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60 Minutes story coming about the fact FDA allowed āunverifiedā tests into the marketplaceā¦which stayed for 50 days.
Federal officials allowed distribution of COVID-19 antibody tests after they knew many were flawed - 60 Minutes - CBS News
Laredo, Texas, wound up getting thousands of antibody test kits from a Chinese company. The untested kits were then tested by the cityās health director, Dr. Hector Gonzalez, who found the tests accuracy to differ wildly depending on when it was given and how long after a person was exposed to the virus. The small sample he tested was only about 20% accurate. āWe had such high hopes to testā¦ we were ready to do public drive-through testingā¦ Now we couldnāt. We were on hold,ā recalls Gonzalez.
Laredo officials reported the faulty tests to federal agents at Homeland Security and officials came to town to seize the tests and start an investigation, but the federal government did little to halt the spread of other un-proven antibody testing kits.
Dr. Alex Marson, an immunology researcher from UCSF and Gladstone Institutes, decided to test a sample of the kits when he learned a friend had tested herself with one. He was concerned there were too many tests on the market and too little information. He and Dr. Patrick Hsu, an assistant professor of bioengineering at U.C. Berkeley, conducted their own analysis with the help of 50 researchers on tests from across the globe. āWe saw a range, saw that some were closer to what we hoped for and others were farther off,ā Marson tells Alfonsi. And he cautions even the most reliable antibody tests arenāt fool-proof, because antibody levels sufficient to give immunity still arenāt known.
It took 50 days for the FDA to reverse its course on antibody tests. In May, it began requiring test developers to apply for emergency authorization and submit data to show their tests worked. It was too late, says Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi. He is investigating the FDA for not regulating the antibody tests. āFraudulent tests flooded the market. Hundreds and hundreds of tests taken by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people,ā says the Illinois Democrat. All companies had to do to get their tests to the U.S. market was state they were self-validated. āWhen you open the floodgates to virtually any product being sold by anybody, well, guess what? Shysters, scam artists, and people who are preying on unsuspecting consumers enter the fray,ā says Krishnamoorthi.
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The inaccuracy of antibody tests is a result of the way they work. While they are easier to carry out, and a result can be obtained quickly, the problem is that they only will show up an infection after the person is contagious. Here is a nice graphic produce by Dr Siouxsie Wiles of Auckland University who has been a leading advisor to our govt here.
We have been using the test that looks for the genetic material of the virus rather than the antibody test. As you can see the benefit of that test s that it can detect the presence of the virus before the person become symptomatic and highly infectious.
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Latest ad from the Lincoln Project about āthe greatest generationā (& how trump apparently regards them).
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CDC says U.S. has āway too much virusā to control pandemic as cases surge across country
#2 at CDC 
The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.
The U.S. has set records for daily new infections in recent days as outbreaks surge mostly across the South and West. The recent spike in new cases has outpaced daily infections in April when the virus rocked Washington state and the northeast, and when public officials thought the outbreak was hitting its peak in the U.S.
"Weāre not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control," she said in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Associationās Dr. Howard Bauchner. "We have way too much virus across the country for that right now, so itās very discouraging."
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5c3vx0ACv8
Go to 3:02 and Dr. Anne Schuchat talks about there was a lot of 'wishful thinking" and that right now there is too much infection going aroundā¦(what this CNBC article is talking about)
She was dismissed as a spox for the Coronavirus early right? She was giving the country some very āheavyā news in Feb/March I believe and the WH did not like this.
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Keep on the lookout for pets in need.
The Pets Left Behind by Covid-19
The pandemicās human toll in New York has been well documented. But what about the dogs and cats of those who become seriously ill?
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The āmessagingā aspect to what T should do in relation to this EPIC Coronavirus situation. Tās closest handlers - Meadows, Kushner, Hicks all want T to lay low and only speak about the economy. Others like VP Pence wants T to take up the CV issue.
Seems like the handlers just need T propped upā¦doing his economy-campaign speak. Thatās a sure fire way to keep T out of more trouble.
The Trump White House has a new internal battle: how much to talk publicly about a pandemic thatās crippling huge swaths of America.
President Donald Trumpās top aides are divided over the merits of resuming national press briefings to keep the public informed about the latest coronavirus statistics as infection rates spike in large states including California, Texas, Florida, Arizona and Georgia.
Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and counselor to the president Hope Hicks are among the aides arguing against these regular sessions because they want to keep the White House focused on the path forward and the nascent economic recovery ā without scaring too much of the country about a virus resurgence when infections are rising at different paces in different regions.
Other senior aides, as well as Vice President Mike Pence and his team, believe keeping Americans up-to-date about the nature of the outbreak is critical as the death toll rises. More than 126,000 people have perished in the U.S. due to the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the governmentās own experts are warning of serious trouble ahead.
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NYTimes:
Senate Approves Extending Paycheck Protection Program
WASHINGTON ā The Senate on Tuesday evening approved extending the application period for a relief program for small businesses, granting five additional weeks for the remaining money left in the program to be spent.
Less than four hours before the Paycheck Protection Program was scheduled to close with $130 billion still available for loans to small businesses seeking to maintain their payrolls, the Senate approved extending the application period and allowing small businesses to receive aid until Aug. 8.
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Oklahoma Is Seeing 100% Positive Test Rate For COVID-19 Following Trumpās Tulsa Rally
Even though Donald Trumpās rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma quickly became a laughingstock after only about 6,000 people showed up, it may be having an impact on the spread of coronavirus in the state.
As MSNBCās Chris Hayes pointed out on Monday, 100 percent of coronavirus tests in Oklahoma came back positive over the past two days.
āYesterday in Oklahoma, they tested 352 people for the coronavirus, and every single test came back positive,ā the MSNBC host said. āToday they tested another 178 people, and all those tests came back positive, too.ā
āIf you canāt do the math in your head, thatās 100% positive rate,ā he added.
Video:
Hayes said:
And it comes less than ten days after that infamous Tulsa, Oklahoma rally where even with the arena far from full, you still had thousands of people gathered in an indoor space cheering and screaming in a city that had just seen a spike in cases and in violation of every single recommendation for safety, again, from the Trump administrationās own CDC. And while we never know cause and effect exactly, particularly in the moment, itās hard to figure out what the exact impact of that rally looks like. Look at this: yesterday in Oklahoma, they tested 352 people for the coronavirus, and every single test came back positive. Today they tested another 178 people, and all those tests came back positive, too. If you canāt do the math in your head, thatās 100% positive rate. Thatās extremely bad.
Trumpās actions are only helping the virus spread
As Chris Hayes noted on Monday, itās hard to pinpoint the exact cause and effect of mass gatherings like Trumpās rally in Oklahoma on the spread of the coronavirus ā especially in the short term.
What we do know, however, is that the presidentās actions ā both direct and indirect ā are helping the virus spread.
Whether itās bringing people together at events that violate every single one of his own CDCās recommendations or refusing to be an example for the country by wearing a mask, Trump himself is an obstacle to stopping the spread of this deadly virus.
The best thing for the health and wellbeing of the United States is for Donald Trump to be voted out of office.
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WTAF. President Supervillain is at it again.
US buys up world stock of key Covid-19 drug remdesivir
No other country will be able to buy remdesivir, which can help recovery from Covid-19, for next three months at least
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If Anyone Doubts Whether Masks Work, Just Look At These Photos
He tested sneezing, talking, singing, and coughing with a mask and without one.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkB0k81oNiI
Least effective
Bandanas
Most effective (aside from N95)
Double layer home made ones - with full coverage and dense material
Researchers at Florida Atlantic Universityās College of Engineering and Computer Science made visualizations to show exactly how face masks stop COVID-19 transmission. Without a mask, droplets produced during coughing can travel up to 12 feet. With a mask, this distance is reduced to just a few inches. But some cloth masks appear to work better than others at stopping the spread of potentially infectious droplets. Read the full #facemask article here: https://www.livescience.com/face-maskā¦
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T keeps hammering home his magical thinking that he presents to his friends on Fox Network
video
The next Sarah Cooper bit āā¦And I think we are going to be very good with the Coronavirus ā¦I think that at some pointā¦itās just going to disappear, I hopeā 
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From Harvard Global Health Institute
Pandemics Explained and where testing targets should go
Great resource/graph of USA
Misinformation is a problem
Uncertainty is at the heart of disease outbreaks. There is so much we donāt know. Which pathogen is the culprit, how deadly is it, how many people are infected? New information comes in small pieces, and needs to be verified. But how? In early February, news spread on Twitter that a doctor ā one of the eight who had been reprimanded weeks earlier by Chinese authorities for sounding the alarm about a new disease ā had died. But was it true?
Sadly, it was. Fact checkers were wary at first, because the initial source was unclear, and because there had already been so much misinformation: The wave of false claims about infection rates as high as 2.8 million people, for example. Or the persistently shared falsehoods that the virus was a) a biological weapon that had leaked from a bio security laboratory in Wuhan or b) smuggled out of Canada by Chinese scientists. (See this Buzzfeed story for more on the early hoax mayhem.)
Outbreaks always attract fear-mongering, rumors and conspiracy theories. Political realities, such as Chinaās all-encompassing grip on information sharing and thorough censorship, always play a role. (MITās Technology Review has an important story about how Chinese crowdsourcers are fighting coronavirus censorship to chronicle the outbreak.)
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The key stat is community transmissions. This is the number that is meaningful to most residents. The big three stats are institutional transmissions (prisons, hospitals, and nursing homes), border transmissions (people with covid coming into the state), and community transmissions (people in the state infecting each other because of poor social distancing). Each requires a different intervention and each is of interest to different intervention specialists). Have to get pragmatic.
āWe still have to do more tests,ā Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday, noting the state is meeting its stated goal of conducting 60,000 to 80,000 tests a day.
A spokeswoman for the California Department of Public Health said the stateās testing capacity will continue increasing but did not specifically address the Harvard figures.
Dr. Thomas Tsai, a surgeon and health policy expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, cautioned that the new goals are more like goal posts that can shift as case rates change. If measures like wearing masks and social distancing are able to bring case rates down, for instance, less testing will be needed.
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Trump has āgone awolā as president amid coronavirus pandemic, says ex-CIA director
Leon Panetta becomes latest prominent public figure to accuse Trump of effectively surrendering to the virus and abandoning Americans to their fate
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It is a horrid virus and it is getting closer to all those in the presidentās inner circle.
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The Washington Post: Top Stories | Trump says U.S. has āmade a lot of progressā controlling pandemic as country sets record for 26th day
Here are some significant developments:
Florida logged another daily high number of new cases. Hospitalizations in Arizona set a record. Intensive care unit capacity at the worldās largest medical center, in Houston, was exceeded at one point in the day.
Several California municipalities dismissed requests from higher governments to forgo fireworks shows or close beach parking lots to promote social distancing, local news outlets in the state reported.
In tweets earlier in the day, Trump correctly said the number of virus deaths and the rate of those deaths are declining. He also said that āIf we didnāt test so much and so successfully, we would have very few casesā ā a false statement that misleads because the rate of positive cases continues to rise in states showing a marked increase in infections.
Trump asserted in his speech at the White House that the country had āput out the flameā of the virus. He added that progress was being made on development of a vaccine, which experts say is unlikely to be widely available until late this year or early next year at the earliest.
Public health experts warned that the virus showed little sign of slowing, partly because of people going to bars and restaurants. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said young adults make up a significant share of new infections but added that the virus will spread to others.
āItās worse, will continue to get worse, and will take months to improve substantially,ā he said on Twitter. āWe are going in the wrong direction, fast.ā
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