Monday, April 20, 2020

Where Are the TESTS?

This blog entry is a lazy one, not a serious work of writing, but because it in fact addresses Trump's laziness as a leader and the fact that his latest coronavirus initiative is not a serious work of doing anything about the pandemic.
Having failed to get the governors of the fifty states that supposedly make up this Union to do his bidding in reopening the economy, Trump has issued a set of guidelines for how to restart the country's economy to show that he's on the ball and doing something about the pandemic.  And, I suppose, Trump thinks he can get away with looking like he's doing something when Joe Biden is stuck in his basement unable to do anything, and Trump may, alas, be right about that. But the guidelines - go here to see them, because, quite frankly, I can't be bothered to summarize them in my own words - are about as patchwork as the country itself, and the most important states and metropolitan areas on't be able to meet the guidelines any time soon. None of them meet them now, despite Trump's insistence to the country; his insistence is based on three-day data on declines of cases, not fourteen-day data as the guidelines say.  And the guidelines are based on testing people for the virus.  Which begs this obvious question:
Where are they?  The states can't test people for coronavirus on their own, and not even together - the federal government as to step in!  So where are the tests?  No tests, no re-opening of the economy?  Trump, who earlier claimed total authority, devolved the responsibility of fighting the virus to the governors.  These are the things Joe Biden keeps calling Trump on, but nobody cares because he's speaking from a basement studio that (it's been said) looks like a public-access-channel studio set.  But that doesn't change the fact that Trump is supposed to be a leader and has to start acting like one. So, again - WHERE ARE THE TESTS?
I'm giving Trump a test. I'm flunking him.

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