Remember Trump’s gaslighting the American public, telling them COVID would simply go away after the election because it was just a hoax?
Right.
It’s still here. By Thanksgiving COVID will have taken more than a quarter million American lives if it continues to kill at a rate of 1,000 more per day.
This is the real hoax, playing out in front of use: Donald Trump is not a leader but a killer who has persistently tried to persuade us we’re imagining these deaths as anything more than a campaign ploy.
The campaign’s over and the cases and deaths are still mounting.
Fortunately we have a president-elect who is taking the pandemic seriously. Biden-Harris transition team has already issued a plan for combating COVID: BuildBackBetter.com/Priorities/COVID-19
While the plan is more of an executive summary at this point, work is already beginning on details:
Tomorrow: President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will receive a briefing in Wilmington, Delaware from the transition COVID-19 advisory board, after which Biden will deliver remarks. They‘ll then hold briefings with transition advisors in the afternoon.
— Sarah Mucha (@sarahmucha) November 9, 2020
Doctors Rick Bright, Atul Gawande, Luciana Borio, and Michael Osterholm are expected to be named advisers for Biden’s COVID-19 team.
This is what leadership and competency looks like when American lives are on the line. If nothing is done between now and Inauguration Day, at least another 73,000 Americans will die from COVID. It looks like Biden-Harris are taking this seriously and not treating it like a hoax.
There’s one big wrinkle, though, not of Biden-Harris’s making.
A single person at the General Services Administration is holding up the formal transition process — a Trump appointee who has previously refused to answer the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s questions regarding Trump’s D.C. hotel which operates out of the old U.S. Post Office building.
Trump appointee at GSA declines to sign letter authorizing Biden transition – The Washington Post https://t.co/DQ0PPNzbS5
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) November 9, 2020
States are going to suffer for the foot dragging by this lone obstructionist, GSA administrator Emily Murphy, protecting Trump. Red states will be hurt in particular since they are suffering the greatest proportional numbers of COVID cases, in part due to Trump’s campaign rallies. These ten states currently lead in number of cases per million residents:
North Dakota — 79408 cases per million
South Dakota — 67231
Iowa — 49899
Wisconsin — 49356
Utah — 47075
Idaho — 46191
Nebraska — 44716
Florida — 44281
Tennessee — 42816
Mississippi — 42534
When weighed against each states’ population, some of these numbers are obscene. South Dakota’s Gov. Kristi Noem’s weak-sauce advocacy for personal responsibility in lieu of a mask mandate in the face of the Sturgis Motor Cycle Rally during August demonstrated she isn’t capable of leading and protecting her state.
Utah announced Sunday night it’s implementing new restrictions including mandatory masks Monday:
Stay tuned — Gov. Gary Herbert plans to announce new coronavirus restrictions at 9:30 p.m., as the state is in the middle of an intense and worsening surge of cases.https://t.co/4Xpz4xIxOc
— The Salt Lake Tribune (@sltrib) November 9, 2020
Whether Utahns comply may depend on whether they believe what they are being told by both the state and federal government. At least Gov. Herbert sees ‘masks optional’ or personal responsibility doesn’t work.
For their sakes and their lives, let’s hope Utahns don’t wait for GSA’s Emily Murphy to do her goddamned job. Right now she’s endangering American lives.