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[Reelya]

Why is Trump against protection from global diseases?

This is a good question.

Well the accurate answer is that he lumps it in with government health care. Similar to how he couldn't give a shit that 25% of all Americans don't have health coverage, he doesn't care about funding a national disease prevention body. It's up to the individual to manage their own disease prevention, not the state. The state is too busy building nukes.

[Rockeater]

Ok, boered so I'll join here
Two things that happened in Isreal related to the virus:
1) First case outside the ones knowns from the Japanise ship, someone returning from Italy, so the entire planeis isolated
2)A parlament member (Potential minister of health) gave a speach with a bunch of bulshiton the thing including the claim it's a biological weapon, so that sad.

[Reelya]

The problem with the theory is that it's useless as a biological weapon. Something that only kills the elderly / retired population isn't a weapon you'd use on an enemy. Also, a highly contagious but only mildly deadly virus isn't a good choice for a bioweapon.

A much more effective biological weapon would be just to replicate a ton of HN51 influenza then bombard a city with canisters. The fact that HN51 doesn't have good human-to-human spreading makes it desirable as a biological weapon, since it's highly deadly but has a short "half-life" as an outbreak, so you can come in a mop up afterwards.

[Iduno]

Since Iran isn't really doing a quarantine, you can bet the party bus is doing its tour around the middle east, at the very least.

The Corona bus is comin' and everybody's jumpin'.
Wuhan to Thailand
Thailand to Japan

Sick people would just stay home for a few days(or still go to work.)  Maybe see a doctor later if it persists after those few day.  (At least that is how my family and I operate in the US.)

Hahahahahahaha! Hilarious. You can be sick when there are no more profits to be had. No go cough in that person's food before you serve it. And don't even think insurance will let you see a doctor.

Trump is a source of enteraining coronavirus news. He's taking personal credit for the lack of cases in the US now. And then straight away he announces Mike Pence is now the fall guy, so if cases spike up, it's Pence's fault.

For someone who throws a lot of people under busses, I'm guessing he's not really pro-public transportation.

[Frumple]

Since Iran isn't really doing a quarantine, you can bet the party bus is doing its tour around the middle east, at the very least.

The Corona bus is comin' and everybody's jumpin'.
Wuhan to Thailand
Thailand to Japan

In related news, apparently whoever owns the corona beer brand has issued a statement that there's no need to add disinfectant to their products to protect from the virus

[Iduno]

Since Iran isn't really doing a quarantine, you can bet the party bus is doing its tour around the middle east, at the very least.

The Corona bus is comin' and everybody's jumpin'.
Wuhan to Thailand
Thailand to Japan

In related news, apparently whoever owns the corona beer brand has issued a statement that there's no need to add disinfectant to their products to protect from the virus

I would, however, improve the flavor.


Edit: And, for my sins, I can no longer get the Vengabus song out of my head.

[Ulfarr]

Greece has joined the server. We had our first confirmed case yesterday and some people are already losing their shits, going everywhere with masks and the like.

[Bumber]

In 2018, for instance, the CDC cut 80% of its efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks because it was running out of money. Ultimately, the department went from working in 49 countries to just 10.

Spoiler: Wasted a bunch of my time checking this (click to show/hide)

Had to go to the CDC website and manually check each country for Global Health Security. Most of the pages were last checked at various points in 2019.

Code: (Countries with Global Health Security listed) [Select]

Belize
Burkina Faso
Cambodia
Cameroon
China
Congo
Côte d’Ivoire
Dominican Republic
Ethiopia
Georgia
Ghana
Guatemala
Guinea
Haiti
India
Indonesia
Kazakhstan
Liberia
Mali
Nigeria
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Tanzania
Thailand
Uganda
Ukraine
Uzbekistan
Vietnam
That's at least 28 countries. The links for Brazil and Laos didn't work. Egypt has Global Disease Detection, and I'm not sure what the difference is. Others are part of the Global Health Security Agenda (CDC says they're assisting Jordan and others to meet the requirements,) and I'm not sure if they're counted as part of the 49 countries.

Some of the countries probably have had their resources scaled back in 2018, but that isn't mentioned. Funding may have been re-approved at some point.

Reducing national health spending by $US15 billion.

Spoiler: Wasted a bunch of my time checking this (click to show/hide)

This is proving ridiculously difficult to check. Firstly, "national health spending" includes spending by individuals, so that could actually be a good thing. Searching for the federal health spending isn't really helping. All I'm getting is worthless projections. I've got 2 data points to show for it:
2017: $1.5 trillion
2018: $1.1 trillion
That shows a ~$300 billion cut, which certainly doesn't seem right.

Okay, I wasted a bunch of time fact-checking the above points when I shouldn't have. Turns out Business Insider is just misquoting other articles. I've numbered the points:

1. In 2018, for instance, the CDC cut 80% of its efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks because it was running out of money. Ultimately, the department went from working in 49 countries to just 10.

Here are some other actions the Trump administration undertook to dismantle government-spending programs related to fighting the spread of global diseases, according to Foreign Policy:

    2. Shutting down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council.
    3. Eliminating the US government’s $US30 million Complex Crises Fund.
    4. Reducing national health spending by $US15 billion.
    5. Consistently attacking Mark Green, the director of the US Agency for International Development.

1. is from a Washington Post article:

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is dramatically downsizing its epidemic prevention activities in 39 out of 49 countries because money is running out, U.S. government officials said.

Not "Ultimately, the department went from working in 49 countries to just 10." The article ends with:

Officials at the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Security Council pushed for more funding in the president's fiscal 2019 budget to be released this month. A senior government official said Thursday that the president's budget "will include details on global health security funding," but declined to elaborate.

I don't care enough at this point to track down that budget and see what kind of funding it ended up getting.

2-5 are from a Foreign Policy article.

2. The article asks:

If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is

Looks like Trump moved the responsibility elsewhere. There was a 2019 Global Health Security Strategy thing. Is the DoD in charge of it now? IDK.

3. The article links to another article that says:

Similarly, Trump seeks to cut $30 million worth of emergency response funds from the State Department’s Complex Crises Fund (CCF)

Looks like it received funding for the year of 2019, so it must have stayed in. It's used as a fund for flexible foreign aid spending for stuff that hasn't been specifically approved. Seems like it has more to do with building nations and preventing conflict than disease control.

4. The article links to another Washington Post article. It says:

President Trump is sending a plan to Congress that calls for stripping more than $15 billion in previously approved spending

Not "national health spending", which refers to the sum total of all US dollars spent on health services by everyone. The article goes on to say:

Almost half of the proposed cuts would come from two accounts within the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that White House officials said expired last year or are not expected to be drawn upon. An additional $800 million in cuts would come from money created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010 to test innovative payment and service delivery models.

A senior administration official said Democrats should recognize that much of this package represents untapped accounts and that cutting the money would create savings without affecting operations.

Democrats have said they are watching the process with skepticism.

We get the usual rhetoric from Chuck Schumer about how Trump and the Republicans are trying to steal healthcare away from the poor children. Ironically the $1.3 trillion spending bill passed while the cuts were being considered, which included:

$414 million increase for Alzheimer’s disease research, $40 million more for research on developing a universal flu vaccine and $17 million more for antibiotic-resistance bacteria research. Separately, it earmarks an additional $2.8 billion to fund treatment and prevention of opioid addiction and research into the subject.

5. lol

[Naturegirl1999]

Thanks for the fact checking

[Zangi]

Why is Trump against protection from global diseases?

This is a good question.

Well the accurate answer is that he lumps it in with government health care. Similar to how he couldn't give a shit that 25% of all Americans don't have health coverage, he doesn't care about funding a national disease prevention body. It's up to the individual to manage their own disease prevention, not the state. The state is too busy building nukes.

Global health security.  It has a distinct lack of national or US in it.  Who cares what happens overseas, as long as it does not come over this way.  (But here we see it coming at us now.)
It could also be reframed as US or national protection from global disease threats.

Also, yes, we gotta increase our bloated military budget some more.

[TamerVirus]

The CDC has finally updated the testing criteria to include hospitalized pneumatic cases without alternative explanatory diagnosis.
Should have done this weeks ago, but now it's off to the races

[ZBridges]

I haven't really had a chance to catch up on the coronavirus news.  How worried should a Californian be about the epidemic and should that person start taking some sort of precautionary measures?

[Folly]

I haven't really had a chance to catch up on the coronavirus news.  How worried should a Californian be about the epidemic and should that person start taking some sort of precautionary measures?

What we're hearing increasingly is that it doesn't matter what prevention measures you use, everyone is going to get this virus sooner or later. So just make sure you have some canned chicken soup ready to go when the time comes.

[ChairmanPoo]

I haven't really had a chance to catch up on the coronavirus news.  How worried should a Californian be about the epidemic and should that person start taking some sort of precautionary measures?

What we're hearing increasingly is that it doesn't matter what prevention measures you use, everyone is going to get this virus sooner or later. So just make sure you have some canned chicken soup ready to go when the time comes.

Nobody is saying that.

[Trekkin]

I haven't really had a chance to catch up on the coronavirus news.  How worried should a Californian be about the epidemic and should that person start taking some sort of precautionary measures?

What we're hearing increasingly is that it doesn't matter what prevention measures you use, everyone is going to get this virus sooner or later. So just make sure you have some canned chicken soup ready to go when the time comes.

How do you get from 0.001% infected to everyone definitely going to catch it, especially with how many vaccines and cures are in development now?