What Next, CDC? Gonna Tell Us To Bleach The Coronavirus Away?

CDC literally saying coronavirus testing is unnecessary now. Wonder where that came from!

If you don't do tests, then you don't have cases! The only reason we have so many cases is because we do so much testing! Testing is great, we're the best in the world at it, but it makes me look bad, so maybe testing is terrible!

Donald Trump has said some version of that syphilis-brained statement 123,679,895 times in the last few months, because he's a fucking moron.

But when we saw in the New York Times that the CDC had, inexplicably, suddenly announced that ACTUALLY you don't might not need a coronavirus test if you don't have symptoms, even if you are pretty sure you were exposed , and even if you were in close contact with that person, and even though people who don't have symptoms can spread the disease, we just assumed Trump's dipshit brain raccoons made that happen. After all, we've been quite worried about the CDC for a while now. No longer the worldwide gold standard in disease control and prevention — you know, the thing in its name — it's sadly become a husk of its former self, more and more each day another political plaything for King Dumbfuck Von Orange.

CNN confirms the obvious:

A sudden change in federal guidelines on coronavirus testing came this week as a result of pressure from the upper ranks of the Trump administration, a federal health official close to the process tells CNN.

"It's coming from the top down," the official said of the new directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trump's Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Brett Giroir gave CNN a statement about "current evidence" and "best public health practices," but you don't want to read it, because fuck off. As CNN notes, it's not like HHS or CDC has actually given out any of this so-called evidence, which would fly in the face of all the up-to-date info we have about COVID-19, part of which is that people seem to be really contagious right before they start showing symptoms.

Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease specialist and associate dean of Emory University School of Medicine, said on CNN Newsroom on Wednesday that the CDC has not provided evidence to explain the changes.

"I mean, the evidence that I'm aware of as of today is that close to 40% of the cases of the infections are asymptomatic and asymptomatic people transmit the infection," Del Rio said. [...] [T]he guidelines baffle me and I really don't understand them."

As the Times notes, current models say round-about half of all coronavirus infections come from the presymptomatic or asymptomatic. They quote infectious disease expert Dr. Krutika Kuppalli of Palo Alto, who explained that hey, you fuckheads, what are you, A IDIOT?

OK, Kuppalli said it nicer than that. Dr. Kuppalli is after all a professional:

"This is potentially dangerous." [...] Restricting testing to only people with obvious symptoms of Covid-19 means "you're not looking for a lot of people who are potential spreaders of disease," she added. "I feel like this is going to make things worse."

The Times talked to a bunch of other doctors, too. All of them said some version of hey, you fuckheads, what are you, A IDIOT?

Hey, though. We never had a national testing strategy, so why not make it worse now? It's not like 180,000 Americans and counting have died of this thing, oh wait they have.

The Trump administration, as we mentioned, has been systematically de-balling the CDC for a while now. They tried to tell hospitals to stop sending their COVID data to the CDC, until that backfired on them, sort of. The CDC caved to Trump's whining on school reopening guidelines, because they were tooooo haaaaaaard. In that case, CDC Director Robert Redfield kissed the royal taint, saying he and Trump were totally "aligned" on what needed to happen with school reopenings.

Of course, we didn't believe that, because of how we had already seen that play , when Trump forced the CDC to change its general reopening recommendations, after killing CDC's actual, detailed reopening guidelines. The "new" guidelines were so impressive nobody at the CDC would attach their name to them.

We used to ask, "CDC, are you OKKKKKKKKK??????"just like we asked "Justice Department, are you OKKKKKK???????" and"SDNY, are you OKKKKKK???????" 

We don't ask that anymore. We know the fucking answer.

[ CNN / New York Times ]

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