With coronavirus cases surging, Politico notes that the head of the White House task force on the pandemic, Vice President Mike Pence, has attended a meeting of the group in over a month.
Pence – who has been touting the Trump administration’s response effort on the campaign trail for weeks – is not expected to be on the line again Friday, when the group holds its first governors call since Oct. 13, said a person with knowledge of the plan. It’s a prolonged absence that represents just the latest sign of the task force’s diminished role in the face of the worsening public health crisis it was originally created to combat.
Campaigning for Donald Trump’s re-election has taken precedence over everything in the White House. Politico notes:
Inside the West Wing, task force members’ growing alarm over the virus’ resurgence has gone largely ignored. And among health officials on the front lines, there is mounting consensus that the federal government has little new aid to offer – leaving states to face the pandemic’s third and potentially worst wave increasingly on their own.
The U.S. is breaking records nearly every day for new coronavirus infections. Yesterday the total was near ninety thousand. More than 1000 Americans died of the disease. Meanwhile in many states, hospitals are overwhelmed with virus patients.
Hospitals in states like Idaho, Utah, Texas and Wisconsin, which had been left relatively untouched by the pandemic in its early days, are now at risk of being overrun – with governors preparing to have the National Guard repurpose convention centers as field hospitals. In Montana, the nearly 300-bed Kalispell Regional Medical Center found itself so short-staffed earlier this month that it stopped quarantining employees exposed to Covid-19.
Medical supplies for frontline workers are also in short supply. NBC News reports the Trump administration is “woefully behind” in stockpiling surgical gloves.
