The chaos caused by the positive Covid-19 tests of the President  and several staffers, family members, and Senators close to him makes it painfully obvious that although the President knew on January 28, 2020 - as he told Bob Woodward - how painful and devastating the "China virus" would be to Americans, the President did little. 

I learned watching an interview on TV today that the President, who refuses to leave office, did not complete renovations of the White House from January to his positive test result that would have made WH more bio-secure. 

He sent checks to just about everyone and tried to bankrupt many future generations. The checks were very good.  The money was greatly needed because Covid-19 closed businesses and put many people out of work.

Imagine the bio-secure palace Trump could have built by now, with just one more Trillion Dollars.

Imagine how many small businesses could have stayed afloat with contracts from that project.

Imagine how many workers would not be facing eviction in January, if they had been able to work on that project.

We would not now have a president hospitalized with the nuclear codes and a virus that causes brain-confusion.

Perhaps, some of the 200,000 Americans who have died on his watch would be living out their full satisfying life with their loved ones.

Just last Friday, the President admitted he tested positive for Covid-19 (as did the First Lady).  During the day, the President was given a novel antibody therapy he obtained from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., an American biotechnology company, that diverted the drugs from clinical trials to be used on a "compassionate use" basis.  Some information about REGN-Cov2 is available
at https://investor.regeneron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/regenerons-regn-cov2-antibody-cocktail-reduced-viral-levels-and.
at https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/fast-moving-regeneron-eyes-summer-clinical-trial-for-covid-19-antibody-cocktail-therapy

I like scientists.  I trust what they prove.  I am  not a scientist.  Is a "monoclonal antibody cocktail" anything like stem cells?

At sunset, the President (without the First Lady) was flown on Marine One (a Sikorsky helicopter) from WH to Walter Reed where he was treated with a dose of Remdesivir which, according to Wikipedia, is sold under the brand name Veklury and is a broad-spectrum antiviral medication developed by the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. .

Someone late Friday night, on MSNBC, was describing how many people were at the recent Rose Garden event to kick-off the nominating process for a prospective Supreme Court Justice.  

At that event, more than a few people were newly infected.  The person being interviewed said it would be a lot of work to trace each one and shrugged his shoulders, suggesting it was too much work for the USA.  As difficult as it is to believe, someone associated with the US government said saving lives was too much work. 

I thought some readers might be interested in the following facts and reasonable extrapolations:
 

Worldwide - Total confirmed Cases	34,246,738
Worldwide - Total Deaths  -	1,023,087
Percent Death/Cases	2.99%
USA - Total confirmed cases	7,318,030
USA - Total Deaths	209,103
Percent Death/Cases	2.86%

About March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) proclaimed Covid-19 a pandemic, affecting the whole world.

About the same time, the CDC issued guidelines calling for everyone to frequently wash their hands in hot soapy water for at least 20 seconds, stay at least 3 feet from other people (this was later expanded to 6 feet), disinfect surfaces (especially frequently touched surfaces), wear an N-95 mask for your own protection, wear some mask to protect others.

Later, relatively quickly for scientific discoveries, tests was found for Covid-19.  Tests with quicker results were less accurate and tests that took days to return results were more accurate.

For most people tests were scarce and hard to qualify for.  The President and those around him were tested every day. 

In other situations, patients going into the hospital for non-Covid related medical procedures were tested before the procedure.  

Eventually, tests were easier to obtain.

With large scale testing, it was found that people were positive though they had no symptoms. They were said to be asymptomatic.  They were contagious.  14 days was the usual quarantine. 

Separation from others has been refined to 2 types:  Isolation for 10 days or Quarantine for 14 days.  If someone has not had contact with other people or things from outside their quarantine area for 14 days, and they have not shown symptoms, it is "assumed" that they do not have Covid-19.

Now, we are being told on TV that it takes a certain build-up of the virus, fairly far into the nasal passage, to register positive on a test. 

We are not being told whether, in a living human body, the virus can build up over time, through repeated exposures, to the point where the viral load is detectable by a test, and whether we are contagious during that viral build-up time.

We do know that we would know much more if we had had a standardized protocol for testing and tracing, and enough tests to do more tests and enough trained tracers to do more tracing.

More of both would have given us more information and more resources and more trained people to test and trace the people around the President and the people with whom they came into contact in the last 14 days.  And, since the people they came into contact with during the last 14 days may have been in contact with someone "shedding the virus" and not showing symptoms 13 or 14 days before that, we have to backward trace about 28 days.

How many people would that be?

The average number of contacts seems to be about 36/day.  I think they identified about 30 who the President's staffer, Holly Hicks, had contact with immediately before her positive test.  So, let's use that as a conservative estimate.

Contact Factors:		Number of People to Contact
President	1	1
People he came into contact with	30	31
People they came into contact with	30	930
Days of possible contagion without symptoms	14	13,020
Previous days of possible contagion without symptoms (because the people on the 13th or 14th day would be affected by the people they met in the previous 13 or 14 days.)	14	182,280
To complete tracing in one day:
Hours a tracer works/day	8
Hours to train a tracer (I'm guessing)	4
Hours left in Day 1 to trace contacts	4
Hours with each contact reached	0.5
Contacts reached on Day One	8
Number of tracers needed to reach everyone on Day One	22,785

Hopefully, some tracers would have had experiences and prior training to get started more quickly.

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To have completed tracing over a weekend:
(The President went into the Hospital late on Friday.)
Contacts reached by one tracer on Day One	8
Contacts reached by one tracer on Day Two	16
Total contacts reached by one tracer over a weekend	24
Number of contact tracers needed to reach everyone in two days	7,595

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To complete tracing in a certain number of days:
Number of days:	4
Total contacts reached by one tracer over that number of days:	56
Number of contact tracers needed to reach everyone in that number of days	3,255
Cost of one tracer paid a livable hourly wage of:	$               25.00
Per Day:	$            200.00
For this project:	$            800.00
Times number of tracers	$  2,604,000.00
Estimated cost to contact trace one person over 28 days:	$  2,604,000.00
(This would give us the first 14 days of tracing for the next degree of separation.)

Maximum likely cost to trace all confirmed cases	$    19,056,150,120,000.00
which is about:	20 Trillion US Dollars

 

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Technical Notes

This does not take into account outliers such as:

A.  Someone who leaves their apartment once every 15 days to go shopping for food.  They would meet their 30 people and, before they leave their apartment again, would know whether they had gotten Covid-19 - or not.

B.  Someone who attends a "super spreader" event where there is the possibility of  a one-to-many transmission of the virus, where one person may infect many people - or, many-to-many transmissions of the virus, where many people may have transmitted the virus to many other, possibly unique, individuals - such as a large gathering where people are in close contact for more than 10 minutes without wearing masks and talking emotively with each other.

I sure hope someone has an app that can tell whose cell phones have been within 6 feet of a contact's cell phone!

It won't produce final results, and may produce some embarrassing results, in exchange for providing a head start in starting.