The timeline of events leading up to the disclosure of President Trump’s diagnosis point overwhelmingly to some mix of a coverup and gross negligence and likely both.Let’s review some key facts, as far as we presently know them.
The New Jersey Trip
Yesterday morning Hope Hicks received test results showing she was COVID positive. It’s not clear when the test was administered (we’ll get to that in a moment). But she received the confirmed positive test yesterday morning before Trump left for a campaign/fundraiser trip to New Jersey. On that trip Trump was frequently observed unmasked, including in an indoor roundtable meeting. He appears to have exposed dozens of people during that trip.
It is clear that the President’s medical staff and top staff (and almost certainly the President himself) knew before leaving on that trip that he had been exposed to COVID. But he went anyway and exposed dozens more.
That was at a minimum an act of gross irresponsibility.
As I’ll note in a moment it also suggests the strong possibility that the White House tried to keep the whole situation secret.
Who Infected Who and When?
Most people are assuming that Hicks infected President Trump. But based on what we know that’s not the only or even the most likely scenario. Indeed, their infections being discovered so close in time makes it probably more likely that some other person or persons infected both of them. But there are details here that don’t add up.
We’ve been led to believe that the President and the people around him are tested either daily or close to daily. The White House medical staff have both the rapid saliva tests which take on the order of 15 minutes or so and the PCR tests which a dedicated lab can turn around in something like an hour and a half. If these tests are being done that frequently there should never been more than hours between someone becoming virus positive (and thus infectious) and tripping off a test.
We know that you can be infectious before becoming symptomatic. Indeed there’s significant evidence that you’re more infectious before developing symptoms. But your infectiousness is about your viral load. A significant viral load should trip off a test.
But here’s the problem. We don’t just know Trump, Melania Trump and Hicks are COVID-positive. They all appear to be actively symptomatic, sick. Presumably their symptoms are currently mild. But it is unlikely that all three people reached viral levels capable of testing positive and became actively sick on the same day.
This throws into some question whether the top people at the White House, including the President, are actually being tested on a daily basis. It also suggests that these three and likely others have been infectious and possibly actively sick for a significant period of time. There’s some mix of failed surveillance and/or secrecy about what the surveillance has found.
Were They Keeping It a Secret?
A critical part of this equation is that the White House didn’t come forward with any of this. Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News learned that Hicks had tested positive and reported that last night. That immediately focused attention on the President’s exposure and forced the overnight disclosure of his illness. Were they planning on disclosing that Hicks had tested positive? That is at best unclear. They hadn’t disclosed that Ronna McDaniel, the head of the RNC who met with Trump last week, tested positive. We just found that out this morning. And what about Trump himself? Trump had repeatedly traveled with Hicks. Her diagnosis Thursday morning should have led to President Trump’s being immediately tested and possibly diagnosed yesterday morning or at the latest in the afternoon. But news reports last night suggested – though without saying so directly – that they were being tested and waiting on results last night.
This timeline has serious holes in it.
This is a crisis situation. Things can get confused. And because it is a crisis situation we can’t assume that all the reporting we have is complete or entirely accurate. We can’t point with total confidence to the contradiction between two apparent facts. Because none of them are that certain. But there are lots of indications that the White House was trying to keep this information under wraps and possibly endangered the lives of numerous people in doing so, including that of the President himself and possibly his challenger Vice President Biden.
― idkwtf (Karl Malone), Friday, 2 October 2020 16:32 (three years ago) link