I had hoped, maybe somewhere in the denial/bargaining stage of processing the coronavirus testing debacle, that at least our state officials were on top of the situation, and at least giving us reliable information.
The evidence before us suggests that the Baker administration is also blowing it. I wish that weren’t so.
Last week, an eternity ago by the punishing exponential math of this epidemic, Biogen officials reached out to the state, trying to get tests for its conferees. Like the case at the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, they were told no, you don’t qualify. How’s that for a Catch-22?
Biogen officials reached out to public health authorities in Massachusetts on March 3, according to a document obtained by the Globe, to report a cluster of about 50 conference attendees with flu-like symptoms in this region and overseas. Those officials were told that the cases did not satisfy requirements for testing.
At Tuesday’s press conference, Mass. Department of Public Health Commissioner Monica Bharel noted that we were getting 2,000 new coronovirus tests from the federal government, and insisted that we had enough tests. That raised an eyebrow for me: Enough for what? Enough for the constrained criteria that keep numbers artificially low? You can’t count what you can’t test. Are we testing in sufficient numbers to estimate the scale of the threat?
Well, here’s the Globe again, doing heroic work:
Federal and state health officials have kept strict limits on who can be tested for the coronavirus, forcing physicians to turn patients away who they believe should be tested, according to doctors and patients. And while the testing shortage is a national crisis that originated with the Centers for Disease Control, other states are testing more people than Massachusetts and have been significantly more transparent about the scope of testing, a key component to containing the virus.
… But at Massachusetts General Hospital on Wednesday, Dr. Monique Aurora Tello described seeing eight people with probable coronavirus, some of whom had recently been on buses and planes — and being unable to test some of the suspected cases.
“Testing pending for some but the State wouldn’t let us test them all,” Aurora Tello wrote on Facebook. “Not enough tests!!”
No, Commissioner Bharel, we don’t have enough tests. And that lack of information and transparency is affecting the advice we’re getting from the state, from local officials, from school officials, all the way down the line. Our major universities, perhaps responding to their own in-house set of experts, have made much bolder and quicker decisions. Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Emerson, Smith, Amherst, et al are shutting down their in-person classes. (I was prepared to teach my lessons today online … but my students all cancelled, since they’re required to be off-campus, out of their dorm rooms by Monday.)
This is a debacle, a scandal that will have an immense human toll. Federal incompetence explains part of it, but only part.We’re just sitting here, a situation far beyond our control, completely at the mercy of the aptitude of our leaders, waiting for someone to get it right.
Update: God help us all. Bloomberg: Massachusetts Virus Outbreak Looks Like Italy’s Just Two Weeks Ago
“Massachusetts is smaller than Italy,” said Sam Scarpino, an assistant professor of network science who heads the epidemics lab at Northeastern. “It has about 100 cases. There were 159 cases in Italy two weeks ago. That’s where we’re headed. We’ve got to move now and decisively prepare hospitals, work remotely and ramp up testing.”
… It may take another week before Scarpino has enough testing data to make any public predictions about the scope of community spread in Massachusetts. But he’s leaning toward the idea that the actual number of infected state residents is likely many multiples of the 95 positive tests announced as of Wednesday. Based on the experience in Italy, China and South Korea, he said, the number of new cases is doubling every four to seven days.
THAT is the real story of the coronavirus, nationwide as much as in MA. We should be more on top of this than the rest of the country given our inherent resources and knowing a single event produced so many of the cases.
Senegal is testing ! With results in 4 hours ! note from friend
NOTE TO EDITORS: It appears that comment editing is broken or else anchor tags (links) no longer work
Somerville residents were just notified (see https://www.somervillema.gov/departments/programs/novel-coronavirus-preparedness-and-information) that all public buildings are closed for two weeks starting Monday, and all events are cancelled for the same period. I’m not surprised. I’m reminded of the duck-and-cover “fallout drills” people of my age remember from our grade-school days.
So far as I can tell, Somerville authorities are doing the only thing they know how to do. This strikes me as a massive and massively useless jerk-around, since there is essentially ZERO surveillance testing.
So we all cower at home and hoard supplies of whatever the day-to-day hot item is (no cleaning supplies at Wegmans, at all), paralyzed by an utter and complete lack of data, lack of information, lack of leadership, and lack of direction.
Our markets tumble, our institutions close one after another, and still we do absolutely NOTHING.
Tell me again that our system of government isn’t completely broken and dysfunctional. Broken at the federal level. Broken at the state level. Overwhelmed at the local level.
Boston is arguably the center of the American biopharmaceutical industry. We are supposed to be the premier medical care center of the world.
So far as I can tell, the only result of that prominence is a being a center of COVID-19 infection because a conference sponsored by one of those huge biopharm giants appears to have metastastized into more than 90 infections.
Where is our governor? Where are the CEOs of all these companies headquartered here? Why is it that home testing kits are being talked about it Seattle, on the other side of the nation, and not here?
Someone in the Trump (mal)administration made the decision to forgo using WHO’s test and tasked the CDC with making up our own. The CDC then released a test riddled with problems, which they had to recall and then release a new one.
The decision to forgo WHO test kits and the failure of the CDC to properly ensure testing may go down in history as colossal blunders.
South Korea, which rapidly took WHO tests and ramped up production, can now test 10,000 cases a day. South Korea has over 180 different test centers. They are, in fact, doing ‘drive-thru’ testing… People are panicking over the numbers in South Korea because they are so big, but they are so big because S.Korea is doing so much testing.
A ray of hope: I think there is a possibility, thanks to South Korea facing the problem unblinkingly, that we soon find out the mortality rate of coronavirus is much much less than we think it is: that the initial mortality rate in China had more to do with the utterly inept response by China and their quarantining many people together haphazardly. That may be my wishful thinking… but it is a possibility. Time will tell.
Donald Trump personally made the decision, two years ago, to dismantle the apparatus for handling epidemics created by the Obama administration in response to the Ebola crisis. That apparatus was explicitly designed to address situations like this.
We now lose precious months while the corrupt, ignorant and bumbling idiots of the current administration attempt to rediscover and recreate what they tore down two years ago.
Then he has the chutzpah to blame Obama for this crisis!
You do not need to agree with or even like Hillary Clinton to recognize she would be handling this crisis 1000x better than the incumbent. The same goes for Joe Biden who gave a sober and presidential speech while the orange caudillo was putting on his best Idi Amin impression and blaming the Chinese and Europeans for all our ills. If it were not for his white skin and the American flag in the background, no one would take this Banana Republican seriously.
Closing schools is a complicated and unfortunate part of this process, but there are a few things I wish had happened and would like to see happen going forward:
Schools should be cancelled statewide for a minimum of three weeks
This is how we get the social distancing needed to flatten the curve and it would prevent the patchwork of responses we are seeing from a possible overreaction (Everett with a six week closure) to endangering students and staff (Boston, which is not closing at all!). It is within the Governors emergency powers to do this and he should, rather than leave it up to the districts which are being overwhelmed with conflicting information and mandates.
Staffing ancillary services should be considerate to worker health
We have to feed the kids who only get lunch and breakfast from us, which means employing those hourly workers. We have to clean the buildings which means employing custodial staff, in my building, these are predominately older gentleman more susceptible to the disease. So how do we balance this? Leadership from the top and better support from the state would be very helpful to figuring this out.
MCAS should be suspended
There’s no way remote learning will be enough to adequately prepare students for these tests and I know in my district we are already missing our ELA testing date which is scheduled for the period of time we are going to be closed.
Testing for data is important, but the year to year variation is not distinct enough that missing this year makes a difference. The sophomores who miss it this year could take it next year and removing those higher stakes reduces the need for anxiety inducing retakes and retests. Better to scrap it for this year.
We need emergency income support and bill collection suspension now
A lot of areas of the economy are going to be affected by the likely steps we will need to take in the coming weeks. It’s rumored a shelter in place order is coming down the pike. Whether that comes or not, losing 130,000 students alone is devastating to the local service based economy. Encore and Logan based airlines are already announcing layoffs affecting my students and their parents.
People living paycheck to paycheck in these service jobs need both income support and bill suspension for this period of time. Rent, electric, gas, and water are essentials that should not be collected so families can afford food and medicine. Masshealth should temporarily cover all medical expenses related to this emergency, and just as the fisherman got relief from the Baker and Romney administrations for red tides, so should other service workers relying on tourist and student dollars that have evaporated overnight.
Gov. Baker could be doing all of these things at the state level and the President should be mustering a similar response at the federal level. This incompetent response is what happens when you succeed at making government the enemy for a generation and undermine its efficacy.
I don’t understand the push for statewide school closings. It would seem to make more sense for districts to respond to local circumstances. The Merrimack Valley Superintendents Association issued a joint statement closing all their schools until March 27th. You know who I suspect was never considered and I doubt will be helped? – substitute teachers. I refused to get anxious about the virus itself as I continue to believe the panic is overblown, but now I’m very anxious about the panic. A two-week closure to me means a loss of potentially $800 that I can ill-afford to sacrifice.
That’s totally unfair Christopher and something the MTA is working on addressing. As I said above-all staff must be covered by payroll too.
Nope. Schools should not be cancelled at all. Schools should be but one of the places in which we test to a fare-thee-well.
We need to test for the virus in schools, in offices, on the street, everywhere. We need to test and test and test and test. We need to test more than South f-ing Korea, which has quickly ramped up to the capability of testing 10,000 people PER DAY.
We need to know the scope of the disease. Anybody who tests positive should be quarantined, rather than simply a blanket isolation of anybody who congregates in large number… or test more than anybody who MIGHT, possibly, maybe, could be, possibly, infected… That’s a bass-ackwards, inefficient and wrong-headed way of doing things, informed by panic and little else.
I’m reminded of the early years of the HIV epidemic, when virtually the entire society began repeating the lie that HIV was spread by oral sex. Because we were collectively too squeamish and too puritanical to actually talk about the sexual practice that was high-risk (receptive anal sex with someone who is HIV-positive), an entire generation and society was brainwashed with all sorts of absurd lies about HIV. We ended up with teenagers who started practicing anal sex because they thought it was safer than oral — they heard about the dangers of oral sex every day, and nobody talked about anal. So they avoided the “dangerous” practice, and jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
The only way to be infected with COVID-19 is to be in contact with someone who already has it or to contact fomites that carry the virus. The only way to even have a clue about that is to know who has the virus and where they’ve been.
It is only through testing — not just testing symptomatic individuals, but SURVEILLANCE testing — that we learn what places to avoid and where to focus our cleaning and sterilization resources.
What is the first thing that happens in middle-class communities when we close all the schools? ALL the parents go to grocery stores WITH THEIR CHILDREN, and walk around handling everything in sight. How many stores clean and sterilize the shopping carts every day? How many people have handled each cart?
We need data, and the only way to get data is to perform testing. I’ve been hearing public officials talk about “millions of tests” being available “by next week” since this all began at least a month ago.
Where are the tests?
It’ll be a lot easier for schools to be turned into testing centers and shelters if there are no students or staff there. Social distancing will not work when you have 2200 people confined to a building of my size and every lunch period is a gathering of 500+ people in a cramped cafeteria. The MTA and MASC and MASS are in rare agreement that the schools should close statewide and Sen. Eldridge is now advancing a bill urging the Governor to do so. Social distancing is the only recourse we have at this point and the only way to flatten the curve. Totally agree with Tom that kids should stay home.
Social distancing is only an early stage method of prevention, and an iffy one at that… At some point, we’ll have to just bite the bullet and go whole-hog for herd immunity: it’s pretty much even money that we can get to that point before we develop a safe and effective vaccine. And that’s the opposite of social distancing.