Just recorded a quick crisis edition of the podcast. Keep an eye on whatever podcast app you use.
The House Oversight Committee has just launched an investigation into the deployment of COVID-19 tests to nursing homes. The investigation was launched in response to a TPM report from August.
The timeline of events leading up to the disclosure of President Trump’s diagnosis point overwhelmingly to some mix of a coverup and gross negligence and likely both.
Let’s review some key facts, as far as we presently know them.
JoinThe Biden campaign has announced that Joe and Jill Biden both did PCR COVID tests today and both tests came back negative.
This is one of a handful of times in TPM’s history that our reporting sparked a congressional probe.
Join
It’s like a novel and not a terribly good one. It now seems quite probable, if not certain, that the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18th triggered a chain of events that led directly to the President’s diagnosis and subsequent hospitalization for COVID-19. As you may have heard, a growing body of circumstantial evidences points strongly to the conclusion that the announcement event for Amy Coney Barrett as the President’s nominee to replace Ginsburg was the spreader event that has led to the current outbreak at the White House and in the upper echelons of the GOP.
To date, Trump, Melania Trump, Sens. Lee and Tillis, the President of Notre Dame University, Kellyanne Conway, campaign manager Bill Stepien, Hope Hicks have all tested positive in the last 48 hours. RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel and Sen. Ron Johnson have also tested positive, though their connection to the Rose Garden event is less direct or at least unclear.
Join
I think TPM Reader DC has this right. The real question isn’t when Trump tested positive. It’s the last time he had a negative test result. That seems likely to be the issue with the muddled timeline …
JoinThe most important question for timeline is when the last negative test was, and exactly when and what testing platform were positive results obtained.
I am supposing he tested negative Wednesday AM using the daily Abbott rapid test. 50% false negative rate.
In retrospect reports that he was dragging Wednesday Night might explain why Conley indicated he had been sick for 72 hours.
A variety of circumstantial evidence now raises the real possibility that the President was himself the super-spreader at the center of the White House COVID cluster. To know with any confidence we will need a thoroughgoing contact tracing investigation. It’s quite possible the vector is a little-known White House aide who mingled through the crowd last Saturday in the Rose Garden. For the moment we only have information about the high profile infectees.
But two bits of circumstantial evidence stand out.
JoinYesterday the Biden campaign announced that Joe Biden had taken a second COVID test and gotten a negative result. (Technically this was apparently his third in response to the President’s diagnosis. But the first two were simultaneous – a double check as it were rather than a follow up.)
This is a big deal and very encouraging.
Biden’s first test in response to Trump’s diagnosis came only two days after his potential exposure at the Tuesday night debate. But 48 or 50 hours just isn’t long enough to tell you much. A negative test after 5 days puts the probabilities much more firmly only Biden’s side, though we’ll need a week more to really be certain that he wasn’t infected. Current science holds that on average people develop COVID symptoms just over five days post-infection and tests can find COVID in pre-symptomatic people 1 to 3 days prior to the onset of symptoms. So he and we are not out of the woods but probabilities are much more firmly on his side.
