Trump's Unfolding Testing Disaster

For weeks, it's been a constant demand for more testing capabilities in order to identify asymptomatic people, isolate them and contact trace who they may have been in contact with. But the first step in the process is testing, and Very Stable Genius and sociopath Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump has failed in that critical task. Perhaps because he's focused on a quick fix vaccine or treatment -- a pill one could take and the economy springs back to life -- he's not grasping the need for testing now (or he is afraid that more testing would uncover much greater levels of infection). As The Guardian article notes:

"...analysts say that without centralized governance and coordination, the national effort remains a competing coalition of state and local outfits hampered by duplicated work, competition for supplies, siloed pursuits of non-transferable solutions and red tape that leaves some labs with testing backlogs and others with excess capacity.

All of which leaves the US without a unified, coherent strategy for testing and contact tracing to contain a virus that does not respect state borders and has already killed more than 60,000 Americans.

Without it, the imminent experiment of reopening the country could be catastrophic, warned Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina in a conference call with reporters this week." (our emphasis)

Sensing that his incompetence on this fundamental aspect will damage him politically, Trump has repeatedly sought to hold the states responsible for testing, who as the above quote notes, are competing for testing resources among themselves (and with the Federal Government). Trump has compounded the problem by misrepresenting the adequacy of supplies, pressuring states to reopen their economies regardless of the COVID-19 infection trends, and lifting social distancing guidelines:

"Meanwhile, as states begin to relax social distancing measures, the Trump administration is spreading dangerous misinformation, denying persistent supply shortages, underestimating the number of Covid-19 cases and exaggerating the margin of safety conferred by the current volume of testing and contact-tracing, experts say.

“We’ve done more than 200,000 tests in a single day,” Mike Pence said at a taskforce briefing this week, in which Trump touted testing as “one of the great assets that we have” in reopening the US.

But at current testing levels, with only rudimentary plans for contact tracing for new cases, the US will be flying virtually blind as it reopens, said Glen Weyl, a technologist who co-authored a report issued by Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics that calls for 5m tests a day by early June."  (our emphasis)

Trump's cult is eager to reopen the bars, malls, etc. regardless of the likelihood that premature reopenings will spread this highly contagious virus, but the majority of Americans aren't going to return until they know it's safe. It'll be the worst of two worlds: no economic rebound and increased infections. A COVID Donnie production.