US Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Yuri Gripas/Reuters
FOX News: Pentagon is 'fully confident' military can withstand threat of coronavirus: Esper
Defense Secretary Mark Esper said a coronavirus protection plan is being “finalized” for DoD employees and service members and will be presented to him next week.
Esper said he was “fully confident” the Pentagon would be able to perform its functions in the event coronavirus comes to the nation’s capital.
“We have a lot of capabilities in this building [the Pentagon],” Esper told reporters. “Our National Military Command Center has the capability to go for weeks at a time if they have to be locked down inside the building if we have some type of outbreak.”
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Update: Esper says new virus won’t prevent military operations -- Military Times/AP
WNU Editor: The virus may not prevent military operations, but I am sure that it will limit some.
Update #2: Some operations are being cancelled .... Pentagon Cancelling Exercises Due to Coronavirus (Popular Mechanics).
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ReplyDeleteHow Many Americans Have Been Tested for Coronavirus?
ReplyDeleteIt’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?
ReplyDeleteThis number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.
But the number of tests performed across the country has fallen far short of those projections, despite extraordinarily high demand, The Atlantic has found.
Read: You’re likely to get the coronavirus
“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”