WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A21
WEDNESDAY Opinion
T
he White House is planning to
host large parties again for the
holidays, only this time, officials
are apparently not even bother-
ing to test the guests in advance. Presum-
ably the administration has finally, be-
latedly realized that testing alone won’t
protect people from the virus. Unfortu-
nately, officials still haven’t learned what
they needed to, which is not “tests don’t
work,” but “testing is a powerful tool
with some major limitations.”
If they’d absorbed that lesson, Presi-
dent Trump might have led on an issue
where there’s still a whole lot of confu-
sion. Instead, his administration appar-
ently abandoned “test everyone” in favor
of “nihilistic shrug.” (Guests at the White
House parties, we’re informed, will be
served on individual plates from behind
plexiglass partitions, which I suppose
will at least give them something to lean
on if they start feeling ill.)
Meanwhile, Americans remain con-
fused. Take my smart and well-informed
friend who asked me, during the White
House epidemic in October, whether you
could infect people while still testing
negative. Or consider all the people who
lined up to get a covid test in the week
before Thanksgiving so they could holi-
day indoors with a clean conscience.
So let’s clear things up: Yes, absolutely,
you can test negative while you are
contagious.
For example, according to studies
highlighted on the Abbott Labs website,
the test that the White House was using
could miss almost 10 percent of active
infections. Some studies have put the
rate of false negatives even higher. All
the other available tests also fail some of
the time, though the rates vary from test
to test.
The high rate of false negatives means
that testing provides the most protection
when it’s deployed at the population
level. At the group level, it’s only a weak,
adjunct tactic to other precautions. And
at the individual level, it’s borderline
useless.
Start with the individuals: If you
think you might have been exposed to
covid-19 — for example, by flying home
for the holiday — a negative test can’t
tell you it’s safe to hang out indoors with
your elderly parents. There’s a signifi-
cant risk that you simply aren’t testing
positive yet, and with case fatality rates
still extremely high among older age
groups, that’s a risk you should take
very seriously.
For a larger group that has t o meet in
person, however, such tests are more
useful. Even if the tests fail 1 in 10 times,
they’re still reducing the group’s expo-
sure by 90 percent. Meanwhile, other
strategies can reduce it further: masks,
upgrades to the ventilation system, dis-
tancing and hand-washing.
At the group level, we should think of
testing the way medieval kings thought
about fending off barbarians. They
didn’t just throw up a wall and call it a
day, because what do you do if the enemy
breaches the wall? So they built a layered
defense — moats, catapults, boiling oil —
plus some soldiers inside the walls.
That’s also the best way to hold covid- 19
at bay: testing and masks and hand-
washing and distancing and good venti-
lation (or best of all, staying outdoors).
Because if you instead try to use testing
as a substitute for other safety measures,
then eventually the virus is likely to slip
through your lone line of defense and
wreak mayhem within.
But even better than group testing
would be mass testing. Because some-
what paradoxically, even this slipshod
strategy might work if we could just test
enough people. And with the advent of
inexpensive — though somewhat less
accurate — home tests, we’re now at a
point where we might be able to put a
serious dent in transmission just by
using tests.
To understand how that might work,
imagine that we start with 100,000 in-
fected people, and on average, they’ll
each infect three more people if nothing
is done. But we don’t do nothing; in-
stead, we start testing that misses
10,000 infections and catches 90,000 of
them.
If those people who test positive do
the patriotic thing and immediately
quarantine themselves, then in the sec-
ond round of transmission, we would
end up with 30,000 infections, instead of
300,000. In the third round, having
caught 27,000 of the second round of
infections, we end up with 9,000 new
infections, instead of 900,000. Repeat
that a few more times, and we’ve basical-
ly wiped out the novel coronavirus
without doing much else.
Of course, it’s not practical to test the
whole country at once, and even if it
were, many people would refuse. But it’s
still true that the more tests we do, the
safer we will all be, so long as we all
understand what we’re doing. Unfortu-
nately, the White House, which ought to
have been leading the way, instead chose
the road to disaster — and even now, too
many Americans appear to be following
in its path.
Twitter: @asymmetricinfoMEGAN MCARDLECoronavirus
testing works.
But not how
you expect.
BY TY SEIDULEP
resident Trump has vowed to veto
a bill authorizing more than
$740 billion in defense spending
because it aims to change the
names of 10 Army installations. The posts
honor Confederate generals who fought
against the United States during the Civil
War.
Few things unite a fractious Congress
during these divisive times, but removing
the names of men who committed trea-
son to preserve slavery brought them
together. Months ago, the House and
Senate passed versions of the defense
authorization bill with veto-proof major-
ities, but now The Post reports “soften-
ing” among Republicans.
The two-thirds majority in each house
needed to override a presidential veto
may be in danger, and some members are
searching for ways to revise the bill,
pushing the decision about renaming the
Army bases into the next administration
and the next Congress.
Such temporizing would be a disgrace
in this year of racial reckoning. Congress
should take a stand, letting the president
know that it will override his veto and
withdraw the honors for these Confeder-
ate generals, who constitute a motley
assortment of pro-slavery activists, post-
war white supremacists, poor tacticians,
traitors and war criminals.
John Brown Gordon, namesake of
Fort Gordon in Georgia, never served in
the U.S. Army. After his service in
Confederate gray, he led the Ku Klux
Klan in Georgia, a group of racist terror-
ists he called a “brotherhood of...
peaceable, law-abiding citizens.” I n
1868, Gordon gave a speech to Black
people in Charleston, S.C., in which he
promised that if they demanded equal
rights, he would lead a race war and “you
will be exterminated.”
The Fort Pickett Army National Guard
installation in Virginia is named for
George Pickett, immortalized in history
for leading a failed charge at Gettysburg
in 1863. The following year, Pickett or-
dered the summary execution of
22 U.S. soldiers who had once served in
the Confederate army. He hanged the
men in front of their families. After the
war ended, he fled the country because
he feared he would be charged for war
crimes.
Fort Lee, also in Virginia, is of course
named for Robert E. Lee. He and his wife,
Mary Custis Lee, enslaved many people;
during the Gettysburg campaign, Lee’s
forces kidnapped Black people and
brought them back to Virginia for return
to their owners or for sale. After the 1864
Battle of the Crater in Virginia, Lee’s
troops massacred Black prisoners of war.
Army posts named for Confederates
Braxton Bragg in North Carolina, John
Bell Hood in Texas and Leonidas Polk in
Louisiana honor some of the worst-
p erforming generals of the entire Civil
War. The other Confederates among the
10 Congress targeted are similarly
c ontemptible.
Why does the United States honor
such a hodgepodge of enemy generals?
The names of these military posts
really tell us more about who chose them
and when. The Army bestowed the desig-
nations during World War I and World
War II, when racist segregation policies
in the military reflected society at large.
But the naming was also sometimes done
to appease White Southerners. The Co-
lumbus, Ga., branch of the United
Daughters of the Confederacy, the lead-
ing neo-Confederate organization, rec-
ommended the local Army camp take its
name from Confederate general Henry
Benning. Before the war started, Benning
had said he preferred “pestilence and
famine” to Black equality.
While history tells us who we were,
changing the 10 Army post names could
better represent who we are and aspire to
become.
Consider that Fort Lee is home to the
Army’s logistics branches: transporta-
tion, quartermaster and ordnance.
U.S. Army logisticians have been among
the finest the world has ever seen, and
they have often included many Black
soldiers. During World War II, the drive
into Germany by Patton’s Third Army
depended on the support of the famed
Red Ball Express. Three-quarters of the
military truckers were Black.
Today, the Army’s logisticians support
the U.S. and allied militaries around the
globe, from Afghanistan to Somalia to
the Philippines. Fifty percent of those
soldiers are Black. Yet their home base
honors a former U.S. Army officer who
fought against the United States to create
a new country dedicated to human bond-
age. Robert E. Lee chose treason to
preserve slavery.
This nation should honor those who
fought bravely to defend it, not its en-
emies. U.S. soldiers deserve to serve on
military posts that reflect the best of
America, not the worst.Ty Seidule, the Chamberlain fellow at
Hamilton College and professor emeritus of
history at the U.S. Military Academy in West
Point, N.Y. , is the author of “Robert E. Lee and
Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth
of the Lost Cause,” forthcoming in January.Let Trump
try to defend
traitorous
Confederates
BY CHRISTOPHER KREBSO
n Nov. 17, I was dismissed as
director of the Cybersecurity
and Infrastructure Security
Agency, a Senate-confirmed
post, in a tweet from President Trump
after my team and other election secu-
rity experts rebutted claims of hacking
in the 2020 election. On Monday, a
lawyer for the president’s campaign
plainly stated that I should be execut-
ed. I am not going to be intimidated by
these threats from telling the truth to
the American people.
Three years ago, I left a comfortable
private-sector job to join, in the spirit of
public service, the Department of
Homeland Security. At the time, the
national security community was reel-
ing from the fallout of the brazen
Russian interference in the 2016 presi-
dential election. I wanted to help.
Across the nation’s security agen-
cies, there was universal acknowledg-
ment that such foreign election inter-
ference could not be allowed to happen
again. The mission was clear: Defend
democracy and protect U.S. elections
from threats foreign and domestic.
With the advantage of time to pre-
pare for the 2020 election, we got to
work. My team at the Cybersecurity
and Infrastructure Security Agency, or
CISA, had primary responsibility for
working with state and local election
officials and the private sector to se-
cure their election infrastructure —
including the machines, equipment
and systems supporting elections —
from hacking. (Other agencies handle
fraud or other criminal election-
r elated activity.) The Russian assault in
2016 had not included hacking voting
machines, but we couldn’t be sure that
Moscow or some other bad actor
wouldn’t try it in 2020.
States are constitutionally responsi-
ble for conducting the nation’s elec-
tions. At CISA, we were there to help
them do it securely. Our first job was to
improve CISA’s relationships with state
and local officials, building trust wherethere was none. We also worked closely
with representatives from across the
election-security community, public
and private, in groups called coordinat-
ing councils. A key development was
the establishment of the Elections In-
frastructure Information Sharing and
Analysis Center to share security-
r elated information with people who
can act on it for defensive purposes. By
the 2018 midterm elections, all
50 states and thousands of jurisdic-
tions had joined the center.
We offered a range of cybersecurity
services, such as scanning systems for
vulnerable software or equipment, and
conducting penetration tests on net-
works. Election officials across the
country responded by markedly im-
proving cybersecurity, including up-
grading to more modern systems,
hardening user accounts through addi-
tional log-on measures and being
quicker to share suspicious-event in-
formation.
But there was a critical weak spot.
Voting machines known as Direct Re-
cording Electronic machines, or DREs,
do not generate paper records for
individual votes. And paper ballots are
essential pieces of evidence for check-
ing a count’s accuracy. With DREs, the
vote is recorded on the machine and
combined with voting data from other
machines during the tabulation proc-
ess. If those machines were compro-
mised, state officials would not have
the benefit of backup paper ballots to
conduct an audit.
In 2016, five states used DREs state-
wide, including Georgia and Pennsyl-
vania, with a handful of others using
DREs in multiple jurisdictions. Fortu-
nately, by 2020, Louisiana was the last
one with statewide DRE usage. Con-
gress provided grant funding in 2018,
2019 and 2020 to states to help them
retire the paperless machines and roll
out auditable systems. As the 2020
election season began, Delaware, Geor-
gia, Pennsylvania and South Carolina
all swapped over to paper-based sys-
tems. Then the emergence of the pan-demic prompted a nationwide surge
toward the use of voting by mail.
The combined efforts over the past
three years moved the total number of
expected votes cast with a paper ballot
above 90 percent, including in the
traditional battleground states. While
I no longer regularly speak to election
officials, my understanding is that in
the 2020 results no significant dis-
crepancies attributed to manipulation
have been discovered in the post-
e lection canvassing, audit and recount
processes.
This point cannot be emphasized
enough: The secretaries of state in
Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada
and Pennsylvania, as well as officials in
Wisconsin, all worked overtime to en-
sure there was a paper trail that could
be audited or recounted by hand,
independent of any allegedly hacked
software or hardware.
That’s why Americans’ confidence in
the security of the 2020 election is
entirely justified. Paper ballots and
post-election checks ensured the accu-
racy of the count. Consider Georgia:
The state conducted a full hand re-
count of the presidential election, a
first of its kind, and the outcome of the
manual count was consistent with the
computer-based count. Clearly, the
Georgia count was not manipulated,
resoundingly debunking claims by the
president and his allies about the
involvement of CIA supercomputers,
malicious software programs or corpo-
rate rigging aided by long-gone foreign
dictators.
The 2020 election was the most
secure in U.S. history. This success
should be celebrated by all Americans,
not undermined in the service of a
profoundly un-American goal.The writer is the former director of the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency. On Wednesday at 11 a.m. on
Washington Post Live, Post columnist David
Ignatius will interview Christopher Krebs
about his role in the 2020 election and the
cyberthreats facing the country.I’ll say it again: The 2020
election wasn’t hacked
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
Absentee ballots and overseas ballots are processed in Atlanta on Nov. 3.should wear black to Biden’s inaugura-
tion in recognition of their brief time in
the NFL — which in Washington means
Not For Long.
This brings us back to the Biden
communications staff, which, in addition
to making choreographed history, is sail-
ing toward treacherous waters. Even
before Thanksgiving, all was not peace
and tranquility in Biden world. Un-
named campaign staffers complained to
Politico that former Obama officials were
snagging top jobs and expressed fears
that they might not get spots in the new
administration. “People are p---ed,” said
one Biden adviser. So it has been in
administrations since the birth of the
Republic.
The spokeswomen, however, mostly
come from within the campaign, except
for press secretary Jen Psaki, who held
several communications titles, including
communications director, in the Obama
White House. Kate Bedingfield, named
White House communications director,
served as campaign communications di-
rector and will now hold the same job she
held for Biden when he was vice presi-
dent. Karine Jean-Pierre, a former NBC
and MSNBC political analyst, was tapped
from the campaign to become principal
deputy White House press secretary.
Ashley Etienne, also from the campaign,
will be Vice President-elect Kamala
D. Harris’s communications director.
And Symone Sanders, a former top 2016
presidential campaign aide to Sen. Ber-
nie Sanders (I-Vt.) who joined Biden’s
campaign in 2019, will become Harris’s
chief spokeswoman and senior adviser.
The women are understandably excit-
ed to step into these new, important
roles, as almost all of them have testified
via Twitter. But they’re also entering aT
he breathlessness surrounding
President-elect Joe Biden’s com-
munications and press offices —
all women! — should be consid-
ered a honeymoon that will end at
approximately 1 a.m. on Jan. 21, the day
after Biden’s inauguration.
It’s all in the stars. Constellations, that
is, of media superstars, many of whom
have become household names and late-
night TV guests, thanks in large part to
outgoing President Trump. The gift that
kept on giving to reporters, editors,
publishers and network bean-counters is
leaving town and will no longer provide
endless fodder for reporters, commenta-
tors and viewers who couldn’t take their
eyes off the spectacle.
We knew it couldn’t last. Eventually,
the producer in chief would have to
leave the Oval Office and the media
would have to scramble for news as in
the days before a wheeler-dealer handed
them diamonds before breakfast. If
Trump wasn’t the media’s favorite presi-
dent, he was surely their favorite fake
wrestler. A pugilist with small hands
and a commander in chief with fallen
arches, The Don was concurrently a
nightmare and a dream-come-true for
pundits and headline writers.
He was simply easy pickins, by his own
choosing. His verbal antics and Twitter
frenzies were often served up for particu-
lar time slots and news shows, which he
reportedly watched for hours through-
out most days while on the taxpayers’
clock.
Celebrity, meantime, has grown expo-
nentially for the erstwhile ink-stained
press corps. Thanks to the country’s
train-wreck infatuation with Trump,
many mere correspondents have become
major attractions themselves. Theylion’s den thick with oversize egos. Even
though much of the media despised
Trump and kept it no secret, this doesn’t
mean they’ll go easy on Biden and his
spokespeople. In fact, given the largeness
of their own celebrity status and the need
to keep their contracts in a less vital,
Trump-free industry, they’re as likely to
be tougher than ever.
This much should assuage Trump sup-
porters and others who believe the media
are always biased. The media are hard on
those in power, full stop. And they care
about one thing — the story, which these
days also translates into being bookable.
Trump was a loaves-and-fishes story who
kept growing the media’s audience, rat-
ings and advertising. Without him, one
wonders what becomes of those big-
budget payrolls. Biden will be more
challenging because — let’s be honest —
he’ll be boring, which is good for the
country but not necessarily good for the
bookers, scribes and narrators.
Thus, to the White House communica-
tions women, a word of advice: Beware.
Celebrity journalists have become the
news and have their own empires to
protect. They won’t remember that you
once rubbed shoulders in makeup. For-
get that you were once “friends,” in other
words, because, ultimately, the best jour-
nalists don’t have friends in high places
or, often, anywhere else. They will run
you over if you stand between them and
the news that must break, (or, be pro-
voked) on their watch.
It will be fun while it lasts, but the
novelty of the all-women communica-
tions team was a trifle concocted for
attention. Nobody sees this more clearly
than a White House press corps ever alert
to the slightest slip.
[email protected]KATHLEEN PARKERThe Biden press team honeymoon won’t last