". . . On April 30, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 63-page draft of recommended guidelines for opening America leaked to the press. The CDC’s guide, which had already been submitted to the White House, reflected the current state of the science on the coronavirus and how to prevent it from spreading in communities once lockdown measures end. If implemented, it would have offered some of the most precise guidance the public had received since the COVID-19 pandemic began. . . Unfortunately, those recommendations will not be implemented. The guide was shelved by the White House before it was ever officially published, with Vice President Mike Pence’s task force complaining that the rules were restrictive and “overly specific.” The implication here was that the White House wished to avoid anything prescriptive or difficult to implement. And so instead, a much sparer and looser set of CDC guidelines for “reopening” was published online on May 14: “Communities, Schools, Workplaces and Events: Guidance for Where You Live, Work, Learn, Pray and Play.”Ambiguity in these circumstances is not neutral. It is harmful. And we deserve better. . . "
The first sign of a massive failure came with testing. South Korea, which has been widely praised for its response to coronavirus, tested more than 66,000 people within a week of the first community transmission within its borders. By comparison, the US took roughly three weeks to complete that many tests — in a country that is much more populous and, now, is on track to have a much worse outbreak than South Korea and other nations. . .
instead trying to downplay the threat of Covid-19. Trump himself has tweeted comparisons of Covid-19 to the common flu — which Jha describes as “really unhelpful,” because the novel coronavirus appears to be much worse. Trump also called concerns about the virus a “hoax.” He said on national television that, based on nothing more than a self-admitted “hunch,” the death rate of the disease is much lower than public health officials projected. . .
And Trump has rejected any accountability for the botched testing process: “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said (in March) . . .
The Trump administration . . . put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of handling the coronavirus pandemic, building out a team that includes well-respected experts like Deborah Birx. But this is in reaction to the epidemic, instead of something that a preexisting agency within the administration was working on for years. . . “It would be nice if the office was still there,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, said during a congressional hearing. “We worked very well with that office.”. . .
other countries’ actions, such as China’s draconian measures, gave the US a bit of time to do something, but the federal government has failed to get even the basics right in that time. . .
Trump has consistently downplayed the coronavirus, comparing it to the common flu and claiming that his administration is doing a “GREAT job” and keeping things under control. Even when announcing his administration’s goal to get 5 million test kits out, Trump said, “I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.”. . .
Trump “did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear — the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential re-election this fall.”. . .
". . . he's not going to get better. He's not going to grow into the job or become more "presidential". How many words, realistically, do you really believe he's read about COVID-19? How many pages of briefings? When are we going to demand more than a circus from the people in whom we now have so much of our futures invested, willingly or not? We should be calling for this guy to resign on a daily basis. He should be impeached again for gross incompetence. Mike Pence looks like fucking FDR by comparison. Most of the president's supporters will never hold him to any standard that he might not meet. In fact, they will continually lower the bar to accommodate him, because they have already invested too much of themselves in this to go back. The sunk cost is too high. It's up to everyone else to plainly say that he should not have this job any longer. We hired him, on a temporary basis, to manage the Executive Branch of our government. He should be fired. . . "
