Covid-19 exponential growth

[0R0 + 6,251]

1 hour ago, Ward Smith said:

From the Medium article. Highly speculative and as I live in the US there are many no's that should say yes. Why not? Oh because the authors think the USA is like teeny tiny Singapore and should be treated as one big monolith. In point of fact, Washington, California and New York to name a few have instituted the serious measures. Podunk, Iowa has not, because no one is infected there. The universities are all closed, the NCAA tourney is cancelled along with every other major crowd event. But we're 50 states with 50 different ways to do things. 

Yes, the writers forget that people in a US city other than the biggest ones are dispersed. You can do your entire day including work without being within 6 ft of another person and can likely avoid touching "public" surfaces for the entire day. For most Americans there is (1) no public transport, (2) no common elevators or stairwells  (3) you can go around with a bag full of sanitation materials because it can sit by you in your car. In Europe and Asia, it is only farmers that live that way. And that is a small fraction of the population. In the US, it is the majority that live in suburban or exurban conditions. Most cities are also sprawling behemoths rather than built tall and dense. The dense cities are Boston, NYC, Downtown LA Chicago Miami coast San Fran and Seattle. The rest of the cities have small dense downtown residential areas, but most of the city is single houses or duplexes with no shared amenities and apartment complexes with open air stairwells and 6 apartments per each.

Chinese cities, Singapore Tokyo Seoul and Hong Kong are extremely dense. NYC is 40k/sqmile, but Columbus OH is 3.6k. Suburbia is 1k and exurbia is much less. This also affects transmission in the home. US suburbia allows you to avoid the rest of the family and be 10 ft away from each other in the same room without using the same bathrooms. 

Propagation of the virus in low density areas without public transport and no shopping or schools is an order of magnitude less likely. Even at the suburban office complexes you can avoid the door handles and sanitize the bathroom, it helps that the virus is killed by simple soap. 

 

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

12 hours ago, Marcin2 said:

In East Asia ( I hope also in Malaysia) governments are doing what they SHOULD and the epidemic is contained.

Wrong! The epidemic is NOT contained in Malaysia at this point. People were not taking it seriously and the army was brought out to assist the police yesterday.

Face it, it is damn near impossible to lockdown an entire country!

Gloves and masks....a placebo.

 

[ronwagn + 6,290]

Nobody in this conversation is talking about finally using the medications that have been found to work well on this coronavirus/clovid 19.  Thankfully President Trump can see through the haze machine created by the deep state eggheads at the FDA. 

https://videos.whatfinger.com/2020/03/22/nice-movement-new-york-will-start-implementing-the-trial-drugs-to-treat-coronavirus-ny-has-acquired-drugs-that-cured-40-people-in-test/

[Marcin2 + 726]

11 hours ago, 0R0 said:

The low risk death rates are about 0.5% @Tom Kirkman posted the risk tables by age group. The average age of people who died in Italy was 80. 

Of course, it is more difficult to do in Europe because the at risk population is larger than in the US. 

This was with working healthcare, without care it is your organism vs the virus. Italy will show us what are the chances.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

10 minutes ago, Marcin2 said:

This was with working healthcare, without care it is your organism vs the virus. Italy will show us what are the chances.

The issue with Italy, as I see it, is that they have a disproportionate elderly population. This somewhat skews the numbers.

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

10 hours ago, Ward Smith said:

From the Medium article. Highly speculative and as I live in the US there are many no's that should say yes. Why not? Oh because the authors think the USA is like teeny tiny Singapore and should be treated as one big monolith. In point of fact, Washington, California and New York to name a few have instituted the serious measures. Podunk, Iowa has not, because no one is infected there. The universities are all closed, the NCAA tourney is cancelled along with every other major crowd event. But we're 50 states with 50 different ways to do things. 

I like the concept behind this chart, but it's somewhat inexact for various reasons. For instance, the UK started out with intensive testing and then stopped, so that line should probably be marked red. As you said, there are regions in the US that should be implementing more extreme measures than others.

Where it is useful is showing the relative costs of different measures. While they both took a hit, China and South Korea's economies will likely come out of this in better shape than Italy, Spain, and France because they did all of the less expensive measures to get in front of the problem.

To date the UK/US are following the European group which is going to cause huge economic hardship. There is a huge lack of leadership in both countries that will cost us for much longer than the duration of the crisis.

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

18 hours ago, Bob D said:

yes   all political leaders need to be sacked.  genius!  BoJo did a bad job ... sack him.  Trump did a bad job ... sack him.  Italy PM did a bad job ... sack him.  If only the Magic 8 ball could steer everyone to the correct decisions.   

Geoff ... you are now in charge.  What do we do??  If you make one bad decision ... your sacked.  Doesn't matter what the reason is for your mistakes/errors.  Can't blame opposing views from medical professionals.  Can't blame the gov't bureaucracy lack of movement.  Any new information that renders your decisions wrong cannot be used as a crutch.  Can't blame lies from certain countries about when/where the virus started, it's contagious and mutating abilities.  Can't blame the political blame game of reporting.  If masks do not exist in quantities necessary for any population and you can't magically make them appear ... sacked.  Good luck.   

So let's talk about the bad moves that Trump did. We're not talking about one bad mistake - almost every action that he has undertaken has made the situation worse:

1. 2018: cuts 90% of CDC overseas budget.
2. 2018: fires the pandemic response team
3. June 2019: fires the US CDC expert in China
4. 22 Jan 2020: states that the US has it "totally under control" after the first cases break out in Washington. Does NOT supply any assistance to the care home, so visitors are still allowed and EMTs arrive with no protective gear to take people to hospital.
5. 31 Jan 2020: does his first and perhaps only right move in monitoring entries from Wuhan
6. While the Germans produced a test beginning 17 Jan, the administration did not roll any tests out until 4 Feb - and those tests then had to be recalled because they were faulty. It wasn't until last week that the US surpassed Canada in the number of tests.
7. 10-19 Feb 2020: continues to spout his incorrect facts. "By April it miraculously goes away".  The situation "very much under control" even though his administration still has barely started testing.
8. Feb 2020: politicizes the outbreak, criticizing news stations and Democrats for any questions. Calls the virus a Democratic hoax.
9. 6 Mar 2020: continues lying that "anyone can get a coronavirus test" when the reality is that many states still can test only 50 patients per week. Also continues downplaying the risk that it could be any worse than the common cold.
10. 11 Mar 2020: claims that the entire problem comes from outside the country, so restricts travel from Europe. Makes exception for UK which also decided to stop testing.
    1. Erroneously states that all trade with Europe will stop
    2. Cases in the US are doubling every three days but he still wants to focus on "walls"
    3. Markets lose faith and tank.
11. 22 Mar 2020: economic stimulus bill because Trump demands $500 billion that the Whitehouse can spend on business with no oversight.

Almost every single thing that the administration has done has made the situation worse. THAT's the reason Trump should be fired. His team has daily briefings to the press that consist of "The President has done a good job of ..." - they're so terrified of Stalin that they don't discuss anything real, they just praise him. (Anthony Fauci is the only exception to this and watch him tiptoe around Trump's lies while trying to tell the truth).

Administrations are meant to deal with crises, not make them worse. There are a handful of other governments that have been worse than the Trump administration, but it really isn't that many.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

23 minutes ago, Geoff Guenther said:

Almost every single thing that the administration has done has made the situation worse. THAT's the reason Trump should be fired. His team has daily briefings to the press that consist of "The President has done a good job of ..." - they're so terrified of Stalin that they don't discuss anything real, they just praise him. (Anthony Fauci is the only exception to this and watch him tiptoe around Trump's lies while trying to tell the truth).

Administrations are meant to deal with crises, not make them worse. There are a handful of other governments that have been worse than the Trump administration, but it really isn't that many.

TDS.

Carry on.

[surrept33 + 609]

Italy vs United States, cumulative cases since 100th infection:

The next week or so may not be very pretty.

Edited March 23, 2020 by surrept33

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

31 minutes ago, Geoff Guenther said:

Almost every single thing that the administration has done has made the situation worse.

Trump's (very controversial) move to ban Chinese travel to America saved more lives than one can possibly fathom. You think this is bad? Run the figures on having fifty-thousand Chinese--half of them infected but showing no fever--infiltrate every corner of the United States. 

As with any serious health disaster (though none of us has seen something of this magnitude), it's easy to be an armchair quarterback. This president is far from perfect, but he banned travel--and was widely criticized as harming the economy and being xenophobic. I'll freely dollop up a negative: when tariffs were splashed across Chinese exports, medical equipment, reagents, testing kits, medicines, etc, were inadvertently part of the package. We suffered, as a result.

But to be fair to the man, those things never should have been made in China in the first place. The fact that they were had to do with corporate competition and, in some cases, American Greed. It's pretty hard to mitigate the human condition.

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

4 minutes ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

Trump's (very controversial) move to ban Chinese travel to America saved more lives than one can possibly fathom.

As I noted above, Trump's move to ban travel from China was the one right call in the entire situation. With a pandemic, though, you have to do the next step - stamp out the virus that is already inside your borders. If you don't, you haven't saved lives, you've only delayed the infection by a couple of weeks.

Using an epidemic for political advantage only works if you have a plan to stop the epidemic, and the administration placed its complete faith in China to stop any spread.

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

1 minute ago, Geoff Guenther said:

With a pandemic, though, you have to do the next step - stamp out the virus that is already inside your borders. If you don't, you haven't saved lives, you've only delayed the infection by a couple of weeks.

Agreed, but he asked for a shelter-in-place for 15 days, gathered a dozen of the most prominent biotech scientists and CEO's at the WH to offer them governmental support for a quick vaccine and/or treatment, and is giving Tony Fauci free rein. Additionally, he is urging the FDA to allow off-label use of chloroquine and zithromax, allowing multiple centers to run their own quick studies on efficacy of these two old drugs, and is urging pharmaceuticals to ramp up production just in case. 

Shy of going to the lab, I'm not sure what else he could do to "stamp out the virus."

Even if my old friend were still in charge of the bioterrorism section in Homeland Security, they call this a novel virus for a reason: it's brand new, came out of the blue, and nobody has immunity. Net/Net, I doubt we'd be any farther along. 

I'm sorry, but I just don't get the doing everything wrong label. I'm no big Trump supporter, but in handling this I'd have to give him a pretty solid A. Not only that, but as long as he's making decent decisions, we--and that includes the Congress--need to push back gently but mostly give him the lead--the man has damn good gut reactions or he would never have gotten to the Oval Office. You want to criticize, then go after a Democratic Party that voted down the stimulus package. If that had been voted in, I rather suspect the Dow would be up a thousand points.  

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

1 hour ago, Geoff Guenther said:

So let's talk about the bad moves that Trump did. We're not talking about one bad mistake - almost every action that he has undertaken has made the situation worse:

1. 2018: cuts 90% of CDC overseas budget.
2. 2018: fires the pandemic response team
3. June 2019: fires the US CDC expert in China
4. 22 Jan 2020: states that the US has it "totally under control" after the first cases break out in Washington. Does NOT supply any assistance to the care home, so visitors are still allowed and EMTs arrive with no protective gear to take people to hospital.
5. 31 Jan 2020: does his first and perhaps only right move in monitoring entries from Wuhan
6. While the Germans produced a test beginning 17 Jan, the administration did not roll any tests out until 4 Feb - and those tests then had to be recalled because they were faulty. It wasn't until last week that the US surpassed Canada in the number of tests.

Going to break down your TDS in chunks

1,2,3 CDC. The overseas component of the CDC was ineffective and was nothing more than retired doctors taking extended vacations on the federal dime. The "pandemic response team" did nothing but write hundreds of pages of contradictory mandates that would be the last thing anyone could or should follow in a crisis. 3 Quick wasn't fired, she was reassigned back to the US. It is speculative at best that she would have received better information From the lying CCP than we got. I suppose you've already forgotten about the trade war? 

4. Not the federal government's responsibility. That failure is on governor Inslee, a democrat. 

5 yes and he received a sht ton of grief about it

6. Blame it on the incompetent bunglecrats at the CDC, whom Trump had very little control over. Believe me, he is rattling cages there now, and they are hiding behind union rules and regulations and the Civil Service Act of 1963, which says they can't be fired even for cause.

I even created an op ed on this weeks ago, do you want a link? 

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

Well, he did try to bribe a German company for their IP for a vaccine for US use only, I'll give you that.

Why did he gut the pandemic response unit and the foreign CDC workers?

Why did it take two full months after Germany to start testing? Simply because the administration didn't find it important.

Why didn't the Federal government assist the care home with the big outbreak, rather than letting it spread?

Why has Trump politicized the entire situation rather than creating a response?

Why did the Democratic party have to come up with a pandemic response bill? (A. The Whitehouse had no clue how much money they would need)

South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan all have gotten a reasonable handle on things. The statistics bear that out. The US and UK have opted for the exponential growth by doing no productive work until this past week.

OK, so he allowed fast-track of some decades-old drugs to see if they help in the treatment. That may pay dividends or it may not. The fact is that we've known for almost two months that this will be a true crisis and he only woke up to that fact a week and a half ago as the crisis has already spun out of control.

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

1 hour ago, Geoff Guenther said:

• 10-19 Feb 2020: continues to spout his incorrect facts. "By April it miraculously goes away".  The situation "very much under control" even though his administration still has barely started testing.
• Feb 2020: politicizes the outbreak, criticizing news stations and Democrats for any questions. Calls the virus a Democratic hoax.
• 6 Mar 2020: continues lying that "anyone can get a coronavirus test" when the reality is that many states still can test only 50 patients per week. Also continues downplaying the risk that it could be any worse than the common cold.
• 11 Mar 2020: claims that the entire problem comes from outside the country, so restricts travel from Europe. Makes exception for UK which also decided to stop testing.
  1. Erroneously states that all trade with Europe will stop
  2. Cases in the US are doubling every three days but he still wants to focus on "walls"
  3. Markets lose faith and tank.
• 22 Mar 2020: economic stimulus bill because Trump demands $500 billion that the Whitehouse can spend on busi

This is where the lies begin. I've already shown that the "virus hoax" is a lie perpetrated by the DNC MSM. At no time did Trump say the virus was a hoax, he was talking about the hoax attacks of the democrats. They were the ones politicizing this! He compared that politicization to every other hoax the democrats had thrown at him. Indeed he was right. Your mileage may vary if you ignore the truth and believe the Guardian. 

Tests are becoming available, but since you're British apparently you have zero concept of how things are done in the US. We're not a tiny little island, we've got 50 states and each of them gets to operate quasi independently. Furthermore, by the 6th he had pushed the morons at the CDC aside (see my response above) and was allowing for outsourcing of tests via companies like Quest. The CDC is not part of the solution, they are the problem. 

Closing the borders is the intelligent thing to do! Other countries are (finally) doing the same. He never said he was closing trade with Europe, must be more Guardian clap trap. Markets were tanking because people are scared. This worldwide pandemic and its response is unprecedented. As usually happens, the stupid lemmings will be separated from their money and the smart, calm people will benefit. Then later, the lemmings will complain the rich got richer. 

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

7 minutes ago, Geoff Guenther said:

Well, he did try to bribe a German company for their IP for a vaccine for US use only, I'll give you that.

Why did he gut the pandemic response unit and the foreign CDC workers?

Why did it take two full months after Germany to start testing? Simply because the administration didn't find it important.

Why didn't the Federal government assist the care home with the big outbreak, rather than letting it spread?

Why has Trump politicized the entire situation rather than creating a response?

Why did the Democratic party have to come up with a pandemic response bill? (A. The Whitehouse had no clue how much money they would need)

South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan all have gotten a reasonable handle on things. The statistics bear that out. The US and UK have opted for the exponential growth by doing no productive work until this past week.

OK, so he allowed fast-track of some decades-old drugs to see if they help in the treatment. That may pay dividends or it may not. The fact is that we've known for almost two months that this will be a true crisis and he only woke up to that fact a week and a half ago as the crisis has already spun out of control.

Too much HORSESHT to dig through. You repeat lies and innuendo, I've got better things to do than set you straight. I get it, you're a TDS victim. No cure for that. No cure for stupidity either. 

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

35 minutes ago, Ward Smith said:

Too much HORSESHT to dig through. You repeat lies and innuendo, I've got better things to do than set you straight. I get it, you're a TDS victim. No cure for that. No cure for stupidity either. 

Excellent. So all you can do is call names rather than rebut with facts. For your info, I'm not British, and I lived in the US much longer than I've lived in the UK. I know how the US works quite well, thank you. 

The markets tasked because the President told them that everything that he had said to date was wrong and that he didn't have a coherent plan going forward. Extending the failed partial plan from 6 weeks before from China to Europe without proposing anything new has a way of tanking markets.

 

Edited March 23, 2020 by Geoff Guenther

[0R0 + 6,251]

1 hour ago, Geoff Guenther said:

So let's talk about the bad moves that Trump did. We're not talking about one bad mistake - almost every action that he has undertaken has made the situation worse:

1. 2018: cuts 90% of CDC overseas budget.
2. 2018: fires the pandemic response team
3. June 2019: fires the US CDC expert in China
4. 22 Jan 2020: states that the US has it "totally under control" after the first cases break out in Washington. Does NOT supply any assistance to the care home, so visitors are still allowed and EMTs arrive with no protective gear to take people to hospital.
5. 31 Jan 2020: does his first and perhaps only right move in monitoring entries from Wuhan
6. While the Germans produced a test beginning 17 Jan, the administration did not roll any tests out until 4 Feb - and those tests then had to be recalled because they were faulty. It wasn't until last week that the US surpassed Canada in the number of tests.
7. 10-19 Feb 2020: continues to spout his incorrect facts. "By April it miraculously goes away".  The situation "very much under control" even though his administration still has barely started testing.
8. Feb 2020: politicizes the outbreak, criticizing news stations and Democrats for any questions. Calls the virus a Democratic hoax.
9. 6 Mar 2020: continues lying that "anyone can get a coronavirus test" when the reality is that many states still can test only 50 patients per week. Also continues downplaying the risk that it could be any worse than the common cold.
10. 11 Mar 2020: claims that the entire problem comes from outside the country, so restricts travel from Europe. Makes exception for UK which also decided to stop testing.
    1. Erroneously states that all trade with Europe will stop
    2. Cases in the US are doubling every three days but he still wants to focus on "walls"
    3. Markets lose faith and tank.
11. 22 Mar 2020: economic stimulus bill because Trump demands $500 billion that the Whitehouse can spend on business with no oversight.

You are mixing things together - the equation of the Trump administration and the bureaucracy - AKA "the swamp" with which he has been at war with since before his first day in office.

Much of what you criticize are positive actions. Other things like the "democratic hoax" was not about the virus itself.

Mistakes that were made and were significant include what you point out as a Trump admin view that the virus is coming from outside the country rather than untracked community spread. However, that ignores the fact that the tracking was done at the state level and information did not transfer well from one state to the next and was not getting to the right places in the Federal government.

Trump can not be responsible for internal failures of independent agencies that have been working within their normal power brokering and regulation writing and tying the hands of professionals in medicine so that they can't compete with the "friends and family" program of allocating contracts and approvals by the bureaucrats. 

The admin. can be faulted for not crushing the bureaucrats and replacing them with competent honest people - good luck with that one. 

Trump's people complain about the intelligence community constantly pushing manipulative analysis and hiding or creating "facts" so it is no surprise that their non specific alarms were directed to the trash can Icon.

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

10 minutes ago, 0R0 said:

You are mixing things together - the equation of the Trump administration and the bureaucracy - AKA "the swamp" with which he has been at war with since before his first day in office.

I see what you're saying there, but after 3 years of running the bureaucracy he can't place blame on it any more. The bureaucracy is his. During his purges he rid himself of as many people who stated facts that were contrary to his instincts, so what is left is Trump's.

Having a president that is allergic to inconvenient facts is what really created this mess. "Democratic hoax" is typical - anyone who said anything about COVID-19 was simply accused of trying to take down the stock market to undermine Trump. Pure paranoia. And he'd gotten rid of everyone who had the guts to stand up to him and tell him he should pay attention.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

1 hour ago, Ward Smith said:

I even created an op ed on this weeks ago, do you want a link? 

Yes please.

[0R0 + 6,251]

1 hour ago, Geoff Guenther said:

Well, he did try to bribe a German company for their IP for a vaccine for US use only, I'll give you that.

Why did he gut the pandemic response unit and the foreign CDC workers?

Why did it take two full months after Germany to start testing? Simply because the administration didn't find it important.

Why didn't the Federal government assist the care home with the big outbreak, rather than letting it spread?

Why has Trump politicized the entire situation rather than creating a response?

Why did the Democratic party have to come up with a pandemic response bill? (A. The Whitehouse had no clue how much money they would need)

South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan all have gotten a reasonable handle on things. The statistics bear that out. The US and UK have opted for the exponential growth by doing no productive work until this past week.

OK, so he allowed fast-track of some decades-old drugs to see if they help in the treatment. That may pay dividends or it may not. The fact is that we've known for almost two months that this will be a true crisis and he only woke up to that fact a week and a half ago as the crisis has already spun out of control.

Re German co. they tried to buy the patent so that the US would have control of the production to favor US deployment. Not a negative but a positive. 

The CDC pandemic response team was counterproductive and I would have fired them too. 

The CDC super counterproductive on testing. They forbade hospitals and private labs to produce tests. The FDA blocked them too with endless regulatory loopholes that would have taken months. The US would have been better off sidelining the agencies into an advisory role and stripping them entirety of their regulatory powers. They act as if their "power mandate" is superior to the lives of people and the operation of the medical system, it takes precedence. 

They are responsible for the non testing. They are responsible for bad testing policy. They are responsible for the long lag time in getting equipment and medication into doctor's hands. It required PERSONAL intervention of Trump to get the FDA to allow the Honeywell commercial N95 masks to be used for medical purposes despite their being built to the same standard on identical production lines. The issue was to get FDA inspection and approvals as were done with the medical production line, again - identical production. The FDA staff believe that their mission is to prohibit people from doing things, not to help them get meds to desperate people and equipment and materials to desperate healthcare workers. They are obstacles that the Trump admin. is fighting constantly. 

The Democrats control the House, this is not parliament, they write the law from scratch. The President can ask to have some particulars, but the Dems don't even read Administration proposals. Only House Republicans can introduce and represent the President's points. And it is them, not the President who get to decide what they are. You are misinformed as to how legislation works in the US. 

Again, you keep thinking the Federal government has control. The feet on the ground are State forces. The Wash. state nursing home was the state's problem and the Feds could only offer backup money and fly a handful of CDC people to run things. Nobody wanted the CDC folks so that was it. They also didn't wait for Fed money to get approved by congress and administered.

Your main criticisms are against things the Administration can't do at all and responsibilities they DON'T have because they don't have authority. 

The pre-Oxford report (Furgesson) thinking was that the best solution was to get a herd immunity going by quickly spreading the virus. But since the report came out, things have shifted. UK, some Scandinavians and others headed that way till they saw Milan's top notch hospitals get overwhelmed. There was an overall realization that the Chinese statistics were incorrect and did not reflect the reality of the disease. That if they ignored the stats from China then they would have a BETTER idea of how the disease spreads and who gets sick and how badly. China DELIBERATELY hid all of the pertinent information, and they were months ahead of everyone in the pandemic. Without that early  info the West was flying blind. 

You need to check your sources and screen out European ones, they don't understand distributed government and the separation of powers. Then you need to screen out political writing from factual journalism. The MSM is distinctly one sided and has come from a bastion of socialist education in humanities departments the world over. The great success of Soviet and pre-Soviet Communist party actions a century ago. If I wanted truthful journalism I would avoid graduates of humanities programs, particularly journalism. It has become a "dis-competent" curriculum. Like teaching surgeons that their only tools are hammers and bats and their success is measured by the amount of blood on the floor.

[ronwagn + 6,290]

3 hours ago, Geoff Guenther said:

So let's talk about the bad moves that Trump did. We're not talking about one bad mistake - almost every action that he has undertaken has made the situation worse:

1. 2018: cuts 90% of CDC overseas budget.
2. 2018: fires the pandemic response team
3. June 2019: fires the US CDC expert in China
4. 22 Jan 2020: states that the US has it "totally under control" after the first cases break out in Washington. Does NOT supply any assistance to the care home, so visitors are still allowed and EMTs arrive with no protective gear to take people to hospital.
5. 31 Jan 2020: does his first and perhaps only right move in monitoring entries from Wuhan
6. While the Germans produced a test beginning 17 Jan, the administration did not roll any tests out until 4 Feb - and those tests then had to be recalled because they were faulty. It wasn't until last week that the US surpassed Canada in the number of tests.
7. 10-19 Feb 2020: continues to spout his incorrect facts. "By April it miraculously goes away".  The situation "very much under control" even though his administration still has barely started testing.
8. Feb 2020: politicizes the outbreak, criticizing news stations and Democrats for any questions. Calls the virus a Democratic hoax.
9. 6 Mar 2020: continues lying that "anyone can get a coronavirus test" when the reality is that many states still can test only 50 patients per week. Also continues downplaying the risk that it could be any worse than the common cold.
10. 11 Mar 2020: claims that the entire problem comes from outside the country, so restricts travel from Europe. Makes exception for UK which also decided to stop testing.
    1. Erroneously states that all trade with Europe will stop
    2. Cases in the US are doubling every three days but he still wants to focus on "walls"
    3. Markets lose faith and tank.
11. 22 Mar 2020: economic stimulus bill because Trump demands $500 billion that the Whitehouse can spend on business with no oversight.

Almost every single thing that the administration has done has made the situation worse. THAT's the reason Trump should be fired. His team has daily briefings to the press that consist of "The President has done a good job of ..." - they're so terrified of Stalin that they don't discuss anything real, they just praise him. (Anthony Fauci is the only exception to this and watch him tiptoe around Trump's lies while trying to tell the truth).

Administrations are meant to deal with crises, not make them worse. There are a handful of other governments that have been worse than the Trump administration, but it really isn't that many.

Geoff, you have never come to grips with the obvious fact that America has done far better than Western and Southern Europe combined even though the populations are similar. We have an excellent record compared to Europe which has a dismal one. 

[0R0 + 6,251]

20 minutes ago, Geoff Guenther said:

I see what you're saying there, but after 3 years of running the bureaucracy he can't place blame on it any more. The bureaucracy is his. During his purges he rid himself of as many people who stated facts that were contrary to his instincts, so what is left is Trump's.

Having a president that is allergic to inconvenient facts is what really created this mess. "Democratic hoax" is typical - anyone who said anything about COVID-19 was simply accused of trying to take down the stock market to undermine Trump. Pure paranoia. And he'd gotten rid of everyone who had the guts to stand up to him and tell him he should pay attention.

The bureaucracy is not under his control. Senate Dems block 75% of his personnel appointments. The president can not fire the people, can't change their positions without cooperation of the department directors, who are usually not his appointees. 

Yes, Trump was reacting in paranoid fashion, but people who  cry wolf and can't be fired will simply be ignored. He took on advisers that didn't give the right answers. What Trump does is fire people who upstage him. He actually does want people to argue before him. What he can't take are "experts" who speak in boulderdash and bureaucratese and act superior when others don't understand them. Like the famous scene with Kelly who observed Trump and figured his main obstacle is his preoccupation with his cell phone and twitter. He picked up Trump's phone and said his team would do the social network postings. Since then they communicated via post-its.

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

7 minutes ago, 0R0 said:

Your main criticisms are against things the Administration can't do at all and responsibilities they DON'T have because they don't have authority. 

I don't know if you live in the US, but when the president declares an emergency he gains authority over all sorts of things, and national security threats like a pandemic are one. The CDC, as a part of the Trump administration, should have been in there immediately.

Everything you've described are Trump's excuses to not act. Trump should not have had to become personally involved in getting more masks - the fact that he gelded the administration is why it couldn't be done earlier.

This week the US will pass China in total number of COVID-19 cases. We had over two more months to deal with this outbreak than China did and we completely flubbed it.

Johnson's use of "herd immunity" is arguably worse, but we can get into that later.

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

11 minutes ago, ronwagn said:

Geoff, you have never come to grips with the obvious fact that America has done far better than Western and Southern Europe combined even though the populations are similar. We have an excellent record compared to Europe which has a dismal one. 

Absolutely, we have to move fast so the UK and US can follow more of an Asian path, not the southern European one. Time is short - the US passes China in the number of COVID-19 cases this week.