My daily threads on some fuck-up by #GrifterInChief
Yup, its ALL under control folks. “As you can see, it’s a beautiful day. The beaches are opened & are having a wonderful time. The water is fine” Amity Mayor. Meanwhile, a maneater was hunting swimmers.
: https://apple.news/AniBBoJvoQsKe9FHHX4BIkg

2/Trump leaves trail of unmet promises in coronavirus response which has given rise to bold promises by tRump as he led the response in the US. For several mos, he & his officials have cast a fog of promises meant to reassure a country in the throes of the #coronaviruspandemic

3/Trump & his team haven't delivered on critical 1s.They talk bewildering nos abt masks on the way, tests being taken, ships sailing to the rescue, breathing machs being built/shipped, field hosp popping up, aircraft laden w supplies from abroad, flowing to crippled businesses

4/Piercing that fog is the bottom-line reality that Americans r going w/out the med supplies & much of financial help they most need from the gov at the very time they need it most &were told they wld have it. US now is at or near height of COVID-19 sickness & death, experts say

5/There's no question that on major fronts — masks, gowns, diagnostic tests, ventilators & more —- the federal gov is pushing hard now to get up to speed. Impressive numbers r being floated for equip & testing procedures in the pipeline.

6/But in large measure they will arrive on the down slope of the pandemic, putting the US in a better position shld the same virus strike again but landing too late for this outbreak's lethal curve. Concerning ventilators, for eg, Trump recently allowed:

7/“A lot of them will be coming at a time when we won’t need them as badly." 2 weeks ago — and its always 2 weeks — Trump brought word of an innovative diagnostic test that can produce results in minutes instead of days or a week.

8/The US testing system, key to containing the spread of infection, has been a failure in the crunch, as public health authorities (but never Trump) acknowledged in March. The rapid test could help change that.

9/Like other glimmers of hope that may or may not come to something, Trump held out these tests as a “whole new ballgame." The new machines and testing cartridges are being sent across the country, and may well hold promise. But they are not ready for actual use in large numbers.

10/NH for 1, received 15 rapid-test machines but 120 cartridges instead of the 1,500 expected. Only 2 machines can be used. “I’m banging my head against the wall, I really am,” Rep Gov. Sununu said Wed. "We’re going to keep pushing on DC multiple times a day to get what we need.”

11/False starts & dead ends r inevitable in any crisis, esp 1 driven by a virus never seen bef. By its nature, a crisis means we're not on top of it. Desperation is the mother of invention here and officials worldwide are winging it, many more successfully than in the U.S.

12/But bold promises & florid assurances were made, day after day, from the WH & a zigzagging president who minimized the danger for months and systematically exaggerates what DC is doing abt it.

“We’re getting them tremendous amounts of supplies,” he said of health care workers

13/“Incredible. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.” This was when Americans were watching something else entirely — doctors wearing garbage bags for makeshift protection.

#MurderMostFoul #MurdererInChief

14/In hospitals, masks, gloves & other protective garb come w the territory. But doctors, nurses, flight attendants & other front-line workers have had to go begging for such basics, even bef publ health leaders flipped & recommended facial coverings for everyone outside the home

15/The mere scale of the pandemic stretched supplies even in better prepared countries. Yet the enduring shortages in the U.S. are not just from a lack of foresight, but also from hesitancy as the pandemic started to sicken and kill Americans.

16/It was not until mid-March, when some hospitals were already treating thousands of infected patients w/out enuf equip & pleading for help, that the gov placed bulk orders for N95 masks & other basic necessities of medical care for its stockpile, The Associated Press reported.

17/DC dithered on supplies for 2 months after global alarm bells rang about a coming pandemic in January. And the Strategic National Stockpile, it turns out — #ourstockpile is not the supply fortress you might have thought from its formidable name.

18/It maxed out days ago, bef the pandemic's peak in US & never filled its purpose of plugging most essential & imm gaps in supplies, tho it helped. This past wk officials said stockpile was 90% depleted of its protective equip, w remainder to be held back for fed employees only.

19/or prolly just #GrifterInChief & his cronies

20/Some shipmts to states were deficient. Wrong masks were sent to IL n a load of 300k. MI got half that was supposed 2b n a shipmt of 450k. When he was trying to get 10k ventilators n late Mar, CA Gov. Newsom said he rec’d 170 broken 1s from nat’l stockpile as well as good 1s

21/WHO SENDS BROKEN VENTILATORS TO DESPERATE STATES? #GrifterInChief #MurdererInChief

22/When officials in AL opened a shipment of medical masks from the stockpile, they found more than 5,000 w rot. They had expired in 2010, officials in the state said, yet been left in place first by the Obama admin and then the Trump admin.

23/When it became clear that critical shortages weren't being solved, the self-styled “wartime pres," who had gone to Norfolk, VA, to send off the USS Comfort Navy hospital ship to NYC, blamed the states and declared the federal government isn't a “shipping clerk.”

24/“Anybody that needs a test, gets a test," Trump said on March 6. "They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.” He said the same day: “Anybody that wants a test can get a test.” Whether it's a case of needing a test or only wanting 1, his assurance was not true then, ...

25/it's not true now & it won't be true any time soon.

The greatly expanding but still vastly insufficient capacity to test people is steered mostly to those who are already sick or to essential workers at the most risk of exposure.

26/If you're sick w presumed COVID-19 but riding it out at home, chances r you haven't been tested. If you worry that you've been exposed and might be carrying and spreading the virus but so far feel fine, you're generally off the radar as well.

27/Trump tries to assure ppl who need to fly that passengers r tested getting on & off flights. He is wrong. Instead, some major airports do screenings, which means asking passengers questions & checking their temperature, not swabbing their nasal passages to find out for sure.

28/Many ppl w the virus will never get sick from it. Others who have it will get sick eventually. Both grps r contagious. But theres no capacity n days of gr8st danger to test app healthy ppl in lrg numbers, so precautionary distancing remains best defense, like n ancient times

29/W/in 3 wks of China's NYE notification to global health auth abt a mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases, China had sequenced genetic makeup of the , German scientists had developed a test for detecting it & WHO had adopted the test & was moving toward global distribution

30/ten days behind, officials at the @CDCgov bypassed the WHO test & sponsored their own, which was flawed out of the gate. Trump said the WHO test was flawed, but it wasn't. Precious time was lost as the US test was corrected, distributed narrowly, then more broadly ...

31/but still not up to par w the countries most on top of the crisis. Testing most lagged during the critical month of Feb as thetook root n US population.Germany, in contrast,raced ahead w aggressive testing of a broad segment of the pop when it had fewer than 10 cases n Jan

32/It has experienced far fewer deaths proportionally than the United States.

“There were many, many opportunities not to end up where we are,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Global Health Institute at Harvard, told AP.

33/Trump told Americans on March 13 that a division of Google's parent co was coming out w a website that would let ppl determine online if they shld get a test &, if so, swing by a nearby place to get one, a notable shortcut in theory. But a game-changer in practice?

34/“It’s going to be very quickly done,” he said. The website is up but operational n just 4 CA counties. Drive-thru sites that he promised wld expedite testing were plagued w shortages & delays n state aft state, such that many ppl w symptoms & a doctor's order were turned away

35/Trump dusted off the #DefenseProductionAct empowering him to order manuf’rs & shippers to make & deliver what the country needs in the crisis. His move raised expectations that a new wave of emer supplies generally & ventilators in particular could come to the aid of pts & ...

36/the ppl looking aft them. He & his advisers inflated those hopes. Under the president's “vigorous, swift” order to GM, said Peter Navarro, WH point man on the emer supply chain, new ventilators would be ready in “Trump time, which is to say as fast as possible.”

37/Yet Trump has held off on using his full powers under the act to command production from private companies. A presidential directive to GM on ventilator manufacturing essentially told the company to do what it was already doing.

38/While most ppl get better from #COVID19 w/out needing medical care, the sickest cannot breathe w/out a ventilator bridging them to recovery. The ventilator shortfall has bn the most frightening deficiency as more ppl get infected & die by the hr.

39/In the current chaos, the size of the shortfall nationally is not known. In the absence of what they regard as dependable fed leadership, sev states formed a supply consortium to coordinate purchases & boost their buying power. The fed gov has pitched in w states & private cos

40/ to spur supplies, tho not exactly in an atmosphere of trust.

Governors accuse Washington of shortchanging states on machines. Washington accuses some of them of trying to build an unreasonable cushion that deprives other, more desperate states.

41/According to the scientific model most favored by fed authorities, the country probably needs nearly 17,000 ventilators to be operating for COVID-19 patients alone at the pandemic's peak, right about now, a figure that exceeds 35,000 under a worst-case scenario.

42/“We have over 100k being built right now or soon 2b started,” Trump said a wk ago. He acknowledged they won't come in time.

WHERE'S THE MONEY?
“This will deliver urgently needed relief,” Trump said in signing #CARESAct into law. The need may be urgent but delivery hasn't bn

43/More than 2 wks later, #MoscowMitch said w some exaggeration, but not much, that "no has gone out theyet.”

Bec of the bureaucracy.

Bec of website glitches.

Bec of confusion among lenders w theto farm out & amg those who need it to keep their businesses afloat.

44/So much for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin's prediction that loans could be turned around and money transferred to businesses’ bank accounts the same day applications were received.

45/Yet bec of the flood of pending loans, Congress is already having to find more for subsidies to help businesses cover payroll. Only a tiny fraction of loans has been released. Meantime state officials r slammed as they try to admin jobless benefits that DC expanded & ...

46/is paying for but having states try to manage. Frustration w package is going viral. In Portland, ME, a furloughed orthopedic medical asst called U/E office on a day set aside for ppl w surnames starting w A through H & & . Altogether, she said, 291 times bef she gave up

47/whew ! That was a long one. Read the article, please. I made abbreviations to allow for character spacing & any name calling is from me!

Long story short? #TrumpIsACompleteFailure