Spot the villain

  

Testing, testing, testing. It's been about 18 weeks since I left the property; that's more than an entire semester. You'd think that in that time the country could have gotten its act together on testing; that was what the lock-down was supposed to help with. Buy time, keep the numbers low, ramp up testing and tracing so that when we reopened, we'd be in a position to quickly isolate cases, quarantine and treat; that we we'd be resuming economic activity and aggressively controlling the spread.

But we (by which I mean Trump's administration) dropped the ball. That's not completely fair, of course. They really never picked it up in the first place. Happy talk about "it will magically disappear when it gets warm", "can we look into that?" about disinfectant, well, all of that utter piffle meant that there was no concerted federally led effort.

Testing was and is seen as shining light on the fact Trump managed to mishandle the situation letting it turn into a truly monumental disaster, both medically and economically. According to his niece, he lacks any empathy and so all he cares about is a metric by which he will be judged. And if we tests less we appear to have fewer cases.  But having fewer cases doesn't mean more people aren't getting sick.  It just means we don't know who and where they are so we have no way of controlling the spread.

And because we still don't have testing at scale, results are coming back in 7 days, which is comparable to the incubation period of the virus. So people may well realize they are sick before their test results come back. In the mean time they have been merrily passing the virus on.

Once the rate of new case arrivals exceeds the capacity to test trace and isolate, it's game over; at that point we can't stop it and it will rip largely unimpeded through the community. Only mask-wearing will slow it sufficiently to prevent hospital capacity being completely overwhelmed.

And of course, as has been well documented, for a variety of reasons it will hit poor communities and communities of color hardest.

But Trump doesn't give a damn; he just wants to create the impression that things are going well so that he can win re-election. Still more people will die needlessly.

So, which one of these two fine gentlemen is the sociopath?

(Trick question: they both are, but only one is real).