Kushner predicts much of the country will be 'back to normal' in June (April 2020)
thehill.com

... White House senior adviser Jared Kushner on Wednesday expressed optimism that much of the country could be "back to normal" by June as several states prepare to lift restrictions meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

"I think what you'll see in May as the states are reopening now is May will be a transition month, you'll see a lot of states starting to phase in the different reopening based on the safety guidelines that President Trump outlined on April 19," Kushner said on "Fox & Friends."

"I think you'll see by June that a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country's really rocking again," the president's son-in-law continued.

The ambitious timeline could be politically risky given that cases in the U.S. are still climbing and health experts have cautioned that parts of the country will have to alternate between imposing strict social distancing measures and easing them back until there's a vaccine in order to avoid new outbreaks. ...

How Jared Kushner's Secret Testing Plan "Went Poof Into Thin Air" (July 2020)
www.vanityfair.com

... On March 31, three weeks after the World Health Organization designated the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, a DHL truck rattled up to the gray stone embassy of the United Arab Emirates in Washington, D.C., delivering precious cargo: 1 million Chinese-made diagnostic tests for COVID-19, ordered at the behest of the Trump administration.

Normally, federal government purchases come with detailed contracts, replete with acronyms and identifying codes. They require sign-off from an authorized contract officer and are typically made public in a U.S. government procurement database, under a system intended as a hedge against waste, fraud, and abuse.

This purchase did not appear in any government database. Nor was there any contract officer involved. Instead, it was documented in an invoice obtained by Vanity Fair, from a company, Cogna Technology Solutions (its own name misspelled as "Tecnology" on the bill), which noted a total order of 3.5 million tests for an amount owed of $52 million. The "client name" simply noted "WH." ...

Though Kushner's outsized role has been widely reported, the procurement of Chinese-made test kits is being disclosed here for the first time. So is an even more extraordinary effort that Kushner oversaw: a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level. ...

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House's official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner's team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. "The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. "It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out," the expert said. ...

Kushner predicts much of the country will be 'back to normal' in June (April 2020)
thehill.com

From It's going to disappear' to WE WILL WIN THIS WAR' (March 2020)
www.washingtonpost.com

... As the coronavirus began to spread across the United States, President Trump repeatedly insisted that it was nothing to worry about. Two months later, the United States became the first country in the world with more than 100,000 cases, the economy has ground to a near standstill, and the virus has killed more than 1,000 people in New York state alone.

As cases increased and stocks tumbled, the president's attitude toward the threat of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has evolved from casual dismissal to reluctant acknowledgment to bellicose mobilization. Below, we trace the winding path of the president's response to the virus, in his own words. ...

The Trump Pandemic (August 2020)
slate.com

... On July 17, President Donald Trump sat for a Fox News interview at the White House. At the time, nearly 140,000 Americans were dead from the novel coronavirus. The interviewer, Chris Wallace, showed Trump a video clip in which Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned of a difficult fall and winter ahead. Trump dismissed the warning. He scoffed that experts had misjudged the virus all along. "Everybody thought this summer it would go away," said Trump. "They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? So they got that one wrong."

Trump's account was completely backward. Redfield and other U.S. public health officials had never promised that heat would knock out the virus. In fact, they had cautioned against that assumption. The person who had held out the false promise of a warm-weather reprieve, again and again, was Trump. And he hadn't gotten the idea from any of his medical advisers. He had gotten it from Xi Jinping, the president of China, in a phone call in February. ...

"Complete incompetence:" Biden team slams Trump's COVID work (January 21, 2021)
arstechnica.com

... Just a day into office, President Joe Biden and his administration have unveiled a comprehensive, 200-page strategic plan and over a dozen executive orders and actions to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic currently rampaging across the country.

With the running start, the administration hopes to finally get control over the virus, which has already taken the lives of more than 408,000 Americans. The number of deaths is expected to top 500,000 next month, Biden said in an appearance Thursday to unveil his strategic plan.

"Things are going to continue to get worse before they get better," he said, calling his approach to the pandemic a "full-scale wartime effort."
Square one

The lag between people becoming infected, developing COVID-19, and succumbing to the disease will keep the numbers grim for weeks to come, regardless of new efforts put in place today. But the administration says it's also facing challenges from inheriting the work from the previous administration.

In remarks Thursday, Biden criticized the federal response so far: "For the past year, we couldn't rely on the federal government to act with the urgency and focus and coordination that we needed, and we have seen the tragic cost of that failure." ...