COVID19 Update - Day 107

US Tests: 29,207,820

US Cases: 2,410,978

US Deaths: 118,031

Worldwide Cases: 9,583,144

Worldwide Deaths: 488,740

If it's not the corruption, it's the incompetence: A play in two acts.

Act One:

Lucas Rensko was making money through a popular handyman-for-hire app called TaskRabbit, doing odd jobs and delivering groceries, when he picked up a task that led him to a leaky-roofed warehouse on a tattered road in northwest San Antonio.

Inside, a man named Jaime Rivera had set up long tables where five or six other “Taskers” earning about $20 an hour were ripping Chinese masks out of plastic bags and stuffing them into new ones that were identical but for one potentially deadly difference. The old packages were labeled in all caps “MEDICAL USE PROHIBITED,” meaning not to be used by doctors and nurses who need the strongest protection from tiny particles carrying the novel coronavirus. The new bags, intended to make their way to Texas hospitals, simply omitted that warning.

This seemingly small deception highlights a huge problem for medical workers whose best defense against a virus that ravages the body with horrifying complexity is a simple, but trustworthy, mask. That trust has eroded as Chinese-made masks claiming, sometimes falsely, to be 95% effective at filtering virus-laden particles made their way into hospitals and now local convenience stores. You might have bought them: KN95s.

Act Two: 

The federal government sent coronavirus stimulus payments to almost 1.1 million dead people totaling nearly $1.4 billion, Congress’s independent watchdog reported Thursday.

The Washington Post previously reported that the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service disbursed some payments of up to $1,200 each to dead people. But the astonishing scope of the problem had not been known.

. . .

The IRS has previously said that stimulus payments issued in the name of dead people have to be returned. But aside from announcing on its website on May 6 that stimulus payments made to dead or incarcerated individuals should be returned, the IRS does not have plans to take additional steps toward recouping the payments, the GAO said.

Not only are dead people receiving checks, but 35 million living people still haven't received theirs, more than 3 months into the pandemic.

Epic incompetence.