COVID19 Update - Day 229

US Tests: 123,068,899*

US Cases: 8,597,312*

US Deaths: 217,023*

Worldwide Cases: 42,886,463*

Worldwide Deaths: 1,152,323*

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

Filed under shocking, but not surprising:

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows off-handedly told CNN on Sunday that the Trump administration is “not going to control” the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 225,000 Americans and has now reached Vice President Mike Pence’s orbit in what appears to be a new COVID-19 outbreak in the White House.

“We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas,” Meadows said on CNN on Sunday morning.

CNN’s Jake Tapper then pressed Meadows on why the country won’t get the COVID-19 pandemic under control.

Meadows replied that it’s “because it is a contagious virus just like the flu” and that the Trump administration is “making efforts to contain it.”

“What we need to do is make sure that we have the proper mitigation factors, whether it’s therapies or vaccines or treatments to make sure that people don’t die from this,” Meadows said.

Put more succinctly, America is now 7 months into a global pandemic which has killed 217,000 Americans, and the White House still has no plan.

They don't even have a plan to keep it out of the White House, it seems.  First, several members of the White House (including Trump and Melania) caught the virus at Amy Coney Barrett's coming out party last month.   And today, we learned that five people in Mike Pence's office have tested positive, including Pence's Chief of Staff.

Recall that Pence is nominally in charge of leading the nation's response to the #TrumpVirus.

In personal news --- shortly after posting this, I received news that my son's #TrumpVirus test came back negative!