 Okay, we're back real live. Coronaville, what's next? This is Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. We have Stephanie Dalton. We have Tim Appichella. And we have Winston Welch. Welcome everybody to the show. All right, our show today is called, Trump has made our trusted CDC into a politicized train wreck. Okay, and indeed in the past 24 hours, the CDC has become an incredible train wreck over its strange reversal of position on whether there should be testing. So Tim, why don't you begin? What did the CDC say? Why did it say this? And what was Trump's involvement in it? And how is the medical community responding? Okay, thank you, Jay. Three points. Yesterday on their website, basically the CDC said, if you've been exposed to a positive case of a COVID-19, you do not necessarily have to get a test unless you're showing symptoms. Now that's a grand departure from, yeah, you need to get a test because you could be asymptomatic and be carrying the virus. So the recommendation prior to yesterday was, get a test under any circumstance if you've been exposed to someone with COVID-19. Today, actually the director, Robert Redfield, has reversed his position. He has now said, close controls, hang on here, close contacts of confirmed COVID-19 patients, you may consider testing. So the website hasn't changed, but Redfield in his words has. Clearly this- How does that mean you make- He's walking back, he's walking back his statement. Clearly he's been exposed that he has received undue pressure from Donald Trump's administration or from Donald Trump directly, that he needs to slow down the testing. As Donald Trump said a month ago, I told my people to slow down the testing because more tests means more cases. Donald Trump doesn't want more cases because that's not good for his image and good for his reelection efforts. Okay, Winston, can you relate that to the truthfulness of what Donald Trump says to the American public? Is this a trick question? I would say that, you know, as I've been saying for quite a while, we can't really, we're looking toward the federal government for answers has not really been the solution here. And I have been saying, we need to look at our local authorities, our state and our federal authorities, companies. However, in Hawaii, I think more important for me because the federal government's information is now become really suspect. And what happened to the daily briefings? What happened to the Trump Pence, Mike Pence task force or even Jared? I mean, it wasn't as, it's all nonsense. But here in the state is much more important for me when we found out today that our state auditor can't even get answers to questions on why we don't have contact tracing here and that the federales have come in here. I mean, when we have the search in general here in Hawaii saying, you guys look like you need some help, that's actually quite disturbing. And then of course, you know, they are giving test out, but we'll probably get to it later about the Abbott labs five minute test, but that's where we're going. So every time you go into Walmart or Kmart Costco, you're just going to get a swab. It'll be a 30 second test. You get a green light, you go forward. That's where we're moving to, but I'm profoundly disappointed in our state where we had zero cases a few months ago because that's where it really lives. So I'm happy that the city is trying to step up here and do the right thing. And, you know, again, I guess the federal government fails you and the state government fails you, we got the city as a backup. So hopefully this federal and the state pick up some of the slack here somehow, but yeah, it's fatiguing. Well, you know, one thing is if you don't get information or if you get confused, you are less likely to follow the rules. You're less likely to wear the mask, you're less likely to do social distancing. And indeed there's a lot of people in Hawaii who gave up the rules. And I think part of that is because they've been either confused or they feel that the information they're getting from David E. Gay in the Department of Health is not true. What do you think about that, Stephanie? Is that your view? I so agree with you. I do. I mean, I have been touting to all my friends on the mainland about how we are a state full of people who know how to follow directions. And that's why we were doing so good is that we're very disciplined and we follow our leaders. And so that leads me to the leadership issue and confusion that may be emanating from them, from those who lead. So the other item that I'm concerned about that came out yesterday and maybe it's just me, I missed it, but I try to track the numbers. And I was astounded. Well, I guess they said it today too. I guess it was from the testing yesterday that we have a positive test rate of 11% and that we are the highest in the nation on that. That is shocking to go from where we were, as you described, to 11% highest testing, positive testing rate in the States. So that probably is below the reality. It's probably more than that. It could happen. And if we did tracing, it would be more than that. If we had real tracing, if the health department had gotten their act together, that is also very disturbing. We had just the last hour, we had a show with Tom Yamachiko who has studied this and written about it about what happened with the, he called it the raid on the department of health where a bunch of legislators went over there to look for the tracers and didn't found half a dozen tracers when it was supposed to have 400 of them. I mean, it's a huge failure. It's a failure in fact, it's a failure in spending and it's a failure in transparency. Well, transparency is a light word for that. It's a failure in being honest with the people. And so if they're honest with us, we're likely to make better moves. We're likely to make better decisions and we're likely to follow the rules. That's really sad what happened. And, you know, those sort of, when you find the government agencies are not telling you the truth, it's not that you change your mind about that the next day. You carry that and you never believe them again or at least not for a long time or at least not for that certain, you know, administration. Anyway, you know, we had a reference a little while ago, Tim, to the $5, five minute, five million unit coming October test from Abbott Laboratories. You familiar with that? Can you talk about it? Not totally familiar with it. I know that Abbott's been working on it and I think it's going to help greatly once it's out there in the marketplace. I know that here locally, they're proposing 70,000 tests for free that, well, you'll have the results in one 24 hour period or at maximum 48 hour period. Again, whether it's a five minute test or a one day test, that allows the opportunity for contact tracing to take place. I think what happens is when these tests get backed up and they're, you know, you're waiting five days or more days than five, contact tracing is near impossible because there's too much time has elapsed. You can't work your way backward to see who's all been in contact with that particular patient. So a five minute, five dollar test is wonderful news. Well, we talked to a guy in the University of Michigan. It must be 45 days ago who was working on a five minute test. And he said he'd done it and it was, you know, high credibility test, but the FDA was sitting on it and he couldn't get the FDA to approve it. And then three weeks ago, we talked to Pat Sullivan who was the CEO of a local company, Oceanit. And he said he had a five minute test and it was in the neighborhood of five dollars too. And likewise, he had submitted it to the FDA and they were sitting on it. You know, and until, you know, the last couple of days when we see that all these agencies, especially health agencies like FDA, CDC, NIH are subject to Donald Trump's control of manipulation, I would have assumed it was just bureaucracy. Now I'm not so sure, because if you put this kind of stuff together, you get a president who doesn't want testing, okay? And then you get the agencies that work for him. And if you talk to the, you know, the chiefs of these agencies, it doesn't take long to figure out who they respond to, slow slowing down on the approvals. You know, I don't know what the big deal is with a test. It's not like a therapeutic or a vaccine where it can kill you. The only question with the test is whether it gives you an accurate result. But these are already shown to be accurate results. The two of them I mentioned. And Abbott Laboratories at 97%. I don't know why we don't have it already. Do you know more about this Winston? I don't. And it's troubling what you just referenced is that, again, this is part and parcel of this entire administration is to undermine credibility in our federal agencies. And it doesn't matter which one where you look at, it's just the wholesale destruction and dismantling of public trust in our institutions, whether it's the post office or the anything. Just look around. And so what happens then is then the public doesn't know what to do. It doesn't trust the information coming out. It doesn't help that the state is also on the bandwagon of not giving information, like the prison. You work at the prison, you want to know, what are my working conditions like? They won't give that information. Fundamentally, what this administration is unleashes is an epidemic of irresponsibility. And I want to say sociopathism, but it's also just not accepting responsibility for giving correct true information to the public. And even those that do, that are trying, they are running into suspicion and mistrust by the public because of how this whole administration has been run. So as far as this test working at 97%, is that Abbott that's saying that? Is that the FDA that's saying that? I want to trust that. The Abbott is saying that. I want to trust Abbott. And I'm going to go in. But the thing is, is if you get a COVID test, if we're at 11% now, let's just do the simple math. We've got a million people on this island. So we've got 110,000 who we can basically just multiply by 10 from what I've read from California. We've got about a 10th of the population here currently having COVID. What does that mean? What if you do test positive? We're supposed to be staying at home anyway. We're supposed to be isolating and socially distancing. So I don't know exactly what that will mean, except to say, don't even go out for groceries, have them delivered. That's all I can pretty much figure out. I mean, if you start having breathing difficulties or chest pains, you can call 911 anyway. So the utility of the test right now, I know we should, as it starts to become ubiquitous to every store we enter or every day, we just take a test before you send your kids to school. That will start having a great deal of utility when we're combined with contract tracing. So we can just say, okay, Mary tested positive this morning. We're quarantining her for two weeks. It's gonna rely on goodwill of citizens, but it's also gonna rely on just, you wanna go into Walmart, you gotta take the test. The problem is, if Mary is about to go to school and you give her the five minute Abbott test, which won't be available till October at best. Then what do you do? Okay, she should be traced. She should be traced because contrary to what the CDC said yesterday, asymptomatic is spreads virus. And then something like 50% of all the cases that come up are infected from asymptomatic patients, victims. So it's quite remarkable. So you gotta trace, you gotta find out who the people are, you gotta look at every one of them. We're not doing that in Hawaii. We're not even close. We're a hundred miles away from there. And the only way we're gonna, go ahead. No, it's the city stepping up here where the state has failed. This is not something I would have seen from the city administration, but you know what? I guess we got tired of being quarantined and singled out where it's the other islands seem to be doing okay. And they banned us from even going there. There's a reason for this. Now the 5 million tests that Abbott's gonna come out would think about this. We got 500 million in this country that's 1% of the population gets COVID tests. Essentially, this needs to be mass produced. I think it was 50 million. If I said 5 million, I'd be very surprised. And you got 10, we got to really roll these things out in a sustained way. But in the meantime, maybe they do some sort of targeted testing for people that are and roll it out from there. There has to be a playbook on this that Obama left. You remember Apple and Google were collaborating in an app that would trace. I think we've talked about this before. This is like three, four months ago. And the idea was that if somebody was in the database in the cloud as a COVID patient, the app would know if you were near this person. So physical distancing from your phone to that person's phone. And it stopped. It stopped because I think it was the federal government maybe the FDA said, no, no, no, it's a violation of privacy, which in an emergency is really not persuasive to me. You don't have to reveal the name. All you have to do is say that somebody near you and let the app deal with him or her. So anyway, I mean, we don't have, I saw some, you know who Ryan Ozawa is? Ryan Ozawa was Bert Lum's cohort on the ByteMarx Cafe radio show, which succeeded the ThinkTech radio show on HPR. And there was something I saw recently on Civil Beat about Ryan, who was a geek, was involved in a group that's developing an app here in Hawaii, an app that would help identify patients, help identify people who you should trace with. It was a tracing, it is a tracing app. We could really make history if we could develop something like that. That would be accepted by the public. And I don't know why we don't have that already. This is supposed to be a big software country. And yet I haven't heard of any software. Have you that does tracing? Has anybody heard of any software that does tracing? Actually, there was something in the beginning. I do recall, darn it. I'm trying to pull back what, whose was it? But they were able to count people in the area of having temperatures. I think something, there was something really interesting in the beginning that looked promising. And then it just disappeared. And I've not ever heard anything since. Yeah, so you go to the POB for routine medical appointment and a few people are out there with a little rich table and they got a thermometer, electronic thermometer and they take your temperature. That's meaningless because most of this virus is shed by asymptomatic people. When are we gonna figure it out? The five minute test could really change things. But I don't think that Trump is inclined to do that because we have seen in so many ways that he's trying to prevent tests. He said that in Tulsa and he has said it ever since. At first he said, I was only joking but we know now that he wasn't joking and is not joking and he wants to suppress the number. You know, remember for example that he said from now on the CDC is not gonna collect data. It's gonna be health and human services which is a complete failure. You know why? Because nobody wants to give health and human services the numbers. So we don't have the numbers that CDC was collecting when it was credible. This whole house of cards is like falling apart. The federal numbers are not reliable but there's one thing clear and that is where over five and a half million and there's now 180,000 deaths. So where are we going on this? I mean, here's a hard question for you Tim. What's the relationship of all of this with the election? Remember that people are afraid to go vote at the polls because of COVID. What effect is this having on the feeling people have about voting? Well, great question Jay because that correlates directly to Donald Trump's fear about mail-in ballots. And he knows that people are fearful to go stand in line. They are concerned about that. So they're inclination to say, give me a mail-in ballot. And of course he needs and wants to stop that. And as we know by his appointment of Louis D. Joy, the postmaster, they have done just that. They have slowed down the mail, maybe a little too prematurely because the cat's out of the bag and we're doing something about it. Congress is doing something about it. So that's a great question Jay. And I think I just want to tag onto something and all three of you have been saying and that is the word credibility. And the more Donald Trump erodes the credibility at the FDA through the plasma theory and miracle cure and then rolling back CDC's position on when you should get tested, have you been exposed to a COVID-19 patient? That credibility has been damaged. Now, let's kind of move down in the future here to say, okay, Donald there's a vaccine that the CDC and the FDA saying, we highly recommend people get this vaccine immediately. Well, with damage credibility to those agencies, personally, I'm gonna be a little bit hesitant to just jump on the bandwagon and say, yeah, give me that vaccine. I don't know the efficiency of it. I don't know the safety of it now because I'm not sure I trust these two agencies any further. And I think that is gonna be a huge hurdle in the future to overcome. Yeah, I mean, everything he does undermines credibility. Hydroxychloroquine is an example of a goose chase. That's not gonna have a positive effect on public health. It's a goose chase. And so the effect it has is, the thinking person does not believe him. But let me ask you this, Winston. What about that issue? The issue of coronavirus and what Donald Trump has done about it? He minimized the risk. He said, it's gonna go away. He said, it's a sniffle. He says 99% of the cases don't hurt anybody. And on and on. I mean, we could spend the rest of the show on that, about how he diminished the threat of it. And then he did all these things to confuse people and goose chase things. So is this reaching the public? Is this a factor in decision process for the American public in November? Those who do go and vote or vote by mail, however they vote. Or do a fair number of people just blow it off? Do they believe his commercials? When he says, and he says it over and over again. Then Pence says it over and over again. And they said it over and over again at the convention here. That Donald Trump had done a wonderful job on dealing with COVID. Where do people come out on it? Do they believe it? You know what? If he says it, it's true for half the nation. And that is just the reality we gotta live with. So hopefully there'll be some people that are able to get a message across. I don't know how it's gonna happen. But like Tim said, when the FDA says here, take this vaccine, you probably got, I read something astounding, like 25 or 30% of the population thinks that it's connected with an alien 5G takeover by Apple that's gonna switch your brain and make you a zombie. An insane amount of people for those sites of conspiracy theories. But you know what? When you already have distrust in things, or do you wanna be the guinea pig? It's like I said, I'm waiting for what the Germans come out with. What do the Germans have to say? The Norwegians, the Danes, the Swiss, the French. And let's go from there, the Japanese and let's see what information we get. This whole virus has to be mass crowd sourced from different countries, companies, cities, the whole nine yards as we see different ways to respond to it, what works, what doesn't. We've got a lot of really good examples of what doesn't work. And we have some good examples of what does work. But you look at New Zealand, immediately locked down, look at Melbourne. They locked down when they had, we and here even in Honolulu, the Marysane, we're locking down again. We don't have a choice, we're at 11%. He is right. We could be the new New York here. And we're at 90% capacity of Queens right now, by the way. Not in ICU beds, but just overall capacity. Yeah, no surprise there. So there are people, including members of the scientific medical research community, that say, you know, there's not enough collaboration going on around the world. That our isolationist policies and the governments and Trump's statements have really had a negative effect on global cooperation and collaboration on these things. And it's very sad. What's worse is that Trump has an influence on leaders, especially tyrannical ones around the world who don't want to wear masks, who don't make rules about wearing masks, who don't care about social distancing in there, having a terrible time to win Brazil. Brazil, the perfect example. Brazil is second only to us and Brazil is much smaller. It's outrageous. But Stephanie, I mean, to go with Winston's point, don't we need to have global cooperation and collaboration on the research? And are we getting that? Will we get that? How can we get that? Will Biden do it? Oh, yes. I mean, I'm sure Biden will do it. And just because he's demonstrated that he can take advice from people who lead him and advised him previously. And I think that we have advice from international, but I don't think anybody's bothering anymore because let's face it, what's the most important data point, okay? I mean, really the thing that's driving, getting the sources and supplies and the way to be held up to be able to do it is of course how many people are gonna be in the ICU. So if we start with these numbers you all were talking about earlier, we say 10% or so and a million people up or so here and we've got 100,000 people that are 10% of a positive test result, okay? So of those 100,000 people, how many are going to the ICU? How many are gonna get over it in a couple of days? How many are asymptomatic and how many are gonna be able to manage this at home? So how many have to actually be supported medically? And as you know, Tripler, Queens has already asked Tripler and evidently Tripler is gonna be able to, which I was surprised to hear that maybe they can take, they can get federal permission to take the burden off of Queens who's over its ICU or close to it. So they're supposed to be receiving. So I mean, I think that we're looking and the international folks have looked at what is our issue here? We've got in New York, it was the overrunning of the medical system. So it's a matter of knowing that percentage of positive tests, which we haven't known, which is the reason to test more, which is why the surgeon general was here in spite of whatever Trump says, his surgeon general was right on with everything he said. So we've got what 70,000 tests to do within these two weeks and he kind of was hooping us on to compete with the other states who are kind of yellow or red to get as many tests done as possible because 70,000 tests in two weeks will be another record. And so if we're setting a record for positive test results, now we need to set that record for how many tests. And I just wanted to get the most tests done, like 70,000 within two weeks is like some huge number every day. So people are working really, really hard. But one of the things I just wanted to share with you on, you may have heard it, which has satisfied me because I've always been so bothered about President Trump saying more tests, more cases. And it was finally Joy Reid who said, now, if we don't give pregnancy tests, does that make the rate of pregnancy go down? So if nobody gets a pregnancy test, is that a way of controlling our population? She's great. And I said, oh, thank you so much. Okay, we're getting to the end of our time. We need some predictions. So, the problem is that Trump is in a bit of a pickle because he wants to keep the number of tests down. He wants to keep the number of cases down. But the dilemma is that they go up anyway and he's trying to be the president who said that he solved the problem. What's he gonna do going forward? There's a tension there. I mean, it's an internal conflict in his position. I don't wanna know about the cases, but I wanna show that I've done a great job with all the therapeutics and the vaccines and the testing. And even though he hasn't done Jack about this, what's he gonna do as we get closer to the election? Which way is he gonna go? Is he gonna attack the pharmaceutical companies? Is he gonna attack the CDC and the FDA and the NIH? Can you predict, can you help me understand which way he is likely to go as we get closer to the election? Yeah, I don't know if it's a matter of prediction, Jay. I think we're seeing his strategy play out right now. And that is, I'll repeat and say the same thing over and over again. I'll then have my loyal network, Trump News, excuse me, Fox News. I will have them repeated a thousand times. I'll have all my surrogates repeated as many times as possible. I'll get the CDC and the FDA to knuckle under and say, what a great job I've done. And by the time the election happens, the American public has heard this over and over again. These lies, but they accept it as truth now because they've been brainwashed. And I think it's not a prediction. I think we're seeing that play out right now in front of all Americans. And I think it's the ones that are savvy enough to say, you're lying, you're bold-faced lying to us. And we're not going to accept, no matter how many times you repeat what a great job you've done on COVID-19, you have it, you've failed. Well, I was impressed doing a decent job on this, Winston. I mean, I do watch MSNBC and I do watch CNN. And to some extent I watch the PBS news hour, but I don't feel they're really making the point that Tim is talking about. What have they been doing? Why haven't they been addressing the lies head on? Why haven't they been examining his strategy on this? And what should they do now? It's a great question, but you're either watching Fox News or you're not. You're in one camp or you're in the other. So there's only that slim percentage that hasn't really made up its mind or thinks, well, he lies a little bit or I don't like him bullying, but he's got this done or he's got that done because they're believe in half the lies or three-fourths of the lies. So I don't know, the media is gonna do what sells ads. And so it may not be in their best interest to delve into any of these things. You want the news in this country or anywhere, you got to go looking for it. Go to the Christian Science Monitor. Go to Deutsche Wellet. You know, go find some in-depth reporting, the Atlantic, you know, the New York magazine, but wherever it is, search for the information yourself. Come up with your own informed decisions as best as you can. Certainly the media has a vital role to play in this. It's just step up and throw those shoes. So Stephanie, I wanna know how you feel about this. Are you less concerned, more concerned, or equally concerned, as you were, say a month ago? We learn, especially we in this discussion, learn about what's going on. We learn about the confusion out there and the misinformation, disinformation. Are you worried about your own safety more or less? Very worried. Very worried. And I'm looking for DeKamala Harris's speech today, which is supposed to address some of, I assume, will address some of these things I haven't read too much about it. And then I think we're gonna have to sneak around more and do more, in other words, something like bumper stickers, okay? Like new birth control. Don't take the pregnancy test. I mean, we need some work here to get this word out to people in other ways. I wanna say, we are doing a certain amount of work and Tim, you'll appreciate this a lot. Yesterday, we got on YouTube. We got probably the most complimentary statement we have gotten in a long time. This fellow made a comment and he said that, actually, I think it was Trump week, but it might have been this show, Coronavirus. He said, we are the enemy of the people. That was Trump week. In addition to that is with the comment was, what lies are you referring to? Well, I don't know, the 20,000 maybe? I don't know. Document it in the post, document it. Okay, we're out of time. Stephanie Dalton, Tim Hapuchella, Winston Wells. Thank you so much for a great and very informative discussion. Aloha. Aloha.