The novel coronavirus or COVID-19 never went away, of course, but it looks like we may be on the outset of a third surge of infections. The United States recorded over 70,000 new infections on Friday and that was the highest number since the summer. Experts have long predicted that we would see another wave of infections over the winter and we now see signs that it's happening.
With that said, Trump and his regime couldn't give less of a shit.
Look...
On call with campaign staff, President Trump says people are tired of hearing about coronavirus. "People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots...Fauci is a nice guy. He’s been here for 500 years."
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 19, 2020
More substantively, the Washington Post reported this morning that the so-called coronavirus task force is more or less idle at this point.
The taskforce never actually did much in the first place, of course, but the Post reports that the group is only meeting once a week and discourse within the group is cleanly divided between experts who still believe in science and those who are just telling Trump what he wants to hear.
And I know this won't shock you at all, but the group that's telling Trump what he wants to hear is winning out.
Trump and many of his advisers have come to believe that the key to a revived economy and a return to normality is a vaccine.
“They’ve given up on everything else,” said a senior administration official involved in the pandemic response. “It’s too hard of a slog.” [...]
These days, the task force is dormant relative to its robust activity earlier in the pandemic. Fauci, Birx, Surgeon General Jerome Adams and other members have confided in others that they are dispirited.
Birx and Fauci have advocated dramatically increasing the nation’s testing capacity, especially as experts anticipate a devastating increase in cases this winter. They have urged the government to use unspent money Congress allocated for testing — which amounts to $9 billion, according to a Democratic Senate appropriations aide — so that anyone who needs to can get a test with results returned quickly.
But Atlas, who is opposed to surveillance testing, has repeatedly quashed these proposals. He has argued that young and healthy people do not need to get tested and that testing resources should be allocated to nursing homes and other vulnerable places, such as prisons and meatpacking plants.
Death is a lagging indicator, as you know, so people who have been infected in recent days are going to die on or near the presidential election. People will literally be dying because of Trump's intentional incompetence on the same day that at least 40 to 50 million Americans vote to give him more time to kill more people.
We've all asked ourselves what it would look like if a Republican were president during a legitimate national crisis of life and death and now we know; this is it.
What it looks like -- and what it is -- is an entire political party deciding that American lives; that your life isn't worth shit. There is no one they wouldn't sacrifice for power. Over 220,000 Americans have already been sacrificed.
Don't vote for people who want you dead.