No Walter Reed for them
It’s not just aides who are at risk in the White House.
The West Wing has reportedly turned into a “ghost town” amid complaints that the White House has failed to trace potential contacts of Trump and his infected aides, with many now working from home even as the president exhorted Americans “not to be afraid of Covid”.
Aides can work from home. You know who can’t?
That has left behind a skeleton staff of about 100 butlers, ushers, cleaners, custodians and maintenance workers, who are often older and drawn from groups at higher risk of developing severe symptoms of the virus, including a butler’s corp that has historically almost exclusively been black.
That work is hands-on, and it’s also not what gets on the news shows.
Members of the Secret Service, who protect the president, have also been thrown into the spotlight with some present and former members complaining anonymously they felt Trump had put service members at risk when they accompanied him on a controversial “drive-by” stunt outside the Walter Reed hospital.
That’s not a feeling, it’s a fact. A frivolous unnecessary trip in a sealed car with someone who has the virus just is risky. Masks help but they don’t make social distancing unnecessary; we’re told to do both. A ride in the car-car with zero ventilation is not doing both.
A still contagious Trump returned to the White House on Monday and defiantly took off his mask on entering the building as complaints grew inside over the lack of precautions taken by the president and his entourage.
Reporting on this has been incensed at his strolling into the building without a mask.
Reports from within the White House paint a picture of workers spooked by a lack of information over when and how certain officials became infected, with many blaming the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, for the information vacuum.
Others have pointed to the fact that Trump and his medical team have refused to disclose when the president received his last negative test, making it impossible for many to know if they had contact with him in a period when he was potentially contagious.
Why would they do that? Why would they refuse? No doubt because the information is damning. Did he know he was infected Wednesday? Tuesday? It makes a difference. So he tries to cover his ass at the expense of other people’s safety. Of course he does.
Oh and by the way that’s a big no on the contact tracing.
According to the New York Times, quoting an unidentified official, the White House had decided not to trace the contacts of guests and staff members who were at the Rose Garden celebration 10 days ago for Trump’s supreme court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, where at least eight people, including the president, may have become infected.
Instead, the source told the paper the efforts had been limited to notifying people who came into close contact with Trump in the two days before his Covid diagnosis on Thursday evening.
“This is a total abdication of responsibility by the Trump administration,” Dr Joshua Barocas, a public health expert at Boston University, told the paper. “The idea that we’re not involving the Centers for Disease Control to do contact tracing at this point seems like a massive public health threat.”
Yes but you see they don’t care.
YES! Something people around here definitely do not understand. The masked people will converge on you quickly in the grocery store. Of course, the unmasked are even worse, because they seem to want to terrify people who are wearing masks.
On the getting out of the hospital thing, any other patient in quarantine would probably not have been released. The big bully we have for a president demands, and gets. I imagine it’s been that way his whole life, from the moment he was born. “Want!” he screams, and someone gives it to him.
His entire administration has been one long abdication of responsibility. At least with Dubya there were some responsible adults (though most of them were malevolent). Trump surrounds himself with toadies.
We know he’s a liar but we have him demonstrating that he’s a hypocrite. He should never have gone to a hospital. After all, covid is nothing to be concerned with. We can only hope his followers have more integrity than he does and stay away from any health care providers if they become ill, just in case it’s covid. You know, the disease that is at once a hoax and a mild disease which should cause no concern whatsoever. I can’t imagine why he hasn’t come out already and stopped all that nonsense about looking for a vaccine. A vaccine for what? A sniffle?
iknklast – here too. I am so sick of having to evade people in masks who won’t deviate an inch from the middle of the sidewalk. Masks are not kryptonite, people!
Going to the store for a simple thing feels like being part of a Pac-Man game. I blame Trump. Most of these people probably wouldn’t have thought about their right to infect others if it weren’t for the giant orange toddler screaming all the time. They would have stuck a mask on their face. And maybe they would learn to do that and social distance.
I guess not only that your mileage may differ, but that it does differ. When I go out on the street nearly everyone is masked, and everyone, masked or not, takes care not to go too close to others. Here in Marseilles we’re not noted for our punctilious obedience to every rule, but in practice the Covid-19 rules are generally obeyed. Mind you, I live in a leafy suburb, not in the centre of the city (where I haven’t been for many months) or, worse, the crime- and drug-ridden Quartiers Nord (exaggeration, of course: the great majority of people who live there are not criminals or drug addicts), and it may be different there. Nonetheless, I suppose most of the people who post here also live in salubrious areas.
Athel, I suspect the difference is a great deal about the United States. The ‘heartland’, where I live, is Trump country, and most of the people are unmasked. The only group I consistently see wearing masks are the elderly – which I constantly hear from kids is the problem group that refuses to wear masks (though for them, it is “Boomers”, and while I realize that most of the elderly these days are Boomers, there are still some older people around). The least likely to be masked are those from about 18 to 50. If I were in Lincoln, they have a mask mandate for public places in the city. They are the only area remaining under restrictions, per our governor’s order, in spite of the fact that we are high on the list of new cases per capita. My boss was extolling yesterday how there are fewer cases, they are less severe, and fewer requiring hospitalization. I suspect he is leading up to requiring everyone to return to in-person classes, since yesterday’s newspaper reported the single highest increase in cases we have had during the pandemic, and that the hospitals in the area are worrying about capacity.