Trump Doesn't Deserve All Of The Blame For The Poor U.S. Response To COVID-19-- Just Most Of It

Yesterday a senior member of Congress told me that he's taking the pandemic a lot more seriously than his wife, his friends and, most disturbingly, his colleagues, and speculated that it's because he's "been hearing about this for a lot longer than most people and I think it is going to get real bad in about 10 days. I hope I'm wrong, but fear I'm not. People in DC are not taking it seriously enough. I'm hearing bars and restaurants are still full." Bad enough, but the leadership is doing far too little and far too late. Obviously McTurtle is worse but Pelosi's pathetic, compromised agenda is just better in comparison with his and Trump's and isn't going to save us from the impact of what could well turn out to be the worst pandemic in American history. And on Meet the Press, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made it clear that the only way to flatten the curve in America is for everyone to "hunker down" for the immediate future-- starting right this second. He warned that deaths in the country "could soar into the millions." Later, on State of the Union he said that "if we go about our daily lives and not worry about everything-- that it’s not going to happen-- it could happen. And it could be worse." He especially warned young people that the bullshit about people their age being immune or not getting a serious case is patently false.

Some people have told me I've been too harsh claiming Trump for the spread of coronavirus. But I haven't been-- not at all. I want to direct your attention to the two short clips, first the one above and then the quickie analysis below. When trying to defend his decision to close down the response apparatus to global pandemics-- like the nightmare we're living through now-- he said, "Some of the people we cut, they haven't been used for many, many years. And if we ever need them we can get them very quickly. And rather than spending the money... and I'm a business person. I don't like having thousands of people around when you don't need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly." He called the inquiry into the time lost in responding to the rapid rate of infection because he disbanded the White House pandemic office "just a nasty question."

Below, Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, is moved to refer to him as a "bozo" on Democracy Now a few days later for that response. "Everybody is recognizing, oops, it was a big mistake by the Trump Administration to obliterate the entire infrastructure if the pandemic response that the Obama administration had created... because it was Obama's program."





Now, as the U.S. hurtles towards recession-- with the country "suffering the most abrupt and widespread cessation of economic activity in its history... that could mean lost jobs, income and wealth for millions of Americans, Trump is bumbling and fumbling and continuing to make every mistake possible at every junction he comes to. I hate to say it, but this is the "president" of the United States, deal with the response to the pandemic:

"Across the country," continued the Washington Post, consumer spending-- which supports 70 percent of the economy-- is grinding to a halt as fears of the escalating coronavirus pandemic keep people from stores, restaurants, movie theaters and workplaces." Writing for Bloomberg News, Mohamed El-Erian asked his readers to "Think of what is happening as a huge paradigm shift for economies, institutions and social norms and practices that, critically, are not wired for such a phenomenon. It requires us to understand the dynamics, not only to navigate them well but also to avoid behaviors that make the situation a lot worse. The bottom line is that the economic disruptions immediately ahead will be more severe and widespread than the ones experienced by the bulk of the population in advanced countries... We live in a global economy wired for ever deepening interconnectivity; and we are living through a period in which the current phase of health policy-- emphasizing social distancing, separation and isolation-- runs counter to what drives economic growth, prosperity and financial stability. The effects of these two basic factors will be amplified by the economics of fear and uncertainty that tempt everyone not just to clear out supermarket shelves but sadly also reignite terrible conscious and unconscious biases."

And the third rate Trump Regime's response to this multi-faceted calamity? The New York Times' Ellen Barry, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner, termed it a patchwork-- which is what Obama had worked to make sure it wouldn't be: It's Totally Ad Hoc. Without leadership and clear guidance from the federal government, local governments are left on their own-- and each one is doing something different without even definitive guidelines to consult. "The United States, a nation founded on the notion of individual rights and limited federal power," wrote Barry, "vests key decisions on public health in state and local government. The last week laid bare a dizzying patchwork of local decision-making, as the largest quarantine in recent American history occurred in a juddering, piecemeal fashion. Limits on public gatherings are being decided by individual counties, school closures by individual school districts. Testing practices vary widely, with some states introducing curbside testing and private testing firms. Although this country has a central public authority for handling infectious disease-- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-- the federal agency cannot get involved on the ground unless invited by states or municipalities."

“We have a completely decentralized public health system,” said Michele Barry, senior associate dean for global health at Stanford University. “It is difficult to mobilize a large containment strategy. That’s what Singapore did, or what China did. We don’t even work from the states up. We work from the counties up.”

She said she worried that this has kept the nation from acting swiftly, to enact aggressive controls on social distancing.

“I’m just worried we’re going to follow the Italy course, rather than the Singapore course or Hong Kong course, because we’re decentralized,” she said.

The Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, a careerist lunkhead who is far out of his depth and should never have been elected to public office, is as much as personification of this dysfunction and catastrophe as Trump. Under Newsom, California has opted for a sub-Italy response. Some schools are closed, some aren't... no endorsement of anything halt the disease. Newsom, like Trump, is a public menace who had always counted on making do as long as nothing to terrible happened while he was in office and who is making the disaster worse. He told The Times that he preferred not to use his authority to enforce guidelines limiting the size of large gatherings, instead leaving the decision to each of California’s 58 counties, the stupidest possible response by one of the stupidest governors in America. "I have the ability as governor to enforce, but I don’t expect we’ll need to do that," the feeble-minded murderer boasted. He prefers local autonomy, "We are many parts but one body. We are informed by locals and then we supplement our support with the state and federal government. And we work hand in glove, collaboratively." California will have an incredibly high death rate thanks to an incompetent president on top of an incompetent governor-- who haven recent days, taken to complimenting each others incompetence.

Bipartisanship: lame and incompetent politicians boosting each other

About a month ago, a friend of mine living in China joked that "COVID-19 was exposing each East Asian country's weakness. China had intransparent and authoritarian government. Japan had inflexible and sclerotic bureaucracy. South Korea had irresponsible cult fanatics. Turns out," he concluded," that the U.S. has all three together."

In battling a pandemic speed trumps perfection:





Over the weekend, CNN reported that infected people without symptoms might be driving the spread of coronavirus. The Trumpist regime insists that COVID-19 "is spread mainly by people who are already showing symptoms, such as fever, cough or difficulty breathing. If that's true, it's good news, since people who are obviously ill can be identified and isolated, making it easier to control an outbreak." But it might not be true, as studies from all over the world have indicated. Instead, people without symptoms-- like Trump and Pence themselves, "are causing substantial amounts of infection... Several experts interviewed by CNN said while it's unclear exactly what percentage of the transmission in the outbreak is fueled by people who are obviously sick versus those who have no symptoms or very mild symptoms, it's become clear that transmission by people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic is responsible for more transmission than previously thought."

For weeks, federal officials have emphasized that asymptomatic transmission can happen, but have said that it's not a significant factor in the spread of the virus.

On March 1 on ABC's This Week, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar told host George Stephanopoulos that asymptomatic spread is "not the major driver" of the spread of the new coronavirus.

"You really need to just focus on the individuals that are symptomatic," he said. "It [the containment strategy] really does depend on symptomatic presentation."

The website for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoes that assessment.

...But during a press briefing at the White House on Saturday, the administration's coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, seemed to strike a somewhat different note on asymptomatic transmission.

She said they're trying to understand people under the age of 20 who don't have "significant symptoms"-- "Are they a group that are potentially asymptomatic and spreading the virus?" she asked.

"Until you really understand how many people are asymptomatic and asymptomatically passing the virus on, we think it's better for the entire American public to know that the risk of serious illness may be low, but they could be potentially spreading the virus to others."