Manic of a panic is geopolitical

[kriesel]

Project Airbridge is to gain weeks by air freight compared to usual ocean freight, allowing a surge of more than the usual supply rate. The stuff that was shipped ocean freight is still coming. So right now while more is needed, more is coming; air and ocean in parallel for a few weeks.

UPS is flying the stuff as part of Airbridge. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fema-...124510509.html

Where's the graft? FEMA is just mobilizing the big fleets of air shippers and existing distributors that are better set up to handle such tasks than the government is.
FEDEX too. https://www.marketwatch.com/press-re...obe-2020-04-08
And apparently the combined commercial cargo fleets are not enough, so capacity is being supplemented with military cargo planes.

The shippers take physical possession but are not the owners of the materials being moved.

"A handful of American health care distributors purchases the supplies, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid for the Shanghai-to-New York flight." The distributors are the ones buying the bulk shipments and are set up to break down bulk shipments to lot sizes suitable for individual hospitals and smaller trucks that can actually go to the hospital loading docks. Can't run an 18 wheeler everywhere, or cargo jet to the hospital receiving dock. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronav...ite-house-says

I don't see cutting distributors out of a vital flow and teaching the National Guard or other govenrment staff how to be distributors as a great alternative to using the distributors that are already up to speed.

This article mentions "giving" supplies to various destinations. That might have been accurate reporting, or might not.It implies government-purchased supplies. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronav...ect-airbridge/

FEMA page regarding supplies https://www.fema.gov/fema-supply-cha...rce-leads-four
"Additionally, in some cases, the federal government may purchase some of the supplies to be used to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) or to provide to states with any identified and unmet needs."

Healthcare Distribution Alliance AIrbridge page https://www.hda.org/news/2020-03-29-...dge-initiative

NY Times article with conflicting statements on supplies handling. In a nutshell, FEMA is attempting fast rational rationing. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/u...-supplies.html

[LaurV]

Well...we all love George Carlin...

[kriesel]

Several MDs post about reopening for business and ending the shutdowns. https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-re...e-b7bb0bc94f00

[kladner]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...=technology-vp

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed aging, inflexible computer systems at the heart of the U.S. economy -- and a shortage of experts to fix the problem. This is slowing the government’s effort to get billions of dollars in stimulus checks to millions of newly unemployed citizens.

The $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed in late March includes a $600 weekly increase in unemployment benefits. That money won’t reach anyone until state agencies update technology systems to reflect the law and handle the flood of new applications.

Oklahoma is trying to implement CARES as quickly as it can, but some claims are taking as long as two weeks to process because of a mainframe computer that runs on a 60-year-old programming language called COBOL.

[kladner]

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/08/b...gua-venezuela/

Regime change-hungry HRW is proudly taking credit for crushing new US sanctions on Nicaragua while pushing to escalate Washington’s economic war on Venezuela. The Grayzone presents a deep dive into the “human rights” arm of US empire.
By Ben Norton

Human Rights Watch, the leading so-called rights organization in the United States, has actively lobbied for Washington to impose suffocating sanctions on leftist governments in Latin America. The group has even praised the Donald Trump administration for ramping up its aggressively destabilizing regime-change measures.

NGOs like Human Rights Watch (HRW) depict targeted sanctions as a more palatable alternative to military action, although these measures are widely recognized by international legal experts to be a form of economic warfare that have led to the deaths of many thousands of civilians, destroyed the livelihoods of countless people, and devastated entire nations’ economies.

As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe, HRW operatives took credit for new sanctions the Trump administration had imposed on Nicaragua’s democratically elected leftist government. Among those cheering on the escalation of economic warfare was HRW Australia development and outreach manager Stephanie McLennan, who chirped that the fresh round of sanctions were “great news!”

This is great news! US sanctions on #Nicaragua officials open door for accountability. In 2019, we recommended sanctions against two of the three named officials—Luis Alberto Pérez Olivas and Justo Pastor Urbina—after finding evidence of grave abuses. https://t.co/f7zFdl2X22

— Stephanie McLennan (@StephMcLennan) March 17, 2020

[kladner]

https://readersupportednews.org/opin...ble-of-reading
Yes. I know that Bororwitz is at the New Yorker. There is an 'Go to original' link at the top of the page. I like to support leftist news aggregation sites, as folks here may have noticed. Reader Supported is pretty tame. Information Clearing House is more on the edge. I do not subscribe to, or endorse any of these views except explicitly. I like to spread diverse viewpoints, especially those which may be less enamored of the political mainstream views emanating from DC.

No one could have seen the coronavirus pandemic coming except for people who are capable of reading, a new study indicates.

The study, published by the University of Minnesota, is highly critical of the current early-warning system for global pandemics, which requires that a person have the literacy necessary to read, comprehend, and digest a memo.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by kladner

https://readersupportednews.org/opin...ble-of-reading

Whole lot of 20/20-hindsight running rampant in the MSM these days. I was pleasantly surprised to see none other than a Vox reporter try to provide some sobering perspective on the media's own role in the early days of what turned into a pandemic:

What went wrong with the media’s coronavirus coverage? - Vox

While President Trump has been correctly pilloried for describing the coronavirus as less dangerous than the flu, that message was commonplace in mainstream media outlets throughout February. And journalists — including my colleagues at Vox — were dutifully repeating exhortations from public health officials not to wear masks for much of 2020.

As we head into the next phase of the pandemic, and as the stakes mount, it’s worth looking back to ask how the media could have done better as the virus broke out of China and headed to the US.

Why didn’t we see this coming sooner? And once we did, why didn’t we sound the alarm with more vigor?

If you read the stories from that period, not just the headlines, you’ll find that most of the information holding the pieces together comes from authoritative sources you’d want reporters to turn to: experts at institutions like the World Health Organization, the CDC, and academics with real domain knowledge.

The problem, in many cases, was that that information was wrong, or at least incomplete. Which raises the hard question for journalists scrutinizing our performance in recent months: How do we cover a story where neither we nor the experts we turn to know what isn’t yet known? And how do we warn Americans about the full range of potential risks in the world without ringing alarm bells so constantly that they’ll tune us out?

Let’s be clear: Journalists have been doing crucial reporting about what the US government got wrong as the pandemic advanced, and what US leaders could have done to prepare America. They provided analysis that put the news in context. And they have also provided important on-the-ground dispatches from places around the world that have been devastated by the disease — often at great personal risk — starting at its epicenter in Wuhan, China.

But when it came to grappling with a new disease they knew nothing about, journalists most often turned to experts and institutions for information, and relayed what those experts and institutions told them to their audience.

And given that the Covid-19 coronavirus is brand new, even the best-meaning experts and institutions gave conflicting information, some of which now has proven to be inaccurate or up for debate. That includes National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, who is now the most trusted official in the federal government when it comes to the Covid-19 response, but as late as February was calling the risk from coronavirus “minuscule” and warning people to worry instead about “influenza outbreak, which is having its second wave.”

“There’s a line between doing aggressive reporting and kind of acting in the role of a public health agency,” Joe Kahn, the New York Times’s managing editor, told Recode. “And you never have a degree of complete certainty about the medical analysis, and the epidemiology.”

That degree of uncertainty is much larger when it comes to a new virus that moves around the world as quickly as a plane. It’s a problem that comes built into the reporting. Perhaps the only solution journalists have is to simply say: The experts we talked to aren’t sure, but they’re trying to find out.

That collage of soothing MSM headlines in the Dan Bongino twitter thread linked near the bottom of the article is quite damning.

Re. Intel-community memos: POTUS gets a lot of memos, and premature panic can carry its own steep cost not just in terms of $ but in lives - as the MSM were frequently reminding us back then. How many very-scary-sounding "this could turn into a global pandemic" warnings has the world experienced in the last 100 years - heck, just in the last 50 we've had Swine Flu, Ebola, SARS and MERS, with Covid-19 the latest in the that series - and how many "panned out", pardon the pan-pun?

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

How many very-scary-sounding "this could turn into a global pandemic" warnings has the world experienced in the last 100 years - heck, just in the last 50 we've had Swine Flu, Ebola, SARS and MERS, with Covid-19 the latest in the that series - and how many "panned out", pardon the pan-pun?

This one. And the costs in not taking it appropriately seriously have been high.

I agree that risk management is all about balancing various probabilities, and the costs of optional actions. But perhaps the balancing should be more towards taking actions which might be safer, even if it they turn out to not have been necessary.

Take the summation of costs of the damage from this over the long term (read: 50 or 100 years or so), and compare that to the costs of faster (and better) action over the same time period.

Where do the economic curves cross? That's your optimization point (to greatly oversimply it -- I know humans aren't very good at collective long-term thinking yet).

[ATH]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Whole lot of 20/20-hindsight running rampant in the MSM these days. I was pleasantly surprised to see none other than a Vox reporter try to provide some sobering perspective on the media's own role in the early days of what turned into a pandemic:

What went wrong with the media’s coronavirus coverage? - Vox

This New York Times reporter "Donald G. McNeil Jr." really was one of the few who saw where it could be headed. On Feb 27th he said: "Mentally prepare that you might need to stay home for a month, not being able to take the subway".

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/p...ronavirus.html

[Uncwilly]

A look at the years 2000, 2038, & 2100. And why disaster prevention success is misperceived by the general population.
https://www.flashforwardpod.com/2020...000-2038-2100/

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

How many very-scary-sounding "this could turn into a global pandemic" warnings has the world experienced in the last 100 years - heck, just in the last 50 we've had Swine Flu, Ebola, SARS and MERS, with Covid-19 the latest in the that series - and how many "panned out", pardon the pan-pun?

On the other hand, I can think of at least one pandemic whose declaration as such was a long time a-comin'...