President Trump is scheduled to hold a press briefing at 6 p.m. ET at the White House, where he is expected to outline his guidance for parts of the country to reopen. Trump has backed away from his “total authority” bluster in which he asserted he could override states on when to relax social distance guidelines. He reportedly told governors on a call Thursday that it would be their call on when life can begin getting back to normal.
So I haven’t dug in myself, but Scott Gottlieb (a trusted voice though right of center) feels that these plans are good:
I don’t think they represent Trump’s whims, but are basically a synthesis of state plans, and have been vetted by experts.
Thus, I make some predictions for the briefing (feel free to come back and see how I did):
Trump won’t be able to explain these with any precision whatsoever, but will throw around grand-sounding platitudes about reopening the country, the spirit of the American people. He will be amphetamine Trump, not downer Trump.
During questioning, the question of testing will come up, as that’s one of the key things. He won’t actually answer any of the questions (he’s unlikely to understand them), but will insist that America is best in the world at testing and there is no problem.
We should actually be glad that there is a plan. If we were completely subject to Trump’s whims, we’d be royally fucked, and I don’t want that.
So tonight, another Trump circle jerk. I’ll tune in here. No way I’m watching, I already know the “outline” he’s going to pretend to outline will be worthless.
With all due respect, the linked powerpoint does not support your claim. From slide 4: “Ability to quickly set up safe and efficient screening and testing sites for symptomatic individuals and trace contacts of COVID+ results” and “Ability to surge ICU capacity”.
Until the nation gets a handle on testing kits that are actually reliable (I’m understanding the ones we have generate a high frequency of false positives, so who’s to say they’re at all accurate on either end of the spectrum), none of this matters.
The first order of business is to stop dicking around and get reliable testing into the hands of the medical community and start a full court press of testing EVERYONE and not just the sick and dying.
We’re a month into this and we still can’t guarantee availability of testing. For those we know about the numbers are horrendous, but too many are still not taking this seriously. Way too many.
Watch Trump/Pence emphasize that 24% of US counties have no reported cases of covid 19.
Which is entirely likely. That’s because 41% of US counties have less than 20,000 people * – and their combined population makes only 4% of the nation’s population. If you take the least populous 24% of counties, you’re talking less than 1.5% of the US population.
In other words, while 24% sounds like a lot, the odds are that we’re talking only the most sparsely populated rural counties that have little or no significant impact on the economy. But Trump wants to make it seem like its a big deal…
*note – I took the data from this page, pasted it into a spreadsheet, and then did various simple operations to come up with these numbers.
So I am reading them, and I’m not gonna agree. They’re pretty high-level, but they are a pretty good framework and address things that to date Trump hasn’t talked about at all, particularly contact tracing. If the authorities actually follow these (filling in details responsibly), I can see it working.
