merelygifted:

Last week, a White House celebration for Amy Coney Barrett was followed by numerous Rose Garden participants testing positive for COVID-19, including several senators and Donald Trump himself. Despite this, there has still been no apparent effort to do contact tracing to determine the true extent of the resulting disease outbreak.

That’s the implication of this New York Times report, which backs up a Washington Post story published Saturday. Both report that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has assembled a contact tracing team “ready to go,” but that despite Saturday claims to the contrary by White House physician Dr. Sean Conley, the agency has not been contacted by the White House to start the process.

Neither is the White House apparently coordinating such efforts without CDC input: The Times notes that on CBS’ Face the Nation, Dr. Scott Gottlieb reported that “he had spoken to several officials who attended the Rose Garden event and who had not been spoken to by any contact tracers.

The question, then, remains why. It is possible that the White House is simply that incompetent, unable to muster a contact tracing response to an apparently superspreading event even when that event is on White House grounds, and with the full cooperation of the whole of federal government available to assist.

But it’s more likely that the White House is intentionally flubbing the tracking of who has or has not tested positive after the event because they don’t want to find out. The spread of COVID-19 to multiple senators, journalists, administration staff members and others is already a political embarrassment for Team Trump; for them to now actively work to hide the scope of the outbreak is, for this crowd of amoral and sociopathic cretins, an expected response.

It may be that numerous other elected officials and members of Trump’s team test positive in the coming days. It may also be that the White House intends to claim we will “never know” how, precisely, they became infected, leaving it to outside observers to attempt such tracking themselves. …