Monday, December 28, 2020

Global – 79,900,000/1,800,000; USA – 19,100,000/332,200 POTUS changed his mind and signed the Omnibus budget bill avoiding a closure of USG. Spoke with Deb. This AM (this is one of many early morning 6:00 AM calls that I have with her just to check in and schmooze about what is going on. She is concerned (probably correctly so) that the Biden people think that there is some COVID-19 response structure here and there is not. There is her and backup from CDC and she railed on about how bad the CDC is (I agree with her in part). She feels that they completely blew COVID-19 by acting like it was influenza and they plugged in the “syndromic” model where you follow and test only those who are symptomatic since it took them forever to admit that COVID-19 was spread symptomatically and was very much different from influenza. PRESS: Taped podcast with ABC Jonathan Karl for later viewing;