Report: Even Trump’s Allies Are Fed Up with His Press Briefings

 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/trump-allies-criticize-coronavirus-press-briefings

One day after the right-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial board came out against Trump’s briefings, which they write “are now all about the President,” the Times reported that a number of GOP allies and advisers of the president would really prefer that he stepped back from the free-wheeling pressers. Republicans in the White House and Congress are “worried” about the briefings and “believe the briefings are hurting the president more than helping him,” describing the president’s daily diatribes “as a kind of original sin from which all of his missteps flow.” Trump “sometimes drowns out his own message,” Senator Lindsey Graham told the Times. (“Any suggestion that President Trump is struggling on tone or message is completely false. During these difficult times, Americans are receiving comfort, hope and resources from their president, as well as their local officials, and Americans are responding in unprecedented ways,” White House spokesman Judd Deere rebutted in a statement to the Times.)

NYT: Trump Allies Think Coronavirus Briefings Hurt Him More Than Help Him | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

Trump Lauds Testing Efforts, But Under 1% Of The U.S. Has Been Checked | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

Trump Continues Looking For 'Targets To Blame' | Morning Joe | MSNBC

Yikes!' Amanpour reacts to Fox News montage about virus

Tucker: Are some of our leaders and the media addicted to doom and gloom?

Can You Be Re-Infected After Recovering From Coronavirus? Here's What We Know About COVID-19 Immunity

https://time.com/5810454/coronavirus-immunity-reinfection/

Troubling headlines have been cropping up across Asia: Some patients in China, Japan and South Korea who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and seemingly recovered have been readmitted to the hospital after testing positive for the virus again.

WHO Director Thanks Multiple World Leaders for Support on World Health Day After Trump Threatens to Freeze U.S. Funding

https://www.newsweek.com/who-funding-world-health-day-1496782

Trump—who has been widely criticized for initially dismissing the threat of the novel coronavirus and failing to formulate a coherent federal response—said Tuesday that the WHO "really blew it." The president claims that the body was too slow to identify the threat of the outbreak in China, where government officials sought to hide the growing problem.

The WHO raised the alarm early on in the crisis, declaring a "public health emergency of international concern" at the end of January, one day before Health Secretary Alex Azar announced a public health emergency, and weeks before Trump declared a national emergency. Almost a month later, the president claimed on Twitter, "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA."

The president's main issue with the WHO appeared to be that it did not support his ban on some travel from China, introduced at the end of January. At the time, the WHO warned that such methods are usually not effective in containing pandemics, and that such a decision could divert attention and resources from more important efforts.

The president later appeared to walk back his funding threat. Responding to a reporter's question as to whether he would pull support for the body, the president replied, "I'm not saying that I'm going to do it. But we're going to look at it."

When he was told he had just said that funding would be withheld, the president falsely claimed, "No, I didn't. I said we're going to look at it."

Biden, Trump Wrong About WHO Coronavirus Tests

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/biden-trump-wrong-about-who-coronavirus-tests/

• Former Vice President Joe Biden falsely claimed that the WHO “offered the testing kits that they have available” but “we refused them.” The U.S. did not actively turn down testing kits from the WHO, although it could have requested them. The kits, however, are primarily intended for lower income nations without testing capacity.
• President Donald Trump also falsely claimed that the WHO test “was a bad test.” The test is highly accurate and has performed well.
•  
•  That brings us to how well the WHO test performs — and Trump’s false claim that the test was “bad.”
  Trump may have concluded this from the way Birx responded when asked about Biden’s claim. She emphasized quality control of testing kits and said, “It doesn’t help to put out a test where 50% or 47% are false positives.”
  False positives are instances in which a test says a person has the disease when a person doesn’t — and should test negative. In the reverse problem, a person who has the disease can test negative when they are actually positive, in what’s called a false negative.
  But there is no evidence that the WHO test doesn’t work well. Sampath, whose organization is now testing different COVID-19 assays from various manufacturers to provide independent verification for countries, said there are “no known issues” with the test. The WHO’s Ryan also said in a CNN interview that the test has performed “extremely well in the field, in multiple countries.”
  “The test has been validated in three external laboratories, adapted by WHO and manufactured in line with international quality standards,” a WHO spokesperson said. “It has shown consistently good performance in laboratory and clinical use, and neither a significant number of false-positive nor false-negative results have been reported.”
  The White House and the vice president’s office did not respond to our requests for comment or clarification. But Birx told the New York Times that the test she alluded to with a 47 to 50% false positive rate was not the WHO test, but rather a diagnostic used in China.
  A study there found that 47% or more of people who didn’t have symptoms and had been in close contact with someone with COVID-19 might have been improperly flagged as having the disease. The paper, however, has been retracted, and the English-language abstract didn’t report the test’s overall false positive rate.
  NPR reported the retraction after FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn referenced the study again in an on-air interview. According to NPR, the retraction occurred a few days after publication on March 5. The retraction was not indicated on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s biomedical literature database, until March 26.

Even if you test negative for COVID-19, assume you have it, experts say

https://www.livescience.com/covid19-coronavirus-tests-false-negatives.html

Conventional diagnostic tests for the novel coronavirus may give false-negative results about 30% of the time, meaning people with an active COVID-19 infection still test negative for the disease, according to news reports.

"Unfortunately, we have very little public data on the false-negative rate for these tests in clinical practice," Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a professor of medicine at Yale University and director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times. However, preliminary research from China suggests that the most common type of COVID-19 test, known as a reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, may give false-negative results about 30% of the time.

 

 That said, no diagnostic test provides accurate results 100% of the time, and the tests developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highly sensitive to the coronavirus, Dr. Larry Madoff, medical director of the Bureau of Infectious Disease at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, wrote in a statement, according to the Globe.
"No test detects every case and there is no current 'gold standard' to compare [the COVID-19 tests] to," he wrote. "Testing may be falsely negative if the test is obtained too early or too late compared to infection, or if the sample isn’t obtained or processed correctly."  

 

Biden falsely says Trump administration rejected WHO coronavirus test kits (that were never offered)

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/16/joe-biden/biden-falsely-says-trump-administration-rejected-w/

• The WHO never offered to sell test kits to the United States.
• The CDC opted to develop its own coronavirus test and did not use the WHO’s protocol for the test. 
  
• Other developed countries with advanced research capabilities developed their own tests.
   
  Biden said, "The World Health Organization offered, offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them." 
  Biden has a point that the U.S. did not attempt to use the WHO test. But the U.S. would never have needed complete kits from WHO. Even if it had adopted the WHO testing approach, it already had access to all the necessary materials. 
  WHO said there was never any talk of WHO sending testing kits to the United States.
  Biden’s words leave out other important context and information. 
  The U.S. chose to use its own test, rather than the one circulated by WHO. Other nations, such as China, Japan and France, also developed their own tests. Multiple public health experts said that is not unusual. 
  Biden’s emphasis on WHO offering kits is simply wrong. We rate this claim Mostly False.

The United States "refused" COVID-19 diagnostic tests offered by the World Health Organization.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-coronavirus-test/

What's True

The U.S. did not use COVID-19 diagnostic tests produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) in favor of producing its own.

What's False

The U.S. did not turn down an offer to use those tests (as no such offer was extended), nor was it unusual for the United States to design and produce its own diagnostic tests in lieu of those made elsewhere.

 

Chinese Firm to Replace Exported Coronavirus Test Kits Deemed Defective by Spain

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/27/world/asia/27reuters-health-coronavirus-shenzhen-bioeasy-spain.html

 

BEIJING/MADRID — China's Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology Co Ltd said on Friday it will replace some coronavirus test kits it exported to Spain after the Spanish government deemed them too inaccurate to be used to diagnose patients.

Spain's Ministry of Health, Consumer Affairs and Social Welfare said in a statement that test kits supplied by Shenzhen Bioeasy were defective and had failed to correctly diagnose people when tested at hospitals.

Shenzhen Bioeasy said in a statement that the incorrect results may be a result of a failure to collect samples or use the kits correctly. The firm said it had not adequately communicated with clients how to use the kits.

The Spanish ministry said it will withdraw the kits that returned incorrect results, and would replace them with a different testing kit provided by Shenzhen Bioeasy.

Coronavirus: Countries reject Chinese-made equipment

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52092395

Spain’s government encountered similar problems with testing kits ordered from a Chinese company.

It announced it had bought hundreds of thousands of tests to combat the virus, but revealed in the following days that nearly 60,000 could not accurately determine if a patient had the virus.

The Chinese embassy in Spain tweeted that the company behind the kits, Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology, did not have an official license from Chinese medical authorities to sell its products.

It clarified that separate material donated by the Chinese government and technology and retail group Alibaba did not include products from Shenzhen Bioeasy.

Turkey also announced that it had found some testing kits ordered from Chinese companies were not sufficiently accurate, although it said that some 350,000 of the tests worked well.

Allegations of defective equipment come after critics warned China could be using the coronavirus outbreak to further its influence.