let's move on to our main story tonight which yet again concerns the corona virus very much the Timothy sha'lame of viruses and that you barely had time to learn its name before suddenly it was everywhere it's been another tough week and everyone is absolutely desperate to get outside perhaps no one more so than Alex Jones who's gone from leading protests against stay at home orders of the Texas Capitol to this Aled minute I will eat my neighbor's I'm not letting my kids down I'm just gonna be honest my super powers being honest I've extrapolated this out and I won't have to for a few years I got food and stuff but I'm literally looking at my neighbor's now I'm going I'm ready to hang them up and got them and scan them and chop them up you know what I'm ready my daughters aren't starving to death I'll eat my neighbor's see my superpower is being honest I'll eat your ass Wow there is a lot to unpack there obviously there's the ass eating promise but even before that he's threatening to feed his neighbor's to his daughters which is weird enough before you consider he also has a son what about him AJ why doesn't he get to eat any human flesh and finally Alex to Matias making plans do desperately devour his neighbor's several years out while also wearing an $8,000 watch you know I may be at least consider selling that or I don't know planting a garden before stooping to actual cannibalism but look things that clearly dire right now the coronavirus death toll is currently over 60,000 in the u.s. meaning that in just three months it's killed more Americans than the Vietnam War which is a truly grim milestone and that is what made it so jarring to see Jared Kushner and his resting do you know who my father is face basically declare victory over the virus on Wednesday the government federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story and and I think that that's really you know what needs to be told I think you'll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is is that but by July the country is really rocking again Oh it'll be really rocking again will it Jared it's incredible to see someone with the skin of a newborn baby birthed in a tub of Neutrogena talk like a middle-aged dad desperately trying to connect his teenage son but before we can celebrate Jared's great success story and get back to our Rakim selves we badly need to work out how we can reopen part of society safely and experts say that really means one thing every public health official says testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing yeah good point Patrick spongebob shouldn't be taking joy right in his open water convertible while wearing a cowboy hat and no mask until we have adequate testing in place absorbent and yellow and porous is he two out of three of those are extremely high risk category so get back in your pineapple spongebob but those experts are right in managing a pandemic there is almost nothing more important than widespread effective testing it is your only chance of tracking and containing the spread from the start unfortunately tests have been alarmingly scarce in this country despite the fact the president has repeatedly claimed that that is not the case even declaring in early March that anyone who wants a test can get a test but that wasn't true then and it still isn't true now as you probably know from seeing countless stories like this dawn Clements in Largo Florida has been sick since Friday her daughter went through it two weeks ago she has all the symptoms no flu and can't get tested I'm immunosuppressed with some health conditions and I live at an al F and I don't know what virus I have I'm running a fever and I have chest congestion and nobody can test us here that is terrible a woman who is symptomatic immunosuppressed and living in an al F sounds like exactly the kind of person that you would want to have tested now al F incidentally refers to assisted living facility and not the 80s sitcom alien although if she were living in Alf she should probably still get tested since I've heard rumors that this whole thing started when someone ate a bowl of alphab and she frankly far from alone here testing is only recently months into the spread of this virus become more widely available in fact our testing failure has been called the original sin of America's pandemic failure because had testing caught the cases in this country early we could have managed the virus through contact tracing and targeted quarantine but that did not happen so the virus spread widely forcing us to use the blunt instrument of making everyone stay at home a lack of testing goes to the very heart of how we got into this situation and the truth is broad testing is our only safe way out of it while experts disagree on the exact number of tests that we need to be doing to safely reopen the lowest estimate is 500,000 a day with others saying a good target would actually be 35 million a day and at present we've only been performing around 200,000 a day so we're not even hitting the lowest target here think of it like this if our goal were to eat an Italian dinner we're currently stuck in traffic on our way to an Olive Garden we're not even halfway to arriving at the worst place that technically qualifies so if our testing shortage is caused this much damage this much disruption and is still not fully resolved we thought tonight might be a good time to ask what the happened and to do that we're going to be looking at two major types of tests diagnostic tests which tell you if you have the virus right now and antibody tests which tell you if you've previously had it and let's start with agnostic tests the most common form of these involve having a giant swab shoved up your nose I don't think anyone described the experience better than this woman oh my god they just pulled my braids out through buyed Austral I was looking I can taste blood that woman took my soul out of my head with that q-tip she actually grabbed the back of my head like we were lovers but instead of kissing me she was impaling my brain yeah that sounds pretty unpleasant unless of course your brain is being pulled out through your nostril by Adam driver pull my heart out through my ear you meaty oaktree impale my brain you unacceptable monstrosity now diagnostic tests are key especially at the beginning of an outbreak but unfortunately the u.s. committed some critical errors early on because in mid-january shortly after this virus was discovered the World Health Organization recommended a diagnostic testing protocol but rather than follow it the CDC decided to develop its own more complicated test which wasn't inherently a bad idea unfortunately though they chose to manufacture testing kits themselves and as those kits were shipped around the country in early February became clear that due to chemical contamination during manufacturing the tests didn't work properly and that was already bad but what made it even worse was the CDC then took weeks to come up with a workaround that would make them usable and just losing days in a pandemic when a virus can spread exponentially is a huge problem losing an entire month is absolutely catastrophic and what's particularly frustrating here is that some private sector labs were willing to jump in and develop their own tests but throughout February they were slowed down by having to jump through bureaucratic hoops like this one of the things is they needed a document FedExed across the country before they would look at the document you couldn't electronically change good electronically transmitted but they couldn't look at it until is FedExed and then they changed that regulation and so from a couple days after February 26th didn't have a test they were completely blind to this had to be incredibly frustrating it was frustrating it was yeah I bet it was in fact the FDA suggested to him that he sent a printed paper hardcopy of the submission and a CD or thumb drive with an electronic copy and where would you even find a blank CD at a Walgreens 20 years ago or does the FDA really expect everyone to burn over road jams 2005 because no way FDA that's a classic mix right there it's got all the songs from American Idiot in the order that they appeared on American Idiot but better because they were stolen off line wire and while that requirement was quickly lifted it was just one of many logistical and bureaucratic challenges that slowed things down at the worst possible time in fact it wasn't until the last day of February that the FDA finally did something that private labs had been begging them to do and allowed those labs to develop and use their own tests without waiting for authorization but by that point a whole month had gone by and incredibly we'd only tested in the whole country 472 people in total that is it even as as we've since learned the virus was spreading undetected in multiple major cities now by contrast on the exact same date South Korea which has just one-sixth our population had completed 55,000 tests and even well into March Alex a czar the Secretary of Health and Human Services didn't seem too concerned about that disparity because watch how he responded when he was asked about it my question is why was South Korea able to do this in a week and it seems to be such a struggle for the you know it's not about ability it's about what they needed to do they had an explosive immediate outburst and cluster becoming one of the world's epicenters of the disease we are not that yeah we're not South Korea South Korea has tested a bunch of people for coronavirus and found a bunch of people with coronavirus we've tested almost no one for coronavirus and found almost no one with coronavirus to the best of our knowledge the situations could not be more different although again the best of our knowledge is essentially no knowledge look for too long the US response seemed to be characterized by an arrogant belief that for some reason coronavirus was never going to come to America because I guess it just wouldn't dare and unfortunately we're currently living in the consequences of those early failures because by moving so slowly we now find ourselves in the midst of serious global shortages of crucial testing components just listen to the scientists that you saw earlier explained the links that he's had to go to in order to get what he needed from the test manufacturer Roche one of the hardest things to find the single-use plastic tips that contain the chemicals and the specimens this is what we're looking for basically we tweeted at Roche and the world to get these things in like you a tweet like Dell said lost your bags or something like that right holy you should not have to tweet at a company to get parts for essential lab equipment not only should there be a better process for that but also that's just not what Twitter is for as we all know Twitter is for exactly three things opossum every hour Chrissy Teigan and the official account for beef and if you don't follow that yeah absolutely should because that's where you can find tweets like nicely done beef which is beef tweeting encouragement at beef and is a level of unconditional self-love that frankly more of us should aspire to and you can also find their actual Mother's Day tweet to the monks who wrangle dust fed us and cared for us we wish you a hashtag happy Mother's Day with a picture of a mother cow and a baby cow who will both presumably one day become beef at which point I'm pretty sure the account will tweet nicely done beef and it's not just lab equipment here even the chemical reagents needed to run the test or the swabs that impale people's brains have to be specifically manufactured something that the president seemed absolutely fascinated by to swab looks innocent not very complicated is it does it remind you of something remind you of this right once a swab wants a q-tip it's actually different it's very sophisticated actually but it's a little bit like so this is the swamp yeah that's the swab obviously and the backstory to him deciding to personally bring a q-tip to that briefing to proudly show everyone is so painfully obvious someone showed him the long swab and he said isn't that a q-tip and they said no they're different and he said but they looked the same and they said no they don't and he said but they're both tall thin and whites like all my girlfriends and they said good one mr. president and he said so what's the problem and they said they're not the same and he said but they're both tall thin and white like all my girlfriends and they said good one again mr. president and he said so what gives and they said he's a q-tip and he said that one is short thin and whites like my girlfriends when they were children and they said exactly and he said I have to tell America and then he did but second and much more importantly for months things like swabs were very hard to find and multiple governors expressed his stress that the federal government was not stepping in to help smooth out the supply chain there are things like shortages on on swabs that we don't have anywhere in America yeah you can't do the tests without we need some assistance from the federal government when it comes to swabs and reagents we've been fighting for for testing it's not a it's not a straightforward test we we don't even have enough swabs believe it or not to do the testing you need testing equipment you need swabs you need vials and you need all of these things at a capacity that does not now exist yeah it's pretty straightforward to do proper testing you need proper equipment is why generally you prefer a doctor with a thermometer of one who just thinks he has a real natural knack for guessing a person's temperature and in response to those concerns Trump initially claimed that the problems those governors were experiencing simply didn't exist we're in great shape it's so easy to get that reagents and and swabs are so easy to get swabs are easy and this isn't something that hospitals and states have been saying there are shortages for more than a month now we have millions of them coming in very soon and many of them already have been ordered and the governor's don't know quite where they are but they'll be finding them fairly soon they'll be finding them fairly soon these are crucial medical supplies in the midst of a pandemic not a scavenger hunt the swabs are on me where imaginations run wild each level I have the pages are piled where imaginations run wild and the pages are polished wicked a bushel a bookshelf the swabs for nationwide diagnostic testing run a bookshelf I did it wait why is this a game now now Trump did eventually invoke the defense production act to ramp up manufacturing of swabs but he did it late and again timing is absolutely everything here from the start the story of diagnostic testing is of us making mistakes and wasting valuable time in fiction the meaning tests were heavily rationed and often only given to people who met extremely narrow criteria which makes it especially frustrating that in his victory lap this week Jared Kushner said this somebody asked me why it took so long I actually said you should look at how did we do this so quickly and what's really happened it's really truly extraordinary no it isn't Jared taking months to do what other countries did in weeks is not extraordinary the only thing that's extraordinary here is that the most punchable face in America somehow looks like it's never been touched by human hands to just absorb fists like a bowl of heavy cream what's your secret your translucent sociopath and look the failures in diagnostic testing have led us to our current situation where we still don't know how many people in this country have or have had the corona virus you may have even found yourself wondering wait did I have it earlier this year I had that cough and it did feel a bit sick was that it well that actually brings us to antibody tests which detect whether your body produced the antibodies that fights the corona virus now finding out if people have those is really helpful for public health officials as it gives them a better sense of where the virus has traveled and how many people have recovered but on an individual level you have to be very careful when talking about antibodies because too often the shorthand is if you have them you're immune here is Governor Cuomo doing basically exactly that that would mean that you're no longer contagious and you can't catch the virus because you have the antibodies in your system which means you can get to work and go back to school you can do whatever you want I can do whatever I want that sounds great governor I for one would absolutely love the opportunity to have my current panic attacks outdoors sometimes you want the walls to close in on you only figuratively and that's okay and look it would obviously be great if the presence of antibodies meant that you were immune from reinfection and there is a good chance that it does mean that but we don't know that yet because cough it 19 is still so new we're still not sure exactly what antibody levels might be needed to make you hypothetically immune how strong that immunity would be or how long it might even last and to his credit Anthony Falchi is constantly trying to point this out we do not know exactly what an antibody titer means I mean there's an assumption a reasonable assumption that when you have an antibody that you are protected against reinfection but that has not been proven for this particular virus yeah and just because something is probably true doesn't mean you can automatically assume that it is I mean did Nintendo create and release Kovac 19 as part of a plan to boost sales of animal crossing to a newly captive audience we don't know for sure do we we all basically agree but we can't say with any certainty yet so antibody tests could actually mean significantly less right now than people understandably want them to and that is assuming that they're even accurate which is not necessarily the case because while the FDA clearly slow things down far too much when it came to diagnostic tests they overcorrected hard when it came to antibody tests basically giving a green light to make tests with essentially no oversight and as a result there are now over a hundred and fifty of them on the market none of which are FDA approved in fact only ten are FDA authorized which means little more than that some forms have been submitted and researchers who've looked at tests have found that while a few are reliable many many many more just are not we have the wild wild west for testing right now the FDA has all but given up its oversight responsibility for the tests we have on the market many of them are nothing short of a disaster right now if you were to test for antibody in most places in the United States over half the tests would be false positives think about what he just said that many of the tests are garbage and over half of the positive test results right now would be wrong at that point why not just how people go to a guess your coronavirus antibody level booth just five bucks and Jim here will guess yours if he's wrong and there's basically no way of knowing if he is then you get a stuffed giraffe so here we are months into this crisis still badly in need of more testing both diagnostic and antibody and yet without any clear coordinated strategy for how to best achieve that and not only has the president repeatedly lied about the availability of our tests he's still doing it right now he's saying that our testing capacity is sufficient to reopen the country which remember according to experts it isn't we're doing around 200,000 tests a day when we likely need millions and yet on Tuesday the president insisted though we were actually just about there some health experts say the US needs five million tests per day by June in order to safely reopen you unveiled a plan yesterday that will increase testing but not by that much why not and can you get to that benchmark well it will increase it and it will increase it by much more than that in the very near future are you saying you're confident you can surpass 5 million tests per day is oh well we're gonna be there very soon if you look at the numbers it could be that we're getting very close but the thing is we're not very close in fact we're not close at all and that is a lie that he's going to get instantly caught on it's like someone claiming that they have a 10-inch penis immediately before taking off their underwear okay that's an undeniably impressive claim but if you're lying I'm gonna be very disappointed and a little angry that you thought I wouldn't notice and sure enough that very day Trump's Assistant Secretary of Health told reporters there is absolutely no way on earth on this planet or any other planet that we can do 20 million tests a day or even five million tests today and look some confusion is inevitable when a new disease starts spreading its way around the world and it's not like rolling out testing on this kind of scale was ever gonna be easy but again and again the people in charge failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario and have been slow in fixing mistakes all of which means in May we are still playing catch-up in the middle of a pandemic which in turn means thousands upon thousands of people dying preventable deaths so if this is a great success story for anyone it's for the coronavirus we need to scale up tests massively and right away because if we want to return to the world that we used to one with sports restaurants hugs and turning down party invitations because it's raining and not because you might die testing is how we get there and that is a message that should really unite everyone in this country from the people at home worried about the potential loss of life to the people out protesting social distancing because they think it's too high a price to pay to Alex Jones preparing to barbecue his neighbor's we could all stand to listen to the advice of one of our bravest brightest stars testing testing testing testing testing testing that guy was really ahead of his time and now this you
Imagine being Alex Jones' neighbor and watching this?
I wasn't ready for Alex Jones' insanity and Spongebob - and then he continued lusting after Adam Driver too lmao
I'm glad he includes these comedic bits because this is such a grim subject, especially in the US.
I knew the US fucked up our testing response, but this segment was informative to truly how badly we did. Also, when he said “I for one would love the opportunity to have my current panic attacks outdoors cause sometimes you want the walls to close on you figuratively and that’s ok” I fucking felt that.
Watching the nose test being performed looks like a whole lot of NOT FUN!
I hadn't heard about the extreme failure of the anti-body tests. 50% false positives sounds like criminal fraud.
There were a lot of people pointing to some prison with an extreme number of prisoners having tested positive for anti-bodies. They were then using that as proof that the virus was a non-issue due to overblown mortality numbers. I was confused how that could be since the CDC was reporting 18% mortality from hospitalized individuals (normally a pandemic would be >6.9%). Maybe bad anti-body tests were the reason?
I expect further installations of Cat Week Tonight. Don't let me down, John.
UK mirror anyone?
also, why is it so hard to find new LWT episodes on UK youtube?
C'mon Jon, show a little love for the old country
I was kind of hoping that they'd only post the 'Cat Week Tonight' bit this week.
I'm not the intended demographic, but Cat Week Tonight may end up being one of my favourite shows!