trump for the privilege of him getting to play golf during work hours at his own clubs, but he doesn’t have to pay his own bills,” wrote Crooked Media editor Brian Beutler.

We have to pay Donald Trump for the privilege of him getting to play golf during work hours at his own clubs, but he doesn't have to pay his own bills. https://t.co/89C8Kk9gvV
— subscribe to my newsletter (@brianbeutler) April 2, 2020

Trump’s tribe of wacko supporters have spiraled out of control — and now they’re a major threat to public health and safety

April 2, 2020 By Amanda Marcotte, Salon- Commentary


Scenes from an America that was widely infected with conspiracism even before people started getting infected with the new coronavirus:

On Tuesday afternoon, a train engineer named Eduardo Moreno, apparently with great deliberation, derailed the freight train he was manning in Southern California, nearly killing occupants of three nearby cars. His target? The USNS Mercy, a Navy medical ship that’s been assisting nearby hospitals with COVID-19 patients.

“I had to. People don’t know what’s going on here,” Moreno reportedly told the officer who arrested him. Apparently, Moreno believes in a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus crisis is a hoax being deployed to cover for a shadowy takeover of the government.
Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been a stabilizing presence during the crisis, quietly and calmly doing everything he can to correct the firehose of lies Donald Trump has been drenching the country with on a daily basis.

For his service, Fauci now requires a security detail, due in no small part to fanatical Trump fans who have embraced conspiracy theories that paint Fauci as part of a “deep state” conspiracy to unseat Trump by faking the threat of COVID-19.

While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, refused until this week to face the threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic and dragged his feet about issuing a shelter-in-place order (saying that Trump hadn’t asked him to) the city of Tampa was actually taking action with strict bans on gatherings and movement. Rodney Howard-Browne, a Trump-loving preacher who has claimed coronavirus is a “phantom plague” invented to trick people into getting vaccines, was arrested for defying those orders and holding packed church services anyway.

DeSantis finally cracked and issued a statewide shelter-in-place order, but exempted church services — effectively overriding the local restrictions in Tampa and elsewhere.

“This order was clearly designed and worded to provide legal and political cover for Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne,” legal expert Jeff Schwartz told a local ABC affiliate.

Chanel Rion, a “reporter” from the far-right, conspiracy theory-obsessed One America News Network, was nailed for repeatedly violating the social distancing rules in the White House press briefing room, showing up in the throng on days when she wasn’t scheduled to attend. The fact that she was ever invited to the White House should be a scandal all by itself — Rion personally and her network routinely spread lies favorable to Trump — but it quickly became clear that she was getting favorable treatment even under the new, coronavirus-caused limits imposed on the briefing room.

Caught with their pants down, the White House reluctantly told Rion she had to follow the rules.

WHITE HOUSE PANDEMIC FUNDING BILL SIGNING MARCH 27,2020\

These four stories are just a snapshot of a growing threat that right-wing conspiracy theorists pose to public health and safety as the number of coronavirus cases grows. (And the rate of growth is now much faster outside New York City, by the way, than in that crowded metropolis.) The threat is twofold, as these stories indicate.

First, there’s the threat of the virus itself. Trump-loving conspiracy theorists are desperate to believe the coronavirus isn’t real — or at least isn’t as bad as the “deep state” is saying. So they’re risking their own health, and other people’s, by openly defying the public health measures put in place to slow the spread.

So far, at least one such prominent person — a Virginia pastor who publicly called the coronavirus a “mass hysteria” — has died after contracting the virus. Unfortunately, the Trump-inspired middle finger to social distancing rules isn’t just a threat to the conspiracy theorists. They’re also potentially turning themselves into vectors who can infect ordinary people who aren’t willing to put their lives on the line to defend Donald Trump.

Second, there’s clearly a threat of violence and mayhem at the hands of conspiracy theorists who, like that train engineer in California, decide to defend their beloved orange leader by taking the fight directly to the “deep state” they believe is faking or hyping this virus.

With 200,000 people infected and nearly 5,000 dead already — and the numbers rising every hour and every day — one might think that conspiracy theorists trying to deny or minimize this virus would be humbled and begin to back down.

Unfortunately, psychology tells us otherwise. When people are faced with evidence that they’re wrong and that their entire worldview is false — including the belief that Trump is a great leader — they tend to dig in deeper, spinning out ever more elaborate rationalizations meant to explain that they were right all along and that reality-based people who disagree have sinister motives.

To make it worse, these conspiracy theorists have been constantly empowered and enabled by Trump, who is a conspiracy theorist himself. With his daily tirade of lies, hunches, harebrained theories and baseless speculation, Trump has helped normalize and encourage his followers to just invent reality for themselves. Worse, the fact that he continues to get away with it helps bolster their view that there are no consequences for flouting reality so boldly.

After all, Trump literally attempted to blackmail a foreign leader, the president of Ukraine, in order to boost a conspiracy theory about Joe Biden. (I know that seems like a thousand years ago. It was less than eight months!) Yes, Trump was impeached by the House for those obvious crimes, but he paid no real political cost for it and was acquitted by Republican senators who largely acknowledged that he’d done something wrong and then lied about it. No wonder Trump’s followers have concluded they can promote wild, counterfactual conspiracy theories without fearing the consequences, even if people die.

In fact, the Trumpian conspiracy theorists are getting desperate. The “hoax” narrative is getting harder and harder to sell. Indeed, the president himself seems to have given up on that one, admitting that this pandemic is a serious problem. So his acolytes are only going to try harder, lie bigger and take more obnoxious and possibly violent actions, in hopes that going big will allow them to maintain the biggest lie of all — that Trump is a wise and brilliant leader who knows what he’s doing.



Add this one to the growing pile of reasons that Trump is to blame for this current crisis. He twiddled his thumbs and lied about the threat for months instead of doing something about it. He continues to screw this up by not doing enough to fight the virus, or to protect the public from the massive economic fallout, which now looks as if it will rival the Great Depression of the 1930s. By being a shameless liar and conspiracy theorist, he laid the groundwork for his followers to react in a way that’s presents a massive threat to public health. themselves and others. There is no telling how much worse they will get before this is all over.

The American South has resisted social distancing measures — and we’re all going to pay the price
April 2, 2020 By AlterNet


As you can see from the New York Times’ examination of travel patterns in the United States, there has been a wide and largely regional disparity across the country in terms of who was quick to self-isolate and who wasn’t. Most of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Upper Midwest, and the West Coast had issued stay-at-home orders by March 27. Other states that were proactive include New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, and Louisiana. The urban areas in Texas tried to be proactive even as their state government opposed them. The South, as a whole, did not instruct people to stay at home and the result is that their travel patterns remained normal, or close to normal.

This is going to matter later.

The inconsistencies in policies—and in when they are imposed—may create new problems, even for places that set limits weeks ago.

“Let’s assume that we flatten the curve, that we push transmission down in the Bay Area and we walk away with 1 percent immunity,” said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. “Then, people visit from regions that have not sheltered in place, and we have another run of cases. This is going to happen.”


There’s a tradeoff to self-quarantining. People don’t get infected with COVID-19, so people don’t survive the infection and get immunity. The isolated communities are nearly as vulnerable to a new outbreak as they were before all this began. It’s worth doing anyway for a variety of reasons, including that it limits how many people are flooding our unprepared and undersupplied hospitals, and that it buys time for researchers to find effective treatments and develop a vaccine. Hopefully, getting COVID-19 in the fall or winter will be more survivable than getting it now.

But areas that were slow or still refuse to isolate and limit travel have spiked their own infection rates and spread the virus far and wide. They’ll have a higher level of immunity but that’s not going to be helpful to the rest of the country.

Looking at the charts, there seems to be more going on than just whether or not a given state government asked people to shelter in place. Outside of the South, people seem to have complied with this even in the absence of official guidance. Meanwhile, with the exception of parts of Louisiana and South Florida, the states of the former Confederacy all look the same regardless of what their governors set as policy. Something cultural explains why Southerners didn’t heed the advice they were hearing in the media, and it’s not just support for Trump. He has plenty of support in the prairies states and Mountain West, and they did significantly reduce their travel. The pattern is visible even in a blue state like Virginia and a purple one like North Carolina, both of which have Democratic governors.

Whether religiosity explains it, or a probably related skepticism toward scientific expert advice, or maybe something to do with their car culture, I don’t know. But their slowness to respond to this outbreak has undermined the effectiveness of the efforts of the areas that did respond. And, because of the nature of this disease, we’re all going to be paying for that for the foreseeable future.

Here are the 4 most stunning revelations about Jared Kushner’s ever-growing role in Trump’s coronavirus response

JARED IS RUNNING A PARALLEL CORONAVIRUS CRISIS TEAM MADE UP OF HIMSELF, THE GRAND POOBAH;THE  MINISTER OF EVERYTHING.
AND THAT'S ALL 
By Alex Henderson, AlterNet- Commentary 4/2/2020

As the worldwide death toll from the coronavirus pandemic surges past 48,500 (according to figures reported by John Hopkins University in Baltimore early Thursday morning, April 2) and the United States becomes #3 in deaths from COVID-19 (behind only Italy and Spain), President Donald Trump is trying to give the impression that he is being as proactive as possible. Gone are the days when Trump irresponsibly described the pandemic as a “hoax” and made the ludicrous claim that Democrats and Never Trump conservatives were exaggerating its dangers. And Trump’s efforts to appear proactive are asserting themselves not only with his coronavirus task force (which includes medical experts Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx), but also, with a separate coronavirus team led by White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner (the president’s son-in-law).

Kushner’s activities during the pandemic are the focus of an in-depth article written by journalists Adam Cancryn and Dan Diamond and published in Politico this week. According to Cancryn and Diamond, “What started two-and-a-half weeks ago as an effort to utilize the private sector to fix early testing failures has become an all-encompassing portfolio for Kushner, who…. has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government: expanding test access, ramping up industry production of needed medical supplies, and figuring out how to get those supplies to key locations.”

Here are some of the most important points from Politico and other media outlets about Kushner’s role in the Trump Administration’s response to coronavirus.

1. Kushner reportedly told Trump that Andrew Cuomo was exaggerating the need for ventilations in New York State — whereas Anthony Fauci agrees with Cuomo

In Democratic circles, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is being praised as “America’s governor” for his aggressive response to the pandemic. Cuomo has been warning that hospitals in his state, especially in New York City, are absolutely overwhelmed but will be even more overwhelmed in the weeks ahead. And according to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, Kushner reportedly told Trump that Cuomo is exaggerating the need for ventilators in New York State — a claim Trump has echoed.


On March 26, Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that New York didn’t need “40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.” But when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Dr. Anthony Fauci if he had any reason to doubt Cuomo, the expert immunologist responded, “There are a lot of different calculations. My experience, I tend to believe Gov. Cuomo.”





2. There is a ‘limited vetting of private companies’ in Kushner’s operation

In their Politico article, Cancryn and Diamond explain that with Kushner’s coronavirus operation, “People around Kushner are fielding all manner of outside pitches, making it difficult for the group to stay focused. And there is limited vetting of private companies and executives’ financial interests, raising questions about the motivations and potential conflicts inherent in an operation that relies on an ill-defined and ever-expanding group of outside contributors.”

3. CREW fears a lack of transparency

Cancryn and Diamond, in their Politico piece, note that the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has expressed some concerns about Kushner’s coronavirus operation — including a lack of transparency, insufficient vetting of the private companies involved and possible conflicts of interest.

Jordan Libowitz, a CREW spokesperson, explained, “They’re not necessarily doing something nefarious, but if they were, this is what they would do to hide it.”

4. Kushner’s coronavirus authority now exceeds that of Health Secretary Alex Azar

Previously, Alex Azar (secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) led Trump’s coronavirus response. But Cancryn and Diamond point out that Kushner now has a more prominent role than Azar, noting, “Kushner’s team has stepped in to coordinate decision-making at agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — and the scope of his authority now exceeds that of Health Secretary Alex Azar, the one-time leader of Trump’s coronavirus response.”

Opinion
Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed

Trump’s son-in-law has no business running the coronavirus response.


By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist
April 2, 2020, 8:34 p.m. ET

Jared Kushner in March. He made his debut at the White House coronavirus briefing on Thursday. Credit...Pool photo by Evan Vucci

Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror.

According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo’s estimate.)

Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”

Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures

Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday. This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.

The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner’s business record for her recent book “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,” speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006.

Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites.

His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — have left the dream of a two-state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy as “the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him.

“Mr. Kushner’s early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media’s coverage exaggerated the threat,” reported The Times. It was apparently at Kushner’s urging that Trump announced, falsely, that Google was about to launch a website that would link Americans with coronavirus testing. (As The Atlantic reported, a health insurance company co-founded by Kushner’s brother — which Kushner once owned a stake in — tried to build such a site, before the project was “suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.”)

The president was reportedly furious over the website debacle, but Kushner’s authority hasn’t been curbed. Politico reported that Kushner, “alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government,” including the production and distribution of medical supplies and the expansion of testing. Kushner has embedded his own people in the Federal Emergency Management Agency; a senior official described them to The Times as “a ‘frat party’ that descended from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government.”

Disaster response requires discipline and adherence to a clear chain of command, not the move-fast-and-break-things approach of start-up culture. Even if Kushner “were the most competent person in the world, which he clearly isn’t, introducing these kind of competing power centers into a crisis response structure is a guaranteed problem,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who helped manage the response to the Ebola crisis during Barack Obama’s administration, told me. “So you could have Trump and Kushner and Pence and the governors all be the smartest people in the room, but if there are multiple competing power centers trying to drive this response, it’s still going to be chaos.”

Competing power centers are a motif of this administration, and its approach to the pandemic is no exception. As The Washington Post reported, Kushner’s team added “another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed response to the crisis.” Nor does his operation appear to be internally coherent. “Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing — outside of that they all report up to Kushner,” reported Politico.

On Thursday, Governor Cuomo said that New York will run out of ventilators in six days. Perhaps Kushner’s projections were incorrect. “I don’t think the federal government is in a position to provide ventilators to the extent the nation may need them,” Cuomo said. “Assume you are on your own in life.” If not in life, certainly in this administration.

RELATED
More from Opinion on Jared Kushner:
Opinion | Frank Bruni: Jared Kushner Fails Up, Again Nov. 26, 2019
Opinion | Ross Douthat: The Corruption Before Trump Oct. 1, 2019
Opinion | The Editorial Board: Questions For and About Jared Kushner March 6, 2019

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. 

Republican baffled at ‘how our government operates’ now that Jared Kushner has taken charge of Trump’s coronavirus response

April 2, 2020 By Sky Palma


Of all the Trump administration officials tasked with responding to the coronavirus, Jared Kushner has not appeared at any of President Trump’s press briefings. As POLITICO points out, Kushner’s push to utilize the private sector to fix early testing failures is creating concern among some health-agency officials who think Trump may be deferring to Kushner over more seasoned experts, despite the potential conflicts of interest that arise.

“Kushner has relied on select officials, including his one-time former roommate and current U.S. foreign investment czar Adam Boehler, and Brad Smith, the head of Medicare’s innovation center, to organize and manage key projects — bypassing the bureaucratic structures and internal rivalries that slowed progress in the response’s early months,” writes POLITICO’s Adam Cancryn and Dan Diamond.

The limited vetting of private companies and the financial interests of executives have raised concerns, but officials working alongside Kushner insist that all ethics are being taken into consideration. But the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) isn’t entirely convinced.

“They’re not necessarily doing something nefarious, but if they were, this is what they would do to hide it,” CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz told POLITICO.

Even some recruited to aid Kushner’s effort have expressed reservations.

“I don’t know how our government operates anymore,” one Republican close to the administration told POLITICO, adding that the sudden authority granted to private sector groups left them with their “eyebrow raised unbelievably high.”

Read the full report over at POLITICO.

The FDA Is Easing Its Ban On Blood Donations From Gay And Bisexual Men Because Of The Coronavirus Pandemic

“The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented challenges to the US blood supply,” the FDA said Thursday.

Dominic Holden BuzzFeed News Reporter April 2, 2020

Guillaume Souvant / Getty Images

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday eased its ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men, citing the “unprecedented challenges to the US blood supply” during the coronavirus pandemic.

The new rules allow blood donations from men who have abstained from sex with another man for more than three months; for the past several years, gay and bisexual men couldn’t donate if they’d had sex with a man in the previous year.

Various forms of the ban — which was first implemented in the 1980s as a total prohibition to keep HIV out of the blood supply — were slowly dialed back under the Obama administration, which said screening and tests increasingly ensured a safe blood supply. Even the one-year policy was widely decried as de facto ban for gay and bisexual male blood donors.

But on Thursday, Peter Marks, director of FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, explained the new rules were prudent given that blood “donor centers have experienced a dramatic reduction in donations due to the implementation of social distancing and the cancellation of blood drives.”

“Based on recently completed studies and epidemiologic data,” he added, “the FDA has concluded that current policies regarding certain donor eligibility criteria can be modified without compromising the safety of the blood supply.”

In the scramble to curb the coronavirus pandemic, some medical facilities have announced plans to collect blood plasma — a subset of whole blood that contains antibodies — from those who had overcome COVID-19 and transfuse it to patients who are still sick with the disease. Gay men, however, had complained they were unable to help in the potentially lifesaving program.

The FDA also scaled back other restrictions on blood donations, according to a statement:

For female donors who would have been deferred for having sex with a man who had sex with another man: the agency is changing the recommended deferral period from 12 months to 3 months.

For those with recent tattoos and piercings: the agency is changing the recommended deferral period from 12 months to 3 months.

For those who have traveled to malaria-endemic areas (and are residents of malaria non-endemic countries): the agency is changing the recommended deferral period from 12 months to 3 months.

Alphonso David, head of the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, applauded the new rules but said, “more needs to be done.”

Democrat Scott Wiener, a member of the California Senate, said in a statement the policy was "still awful."

"The celibacy requirement still irrationally discriminates against gay and bisexual men by placing a celibacy requirement on them without placing that same requirement on sexually active straight people," he continued, adding that "modern HIV testing technology is so accurate and powerful that it will detect any HIV infection that occurred 10-14 days or longer before the donation."

Even the one-year rule had been blasted by lawmakers as being unscientific and needlessly biased. In 2016, several senators urged the Obama administration “to develop better blood donor deferral policies that are grounded in science, based on individual risk factors, don’t unfairly single out one group of individuals, and allow all healthy Americans to donate.”

It was not immediately clear if new rules would affect transgender people — for years, the FDA has enforced incoherent rules on transgender blood donors that effectively banned all transgender people from donating.

Dominic Holden is a political reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

THE NEW LINE FROM THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE IS THAT THEIR FAILURE TO PREPARE FOR THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC WAS THE CHINESE WERE AT FAULT......SERIOUSLY....DIDN'T LET THEM KNOW TILL JANUARY....NOT TRUE THEY LEARNED WHEN WE ALL DID DEC.17 WHEN CHINA ANNOUNCED THE WUHAN QUARANTINE. TRUMP ET AL IGNORED FURTHER WARNINGS FROM THEIR OWN INTELLIGENCE REPORTS IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY UNTIL TRUMP ANNOUNCED THE FIRST CASE OF FIFTEEN THAT WOULD BE GONE LIKE A MIRACLE IN NO TIME IN LATE FEBRUARY.

Staff Said The Free Mask Kits At Jo-Ann Fabrics Are Just Scraps From The Clearance Bin

"It is at best a thinly veiled excuse to draw customers into the store so they buy more nonessential products,” said one Jo-Ann store manager.

Amber Jamieson BuzzFeed News Reporter April 2, 2020

Alex Menendez / AP

An employee in Florida shows off face masks that were created by volunteers with donated materials from Jo-Ann fabric store on March 27.

The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today.

Does a free homemade mask kit made from clearance bin scraps count as an essential item during the coronavirus pandemic?

Major fabric retailer Jo-Ann Fabrics and Crafts claims that the free mask kits it gives out to customers are critical for health care workers and, therefore, its stores across the country need to remain open.

But that argument is not convincing everyone — even Jo-Ann workers themselves, four of whom told BuzzFeed News their stores were supplying poor-quality fabrics and materials in what they viewed as a slapdash effort to remain open.

“We’re trying to keep it [to what the company has described as] the correct kind of fabric— high thread count, 100% cotton — but it's gotten to the point where we are just grabbing random bolts of fabric off the shelves, whatever fits," said one store manager near Seattle, who asked to remain anonymous, like all employees interviewed for this article, in order to protect their employment. "We burned through all our clearance fabric."

"It’s kind of crazy we’re still open to the public," said a Jo-Ann employee from a store in Portland, Oregon.

The company denied the mask kit program had ulterior motives. “While we are sensitive to our Team Members' perception in this uncertain and frightening time, this is in no way a ploy,” a Jo-Ann spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.


Alex Menendez / AP

Wearing masks to stop the spread of the coronavirus has become more commonplace in everyday settings, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is weighing changes to its recommendation that only those with the virus or in a health care setting should wear them. On Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti recommended citizens “use homemade face coverings when they are in public and interacting with others,” such as a trip to the supermarket.

Homemade masks may help reduce spit or droplets from infected individuals, if made out of tightly woven cotton and used properly — such as washing hands before or after removal, washing masks after use, and maintaining social distancing. But homemade masks are not recommended for a health care environment, unless no other options are available.

Some officials aren’t convinced either by Jo-Ann’s argument that it is ultimately benefiting health care workers by remaining open.

On Monday, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel denied the craft company's request to classify its retail workers as "critical infrastructure workers." Instead, Nessel ordered the store to close as part of the state's stay-at-home order, which closes all nonessential businesses. On Wednesday, police in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, also closed a Jo-Ann retailer that had remained open a week after the state implemented a shutdown order banning nonessential business.

As the coronavirus pandemic unfolded, customers flocked to Jo-Ann stores to purchase sewing and craft projects for bored kids and people stuck at home to use during quarantine. But many in the crowded stores, where both customers and staff can skew older, were not adhering to social distancing.

Soon, employees and customers flooded Jo-Ann's social media with calls for the stores to close and move to online orders only, with delivery or curbside pickup. A Twitter account called "Jo-Ann Employee Confessions" posted updates of employees saying they feared coming to work and that cleaning supplies were inadequate.


Joann Employee Confessions@EmployeeJoann

Joann is willing to sacrifice their employees. #boycottJoann #closethedoors #healthoverwealth #peopleoverprofit #CoronaVillains03:48 AM - 27 Mar 2020

Jo-Ann’s management had insisted the company was an essential business, in part because they sell supplies to other small home businesses (such as fabric for Etsy sellers). But their most forceful argument was that they were offering supplies to make masks and gowns for essential health care workers, which have been in short supply across the country during the coronavirus crisis.

"The backlash from Jo-Ann’s not closing the store was so huge, they rolled out these masks,” said a manager from a Jo-Ann in the Bay Area, where the store was closed to the public after local authorities intervened following California's shelter-in-place order, but online orders were available for curbside pickup.

The company began offering free mask kits — with enough supplies to make five masks, supposedly to be donated to health care and other essential workers — which people could pick up in stores starting on March 16. On March 21, Jo-Ann’s social media accounts posted a video showing people how to sew a face mask.

"The timing was very fishy, it was when a lot of nonessential businesses were being forced to shut down," said the Jo-Ann staffer from Portland, Oregon.

For one Jo-Ann worker near Columbus, Ohio, the free mask kits announcement was enough for her to stop working, already frustrated at the “Black Friday–type crowds” in stores and the lack of staff and cleaning equipment. “That was kind of my moment when I decided to take a leave of absence,” she told BuzzFeed News. “We announced [the mask kits] and I saw how bad the crowds were, and I just realized Jo-Ann’s weren’t going to shut down throughout this, no matter what, and I had to put myself first.”

“It just felt like a ploy to get around the rules,” she added.


Alex Menendez / AP
A Jo-Ann fabric storefront open on March 27.

But a Jo-Ann spokesperson defended the company’s motives. “We have been and are providing essential materials for a real need," the spokesperson said. "Even the Mayor of Los Angeles yesterday told all residents they should create and wear handmade masks or face coverings in public. It is critical to reserve medical face masks for those who need them in the most dangerous situations.”’

In their statement to BuzzFeed News on Thursday, the Jo-Ann spokesperson broadened their previous focus on health care workers needing their masks to include “health care systems, at-risk organizations, and our communities.”

Both the World Health Organization and the CDC had initially advised ordinary citizens to avoid wearing masks to stop the spread of the coronavirus, as masks are limited and should be kept for health care workers. But as the CDC weighs changing that recommendation — and homemade masks become commonplace — Jo-Ann management argued they were offering a necessary service for health care workers, even if the effectiveness of a nonsurgical mask remains unclear.

“I feel like the public is grossly misinformed about how well the masks work and the purpose for them,” said the Seattle-area Jo-Ann manager.

The first cluster outbreak in the United States happened within an hour's drive of her store, which meant that demand for masks at the store has been particularly high. But she believes the masks are just a publicity stunt, in order to keep stores open and move the focus away from workers complaining about the danger to their health. “It is at best a thinly veiled excuse to draw customers into the store so they buy more nonessential products,” said the manager.

Partly, that's because the mask program was announced without warning to stores, where staff members quickly found themselves without the required materials to assemble the mask kits.

“Initially I volunteered to help make the kits for this — I was led to believe this was something to actually help," said the Seattle-area manager. "The supply was not keeping up with the gigantic demand — we ran out of supplies within three hours of the first day."

Her store ran out of the interface material that is supposed to serve as a filter in the mask "within an hour on the first day." The store was already out of elastic before the free mask program was announced. "We have been using stretchy jewelry cord and bias tape as ties," she said. "The guidelines the hospital have requested specifically asked for a certain kind of material because it needs to withstand bleaching and cleaning by the hospital, and as far as I'm aware, we don't have anything like that."

The coronavirus is spread via droplets, such as when people cough. A well-fitted cotton mask may prevent the spread of the virus if a sick person is wearing it, but other guidelines are also needed, such as washing hands before and after putting on a mask and removing it, and washing a mask in hot water and soap after use.

The four employees who spoke to BuzzFeed News all feared they were risking their health because of masks that were not even suitable for use.

"I have no idea why people are falling for this," said the Bay Area manager, who noted her store was out of elastic and none of the fabric is sanitized or washed. "It’s better than nothing — but put a T-shirt over your face, it’s going to be just as sufficient."

Mayor Garcetti noted that “research shows even a bandana tucked in can have an effect at slowing down droplets’ spread.” (There is likely some added benefit to wearing something that is more closely fitted to the face than a T-shirt or bandana.)


Fletcherjcm/Flickr/Creative Commons / Via Flickr: maryandjc

Continuing to have customers come in store — rather than just purchasing online or for curbside pickup — also increases the risk of spreading the disease, even if people are coming in partly to grab mask kits. “Staying open and having these wild crowds — we’re understaffed and not cleaning things — we’re just exacerbating the issue,” said the employee near Columbus. “It felt like we were making the problem we were trying to solve worse.”

The Bay Area manager said she's been told by customers that hospitals are rejecting the masks (personal protective equipment, or PPE, requirements and what donations are accepted often changes by individual facility). "Customers are calling us, telling us, 'No one wants these masks, what do I do with them?’” said the Bay Area manager.

A Jo-Ann spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that although the masks are “not medical grade,” they are being made per CDC guidelines and have been accepted by some hospitals. The spokesperson would not say how many masks had been donated to hospitals. Jo-Ann has launched a daily count showing how close the company is to its 100 million mask goal. As of Thursday, it's closing in on 20 million.

"The CDC has recently ruled home crafted masks as acceptable crisis response options when other supplies have been exhausted, and all masks collected will only go to those hospitals and healthcare systems that are accepting them at this time," said a Jo-Ann spokesperson in a statement.

But that might be an overstatement of CDC guidelines, which instead suggest homemade masks such as a bandana or scarf may be used as a “last resort” for health care workers when face masks are unavailable, and should not be considered proper PPE, as it’s unclear how effective they are at stopping the transmission of COVID-19 in a health care setting.

"While these items are not medical grade," the Jo-Ann spokesperson continued, "they have been created using fabric and materials recommended for medical settings, and we have provided donations of the completed masks to hospitals around the country who are in need, and have requested them."

A fabric mask won't be as protective as a surgical or N95 mask, and some hospitals are not accepting homemade fabric masks. “Caution should be exercised when considering this option,” warns the CDC.

If you're someone who is seeing the impact of the coronavirus firsthand, we’d like to hear from you. Reach out to us via one of our tip line channels.

In an FAQ on its site about how Jo-Ann is handling COVID-19, the company’s response is a question about how it is caring for its “own people in the midst of the pandemic" focuses on the mask program. "We’ve made provisions for employees who choose to take leave during the coronavirus crisis," reads the statement. "At the same time, we believe this program will give others the opportunity to contribute to their local communities by facilitating the production of gear for medical professionals and their patients in need."

When Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced a stay-at-home order on March 20, Jo-Ann gave its staff a letter they were to show authorities, arguing that the store supplied PPE to health care workers.

"Specifically, Jo-Ann provides custom cuts of fabric, elastic and clear vinyl that are later finished into gowns and face masks," it reads. "Hospital systems have begun reaching out directly to Jo-Ann to help provide these needed goods. Jo-Ann must be able to continue to supply these materials to customers who are making these finished goods and donating them to hospitals. Jo-Ann’s business is vital to the supply chain for both Illinois small businesses as well as its front line healthcare professionals.”

But Illinois — along with some other states with stay-at-home orders in place, including Maryland and New York — determined Jo-Ann was nonessential and must shut.

The letter from Michigan's attorney general on Monday specifically addresses the company's claim that it sells fabric for face masks and hospital scrubs, noting that these could continue via online orders:

Your letter dated March 24, 2020, indicates that Jo-Ann Fabrics remains open to the public based on the company’s belief that its on-site operations are necessary to sustain and protect lives because “hundreds of hospitals and thousands of generous volunteers are turning to Jo-Ann” for raw materials like custom cut fabric, marine vinyl, crafting foam, and other goods that are finished into face masks, face shields and hospital scrubs and gowns.

We appreciate the contributions that you have devoted to addressing the current crisis. Nevertheless, while certain products from your store may be used to craft personal protective equipment, the Governor’s Order carefully balances the danger to the public and to workers when on-site operations continue versus the need for those on-site operations to sustain and protect life.

Over half of Jo-Ann stores have closed to the public, but certain states and counties — including California and Pennsylvania — have allowed stores to remain open or allow curbside pickup for online purchases, even with stay-at-home orders in place.

The Portland employee argued that people could make masks using old T-shirts and pillowcases, rather than putting her and her colleagues at risk. "They could try and source materials at home before going out and exposing other people and themselves," she said.

The employees told BuzzFeed News the mask kits might just be a welcome distraction for customers in a scary uncertain time. "It’s more a craft project for people to feel safe," said the Bay Area manager.

The Seattle-area manager recently gave one mask pack to a thrilled customer whose son works as an EMT. "These masks gave them a sense of control over the situation and peace of mind, knowing they were helping out," she said. "That’s the only benefit I see to these mask kits. Not so much how effective they are against the disease, but the mental and emotional comfort it gives to the common person.”

But that doesn't help Jo-Ann workers who fear catching the virus because their store won't close to the public. "People coming in just for craft supplies — because you're bored, but your craft supplies aren't more important than our health," said the staffer from Portland.

"It’s such a clusterfuck," said the Bay Area manager. "I hope Jo-Ann survives this because I need a job. But the second the dust settles and we can start looking for another job, we’re gone, because their response to this is horrible."


 Amber Jamieson is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

“Silent Carriers” Are Helping Spread The Coronavirus. Here’s What We Know About Them.

People with no COVID-19 symptoms may be spreading the disease — but big questions remain about how much they are driving the pandemic.

Stephanie M. LeeBuzzFeed News Reporter April 2, 2020

Nurphoto / Getty Images
People walk in a New York City park despite social distancing orders, March 26.

Fever, a dry cough, fatigue: By now, these have become the telltale signs of COVID-19. But can it be unwittingly spread by people with no symptoms?

In late January and early February, when the disease had begun to spread outside China, leading health officials, including the World Health Organization, told the public that transmission from asymptomatic people was likely “rare,” based on information available at the time. “In all the history of respiratory-borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Jan. 28.

Those assessments were based on early data out of China, where the virus originated in late December. A few months later, as the coronavirus has afflicted more than 1 million people worldwide and killed 51,000 of them, scientists know a lot more about how the virus spreads. And an emerging body of data suggests that there are probably a significant number of infected people who don’t have symptoms but are likely to be transmitting the virus. Since they may not know that they’re sick, they may be taking fewer precautions than people with symptoms.

Researchers still don’t know how common these cases are or how much they are driving the pandemic. On Monday, the director of the CDC told NPR that the number of asymptomatic individuals “may be as many as 25%.”

Here’s what we know so far about these so-called silent carriers.

1. First, it’s important to keep in mind that “asymptomatic” is different from “presymptomatic.”

Being presymptomatic means you’ve been infected and don’t feel any symptoms at the time you get tested, but will develop them later on. In contrast, asymptomatic people never have any symptoms during the course of their infections at all.

That difference matters for the scientists who are racing to identify and count cases to study the spread of the virus. If you’re truly asymptomatic, you’re probably not going to get tested and would therefore never be counted by the health care system. But you may still be contributing to the virus’s spread.

Alternatively, suppose you are symptom-free when you test positive, only to later develop a fever and cough that you don’t report to your doctor. You might be mistakenly counted as asymptomatic rather than presymptomatic.

“Previously we had commonly used asymptomatic to include both groups so it's tough to break out of that thinking and lexicon,” Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University, said by email. “But I think this pandemic has shown that there may be nuance between those who are not YET symptomatic and those who might NEVER show symptoms, and that seems to be important here.”

To Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease expert at Columbia University, the simpler and more important distinction is between “documented” versus “undocumented” cases — the latter being all infected people who aren’t diagnosed. Those could include a person who is very sick but “hates to go to the hospital or see a doctor and toughs it out at home,” he told BuzzFeed News.

It’s more likely that a lot of these undocumented COVID-19 cases have symptoms mild enough that they don’t feel the need to see a doctor, but are walking around in the world anyway, he said.

The slight differences in these terms matter. “They’re not all the same thing but are getting conflated,” Smith said.


Carl Court / Getty Images

2. Estimates for how many “silent carriers” there are vary. For asymptomatic cases, estimates range from 18% to 30% of all infections.

It’s tough to quantify the number of asymptomatic people, because they’re unlikely to seek testing on their own. But the coronavirus outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship gave researchers a unique chance to study this — even if it was a nightmare for the 3,700 passengers and crew members trapped off the coast of Japan.

Held under quarantine over two weeks in February, many of the people on board were repeatedly tested and their symptoms, or lack thereof, were tracked. CDC researchers found that 46.5% of infected people did not have symptoms at the time of testing. Many eventually did develop symptoms, but statistical models suggest that 18% of infected cases remained asymptomatic.

One caveat is that the passengers were older than the general population. Elderly people are more likely to be severely affected or killed by COVID-19, while younger people are more likely to develop mild symptoms.

Because of the skewed demographics, Gerardo Chowell, a Georgia State University mathematical epidemiologist who led a study about asymptomatic cases aboard the Diamond Princess last month, thinks the true number of asymptomatic people in the world is around 30% or 40%. “We know there’s a substantial fraction of asymptomatic” cases, he told BuzzFeed News.

Other researchers have produced estimates in this ballpark. One recent report said 29%, but was based only on a group of two dozen people in China. Another reported 30% of COVID-19 patients may not have symptoms, based on screenings of 565 Japanese citizens evacuated out of Wuhan in February.

CDC director Robert Redfield offered up yet another percentage this week, telling NPR, “One of the [pieces of] information that we have pretty much confirmed now is that a significant number of individuals that are infected actually remain asymptomatic. That may be as many as 25%.” He did not cite what that figure was based on.

Part of why it has taken a while for scientists to realize the outsize role that people without symptoms may play in spreading the disease may be because of how the initial data out of China was reported.

As of Feb. 11, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was reporting that of more than 72,000 reported cases in mainland China, about 1.2% were asymptomatic. The WHO–China joint report about the coronavirus, from mid-February, stated, “The proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.”

But last week, the South China Morning Post reported that, according to confidential Chinese government data, more than 43,000 people in China had tested positive for the virus by the end of February “but had no immediate symptoms.” These people were not included in the government’s official tally, according to the news outlet, which suggested that these people could therefore be as high as one-third of those who test positive. Researchers told BuzzFeed News that this estimate seemed plausible.

Putting aside the presence or absence of symptoms, low testing rates, especially in the US, mean that we do not know about a large proportion of people with COVID-19.

Shaman, the Columbia infectious disease expert, thinks the proportion of undocumented cases — infected people who are not officially diagnosed — could be as high as 86% in some places, meaning that these “invisible” cases are driving the pandemic. That estimate, published last month, was based on projected activity in Wuhan in the weeks before China imposed strict travel restrictions to stem transmission.

Since the virus has spread beyond Wuhan, Shaman said, “We’re seeing increasing evidence that there’s a lot of virus out in the community, a lot of infections out there, much more so than are being confirmed.”

More precise numbers won’t be possible to determine without health-care systems that can treat and diagnose lots of patients — which may not exist in developing countries — and robust, widespread testing. The US was slow to start testing compared to countries like South Korea and still has not scaled it up to a level that public health experts say is necessary.

The most definitive testing would include running blood antibody tests on everybody, which could detect whether they ever had the virus even if they didn’t show symptoms. Singapore has been using these tests to trace infections, and the United Kingdom is preparing to roll them out as well.

TRUMP'S "INVISIBLE" ENEMY/SCOURGE/ETC.

IS ACTUALLY QUITE VISIBLE UNDER A MICROSCOPE

NIH
Colorized scanning electron micrograph of a cell (blue) infected with the coronavirus, isolated from a patient sample.

3. Presymptomatic people can transmit the virus for a few days before they have symptoms, studies suggest.

The virus’s incubation period — the time between getting infected and showing symptoms — is about five days. That’s similar to that of the coronavirus that caused SARS. (For COVID-19, virtually everyone who develops symptoms does so by day 12.)

The problem is that people seem to be unwittingly spreading the new virus before they have symptoms, research suggests, and this presymptomatic transmission is happening at a more rapid rate than it did with SARS. With COVID-19, such transmission may even be happening more frequently than transmission from those with symptoms, researchers from Japan said in a study in late February.

“This suggests that a substantial proportion of secondary transmission may occur prior to illness onset,” they wrote.

Other research also supports the idea that presymptomatic transmission can happen for a few days before symptoms kick in. On Wednesday, the CDC released data about such cases in Singapore from late January to mid-March. In these cases, a person gave the virus to someone before they themselves developed symptoms, with no evidence that the second person had been exposed to anyone else who was infected.

In cases where researchers were able to confirm the dates of exposure, transmission happened one to three days before the originally infected patient developed symptoms, according to the report.

Scientists are still figuring out exactly when someone crosses the threshold from being infected to being able to infect others. The CDC says that someone can transmit the virus up to 48 hours before symptoms develop.
4. We don’t know with certainty that asymptomatic people are spreading the virus — though they probably are.

Completely symptom-free people can still carry around substantial amounts of the virus, also known as a person’s “viral load,” evidence suggests.

For example, researchers in China recently reported on one coronavirus patient who never developed symptoms, but whose viral load was similar to that of 17 others who did have symptoms. This “suggests the transmission potential of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic patients,” according to a preliminary report in the New England Journal of Medicine last month. There have been other individual cases of asymptomatic transmission seeming to happen, as reported by researchers in China in February.

But it still hasn’t been definitively proven that these people are giving the virus to others. Proving that would mean checking asymptomatic people to see if they were actually excreting live virus, and therefore were infectious. Antibody tests, which can be done after an infection ends, would also confirm they were truly infected. Right now, “we really don’t know if people who are truly asymptomatic can transmit or not,” said Smith of Kent State University.
5. All of this reinforces the importance of staying home as much as you can (and, some say, of wearing a mask).

The possibility that people can unknowingly spread the virus has inspired a heated debate over whether everyone should be wearing masks in public — including homemade, nonmedical ones — to help avoid getting sick as well as to prevent infecting others. The CDC currently discourages healthy people from wearing them, but is reconsidering that guidance.

How well a mask wards off infection varies depending on the setting, use, and fabric, studies show. But Chowell, among other experts, is pro-mask all the time. “We all should be wearing some sort of mask whenever you go out and have to interact with other people,” he said.

Whether you cover your face or not, it’s still important to help prevent transmission by practicing socially distancing, which means staying 6 feet away from others in public, staying home as much as possible, and avoiding crowded places, according to public health experts and the CDC’s national guidelines. In a further attempt to reduce transmission, at least 30 states are issuing shelter-in-place orders that have closed schools, offices, parks, and nonessential businesses.

Until the virus is under control, we likely won’t fully understand what role non-diagnosed cases are playing in the outbreak.

“We know we have a problem,” said Juan Gutierrez, a mathematics professor who specializes in infectious disease modeling at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “We have a hint of what could be the size of the problem. And a story will emerge many months from now when we have widespread testing in the population and we can start ascertaining, ‘Who got affected?’ and then asking people, ‘did they ever get symptoms?’”

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Stephanie M. Lee is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.