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1. The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Like Nuclear War, Expert Says
2. Exclusive: Inside the military's top secret plan if coronavirus cripples the government
3. China Is Legally Responsible for COVID-19 Damage and Claims Could Be in the Trillions
4. US steps up maritime provocations in attempt to distract China's COVID-19 fight - Global Times
5. China launches new facilities in West PH Sea just as world's eyes fixed on COVID-19
6. Another crisis awaits China, the biggest beneficiary of globalization
7. Exclusive: U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak
8. Harsh Steps Are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say
9. CDC Coronavirus Testing Decision Likely to Haunt Nation for Months to Come
10. As the West Panics, Putin Is Watching
11. How the Virus Got Out
12. As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets
13. Cool Gear Like This Only Goes So Far. U.S. Special Forces Need Help.
1. The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Like Nuclear War, Expert Says
I have pasted Jeffrey Lewis' interview below David Axe's article here.
The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Like Nuclear War, Expert Says
The National Interest · by David Axe · March 22, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has a lot in common with an atomic attack. The effects of the virus, and the United States's dysfunctional nationwide
response to the same, are like a "nuclear war in slow motion," according to Jeffrey Lewis, an arms-control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.
Noting that confluence,
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
interviewed Lewis to understand just how pandemic and nuclear war, and the U.S. government's role in each, can overlap -- and just what we might learn from that.
The fictional atomic massacre in the novel is triggered by four intersecting errors: North Korean troops mistakenly shoot down a South Korean airliner. Seoul retaliates by striking one of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un's palaces.
Kim, convinced he's being targeted for assassination, steels himself for a desperate war of survival. An inattentive, irritable Trump, distracted by a delayed golf game, tweets a personal insult directed at Kim's sister.
For Kim, the tweet is the final straw. He triggers Pyongyang's nukes.
"A lot of people complain that the book is a cheap shot at Trump, but in fact, I think it's accurate to say that he's very immersed in his own feelings all the time," Lewis told
Bulletin writer John Krzyzaniak. "He's not making any effort to play the role of president in the sense of being concerned about how his words and actions will be interpreted by others."
Trump "is emoting because of how it makes him feel in the moment," Lewis added. "And so the way in which his tweets and comments have tanked the stock market and generally sown panic and confusion, that's precisely what he does in the book. It's kind of a minor detail whether the enormous numbers of casualties are from a nuclear war or from a pandemic, it's the same fundamental dysfunction."
Krzyzaniak noted that U.S. states have responded to the pandemic in more focused and effective ways than Trump's administration has done. "State and local officials are acting on their own to mitigate things in a way that they might not be able to do during a nuclear crisis," Krzyzaniak said. "Does that help?"
"No, I think the lack of adequate testing capacity has forced localities to step in," Lewis answered. "But unfortunately, I don't think states and localities
have the tools that they need to really combat this effectively. I don't want to be critical of them because they're trying to do the best they can. But there's
a reason we have a federal government. The federal government has responsibilities and it is failing abjectly at them."
"Not to dwell too much on the book, but that's the central warning of the novel, that the government has really important responsibilities," Lewis added. "And if you have people who are not competent in their positions, or who are not interested in doing that particular job, and if you have this kind of leader in this situation, things get out of hand much more quickly than you realize."
David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels and
The National Interest · by David Axe · March 22, 2020
How the coronavirus outbreak is like a nuclear attack: An interview with Jeffrey Lewis - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
thebulletin.org · by Gayle Spinazze · March 20, 2020
How the coronavirus outbreak is like a nuclear attack: An interview with Jeffrey Lewis
President Trump receives a briefing on the coronavirus outbreak in the Situation Room of the White House, Jan. 29, 2020. Photo Credit: White House.
In 2018, arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis published a
book titled
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel. As the title suggests, it's a fictitious account, written in the style of a retrospective government report, of a nuclear attack on the continental United States.
It's not about a global pandemic, nor is it meant to be predictive. But because the main events of the novel play out over several days in late March 2020, the
Bulletin contacted Lewis to ask him about his thoughts on the ongoing
coronavirus outbreak, and whether he sees any similarities to the nuclear crisis that unfolds in the book.
In this interview, Lewis describes the pandemic as a "nuclear war in slow motion" and says that effectively managing both types of crises requires a cooperative, internationalist approach. In both the real world and the fictional world of his book, he sees a disaster exacerbated by dysfunction within the White House-a product not only of staffing inadequacies but also of senior advisers who are more focused on managing the president than on managing the crisis itself.
The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
John Krzyzaniak: Your book gives a fictitious, speculative account of a nuclear attack against the United States, and how the US government responds. Obviously, what's happening right now is not a nuclear attack. But you must see parallels between the coronavirus pandemic and what happens in your book.
Jeffrey Lewis: The biggest parallel is that what is about to happen will have been largely preventable, particularly in the United States, where the
bungled federal response is exactly the kind of dysfunction that I tried to depict in the book.
In
The 2020 Commission, no one wants nuclear war. Trump doesn't want a nuclear war; his staff doesn't want a nuclear war. And yet they stumble into one. And the way in which they stumble into one is by being completely focused on managing the president's emotions and the political situation, leaving no time to actually manage the crisis.
And every news story I've read, every inside account of what's happening with the coronavirus is exactly that. The federal response is entirely about managing Trump's ego and whims, and there's actually precious little attention devoted to managing the outbreak.
JK: What about the tweets? In your book, the tweets contribute to the crisis.
JL: One of the things I have been criticized most frequently for is the idea that the tweets in the book are somehow unrealistic, which to me is mind-boggling, because most of them are real tweets. I just changed the names of the people they were about. I took real tweets about Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and the Affordable Care Act and changed them to be about Kim Jong Un and the deal he was trying to negotiate. But they really were Trump's words.
So a lot of people complain that the book is a cheap shot at Trump, but in fact, I think it's accurate to say that he's very immersed in his own feelings all the time. He's not making any effort to play the role of president in the sense of being concerned about how his words and actions will be interpreted by others. He is emoting because of how it makes him feel in the moment. And so the way in which his tweets and comments have tanked the stock market and generally sown panic and confusion, that's precisely what he does in the book. It's kind of a minor detail whether the enormous numbers of casualties are from a nuclear war or from a pandemic, it's the same fundamental dysfunction.
JK: During a nuclear crisis, I'd think the timelines would be much
more compressed compared to what we're seeing in the coronavirus outbreak. Is that better or worse?
JL: I don't think it makes any difference. I don't think giving this group of human beings more time leads to better outcomes. Of course, from the perspective of a novelist the time issue in the book creates a sense of tension. But I could easily have written the book about a pandemic, though it probably wouldn't have been as good as Michael Crichton's
The
Andromeda Strain.
In the nuclear field, we do worry that decisions made under tight timelines will be worse decisions, and that's probably true. But I don't think any amount of time would allow Trump to make better decisions. It's just the situation might be slightly more forgiving. But as we're learning now, it's not. It's not more forgiving.
JK: The response to the virus in United States has been somewhat decentralized. State and local officials are acting on their own to mitigate things in a way that they might not be able to do during a nuclear crisis. Does that help?
JL: No, I think the lack of adequate testing capacity has forced localities to step in. But unfortunately, I don't think states and localities have the tools that they need to really combat this effectively. I don't want to be critical of them because they're trying to do the best they can. But there's a reason we have a federal government. The federal government has responsibilities and it is failing abjectly at them.
Not to dwell too much on the book, but that's the central warning of the novel, that the government has really important responsibilities. And if you have people who are not competent in their positions, or who are not interested in doing that particular job, and if you have this kind of leader in this situation, things get out of hand much more quickly than you realize.
JK: How important is international coordination?
JL: My mentor,
John Steinbruner, who was the chair of my dissertation committee, started his career working on nuclear weapons issues. But one of the other main streams of his research was on pandemics, because to him, it was the same problem. These are both cases where humankind is facing massive danger. And to prevent them requires good international governance and cooperation, because these dangers are way too big for countries to deal with on their own.
I think he was exactly right; a pandemic is just a kind of nuclear war in slow motion. Preventing nuclear war and managing a pandemic require the same conceptual approach.
JK: We will probably have many weeks and months ahead, while we're all trapped in our homes, to dwell on the lessons learned, and whether certain lessons could be applied to
nuclear command and control. But from an academic perspective, have you learned any lessons for your work in the nuclear field?
JL: One thing about nuclear command and control, which the virus outbreak underscores, is that it is so hard to get good information in a crisis. The epidemic spiraled out of control so quickly in certain countries that even the best experts were rushing to figure out what was going on. To me the danger of a nuclear war is not that somebody's going to get up one morning and say, "Ah, fuck it," and push the button. It's that we're deeply flawed as human beings, and we have imperfect information, and we're always trying to make decisions under complexity. And I think you saw the same things here. There was enough uncertainty early on that people could argue about how contagious the virus is, or how deadly it is. That uncertainty hampered the response at a critical moment.
Jeffrey Lewis is the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk, the leading blog ...
John Krzyzaniak is an associate editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Before joining the Bulletin, he was an associate editor at the journal
Ethics & International Affairs, based...
thebulletin.org · by Gayle Spinazze · March 20, 2020
2. Exclusive: Inside the military's top secret plan if coronavirus cripples the government
Ahh.. William Arkin. I still have his book listing all the military and intelligence code names he accumulated. He can put a spin on the most benign or basic military planning (and the names that go along with the plans). But if any of these names are actual code words for classified contingency plans they will have to be changed. But more important
, who is providing this guy such information? (assuming it is true and I have no way to know since I am not privy to current plans and operation - my sense is these words probably come from someone on the periphery who does not have complete knowledge of the plan and provides speculative
information
to Arkin who then spins it.).
Exclusive: Inside the military's top secret plan if coronavirus cripples the government
Newsweek · by William M. Arkin On 3/18/20 at 7:00 AM EDT · March 18, 2020
U.S. President Donald Trump to hold coronavirus news conference on Friday, March 13.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Even as President Trump says he tested negative for coronavirus, the COVID-19 pandemic raises the fear that huge swaths of the executive branch or even Congress and the Supreme Court could also be disabled, forcing the implementation of "continuity of government" plans that include evacuating Washington and "devolving" leadership to second-tier officials in remote and quarantined locations.
But Coronavirus is also new territory, where the military itself is vulnerable and the disaster scenarios being contemplated -- including the possibility of widespread domestic violence as a result of food shortages -- are forcing planners to look at what are called "extraordinary circumstances".
Above-Top Secret contingency plans already exist for what the military is supposed to do if all the Constitutional successors are incapacitated. Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law.
According to new documents and interviews with military experts, the various plans - codenamed Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac - are the underground laws to ensure government continuity. They are so secret that under these extraordinary plans, "devolution" could circumvent the normal Constitutional provisions for government succession, and military commanders could be placed in control around America.
"We're in new territory," says one senior officer, the entire post-9/11 paradigm of emergency planning thrown out the window. The officer jokes, in the kind of morbid humor characteristic of this slow-moving disaster, that America had better learn who Gen. Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy is.
He is the "combatant commander" for the United States and would in theory be in charge if Washington were eviscerated. That is, until a new civilian leader could be installed.
'We're in territory we've never been in before'
What happens, government expert Norman Ornstein asked last week, if so many members of Congress come down with the coronavirus that the legislature cannot meet or cannot muster a quorum? After 9/11, Ornstein and others, alarmed by how little Washington had prepared for such possibilities, created a bipartisan Continuity of Government Commission to examine precisely these and other possibilities.
It has been a two-decade long futile effort, Ornstein says, with Congress uninterested or unable to either pass new laws or create working procedures that would allow emergency and remote operations. The rest of the federal government equally is unprepared to operate if a pandemic were to hit the very people called upon to lead in an emergency. That is why for the first time, other than planning for the aftermath of a nuclear war, extraordinary procedures are being contemplated.
In the past, almost every imagined contingency associated with emergency preparedness has assumed civil and military assistance coming from the outside. One military officer involved in continuity planning calls it a "cavalry" mentality: that military assistance is requested or ordered after local civil authority has been exhausted.
"There might not be an outside," the officer says, asking that she not be named because she is speaking about sensitive matters.
In recognition of the equal vulnerability of military forces, the Pentagon has instituted unprecedented restrictions on off-base travel. Last Wednesday it restricted most overseas travel for 60 days, and then on Friday issued supplemental domestic guidance that essentially keeps all uniformed personnel on or near military bases. There are exceptions, including travel that is "mission-essential," the Pentagon says.
Mission essential in this regard applies to the maze of more than a dozen different secret assignments, most of them falling under three larger contingency plans:
- CONPLAN 3400, or the military's plan for "homeland defense," if America itself is a battlefield.
- CONPLAN 3500, "defense support of civil authorities," where the military assists in an emergency short of armed attack on the nation.
- CONPLAN 3600, military operations in the National Capital Region and continuation of government, under which the most-secret plans to support continuity are nested.
All of these plans are the responsibility of U.S. Northern Command (or NORTHCOM), the homeland defense military authority created after 9/11. Air Force General O'Shaughnessy is NORTHCOM's Colorado Springs-based commander.
On February 1, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper signed orders directing NORTHCOM to execute nationwide pandemic plans. Secretly, he signed Warning Orders (the WARNORD as it's called) alerting NORTHCOM and a host of east coast units to "prepare to deploy" in support of potential extraordinary missions.
Seven secret plans - some highly compartmented - exist to prepare for these extraordinary missions. Three are transportation related, just to move and support the White House and the federal government as it evacuates and operates from alternate sites. The first is called the Rescue & Evacuation of the Occupants of the Executive Mansion (or RESEM) plan, responsible for protecting President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and their families--whether that means moving them at the direction of the Secret Service or, in a catastrophe, digging them out of the rubble of the White House.
The second is called the Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan (or JEEP), and it organizes transportation for the Secretary of Defense and other national security leaders so that they can leave the Washington area. The Atlas Plan is a third, moving non-military leaders - Congressional leadership, the Supreme Court and other important figures - to their emergency relocation sites. Under Atlas, a still- secret bunker would be activated and cordoned, with government operations shifting to Maryland.
The three most compartmented contingencies - Octagon, Freejack, and Zodiac - call upon various military units in Washington DC, North Carolina and eastern Maryland to defend government operations if there is a total breakdown. The seventh plan - codenamed
Granite Shadow - lays out the playbook for extraordinary domestic missions that involve weapons of mass destruction. (I disclosed the existence of this plan in 2005, and its associated "national mission force"--a force that is on alert at all times, even in peacetime, to respond to a terrorist attack or threat with the nuclear weapon.)
Most of these plans have been quietly activated during presidential inaugurals and State of the Union addresses, the centrality of the weapons of mass destruction scenario seen in the annual
Capital Shield exercise in Washington. Last year's exercise posited a WMD attack on Metro Station. Military sources say that only the massive destruction caused by a nuclear device - or the enormous loss of life that could be caused by a biological agent - present catastrophic pressure great enough to justify movement into extra-Constitutional actions and extraordinary circumstances plans.
"WMD is such an important scenario," a former NORTHCOM commander told me, "not because it is the greatest risk, but because it stresses the system most severely."
According to another senior retired officer, who told me about Granite Shadow and is now working as a defense contractor, the national mission force goes out on its missions with "special authorities" pre-delegated by the president and the attorney general. These special authorities are needed because under regulations and the law, federal military forces can supplant civil authority or engage in law enforcement only under the strictest conditions.
When might the military's "emergency authority" be needed? Traditionally, it's thought of after a nuclear device goes off in an American city. But now, planners are looking at military response to urban violence as people seek protection and fight over food. And, according to one senior officer, in the contingency of the complete evacuation of Washington.
Under Defense department regulations, military commanders are authorized to take action on their own - in extraordinary circumstances - where "duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation." The conditions include "large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances" involving "significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property." The Joint Chiefs of Staff codified these rules in October 2018, reminding commanders that they could decide, on their own authority, to "engage temporarily" in military control in circumstances "where prior authorization by the President is impossible" or where local authorities "are unable to control the situation." A new Trump-era Pentagon directive calls it "extreme situations." In all cases, even where a military commander declares martial law, the directives say that civil rule has to be restored as soon as possible.
"In scenarios where one city or one region is devastated, that's a pretty straightforward process," the military planner told me. "But with coronavirus, where the effect is nationwide, we're in territory we've never been in before."
Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh attend the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives at the U.S. Capitol Building on February 5, 2019 in Washington, DC.
Pool/Getty
An extended period of devolution
Continuity of government and protection of the presidency began in the Eisenhower administration with the possibility emerging that Washington could be obliterated in an atomic attack. The need to plan for a nuclear decision-maker to survive even a direct attack led to the building of bunkers and a maze of secret procedures and exceptions, many of which are still followed to this day. Congress was also folded in - at least Congressional leadership - to ensure that there would always be a Constitutional successor. And then the Supreme Court was added.
Before 9/11, continuity and emergency programs were broadened beyond nuclear war preparedness, particularly as hurricanes began to have such devastating effects on modern urban society. And because of the advent of pandemics, broadly beginning with the Avian Influenza, civil agencies responsible for national security, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, which is the lead agency to respond to coronavirus, were also brought into continuity protection.
Despite well-honed plans and constant testing over 30 years, the attacks of September 11, 2001 severely tested all aspects of continuity movement and communications. Many of the procedures written down on paper were either ignored or thrown out the window. As a result, continuity had a second coming, billions spent by the new Department of Homeland and the other national security agencies to ensure that the Washington leadership could communicate and move, a whole new system established to be ready if a terrorist attack came without warning. Bunkers, many shuttered at the end of the Cold War, were reopened and expanded. Befitting the panic at the time, and the atomic legacy, the most extraordinary planning scenario posited a terrorist attack that would involve an improvised nuclear or radiological dispersal device in a major American city.
The terrorist attack scenario dominated until 2006, when the disastrous government response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans shifted federal government preparedness to formally adopt an "all-hazards" system. Civil agencies, the 50 states and local communities - particularly large cities - all began to synchronize emergency preparedness with common protocols. U.S. Northern Command was created to harness military assistance in domestic disasters, it's three overarching contingency plans the product now of 15 years of trial and error.
Government at all levels now have extensive "continuity" programs to respond to man-made and natural disasters, a national response framework that has steadily grown and taken hold. This is the public world of emergency response, ranging from life-saving efforts to protect and restore critical infrastructure, to drills that practice the evacuation of key officials. It is a partnership created between federal government agencies and the States, carefully constructed to guard the rule of law.
In July 2016, Barack Obama signed the classified Presidential Policy Directive 40 on "National Continuity Policy," establishing "essential functions" that government agencies were tasked to protect and retain. At the highest level were the National Essential Functions, those that posit "the continued functioning" of government under the Constitution. In order to preserve Constitutional rule, agencies were ordered to have not just a line of succession but also one of "devolution," a duplicate chain of individuals secreted outside Washington available in a catastrophic emergency. Federal Continuity Directive 1, issued just days before Donald Trump became president, says that devolution has to establish "procedures to transfer statutory authority and responsibilities" to this secondary designated staff to sustain essential functions.
"Devolution may be temporary, or may endure for an extended period," the directive states. And it further directs that the devolution staff be located at "a geographically dispersed location unaffected by the incident." Except that in the case of coronavirus, there may be no such location. This places the plans for the extraordinary into completely uncharted territory, planners not just considering how devolution or martial law might work in a nationwide disaster but also how those earmarked to implement these very plans have to be sequestered and made ready, even while they are equally vulnerable.
NORTHCOM stresses in almost everything it produces for public consumption that it operates only in "support" of civil authorities, in response to state requests for assistance or with the consent of local authorities. Legally, the command says, the use of federal military forces in law enforcement can only take place if those forces are used to suppress "insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy." A second test also has to be met, that such disturbances "hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State," that is, that the public is deprived of its legal and constitutional protections. Local civil authorities must be "unable, fail, or refuse" to protect the civilian population for military forces to be called in, Pentagon directives make clear.
Hurricane Katrina forced the federal government to shift from a terrorism scenario to an "all-hazards" system. A family on their porch in the Treme area of New Orleans, which lies under several feet of water after Katrina hit on August 29, 2005.
Rick Wilking/REUTERS
Since Hurricane Katrina in 2006, no emergency has triggered any state to even request federal military aid under these procedures. Part of the reason, the senior officer involved in planning says, is that local police forces have themselves become more capable, acquiring military-grade equipment and training. And part of the reason is that the governors have worked together to strengthen the National Guard, which can enforce domestic law when it is mustered under state control.
But to give a sense of how sensitive the employment of military forces on American soil is, when the New York National Guard arrived in New Rochelle last week, even though they were operating under the control of the governor, Mayor Noam Bramson still found it necessary to
assure the public that no one in military uniform would have any "policing function."
Local authorities around America are already expressing worries that they have insufficient equipment, particularly ventilators, to deal with a possible influx of coronavirus patients, the number of hospital beds fewer than the potential number of patients that could need them. And brawls have already broken out in stores where products are in short supply. The worst case is that shortages and violence spreads, that the federal military, isolated and kept healthy behind its own barricade, is called to take over.
Orders have already gone out that Secretary of Defense Esper and his deputy, David Norquist, remain physically separated, to guard against both of them becoming incapacitated. Other national security agencies are following suit, and the White House continuity specialists are readying evacuation should the virus sweep through the Executive Mansion.
The plans state that the government continues essential functions under all circumstances, even if that is with the devolved second string or under temporary military command. One of the "national essential functions", according to Federal Continuity Directive 1 is that the government "provid[e] leadership visible to the Nation and the world ... [while] maintaining the trust and confidence of the American people" The question is whether a faceless elite could ever provide that confidence, preserving government command but also adding to public panic. That could be a virus too.
Newsweek · by William M. Arkin On 3/18/20 at 7:00 AM EDT · March 18, 2020
3. China Is Legally Responsible for COVID-19 Damage and Claims Could Be in the Trillions
A fascinating argument.
Conclusion:
Still, injured states are not without remedy. Barring any prospect for effective litigation, states could resort to self-help. The law of state responsibility permits injured states to take lawful countermeasures against China by suspending their own compliance with obligations owed to China as a means of inducing Beijing to fulfill its responsibilities and debt (Article 49). Countermeasures shall not be disproportionate to the degree of gravity of the wrongful acts and the effects inflicted on injured states (Article 51). The choice of countermeasures that injured states may select is wide open, with only minimal limitations. For example, countermeasures may not involve the threat or use of force or undermine the human rights of China (Article 50). Except for these limitations, however, the United States and other injured states may suspend existing legal obligations or deliberately violate other legal duties owed to China as a means to induce Beijing to fulfill its responsibilities and address the calamitous damages it has inflicted on the world.
The menu for such countermeasures is as limitless as the extent that international law infuses the foreign affairs between China and the world, and such action by injured states may be individual and collective and does not have to be connected explicitly to the kind or type of violations committed by China. Thus, action could include removal of China from leadership positions and memberships, as China now chairs four of 15 organizations of the United Nations system. States could reverse China's entry into the World Trade Organization, suspend air travel to China for a period of years, broadcast Western media in China, and undermine China's famous internet firewall that keeps the country's information ecosystem sealed off from the rest of the world. Remember that countermeasures permit not only acts that are merely unfriendly, but also licenses acts that would normally be a violation of international law. But the limitations still leave considerable room to roam, even if they violate China's sovereignty and internal affairs, including ensuring that Taiwanese media voices and officials are heard through the Chinese internet firewall, broadcasting the ineptness and corruption of the Chinese Communist Party throughout China, and reporting on Chinese coercion against its neighbors in the South China Sea and East China Sea, and ensuring the people of China understand the responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party in unleashing a global contagion.
China Is Legally Responsible for COVID-19 Damage and Claims Could Be in the Trillions - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by James Kraska · March 23, 2020
As the novel coronavirus incubated in Wuhan from mid-December to mid-January, the Chinese state made evidently intentional misrepresentations to its people concerning the outbreak, providing
false assurances to the population preceding the approach of the Lunar New Year celebrations on Jan. 25. In mid-December, an outbreak of a novel influenza-like illness was traced to workers and customers of the city's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which contained exotic and wild animal species. On Dec. 26, multiple
Chinese news outlets released reports of an anonymous laboratory technician who made a startling discovery: The sickness was caused by a new coronavirus that was 87 percent similar to SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, sounded the alarm in an online chatroom on Dec. 30. That night, Wuhan public health authorities solicited information on the emergence of a "pneumonia of unclear cause," but omitted Li's discussion about SARS or a novel coronavirus. Li and other medical professionals who tried to disclose the emergence of the virus were
suppressed or jailed by the regime. On Jan. 1, the state-run
Xinhua News Agency warned, "The police call on all netizens to not fabricate rumors, not spread rumors, not believe rumors." Four days after Li's chatroom discussion, officers of the Public Security Bureau forced him to sign a letter acknowledging he had made "
false comments
," and that his revelations had "severely disturbed the social order." Li, who has become something of an
underground folk hero in China against chicanery by state officials, ultimately died of the disease. China silenced other doctors raising the alarm,
minimizing the danger to the public even as they were bewildered and overwhelmed.
State media suppressed information about the virus. Although authorities closed the Wuhan "wet market" at the epicenter of contagion, they did not take further steps to stop the wildlife trade. By Jan. 22, when the virus had killed just 17 yet had infected more than 570 people, China tightened its suppression of information about the coronavirus that it deemed "
alarming," and further
censored criticism of its malfeasance. "Even as cases climbed,
officials declared repeatedly that there had likely been no more infections."
On Jan. 31, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission falsely stated that there was
no human-to-human transmission of the disease, which it described as a seasonal flu that was "preventable and controllable." On Feb. 1, the
New York Times reported that "the government's initial handling of the epidemic
allowed the virus to gain a tenacious hold. At critical moments, officials chose to put secrecy and order ahead of openly confronting the growing crisis to avoid public alarm and political embarrassment."
Importantly, China
failed to expeditiously share information with the World Health Organization (WHO) on the novel coronavirus. For example, China waited until Feb. 14, nearly two months into the crisis, before it disclosed that
1,700 healthcare workers were infected. Such information on the vulnerability of medical workers is essential to understanding transmission patterns and to devise strategies to contain the virus. The experts at WHO were stymied by Chinese officials for data on hospital transmissions.
China's failure to provide open and transparent information to WHO is more than a moral breakdown. It is also the breach of a legal duty that China owed to other states under international law, and for which injured states - now numbering some 150 nations - may seek a legal remedy.
Unfortunately, China's evasions are part of the autocratic playbook, repeating its obstruction of information that
worsened the SARS crisis 18 years earlier. In that case,
China tried to cover up the SARS epidemic, which
led WHO member states to adopt the new International Health Regulations in 2005. In both cases, China and the world would have been spared thousands of unnecessary deaths had China acted forthrightly and in accordance with its legal obligations. Although China's public health system has been modernized, observed Jude Blanchette, head of China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, its
political system has regressed.
International Health Regulations
As one of the 194 states party to the legally binding 2005
International Health Regulations, China has a duty to rapidly gather information about and contribute to a common understanding of what may constitute a public health emergency with potential international implications. The legally binding International Health Regulations were adopted by the World Health Assembly in 1969, to control six infectious diseases: cholera, plague, yellow fever, smallpox, relapsing fever, and typhus. The 2005 revision added smallpox, poliomyelitis due to wild-type poliovirus, SARS, and cases of human influenza caused by a new subtype, set forth in the second annex.
Article 6 of the International Health Regulations requires states to provide expedited, timely, accurate, and sufficiently detailed information to WHO about the potential public health emergencies identified in the second annex in order to galvanize efforts to prevent pandemics. WHO also has a mandate in Article 10 to seek verification from states with respect to unofficial reports of pathogenic microorganisms. States are required to provide timely and transparent information as requested within 24 hours, and to participate in collaborative assessments of the risks presented. Yet China
rejected repeated offers of epidemic investigation assistance from WHO in late January (and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in early February), without explanation. The
Washington Post concluded in a story on Feb. 26 that China "
was not sending details that WHO officials and other experts expect and need." While WHO later commended China for its efforts, Mara Pillinger of Georgetown's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law concluded that Beijing's partial collaboration "
makes it politically tricky for WHO to publicly contradict" China while still getting at least some useful data from China.
China's Legal Responsibility
While China's intentional conduct is wrongful, is it unlawful? If so, do other states have a legal remedy? Under Article 1 of the International Law Commission's 2001
Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, states are responsible for their internationally wrongful acts. This commission's restatement of the law of state responsibility was developed with the input of states to reflect a fundamental principle of international customary law, which binds all nations. "Wrongful acts" are those that are "attributable to the state" and that "constitute a breach of an international obligation" (Article 2). Conduct is attributable to the state when it is an act of state through the executive, legislative, or judicial functions of the central government (Article 4). While China's failures began at the local level, they quickly spread throughout China's government, all the way up to Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. He is now being pilloried by Chinese netizens for his failures of action and inaction. The most prominent critic, Chinese tycoon Ren Zhiqiang, lambasted Xi for his mishandling of the coronavirus, calling him a "
power hungry clown." Ren soon disappeared.
Responsibility flows from local Wuhan authorities to Xi himself, which are all organs of the state of China, and whose conduct is therefore attributable to China. An "organ of the state" includes any person or entities that are acting in accordance with national law. Even if China were to disavow conduct by local authorities or state media as not necessarily directly attributable to the national government, such actions nevertheless are accorded that status if and to the extent the state acknowledged and adopted the conduct as its own, as was done by the officials in Beijing (Article 11).
Wrongful acts are those that constitute a breach of an international obligation (Article 11). A breach is an act that is "not in conformity with what is required of it by that obligation ... ." China's failure to expeditiously and transparently share information with WHO in accordance with the International Health Regulations constitutes an early and subsequently extended breach of its legal obligations (Article 14). Consequently, China bears legal responsibility for its internationally wrongful acts (Article 28). The consequences include full reparations for the injury caused by the wrongful acts. China did not intentionally create a global pandemic, but its malfeasance is certainly the cause of it. An epidemiological model at the University of Southampton found that had China acted responsibly just one, two, or three weeks more quickly, the number affected by the virus would have been cut by
66 percent, 86 percent, and 95 percent, respectively. By its failure to adhere to its legal commitments to the International Health Regulations, the Chinese Communist Party has let loose a global contagion, with mounting material consequences.
The cost of the coronavirus grows daily, with increasing incidents of sickness and death. The mitigation and suppression measures enforced by states to limit the damage are
wrecking the global economy. Under Article 31 of the
Articles of State Responsibility, states are required to make full reparations for the injury caused by their internationally wrongful acts. Injuries include damages, whether material or moral. Injured states are entitled to full reparation "in the form of restitution in kind, compensation, satisfaction and assurances and guarantees of non-repetition" (Article 34). Restitution in kind means that the injured state is entitled to be placed in the same position as existed before the wrongful acts were committed (Article 35). To the extent that restitution is not made, injured states are entitled to compensation (Article 36), and satisfaction, in terms of an apology and internal discipline and even criminal prosecution of officials in China who committed malfeasance (Article 37). Finally, injured states are entitled to guarantees of non-repetition, although the 2005 International Health Regulations were designed for this purpose after SARS (Article 48). As the world continues to suffer the costs of China's breach of its legal duties, it remains to be seen whether the injured states can be made whole.
No one expects that China will fulfill its obligations, or take steps required by the law of state responsibility. So, how might the United States and other nations vindicate their rights? The legal consequences of an internationally wrongful act are subject to the procedures of the Charter of the United Nations. Chapter XIV of the
charter recognizes that states may bring disputes before the International Court of Justice or other international tribunals. But the
principle of state sovereignty means that a state may not be compelled to appear before an international court without its consent. This reflects a general proposition in international law, and its fundamental weakness.
Still, injured states are not without remedy. Barring any prospect for effective litigation, states could resort to self-help. The law of state responsibility permits injured states to take lawful countermeasures against China by suspending their own compliance with obligations owed to China as a means of inducing Beijing to fulfill its responsibilities and debt (Article 49). Countermeasures shall not be disproportionate to the degree of gravity of the wrongful acts and the effects inflicted on injured states (Article 51). The choice of countermeasures that injured states may select is wide open, with only minimal limitations. For example, countermeasures may not involve the threat or use of force or undermine the human rights of China (Article 50). Except for these limitations, however, the United States and other injured states may suspend existing legal obligations or deliberately violate other legal duties owed to China as a means to induce Beijing to fulfill its responsibilities and address the calamitous damages it has inflicted on the world.
The menu for such countermeasures is as limitless as the extent that international law infuses the foreign affairs between China and the world, and such action by injured states may be individual and collective and does not have to be connected explicitly to the kind or type of violations committed by China. Thus, action could include removal of China from leadership positions and memberships, as China now chairs
four of 15 organizations of the United Nations system. States could reverse China's entry into the World Trade Organization, suspend air travel to China for a period of years, broadcast Western media in China, and undermine China's famous internet firewall that keeps the country's information ecosystem sealed off from the rest of the world. Remember that countermeasures permit not only acts that are merely unfriendly, but also licenses acts that would normally be a violation of international law. But the limitations still leave considerable room to roam, even if they violate China's sovereignty and internal affairs, including ensuring that Taiwanese media voices and officials are heard through the Chinese internet firewall, broadcasting the ineptness and corruption of the Chinese Communist Party throughout China, and reporting on Chinese coercion against its neighbors in the South China Sea and East China Sea, and ensuring the people of China understand the responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party in unleashing a global contagion.
James Kraska is chair and Charles H. Stockton professor of international maritime law in the Stockton Center for International Law at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent those of the Stockton Center, the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
warontherocks.com · by James Kraska · March 23, 2020
4. US steps up maritime provocations in attempt to distract China's COVID-19 fight - Global Times
From the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda paper. For the CCP freedom of navigation operations are provocations.
US steps up maritime provocations in attempt to distract China's COVID-19 fight - Global Times
globaltimes.cn
The guided-missile destroyer Hohhot (Hull 161) attached to a destroyer flotilla with the navy under the PLA Southern Theater Command steams in waters of the South China Sea during a maritime training exercise in Mid-July, 2019. Photo:China Military
Since late January, US warships have travelled within 12 nautical miles of the South China Sea islands in Chinese territory five separate times. Three instances happened close to one another on March 10, 13, and 15. The US took the move when the novel coronavirus was spreading in the US, which sent a dangerous signal.
The current US administration wants to shift attention from its failure in containing COVID-19 and the plummeting stock market, so it is increasing efforts to escalate tension in the South China Sea region.
The US government, including the defense department, allowed their provocative activities to go unchecked. Meanwhile, the US military, along with the Navy, is being tasked with providing additional resources and personnel to help the country combat the COVID-19 pandemic, an indication of further provocations by the US.
Trump administration has played up the moves in the South China Sea. Such a clear signal could mislead the US Navy to play with fire.
The US has sent warships, including aircraft carriers, amphibious assault and littoral combat ships, and destroyers to the South China Sea. Such intrusions could complicate the situation and may start a China-US military conflict.
The Trump administration and China hawks believe that such actions during the crucial period of the COVID-19 outbreak can shift Americans' attention by inciting nationalist sentiment. This is in line with Trump's characteristic behavior of passing the buck.
Since the outbreak started, US political circles have been chanting that this is a "Chinese virus" or "Wuhan virus," which has escalated antagonism between both countries. At this point, if the US military provokes China in the South China Sea, it could jeopardize bilateral ties.
After the pandemic, the US could draw regional claimant countries, such as Vietnam, to its side, via carrying out maritime exercises and joint military training. The US will use every means to initiate joint efforts to confront China.
In early March, the
USS Theodore Roosevelt made the second-ever visit by a US aircraft carrier strike group to Vietnam to mark 25 years of diplomatic relations, and left four days later.
In the face of such provocation, China must raise its guard and should take actions, such as launching military exercises in the South China Sea. This would send a signal to the outside world, especially to the US, that the preparedness of the Chinese military in safeguarding its country has not relaxed amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The author is a senior research fellow and professor at the Collaborative Innovation Center of South China Sea Studies, Nanjing University.
[email protected]
globaltimes.cn
5. China launches new facilities in West PH Sea just as world's eyes fixed on COVID-19
From the Philippines press. Most other media outlets are distracted as noted. I am sure INDOPACOM, PACFLEET, and 7th Fleet are tracking this.
Excerpts:
Maritime security expert Collin Koh said the launching of two new research centers by China at this time is a significant development.
"Some may think that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic would have distracted Beijing from these maritime flashpoints," Koh told INQUIRER.net.
"Truth is, this is far from the case. The PLA (People's Liberation Army) is touted to remain combat ready despite the coronavirus," he said.
"Using these supposedly 'civilian scientific' endeavors to assert claim is one such modus operandi, and one that's also often overlooked by all of us," he said.
"Yet at the same time, the resulting strategic ramifications are not any less insignificant," he said.
Koh believes China will remain consistent in its activities in the disputed waters. However, because of the pandemic that has swept across the globe, its actions might go unnoticed.
China launches new facilities in West PH Sea just as world's eyes fixed on COVID-19
globalnation.inquirer.net · by Frances Mangosing
MANILA, Philippines-While the world is turning topsy turvy over the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that started in China, it's still business as usual for the Asian giant in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea).
Two research stations were recently launched on two of China's large man-made islands in the West Philippine Sea - Kagitingan (Fiery Cross) and Zamora (Subi) Reef, Chinese news agency Xinhua reported on March 20.
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The research facilities, which are under the Integrated Research Center for Islands and Reefs of the Chinese Academy Sciences (CAS), feature a number of labs on ecology, geology and environments, the report said.
These can support scientists in field investigation, sampling and scientific research in the Spratlys,a volatile region crisscrossed by maritime territorial disputes.
"An integrated scientific research base on coral reef and deep-sea" has now been set up in the two research stations now in operation, plus a previously-established research center on Panganiban (Mischief) Reef, said a Chinese source quoted in the report.
The bases are envisioned as support facilities for "interdisciplinary research of oceanographers."
They were also designed to "improve the in-situ observation and experimental capabilities on ecology, geology, environments, materials and marine energy utilization in the tropical marine environment," the Xinhua report said.
"The research conditions and facilities will be further optimized for better support," the report said.
The CAS planned to "promote innovation capability and the supply of public service products of marine science and technology to meet the needs of both China and other littoral countries around the South China Sea."
CAS, which was established to solve science and technology problems in the South China Sea, believes it would be contributing to the emergence of a maritime community with supposedly shared resources.
China in recent years had transformed reefs and islands into outposts equipped with harbors, airstrips, missile shelters, communications facilities, expanding its ability to monitor its and rivals' activities in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims to almost entirely own.
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Aside from the Philippines and China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan also have claims in the South China Sea, which is dotted by vital sea-lanes through which $5 trillion in global commerce passes every year and where islets, reefs, and atolls are believed to be sitting atop vast energy reserves.
Maritime security expert Collin Koh said the launching of two new research centers by China at this time is a significant development.
"Some may think that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic would have distracted Beijing from these maritime flashpoints," Koh told INQUIRER.net.
"Truth is, this is far from the case. The PLA (People's Liberation Army) is touted to remain combat ready despite the coronavirus," he said.
"Using these supposedly 'civilian scientific' endeavors to assert claim is one such modus operandi, and one that's also often overlooked by all of us," he said.
"Yet at the same time, the resulting strategic ramifications are not any less insignificant," he said.
Koh believes China will remain consistent in its activities in the disputed waters. However, because of the pandemic that has swept across the globe, its actions might go unnoticed.
"The world is likely to overlook such developments given their priority focus on the virus. This should apply to the other South China Sea parties too," Koh said.
"Any PLA letup, or for that matter letup by Beijing in pushing its maritime sovereignty and rights in the South China Sea, amid the coronavirus would send a wrong signal to both domestic and external audiences," he said.
The expert said China's continued proactiveness in the South China Sea despite grappling with the coronavirus was evident after it was the first to publicize a US freedom of navigation exercise in the Paracels on March 10. The US usually reports its own freedom of navigation operations.
Edited by TSB
globalnation.inquirer.net · by Frances Mangosing
6. Another crisis awaits China, the biggest beneficiary of globalization
Excerpts:
Beijing finds itself in a position to face the economic consequences of global supply disruptions and shrinking demand although it has been waiting for the perfect timing to declare its victory in the war against COVID-19. The world's No.1 beneficiary of globalization seems to be just a few steps away from becoming the biggest victim of a growing headwind in the globalized market. The Chinese government alone is not able to fight against the second crisis coming on the scene unlike COVID-19 within the country.
Regrettably, the United States and China, the two biggest economic powerhouses highly interdependent in terms of production, consumption and trade, are pointing an accusatory finger at each other while wasting time arguing over coronavirus responses and accountability as an epicenter. Worryingly, the ongoing U.S.-China tug-of-war will inevitably offset efforts by the rest of the world to beat the coronavirus-induced shock to the global economy.
Another crisis awaits China, the biggest beneficiary of globalization
donga.com
Posted March. 23, 2020 07:37,
Updated March. 23, 2020 07:37
Another crisis awaits China, the biggest beneficiary of globalization. March. 23, 2020 07:37. .
All eyes have recently been on a Chinese student named Yao Yao across Chinese social media platform Weibo, who successfully came back home from Italy where he studied. With the COVID-19 pandemic worsening across Italy, he decided to return to his hometown, Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, China.
Yao Yao did neither eat nor drink anything with his mask on for 28 hours all the way from Italy to his final destination via Abu Dhabi and Beijing. His pitiful story has garnered widespread support online being described as a so-called "textbook way of return." However, the number of coronavirus infections from overseas are worryingly on the rise in China due to an increasing number of Chinese citizens evacuating European countries and the United States in the belief that China is a safer place to stay. The unexpected development has puzzled Chinese health authorities, which have confidently boasted about having none of new infections reported at home.
In response, the Chinese government has put tight entry control in place while ordering international flights to Beijing to arrive at an airport near its capital city instead. The recent prohibitive measures are not line with Beijing's criticism over other countries closing the door to Chinese citizens at the peak of the pandemic across China. A series of aviation limits have wreaked havoc on major Chinese airlines, including Air China with the number of their passengers in February nosediving over a whopping 80 percent on a year-on-year basis.
Added to that, the global supply chain is suffering from the ever-tightening of border controls across the world. It is a relief that China-based factories have resumed production since the slowdown of the virus at home. Nevertheless, their comeback does not translate into 100 percent operation as they fall short of raw material due to global supply disruptions. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's survey of 237 businesses located in southern China, 32 percent face supply shortages of raw material.
Overall, the Chinese economy has been hit hard by the decreasing consumption demand across the globe. Despite the resumed operation last month, a Hangzhou-based auto part company sees its orders decline 30 percent in volume compared to normal levels due to decreases in demand not only in China but also in South Korea and Japan, according to The Washington Post. U.S. shoemaker Steve Madden and electronics fabricator Best Buy produce 73 percent and 60 percent of their products within China, respectively, said U.S. analysis firm Coresight Research. This implies that decreasing demand in the U.S. market driven by the COVID-19 outbreak can shrink factory production in China, then affecting the Chinese economy as a whole.
Beijing finds itself in a position to face the economic consequences of global supply disruptions and shrinking demand although it has been waiting for the perfect timing to declare its victory in the war against COVID-19. The world's No.1 beneficiary of globalization seems to be just a few steps away from becoming the biggest victim of a growing headwind in the globalized market. The Chinese government alone is not able to fight against the second crisis coming on the scene unlike COVID-19 within the country.
Regrettably, the United States and China, the two biggest economic powerhouses highly interdependent in terms of production, consumption and trade, are pointing an accusatory finger at each other while wasting time arguing over coronavirus responses and accountability as an epicenter. Worryingly, the ongoing U.S.-China tug-of-war will inevitably offset efforts by the rest of the world to beat the coronavirus-induced shock to the global economy.
한국어
donga.com
7. Exclusive: U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak
What if? Easy to second guess now. But the priority was downsizing the government and eliminating positions that seem non-essential and not sufficiently contributing to national security and efficient government operations. I am sure this was a logical move to decision makers at the time but now we have 20/20 hindsight.
Exclusive: U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak
Reuters · by Marisa Taylor11 Min Read · March 23, 2020
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Several months before the coronavirus pandemic began, the Trump administration eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in China, Reuters has learned.
The American disease expert, a medical epidemiologist embedded in China's disease control agency, left her post in July, according to four sources with knowledge of the issue. The first cases of the new coronavirus may have emerged as early as November, and as cases exploded, the Trump administration in February chastised China for censoring information about the outbreak and keeping U.S. experts from entering the country to help.
"It was heartbreaking to watch," said Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese American who served in that role, which was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2007 and 2011. "If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster."
Zhu and the other sources said the American expert, Dr. Linda Quick, was a trainer of Chinese field epidemiologists who were deployed to the epicenter of outbreaks to help track, investigate and contain diseases.
As an American CDC employee, they said, Quick was in an ideal position to be the eyes and ears on the ground for the United States and other countries on the coronavirus outbreak, and might have alerted them to the growing threat weeks earlier.
No other foreign disease experts were embedded to lead the program after Quick left in July, according to the sources. Zhu said an embedded expert can often get word of outbreaks early, after forming close relationships with Chinese counterparts.
Zhu and the other sources said Quick could have provided real-time information to U.S. and other officials around the world during the first weeks of the outbreak, when they said the Chinese government tamped down on the release of information and provided erroneous assessments.
Quick left amid a bitter U.S. trade dispute with China when she learned her federally funded post, officially known as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, would be discontinued as of September, the sources said. The U.S. CDC said it first learned of a "cluster of 27 cases of pneumonia" of unexplained origin in Wuhan, China, on Dec. 31.
Since then, the outbreak of the disease known as COVID-19 has spread rapidly worldwide, killing more than 13,600 people, infecting more than 317,000. The epidemic has overwhelmed healthcare systems in some countries, including Italy, and threatens to do so in the United States and elsewhere.
During a press briefing on Sunday shortly after this story was first published, President Donald Trump dismissed the Reuters report as similar to other stories regarding the CDC that he described as "100 percent wrong," without addressing whether the role had been eliminated.
U.S. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield maintained the agency's presence in China "is actually being augmented as we speak," without elaborating.
In a statement to Reuters before the report was published, the CDC said the elimination of the adviser position did not hinder Washington's ability to get information and "had absolutely nothing to do with CDC not learning of cases in China earlier."
The agency said its decision not to have a resident adviser "started well before last summer and was due to China's excellent technical capability and maturity of the program."
The CDC said it has assigned two of its Chinese employees as "mentors" to help with the training program. The agency did not respond to questions about the mentors' specific role or expertise.
The CDC would not make Quick, who still works for the agency, available for comment.
Asked for comment on Chinese transparency and responsiveness to the outbreak, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs referred Reuters to remarks by spokesman Geng Shuang on Friday. Geng said the country "has adopted the strictest, most comprehensive, and most thorough prevention and control measures in an open, transparent, and responsible manner, and informed the (World Health Organization) and relevant countries and regions of the latest situation in a timely manner."
One disease expert told Reuters he was skeptical that the U.S. resident adviser would have been able to get earlier or better information to the Trump administration, given the Chinese government's suppression of information.
"In the end, based on circumstances in China, it probably wouldn't have made a big difference," Scott McNabb, who was a CDC epidemiologist for 20 years and is now a research professor at Emory University. "The problem was how the Chinese handled it. What should have changed was the Chinese should have acknowledged it earlier and didn't."
ALERT FROM CHINA'S CDC
Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on Friday that his agency learned of the coronavirus in early January, based on Redfield's conversations with "Chinese colleagues."
Redfield learned that "this looks to be a novel coronavirus" from Dr. Gao Fu, the head of the China CDC, according to an HHS administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Dr. Redfield always talked to Dr. Gao," the official said.
HHS and CDC did not make Azar or Redfield available for comment.
Zhu and other sources said U.S. leaders should not have been relying on the China CDC director for alerts and updates. In general, they said, officials in China downplayed the severity of the outbreak in the early weeks and did not acknowledge evidence of person-to-person transmission until Jan. 20.
After the epidemic exploded and China had imposed strict quarantines, Trump administration officials complained that the Chinese had censored information about the outbreak and that the United States had been unable to get American disease experts into the country to help contain the spread.
Azar told CNN on Feb. 14 that he and CDC director Redfield officially offered to send a CDC team into China on Jan. 6 but still had not received permission for them to enter the country. HHS oversees the CDC.
"Dr. Redfield and I made the offer on January 6th - 36 days ago, 60,000 cases and 1,300 deaths ago," Azar said. "We made the offer to send the CDC experts in to assist their Chinese colleagues to get to the bottom of key scientific questions like, how transmissible is this disease? What is the severity? What is the incubation period and can there be asymptomatic transmission?"
Days later, the World Health Organization secured permission to send a team that included two U.S. experts. The team visited between Feb. 16th and 24th. By then, China had reported more than 75,000 cases.
On Feb. 25, the first day the CDC told the American public to prepare for an outbreak at home, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of mishandling the epidemic through its "censorship" of medical professionals and media.
Relations between the two countries have deteriorated since then, as Trump has labeled the coronavirus the "Chinese virus" - a description the Chinese have condemned as stigmatizing. Last week, the Chinese government announced that Americans from three U.S. news organizations, The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, would be expelled from China.
ONCE 'FRIENDS,' NOW RIVALS
The decision to eliminate Quick's job came as the CDC has scaled back the number of U.S. staffers in China over the last two years, the sources told Reuters.
"We had already withdrawn many technical public health experts," the same expert said.
The CDC, however, disputed that staffing was a problem or that its information had been limited by the move. "It was not the staffing shortage that limited our ability" it said.
The U.S. CDC team in Beijing now includes three American citizens in permanent roles, an additional American who is temporary and around 10 Chinese nationals, the agency said. Of the Americans, one is an influenza expert with expertise in respiratory disease. COVID-19 is not influenza, though it can cause severe respiratory illness.
The CDC team, aside from Quick, was housed at U.S. Embassy facilities. No American CDC staffer besides Quick was embedded with China's disease control agency, the sources said.
China in recent weeks has reported a dramatic slowdown in new cases, the result of drastic containment measures including the lockdown of Hubei province, home to 60 million people.
Nevertheless, the infectious disease experts who spoke with Reuters said, the United States could use people like Quick with contacts on the ground, especially if fears of a second wave of infections materializes.
Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the CDC, said that if the U.S. resident adviser had still been in China, "it is possible that we would know more today about how this coronavirus is spreading and what works best to stop it."
Dr. George Conway, a medical epidemiologist who knows Quick and had served as resident advisor between 2012 and 2015, said funding for the position had been tenuous for years because of a perennial debate among U.S health officials over whether China should be paying for funding its own training program.
Yet since the training program was launched in 2001, the sources familiar with it say, it has not only strengthened the ranks of Chinese epidemiologists in the field, but also fostered collegial relationships between public health officials in the two countries.
"We go there as credentialed diplomats and return home as close colleagues and often as friends," Conway said.
In 2007, Dr. Robert Fontaine, a CDC epidemiologist and one of the longest serving U.S. officials in the adviser's position, received China's highest honor for outstanding contributions to public health due to his contribution as a foreigner in helping to detect and investigate clusters of pneumonia of unknown cause.
But since last year, Frieden and others said, growing tensions between the Trump administration and China's leadership have apparently damaged the collaboration.
"The message from the administration was, 'Don't work with China, they're our rival,'" Frieden said.
Trump's re-election campaign sent out a statement Sunday evening dismissing controversy about the CDC'S cut as a matter of politics.
"Democrats are eager to politicize the coronavirus crisis and weaponize it against President Trump, the statement said. "In so doing, they're siding with the Chinese and providing cover for Beijing's cover-up."
Marisa Taylor reporting from Washington; Additional reporting by Alexandra Alper in Washington, Tony Munroe and Cheng Leng in Beijing; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Julie Marquis
Reuters · by Marisa Taylor11 Min Read · March 23, 2020
8. Harsh Steps Are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say
I think there are some who think we have already gone too far.
Harsh Steps Are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say
The New York Times · by Donald G. McNeil Jr. · March 22, 2020
A beach stroller in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn on Saturday.
Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Scientists who have fought pandemics describe difficult measures needed to defend the United States against a fast-moving pathogen.
A beach stroller in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn on Saturday.
Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.
Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country's leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world.
There is a chance to stop the coronavirus. This contagion has a weakness.
Although there are incidents of rampant spread,
as happened on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the coronavirus more often infects clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues, said Dr. David L. Heymann, who chairs an expert panel advising the World Health Organization on emergencies.
No one is certain why the virus travels in this way, but experts see an opening nonetheless. "You can contain clusters," Dr. Heymann said. "You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing."
But doing so takes intelligent, rapidly adaptive work by health officials, and near-total cooperation from the populace. Containment becomes realistic only when Americans realize that working together is the only way to protect themselves and their loved ones.
In interviews with a dozen of the world's leading experts on fighting epidemics, there was wide agreement on the steps that must be taken immediately.
Those experts included international public health officials who have fought AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, flu and Ebola; scientists and epidemiologists; and former health officials who led major American global health programs in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home. Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.
But tactics like forced isolation, school closings and pervasive GPS tracking of patients brought more divided reactions.
It was not at all clear that a nation so fundamentally committed to individual liberty and distrustful of government could learn to adapt to many of these measures, especially those that smack of state compulsion.
"I think you can appeal to people to do the right thing."
In the week since the interviews began, remarkable changes have come over American life. State governments are telling residents they must stay home. Nonessential businesses are being shuttered.
The streets are quieter than they have been in generations, and even friends keep a wary distance. What seemed unthinkable just a week ago is rapidly becoming the new normal.
What follows are the recommendations offered by the experts interviewed by The Times.
Scientists must be heard
Adm. Tim Ziemer, who led the National Security Council's pandemic response unit until it was disbanded in 2018.
Credit...Chris Kleponis/dpa, via Alamy
The White House holds frequent media briefings to describe the administration's progress against the pandemic, often led by President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, flanked by a rotating cast of officials.
Many experts, some of whom are international civil servants, declined to speak on the record for fear of offending the president. But they were united in the opinion that politicians must step aside and let scientists both lead the effort to contain the virus and explain to Americans what must be done.
Just as generals take the lead in giving daily briefings in wartime - as
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf did during the Persian Gulf war - medical experts should be at the microphone now to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs.
The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps,
as happened again on Friday.
Instead, leaders must describe the looming crisis and the possible solutions in ways that will win the trust of Americans.
Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times - not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president's health. There is no time left to point fingers and assign blame.
"At this point in the emergency, there's little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who's at fault," said
Adm. Tim Ziemer, who was the coordinator of the President's Malaria Initiative from 2006 until early 2017 and led the pandemic response unit on the National Security Council before its disbanding.
"We need to focus on the enemy, and that's the virus."
Stop transmission between cities
The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing.
If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.
The virus would die out on every contaminated surface and, because almost everyone shows symptoms within two weeks, it would be evident who was infected. If we had enough tests for every American, even the completely asymptomatic cases could be found and isolated.
The crisis would be over.
Obviously, there is no magic wand, and no 300 million tests. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze.
To attempt that, experts said, travel and human interaction must be reduced to a minimum.
Italy moved incrementally: Officials slowly and reluctantly closed restaurants, churches and museums, and banned weddings and funerals. Nonetheless, the country's death count continues to rise.
The United States is slowly following suit. International flights are all but banned, but not domestic ones. California has ordered all residents to stay at home; New York was to shutter all nonessential businesses on Sunday evening.
On Friday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said he advocated restrictive measures all across the country.
In contrast to the halting steps taken here, China
shut down Wuhan - the epicenter of the nation's outbreak - and restricted movement in much of the country on Jan. 23, when the country had a mere 500 cases and 17 deaths.
Its rapid action had an important effect: With the virus mostly isolated in one province, the rest of China was able to save Wuhan.
In a vast, largely closed society, it can be difficult to know what is happening on the ground, and there is no guarantee that the virus won't roar back as the Chinese economy restarts.
But the lesson is that relatively unaffected regions of the United States will be needed to help rescue overwhelmed cities like New York and Seattle. Keeping these areas at least somewhat free of the coronavirus means enacting strict measures, and quickly.
Stop transmission within cities
Within cities, there are dangerous hot spots: One restaurant, one gym, one hospital, even one taxi may be more contaminated than many identical others nearby because someone had a coughing fit inside.
Each day's delay in stopping human contact, experts said, creates more hot spots, none of which can be identified until about a week later, when the people infected there start falling ill.
To stop the explosion, municipal activity must be curtailed. Still, some Americans must stay on the job: doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers; police officers and firefighters; the technicians who maintain the electrical grid and gas and phone lines.
The delivery of food and medicine must continue, so that people pinned in their homes suffer nothing worse than boredom. Those essential workers may eventually need permits, and a process for issuing them, if the police are needed to enforce stay-at-home orders, as they have been in China and Italy.
People in lockdown adapt. In Wuhan, apartment complexes submit group orders for food, medicine, diapers and other essentials. Shipments are assembled at grocery warehouses or government pantries and dropped off. In Italy,
trapped neighbors serenade one another.
It's an intimidating picture. But the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals - and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart.
As of the same date, fewer than 9,000 Americans had been tested.
Everyone who is infected in South Korea goes into isolation in government shelters, and phones and credit card data are used to trace their prior movements and find their contacts. Where they walked before they fell ill is broadcast to the cellphones of everyone who was nearby.
Anyone even potentially exposed is quarantined at home; a GPS app tells the police if that person goes outside. The fine for doing so is $8,000.
Fix the testing mess
Testing must be done in a coordinated and safe way, experts said. The seriously ill must go first, and the testers must be protected.
In China, those seeking a test must describe their symptoms on a telemedicine website. If a nurse decides a test is warranted, they are directed to one of dozens of "fever clinics" set up far from all other patients.
Personnel in head-to-toe gear check their fevers and question them. Then, ideally, patients are given a rapid flu test and a white blood cell count is taken to rule out influenza and bacterial pneumonia.
Then their lungs are visualized in a CT scanner to look for "ground-glass opacities" that indicate pneumonia and rule out cancer and tuberculosis. Only then are they given a diagnostic test for the coronavirus - and they are told to wait at the testing center.
The results take a minimum of four hours; in the past, if results took overnight, patients were moved to a hotel to wait - sometimes for two to three days, if doctors believed retesting was warranted. It can take several days after an exposure for a test to turn positive.
In the United States, people seeking tests are calling their doctors, who may not have them, or sometimes waiting in traffic jams leading to store parking lots. On Friday, New York City limited testing only to those patients requiring hospitalization, saying the system was being overwhelmed.
Isolate the infected
As soon as possible, experts said, the United States must develop an alternative to the practice of isolating infected people at home, as it endangers families. In China, 75 to 80 percent of all transmission
occurred in family clusters.
That pattern has already repeated itself here. Seven members of a large family in New Jersey were infected; four have already died. After a lawyer in
New Rochelle, N.Y., fell ill, his wife, son and daughter all tested positive.
Instead of a policy that advises the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease and Prevention now does, experts said cities should establish facilities where the mildly and moderately ill can recuperate under the care and observation of nurses.
Wuhan created many such centers,
called "temporary hospitals," each a cross between a dormitory and a first-aid clinic. They had cots and oxygen tanks, but not the advanced machines used in intensive care units.
American cities now have many spaces that could serve as isolation wards. Already New York is considering turning the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center into a temporary hospital, along with the Westchester Convention Center and two university campuses.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said on Saturday that state officials were also considering opening isolation wards.
In China, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the World Health Organization's observer team there, people originally resisted leaving home or seeing their children go into isolation centers with no visiting rights - just as Americans no doubt would.
In China, they came to accept it.
"They realized they were keeping their families safe," he said. "Also, isolation is really lonely. It's psychologically difficult. Here, they were all together with other people in the same boat. They supported each other."
Find the fevers
Because China, Taiwan and Vietnam were hit by SARS in 2003, and South Korea has grappled with MERS, fever checks during disease outbreaks became routine.
In most cities in affected Asian countries, it is commonplace before entering any bus, train or subway station, office building, theater or even a restaurant to get a temperature check. Washing your hands in chlorinated water is often also required.
"They give you a sticker afterward," said Dr. Heymann, who recently spent a week teaching in Singapore. "I built up quite a collection."
In China, having a fever means a mandatory trip to a fever clinic to check for coronavirus. In the Wuhan area, different cities took different approaches.
Cellphone videos from China show police officers knocking on doors and taking temperatures. In some, people who resist are dragged away by force. The city of Ningbo offered bounties of $1,400 to anyone who turned in a coronavirus sufferer.
The city of Qianjiang, by contrast, offered the same amount of money to any resident who came in voluntarily and tested positive.
Some measures made Western experts queasy. It is difficult to imagine Americans permitting a family member with a fever to be dragged to an isolation ward where visitors are not permitted.
"A lot of people's rights were violated," Dr. Borio said.
Voluntary approaches, like explaining to patients that they will be keeping family and friends safe, are more likely to work in the West, she added.
Trace the contacts
Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is essential, experts said. At the peak of its epidemic, Wuhan had 18,000 people tracking down individuals who had come in contact with the infected.
At the moment, the health departments of some American counties lack the manpower to trace even syphilis or tuberculosis, let alone scores of casual contacts of someone infected with the coronavirus.
Dr. Borio suggested that young Americans could use their social networks to "do their own contact tracing." Social media also is used in Asia, but in different ways.
When he lectured at a Singapore university, Dr. Heymann said, dozens of students were in the room. But just before he began class, they were photographed to record where everyone sat.
"That way, if someone turns up infected later, you can find out who sat near them," Dr. Heymann said. "That's really clever."
Contacts generally must remain home for 14 days and report their temperatures twice a day.
Make masks ubiquitous
American experts have divided opinions about masks, but those who have worked in Asia see their value.
There is very little data showing that flat surgical masks protect healthy individuals from disease. Nonetheless, Asian countries generally make it mandatory that people wear them. In China, the police even used drones to chase individuals down streets, ordering them to go home and mask up.
The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology, experts explained.
All experts agree that the sick must wear masks to keep in their coughs. But if a mask indicates that the wearer is sick, many people will be reluctant to wear one. If everyone is required to wear masks, the sick automatically have one on and there is no stigma attached.
Also, experts emphasized, Americans should be taught to take seriously admonitions to stop shaking hands and hugging. The "W.H.O. elbow bump" may look funny, but it's a legitimate technique for preventing infection.
"In Asia, where they went through SARS, people understand the danger," Dr. Heymann said. "It's instilled in the population that you've
got to do the right thing."
Preserve vital services
Federal intervention is necessary for some vital aspects of life during a pandemic.
Only the federal government can enforce interstate commerce laws to ensure that food, water, electricity, gas, phone lines and other basic needs keep flowing across state lines to cities and suburbs.
Mr. Trump has said he could compel companies to prioritize making ventilators, masks and other needed goods. Some have volunteered; the Hanes underwear company, for example, will use its cotton to make masks for hospital workers.
He also has the military; the Navy is committing two hospital ships to the fight. And Mr. Trump can call up the National Guard. As of Saturday evening, more than 6,500 National Guard members already are assisting in the coronavirus response in 38 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.
High-level decisions like these must be made quickly, experts said.
"Many Western political leaders are behaving as though they are on a tightrope," said Dr. David Nabarro, a W.H.O. special envoy on Covid-19 and a veteran of fights against SARS, Ebola and cholera.
"But there is no choice. We must do all in our power to fight this," he added. "I sense that most people - and certainly those in business - get it. They would prefer to take the bitter medicine at once and contain outbreaks as they start rather than gamble with uncertainty."
Produce ventilators and oxygen
The roughly 175,000 ventilators in all American hospitals and the national stockpile are expected to be
far fewer than are needed to handle a surge of patients desperate for breath.
The machines pump air and oxygen into the lungs, but they normally cost $25,000 or more each, and neither individual hospitals nor the federal emergency stockpile has ever had enough on hand to handle the number of pneumonia patients that this pandemic is expected to produce.
New York, for example, has found about 6,000 ventilators for purchase around the world, Governor Cuomo said. He estimated the state would need about 30,000.
The manufacturers, including a dozen in the United States, say there is no easy way to ramp up production quickly. But it is possible other manufacturers, including aerospace and automobile companies, could be enlisted to do so.
Ventilators are basically air pumps with motors controlled by circuits that make them act like lungs: the pump pushes air into the patient, then stops so the weight of the chest can push the air back out.
Automobiles and airplanes contain many small pumps, like those for oil, water and air-conditioning fluid, that might be modified to act as basic, stripped-down ventilators. On Sunday, Mr. Trump tweeted that Ford and General Motors had been "given the go-ahead" to produce ventilators.
Providers, meanwhile, are scrambling for alternatives.
The United States must also work to increase its supply of piped and tanked oxygen, Dr. Aylward said.
One of the lessons of China, he noted, was that many Covid-19 patients who would normally have been intubated and on ventilators managed to survive with oxygen alone.
Hospitals in the United States have taken some measures to handle surges of patients, such as stopping elective surgery and setting up isolation rooms.
To protect bedridden long-term patients, nursing homes and hospitals also should immediately stop admitting visitors and do constant health checks on their staffs, said Dr. James LeDuc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
The national stockpile does contain some prepackaged military field hospitals, but they are not expected to be nearly enough for a big surge.
In Wuhan, the Chinese government famously built two new hospitals in two weeks. All other hospitals were divided:
48 were designated to handle 10,000 serious or critical coronavirus patients, while others were restricted to handling emergencies like heart attacks and births.
Wherever that was impractical, hospitals were divided into "clean" and "dirty" zones, and the medical teams did not cross over. Walls to isolate whole wards were built, and - as in Ebola wards - doctors went in one end of the room wearing protective gear and left by the other end, where they de-gowned under the eyes of a nurse to prevent infection.
Decide when to close schools
As of Saturday, schools in 45 states were closed entirely, but that is a decision that divided experts.
"Closing all schools may not make sense unless there is documented widespread community transmission, which we're not seeing in most of the country," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former C.D.C. director under President Barack Obama.
In China, Dr. Aylward said, he asked all of the doctors he spoke to whether they had seen any family clusters in which a child was the first to be infected. No one had, he said, which astonished him.
That leaves a quandary. Closing schools is a normal part of social distancing; after all, schools are the workplaces for many adults, too. And when the disease is clearly spreading within an individual school, it must close.
But closing whole school districts can seriously disrupt a city's ability to fight an outbreak. With their children stuck at home, nurses, doctors, police officers and other emergency medical workers cannot come to work.
Also, many children in low-income families depend on the meals they eat at schools.
Cities that close all schools are creating special "hub schools" for the children of essential workers. In Ohio, the governor has told school bus drivers to deliver hot meals to children who normally got them at school.
China's effort succeeded, experts said, in part because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The government declared a "people's war" and rolled out a "Fight On, Wuhan! Fight On, China!" campaign.
Many people idled by the lockdowns stepped up to act as fever checkers, contact tracers, hospital construction workers, food deliverers, even babysitters for the children of first responders, or as
crematory workers.
With training, volunteers were able to do some ground-level but crucial medical tasks, such as basic nursing, lab technician work or making sure that hospital rooms were correctly decontaminated.
Americans often step forward to help neighbors affected by hurricanes and floods; many will no doubt do so in this outbreak, but they will need training in how not to fall ill and add to the problem.
"In my experience, success is dependent on how much the public is informed and participates," Admiral Ziemer said. "This truly is an 'all hands on deck' situation."
Prioritize the treatments
Clinicians in China, Italy and France have thrown virtually everything they had in hospital pharmacies into the fight, and at least two possibilities have emerged that might save patients: the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and the antiviral remdesivir, which has no licensed use.
There is not proof yet that any of these are effective against the virus. China registered more than 200 clinical trials, including several involving those treatments, but investigators ran out of patients in critical condition to enroll. Italy and France have trials underway, and hospitals in New York are writing trial protocols now.
One worry for trial leaders is that chloroquine has been given so much publicity that patients may refuse to be "randomized" and accept a 50 percent chance of being given a placebo.
If any drug works on critical cases, it might be possible to use small doses as a prophylactic to prevent infection.
An alternative is to
harvest protective antibodies from the blood of people who have survived the illness, said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
The purified blood serum - called immunoglobulin - could possibly be used in small amounts to protect emergency medical workers, too.
"Unfortunately, the first wave won't benefit from this," Dr. Hotez said. "We need to wait until we have enough survivors."
Find a vaccine
The ultimate hope is to have a vaccine that will protect everyone, and many companies and governments have already rushed the design of candidate vaccines. But as Dr. Fauci has explained multiple times, testing those candidate vaccines for safety and effectiveness takes time.
The process will take at least a year, even if nothing goes wrong. The roadblock, vaccine experts explained, is not bureaucratic. It is that the human immune system takes weeks to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take weeks to appear.
After extensive animal testing, vaccines are normally given to about 50 healthy human volunteers to see if they cause any unexpected side effects and to measure what dose produces enough antibodies to be considered protective.
If that goes well, the trial enrolls hundreds or thousands of volunteers in an area where the virus is circulating. Half get the vaccine, the rest do not - and the investigators wait. If the vaccinated half do not get the disease, the green light for production is finally given.
In the past, some experimental vaccines have produced serious side effects, like Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can paralyze and kill. A greater danger, experts said, is that some experimental vaccines, paradoxically, cause "immune enhancement," meaning they make it more likely, not less, that recipients will get a disease. That would be a disaster.
One candidate coronavirus vaccine Dr. Hotez invented 10 years ago in the wake of SARS, he said, had to be abandoned when it appeared to make mice more likely to die from pneumonia when they were experimentally infected with the virus.
In theory, the testing process could be sped up with "challenge trials," in which healthy volunteers get the vaccine and then are deliberately infected. But that is ethically fraught when there is no cure for Covid-19. Even some healthy young people have died from this virus.
Reach out to other nations
Wealthy nations need to remember that, as much as they are struggling with the virus, poorer countries will have a far harder time and need help.
Also, the Asian nations that have contained the virus could offer expertise - and desperately needed equipment. Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba, recently offered
large shipments of masks and testing kits to the United States.
Wealthy nations ignored the daily warnings from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.'s director general, that far more aggressive efforts at isolation and contact tracing were urgently needed to stop the virus.
"Middle income and poorer nations are following the advice of international organizations while the most advanced nations find it so hard to implement it," Dr. Nabarro said. "That must change."
In declaring the coronavirus a pandemic, Dr. Tedros called for countries to learn from one another's successes, act with unity and help protect one another against a threat to people of every nationality.
"Let's all look out for each other," he said.
The New York Times · by Donald G. McNeil Jr. · March 22, 2020
9. CDC Coronavirus Testing Decision Likely to Haunt Nation for Months to Come
Another "what if."
CDC Coronavirus Testing Decision Likely to Haunt Nation for Months to Come
The Daily Beast · by Kaiser Health NewsPublished Mar. 23, 2020 4:31AM ET · March 23, 2020
By Rachana Pradhan | Kaiser Health News
As the novel coronavirus snaked its way across the globe, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in early February distributed 200 test kits it had produced to more than 100 public health labs run by states and counties nationwide.
Each kit contained material to test a mere 300 to 400 patients. And labs, whether serving the population of New York City or tiny towns in rural America, apparently received the same kits.
The kits were distributed roughly equally to locales in all 50 states. That decision presaged weeks of chaos, in which the availability of COVID-19 tests seemed oddly out of sync with where testing was needed.
A woman in South Dakota with mild symptoms and no fever readily got the test and the results. Meanwhile, politicians in places like New York, Boston, Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay Area-all in the throes of serious outbreaks - couldn't get enough tests to screen ill patients or, thereby, the information they needed to protect the general public and stem the outbreak of the virus, whose symptoms mimic those of common respiratory illnesses.
Rapid testing is crucial in the early stages of an outbreak. It allows health workers and families to identify and focus on treating those infected and isolate them.
Yet health officials in New York City and such states as New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Georgia confirmed to Kaiser Health News that they each initially got one test kit, calling into question whether they would have even stood a chance to contain the outbreaks that would emerge. They would soon discover that the tests they did receive were flawed, lacking critical components and delivering faulty results.
During those early weeks, the virus took off, infecting thousands of people and leading to nationwide social distancing and sheltering in place. Public health officials are just beginning to grapple with the fallout from that early bungling of testing, which is likely to haunt the country in the months to come.
Too Little Too Late
The first shipment to Washington state arrived more than two weeks after officials there announced the first U.S. case of coronavirus, and at a moment when deadly outbreaks of the disease were already festering in places like the Life Care Center in Kirkland. Within weeks, three dozen people infected with COVID-19 would die at the nursing home in the suburbs of Seattle.
The spread of COVID19 would not take long to overwhelm the state, which as of Friday had more than 1,300 cases.
The Trump administration in recent days has attempted to speed test for the virus after early missteps hampered the government's response to contain the contagion, and officials have had to respond to a barrage of criticism from public health experts, state officials and members of Congress.
Federal health officials have eased the process for university and commercial labs to perform their own tests, and they are ramping up their capacity. As of March 16, public and private labs in the U.S. had the ability to test more than 36,000 people a day, according to estimates compiled by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., a figure expected to rapidly escalate in coming weeks. That figure, however, can vary considerably by state and does not indicate how many tests are actually given to patients.
"We are now beginning to see that they have spread out in a prioritized way. We asked them to prioritize the regions that were mostly affected," Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said Wednesday of private labs' testing, without elaboration.
The scaling up of testing is set to take place after weeks of faltering and hundreds, if not thousands, of undiagnosed people spreading the virus. For example, New York's state health department received a faulty CDC test kit on Feb. 8 for 800 patient specimens, an amount that's consistent with other states, according to a spokesperson. It later began testing patients with a test that state officials developed based on the CDC protocol and has significantly increased testing-as of Friday, more than 7,200 people had tested positive statewide.
In New York City, the first batch was obtained on Feb. 7.
"The other state and local public health laboratories got test kits as they became available," said Eric Blank, chief program officer of the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
Places in the middle of the country with no outbreaks had the luxury of time to plan. For example, Missouri officials have had about 800 tests to work with, leading to only 395 performed so far in the region by public health labs - 26 of which were positive. When private lab tests are accounted for, as of Friday there were 47 confirmed cases.
Health care providers and public health staff in the state, however, benefited from the fact that there is less international travel to the region, according to infectious disease expert Dr. Steven Lawrence of Washington University in St. Louis.
"This is very similar to 1918 with the influenza pandemic-St. Louis had more time to prepare and was able to put measures in place to flatten the curve than, say, Philadelphia," Lawrence said. "Seattle didn't have an opportunity to prepare as much in advance."
While commercial labs are coming online, strict restrictions are limiting testing capabilities, Lawrence said.
"The state has had their hands tied," he added.
Waiting And Wondering
Because of a widespread lag in testing, it is still a mystery for thousands of people to know whether they've come into contact with an infected person until well after it happens. As of Friday, the pandemic had killed more than 11,000 globally. More than 16,000 Americans were confirmed infected and at least 216 have died.
"CDC will distribute tests based on where they can do the most good. But without hospital-based testing and commercial testing, it will not be possible to meet the need," said Tom Frieden, who led the CDC during the Obama administration and is a former commissioner of the New York City Health Department.
In California, public school teacher Claire Dugan, whose state was among the hardest hit in the initial wave of U.S. coronavirus cases, was told she didn't qualify for testing because she had not traveled abroad to any country with an outbreak of the virus or been in contact with an infected person. Dugan, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is already medically fragile after a stray bullet nearly killed her while driving four years ago, sought a test from her doctor after registering a temperature of 100.7 degrees earlier this month.
"There are a lot of layers as to why this is so messed up," said Dugan, who relies on a feeding tube and said she sought a test not only to protect herself but her students. "It's community spreading right now, so it's kind of silly we're still insisting on [the early criteria for testing]. How would I know?"
Since the CDC's initial distribution, states have been reordering more tests through the office's International Reagent Resource - a long-standing tool that public health labs have relied on. They have also revised testing protocols to use only one sample per person, which boosts the number of people screened.
Yet problems still abound with tests or other materials needed to be able to detect the virus. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said on March 12 that county public health labs can't use all of the 8,000 test kits the state has because they are missing key components.
In Pennsylvania, state officials weren't able to begin testing until March 2 because of problems with the CDC's initial kit, according to Nate Wardle, a spokesperson at its department of health. New York City received two newly manufactured CDC test kits on Feb. 29 and also began performing tests March 2, its health department told KHN.
"We are still limited on extraction kits," Mandy Cohen, the Health and Human Services secretary in North Carolina, said in an interview in mid-March. Officials earlier this month could test only 300 patients because of shortages in the extraction materials needed to register whether the novel coronavirus is present.
In North Dakota, Loralyn Hegland wrote her physician's practice an email on March 10 with the subject line "dry cough," wondering if she should come in for testing after learning that was one symptom of COVID-19. The recommendation she got echoes those of countless others across the U.S., saying her risk of being exposed was very low because she hadn't traveled outside the U.S. and had not come into contact with a person who had been "definitely" diagnosed with the virus.
Hegland, who lives in Fargo, didn't have a fever but decided to shelter herself, anyway, out of caution.
Would she push to get a test?
"What's the point?" she said. "You can't know what you don't know. It's just that simple. How else do you explain it to people when you're not testing?"
KHN Midwest correspondent Lauren Weber in St. Louis contributed to this article.
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
The Daily Beast · by Kaiser Health NewsPublished Mar. 23, 2020 4:31AM ET · March 23, 2020
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10. As the West Panics, Putin Is Watching
Of course Putin is learning. How do you create panic in the US and cause distrust in the government? But Russia's propaganda and information. arms are working to help sow dissent and discord in the US building on the distrust of the government as well as those who believe this is all a hoax and a plot to bring down the President. We need to expose Russian (and Chinese, etc) strategy and tactics, techniques, and procedures.
We have to understand we are facing two types of enemies - the virus and political warfare using information and cyber. Failure to take both seriously will be our downfall.
But regardless of whether they opt for biological viruses or computer ones, new forms of disinformation campaigns, supercharged espionage, or another not-yet-seen form of aggression, the West's adversaries can bide their time. They can wait until they have exhaustively documented the West's failures in responding to the coronavirus. Those lessons can then be used when another-potentially even worse-crisis hits. Iran is certainly still waiting to avenge the killing of its military commander Qassem Suleimani this January.
A two-front war, involving a combination of Mother Nature's caprice and tricks thought up by adversaries rather than military formations, presents a frightening scenario. The answer is to be prepared. And as the coronavirus has made abundantly clear, preparedness involves not just the government but everyone.
As the West Panics, Putin Is Watching
Foreign Policy · by Elisabeth Braw · March 23, 2020
Europe is in disarray. Millions of people are under lockdown, the private sector is on its knees, governments are struggling to counter a completely unexpected adversary while maintaining some semblance of order. And that's just COVID-19. Imagine the impact of an additional crisis at such a moment, caused by one of the West's adversaries.
"God is watching us from a distance,"
sang Bette Midler. U.S. and European leaders can be sure that somebody else is also watching them from a distance, too: Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders of countries competing with the West.
The new coronavirus has, as of March 23, killed more than 14,000 people and infected over 341,000. The virus has
wiped out all U.S. stock market gains made during Donald Trump's presidency and caused the British pound to
drop to a level not seen since the early 1980s. BMW, Nissan, Daimler, Volkswagen, Fiat, Peugeot, and other carmakers have halted their manufacturing in Europe. General Motors and Ford have closed all their production in the United States. Deutsche Bank is predicting the worst global economic downturn since the end of World War II. The International Labor Organization has issued warnings of 25 million job losses worldwide.
That's just the tangible damage brought by the vicious virus. Panic-buying in countries such as the United Kingdom has already emptied shelves; not even repeated pleas by supermarket chains to "buy only what you need" have convinced shoppers to be considerate of others. Supermarkets have now had to introduce rationing of necessities. "If you could help us by limiting demand of essential items and allowing us to focus on the core needs of our customers-we are confident that we can continue to feed the nation,"
said the supermarket chain Tesco in a statement.
The massive Defender-Europe 20 exercise, which involves some 40,000 primarily U.S. soldiers practicing a rapid deployment to Europe and advancement through the continent, has been throttled.
The coronavirus has even curtailed Western military activities. On March 18, Norway and nine allies (including Britain and the United States)
called off Cold Response 2020, a joint exercise practicing the defense of northern and central Norway. And the massive Defender-Europe 20 exercise, which involves some 40,000 primarily U.S. soldiers practicing a rapid deployment to Europe and advancement through the continent,
has been throttled. "As of March 13, all movement of personnel and equipment from the United States to Europe has ceased.... Linked exercises to Exercise Defender-Europe 20-Dynamic Front, Joint Warfighting Assessment, Saber Strike and Swift Response-will not be conducted," U.S. Army Europe announced on March 16.
Defender-Europe 20 was meant to be a complex exercise involving 20,000 U.S. soldiers along with 20,000 pieces of equipment. The soldiers and materiel would then meet up with Europe-based U.S. troops and equipment as well as European troops and advance toward NATO's eastern front. Because no such exercise has been conducted in a quarter-century, Defender-Europe 20 is vital. Defender-Europe 20 "shows that NATO allies and partners stand stronger together," a U.S. Army Europe
factsheet explains. Its cancellation is now showing U.S. and European Union adversaries just how weak NATO can be under certain circumstances.
The virus had already
infected Gen. Jaroslaw Mika of the Polish armed forces and forced his colleague Lt. Gen. Christopher Cavoli, U.S. Army Europe's commander, to
self-isolate as a result.
Propaganda outlets supporting Russia and China are already
producing a barrage of coronavirus disinformation aimed at sowing further chaos in the West. "Coronavirus could have originated from Latvia,"
suggested Sputnik Latvia on March 15, while another Russian propaganda outlet, Geopolitica.ru,
posited that the coronavirus may have been created in the United States as a biological weapon. Chinese diplomats are, in turn, engaged in concerted disinformation campaign, for example
suggesting that the coronavirus was created by the U.S. Army.
Mostly, though, the coronavirus remains the only major challenge affecting Western countries. As bad as it is, that's lucky.
It's safe to assume that Putin and his colleagues are watching the bedlam in Europe and the United States with schadenfreude, but more than that, they're using it for educational purposes. The coronavirus is a perfect opportunity for the West's adversaries to watch how countries cope-or don't cope-with a major crisis.
After all, an adversary can exploit a crisis by adding a second one. The United States could, for example, exacerbate Iran's coronavirus misery by imposing even more sanctions-as it did last week-or by staging cyberstrikes against power plants. (A U.S. cyberattack last September "
took aim at Tehran's ability to spread 'propaganda,'" Reuters reported.) And Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or proxies operating on their behalf could use this opportunity to conduct massive cyberattacks against Western targets.
According to
2019 Cyber Readiness Report compiled by Hiscox, the global insurer, more than 61 percent of firms in major Western economies, including the United States, reported a cyberattack in the previous 12 months, up from 45 percent the year before.
A major knockout like the 2018 NotPetya virus, which brought down scores of multinationals including the pharmaceutical giant Merck and Maersk, the world's largest shipping company, are rare-but they are bound to happen again.
Russian attackers have already managed to
gain access to the control room of certain U.S. utilities providers. Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security didn't identify the companies targeted, Jonathan Homer, the department's chief of industrial control system analysis, told media that the hackers "got to the point where they could have thrown switches" and disrupted power flows. And late last year, an Iranian government-affiliated hacker group known as Refined Kitten further upped the game: Western cyber-analysts
discovered that the Iranian hackers could tamper with the control systems of vital installations such as electrical utilities, manufacturing plants, and oil refineries.
Putin would need neither cyberattacks nor little green men to weaken the West. All he'd need to do is send a planeload of tuberculosis-infected prisoners to a country of his choice.
Refined Kitten and the Russian hackers didn't interfere with the control system; they were clearly just conducting reconnaissance. And they're in no rush. In warfare, the advantage is with the attacker, who can choose the time and manner of action-and that's especially the case in gray zone warfare, when an attacker's list of options is limited only by their imagination.
Indeed, why not employ another vicious disease next time the West is struggling? A couple of years ago I discussed Russian gray zone aggression with a globally noted public health expert who prefers to remain anonymous. He listened politely, then pointed out that Putin would need neither cyberattacks nor little green men to weaken the West. All he'd need to do, the professor told me, was to send a planeload of tuberculosis-infected prisoners to a country of his choice.
Although Russian prisons' TB rate has declined from the astronomic rate of
4,347 per 100,000 prisoners reached in 1999, in 2011 the figure was still an alarming 1,299 per 100,000, and Russian prisoners remain
one of the world's most TB-infected groups. (In 2018, the United States had
2.8 TB infections per 100,000 residents; Russia had
54.) TB is already a
health concern in Europe and the
United States; the spread of vaccine-resistant strains is particularly worrisome. If Putin sent 300 TB-infected prisoners to a country of his choice, they could efficiently spread their disease. To be sure, there's a TB vaccine, but it's
not given to every baby and doesn't work well in adults.
Now, as the coronavirus ravages Western economies and health care systems, it would clearly be a good time for the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iranians, or any other country with an ax to grind to open a second front.
Some second-front testing might already be happening. On March 15, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was
hit by a cyberattack that overloaded its servers with millions of hits, and around the same time it
emerged that impersonators have been copying the Johns Hopkins University's much-used global coronavirus map and loading their versions with malware, thus using a biological virus that's frightening everybody to spread a virtual one to their computers as well. And on March 17, the U.K. government unexpectedly
acknowledged the existence of the hitherto secret Joint State Threats Assessment Team, a government body that monitors foreign spies.
But regardless of whether they opt for biological viruses or computer ones, new forms of disinformation campaigns, supercharged espionage, or another not-yet-seen form of aggression, the West's adversaries can bide their time. They can wait until they have exhaustively documented the West's failures in responding to the coronavirus. Those lessons can then be used when another-potentially even worse-crisis hits. Iran is certainly still waiting to avenge the killing of its military commander Qassem Suleimani this January.
A two-front war, involving a combination of Mother Nature's caprice and tricks thought up by adversaries rather than military formations, presents a frightening scenario. The answer is to be prepared. And as the coronavirus has made abundantly clear, preparedness involves not just the government but everyone.
Foreign Policy · by Elisabeth Braw · March 23, 2020
11. How the Virus Got Out
This is a fantastic visual chart. It cannot be emailed so please go to this link to view it.
It seems simple: Stop travel, stop the virus from spreading around the world.
Here's why that didn't work.
Many of the
first known cases clustered around a seafood market in Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million and a transportation hub.
Four cases grew to
dozens by the end of December. Doctors knew only that the sick people had viral pneumonia that did not respond to the usual treatments.
The true size of the outbreak was much larger even then - an invisible network of
nearly 1,000 cases, or perhaps several times more.
Estimates from Trevor Bedford, University of Washington, and Lauren Gardner, Johns Hopkins University
With each patient infecting two or three others on average, even a perfect response may not have contained the spread.
But Chinese officials did not alert the public to the risks in December. It wasn't until Dec. 31 that they alerted the World Health Organization and released a statement - and a reassurance.
"The disease is preventable and controllable," the government said.
The timing of the outbreak could not have been worse.
Hundreds of millions of people were about to travel back to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year.
Here's how people moved around on Jan. 1, according to a Times analysis of data published by Baidu and major telecoms, which tracked the movements of millions of cell phones.
12. As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets
We have to effectively balance individual liberty and public health surveillance activities.
As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets
The New York Times · by Natasha Singer · March 23, 2020
Tracking entire populations to combat the pandemic now could open the doors to more invasive forms of government snooping later.
In January, South Korea began posting detailed location histories about people who tested positive for the coronavirus, leading to public blaming and shaming.
Credit...Woohae Cho for The New York Times
In South Korea, government agencies are harnessing surveillance-camera footage, smartphone location data and credit card purchase records to help
trace the recent movements of coronavirus patients and establish virus transmission chains.
In Lombardy, Italy, authorities are analyzing
location data transmitted by citizens' mobile phones to determine how many people are obeying a government lockdown order and the typical distances they move every day. About 40 percent are moving around "too much," an official recently said.
In Israel, the country's internal security agency is poised to start
using a cache of mobile phone location data - originally intended for counterterrorism operations - to try to pinpoint citizens who may have been exposed to the virus.
As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably eager to employ every tool at their disposal to try to hinder the virus - even as the surveillance efforts threaten to alter the precarious balance between public safety and personal privacy on a global scale.
Yet ratcheting up surveillance to combat the pandemic now could permanently open the doors to more invasive forms of snooping later. It is a lesson Americans learned after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, civil liberties experts say.
Nearly two decades later, law enforcement agencies have access to higher-powered surveillance systems, like fine-grained location tracking and facial recognition - technologies that may be repurposed to further political agendas
like anti-immigration policies. Civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of state power.
"We could so easily end up in a situation where we empower local, state or federal government to take measures in response to this pandemic that fundamentally change the scope of American civil rights," said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan.
As an example, he pointed to
a law enacted by New York State this month that gives Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo unlimited authority to rule by executive order during state crises like pandemics and hurricanes. The law allows him to issue emergency response directives that could overrule any local regulations.
This month, Australia's health minister publicly chastised a doctor whom she accused of treating patients while experiencing symptoms of the virus - essentially outing him by naming the small clinic in Victoria where he worked with a handful of other physicians.
The health provider, who tested positive for the coronavirus, responded with
a Facebook post saying the minister had incorrectly characterized his actions for political gain and demanded an apology.
"That could extend to anyone, to suddenly have the status of your health blasted out to thousands or potentially millions of people," said Chris Gilliard, an independent privacy scholar based in the Detroit area. "It's a very strange thing to do because, in the alleged interest of public health, you are actually endangering people."
But in emergencies like pandemics, privacy must be weighed against other considerations, like saving lives, said Mila Romanoff, data and governance lead for
United Nations Global Pulse, a U.N. program that has studied using data to improve emergency responses to epidemics like Ebola and dengue fever.
"We need to have a framework that would allow companies and public authorities to cooperate, to enable proper response for the public good," Ms. Romanoff said. To reduce the risk that coronavirus surveillance efforts might violate people's privacy, she said, governments and companies should limit the collection and use of data to only what is needed. "The challenge is," she added, "how much data is enough?"
The fast pace of the pandemic, however, is prompting governments to put in place a patchwork of digital surveillance measures in the name of their own interests, with little international coordination on how appropriate or effective they are.
In hundreds of cities in China, the government is
requiring citizens to use software on their phones that automatically classifies each person with a color code - red, yellow or green - indicating their contagion risk. The software determines which people should be quarantined or permitted to enter public places like subways. But officials have not explained how the system makes such decisions, and citizens have felt powerless to challenge it.
In Singapore, the Ministry of Health has posted information online about each coronavirus patient, often in stunning detail, including their relationships to other patients. The idea is to warn individuals who may have crossed paths with them, as well as alert the public to potentially infected locations. "Case 219 is a 30-year-old male," says one entry
on the health ministry's site, who worked at the "Sengkang Fire Station (50 Buangkok Drive)," is "in an isolation room at Sengkang General Hospital" and "is a family member of Case 236."
On Friday, Singapore also introduced a smartphone app for citizens to help authorities locate people who may have been exposed to the virus. The app, called
TraceTogether, uses Bluetooth signals to detect mobile phones that are nearby. If an app user later tests positive for the virus, health authorities may examine the data logs from the app to find people who crossed their paths. A government official said the app preserved privacy by not revealing users' identities to one another.
In Mexico, after public health officials notified Uber about a passenger infected with the virus,
the company suspended the accounts of two drivers who had given him rides, along with more than 200 passengers who had ridden with those drivers.
In the United States, the White House recently spoke with Google, Facebook and other tech companies about potentially using aggregated location data captured from Americans' mobile phones for public health surveillance of the virus. Several members of Congress subsequently wrote
a letter urging President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence to protect any virus-related data that companies collected from Americans.
The digital dictates may enable governments to exert more social control and enforce social distancing during the pandemic. They also raise questions about when surveillance may go too far.
In January, South Korea's government began posting detailed location histories on each person who tested positive for the coronavirus. The site has included a wealth of information - such as details about when people left for work, whether they wore a mask in the subway, the name of the stations where they changed trains, the massage parlors and karaoke bars they frequented and the names of the clinics where they were tested for the virus.
In South Korea's highly wired society, however, internet mobs exploited patient data disclosed by the government site to identify people by name and hound them.
As other countries increase surveillance, South Korea had an unusual reaction. Concerned that privacy invasions might discourage citizens from getting tested for the virus, health officials announced this month that they would refine their data-sharing guidelines to minimize patient risk.
"We will balance the value of protecting individual human rights and privacy and the value of upholding public interest in preventing mass infections," said Jung Eun-kyeong, the director of South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That is a tricky balance that some U.S. officials may need to consider.
In New York this month, Mayor Bill de Blasio
posted details on Twitter about a lawyer in Westchester who was the second person in the state to test positive for the virus - including the name of the man's seven-person law firm and the names of the schools attended by two of his children. A few hours later, The
New York Post identified the lawyer by name and was soon referring to him as "patient zero" in the coronavirus outbreak in New Rochelle.
In a response
posted on Facebook, Adina Lewis Garbuz, a lawyer who is the wife of the man, Lawrence Garbuz, pleaded with the public to focus instead on the personal efforts the family had made to isolate themselves and notify people who came into contact with them.
"We would have preferred this all remain private," Ms. Garbuz wrote in the Facebook post, "but since it is no longer, I wanted to at least share some truths and allay people's fears."
Natasha Singer reported from New York and Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul. Aaron Krolik and Adam Satariano contributed research.
The New York Times · by Natasha Singer · March 23, 2020
13. Cool Gear Like This Only Goes So Far. U.S. Special Forces Need Help.
Excerpts:
SOF offer a unique toolset to counter Iran's unconventional warfare. These units can avoid the massive, public tit-for-tat escalations that have come from both sides exchanging conventional rocket fire. Instead of responding to rocket attacks solely with missile defenses and retaliatory fire, the United States should leverage its unique SOF capability.
...
First, legislators should clarify the legal authorities required to take offensive action in increasingly unconventional environments.
...
Second, in the process of legislating authorities, Congress should be sure that SOF will have clear authorization to focus on countering Iranian activities with unconventional and information operations to target Iranian and proxy personnel and facilities.
...
Third, SOF should return to their core function of bolstering partner military forces, especially in Iraq, to serve as a counterweight to Iran's proxy forces.
...
This use of SOF supports the National Defense Strategy perfectly, as conventional forces rebuild readiness and refocus peer competition. Peer competition will take place in the open, economically, diplomatically, but hopefully not with open combat. However, armed conflict will likely occur in the periphery grey zones involving proxies.
SOF are uniquely suited to providing counter pressure without fear of escalation, so maintaining effective and independent units will be essential.
Cool Gear Like This Only Goes So Far. U.S. Special Forces Need Help.
The National Interest · by Thomas Trask · March 22, 2020
Just when the United States thought it was getting out, Iran pulled it back in. In the last few weeks,
American forces that had surged to the Middle East after Iranian aggression began to withdraw. Soon afterwards, America's regional presence quickly swelled when an Iranian proxy killed two Americans and one British soldier at the Taji base in Iraq. Despite this temporary power projection, the Pentagon is still preparing to redeploy much of its force from the region. With the decreasing military presence, Special Operations Forces (SOF) will be critical to protecting enduring U.S. interests.
The response of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) has focused on deterring conventional missile strikes from Iranian soil. CENTCOM will continue deploying two aircraft carriers in the Middle East. Also, air defense systems will soon be operational in Iraq.
Nonetheless, these defenses likely would not have changed the outcome of the recent attack. Newly deployed Patriot missiles can intercept Iranian ballistic missile attacks, like those in January that injured over one hundred American soldiers. Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar (C-RAM) systems are useful against the low-flying rockets typical to Iranian proxies. However, according to CENTCOM Commander General McKenzie, their primary purpose will be to protect the Patriots missiles.
This complicated system of military power signals to Iran that the administration is capable of escalating. CENTCOM's force projection and missile strikes reinforce a red line against killing Americans. In the short term, this may deter Iran from launching its own attacks against American troops. Yet, a
second rocket attack on the Taji base shows Iranian proxies remain undeterred. Each American withdrawal from the region only emboldens Iran and its allies.
Regardless, the administration's aim to decrease its military presence in the Middle East is clear.
As the number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq decreases, the additional missile defenses and
consolidation of forces on a fewer number of bases is a necessary protective measure. Defending American soldiers will become increasingly complicated as Iran becomes more aggressive and fewer U.S. troops remain in the region.
America's fluctuating military presence begs the question: will the Iranian threat inexplicably decrease, or will U.S. forces again struggle to deter Iran? Past and present signs point to the latter.
SOF offer a unique toolset to counter Iran's unconventional warfare. These units can avoid the massive, public tit-for-tat escalations that have come from both sides exchanging conventional rocket fire. Instead of responding to rocket attacks solely with missile defenses and retaliatory fire, the United States should leverage its unique SOF capability.
First, legislators should clarify the legal authorities required to take offensive action in increasingly unconventional environments. While the use of force in locations like Syria and Iraq is an ongoing, often rancorous, bipartisan debate in Washington, the situation demands sober attention and legal clarification to avoid a larger scale armed conflict. To effectively counter Iranian malign activity in Iraq, the president, and the must clearly articulate engagement criteria. Guidance from the legislative and executive branches should, in particular, clarify the role of SOF units and differentiate them from the intelligence community. Yet, lawmakers should avoid limiting necessary activities as part of these changes.
Second, in the process of legislating authorities, Congress should be sure that SOF will have clear authorization to focus on countering Iranian activities with unconventional and information operations to target Iranian and proxy personnel and facilities.
On the low-end, these SOF actions would ensure the safety of political movements aligned with the United States. More aggressive SOF action could consist of concerted clandestine and drone attacks. Additionally, special operators embedded with regional forces can disseminate intelligence about the Iranian regime, ensuring partner forces are more effective. Special operations units are adaptable and creative, making them well-suited to creating uncertainty. Keeping the Iranian regime guessing about where and how it faces U.S. pressure will not defeat the regime. However, it will minimize the effectiveness of its proxies in Iraq and Syria.
Third, SOF should return to their core function of bolstering partner military forces, especially in Iraq, to serve as a counterweight to Iran's proxy forces. American efforts should expand operations with militias that engage with Iran's proxies. Respecting legitimate regional sovereignty, the United States can offer security alternatives to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This includes thwarting Iran's strategy of creating grievances among Sunni populations in attempts to delegitimize the Iraqi government. Increasingly, Shia populations also feel that Tehran has created economic and political hardships.
SOF have been among the most overused and heavily committed in the U.S. military. Their use must proceed at a sustainable long-term pace. America must protect the investment it has made to build this force.
This use of SOF supports the National Defense Strategy perfectly, as conventional forces rebuild readiness and refocus peer competition. Peer competition will take place in the open, economically, diplomatically, but hopefully not with open combat. However, armed conflict will likely occur in the periphery grey zones involving proxies.
SOF are uniquely suited to providing counter pressure without fear of escalation, so maintaining effective and independent units will be essential.
Lt. Gen Thomas Trask, USAF (ret.), former Vice Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, serves on the Hybrid Warfare Policy Project at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).
The National Interest · by Thomas Trask · March 22, 2020
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