Boris Johnson’s former top aide paints a damning picture of the U.K. government’s pandemic response.

 

Dominic Cummings testifying about the British government’s response to the pandemic at a Parliamentary hearing in London on Wednesday.Credit...UK Parliament, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

NY TIMES

LONDON — Dominic Cummings, the former top aide to Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, on Wednesday painted a picture of chaos, incompetence and confusion at the heart of the government in a ferociously critical account of its early handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Testifying before lawmakers, Mr. Cummings said that Mr. Johnson had initially regarded Covid-19 as a “scare story” and at one point had suggested that a doctor inject him with the coronavirus on live television to play down the dangers to a worried public.

The prime minister was being advised by a health secretary, Matt Hancock, whom Mr. Cummings accused in his testimony of lying repeatedly, being unworthy of the health care workers he directed and presiding over the deadly transfer of elderly patients from hospitals to nursing homes, many of them carrying the virus.

And as the pandemic closed in on Britain, Mr. Johnson was distracted, his former aide said, by an unflattering story about his fiancée and her dog.

“When the public needed us most, the government failed,” said Mr. Cummings, the political strategist who masterminded Britain’s campaign to leave the European Union and engineered Mr. Johnson’s rise to power before falling out bitterly with his boss and emerging as a self-styled whistle-blower.

Mr. Cummings testified for more than seven hours, in a scene with few precedents in British politics: an unelected aide who had been arguably the nation’s second-most powerful man, offering an unfiltered look at the inner workings of the British government as it confronted the greatest national emergency since World War II.

“The problem in this crisis was very much lions led by donkeys, over and over again,” Mr. Cummings said.

Mr. Johnson, who was hospitalized with a severe case of Covid-19 in April 2020, flatly rejected several of the assertions of his former aide in his own appearance on Wednesday in Parliament, where lawmakers are trying to determine how the early days of the pandemic were botched so badly.

Mr. Cummings, 49, did not absolve himself of all blame. He admitted he had not been open about the reasons for a much-criticized road trip he made with his family that breached lockdown rules. And he acknowledged his mistake in not pushing the prime minister to lock down the country earlier than he did, in March of last year.

“Yes, it was a huge failing of mine,” Mr. Cummings told a joint meeting of Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committees. “I bitterly regret that I did not hit the emergency panic button earlier than I did.”

New York City has about a third of the nation’s confirmed coronavirus cases, making it the new epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.. UPDATES

NY TIMES

Density creates alarming virus “attack rate” in New York City, officials say.

Nearly 1 in 1,000 people in the New York metropolitan area have contracted the virus, five times the rate of the rest of the country, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said on Monday.

The New York metro area is experiencing a virus “attack rate” of nearly one in a thousand, or five times that of other areas Dr. Birx said. In epidemiology, the attack rate is the percentage of a population that has a disease.

New York’s population density may help explain why the “attack rate” is so high.

New York is far more crowded than any other major city in the United States. It has 28,000 residents per square mile, while San Francisco, the next most jammed city, has 17,000, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

All of those people, in such a small space, appear to have helped the virus spread rapidly through packed subway trains, busy playgrounds and hivelike apartment buildings, forming ever-widening circles of infections. The city now has more coronavirus cases per capita than even Italy.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York will issue an order requiring hospitals to increase capacity by at least 50 percent, he said on Monday. New York State saw a one-day increase of nearly 5,000 cases, putting the total at 21,689 as of Monday night.

After days of criticizing the Trump administration for not doing enough to help the city, Mr. de Blasio said he had a “very substantial conversation” with President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday night about getting additional supplies, medical personnel and financial support.


Trump hints at a short shutdown: “I’m not looking at months.”

The White House coronavirus task force provided an update as the virus spreads in America.
We are going to save American workers, and we’re going to save them quickly. And we’re going to save our great American companies — both small and large. This was a medical problem. We are not going to let it turn into a long lasting financial problem. We also have a large team working on what the next steps will be once the medical community gives a region the OK, meaning the OK to get going, to get back. Let’s go to work. Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down. America will, again and soon, be open for business very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting — a lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. We’re not going to let the cure be worse than the problem.



‘Our Country Wasn’t Built to Be Shut Down,’ Trump Says

President Trump, in a nearly two-hour coronavirus briefing, hinted on Monday that the economic shutdown meant to halt the spread of the virus across the country would not be extended.

“America will again and soon be open for business,” the president said, without providing a timeline for when he believes normal economic activity could resume. He later added, “I’m not looking at months, I can tell you right now.”

“If it were up to the doctors, they’d say let’s shut down the entire world,” Mr. Trump said. “This could create a much bigger problem than the problem that you started out with.”

Mr. Trump also suggested that he would soon re-evaluate the federal guidance urging social distancing. More states moved on Monday to impose their own sweeping stay-at-home orders, which will soon cover more than 158 million Americans in 16 states.

Washington, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Oregon became the latest states to announce sweeping directives to keep more people home in an effort to slow the spread of the virus.

Mr. Trump sent mixed signals from the White House podium, agreeing at one point with his surgeon general and saying, “It’s going to be bad,” then suggesting that the response to the virus may have been overblown.

“This is going away,” Mr. Trump said, citing jobs, “anxiety and depression” and suicide as arguments for restoring the U.S. economy.

He compared deaths from the novel coronavirus so far to deaths from other causes — influenza and car accidents — suggesting that the scale of those preventable deaths means economic restrictions may not be appropriate to prevent the spread of the virus.

While it is true that those causes of death outnumber deaths from the virus to date, projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that deaths from Covid-19 could range from 200,000 to 1.7 million people. Estimates from other scientists place the potential deaths in a range from several hundred thousand to several million deaths, substantially more than annual deaths from car accidents and flu combined.


‘You Must Stay At Home,’ Boris Johnson Tells Britain

Facing a growing storm of criticism about his laissez-faire response to the fast-spreading coronavirus, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Monday that he would place Britain under a virtual lockdown, closing all nonessential shops, banning meetings of more than two people, and requiring people to stay in their homes, except for trips for food or medicine.

People who flout the new restrictions, the prime minister said, will be fined by the police.

The steps, which Mr. Johnson outlined in a televised address to the nation, bring him into alignment with European leaders like President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who have all but quarantined their countries in a desperate bid to slow the outbreak.


Facebook re-emerges as a news hub.


As of Thursday, more than half the articles being consumed on Facebook in the United States were related to the coronavirus.

Before the coronavirus, Facebook could feel at times like the virtual equivalent of a sleepy bingo parlor — an outmoded gathering place populated mainly by retirees looking for conversation and cheap fun.

Now, stuck inside their homes and isolated from their families and friends, millions of Americans are rediscovering the social network’s virtues. That has lifted usage of Facebook features like messaging and video calls to record levels and powered a surge in traffic for publishers of virus-related news.

As of Thursday, more than half the articles being consumed on Facebook in the United States were related to the coronavirus, according to an internal report obtained by The New York Times. Overall U.S. traffic from Facebook to other websites also increased by more than 50 percent last week from the week before, “almost entirely” owing to intense interest in the virus, the report said.

In Texas and Ohio, abortion is declared “nonessential.”
A new front in the political fight over abortion has been sparked by the coronavirus pandemic.

Texas and Ohio have included abortions among the nonessential surgeries and medical procedures that they are requiring to be delayed, saying they are trying to preserve precious protective equipment for health care workers and to make space for a potential flood of coronavirus patients.

But abortion-rights activists said that abortions should be counted as essential and that people could not wait for the procedure until the pandemic was over.

On Monday, Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, clarified that the postponement of surgeries and medical procedures announced by the governor over the weekend included “any type of abortion that is not medically necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.”

Failure to do so, he said, could result in penalties of up to $1,000 or 180 days of jail time. It was not immediately clear if that included medication abortion, which involves providers administering pills in the earlier stages of pregnancy.

The move followed a similar action by health authorities in Ohio last week and has prompted a legal scramble by abortion rights groups to preserve access. Activists accused state leaders of using the coronavirus crisis to advance an existing agenda to restrict abortions.

SUPPORT FOR SYRIA BOMBING DROPPING, OBAMA MAY GO IT ALONE

The British Parliament voted down the option of taking military action against Syria by 13 votes on Thursday. Lawmakers voted 285 to 272 against a limited strike on Syrian targets as a response to the chemical-weapons attack the Syrian government [allegedly--Esco] unleashed on its own people last week. The motion was backed by Prime Minister David Cameron, and while it is nonbinding, Cameron acknowledged that the British public was against military support and admitted defeat. "I get it," he told Parliament.

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With a thin legal rationale for bombing and ghosts of bad Iraq intelligence in their minds, Western leaders are signaling some measure of caution about intervening in Syria. President Obama said Wednesday he “hasn’t made a decision,” Obama plans to release detailed proof of the chemical attack Thursday. [ He did not--Esco-- See below] Meanwhile, top newspapers from both countries have begun to question a potential intervention; The New York Times’s editorial board wrote Thursday that Obama “has yet to make a convincing legal or strategic case,” and The Telegraph called for “complete transparency” in the decisionmaking process.


A United Nations team on Thursday with a sample from one of the sites in the Damascus area.


N.Y. TIMES

The vote was...a setback for Mr. Obama, who, having given up hope of getting United Nations Security Council authorization for the strike, is struggling to assemble a coalition of allies against Syria.

But administration officials made clear that the eroding support would not deter Mr. Obama in deciding to go ahead with a strike. Pentagon officials said that the Navy had now moved a fifth destroyer into the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Each ship carries dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles that would probably be the centerpiece of any attack on Syria.

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Although administration officials cautioned that Mr. Obama had not made a final decision, all indications suggest that a strike could occur soon after United Nations investigators charged with scrutinizing the Aug. 21 attack leave the country. They are scheduled to depart Damascus on Saturday.
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The White House presented its case for military action to Congressional leaders on Thursday evening, trying to head off growing pressure from Democrats and Republicans to provide more information about the administration’s military planning and seek Congressional approval for any action.
....While the intelligence does not tie Mr. Assad directly to the attack, these officials said, the administration said the United States had both the evidence and legal justification to carry out a strike aimed at deterring the Syrian leader from using such weapons again.

A critical piece of the intelligence, officials said, is an intercepted telephone call between Syrian military officials, one of whom seems to suggest that the chemical weapons attack was more devastating than was intended. “It sounds like he thinks this was a small operation that got out of control,” one intelligence official said.

But Republican lawmakers said White House officials dismissed suggestions that the scale of the attack was a miscalculation, indicating that the officials believe Syria intended to inflict the widespread damage.

 

The situation should be resolved in a peaceful way through dialogue." BAN KI-MOON, UN Secretary-General

 

 

Several officials said that the intelligence dossier about the attack also includes evidence of Syrian military units moving chemical munitions into place before the attack was carried out.

Mr. Obama, officials said, is basing his case for action both on safeguarding international standards against the use of chemical weapons and on the threat to America’s national interest.

That threat, they said, is both to allies in the region, like Turkey, Jordan and Israel, and to the United States itself, if Syria’s weapons were to fall into the wrong hands or if other leaders were to take American inaction as an invitation to use unconventional weapons.

 

Mr. Obama has referred, somewhat vaguely, to reinforcing “international norms,” or standards, against the use of chemical weapons, which are categorized as “weapons of mass destruction” even though they are far less powerful than nuclear or biological weapons.

I'm comfortable that the things the president told Assad not to do he did." LINDSEY GRAHAM Republican senator from South Carolina

N.Y. TIMES

The evidence of a massacre is undeniable: the bodies of the dead lined up on hospital floors, those of the living convulsing and writhing in pain and a declaration from a respected international aid group that thousands of Syrians were gassed with chemical weapons last week.

And yet the White House faces steep hurdles as it prepares to make the most important public intelligence presentation since February 2003, when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made a dramatic and detailed case for war to the United Nations Security Council using intelligence — later discredited — about Iraq’s weapons programs.

More than a decade later, the Obama administration says the information it will make public, most likely by [the weekend, according to The Guardian] will show proof of a large-scale chemical attack perpetrated by Syrian forces, bolstering its case for a retaliatory military strike on Syria.

Anti war protesters carry the Syrian flag as they stand near the US Armed Forces Recruiting Center in New York.


....the White House faces an American public deeply skeptical about being drawn into the Syrian conflict and a growing chorus of lawmakers from both parties angry about the prospect of an American president once again going to war without Congressional consultation or approval.

American officials said Wednesday there was no “smoking gun” that directly links President Bashar al-Assad to the attack, and they tried to lower expectations about the public intelligence presentation. They said it will not contain specific electronic intercepts of communications between Syrian commanders or detailed reporting from spies and sources on the ground.

But even without hard evidence tying Mr. Assad to the attack, administration officials asserted, the Syrian leader bears ultimate responsibility for the actions of his troops and should be held accountable.

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 The bellicose talk coming from the administration is unnerving some lawmakers from Mr. Obama’s party, who are angry that the White House seems to have no inclination to seek Congress’s approval before launching a strike in Syria.

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 As the White House now considers direct military action in Syria, something it has resisted for two years, Speaker John A. Boehner wrote a letter on Wednesday to Mr. Obama asking the president to provide a “clear, unambiguous explanation of how military action — which is a means, not a policy — will secure U.S. objectives and how it fits into your overall policy.”

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Even as he now contemplates getting deeper into a war he had long resisted, Mr. Obama appears to be mindful that the opposition remains. “We can take limited, tailored approaches, not getting drawn into a long conflict,” he said Wednesday on “NewsHour.” He added, “Not another repetition of, you know, Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about.”