One of the things that would be really useful would be test people.
If you find swaths of the population that have antibodies and have had the disease and
are presumably immune.
Those are people that could get back to work earlier while other groups may maintain physical
distancing for a longer period of time.
It's early to be talking about that, but we need to start doing some antibody testing
of the population as soon as we have a test that can be done in large numbers and it can
become part of the eventual plan.
We're not there yet, but the eventual plan of getting some parts of the population back
to work when it is deemed safe and appropriate by medical professionals, not by politicians
trying to win reelection in a few months.
I have a story today about true incompetence.
Listen to this insanity.
We just learned that last week a Trump administration official called a Thai official and said,
hey, we need some PPE.
What can you send us?
The Thai official said, wait a second.
You just sent us the same PPE you're now asking us to send you.
What on earth is going on here?
It's just one story.
It's a micro story, but it's really a microcosm of the embarrassing, failed response of this
administration in dealing with the pandemic.
We're having trouble getting masks.
We're having trouble getting gloves.
Other PPE, personal protective equipment for our medical professionals.
So a Trump administration says, hey, let's call our friends in Thailand.
And says, hey, we need you to send us some stuff like right away.
The Thai officials get confused and they say, wait a second.
Well, we just got a call from a different person in your administration saying a plane
is bringing us that same stuff from you that you are now asking us for.
Imagine the embarrassment and the confusion.
Our shipment to Thailand is en route.
Well, we are asking them to send us the same stuff.
The shipment was immediately put on hold so that people could figure out to borrow a term
from Donald Trump.
What the hell is going on?
Understand the level of incompetence and nonsense going on here that you have the Trump administration
sending stuff to Thailand and another part of the Trump administration asking Thailand
for the same stuff back.
We meanwhile, found out, as I told you earlier this week, that the Trump administration also
sent 18 tons of PPE to China in the first week of February, while Trump was publicly
downplaying the risk from the virus only to now have shortages.
To be clear, the February 6th or 7th stuff that went out was not from the stockpile,
but it is still PPE that could have become part of what was available to hospitals here.
South Korea, meanwhile, had their first case on the same day as the United States or within
a few hours.
Difference may have been a different day technically, but within the same 24 hour period they had
rolled out a test by February 7th when we were sending stuff to China and pretending
everything was fine.
They had started contact tracing, fever clinics and isolation.
And still today, South Korea has fewer than 200 total deaths in the entire country of
51 million people.
We had over a thousand deaths in a single day multiple times this week.
We are being led by the blind.
This is a mess of a government reaction.
And listen, you know, Trump has bankrupted casinos.
He's been in positions, were not a single bank, would lend money to him.
It's more of the same.
Every day we have another disclosure about gross, sustained, persistent incompetence
where Trump is publicly cheerleading his own handling of the entire fiasco.
While what's going on behind the scenes is absolutely atrocious.
When Mike Pence seems to have more of a clue than you do, which is the case with Pence
and Trump, you know, you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.
Check out the political article that reports on this were linking to it on YouTube.
And really, you know, you have to read it to understand the dystopian nature of this
administration's failings.
And by the way, all of these missteps not testing early, not mobilizing the stockpile
of ventilators and other supplies early, not coming up with a travel shutdown plan early,
all of this stuff.
This is what a pandemic response team would have done if Trump hadn't disbanded it in
2018 and bragged about it at the time and then last week or the week before.
Of course, Trump played dumb.
Pandemic response team.
Now, I don't know.
Maybe ask Anthony Foushee about that.
All of this stuff that Trump should have been doing is in the pandemic response playbook.
It's a color coded 69 page playbook which the Obama administration left behind for the
Trump administration.
They've ignored it.
We're in trouble, guys.
There is starting to be real blood on the hands of this administration.
Remember that Thursday, April 9th, we are doing a membership bomb to try to replace
some of the lost members from March.
So because of the virus and people tightening their budgets, we had three hundred and eighty
nine people, three, eight, nine cancel memberships in March.
That's never happened before.
It's by far the largest number we've ever dealt with.
And I get it.
Everybody's in this together.
We're all trying to figure out how do we, you know, get through this phase to the next
phase.
But what we are trying to do is on April 9th, we're gonna send out an email to everybody
on our mailing list.
You can get on the mailing list at David Pakman dot com.
Very easy.
We'll send you a coupon code.
It'll work just that day.
And we want to try to get, you know, maybe we can get 150, maybe 200 people to sign up
that day.
So get on the mailing list.
You'll be notified April 9.
In the meantime, let me know how your quarantine is going.
I'm on Twitter at Deepak's The David Pakman Show David Pakman dot com.