Spotted today in the “politics” stream, embedded within a dumb right-wing meme. When they inadvertently reach the point!

“70 days” is approximately the time between China’s and the WHO’s first public announcements about the novel coronavirus in early-January 2020, and when Trump finally declared a national emergency over Covid-19 on March 13, 2020. (I believe the stock market plunges, more than anything, forced his hand)

In the meantime, Trump took just one significant action — banning travel from China — on Jan. 31. He spent the rest of his time whining about the press and Democrats, to the point of calling coronavirus panic “their new hoax” at a South Carolina campaign rally on Feb. 28.

Well? Did the China travel ban keep the virus off our shores?

And was the “panic” justified?

This is the most comprehensive article I’ve seen to date on the Trump Administration’s failures. Wasn’t the first such article and certainly won’t be the last.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.amp.html

The really interesting question is whether the Trump Administration got any classified reports about the virus *before* the public announcements by China and the WHO in early-January 2020. In theory, the Trump Administration could have known as early as November 2019, because that’s when Chinese authorities first learned about it. That would make Trump’s response even more damning.

But for now, we can only say that Trump wasted 70 critical days, while other countries were getting their responses in order.

And we’re paying for it now in so many ways.

I'm not terribly sure that Trump had the information. Nor that China and WHO understood how serious the virus was before it was too late. The biggest issue with the virus is that it's asymptomatic and has a longer than normal incubation time. It's a thing easily missed and the under-reaction by all parties makes sense in that context.

I cannot currently fault Trump's response time.

What we can fault Trump on, if you really want to blame him for something, is dismantling the Pandemic's response team in 2018, his continued attempts to undersell the virus as a threat, his partisan attitude to blue and red states during the crisis, and his push to reopen the economy premature.

If we find a suitable treatment for the virus before fall, this could easily be a triumph for the Trump administration. It will certainly be spun that way whether it is or not.

Except these "other countries" you're talking about have far higher mortality rates from the virus than we do. The US is actually doing better than the vast majority of the 1st world, but partisan morons like you will twist the truth however you can in order to make Trump look bad.

Um....

If I may, real quick check the higher mortality rate...

Where it began China 6%

Other countries:

United Kingdom 15%

France 14%

Italy 14%

Spain 11%

Canada 6%

Iran 6%

USA 6%

3% Turkey

1% Russia

I can concur, right now our fatality rate is much lower than most first world countries.

I included Iran because I wanted to see what a warm climate country was handling it. Strangely the colder countries are doing better. I wonder how that fits into the theory that warmer climate will slow this thing down. Hmmm.

I actually heard that brazil is concerned that they're going to end up the world epicenter of the virus because of the way its ballooning out of control there - makes me think that temperature isn't really a huge issue. Also kind of concerning considering how many indigenous tribes there are in Brazil that wouldn't have access to any of the medical equipment or procedures they'd need to fight it - I guess their big hope though would be since they're mostly so isolated they may never catch it.

Brazil and Mexico are both in for a rude awakening, as their Presidents more than any other countries' appear to still be heads-in-the-sand about this

Death rates are perhaps a better reflection of the existing state of our healthcare system. Infection and transmission rates are where the public policy response to this crisis comes in, and on that front we are doing terribly.

It's also hard to compare apples-to-apples on death rates, because some other first-world countries got hit before we did, and it takes some time for death to catch up with infections.

So are you suggesting then that we have better healthcare than europe does? ;P

Hah. I actually think the millions going unemployed during this public health crisis shows exactly why it's a bad idea to tie access to healthcare to employment, and to my knowledge, we're the only first-world country that does that.

If some European countries have higher death rates now, again I think that's because they were hit earlier than us, but we'll see when the dust settles.

South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all have universal healthcare and they're faring quite well. Again, because of their rapid and vigorous public policy responses.

So far as I know those nations had far more vigorous responses than we did - not in timing but in actions. For instance, when the outbreak first started(and even today) quarantine is not "forced" per se. It's voluntary and the government only steps in if someone is proven to have not quarantined themselves.

I personally believe had we forcibly locked down suspected cases right off the bat we could have avoided much of what is happening right now. However, I don't think either side would have supported such drastic actions. The left would have used that as fuel for the "trump is a tyrant" argument and the right would have said it violated their constitutional rights(which they'd be right about).

So what steps would you suggest should have been taken at the time, without the benefit of hindsight? Put yourself back into the mindset you were in in january and february. What at the time did you think we should be doing? Did you complain AT THE TIME that we weren't doing enough? I don't recall seeing you post anything of the sort, though I could have missed it. If memory serves the only thing you cared about at the time was the fact that republicans didn't vote to remove Trump from office.

Tracking, tracing, testing, and voluntary quarantines/social distancing seemed to work for South Korea. They never went to full lockdowns and now they're basically out of the woods:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/china-and-south-korea-mark-major-milestones-in-taming-coronavirus/ar-BB13CvHr

It's perhaps too late to do tracking/tracing here, since the virus is now basically everywhere, and arguably prohibited by HIPAA and other health privacy laws. But laws can and should be changed in response to our needs.

How much do we value health privacy during a pandemic? Is it worth the trillions of dollars in public spending we've had to resort to, in order to tread water economically?

Honestly, I think it would absolutely have been worth it to violate privacy in order to prevent what's going on now. I think our response has been too light across the board. However, that said.. it's not Trump's fault, either. NOBODY has been pressing for the kind of measures I think and have thought since early on were necessary to nip this in the bud before we had a major outbreak. Now it's too late.

At the same time people criticize Trump for not acting fast enough, there were plenty of people on the other side who were treating it very lightly as well. The tweets by the new york health commissioner and de blasio are perfect examples. We KNEW there was a major outbreak in china and that it was only a matter of time before it hit us here, yet they still were suggesting people attend parades and go to movie theaters. You can try to play it off like it's Trump's fault but the fact of the matter is our leaders on BOTH SIDES acting too slowly and too lightly, and by the time we really started taking action the damage was done and there was no real way to contain the outbreak.

So now we're stuck sitting around with our dicks in our hands while what was a booming economy absorbs the blow, losing much of the progress we'd made in recent years and our debt continues to rise because we have to find a way to keep peoples' financial affairs at least stable in a very unstable time.

conservatives may be perfectly intelligent. not all of them, but some. it's often locked in the genes as a recessive trait that emerges in their offspring.

Lol. The intelligent ones, and there are a few of them here, perplex me the most.

I couldn’t labor under the mental whiplash that supporting this President would require.

Yes. They are the most puzzling. Do they really believe what they say? Or are they just maintaining momentum til the next cycle?

As a conservative I can say that most of them here have no clue what they are taking about.

did you mention a political stream with more rational debate? someone did the other day but i can't recall

Tnx!

Oh, thank you! I missed this. Still, it can't hurt to update it occasionally.