https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/coronavirus/article241664666.html

BY BROOKE WOLFORD
MARCH 31, 2020 06:58 PM, UPDATED 18 MINUTES AGO

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend people stand six feet away from one another to avoid spreading the coronavirus.

But research suggests that is not nearly enough distance to keep yourself safe from the coronavirus.

Social distancing measures encourage people to either stay home or, in cases when you need to go out in public, keep a safe distance, according to CDC guidelines. But research suggests that safe distance is actually 27 feet, USA Today reported.

Research on the dynamics of coughs and sneezes found these “exhalations cause gaseous clouds,” that have the ability to travel up to 27 feet, Dr. Lydia Bourouriba, an associate professor at MIT, told USA Today.

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https://apnews.com/dac7209821f922658c635c8ec4069460


A 5-minute test kit for COVID-19 developed by Abbott Laboratories sits on a table ahead of a briefing by President Donald Trump about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, Monday, March 30, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

By CALVIN WOODWARD
27 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — For a few moments in the Rose Garden, the coronavirus pandemic is a bucking bronco with President Donald Trump on its back. His arm swings an invisible rope. He seems to be hanging on for dear life.

“Ride it like a cowboy,” he growls. “Just ride it. Ride that sucker right through.”

This rodeo riff came during the daily White House coronavirus task force briefing, where science meets all things Trump.

It’s where the teetotaling president serves a 5 o’clock cocktail of public-health policy, twisted facts, invented achievements, performance art, hectoring, cheerleading, erraticism, improvisation, self-praise, pet theories and a dash of eloquence. Shaken not stirred. Late in starting, finished when he feels like it.

The self-styled “wartime president” is, at least, a showtime president. He’s enjoying the high ratings of his briefings and boasting they’re up there with “The Bachelor.” Meantime on the streets of the country, people are recoiling in the wake of each passing stranger’s exhalation. In jammed hospitals, patients are fighting for life. The death toll arcs upward.

Still the show must go on.

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https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Exclusive-Captain-of-aircraft-carrier-with-15167883.php

Matthias Gafni and Joe Garofoli March 31, 2020 Updated: March 31, 2020 4 a.m.


The U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt is anchored off Manila Bay as it takes on top Philippine officials and businessmen for a cocktail reception Friday, April 13, 2018 west of Manila, Philippines. The aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71), and several escort ships sailed in the South China Sea in a display of America's naval Photo: Bullit Marquez / AP

The captain of a nuclear aircraft carrier with more than 100 sailors infected with the coronavirus pleaded Monday with U.S. Navy officials for resources to allow isolation of his entire crew and avoid possible deaths in a situation he described as quickly deteriorating.

The unusual plea from Capt. Brett Crozier, a Santa Rosa native, came in a letter obtained exclusively by The Chronicle and confirmed by a senior officer on board the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, which has been docked in Guam following a COVID-19 outbreak among the crew of more than 4,000 less than a week ago.

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Captain of Aircraft Carrier Pleads for Help as Virus Cases Increase Onboard

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Helene Cooper

March 31, 2020
Updated 11:48 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — The captain of an American aircraft carrier deployed to the Pacific Ocean has pleaded with the Pentagon for more help as a coronavirus outbreak aboard his ship continues to spread, officials said Tuesday. Military officials say dozens of sailors have been infected.

In a four-page letter, first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday, Capt. Brett E. Crozier of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt laid out the dire situation unfolding aboard the warship, with more than 4,000 crew members, and what he said were the Navy’s failures to provide him with the proper resources to combat the virus by moving sailors off the vessel.

“We are not at war,” Captain Crozier wrote. “Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our sailors.”

The carrier is currently docked in Guam.

Captain Crozier recommended offloading his entire crew, and then quarantining and testing them while the ship was professionally cleaned. But that proposal raised a series of issues, especially as housing more than 4,000 people while also isolating them would be extremely difficult on the island.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/cuomo-begged-for-coronavirus-protective-gear-by-doctors-nurses

Is sterilizing and reusing masks and other medical equipment safe? Frontline health-care workers are worried they’re about to find out.

Erin Banco
National Security Reporter

Olivia Messer
Reporter

Updated Mar. 31, 2020 6:05AM ET / Published Mar. 31, 2020 4:44AM ET

Shortages of personal protective equipment in some New York City medical facilities have grown so dire that health-care professionals are bucking directives from their executives to reuse gear and making an end-run at Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office to plead for additional supplies.

Over the past two weeks, a handful of New York health-care executives told state representatives—including those in Cuomo’s office—that they were not running low on personal protective equipment (PPE) because they implemented protocols directing staff to reuse items like face masks and gowns when treating COVID-19 patients, according to three individuals familiar with the conversations. Executives said they drafted those protocols, which include sanitization of personal protective gear, based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), those sources said.

But the lack of protective gear and the restrictions on the stockpiles have forced some health-care professionals in the city to resort to wearing trash bags over their scrubs to imitate medical gowns. Doctors and nurses are at times forced to wear makeshift face shields to preserve the heavy-duty ones.

Now, medical workers are reaching out directly to state officials, including Governor Cuomo, to ask for help.

“There’s this idea out there that everything is fine and we all have what we need, but that really isn’t the case,” said one nurse who spoke to The Daily Beast anonymously because they did not want to lose their job. “We took on the job of calling the governor’s office ourselves and letting them know the situation we were in.”

The conversations come as the number of coronavirus cases continues to spike in New York. In a 24-hour period ending Monday, almost 7,000 people in the state tested positive for the virus, and 253 people died. The calls to the governor’s office by doctors and nurses about the shortages of protective gear underscore the severity of the situation, particularly in New York City, where some hospitals last week set up makeshift morgues.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/157094/americas-newspapers-covered-pandemic

The terrifying, censored coverage of the 1918 Spanish flu

By WALTER SHAPIRO
March 31, 2020

When Donald Trump first declared that the coronavirus shutdown would be over by Easter, he was embracing a hallowed American tradition of happy-talk denial. As the polymath president (part war-time leader, part Nobel-level epidemiologist) said last week, “Our people are full of vim and vigor and energy. They don’t want to be locked into a house or an apartment or some space. It’s not for our country, and we are not built that way.”

America was never built that way, as the history of the influenza pandemic a century ago demonstrates. In October 1918 alone, 195,000 Americans died from the virus. Yet President Woodrow Wilson, obsessed with a war in Europe that would end on November 11, made no public references to the disease. And states received no assistance from Washington, not even from the Food and Drug Administration.

Meanwhile, the big-city newspapers—the dominant news sources in the days before radio—sugarcoated the truth, practicing an alarming level of self-censorship. Any article or headline suggesting more than casual concern about the disease would be open to attack for undermining morale on the home front during the Great War.

“As terrifying as the disease was, the press made it more so,” John M. Barry wrote in his epic history, The Great Influenza. “They terrified by making so little of it, for what officials and the press said bore no relationship to what people saw and touched and smelled and endured. People could not trust what they read.”

The result was a crash course in how public ignorance coupled with rampant misinformation tragically delayed efforts to contain the virus. At least, unlike Trump, Wilson was neither promoting untested treatments in White House briefings nor suggesting that New York hospitals were selling face masks on the black market. But the papers from 1918 are also a reminder that clueless public officials, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (who kept the beaches open during spring break), are only the latest in a long line of American leaders who allowed business values to trample public health in an emergency.



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https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/31/doctors-hospitals-front-lines-coronavirus/

By HELEN BRANSWELL @HelenBranswell

MARCH 31, 2020

Streets in cities and towns across the country are eerily quiet. Car traffic has dropped so substantially air pollution is abating. In many places, people are hunkered down indoors, trying to avoid contracting Covid-19.

But the true battle against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the disease, is playing out in hospitals that are currently — or will soon be — engulfed in an onslaught of patients struggling to breathe.

The tsunami has crashed over Seattle, parts of California, New Orleans, and New York City. In Boston and other places along the eastern seaboard, the full force of the wave hasn’t yet hit, but it’s clear it is coming soon.

Hospitals everywhere are surging their capacity, discharging any patients who can safely go home and attempting to conserve dwindling supplies of personal protective equipment, or PPE. Some are resorting to extraordinary measures — even going so far as to sanitize used N95 masks by baking them — to prevent health care workers from becoming Covid-19 patients themselves.

What does it look like to be on the front lines of that response — and what can we expect to happen in facilities across the country in the weeks to come?

STAT spoke with three clinicians about what is happening in U.S. hospitals: Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Lifespan Health Systems in Providence, R.I.; Lakshman Swamy, an intensive care doctor at Boston University Medical Center and the VA Boston; and Craig Spencer, an ER physician and director of global health in emergency medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. Spencer has firsthand experience with devastating infectious diseases: He contracted Ebola in West Africa in 2014.

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https://twitter.com/JanetMaslin/status/1244855490850553858
Janet Maslin@JanetMaslin

More awful news. Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger is in a medically-induced coma due to COVID-19. He is 52.

Jonathan Demme, with his glorious ears, used this Kinks cover in “The Manchurian Candidate.”

FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE- Better Things via @YouTube

1:14 AM - Mar 31, 2020

https://twitter.com/maddow/status/1244762143750316034
Rachel Maddow MSNBC ✔@maddow

Hi again, Mr. President! That clip was from March 20, after you said the ship would be in New York harbor by last week. The ship was not in New York last week -- which is what I said on my show.

You were wrong about it.

No hard feelings. Everyone's glad it's there now. But...

Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump

Embedded video

Rachel Maddow MSNBC ✔@maddow

you really have been terrible about communicating true, factual information to the public in this crisis. Please let the experts and scientists speak instead.

And please nationalize the supply chain for critical medical supplies. Thanks for watching, Mr. President.

7:03 PM - Mar 30, 2020