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[Frumple]

And yet in spite of it Florida still exists, which is the real disaster. 

Right well I underestimated Harvey a bit and I'll retract "major hurricane" but let me reemphasize: I said crisis, and in the grand scheme of things hurricanes are not really a crisis in terms of what an administration actually does unless it's a very unusual incident.

Like, just to reiterate, but Michael was the highest category hurricane to hit the florida panhandle since we've been tracking hurricane strength. It was a literally historic storm for this region, fema et al didn't manage nearly enough, and the high level decision making did, in fact, get involved and was handled pretty shit.

I didn't have power outside a generator for a month straight. My area is still fixing shit from the damage. More than one of the hurricanes we've had over the course of this administration have, in fact, been bloody unusual.

This administration has been so goddamn clownshoes its consistently extremely shit response to disasters maybe doesn't register well in the grand scheme of things, I guess, and maybe the unceasing cavalcade of horseshit or the unending time malaise of 2020 has made it harder to recall the earlier fuckups, but while covid is undoubtedly the widest scale non-self-inflicted crisis trump and co have dropped the ball on it damn sure ain't the only or the first. S'all I'm sayin'.

[Dostoevsky]

There's also the fact that Puerto Rico has been pretty well wiped clean by multiple major hurricanes over the course of this administration and received very little help in recovering, but I guess since they're not a real state it doesn't count.

(Yeah I'm being cheeky, but more towards the administration than anybody here. There's some bad evidence out there about the administration not giving two sheets about PR's recovery.)

Anyways, this is getting pretty Ameripol right now isn't it?

[Naxza]

I seem to recall a report that one of the officials in charge of the response explicitly said, in an internal communication, that was exactly the plan.

I don't remember the source, so take this with a grain of salt pour a few pounds of salt on this post.

Vanity fair is the source, stating Jared Kushner backed off on his COVID response plan after hearing it was impacting primarily blue cities.

Spoiler: Here's the 'conspiracy' bit (click to show/hide)

But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

In her statement, McEnany said, “The article is completely incorrect in its assertion that any plan was stopped for political or other reasons. Our testing strategy has one goal in mind—delivering for the American people—and is being executed and modified daily to incorporate new facts on the ground.”

On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states.

Under the plan released that day, the federal government would act as a facilitator to help increase needed supplies and rapidly approve new versions of diagnostic-testing kits. But the bulk of the effort to operate testing sites and find available labs fell to the states.

“I had this naive optimism: This is too important to be caught in a partisan filter of how we view truth and the world,” said Rick Klausner, a Rockefeller Foundation adviser and former director of the National Cancer Institute. “But the federal government has decided to abrogate responsibility, and basically throw 50 states onto their own.”

I leave you to consider for yourself the validity of a Vanity Fair article, but this is the one passing it around.