Washington – Donald Trump’s State of emergency declaration frees up $ 50 billion to fight the spread of the disease and help the most affected states.
- President Trump is exercising statutory authorities to declare a national emergency in response to the coronavirus.
- The unprecedented action the President is taking invites States, territories, and tribes to access over $42 billion in existing funding to combat the coronavirus.
- The Administration has taken decisive action to ensure State, local, and tribal leaders have the resources they need to provide protective measures for their communities.
- The Small Business Administration also has the authority and available funding to make over $7 billion in loans to qualifying small businesses to assist economic recovery.
- President Trump is directing further actions across his Administration in response to the coronavirus.
- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has announced guidance to limit medically unnecessary visits to nursing homes to protect vulnerable elderly Americans
- The Secretary of Education will be waiving interest on all student loans held by the Federal Government.
- The President is directing the Department of Energy to purchase large quantities of crude oil for the strategic reserve.
- The President is urging every state to set up emergency operations centers and is asking every hospital to activate its emergency preparedness plan.
Will the United States soon know the real extent of the coronavirus pandemic in the country? After a series of contradictory statements in recent days, US President Donald Trump announced on Friday, March 13, a state of national emergency to deal with the Covid-19 epidemic, which, according to official figures, it affected some 1,800 people and left 49 dead.
50 billion
This decision frees up $ 50 billion to fight the spread of the disease and help the most affected states in the country. It should notably speed up the implementation of screening tests, a black point of the strategy implemented by the Trump administration in recent weeks, but for which the president declined on Friday any “responsibility.”
Confusion That Reigns
Evoking his case, Donald Trump, however, illustrated the confusion that reigns. On this subject at the highest level of his administration, after having excluded from undergoing a screening test, while he was in contact with of people with the virus in recent days – “I have no symptoms,” he argued – Donald Trump finally admitted, a few minutes later, that he was “probably” going to be tested.
Also Read: The Facts on the Coronavirus
During his press conference, the American president surrounded himself with managers of supermarket chains, who will make their parking lots available to carry out these tests on patients performed in their cars, a practice implemented in South Korea and Germany, in particular. Mr. Trump had also invited representatives from private Pharmaceutical laboratories, now authorized to carry out these analyses.
Number of cases detected
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has indeed made it possible to market faster screening equipment, created by the Roche company, and available in around a hundred laboratories across the country. The president has generally promised fewer “regulations” to ease access to tests for those who need them. A patient will no longer need to be prescribed by a doctor to do this.
Screening Kits
Due to the lack of available screening kits and the lack of strong political will to remedy this shortage, only some 11,000 people have been tested in the United States – several thousand are tested every day in South Korea. In this context, American public health experts have acknowledged for several days that they do not have a clear idea of ??the seriousness of the spread of the coronavirus in the country.
Dr. Anthony Fauci
During two hearing sessions before the Congress, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases and Allergies, acknowledged that the test system, crucial to trace the evolution of the pandemic, does work not – “it’s a failure,” he admitted to the elected officials. This expert, renowned for his precise interventions and his statements, sometimes contradicting those of the White House on the disease, therefore anticipates a sharp increase in the number of cases detected as soon as the diagnoses can be made.
The difficult access to screening tests across the country since the eruption of the epidemic, as well as the random monitoring of people placed in quarantine, have favored the spread of the disease, the magnitude of which remains undervalued. Thus, the head of public health in Ohio assured Thursday that the state probably had “100,000 people infected with the virus, or 1% of the population”, while so far, only five cases have been officially confirmed.
Underestimation of the pandemic
The measures announced on Friday, therefore, aim to make up for a delay caused by the underestimation of the epidemic by the Trump administration, the American refusal to use the tests developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the first weeks of the outbreak, focusing detection measures on people who transited through China, even though the virus was already in the country, and the unpreparedness of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to launch their tests.
Centers for Disease Control
So far, according to their Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, the public health system, has been able to test 75,000 people. The new measures should increase these capacities by several thousand per day. Provided that the shortage of ad hoc materials to perform the analyzes already seen in California does not complicate their implementation.
CDC estimated
At the end of February, projections made by the CDC estimated that 2.4 million to 21 million people could require hospitalization due to the coronavirus in the coming weeks in the United States. The final proportion would depend on the containment and prevention measures taken to limit the pandemic, including early testing, experts said.
Nancy Pelosi
On the political front, the speaker of the majority Democratic House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, announced Friday evening that she had reached an agreement with the Trump administration on a text which provides for the funding of free access to screening tests as well that paid sick leave to allow people affected by the virus to stay at home; 25% of American employees, especially in small businesses and shops, do not benefit from this social protection. The text was adopted by the House in the evening.
“Social distancing.”
During Thursday’s hearings before the committee of the House of Representatives, when one of the congressmen estimated the cost of a test for an uninsured patient at nearly 1,300 dollars, the Director of the CDC was committed to guaranteeing their free for all Americans, regardless of their level of social protection (some 27 million of them are uninsured). The text has yet to be passed by the Senate and signed by President Trump before coming into force.
State of Emergency and Wall Street
Anticipating these announcements, Wall Street rebounded on Friday after reaching a historically low level the previous day. For their part, most American states have adopted drastic measures in recent days: closings of schools and universities, cancellations of cultural and sporting events, the introduction of telework.
Hand washing and “social distancing” – the practice of setting up a space of at least three feet between two people – are now recommended in all public places. Donald Trump did not give the best publicity to these good practices on Friday, ostensibly shaking the hands of most of the officials around him.