US Cases: 4,690,062*
US Deaths: 147,628*
Worldwide Cases: 18,187,396*
Worldwide Deaths: 691,352*
* - Numbers are a lower bound. True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration
For more than two weeks now, I have posted these entries with the caveat that 'Numbers are a lower bound. True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration'. The reason, as I explained back on July 15, the Trump administration unexpectedly seized control of COVID19 tracking data. And now that we've had some time for investigations to occur, we have more insight into the damage that decision caused:
“Nothing happens in 72 hours in the federal government,” he said, calling the abrupt change to TeleTracking “a faceplant.”Missouri took down its hospitalization data for twelve days because it couldn’t be sure the numbers coming from the state’s hospitals — which were reporting to a new system with minimal background training — were accurate.And that’s the tension at the heart of this latest Trump administration action. While the switch to TeleTracking was purportedly meant to sharpen the national picture of a global pandemic — with necessary information about things like hospital space, drug use and ventilator supply — it did the opposite. As a result of the chaos, the federal government effectively “cut off” local officials’ situational awareness, Dillon said.
I would say this is just another example of the Trump administration's incompetence. But I think in this case, the switch to TeleTracking worked exactly as intended: It sowed chaos and confusion.
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