Coronavirus

“We’ve solved every problem”

Written by SK Ashby

Trump flew to Arizona last Friday and toured a factory that makes masks and others medical equipment where he claimed his regime has "solved every problem" by meeting all demands for equipment.

That's obviously not true, but Politico reports that his own officials warned that equipment shortages are coming because of Trump's other endeavors.

Trump regime officials held a conference call on the same day he toured the factory when several of them said reopening the economy too soon may lead to shortages.

The officials also expressed concern that governors moving to reopen their economies while cases were still prevalent threatened to plunge the nation into a new and potentially deadlier chapter of the outbreak.

“The numbers of deaths definitely will be high,” Daniel Jernigan, director of the Center for Disease Control’s influenza division, said at the start of a May 1 conference call. Jernigan did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Minutes later, another official underscored the risk facing the U.S.: If all the states moved to lift their social distancing restrictions, hospitals nationwide could see a surge of new coronavirus cases, creating the potential for severe ventilator shortages within weeks.

Various projections that we'll see an uptick in cases and deaths in June are starting to come into focus.

If states ease their restrictions over the next two weeks -- and if the incubation period of the virus is about two weeks -- people who are infected when restrictions are lifted this month will hit hospitals in the first weeks of June.

Short of extending stay-at-home orders, the only way to prevent another wave of infections would be to test virtually everyone and tell those who are infected to stay home, but we have no system in place for that. We don't have widescale testing or tracing.

I hope I'm wrong, but it feels like most of America is just saying "fuck it" and hoping the virus will magically disappear if we collectively will it out of existence. It's like we're relying on American Exceptionalism to spare us from ourselves.