Ebola and COVID are VERY different diseases that transmit and behave VERY differently.
Unlike, COVID, Ebola:
- Does not spread asymptomatically
- Is not very contagious at symptom onset, becomes more contagious as symptoms worsen
- Spreads thru direct contact with bodily fluids
This means the precautions for both diseases are very different.
Under Obama we developed a careful system for screening returning travelers from West Africa, based on the science (remember science?) of how the virus spreads. I wrote about it here: cgdev.org/publication/st…
The crux of that was daily symptom self-screening (with vivid handouts!) and daily check-ins with local health dept to report back.
This worked for Ebola, because symptoms were a reliable predictor of infection, and if caught at/near onset, posed little risk to others.
Bowling, subway, taxi, dining while *pre-symptomatic* didn't pose a transmission risk. And even once symptomatic, transmission would require contact with bodily fluids.
COVID almost the inverse: substantial pre-symptomatic transmission risk, easily spread thru inhaled particles.
Which means Craig's behavior - immediately isolating once he ran a fever - responsibly followed public health guidelines.
Trump's joyride yesterday....did not.
So it's not that Trump was right back in 2014 and hypocritical now.
It's that he actually got it wrong BOTH TIMES.
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Douthat's column and the powerful @AlecMacGillis piece it references both argue without much evidence that the resistance to school reopening is largely a reaction to Trump pushing schools to open.
Let's be explicitly clear: "learning to live with it" means needlessly accepting hundreds of thousands more preventable deaths and letting our hospitals get nuked yet again.
"Close the country" vs "learn to live with it" is a false choice, and one that exists only because of Trump's mishandling of the pandemic.
Peer countries have had shorter closures than we have precisely because they chose not to live with it but to control it.
There is an option besides indefinite closure vs let-it-rip: evidence-driven reopening + aggressive public health interventions centered around mass testing and tracing.
Trump's whole game since back in April/May is to make you forget that option exists.
It's not a choice between living recklessly vs living in fear. It's a choice to live responsibly, to balance sensible precautions with continuing to live our lives.
He is still, even now, trying to frame a false choice.
He wants you to believe we must choose between taking no risks or accepting all risks.
That's not the choice, that was never the choice.
The choice was and is incompetent outbreak response vs competent outbreak response.
The West Wing and EEOB facilities are conducive to transmission - small, enclosed spaces with limited airflow (many/most suites in EEOB have secure doors and windows that are always closed).
So there's real risk of rolling spread throughout the staff.
But must balance keeping government running with stopping spread.
White House should immediately take several steps:
- First, quarantine anyone who was in direct contact with POTUS or other confirmed. Fact that McEnany was still working y'day suggests this hasn't happened.
Trump says if the country had listened to Biden, the country "would have been left wide open."
False. Biden didn't speak against the China ban, and when Trump banned EU travel, Biden rightly pointed out that the ban was not a substitute for a plan: