Coronavirus Update 3: We Still Fly Blind, But at Least Trump Seems to be Awake Now

The president's press conference yesterday heralded a major, yuuuuge!, change in his demeanor and tone. It appears that the president has come to realize we have a bona fide public health emergency on our hands. Until yesterday, he was treating this as a public relations problem for himself, i.e., his fragile, endlessly needy ego, and his re-election. God only knows what brought this miracle about. Maybe it was God itself. Whatever it was, it sure wasn't the president on his own. He's not that self-aware.

We still fly blind because large scale coronavirus testing is still not in place or possible. Maybe by the end of this week testing will ramp up. Our eyes will begin to open a few days later so that we will probably start to see just how many people in America are infected. At present, we still have no idea.

An infectious disease expert, Ian Lipkin, on Rachael Maddow yesterday argued that total, nationwide social distancing is necessary at this point. He points to what 7 counties in the San Francisco bay area is doing as the model for what the nation needs to do. Maddow pointed out that America has no coordinated national response. That has left states and localities to act on their own in the information and leadership vacuum our inept president has created through his inaction.



Maddow played very persuasive comments by New York governor Andrew Cuomo asking for the president to deploy the Army corps of engineers to start building hospital overflow facilities right now. Cuomo points out that the federal government is the only government function in America with the authority and resources to act now to try to avoid a collapse of health care infrastructure in areas with high coronavirus infection rates.



Cuomo was pointed in arguing that America's for-profit business model does not allow for the building and maintaining of excess health care facilities. Unused hospital beds do not generate profits and thus there are no excess hospital beds for people who become critically ill. In other words, American capitalist for-profit health care does not care about public health emergencies. Capitalism cares only about profit, not the public interest.

So, the good news is that our president has probably risen above himself, at least for a day, and experts and governors are acutely aware of the situation and know what to do. Whether our stable genius president has the guts to act intelligently is an open question. Maybe we should be happy that he is simply awake, even if he is too inept to act on his awareness.