COVID19 Update - Day 68

US Tests: 11,499,203
US Cases: 1,479,856
US Deaths: 83,854
Worldwide Cases: 4,710,614
Worldwide Deaths: 315,023

A medical journal has given Joe Biden an endorsement in his campaign against Trump, but it's not a journal run by a bunch of Democrats.  In fact, it's not even run by Americans at all; it's the British journal The Lancet:

"The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets — vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear," the journal states. "But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency."

Seeking to lay a pile of critical failings at Trump's feet, the editorial — titled "Reviving the U.S. CDC" — says a federal agency that was once "the gold standard for global disease detection and control" has devolved into an "ineffective and nominal adviser" on the U.S. response to a disease that poses a public health threat of historic proportions.

The Trump administration has "chipped away at the CDC's capacity to combat infectious diseases" in a number of ways, The Lancet says, citing the reduction of CDC staff in China and the withdrawal of the last American CDC expert from the Chinese CDC campus last July – moves that left an "intelligence vacuum" when the novel coronavirus was detected in Hubei province in late 2019.

And The Lancet says that partly because of the CDC's own errors – chiefly a mistaken early insistence on maintaining control of coronavirus testing — "The USA is still nowhere near able to provide the basic surveillance or laboratory testing infrastructure needed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic."

This isn't going to change any minds in the Trump Death Cult, because nothing will.  But for those who still have the ability to discern objective reality, this is every bit as damning an indictment of Trump as anything else we've seen the past 3 months.

It's saying that Americans are dying, and that Trump and his GOP enablers aren't able to carry out the most basic job of government: keeping Americans safe.

On the personal side, I had my usual 3 hour Zoom chat with other alumni from my college today.  It was fun.  And with the warmer weather and the expectation that it's really hard to catch the virus from others if you're outside, there's been some talk about actually socializing again, for picnics and whatnot (while observing appropriate social distancing, of course).

We need to be able to appreciate the little things.