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“Slow the testing down,” he said, and it’s happening.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
We are now in the Covid-19 pandemic where Donald Trump and his allies seek to suppress data on the spread of the coronavirus, because of course they are. True to their shape, however, they are far from the curve. From a political point of view (which is all they care about), their efforts to delete the data are too weak, too late.
Where we are: In just a few days, millions of Americans will see their profits drop dramatically as unemployment benefits expire. This requires urgent action; However, avoiding economic calamity was going to be difficult, because Republicans generally hesitated to provide inactive aid personnel out of pandemic necessity.
But now it turns out that there is some other impediment to action: an intra-G.O.P. investment dispute for the detection and detection of inflamed people. Even Senate Republicans are building a checking account, which is urgently needed given our current situation: the increase in some cases has created a stack of checks, and the effects of checks take so long to come back that they are really useless.
But Trump officials oppose any new cash for testing. They’re looking slightly at their opposition, as Trump himself explained the strategy a month ago in his concentration in Tulsa: when he expanded the evidence, he said, “You’re going to locate more cases, so I said to my people, “Reduce the speed of testing, please?”
In other words, what you don’t know can’t hurt Trump.
No one will be surprised that Trump’s team is trying to suppress the bad news about the pandemic. This was completely predictable given the Obama Screening Act: each of the right-wing conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama was an indication of what Republicans were looking to do themselves, and they would do it once they had the power.
Remember, for example, wild claims about an imminent military takeover of Texas, lent credence by senior Republicans? Now we have unidentified Department of Homeland Security agents in unmarked vehicles seizing people off the streets of Portland, Ore. Remember claims that the government was secretly constructing concentration camps? Thousands of migrants are now immured in detention centers, often under horrifying conditions.
And the existing war against Covid-19 evidence has been heralded through constant claims that the Obama administration is suppressing bad economic news. The “truths of inflation” insisted that the federal government was hiding the rampant inflation that the right had predicted, but that never happened. The veracity of unemployment, including, among others, a Donald Trump, said that official employment figures that looked like an ever-improving economy were false, and that unemployment was much higher than had been reported.
Therefore, it was inevitable that the Trumpists would do what they wrongly accused Obama of doing and hide to hide the bad figures of the pandemic. Testing efforts are just one component of the story.
The Trump administration recently ordered hospitals to avoid disclosing Covid-19’s knowledge to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and to send it to a personal contractor. As a result, hospitalization knowledge, a key indicator of the pandemic, disappeared from C.D.C. before being reinstated after widespread protest.
And some Republican-controlled states, adding Georgia, have been accumulating knowledge about the coronavirus for months, misering them to underestimate the problem.
The riddle is why the last verification attack came so late. Pro tip: If you’re looking to hide bad epidemiological news, start hiding before everyone realizes that the pandemic is getting out of hand.
A desirable Post-Mortem from The Times about the failure of Trump’s reaction to the coronavirus is helping us perceive what happened. And I mean mortem: Americans die of Covid-19 at a rate 8 times that of Canada, ten times higher than in Europe.
The Times report makes it clear that Trump’s team has never seriously thought about trying to deal with the truth of the pandemic. However, it also makes clear that officials were convinced in April that they were leaving with this abdication of responsibility, that the coronavirus was disappearing.
And by the time they realized that the virus wasn’t playing along with their political games, it was too late to hide the truth.
At this point it’s not even clear what purpose obstructing testing is supposed to serve. The attempt to engineer an economic boom before the election has already failed, as reopened states are reversing course. And Trump has already squandered all credibility on the coronavirus; even if the numbers on reported cases suddenly started to look much better, who besides his hard-core supporters would believe them?
So this doesn’t look like a political strategy as much as an attempt to soothe the boss’s fragile ego. Trump keeps insisting, falsely, that the only reason we’re seeing so many cases is too much testing, so his aides are trying to mollify him by holding testing down.
And if that cries out the reaction to the U.S. pandemic, which makes it more unlikely to conduct isolated tracking tests, well, treatment of the virus has never been a component of the plan.
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