COVID19 Update - Day 281

US Tests: 192,085,022*

US Cases: 16,760,997*

US Deaths: 298,775*

Worldwide Cases: 74,115,894*

Worldwide Deaths: 1,646,942*

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

(Sorry for skipping yesterday. Don't say you weren't warned about Tuesdays, though)

More reason to tamp down your hopes of getting a vaccine any time soon:

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has been offering a rosy timeframe for when the COVID-19 vaccine will be widely available, but other officials working on the Pentagon-led effort to speed the virus to the public are now presenting a less optimistic forecast.

In remarks Thursday, officials from the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed projected that the COVID-19 vaccine would not begin to be widely available until late spring or summer.

The remarks by officials involved in the distribution effort came on a call hosted by the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management.

Army Col. Victor Suarez, a vaccine program manager at Operation Warp Speed, said on the call that “we want to make enough vaccine doses so that everybody who wants a vaccine in the United States can get a vaccine by this summer.”

“When vaccine becomes more plentiful in spring and summer, what you’re gonna see is more tiered groups opening up,” Suarez said at another point on the call, referring to the groups of people who the CDC has given priority to receive the vaccine, either due to the essential nature of their work or unique vulnerability to the virus.

Suarez’s remarks suggest that widespread availability of the vaccine ay not come until  deeper into the summer.

The problem --- predictably --- is that THERE IS NO NATIONAL PLAN for distributing the vaccine.  And so the question of when any particular individual receives it is up to the vagaries of the state in which they happen to live.

Heckuva job, Trumpies.