Why did national COVID response plan go ‘poof’?

Over the weekend, Vanity Fair published “How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan ‘Went Poof Into Thin Air.’ ”

In early March, Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser — brought together a group of businessmen and bankers to create a coronavirus response plan. The article claims Vanity Fair acquired a copy of this task force’s plan. The document lays out a federal response that would have “set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.”

One participant who spoke with Vanity Fair said they were confident in the plan, and members of Kushner’s task force had expected their plan to reach the president in early April and be announced in the Rose Garden. It never was. As the participant said, the plan “just went poof into thin air.”

Instead, when President Trump did finally address the nation, it was to tell America that the states were responsible for themselves. In an April 4 NPR article, Kushner was quoted as already making the distinction that the federal stockpile of medical supplies — “our stockpile” — was not meant for the states. Trump doubled down on Kushner’s point and is quoted by NPR as saying, “We need it for the government and the federal government. … The federal government needs it, too, not just the states.”

At the same time Kushner’s task force’s plan for a national response went “poof,” Kushner, Trump and other Trump administration officials were already proclaiming the pandemic response was the responsibility of individual states.

Then Vanity Fair drops this bombshell, a quote from an expert who worked alongside Kushner’s group: “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.”

Whether that statement is true or not, it is true that the states hit hardest by the first wave of COVID-19 are primarily Democratic. This can be seen by comparing a Johns Hopkins map that charts coronavirus trends from Jan. 22 to Aug. 3 and just about any map that denotes states by their prevailing political views. The Democratic states New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island all had intense spikes, their numbers surging as early as mid-March. California soon followed with a flood of cases in early April.

It’s also true that at the time COVID was hitting these left-leaning states the hardest, Trump and his administration chose to forgo a national strategy, leaving states to fend for themselves. And now that primarily Republican states — including ours — are seeing swelling case numbers, Trump has started wearing a mask.

Maybe scrapping the national plan was politically motivated; maybe it was short-sighted optimism. But the one thing we can’t argue is that more than 150,000 Americans — more than 120 West Virginians — have lost their lives to COVID-19 since March, and that number continues to grow.