The slow and incompetent response from the Trump Administration should be raising alarms. The failures are too blatant to be accidental. And, if deliberate, there is a purpose. Jackrabbit Blog has previoulsy speculated on that purpose in our post: The Empire Games Covid-19.
Trump touts 15-minute testing as a “game-changer” …
… but implementation of the technology was delayed for weeks and there is no firm date for delivery of the tests.
March 28: FDA grants emergency approval for 15-minute coronavirus test
Abbott said it is ramping up production to deliver 50,000 tests to the U.S. health care system starting next week.
March 17: Japan company launches ‘15-minute testing kit’
The tests, which were originally developed by a Chinese partner company, involve placing a few drops of blood and some testing agent onto a membrane… “The new product went on sale on Monday (3/16) and we are providing it to testing companies, hospitals, laboratories and universities,”
Feb. 15: China develops COVID-19 detection kit that delivers results in 15 minutes
Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook
. . . “The U.S. government will use all powers at its disposal to prevent, slow or mitigate the spread of an emerging infectious disease threat,” according to the playbook’s built-in “assumptions” about fighting future threats. “The American public will look to the U.S. government for action when multi-state or other significant events occur.” . . . Trump has claimed that his administration could not have foreseen the coronavirus pandemic, which has spread to all 50 states and more than 180 nations, sickening more than 460,000 people around the world. “Nobody ever expected a thing like this,” Trump said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. . . . In a subsequent section, the playbook details steps to take if there’s evidence that the virus is spreading among humans, which the World Health Organization concluded by Jan. 22, or the U.S. government declared a public health emergency, which HHS Secretary Alex Azar did on Jan. 31.
Under that timeline, the federal government by late January should have been taking a lead role in “coordination of workforce protection activities including… [personal protective equipment] determination, procurement and deployment.” Those efforts are only now getting underway, health workers and doctors say.
Exclusive: The Military Knew Years Ago That a Coronavirus Was Coming
Despite President Trump’s repeated assertions that the Covid-19 epidemic was “unforeseen” and “came out of nowhere,” the Pentagon was well aware of not just the threat of a novel influenza, but even anticipated the consequent scarcity of ventilators, face masks, and hospital beds, according to a 2017 Pentagon plan obtained by The Nation.