Trump privately appeals to Asia and Europe for medical help to fight coronavirus
Despite president’s rhetoric that the US would not rely on foreign nations for help, the administration has approached European and Asian partners
Julian Borger in Washington. Last modified on Wed 25 Mar 2020 03.18 GMT

The US has been appealing to its allies for help in obtaining medical supplies to overcome critical shortages in its fight against coronavirus.

In his public rhetoric Donald Trump has been talking up the domestic private sector response to the crisis.

“We should never be reliant on a foreign country for the means of our own survival,” Trump said at a White House briefing on Tuesday evening. “America will never be a supplicant nation.”

However behind the scenes, the administration has approached European and Asian partners to secure supplies of testing kits and other medical equipment that are in desperately short supply in the US.

On Tuesday, Trump spoke by phone with the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, asking if his country could supply medical equipment.

The official White House account made no mention of the request, but according to the South Korean presidency, the Blue House, the call was made at Trump’s “urgent request”.

Trump praised the South Korean testing programme, which has helped contain the outbreak there. Moon told Trump that he would support South Korean exports of critical supplies to the US “if there is a domestic surplus”.

Foreign Policy reported that the third-ranking diplomat in the state department, David Hale, had asked for a list of countries that might be able to sell “critical medical supplies and equipment” to the US.

“Depending on critical needs, the United States could seek to purchase many of these items in the hundreds of millions with purchases of higher end equipment such as ventilators in the hundreds of thousands,” an email sent to embassies in Europe and Eurasia said.

The email underlined that the request applied to host countries “minus Moscow”.

On 15 March, German officials said they had fended off a Trump administration offer to buy exclusive access to a potential vaccine being developed by a German company, CureVac.

The US has scaled up its diagnostic testing after a slow start and Trump boasted on Tuesday that the country had performed more tests in eight days than South Korea had managed in eight weeks.

As of last week, South Korea had tested 270,000 people (one in 190 of the population) since the beginning of the outbreak while the US has performed 266,000 tests (one in 1,230) in the past eight days. Seoul also started testing much earlier in the country’s outbreak.

Some of the critical components of the diagnostic test are in short supply globally, including the reagents needed to identify the presence of the Covid-19 virus, and nasal swabs used for taking the samples.

The shortages will constrain the US ability to carry out mass testing in the near term, and the administration’s medical experts have been urging that tests are restricted to patients who have already been hospitalised.

On March 18, the Defense One military news site reported that the US air force had quietly flown half a million nasal swabs from Italy to Memphis, where they were distributed around the country.

The US is turning its allies at a time when it has strained relations with many of them. Trump has been demanding South Korea pay much more, reportedly up to $5 bn a year, to cover the costs of US troops based on its soil and the US military has threatened to lay off thousands of Korean employees if Seoul does not agree to a deal.
Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... oronavirus

pathetic

Had a pickup truck with a blow horn and a couple uniformed gentlemen (police/military?) in the back going up and down the streets blasting a message. Anyone else seen/heard them? Know what they are saying?

Khmer_Risotto wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 3:00 pm Had a pickup truck with a blow horn and a couple uniformed gentlemen (police/military?) in the back going up and down the streets blasting a message. Anyone else seen/heard them? Know what they are saying?

Clean your bedding and wash your fuming hands you muppets!


Or something along those lines...

It is not a "seasonal virus" - people will be catching this and dying in both summer and winter (although season do have some role)

30 deg C - totally wrong.
[/quote]

Maybe, but I’m still confused about all this: SEA Countries had millions of tourists from China and elsewhere coming in and moving freely for at least a month before this was recognized as a pandemic, and measures started to be taken to contain it. It was too little, too late, but even now I am not seeing or hearing about hospitals being overwhelmed, or huge numbers of people dying, like has been predicted.
Now Oxford scientists believe it’s possible that half of the UK population could have already been infected, with most showing very mild symptoms, if any at all. If they turn out to be correct, that would mean that the hospitalization and death rates for infected people are much, much lower than what we are currently assuming.
We will all feel pretty stupid, if, after this is all over, we crunch the numbers and realize that Corona is actually less deadly than the common flu, which has already killed at least 20,000 in the USA alone since October, according to the CDC.

Let me be clear, I’m not saying we should do nothing, but every day it’s looking more and more like the worst is already here for SEA, which was the first part of the world, outside of China, to become infected, and one of the last to implement the strict controls that other parts of the world did much earlier.

How far do we let this drag the economy into the gutter before we decide that it’s better to just let it run it’s course?

Fair enough question Ryan, i wonderd the same. re infection rates in SEA
Found this .. see link below

PS, my view, the economy is to serve the people - despite our governments and BigBiz convincing most of us that it is the other way round these days.
Govs everywhere are pushing back on the epidemiologists call for stronger measures - because they work for biz interests, basically.
I don't believe in tens, thousands of extra deaths in order to limit damage to "the economy".
Sacrificing our old and sick for it. But that is just my personal point of view.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-as ... ses-doubts

What f**king pathetic dick trump is,trumps words WE WILL BE UP AND RUNNING BY EASTER, enjoy your EASTER egg Mr president, you are a bloody tosser

the holy word nowdays is economic growth

if u suggest the word unsustainable, you are a demon

quality of life is seen as socialist

checkout time draws near

Shazza wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 3:52 pm What f**king pathetic dick trump is,trumps words WE WILL BE UP AND RUNNING BY EASTER, enjoy your EASTER egg Mr president, you are a bloody tosser

When I heard him say that I couldn't help thinking of "Over by Christmas"



Military analysts led people to believe World War I would be over by Christmas 1914—but new tactics and weapons proved that estimate wrong.

While their assumption seemed logical enough in light of Europe’s recent military history, the advent of modern weaponry and widespread acceptance of the concept of total war soon proved the phrase “over by Christmas” both ridiculously optimistic and cruelly inaccurate. https://www.historynet.com/over-by-christmas.htm

SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 3:41 pm Fair enough question Ryan, i wonderd the same. re infection rates in SEA
Found this .. see link below

PS, my view, the economy is to serve the people - despite our governments and BigBiz convincing most of us that it is the other way round these days.
Govs everywhere are pushing back on the epidemiologists call for stronger measures - because they work for biz interests, basically.
I don't believe in tens, thousands of extra deaths in order to limit damage to "the economy".
Sacrificing our old and sick for it. But that is just my personal point of view.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-as ... ses-doubts

I know about at least one hospital in the Netherlands which tested their (a-symptomatic) staff about 2 weeks ago and found 5% of their staff were infected. Research of the genome showed they were infected with a different strain than the sick in the hospital.

That's why I think 50-60% infected already seems very high to me. The Netherlands is a bit ahead of the USA on 'the curve'.

At least, to me, it shows the numbers presented are worth nothing and the virus is probably a not as lethal as some people are thinking.