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Evidence of the Trump administration’s jaw-dropping incompetence continues to grow. A report by Rep. Katie Porter shows even in February , when it was clear the pandemic was spreading in this nation, the United States was actually exporting now desperately needed ventilators and other medical equipment in large numbers, with mask exports alone increasing tenfold. It would be mid-March before the Trump administration made moves to bulk-order similar supplies for the national stockpile, and longer still until the Defense Production Act was invoked to prepare to retool factories for increased production.

We now also know that the Trump administration was warned by intelligence services last November of a new emerging disease in China-suggesting Chinese authorities took more action than has been previously known in attempting to cover up the outbreak, but also signaling that the Trump team had two more months than previously known to prepare the United States to face the same outbreak-months that were instead squandered.

In today’s pandemic news:

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• Amid a firestorm of controversy and allegations of insider trading based on knowledge gained in Senate briefings, wealthy Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler announced she would be liquidating her stock holdings . But, of course, will be keeping the money earned in the trades.

• After lashing out at an inspector general’s report documenting severe medical shortages in the nation’s hospitals, Donald Trump phoned in to the Sean Hannity show to instead insist that he “was right” that states did not need as much equipment as they claimed and that “everyone is in great shape.” This is, by all evidence, false.

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• After blocking a commercial Colorado order for 500 ventilators by buying the equipment out from under them, Trump tweeted that his administration would be providing the state only one-fifth of that number from the national stockpile .

• Healthcare and environmental inequality in America continue to cause disproportionate deaths in black communities, with black Americans in COVID-19 hotspots so far suffering from shockingly higher mortality rates than whites.

• Democrats are signaling they will support moves to spend an additional $250 billion for previously passed (and so far all-but-unimplemented) small business lending program during the pandemic, so long as it is coupled to other pandemic relief efforts .

• Also in dire need of quick action : Unemployment claim processing, unable to cope with now-record job losses.

• As the Trump administration continues its inability to coordinate a coherent national strategy for widespread COVID-19 testing and tracking (moves required before stay-at-home orders can be safely lifted), states are finding they “really are on their own” in building those systems .

• Conservative media, and especially Fox News, are latching on to a new Trump suggestion that the worst of the pandemic may be over, even though no U.S. state or city has yet “peaked” in cases or deaths and true peaks are, in many states, still predicted to be weeks away.

• Over the weekend, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention modified their website to claim that a Trump-hyped drug might “anecdotally” be of use in treating COVID-19 patients, giving credence to Trump’s own insistences even though the drug can be dangerous, has no non-“anecdotal” evidence of effectiveness, and is now in short supply for the lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients who require it.

• It is not like the flu: Despite comparisons by Trump and Trump-allied pundits to the H1N1 epidemic in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken only 43 days to kill as many Americans as the H1N1 pandemic did over the course of a year. And the COVID-19 pandemic has yet to peak.

This Piece Originally Appeared in www.dailykos.com

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