LOCKDOWN: “Business and tourism leaders are preparing for the possibility that Cayman could be closed to visitors until next year.”

ANSWERING THE CALL… AGAIN: More Than 25,000 Former Soldiers Have Now Volunteered to Return to Duty. “The service first sent out an appeal in late March to retired officers and enlisted soldiers from a targeted set of specialties, asking for volunteers to re-don the uniform and reinforce Army communities thinned by emergency field hospital and personnel deployments to regions hit hardest by the virus. It would ultimately expand the call for volunteers to recently separated soldiers in the Individual Ready Reserve and to ‘gray-area’ soldiers — Guardsmen and reservists who have completed 20 years but haven’t yet met requirements for retirement.”

THIS IS A REAL PROBLEM:  The Trump Administration doesn’t seem to take the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seriously.  It enters into package deals (as it must) with Senate Democrats when it seeks to fill EEOC commissioner positions.  But somehow the deal it gets is always a ghastly one.  Back in 2017,  the Trump Administration paired a non-lawyer with the Democrats’ nomination of Chai Feldblum, a far-far-left law professor (and someone I rather like as a personal matter).  The non-lawyer (whose name I won’t mention) was a very talented guy who richly deserved a post somewhere in the Trump Administration. But I guarantee you that Chai Feldblum would have steamrolled him.  Employment discrimination law is complicated; learning it on the job as an EEOC Commissioner just won’t work.  Mercifully, that deal unraveled once Senate Republicans took a look at it.  Now Senate Democrats have apparently convinced the Trump Administration to enter a package deal with Jocelyn Samuels, who, like Chai Feldblum, was responsible for some of the Obama Administration’s worst excesses in this area of the law.  Paul Mirengoff at Power Line explains why such a package is not a great idea.

HMM: L.A. Times: New signs suggest coronavirus was in California far earlier than anyone knew.

A man found dead in his house in early March. A woman who fell sick in mid-February and later died.

These early COVID-19 deaths in the San Francisco Bay Area suggest that the novel coronavirus had established itself in the community long before health officials started looking for it. The lag time has had dire consequences, allowing the virus to spread unchecked before social distancing rules went into effect.

“The virus was freewheeling in our community and probably has been here for quite some time,” Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician who is the chief executive of Santa Clara County government, told county leaders in a recent briefing.

How long? A study out of Stanford suggests a dramatic viral surge in February.

But Smith on Friday said data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local health departments and others suggest it was “a lot longer than we first believed” — most likely since “back in December.”

“This wasn’t recognized because we were having a severe flu season,” Smith said in an interview. “Symptoms are very much like the flu. If you got a mild case of COVID, you didn’t really notice. You didn’t even go to the doctor. The doctor maybe didn’t even do it because they presumed it was the flu.”

Just as New York has strong ties to travelers from Europe, who are believed to have brought the coronavirus there from Italy, the Bay Area is a natural hub for those traveling to and from China. Santa Clara County had its first two cases of COVID-19 almost a week before federal approval of emergency testing for the disease Feb. 4. Both were in travelers returning from Wuhan, China, where the virus was rampant. . . .

COVID-19 did not reappear in the Bay Area until Feb. 27, when doctors finally decided to test a hospitalized woman who had been ill for weeks. She became the region’s first case of community-spread coronavirus.

But from there, almost every positive test pointed toward local spread. “When public health [officials] tried to track down the start of the disease … we weren’t able to find, specifically, a contact,” Smith told county supervisors. “That means the virus is in the community already — not, as was suspected by the CDC, as only in China and being spread from contact with China.”

Researchers still unsure how long the virus lurked are now turning to blood banks and other repositories to see if lingering antibodies can show them what was missed. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health is looking for virus antibodies in samples from blood banks in Los Angeles, San Francisco and four other cities across the country.

A lot of people have been speculating on this.

THINK SPYGATE INDICTMENTS ARE COMING? THINK AGAIN: Diana West offers a bracing splash of historical reality about indictments and the Washington Swamp. I hope she’s wrong on this one (as she does), but the history is there, thanks to M. Stanton Evans and Herb Romerstein. I knew them both and absolutely trust their insights, discernment and devotion to the Republic.

ISN’T THAT WHERE THEY STARTED? Bill Maher BLASTS China Over WuFlu… The Left Goes NUTS.

WHAT IF CHINA HAD BEEN TRUTHFUL ABOUT CORONAVIRUS? Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb believes the pandemic that has swept the world could well have been contained in China, perhaps even to the Wuhan region. This whole episode will be costing China for decades to come, and rightfully so.

WELL, YES. IT WAS A POLITICALLY MOTIVATED HIT JOB: AN “INSURANCE POLICY.” It’s Official: Every Aspect of Crossfire Hurricane Was Shady.

At the height of the Russia-collusion hysteria, anyone who theorized that Crossfire Hurricane had been sparked by the Steele dossier — a document paid for by the political party running against target of the investigation — would be rigorously fact-checked.

Mainstream reporters covering the story would authoritatively inform their audience that it was evidence gleaned from a conversation with then-20-something former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos that had triggered the investigation. They knew, of course, that if the FBI had relied principally on the dossier, the investigation would look transparently and problematically partisan. The Papadopoulos conversations, on the other hand, sounded pretty damning, even though journalists didn’t know exactly what they entailed.

Well, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz recently told the Senate that those FISA warrants used to spy on the Trump campaign were “entirely” predicated on information from that dossier. And we now know that virtually every one of those applications to spy on American citizens was rife with errors, misleading information, and “fraudulent” evidence. You know, just some endemic, comprehensive, and highly targeted “sloppiness.”

We now learn from a new CBS News report that the Papadopoulos evidence was also misrepresented in applications. Two weeks before Election Day, in the midst of a contentious presidential campaign, the Obama administration’s DOJ filled out surveillance warrant applications without including contradicting evidence — and then left out that evidence again on three subsequent renewals. Just another mishap.

And yes the whole thing does “reek of corruption” — because it was entirely corrupt.

CHANGE: Trump Threatens Countries With Visa Sanctions If They Stop Accepting Deported Citizens.

AS THE PANDEMIC PERSISTS: Beijing probes the South China Sea. Like they say on Instapundit, don’t trust China, meaning the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.

MILITARY MASKING: Authorized masks while in uniform.

CHINA SYNDROME: China stifles coronavirus research in apparent bid to control narrative, analysts say. The American press corps will help as much as it can.

DON’T TRUST CHINA, CHINA IS A**HOLE: Dr. Fauci: Coronavirus Erupted in December While China Insisted No Human-to-Human Spread.

THE MONUMENTAL FAILURE OF THE CDC.

The lack of preparedness at every level of government (federal, state, and local) has nothing to do with a lack of funding or inadequate staffing. Instead, it has everything to do with governments’ bloat, mismanagement, cronyism, and poor focus.

That’s particularly true of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In theory, the prevention of diseases like this one is the agency’s entire reason d’être. It is right there in its name “Disease Control.” Its mission statement page also makes the centrality of this goal clear. It states as its priority “confronting global disease threats through advanced computing and lab analysis of huge amounts of data to quickly find solutions.”

Apparently, not really.

While there is a lot of blame to go around, it is no secret how much the CDC is to blame for the country’s lack of preparedness to take on the coronavirus (followed very closely in ineptitude by the Food and Drug Administration). The agency’s failure to understand the severity of this virus, to provide useful advice to the American people and to political leaders, and to deliver appropriate testing capabilities has been widely documented.

As I wrote last week, emails reveal that weeks after the virus started roaming freely in the U.S., CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield told his employees that “the virus isn’t spreading in the US at this time.” But a month later, the CDC was still telling state and local officials that its “testing capacity is more than adequate to meet current testing demands.”

It wasn’t.

Nope.

Related: The CDC was Fighting Racism and Obesity Instead of Stopping Epidemics.

Flashback: You had one job, CDC.