Evaluating the free market by comparing it to the alternatives (We don't need more regulations, We don't need more price controls, No Socialism in the courtroom, Hey, White House, leave us all alone)
"NY State Governor Cuomo’s lifting of regulations
to deal with the coronavirus emergency may be the most libertarian
government document in a generation. Here are a few laws that have been
suspended or modified:
Paragraph 1 of Section 6542 of the Education Law and
Subdivisions (a) and (b) of Section 94.2 of Title 10 of the NYCRR to the
extent necessary to permit a physician assistant to provide medical
services appropriate to their education, training and experience without
oversight from a supervising physician without civil or criminal
penalty related to a lack of oversight by a supervising physician;
Notwithstanding any law or regulation to the contrary, health care
providers are relieved of recordkeeping requirements to the extent
necessary for health care providers to perform tasks as may be necessary
to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, including, but not limited to,
requirements to maintain medical records that accurately reflect the
evaluation and treatment of patients, or requirements to assign
diagnostic codes or to create or maintain other records for billing
purposes. Any person acting reasonably and in good faith under this
provision shall be afforded absolute immunity from liability for any
failure to comply with any recordkeeping requirement.
Subparagraph (ii) of paragraph (2) of subdivision (g) of 10
N.Y.C.R.R. section 405.4, to the extent necessary to allow graduates of
foreign medical schools having at least one year of graduate medical
education to provide patient care in hospitals, is modified so as to
allow such graduates without licenses to provide patient care in
hospitals if they have completed at least one year of graduate medical
education;
Sections 3502 and 3505 of the Public Health Law and Part 89 of Title
10 of the NYCRR to the extent necessary to permit radiologic
technologists licensed and in current good standing in any state in the
United State to practice in New York State without civil or criminal
penalty related to lack of licensure;
The only non-libertarian aspect is the word “temporary.”"
"Every person who grew up or even just briefly lived in Texas knows
two things, by heart: the pledge of allegiance to the state flag, and
that “no store does more than my HEB.” The beloved grocery store is
universally known (among Texans, and anyone who knows a Texan) for fresh
tortillas, smiley employees, and generally being the best place to buy
food in the state. But for the past three months, doing more has also
included perhaps the smoothest and swiftest response to the COVID-19
pandemic in the entire country. HEB’s list of coronavirus safety measures
is long and thorough, and more stores—especially in places with already
high confirmed cases—should be doing exactly what the Texas chain
already has.
Grocery stores have become an unexpected frontline of the
coronavirus pandemic, as people facing quarantines and lockdown crowd in
to hoard toilet paper, flour, and hand sanitizer (or just to absently browse,
which is sick and wrong). Grocery employees are considered essential
workers, meaning they’re among the few groups who have to keep leaving
their homes and commuting, even as the rest of us are told to stay home
and stay well. For workers and customers alike, grocery store aisles are
easily one of the most dangerous places anyone can be during the
pandemic. Some stores have taken measures to mitigate that danger and
keep people safe, to the best of their ability. Others have gone the
White House route and can’t seem to get it together, risking the health
of countless people all the while.
HEB, meanwhile, has remained
countless steps ahead of the game. Before the WHO upgraded coronavirus
to pandemic status, before the White House and most state governments
announced any plans, and before there was even a single identified case
in Texas, HEB—the beloved, Texas-only grocery chain—was preparing an emergency response plan it’s been refining since 2005.
“When did we start looking at the coronavirus? Probably the second week
in January, when it started popping up in China as an issue,” Justen
Noakes, director of emergency preparedness at HEB, recently told Texas Monthly
in an oral history about the store’s much-lauded response to the
pandemic. Current customers and far flung HEB fans alike regularly
praise the multi-billion dollar chain for doing more than the federal government to respond to coronavirus, a statement that becomes distressingly more true each day. After reading the Texas Monthly story, Arnold Schwarzenegger
referred to HEB’s response as “a masterclass in preparation and being
ready to support your community.” Within a month of the virus reaching
Texas, HEB had done more to protect shoppers and employees and replenish
empty shelves than any store in New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus pandemic.
Since early March, HEB has:
Extended fully paid medical leave to anyone diagnosed with coronavirus
Given hourly store, warehouse, manufacturing, and distribution employees $2/hour pay increases through April 12
The only grocery store I’ve gone to since coronavirus started
spreading throughout New York City is a Union Market two blocks from my
apartment, which I normally never shop at because it’s exorbitantly
expensive. The last time I went, a little over a week ago, they’d just started
closing early, letting seniors shop before opening, and had stuck
pieces of painter’s tape every six feet on the floor in the register
line, to mark where people should stand.
I stopped going to the
Key Food around the corner because, the last time I went, the lines for
the registers were crammed into one of the store’s slim aisles and it
was impossible to move around without bumping into another person. It
felt chaotic and dangerous to be there, and that was after five minutes,
not an eight-hour shift. Compared to HEB, whose Texas stores are the
size of airplane hangars, NYC grocery stores have the unfair
disadvantage of having to cram as many aisles as possible into very
small spaces...; but that’s just all the more reason to limit customers
and minimize contact.
As a privately held, $28 billion-a-year company,
HEB could probably swing more than a temporary, $2 raise for hourly
workers, and employees still say working at even a well-prepared grocery
store right now is unnerving and scary. But in the face of reports about Whole Foods employees getting sick, having panic attacks on the job, being instructed to buy hand sanitizer elsewhere, and encouraged to share sick leave
with colleagues, HEB’s response is practically golden. HEB probably had
a head start because it operates solely in a state where hurricane
season means nearly annual emergency situations,
but there’s no discernible reason why Amazon-owned Whole Foods (or any
other grocery store) couldn’t start taking a page from HEB’s playbook
and put many of the same measures in place to protect its employees
going forward."
"Dyson has received an order from the UK government for 10,000
ventilators to support efforts by the country’s National Health Service
to treat coronavirus patients.
James Dyson, the company’s billionaire founder, confirmed the order in a letter to employees shared with CNN on Wednesday.
“A ventilator supports a patient who is no longer able to maintain
their own airways, but sadly there is currently a significant shortage,
both in the UK and other countries around the world,” Dyson wrote.
Dyson said the company had designed and built an entirely new
ventilator, called the “CoVent,” since he received a call 10 days ago
from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“This new device can be manufactured quickly, efficiently and at
volume,” Dyson added, saying that the new ventilator has been designed
to “address the specific needs” of coronavirus patients.
A spokesperson for the company, which is best known for its vacuum
cleaners and hand dryers, said the ventilators would be ready by early
April. Dyson, who has wealth worth $10 billion according to Bloomberg, wrote in his letter that he would also donate 5,000 units to the international effort to tackle the pandemic.
“The core challenge was how to design and deliver a new, sophisticated
medical product in volume and in an extremely short space of time,” he
added. “The race is now on to get it into production.”
Healthcare workers in many parts of the world are having trouble
enough critical supplies, such as masks, gloves and ventilators, to deal
with the influx of patients suffering from the highly contagious virus.
In the United States, Ford has announced that it’s working with 3M
and GE Healthcare to produce medical equipment including ventilators and
protective gear. GM and Tesla have also pledged to make ventilators."
"It’s easy to feel depressed and scared these days. News about the
impact and death toll of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, is constant.
Government responses have been chaotic, ranging from near-indifference
to suddenly shutting down the economy, with politicians offering to pay
for everything.
Yet we shouldn’t lose sight of the exceptional vitality that the
private sector is demonstrating during this mess. It will make a
difference, so cheer up!
After what can only be described as a multilevel government failure
that resulted in the United States having practically no coronavirus
tests available for weeks after the onset of the pandemic, the private
sector ramped up its production so much that we’re now testing 65,000
people every day. This number is bound to grow. The tests are a
crucial component of making it through this crisis, and they’ll become
even more accurate and deliver results faster as innovators do what they
do best when they’re unhindered by silly or contradictory government
regulations.
Singapore’s Veredus Laboratories, for example, said it will soon
release “Lab-on-Chip” kits to test patients for three kinds of
coronavirus within two hours. Four American startups had also launched
at-home tests for COVID-19, until the Food and Drug Administration
unwisely demanded they stop issuing or testing kits.
There are many other remarkable developments. For instance, only a
few weeks after the beginning of this outbreak in the United States,
many pharmaceutical firms worked at lightning speed to develop a
vaccine. Last week, the first doses of an experimental COVID-19 vaccine
were administered to a group of volunteers. Many companies are hard at
work trying to come up with a cure. Whether it’s testing old medications
to figure out if they can mitigate the virus’s effects or developing
new drugs, the private sector is going full speed ahead to help.
Americans, especially health-care professionals, need face masks.
Companies nationwide are shifting resources to produce more masks. The
firm 3M, for instance, announced that it “ramped up to maximum
production levels of N95 respirators and doubled our global output to a
rate of more than 1.1 billion per year, or nearly 100 million per
month.” 3M Chairman and CEO Mike Roman added
that “more than 500,000 respirators are on the way from our South
Dakota plant to two of the more critically impacted areas, New York and
Seattle, with arrivals expected starting tomorrow. We are also ready to
expedite additional shipments across the country.”
What about companies that weren’t in the face mask business? A group
of American apparel and textile companies like Fruit of the Loom and
Hanesbrands came together almost overnight to create a medical face mask
supply chain to help hospitals, health-care workers and citizens
battling the virus’s spread. Efforts like this abound.
It gets even better. Researchers trying to understand where best to
send supplies or how to mitigate outbreaks are now being helped by
Facebook’s disease prevention maps, which display population density,
demographics and travel patterns. As George Mason University’s Tyler
Cowen also explains for Bloomberg, “Skype and Zoom sessions will replace
many a class, and the textbook companies are stepping forward with
electronic portals that present classroom materials, interactive
exercises and grade student answers.”
Creativity and selflessness are on display everywhere. In Canada, an
anesthetist managed to turn one life-saving ventilator into nine. In
Italy, a company used its 3D printer to manufacture much-needed
ventilator valves to be used in that country’s overwhelmed hospitals.
These entrepreneurs then created another life-saving device. As they
explain in the New York Times, they modified “a snorkeling mask
already on the market to create a ventilation-assisted mask for
hospitals in need of additional equipment, which was successful when the
hospital tested it on a patient in need.”
And where I live in Virginia, a couple has been 3D-printing shields to protect N95 masks. The Washingtonian
reports, “For each request received, the Filkos are covering shipping
costs and sending four free masks to doctors, nurses, and other
healthcare workers.”
Companies are indeed stepping up to help those in need. Burger King
is giving out two free kids’ meals to everyone who orders food through
their app. U-Haul is providing one month of free storage for students
displaced from their universities by the virus.
So, during these depressing times, don’t underestimate human ingenuity. Just keep your eyes open, and prepare to be amazed."
"From its biggest cities to its smallest towns, America’s
chance to contain the coronavirus crisis came and went in the seven
weeks since U.S. health officials botched the testing rollout and then
misled scientists in state laboratories about this critical early
failure. Federal regulators failed to recognize the spiraling disaster
and were slow to relax the rules that prevented labs and major hospitals
from advancing a backup.
Scientists around the country found themselves shackled as the disease spread.
“We
were watching a tsunami and standing there frozen,” said Dr. Debra
Wadford, director of the public viral disease laboratory in California,
where some of the country's earliest patients were identified.
The
nation’s public health pillars — the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration — shirked their
responsibility to protect Americans in an emergency like this new
coronavirus, USA TODAY found in interviews with dozens of scientists,
public health experts and community leaders, as well as email
communications between laboratories and hospitals across the country.
The result was a cascading series of failures now costing lives.
CDC leaders not only bungled their role in developing the first
coronavirus test permitted in the country, they also misrepresented the
efficacy of early solutions to state health authorities.
Then,
public and private lab directors felt rebuffed by the FDA when they
first offered to help troubleshoot the problem by developing their own
tests. The agency, through its emergency authority, had placed
restrictions on labs that can apply in emergencies but not in normal
circumstances.
In a statement to USA Today, FDA spokeswoman
Stephanie Caccomo said validating outside tests is essential in a crisis
when "false results can lead to significant adverse public health
consequences."
A reliable, accessible test was key to averting today’s disaster.
Countries such as South Korea had already shown how such diagnostics —
developed and scaled up with the help of the private sector at the onset
— could be used to identify people with early infections before they
spread the virus widely.
In late February, the CDC's deputy
director of infectious disease projected calm in a conference call with
state laboratories. The labs were told they could now send samples to
the CDC and receive results within 24 hours.
“That was a
bald-faced lie,” said Wadford. At that point, she was waiting four to
five days on test results for samples she had sent to the CDC.
"The most disappointing part was that they couldn’t just be frank and
straight with us,” said Wadford, who took detailed notes of the
conference call that she dictated to USA TODAY. “Tell us the situation.
Don’t sugarcoat it and lie. But to mislead us is just not right.”
The
following week, President Trump tweeted: “The Coronavirus is very much
under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all
relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and
very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”"
"Caccomo denied that the FDA was overly restrictive
at the onset of the outbreak and then slow to adapt to the
"unprecedented public health emergency.”
“We recognized the
urgent need for even faster testing availability, so we quickly adapted
our policies to help expedite patient testing,” Caccomo said.
The
agency worked with outside labs as early as Jan. 22, she said, before
opening up the emergency authorization process at the end of February.
"As
the emergency evolved," Caccomo added, "FDA determined that the
benefits of increased testing capacity outweighed the risks associated
with use of additional tests."
The time lost in February was critical to containing the outbreak and
helping hospitals prepare, experts say. With each delay, the virus
spread undetected as people likely unaware of an infection attended
conferences and weddings, frequented bars and restaurants and took
long-planned cruise vacations.
America is now paying the price.
More than half of the country’s population has been ordered to stay home
to slow the spread. Doctors are rationing supplies. Like New York City,
communities have limited testing because the outbreak has grown so
large that hospitals must instead target the most vulnerable.
From Texas to New York –– the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak
–– medical facilities burned through protective supplies, including
masks, almost immediately, in part because doctors did not have
widespread access to tests a month ago, forcing them to take extensive
precautions with all patients showing symptoms.
New York City
health officials now recommend against testing patients who do not
require hospitalization, even if they have symptoms such as fever, to
preserve limited resources. In viral social media posts, doctors
describe hospitals overrun with the sick and dying. Patients with
symptoms wait in clinic lines for up to 11 hours to get tested.
Dr.
Alan Bigman, who runs a multi-speciality medical practice there, has
agonized over an impossible position: pull patients away from jobs and
out of the community without a diagnosis or risk running out of testing
supplies for the next person who walks into the clinic.
“They have kids, and they have neighbors,” he said. “I need to know if they are positive or not.”
The crisis may soon be just as dire in rural communities. As of
mid-March, Dr. April Abbott, the microbiology lab director at the
largest hospital chain in southern Indiana, said she could not get
equipment to run her own tests, in part because the federal government
does not consider her area a priority like New York or California.
Hotspots
could be hiding across the country. Smart thermometer company, Kinsa,
recently noted an unusually high volume of fevers in east Texas and
northern New Mexico, for instance, places where reported infections –
and tests – remain low.
“We're not able to get testing supplies
because we can't prove we need them,” Abbott said, “And we can't prove
we need them because we can't perform the tests.”"
"Federal testing push falls behind
Since
early January, a virus raging in China had the attention of public
health experts. A coronavirus, it was the newest member of a large
family of viruses whose evils include the common cold. The name refers
to how it looks under a microscope, with crown-like spikes on its
surface.
U.S. intelligence communities soon began warning of a global pandemic, which The Washington Post reported last week was downplayed by the Trump administration.
After
the first American case turned up in Seattle in late January, an
infectious disease expert there began asking state and federal officials
to let her repurpose nasal swab flu tests for the new coronavirus. The
answer, the New York Times reported: no.
Twenty-plus
years of public health preparedness drills dictated what the government
should have done next: mobilize state, hospital and commercial
laboratories to develop testing to isolate the sick and buy time for
hospitals to activate plans for handling a surge.
“When you see a
disaster coming, you want to go big and go now,” said Dr. Tara O’Toole,
who helped develop pandemic response plans in the Department of Homeland
Security under former President Barack Obama.
But for weeks, the federal testing push fell further and further behind.
On
Jan. 31, after Americans began returning stateside from the outbreak’s
origin in Wuhan, China, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar
declared a public health emergency, but called the threat to this
country “low.”
Shortly after, the FDA gave the CDC authority
through an emergency use authorization to begin rolling out a diagnostic
test kit for the state public health labs.
If any scientists at
universities, the public labs or private facilities wanted to develop
their own tests — which they sometimes call “home brew” — or adopt the
World Health Organization’s, they would need to submit separate
applications with 28 pages of guidelines.
Labs found the process more burdensome than any other regulation they deal with.
Under
normal circumstances, scientists can run various tests without special
FDA approval. But emergency orders shift the regulatory landscape,
imposing restrictions. Experts say the agency moved far too slowly to
lift them, given the magnitude of the building crisis.
Instead,
the FDA stuck with one of the most restrictive approaches possible,
according to Dr. Josh Sharfstein, a former deputy commissioner at FDA.
“The
response has been backwards,” said Sharfstein, now vice dean for public
health practice and community engagement at Johns Hopkins University,
who advocates for more regulation during non-emergencies and less in
urgent situations like this one.
The FDA, an arm of the
Department of Health and Human Services, regulates according to laws
passed by Congress and guidance laid out by the administration. Yet
Trump has blamed the initial approach on the prior administration, which
he said created barriers that made it difficult to rapidly ramp up
testing."
"Dr.
Margaret Hamburg, who served as commissioner of the FDA under former
president Barack Obama and helped oversee the agency’s response to the
H1N1 flu outbreak, said there was nothing stopping the administration
from acting sooner."
"Flawed test, then flawed response
The
federal emergency declaration allowed the CDC to begin distributing
test kits to state health department labs across the nation in early
February.
Right away, a problem surfaced. California received its
kits on a Friday. Scientists worked through the weekend, discovering
that some components of the CDC’s test were flawed and produced
inconclusive results.
The issue centered on one of the three testing components, or reagents, used to detect the new virus, COVID-19.
On Sunday, Wadford, one of the directors of the California public
health lab, frantically messaged colleagues at the Association of Public
Health Laboratories. She wanted to know if other labs had encountered
the same problem.
“We are hearing of it from at least one state
lab,” an official from the laboratory association wrote back in an
email. “Seems like it might be real.”
The CDC promised to quickly
fix the test. But for two weeks, the agency offered temporary solutions
— such as creating a new “surge” lab and offering to receive samples at
CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
Those patches themselves were so
flawed that results that took days were often inconclusive, too,
according to Wadford. At one point, the surge lab also failed to
immediately notify the state labs of positive cases by phone, as they
had done earlier in crises.
The CDC has acknowledged problems with its testing development.
"This
has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked," Dr. Nancy Messonnier,
director of its National Center for Immunization and Respiratory
Diseases, told reporters in late February.
Noting that the U.S. had few cases at the time, she added: "To date, our strategies have been largely successful."
The agency did not respond to a request for additional comment under deadline.
By the third week of February, still with no permanent solution in place, the FDA was well aware of the problem.
On
Feb. 24 — the same day Trump tweeted “the Coronavirus is very much
under control” — Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of
Public Health Laboratories, sent a letter to the FDA begging the agency
to scale back its original strategy and lift the home-brew restrictions
preventing them from making their own tests.
Around the same time, more than 100 scientists in private labs and universities penned a similar letter to Congress.
“They
are first responders with lab coats and they couldn’t actually gown
up,” Becker said in an interview, calling the situation at that stage
desperate.
On Feb. 29, the administration changed course and
began rolling back the restrictions. The new strategy allowed both
private and public labs to use a modified version of the CDC test and
start developing their own.
In the coming days and weeks, the FDA
continued to ease restrictions to make it easier for others to come
online with tests, including commercial laboratories.
Experts criticize the agency, however, for moving slowly given the magnitude of the health epidemic unfolding.
“CDC
tests were never supposed to meet the entire need for the U.S.,” said
Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, noting that commercial labs and
hospitals play critical roles in reaching the scale required in a major
epidemic such as the new coronavirus.
During these lost weeks in
February, federal officials missed their chance to contain the outbreak
before it swept across the country, unseen.
As testing ramped up, states found themselves behind
At
Texas Children’s Hospital, doctors lament the weeks that passed without
an in-house test to show in hours, not days, what they were dealing
with.
Dr. Jim Dunn, director of medical microbiology and virology
at the hospital, had developed lab tests for the Zika virus for weeks
before the FDA stepped in. He said the restrictions this time prevented
Texas Children’s from getting out in front of COVID-19.
“They
pulled the plug before we even had a chance to get going,” said Dunn,
noting that the hospital expended resources in the early days when
doctors didn’t know who did and didn’t have the virus. “It could have
affected how the masks were allocated.”"
The CDC fumbled its communication with public health officials and underestimated the threat of the coronavirus even as it gained a foothold in the United States, according to hundreds of pages of documents ProPublica obtained.
"On
Feb. 13, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent out
an email with what the author described as an “URGENT” call for help.
The
agency was struggling with one of its most important duties: keeping
track of Americans suspected of having the novel coronavirus. It had “an
ongoing issue” with organizing — and sometimes flat-out losing — forms
sent by local agencies about people thought to be infected. The email
listed job postings for people who could track or retrieve this
paperwork.
This
email is among hundreds of pages of correspondence between federal and
state public health officials obtained by ProPublica through a records
request in Nevada.
During
the period in which the correspondence was written, from January to
early March, health officials were trying to stay ahead of the
coronavirus outbreak underway in China. By mid-February, when the CDC
job postings email went out, the virus had a toehold in the United
States, where there were already 15 confirmed cases. In another two
weeks, the first case of community transmission would be reported in
California, followed shortly by cases in Washington.
The
documents — mostly emails — provide a behind-the-scenes peek into the
messy early stages of the U.S. response to the coronavirus, revealing an
antiquated public health system trying to adapt on the fly. What comes
through clearly is confusion, as the CDC underestimated the threat from
the virus and stumbled in communicating to local public health officials
what should be done.
The
same week the CDC sent out the email about the job openings, the agency
sent Nevada officials alerts about 80 potential coronavirus patients to
monitor, documents show. Four were not Nevada residents.
A
state epidemiologist, in each instance, corrected the agency, informing
the CDC that the person was from New York, not Nevada. (The CDC then
redirected each report to New York, the documents show.)
The
confusion sometimes went both ways. On March 4, a program manager in
the Nevada Health Department reached out to the CDC to ask about
congressional funding for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel
coronavirus.
“There seems to be a communications blackout on this end,” the program manager wrote, wondering if funds would be distributed based on the number of cases in each state or by population.
“Unfortunately,
there is no clear answer to your questions,” responded a CDC staffer,
apologizing for the lack of information. “We are hearing all of the
rumor mills as well.”
“Thank you,” the Nevada program manager replied. “It’s good to be confused together.”
Obtained by ProPublica, identifying information redacted.
Chaotic Coordination
For
much of February, the CDC kept a tight grip on who should be tested for
the coronavirus, a strategy that has been criticized by epidemiologists
for limiting the ability to track the spread of the disease.
In
a Feb. 19 presentation to state health officials, the CDC described the
definition of a person who ought to be tested: You had to have had
close contact with someone confirmed to have COVID-19, or to have
traveled from China and then had respiratory symptoms and a fever at the
same time.
However,
the CDC’s own guidance from a month prior, distributed to the states on
Jan. 17, had a footnote that said that “fever may not be present in
some patients,” such as people who had taken fever-lowering medications,
according to one of the documents obtained by ProPublica. That caveat
was not on the slides presented to the states in mid-February.
In
a statement to ProPublica, the CDC said clinicians could always use
their judgment to decide who received a test. “CDC never declined a
request for testing that came from a state or local health department,”
the agency said.
In
mid to late February, the CDC was trying to move responsibility for
coronavirus testing from itself to state health departments — a critical
step, since the CDC does not have the capacity to be the nation’s
testing lab. Slides from the Feb. 19 presentation describe the process
for transitioning from “Phase 1,” in which the CDC determined who was a
potential COVID-19 patient and conducted all the testing, to “Phase 2,”
in which local health departments would do that work and report data
back to the CDC.
Because of delays with test kits,
Phase 2 had to be “redesigned,” the presentation said, so the CDC would
continue to test specimens and return results. The CDC told ProPublica
that all states have now transitioned to the original Phase 2 plan,
where they can run their own tests.
The
CDC presentation also directed the states to use a web platform called
DCIPHER, which the agency was already using for food-related outbreaks,
to report potential COVID-19 patients and confirmed cases.
But
it wasn’t until the week of Feb. 24 — the same week that the U.S. would
discover its first case of community-acquired COVID-19 — that the CDC
scheduled a training for states on how to use the platform, according to
the documents.
On
March 1, the CDC emailed Nevada’s Health Department, requesting that it
send a list of users and email addresses to connect to the DCIPHER
system, to “ensure that we can onboard your jurisdiction.”
“We sent a spread sheet a couple weeks ago which I thought covered this,” a state epidemiologist responded.
Four
days later, Nevada announced its first confirmed case of the
coronavirus. It’s unclear when the state managed to successfully get on
the DCIPHER system. Officials from Nevada declined to comment.
“Maybe Just Kidding”
A
key part of the CDC’s strategy during the early days of the outbreak
was identifying infected travelers returning from China. The process for
screening passengers arriving at Los Angeles International Airport did
not go smoothly, the correspondence obtained by ProPublica indicates.
On
Feb. 16, a CDC staff member sent a message to colleagues about a buggy
electronic traveler screening questionnaire that wouldn’t save
correctly, among other issues. Also, the tool’s drop down field
auto-populated with “United Kingdom” instead of “United States,” forcing
users to type “United States of America.”
The
CDC staffer also said the agency was struggling to interview
non-English speakers in a timely manner and needed additional
interpreters.
“Hello
Team,” another CDC staff member responded, offering a solution: “The
Google translate App has a real-time voice translation option.”
The
screening protocol also wasn’t always clear. On Feb. 29, a CDC officer
at LAX sent an email to her colleagues, saying: “In case this comes up
again, we are not screening private flights. These would be flights that
land at LAX but don’t arrive into the regular terminal … mainly for
rich people.”
Just
over two hours later, the officer emailed again. “And, maybe just
kidding,” she wrote. Information from headquarters seemed to contradict
what she had said about private flights, she said.
The
CDC told ProPublica that it scaled up the screening almost overnight,
so it focused on vetting the largest segment possible of high-risk
passengers coming from places like Wuhan, China. The agency trained
staff and dealt as best it could with limited staffing and translation
services, it said."
"More than 6,000 complaints of coronavirus-related price gouging have
flooded into state attorneys-general offices across the country,
according to The Washington Times’ analysis of publicly available data.
All told, 6,247 complaints were filed last week
against retailers who reportedly raised prices for such essential items
as hand sanitizers, face masks, toilet paper, and disinfectant wipes,
according to the Times’ analysis.
Pennsylvania topped the nation with 1,600 complaints. Michigan was second with 800, followed by New Jersey with 600 complaints.
The total number of complaints nationwide is likely much higher
because several large states, including California and Massachusetts,
did not release their numbers.
Government officials have been sternly warning
retailers not to raise prices during the pandemic and aggressively
fining those who do.
Increasing prices during an emergency may seem like cruel
profiteering, but free-market economists say the crackdown could do more
harm than good.
As they see it, essential items fly off the
shelves faster when government-mandated price controls keep prices
artificially low. By letting the market dictate the cost, some consumers
buck the price tag leaving more supply available. Thus higher prices
prevent panic buying, according to economists.
“The choice is between low prices with no
availability and nothing to buy, or high prices where the supply is
going to be available,” said Mark J. Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and professor at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.
Most states have price-gouging laws on their
books, although the threshold to declare increases as “gouging” varies.
Some states bar retailers from inflating prices by 10% during an
emergency.
Free-market economists argue that market forces should be allowed to
decide the cost of products. In their view, so-called price gouging
encourages suppliers to rush into the market with much-needed supplies
thus lowering prices anyway.
As law enforcement ramps up its efforts to
combat price-gouging, retailers are beginning to push back. They say the
cost of fines and battling lawsuits could cause more harm to their
business than the coronavirus pandemic.
A liquor store in Fresno, California, was fined
$10,000 for jacking up the price of bottled water. The store was
selling a 24-pack of bottled water for $16, according to the City
Attorney’s Office. Typically, a pack of water retails between $4 and $5.
Officials in Jersey City, New Jersey issued 9
fines totaling $90,000 to one discount store they say inflated the price
of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant wipes.
New York City has issued more than $275,000 in fines for alleged price gouging.
“Those stores operate on very thin profit margins and fines of $50,000 or $60,000 could bankrupt smaller retailers,” Mr. Perry
said, adding that larger retail stores like Target or Walmart don’t
usually raise prices because they fear damage to the company’s
reputation.
Mr. Perry said the finger should be pointed at greedy consumers rather than store owners.
“Consumers who had no thought about their
fellow Americans bought up al the toilet paper they didn’t really need,”
he said. “Price gouging laws won’t do anything to address the panic
buying because if prices stay low, then the toilet paper is going to get
bought up by the people who get there first.”
The solution, he says, is for stores to
restrict the number of items a customer can buy. By limiting customers
to two bottles of hand sanitizer or one pack of toilet paper retailers
can combat panic buying.
“Quotas are the way to correct the problem
rather than sending law enforcement or attorneys general out to fine
companies,” he said."
