This is not a convincing claim.
Not if they think they might be the ones doing the dying. As long as it is “other people” (for whatever value of ‘other’), that’s one thing, but the longer this goes on the more people see deaths close to them, or among demographics similar to them.
Actually not a bad approach. Quite good really. While two weeks might not be enough to see a rebound it would be enough to see a failure of continued downward trajectory in all listed criteria for 14 days, as the gating criteria requires. If not continued downward on all no advancing. Unstated, possibly understood but should be stated explicitly: if a significant rebound go back one stage. “Significant rebound” should be defined.
I doubt ANY states meet the required gating and preparedness criteria at this point, or will by May 1.
Not sure if some of those making pronouncements in this thread actually read the proposed plan. The gates (first on) require 14 days of downward trajectory of syndromic cases (COVID19-like and ILI), and of documented cases, and of positive results as a share of total tests. And it requires documented ability to test in large numbers, to do contact trace testing, and to do surveillance monitoring of asymptomatic cases. And it requires documented capacity to handle an ICU surge if one was to occur, along with having adequate PPE supplies.
Which state do you think meets all of those now? Would by May 1?
No idea if Trump understands what this document says but it is a very cautious and measured approach.
Of course it is a suggestion to the governors at most.
I’m not going to feel comfortable visiting my parents without knowing whether I’m a spreader. And I’m not going to feel comfortable going into the office with vulnerable coworkers.
I want widespread testing to free up this part of my guilt-prone conscience. I want to go back to “normal”, but it will be hard to do that amid the fear that I’m spreading viruses all over the place. I want to be a responsible person. I don’t want to send someone to the hospital or worse just because I miss going to the movies or eating at restaurants.
Right now, you can have all the cardinal signs of the virus and be denied a test. Last week my office building (a 23-story building) was shut down because of a potentially sick person. That was last Friday. The test results are still pending. How do people "go back to normal’ when they have to self-isolate for a week waiting for a test result? So I just can’t see how we phase back into to normalcy without ramping up testing a whole lot.
I read through it on my phone so I won’t say it was a deep dive, but I agree that it did seem measured and reasonable. I think the 1 May/15 May/1 June dates were probably shoehorned in at Trump’s request and have no bearing on reality for most states, and that’s probably going to cause a problem. A lot of states, especially stubborn red states, are still on the upswing and not taking appropriate measures as is, so the idea that they’d be able to return to normal by June is just silly.
Here in Ohio, which I think has been one of the states handling this best, the governor said today that limited businesses will be allowed to reopen on 1 May, as long as they’re making efforts at sanitation and social distancing. 1 May is when the existing stay-at-home order is set to expire anyway. Based on what we’re seeing with the numbers that seems reasonable for us. However, he’s wisely committed to nothing more than that at this point. No decision on school yet, no blanket lifting of the stay-at-home order, no promises about anything happening at all this summer. I think that’s about the best anyone can predict at this point, and like I said, this is in a state that hasn’t been hit particularly hard and has a stellar public health team in place.
I’ve got a Florida vacation planned for July, I have a hard time thinking that Florida will be anything other than a shitshow by then. 1 June is laughable for them, the IHME model doesn’t even show them as peaking before 8 May.
From OP’s link:
“The backdrop: During the 1.5-hour call on Wednesday with Trump’s new “Great American Economic Revival Industry” group…”
Yeah, OK.
I admit that I’m not a mind reader, but I don’t think Fauci’s really on board. He looks worn down and it seemed like he was eager to avoid taking questions and it didn’t seem like Trump wanted him taking too many questions, either.
Putting my political biases aside for a moment, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure to reopen the economy, which is understandable. With 30-40% of the country (not even counting the impact of small businesses with 5-20 employees) possibly facing extreme financial distress in the next 3-8 weeks, I get it. Beyond that 30-40% facing a crisis within the next few weeks, another chunk of America that’s fine for the moment will start feeling it.
But the smart thing to do is to let the government institutions pay people and businesses to stay home or minimize operations. If we push people out now before the threat is truly gone, we’ll be right back here and public officials will have less credibility. I think the one thing people need right now is to know that there’s some sort of blue print for recovery.
Depends on what the question is. If it’s “is the plan this document lays out going to happen in anything like the suggested time frame” then the answer is…not just no but hell no. As you note, no adequate testing infrastructure in place - any where, yet. No reasonable PPE levels. Not enough hospital surge capacity.
If the question is “are the broad outlines of this plan completely batshit insane”, then, no, it’s not completely insane. Whish is - sadly - the very low bar we all use now…
Also - any sentence that includes the structure “does Trump understand X” can always be answered in the negative. 
There’s a lot to unravel here, but a few points:
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We need lots of testing, but something on the order of 1-3% of a given population per week is a rough guideline. So - 3.5 - 10 million tests/week for the entire country. Still comes out to about a million/day, but not millions/day (Yes, I am aware of several recent suggestions that 10-30 million tests/day might be needed have been floated. No, I do not take these seriously.)
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So, could we do a million a day? Yes. Right now the U.S. can do ~100k/day. Importantly, most of the really high-speed testing systems that were trumpeted a month ago are still getting their reagent pipelines up to speed: that’s likely 8-12 weeks from full tilt There are also dozens of labs working on multiplexing reactions that will increase the existing pipelines by 4 to 12 fold in the next 6-8 weeks.
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These kind of molecular diagnostic tests scale very well: running a few dozen tests manually costs hundreds of dollars per test. Running a few thousand tests - costs $50/test. Some of the numbers I’ve seen pitches for 50k+ tests/week are in the $10-20 range. And as you ramp these tests up you automate - driving the cost per unit down further.
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None of these testing modalities are novel. There are a bunch of specific details to work through, primer sets to tweak, reaction conditions to optimize, but the underlying technology is the same as hundreds of other molecular tests run every day in hundreds of clincal labs all over the country. And you need smart clinical scientists running the systems and good pathologists signing off that everything worked - but this isn’t like you need a bunch of PhDs running each instrument or interpreting each result.
Ramping up to test entire populations for a novel viral agent is a heavy lift and it will take (more) time. But it is a solvable problem.
Remember: even if we have a vaccine in-hand by the fall (and I would not bet a wooden buckle on that), we still have to have a robust testing system. If we get a really great system up and running soon (plus all the other stuff), we might be able to try limited returns to “normal” in controlled areas with careful monitoring. Maybe.
Finally, the virus doesn’t care what we want to do, or what we feel is reasonable: if we let the genie out of the bottle Bad Things are going to happen. There are a lot of lessons to learn (re-learn) from this pandemic, but the most important one right now is that vigilence is about the only thing we are doing that works: relax that too soon and we’re going to have thousands more dead Americans in a hurry.
To state the obvious, it is impossible to avoid a political component in any management plan. We can reasonably assume that the bulk of any exit plan (whatever country, here in Oz we received ours yesterday) has been developed by professionals with a reasonable grasp on the reality of the situation. They will, of necessity, create a range of options, and a range of expected outcomes. With guidance on the error in estimates. Some of that grounding in reality has to take into account the political realities of where they are. Each country is different. Different populations are going to accept different levels of prescribed behaviour and intervention. Nothing special here.
Eventually it is the job of the elected politicians to make the final call. That is the entire point of having them in the job. It is also the job of the elected politician to sell the plan, and manage those parts of their remit that need managing to best effect. In most countries, that means the executive. In federations - the USA, Australia, Canada, Germany, to name a few, there is another level to interact with, each with nuanced politics involved. Different amounts of autonomy, different relationships with the federal leadership.
Eventually someone has to make a call on the plan. Not just what it is, but how it will be pitched and how it will be managed into the future. That takes skill, and real leadership.
I have previously opined on worldwide differences in how the pandemic has been managed and pitched across the world. Lowball? Rosy picture? Grim realistic? Fight them on the beaches or All home by Christmas? Politics 101 says Lowball. Manage expectations. It is much easier to alter the plan with good news than bad.
But, trying to avoid too much obvious politics, there are always other things in play. Presented with a range of possible outcomes with a range of error, there is a natural tendency to settle on the one that fits with other pressures. If POTUS is seeking re-election, it is hardly surprising he will fixate on the possible outcome that best fits that. However, the next question is how does he decide to pitch the plan? South Korea just re-elected its government in a landslide on the back of their management of Covid-19. Pitching a rosy path and best outcomes is IMHO a naive way of planning re-election anywhere. Everything is downhill from here. There are no upsides to making such a call now. If everything works out fine you are no better off. If things don’t work out, you just plain look bad.
So far, there seems to have been a willingness on part of the electorate to forget empty promises and disregard reality as fake news. It might be more difficult this time.
In short the essential people that have been working all along. The only ones that create hotspots seem to be the ones dealing with senior citizens, prisons, and the occasional industrial facility that was late to the party on figuring out how to distance. That’s not to say these people did not get infected but I haven’t seen many cases of them being a hotspot. Yes I know a meat plant or 5 have shutdown and a few transit workers got sick in the most intense hotspot on the planet. Many more meat plants are still running as are transit workers working outside the general hotspots.
That the actual guideline does not put forth suggested dates as a timeframe. It proposes certain fairly stringent criteria that should be met before entering a first phase and before proceeding to a next phase. May 1, May 15, June 1, are NOT part of the guideline. Theoretically if a state met the gating criteria by May 1 they could start and if they continued to consistently drop on all measures, etc. over the next two weeks and then the next, they could advance on that schedule. Of course that would be with consistent drop on all measures for a six week period before phase three was entered, and consistent documented capacity on all the metrics. It would be listening to what the disease was telling us.
Which is what we should do.
This is lunacy. Nobody is going to test ~2% of their population every week. It’s insane monetarily and logistically.
I’m uncertain about the antibody test? It sounds like people recovered from Coronavirus can return to work? The antibody test confirms that you’ve had Coronavirus?
That’s great that the Coronavirus survivors can go back to work. But what about the rest of us? Are we supposed to hide in isolation indefinitely? When would it be safe for us to come out?
Are the officials assuming we’ll all get the virus eventually?
Let’s say half the employees at your job return to work. They passed the antibody test. Their lives are almost back to normal. Won’t people in isolation feel the need to catch the virus and become eligible to work too?
That’s one terrible decision for anyone to make.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/16/health/coronavirus-treatments-vaccines/index.html
Another issue with 2 weeks is that one of the many ways that CORVID is not the flu is that many people seem to get gradually worse over time. So a person might take 10 days to develop symptoms, but even more days to go to the doctor, and then even more to worsen to where they need to go to the hospital. So hospitalizations lag even more.
I’m no medical expert, but assuming that my state of Texas attempts to go to Phase 1 at the beginning of May, it seems as though following the plan will almost guarantee a resurgence of the virus sometime in late June early July, and therefore a return to a lockdown condition.
I help manage a small, non-profit museum that most likely will run out of money and have to fold permanently if we are unable to return to full operations before August or so. OTOH, we have a mostly volunteer staff who are mostly elderly men, and thus in the cohort at high risk of severe impact if they acquire the virus, so the decision of when to re-open will not be an easy one, regardless of what the governmental guidelines say. I fully understand that we are a fairly insignificant part of the overall economy, and I’m not concerned about my own pay (I’m semi-retired anyway); I guess I’m just pointing out that for some specific cases these guidelines come off as overly simplistic and unhelpful.
(I am not willing to return to 'normality,"if by that you mean the way we were before. Sorry, carry on.)
Could you be more specific? I’m genuinely curious.
He also mentioned, at one of his press conferences, that he wanted to reopen the border to Canada.
Of course he didn’t consult Canada in any way. Not even a heads up. Two weeks hijacking our purchased urgent medical supplies.
Canada has since announced it will reopen it’s borders on its own time line.
Not America’s.