How Trump Is Going to Get Away With a Pandemic, by Sonia Shah | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-hiding-covid
There are lots of ways for the Trump administration to cook the data to hide the extent of the coronavirus outbreak—in fact, it already is doing so.
(...) Wide use of at-home Covid-19 self-testing kits could have a similar effect. Critics say users are unlikely to get an accurate result with such kits, since doing so requires an uncomfortable swab deep into the back of the nose or throat where the virus lurks. More likely, users will take a shallow swab, miss the virus, and obtain a happy but false negative result—contributing to a rosy and politically expedient underestimate of the epidemic. Along with hastily approving such self-testing kits, the administration’s top officials have touted the discomfort of more accurate lab tests. Vice President Pence called his “kind of invasive.” If hospitals were to muzzle their staff by, say, preventing them from sharing their work experiences—as anecdotal reports suggest some are—they might help conceal the extent of the outbreak, too, by obscuring the carnage unfolding in their wards.
