The president* has a new plan! From CNBC:

In furtherance of this shared goal, my administration is working to publish new guidelines for state and local policymakers to use in making decisions about maintaining, increasing, or relaxing social distancing and other mitigation measures they have put in place. This is what we envision: Our expanded testing capabilities will quickly enable us to publish criteria, developed in close coordination with the Nation’s public health officials and scientists, to help classify counties with respect to continued risks posed by the virus. This will incorporate robust surveillance testing, which allows us to monitor the spread of the virus throughout the country. Under these data-driven criteria, we will suggest guidelines categorizing counties as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk.



With each passing day, our increasingly extensive testing capabilities are giving us a better understanding of the virus and its path. As testing gives us more information about who has been infected, we are tracking the virus and isolating it to prevent further spread. This new information will drive the next phase in our war against this invisible enemy.



For those of you keeping score at home, there are 3,114 counties in the United States. To say that we’re going to go county by county and find and isolate hot zones is a preposterous notion, and in any case, it depends on an extensive testing regime that exists primarily in the president*’s mind. (It also depends on the president*’s acting in good faith in an election year. Dog declines to hunt.) He wants the country re-opened and he doesn’t care what happens thereafter. This plan, if he acts on it, is a profound dereliction of duty and a massive violation of his oath of office. Not that it’s anything new in that regard.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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