A former White House public health official whose position was eliminated by President Donald Trump is calling for stronger national guidelines for when and how to reopen the economy.
Dr. Beth Cameron, who is currently vice president of global biology programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, was previously a senior director in the White House pandemic office under the National Security Council. The office was initially established by the Obama administration after the Ebola outbreak in 2014, but the Trump administration dissolved it as part of a departmental consolidation in 2018.
"I definitely think we would have been better prepared if we had an exercised senior team in the White House whose only job it was to look at pandemic threats," Cameron told Cheddar.
The job of the office was to prepare for the possibility of a pandemic and anticipate possible challenges and failure points, which Cameron said would have been especially useful early on in the federal government's coronavirus response during the height of uncertainty.
Now she is calling for a more robust White House Coronavirus Task Force that taps into the wealth of knowledge still available in the federal government to provide guidelines with specific metrics to shape state reopening plans.
"That's really the first priority because the economic recovery here and public health response are absolutely inextricably linked," Cameron said.
One possible benchmark is the ratio of positive tests to total tests. Cameron said the current ratio in Washington DC is 20 percent but should be closer to 3 percent. Raising the level of testing across the country should be a prerequisite to reopening.
The current outbreak among White House staff, she said, only underscores the need for more intensive testing and tracing before a full reopen is safe. "We've got a long way to go before the testing that is available in the White House is available to everyone else."
As the total number of cases in the U.S. continues to grow, the issue of travel also has not been "adequately addressed" in White House social distancing guidelines, according to Cameron.
"It's becoming obvious now that as some states are relaxing certain measures, people are moving from one place to another," she said. "Of course, they're going to. This is just another reason why we really need a set of metrics for the whole country and a unified response."
If the reopening process isn't handled properly, the country could see a new spike in cases over the summer in a lead up to the flu season.
"We should be looking at this more like stretching a rubber band and less like opening a door and opening the floodgates," she said.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
