Trump has COVID: How is this political?
I’m blown away by how much more engagement a newsletter about Trump drives than a newsletter about anything else I’ve written. I now viscerally understand why every media organization puts him front and center all the time - it gets eyeballs, clicks, and views.
The President having COVID continues to be the biggest story in the world. I wrote earlier this week about how sick the President appeared to be based on the information released about his test results and treatments.
Since then, Trump has been discharged from the hospital and seems intent on doing as much as he can to continue to spread the virus. From taking off his mask immediately to shunning contact tracing, it is only possible to draw one reasonable conclusion:
The President is objectively pro-COVID.
The superspreader events (yes, that is events, plural!) at the White House are shocking but ultimately sort of unsurprising for anyone who has been following the federal response to the pandemic.
What is happening?
The president is still at risk
Trump is only about a week into his symptoms. Although he was discharged from the hospital and doesn’t appear to need supplemental oxygen any longer, he isn’t in the clear just yet.
Descent into the media coverage of Trump’s illness is not something I would recommend. You’ll wind up simultaneously more stressed out and more confused.
Here are a few of the important take home points:
There is some type of cover up going on - either about how long he was sick, how often he was tested, when his first positive test came back. Maybe all of these things. I started to do some investigative work to sort through the lies, but I got sick of it and decided to move on with my life.
The President’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, is complicit in the cover-up and is making the public health fallout worse (more on this below)
The President likely has COVID pneumonia, which you can infer from Dr. Sean Conley’s unwillingness to report his chest CT scan, despite release of other, more positive, information about his health
His need for supplemental oxygen puts him in a higher risk category, and he is likely only at the beginning of the disease course. A week into symptoms means that he isn’t out of the window when he could get significantly worse. At least another week of symptoms is likely.
There’s another point that I’ve seen a lot in the news that I’d like to rebut: the suggestions that dexamethasone is making the President act euphoric and crazy.
While steroids certainly make a patient feel better and cause strange behavior in a minority of patients, I’d like to offer two counterpoints that the medication is not making him act insane: (1) the last 74 years of his life and (2) his Twitter feed, which is really just a corollary to point 1.
Sure, dexamethasone can cause mania, but the burden of proof here should be to demonstrate that this is new behavior rather than just an adult man acting the same way he has acted for almost 8 decades.
But let’s move on.
This isn’t a political newsletter. I don’t want to be talking about this
Unfortunately, with their actions, the administration has left people who want this to be about the medicine no choice but to get into the politics.
Without context, new information is useless.
And the context with this pandemic right now is that the deliberate action of our administration is currently making things worse.
The surreal part is that they’re taking these actions as the President and quite a few members of his administration are literally infected with SARS-CoV-2. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Trump White House is actually doing the opposite of what they should be doing in almost every realm.
The “why” behind their decision making is pretty simple: They don’t know any better, and they don’t care.
The world would be so much better if I could just write about COVID clinical trials or a discussion of the sensitivities of different rapid tests. Or, even better, the early results from vaccine clinical trials.
But we’re not there right now, because the Trump administration is undermining us and putting us all at risk.
The Trump administration is failing themselves
The public health keys to contain a pandemic are testing, contact tracing, and isolation.
The White House has deliberately done none of these things well. They are choosing not to do contact tracing around the recent superspreader events. They are choosing not to isolate with positive tests.
And on the testing front, they seem to have believed their own lies about the accurary of testing. The incompetence is sort of stunning - they have access to the smartest health experts in the world but still don’t seem to understand the basics of testing characteristics and the concepts of a false negative or an incubation period.
But they aren’t just failing from a public health perspective, each individual is also choosing to put him or herself at risk by refusing the individual keys to stay safe during this pendemic: masks and physical distancing.
Most of the folks in the White House didn’t need to get infected, but here we are.
The Trump administration is also failing the rest of us by misleading us about the severity of COVID
I already mentioned that they’re doing all of the usual pandemic-containment work poorly or not at all.
But the more insidious part of this is the constant downplaying of a virus that’s killed 200,000 Americans and counting.
While there’s a lot of blame to go around, special attention needs to go towards Dr. Sean Conley, who seems to view his public role as describing how strong the President is instead of framing this in a more intellectually honest way: an elderly man with underlying medical problems was admitted to the hospital with a viral pneumonia and hypoxia necessitating supplemental oxygen which was complicated by acute kidney injury.
I recognize that Dr. Conley is not a public health official - he’s the President’s doctor - but to describe that the President’s [incomplete] recovery has been driven by his personal strength rather than as a result of high quality health care (with the Regenron monoclonal antibody exception) serves as an implicit claim that those who died from COVID-19 did so because of personal weakness.
To be cavalier about COVID is the ultimate act of privilege. It’s easier to dismiss concern about this virus when you know that you’ll have access to top quality health care and won’t lose your job if you get sick.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me
I’m no longer surprised about the willful incompetence. But I am getting more and more outraged.
Why would the leader who never cared whether we had enough PPE in the hospital care about contact tracing?
Why would the leader who wanted to do less testing care about understanding the accuracy of his own diagnostic tests?
Why would the leader who told us about the danger of masks care if he was exposing his own secret service to the virus in a closed vehicle?
That’s why the only surprising thing in this whole fiasco is that Trump isn’t on hydroxychloroquine. He never cared in the first place whether it worked when he told you about it, but I did think that he believed his own nonsense.
Even though this is about the President, it shouldn’t be political
So I know that we’re talking about the President and the White House, but this is about competence and caring, not about labor laws or marginal tax rates.
You end up where we are when you have leaders who don’t care. And right now, we have a leader who doesn’t care.
Caring shouldn’t be political. But here we are.
There’s legitimate debate to be had over the right policies, particularly about opening schools. (I would recommend listening to the Plenary Session Podcast for some nuanced and thoughtful discussion on the school question).
So I’ll stop here with hope that we can start to talk about things on this newsletter that are actually health related moving forward.
I’ll avoid the politics if the politicians start giving a shit that 1 in 1000 black Americans have died from COVID or whether I have PPE to protect myself during a second surge.
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