Trump Continues To Make The Pandemic Worse

Trump and his allies went bonkers yesterday when Pelosi went on CNN and characterized Trump's Don't Test/Don' Tell policy in response to the spread of the coronavirus "deadly." She told Jake Tapper as well as Americans who haven't been paying attention, exactly what they need to hear about his malevolence, incompetence and narcissism: "His denial at the beginning was deadly, his delaying of getting equipment... to where it is needed is deadly, and now the best thing would be to do is to prevent more loss of life, rather than open things up so that, because we just don’t know... As the President fiddles, people are dying.

Over 44 top economists were polled on Friday about Trump's COVID-19 responses. It went about as well as you would imagine, 80% agreeing that "Abandoning severe lockdowns at a time when the likelihood of a resurgence in infections remains high will lead to greater total economic damage than sustaining the lockdowns to eliminate the resurgence risk." And 93% agreeing that "Optimally, the government would invest more than it is currently doing in expanding treatment capacity through steps such as building temporary hospitals, accelerating testing, making more masks and ventilators, and providing financial incentives for the production of a successful vaccine." Not one economist said they disagreed with either question.

Trump's own top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also on State of the Union with Tapper, said the U.S. will certainly have "millions of cases" of COVID-19 and more than 100,000 deaths. It disagrees with Trump on the rollback of sheltering in place and social distancing. Watch:





On Friday, the NY Times published an OpEd by infectious-disease expert Michael Osterholm and documentarian Mark Olshaker, It’s Too Late to Avoid Disaster, but There Are Still Things We Can Do. "Our leaders," they wrote, "need to speak some hard truths and then develop a strategy to prevent the worst." And without mentioning him by name, they went right after Trump for his incredible political cowardice. "Of all the resources lacking in the Covid-19 pandemic, the one most desperately needed in the United States is a unified national strategy, as well as the confident, coherent and consistent leadership to see it carried out. The country cannot go from one mixed-message news briefing to the next, and from tweet to tweet, to define policy priorities. It needs a science-based plan that looks to the future rather than merely reacting to latest turn in the crisis... Our leaders need to begin by stating a number of hard truths about our situation. The first is that no matter what we do at this stage, numerous hospitals in the United States will be overrun. Many people, including health care workers, will get sick and some will die. And the economy will tank. It’s too late to change any of this now."