Erin Banco and Aswin Suebsaeng explain just how lax the White House testing regimen for COVID-19 is at The Daily Beast:
The White House may house some of the most important figures in government. But for months, the testing protocols to screen potentially infectious individuals have been more lax than the president’s aides present to the public.
Olivia Troye, a former senior adviser for the White House coronavirus task force, said in an interview Friday morning that “the majority of people who work in” the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which houses most offices for White House staffers, “weren’t getting tested daily” when they “went into the West Wing for meetings.”
“I knew this because you have to be on the list to get tested and I know from talking to them,” Troye recalled. “It was going to be a time constraint and a resource constraint… These were more junior staffers who weren’t seeing the president, but from what we know about how this virus spreads, that… wasn’t keeping people safe.”
Two individuals familiar with the matter said that after National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien tested positive for the virus July 27, the White House implemented a new testing policy that said all officials and staffers in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building agree to random coronavirus testing. It marked the first time the White House made it mandatory for employees to get tested, despite several individuals testing positive before that date. But, as outlined in a memo The Daily Beast previously obtained, there were still holes in the plan: Not every official was tested every day.
“They basically picked names out of a hat,” one official said.
Under the testing regimen, the “failure to report to testing” would be “considered a refusal to test,” while an individual could defer testing “based on a compelling need.” Exceptions included those who had teleworked for more than 30 days or planned to in the following two weeks, employees on approved leave or on official travel, or people who were not in the immediate vicinity of the building during testing hours.
There were, officials said, other problems with the testing protocols. For starters, staffers in the EEOB said they have been concerned about the accuracy of the tests administered—swab tests with near immediate results. And one other EEOB official said that while not everyone in the building has been required to work from the office, some individuals who experienced symptoms over the last several months were able to stay at work before securing a time to be tested.
At the White House, those entering the compound had reportedly been required to take Abbott point-of-care swab tests. But scientists said those have mixed results and it’s unclear what tests are being administered now. Over time, the universe of those subjected to testing has been decreased to those who work closely with the president. The White House does not mandate the wearing of face masks either.
The administration’s testing protocol for those invited to join the president on Air Force One has also struck many as seriously flawed. According to a congressional aide, the White House didn’t always make guests isolate after getting the test that is required in order to go on the plane, meaning that a guest could get tested and then go about their business—risking exposure—before boarding. “It didn’t inspire confidence,” said the aide.
Much more at the link.
This was all preventable. Mandatory use of masks, proper social distancing, minimizing in person contact, authorizing as much telework as possible, regular hand washing, having a proper testing regime, and ACTUALLY LISTENING TO LEGITIMATE SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS AND FOLLOWING THEIR SCIENTIFICALLY BASED MEDICAL ADVICE AND RECOMMENDATIONs would have all reduced the probability of what is happening. Instead the President couldn’t even be bothered to do the easiest and least difficult type of leadership: leading by example by wearing a mask, keeping his events few and almost exclusively by video teleconference, and listening to Dr. Fauci.
Hire a clown, expect a circus.
We are off the looking glass and through the map!
Open thread!
Yutsano
No Amendment 25 letter yet. I wonder if he’s too proud.
dmsilev
Clowns, for all the terror that they engender, work hard at their craft. Comparing them to Trump is really unfair to clowns. If nothing else, clown makeup looks better and is more naturalistic.
PsiFighter37
Reading that Tillis got it too. Going to be a real damn shame when he gets his ass handed to him by an even bigger margin in a month.
BGinCHI
When they reach out for ventilators for the WH crew, I hope they’re from Tesla.
BGinCHI
@dmsilev: Plus the balloon animals.
No way Trump can do that.
dr. bloor
Richest nation on the planet, playing it fast and loose with the simplest of responses in the face of a pandemic. The only thing I worry about with respect to Trump taking a dirt nap is that it will free voters to go Republican because he’s not the face of the party anymore.
dr. bloor
@dmsilev: Interestingly enough, clowns are not quite as terror-inducing as the WH crew.
dmsilev
@PsiFighter37: One or two more Senate Judiciary Republicans taken offline, and they have a bit of a problem.
lamh36
Don’t even GET me started.
Yutsano
Alexandra Petri is all of us right now. National treasure doesn’t even cover her.
Roger Moore
@Yutsano:
I want to see the 25th invoked so we can have an acting President to go with all the other acting officials in the cabinet.
lamh36
Boy…fool even got the Secret Service pissed enough to leak about being pissed…
https://twitter.com/markberman/status/1312189722949677056
Adam L Silverman
@lamh36:
via GIPHY
Anoniminous
Guess the Republican’s ability to create their own reality has evaporated.
jl
They could have had any fricken test in the whole world that they wanted, one of them should have met the time and trouble constraints. There are poor countries in Africa using high quality rapid tests as part of their control program (and doing pretty darn good, better than us). The WH could have called one of them for advice, maybe they’d send a charity starter kit
Edit: and they could had super expert advice on how to optimize a screening protocol with tests and other stuff, to fit their very fastidious needs. Did they even ask?
Sab
We are in October now. November is just a month away. I am angry already that my husband and I will be sitting down to our tiny chicken while Dad sits alone in his nursing home and my stepkids eat their tiny chickens across town.
I work seasonally. I never gave actual official notice to my accounting firm last Spring, since it was a hectic time. They don’t wear masks. I suppose I should tell them I won’t be back. They aren’t running ads and it’s already October.
ETA corrections for typing with thumbs
Ruckus
Hire a GOP clown, expect an elephant shit show.
Fixed it for you.
jl
@dr. bloor: ‘clowns are not quite as terror-inducing as the WH crew’
Those sinister clowns in the woods from a while back surely have decided to throw out their wigs and big shoes, go home and take up tiddly winks, stamp collecting, some other hobby. Why would they even bother, no way to compete with this mess.
Anoniminous
@dmsilev:
They can always temporarily assign Senators to the committee.
The only snag I see is they lose enough so they no longer have a working majority on the floor.
Lapassionara
@lamh36: whoa, that is unexpected. That agency is famously tight-lipped.
frosty
@Yutsano: Petri’s column was perfect. “I got up to get a sandwich” LOL. Exactly the way I feel. I thought I’d be doing something interesting when I retired, like pick up a new hobby or improve my guitar playing. Nope, it’s news news news. Mostly through B-J, though.
Ken
Since Trump’s in the hospital anyway, maybe this would be a good time to get that DNA sample for E. Jean Carroll.
Villago Delenda Est
Frankly, all these people deserve to get sick and become inches away from a visit from the grim reaper. Who will tell them “YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN TESTED MORE”.
RaflW
The whole damn Admin is like the ValuJet Presidency. Cut corners, give the appearance of following regs while not having any substantive interest in a culture of safety, all to make the mercurial, shitty CEO happy.
patrick II
Word Template: The White House _________________________________________ was haphazard and slipshod.
jl
After reading the article, I don’t think they even bothered to ask how to get a good daily test program going. Resource constraints? For the WH?
Been a lot of research by disease control experts on how to optimize screening protocols for different situations. They can be done right tippity top now, just not at any scale. The WH doesn’t need that much scale.
And apart from that, they never heard of Zoom? Skype? HouseParty (I think that’s the name). Buelller…. Bueller…
Edit: Maybe lamh an chime in. If you don’t need scale, there is a zoo of tests, and multiple test and screening protocols that can be done, and some of them for months.
Kay
Oh, they can’t run anything. Everything they do is poor quality work. We were supposed to be believe they were managing their own people well? Why would anyone think that? This is just the first time their incompetence has hurt them instead of other people.
dr. bloor
@jl: Stephen King’s rage at the current administration is surely rooted in the knowledge that had he written a novel about the last four years, his editor would have kicked it back to him with a post-it saying that readers would be incapable of suspending disbelief to this extent.
Immanentize
@Villago Delenda Est: Pratchett
jl
@dr. bloor: He should be above artistic jealousy at this point. But.. he’ll think of something after he simmers down.. seems mature enough. We all lose our cool at times of stress.
lamh36
@Adam L Silverman: I literally posted a whole twitter thread last night about COVID testing protocol at my last hospital right before the news of Trump’s positive result…LOL
I really am trying to chillax this weekend before starting the new job Monday…LOL.
Suffice it to say, SMH…as Microbiologiat who has dealt with infectious disease my entire career and…knock on wood…have never gotten exposed or infected doing the job…this entire business of not taking bare minimum “universal precautions”…one of first things u are taught about in Med lab school…is INFURIATING to see
piratedan
@jl: they could have gone Roche, they could have sourced a real medical instrument Lab for PCR, and those results tend to be above 95% accurate, instead they went cheap (like everything Trump does) and went Abbott and they didn’t even bother to test everyone
The Dangerman
Basically children wanting to eat at the big persons table.
Amateurs and Assholes all the way down.
dmsilev
Washington Post wins the Most Terrifying Headline award:
Kay
If this is over in November and all these people get fired and go back wherever they came from, can we have some kind of national observation that we have lost more than 200,000 people to this? It’s obscene that we haven’t done that.
Inspectrix
I really, really hope that the WH housekeepers, kitchen staff, butlers, Secret service, don’t get sick. We might not hear about them because they aren’t public figures.
We had a small Early Thanksgiving last month outdoors with a few relatives since we knew November would be impossible to enjoy outdoors in New England.
Adam L Silverman
@lamh36: I was teasing. I actually forwarded your thread to several retired general officers I’ve worked for and still consult for and with.
jl
@piratedan: There is a lot of research on multiple test screening protocols. You can combine a sequence of tests to tailor time, specificity and sensitivity to optimize screening. You get synergies, dude, synergies.
Michael Mina lab twitter is a good place to start, if you want to impress friends and family with inside dope on it.
@michaelmina_lab
https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab
I don’t think they cared enough to even try, even ask. Maybe just said, ‘Hey, send over some test kits, and don’t bother us about it no more, HoKay?’.
Edit: and the lesson of the article in the post, and Mina’s tweets today is, I think, a better testing protocol, along with some even half assed precautions, probably would have stopped the chain of transmission before it got how knows how many top GOP brass and the president infected. From looks of his tweets, Mina hasn’t read how lousy the testing was yet.
Shalimar
@Yutsano: 25th Amendment is the backup plan, if the president is incapacitated. The primary method of making Pence acting president would be for Trump to sign an order transferring power for a specific period of time or indefinitely.
They aren’t doing either of those as long as Trump is awake and alert. It isn’t like he does anything presidential most days anyway. He can watch Fox and tweet from a hospital bed.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@The Dangerman: How are you feeling, saw on a dead thread you have the ‘rona?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kay: You mean like the 9-11 anniversary?
Ken
Hoping that… something will change soon and allow the US government to use better health protocols?
piratedan
@jl: i know, I handle lab software support, these asshats continually half-ass everything (as in the GOP) I fucking loathe them….
schrodingers_cat
Were Mitch and Lindsey at the super spreader event in the Rose garden? I saw Jabba Barr.
jl
@piratedan: OK, maybe you can post an informed rant on all the possibilities they didn’t even bother to ask about. I’d be interested in hearing from people like you or lamh on it.
Just unbelievable.
The Dangerman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I feel fine, thanks. No obvious symptoms at all. Maybe a bit tired and a slight headache but in 2020 I’m not calling those things symptoms. No cough, trouble breathing, etc
Jim, Foolish Literalist
So Tucker’s on a roll, apparently
anybody else remember, as I do, that Tucker started out as a sort of nerdy libertarian– I mean, that was his schtick, he affected a bow tie which I always took to be some kind of signal to other media types, the ones who might hire him, that he was some kind of young George Will
Nicole
You know… I find learning that the WH was as incompetent about testing at the White House as they are about absolutely everything else very reassuring. I was a bit worried, after all the talk about the key to pushing down the virus being testing, and then the WH, which we’d been told was testing like crazy, has this huge outbreak. It’s reassuring to realize that, no, they were just lying about that, too.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@schrodingers_cat: I believe it’s Jabba the Barr.
Sab
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Our neighborhood 9/11 memorial, planted on a public traffic island, couldn’t be bothered to lower the flag for Ginsberg. The flagpole actually has a lock on it. We don’t know who is in charge, I don’t want to be petty, but I am actually seriously irked. I think I will have an extremely subversive tiny float in next year’s 4th of July parade. Ideas would be appreciated. Maybe a Ginsberg float.
Villago Delenda Est
@Immanentize: Aye!
Kay
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Oh, I don’t know. I’m actually bad at ceremonies. But some people are good at it. I think a recognition, mourning, is important. Obviously I dislike these people but even with that I cannot help but notice how the whole country has stopped to follow their health issues and we have lost more than 200,000 people with no formal, national recognition of that from the Trump Administration at all. I can’t help but notice that.
But we can do it when they leave. It will be better then anyway. Covid changed a lot of funerals. We’ll call this one “delayed until it could be conducted appropriately”.
jl
HW assignment for BJ political mavens, discuss amongst yourselves.
“@JoeBiden
Please put your ads back on the air ASAP. Trump is a profound danger to the future of the company. His infection with Covid changes nothing. The Trump campaign is collapsing. Destroying Trump and Trumpism is a moral imperative. This is the time to strike harder”
https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1312203719044296705
Even with a mild case, Trump will be in peril for three weeks. If his case is getting serious, up until election. Biden campaign can’t shut down that long. What to do? Above my political kibbitzing paygrade.
Villago Delenda Est
@dmsilev: As if he doesn’t have enough already.
RaflW
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I partly blame PBS for credentialing that shit heel with a show, however briefly.
Damien
@Adam L Silverman: Out of curiosity, what happens to belligerents in a low-intensity conflict when their leader is incapacitated?
asking for a friend
Sab
@Nicole: Also reassured about them phucking up the election. They want to but probably they aren’t up to the job.
Anoniminous
SARS-CoV-2 is a Class IV Biohazard:
“Biohazard Level 4: Viruses that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available”
NIH, etc., lab protocol for handling the beastie is full body containment suit with its own oxygen supply.
Further, “The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system(s,) and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent doors from both opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.”
Those dumb ignorant hick bigots wandered around not even masked and gloved.
Crashman06
@jl: I thought he only cancelled his negative ads. Didn’t think he was shutting down anything else?
dr. bloor
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Some have suggested that getting pantsed by Jon Stewart was a formative moment for him. I think he just saw more screen time and money in being a more gentile version of Alex Jones.
Sab
@Kay: My Dad’s nurse’s aide has lost two immediate family members to Covid. And she still goes to work for Dad every single day.
The Dangerman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I feel so well that I wonder if I could be a false positive. The public health nurse said the test was reliable and dropped the number 95 percent on me. I dunno. 1 in 20 false positives didn’t impress me much (/Shania)
Kristine
According to the Twitter (Sam Wang retweet), Kellyanne Conway tested (+) for COVID-19.
https://twitter.com/jttkemp/status/1312207017885401089
piratedan
@jl: i’ll defer to lamh36 since she still works the bench, the thing is their testing protocol is obvious bullshit… if we’re talking about the Presidency, you test at a minimum two layers deep, those he meets with on a day to day basis that share the same room with him and then everyone else that those people come in contact with. Then you also (for shits and giggles) test everyone who cleans and supports the building and everyone who makes a delivery. You can simply do a temp check and a point of care test. You fail either one, you get ushered to a room for a PCR test.
you dedicate a lab to run the tests (PCR) for anyone who comes out with a strip positive for confirmation. You have a couple of of instruments running (there’s usually a 50 minute turnaround from specimen load to result), one at the top of the hour and the other at the bottom. Once you have a yea or nay, you decide what your protocol requires next.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Sab: When I lived up in the hill country of Glendale, we had weekly peace vigil at the local veterans memorial. It had a 24 hour flag, the guy in charge of the flag would take it down before we’d arrive and put it back up after we left.
jonas
Which at this point pretty much deserves to replace “E pluribus unum” as the national motto. What would that be…”si asinum elegeris, circum expecte”?
ThresherK
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Tucker Carlson “affected a bow tie which I always took to be some kind of signal to other media types”
That message is “I’m Mo Rocca”, and I refuse to give up the idea that he was hired at least twice by companies who thought they’d inked Rocca.
HumboldtBlue
Steve Schmidt has a few words to type.
Eljai
I’m seeing twitters about Claudia Conway saying her mom has covid. I wonder if it’s really true. That would be…something.
Kay
@jl:
I disagree. I think it was time for a positive closing argument for Biden anyway. I was hoping they would pivot. People vote earlier now. It was time to go from anti-Trump to pro-Biden.
The Lincoln Party people aren’t Democrats. They have some different goals. It’s not the Democrats job to reform or reinvent the GOP. Democrats have their own agenda and it involves more than being anti-Trump.
Miss Bianca
@jl: Did you notice that those sinister clown sightings back in 2016 stopped almost simultaneously with Trump getting elected?
HumboldtBlue
@Sab:
I gotta say, for as tough a spot as I am in one thing I get reminded of every goddamn day is I am fortunate and that others are struggling terribly.
Roger Moore
@piratedan:
I think this is less about cost and more about speed. PCR assays take an hour or two, and nobody wants to have to wait that long for a meeting. So they went with the 15 minute test so visitors wouldn’t have to wait too long before seeing the President. The bigger problem is that they couldn’t run a rigorous testing program. They probably should have had a regular PCR based survey testing program for everyone and the 15 minute quickie test for one-time visitors. Instead, they had a slipshod system that didn’t test everyone regularly but gave them the perception of safety.
jl
@piratedan: Thanks. That sounds like protocols I’ve read, but not an expert, so don’t understand the details and would get them mixed up.
But, wow. Poor countries like Senegal have been doing that kind of thing for a while, and gradually scaling it up for top notch prevention outbreak control for large areas of the country. So, compare that to the WH, with the most powerful person in the world. We have become a very weird and dysfunctional country.
Senegal has like $4K per capita GDP, and they got $500 million or so aid, and they can manage something like that. No place in the US can. Well, except maybe for pro sports.
Another Scott
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
NPR from 9/29:
(Emphasis added.)
They said the quiet parts out loud – in court.
Cheers,
Scott.
jl
@Roger Moore: Chime in if you have a proposal. I think piratedan’s main idea is that you can put one person through a sequence of tests and tailor it to get the time and trouble and characteristics of the total protocol optimized.
Edit: OTOH, if they couldn’t find a protocol that worked, they could have just taken some simple transmission precautions (anyone explain to them you can do meetings with masks on?), or said eff it, you Zoom in for this or that meeting. It’s just all total FUBAR everything with them on stuff that would make an interesting middle school science project, and that a good group of students would ace.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@dr. bloor: he’s been fired at least once by every major cable network, I think his MSNBC incarnation, before they settled on a leftward drift, was a would-be groovy (yeah, I typed groovy) moderate/libertarian. IIRC Rachel Maddow transitioned from radio to TV with a regular guest spot on that show. I remember thinking Rachel made Tucker nervous.
Now that I’m reminiscing… Pat Buchanan was a regular on TRMS when it started out. They had a graphic and a theme song introduction him as “Uncle Pat”, as in your crabby and probably a little nutty right-wing uncle. I always suspected the segment didn’t last because Buchanan may be nuts, but he was lucid enough to realize they were taking the piss out of him
Kay
@Sab:
My daughter has an 8 month old. She treats people every day and I worry about her every day. You know what she doesn’t do? She doesn’t attend fancy parties and refuse to wear a mask. She sacrifices on social events to attempt to limit the risk she’ll contract this and die. That’s what most of us have been doing- elaborate risk analysis that always involved not doing things we enjoy so that we could shift as much risk to “essential” activities. We all have been doing that. Except these people. Who inexplicably decided to hold parties to crown the new justice. 19,000 Amazon warehouse workers contracted this at work. These people volunteered to expose themselves at a completely non-essential social event. So why are we not mourning the Amazon group but are mourning this group? I think I prefer the Amazon employees, frankly. I’ll spend a day on them.
piratedan
@Roger Moore: usual turnaround on these is roughly 50 minutes from instrument load, the maguffin is procurement, labelling, transport to the lab (which can vary depending on where you are and how close the lab actually is), normally known as turnaround time, most ER’s run in the 5-15 minute range and this is what you would prefer to run at since it’s the US seat of government, coming off the instrument its a matter of reviewing the result and accepting it. results sent electronically, that’s a very small window generally but you also have to account for humans being humans and paying attention. so yeah 90 minutes, the thing is, we’re talking about the safety of the President, sorry if you’re inconvenienced in a pandemic
SiubhanDuinne
Aaaaand … Kellyanne Conway’s tested positive!
zhena gogolia
@Kay:
I am so furious I can’t see straight.
Eljai
@SiubhanDuinne: I saw her daughter posted it on TikTok in the last 30 minutes or so and now Kellyanne confirmed it on her own Twitter account. I wonder if she would have said anything if her daughter had not called her out.
Another Scott
@Kay: All the “Amazon 19,000” stories I’ve seen say that they tested positive or were presumed positive, not that they contracted it at work. I’m not sure how they would know where it was contracted, given it’s out of a population of 1.3 M employees (unless they’re doing a mountain of contact tracing, which it seems unlikely Amazon would pay for).
Cheers,
Scott.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s worse than that, Pat’s segment on TRMS was called “It’s Pat”.
prostratedragon
The dawn of empiricism
SiubhanDuinne
@Eljai:
Kellyanne was at that Rose Garden party — unmasked, of course. I saw a video clip that showed her in very close conversation with Bill Barr (also maskless), at one point whispering something in his ear. Wonder if he’ll be the next one to report testing positive. We can but hope…
zhena gogolia
@SiubhanDuinne:
I heard he was negative. But I guess it’s early days.
jl
@Another Scott: CA had to pass a law just last week to mandate notification of workers at non-retail worksites if they were exposed. More than six months into the epidemic. Unbelievable how badly the US fails to protect its essential workers.
Other counties have been much stricter, and several are getting even extra stricter, on uniform protections across all workers, recreation, residential all settings. Probably why many countries are doing much better.
In CA construction sites, distribution, agriculture, food processing, big sources of transmission that have been badly neglected. A horrible equity and moral issue, but also a serious disease control issue.
Edit: and as I’ve noted before, so sorry to repeat, but contact tracing and outbreak control is split in a bad way between public health departments and CA occupational health and safety. We stink at solving this problem at every level.
Kay
@zhena gogolia:
I’m so glad you get what I’m saying- I know you have been saying it for a while.
We sacrificed a lot to try to keep one another safe. I have not seen my oldest son in more than a year. MOST of us are working in places that are NOT safe. These people sacrificed nothing and in fact may have infected a lot of innocent people with the absolutely insanely selfish act of holding those SCOTUS parties. They deny themselves nothing and then demand we all show sympathy. Do they really not know what Americans have been thru since March? They’re just now realizing that people get sick and die of this? I mean, Jesus Christ- it’s selfishness to the point of mental illness.
Percysowner
@lamh36: Funny, I remember various main stream press outlets reporting rumors of how much the Secret Service hated Hillary Clinton because she was a bitch on wheels. I never believed it although I am sure the Secret Service isn’t free from misogyny , so some of them may have thought that.
Now when they are
sent to the cornfield, “forced” to protect Hillary I imagine they are thanking God and kissing the ground she walks on, because I am absolutely certain that Hillary wears her masks, social distances and washes her hands like a champ AND makes sure her Secret Service people are safe.Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
Well, not to be heartless or anything, but it will be easier to manage what promises to be a logistically complicated election process without Bill Barr and his thuggish, corrupt lawyers deliberately screwing up the works.
So he can take some time off – he should take his shitty, sleazy hires with him. They need to quarantine too.
mrmoshpotato
Amended.
Another Scott
@jl: Yup.
The only way we’re going to get a handle on Covid is via national standards, procedures, reporting, notification, etc. It’s a national problem.
It didn’t have to be this bad. If we had kept our CDC surveillance people in China, we probably would have known about the outbreak there in November. Donnie’s people wasted almost a year, helped kill over a million people around the world, and they’re not done yet.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
prostratedragon
@lamh36:
I saw your thread last night –the miracles and wonders are piling up– and saved it for reference. Thanks for it.
Cheryl Rofer
RaflW
@Kay: “These people volunteered to expose themselves at a completely non-essential social event.”
One of the reasons the priest who is president of Notre Dame should resign. His presence there was marginally necessary. Not wearing a mask, and shaking hands (both the contact and the close distance to do the shaking are problematic). Just reckless.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Cheryl Rofer: thank you for that, I’ve been wondering
and why O why was Lindsey G not there?
James E Powell
@HumboldtBlue:
That link goes nowhere. Did you mean this thread?
James E Powell
@mrmoshpotato:
This was all preventable by Comey keeping his big mouth shut.
Uncle Cosmo
@Kay: According to this paper in the NEJM, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the USA was identified on – wait for it –
January 20, 2020.
If that date holds up, I would hope the new President would note that in his inaugural speech, and request a long moment of silence for the (in all likelihood) > 300,000 lives lost.
(And I would hope some thought would be given to a milestone date for a fuller commemoration later in the year.)
debbie
@BGinCHI:
Hell, I hope the shelves are empty, like they are for us.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Sab:
Lady Liberty in a slightly spiky lace collar?
brantl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He is a young George Will, as he ‘matures’, he’s turning into a bigger and bigger opinionated-without-true-facts inveterate assholes.