COVID19 Update - Day 142

US Tests: 54,644,715*

US Cases: 4,464,823*

US Deaths: 144,139*

Worldwide Cases: 17,237,642*

Worldwide Deaths: 671,909*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

I haven't spent a lot of time bashing Jared Kushner.  This is surprising, because although the man doesn't seem to be competent at anything, Trump puts him in charge of everything.  Usually with disastrous results.

However, according to a new report by Vanity Fair, Kushner was on the verge of doing something right earlier this year.  Trump put him in charge of developing a national testing effort, and according to Vanity Fair, it would have been at least a competent plan --- and certainly better than the no-plan-at-all Trump ending up pursing --- but it was abandoned for completely stupid reasons:

The plan called for the federal government to coordinate distribution of test kits, so they could be surged to heavily affected areas, and oversee a national contact-tracing infrastructure. It also proposed lifting contract restrictions on where doctors and hospitals send tests, allowing any laboratory with capacity to test any sample. It proposed a massive scale-up of antibody testing to facilitate a return to work. It called for mandating that all COVID-19 test results from any kind of testing, taken anywhere, be reported to a national repository as well as to state and local health departments.

And it proposed establishing “a national Sentinel Surveillance System” with “real-time intelligence capabilities to understand leading indicators where hot spots are arising and where the risks are high vs. where people can get back to work.”

By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.

. . .

[Fear of bad publicity and the hope that the virus would just fade away meant] the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

Hey, Trump supporters who happen to live in blue states!  Trump decided that his re-election was more important than your life!  Still feel like voting for him?

It is always, always, always, always, ALWAYS about him, and only him.