One of the enduring puzzles this year has been why the GOP and the Trump administration in particular didn’t take an emerging pandemic seriously and didn’t act with any urgency from the outset.
Did it ever occur to you that President Trump was informed of the facts of the pandemic long before they played out, and that his approach still makes the only sense in light of it all?
We learned everything we needed to know about COVID-19 from Wuhan in December and January, plus research previously done on the other four common-cold coronaviruses. The hyper-geniuses in the Pentagon basement likely created all the possible scenarios and Trump was informed:
1. There's no way to keep older more infirm Americans safe from the virus once it begins to spread; isolating older and infirm people from the general population is largely impossible. That is, indeed, sadly true.
2. The infection fatality rate is about 0.60%, maybe it's about 17 times more deadly than the flu's 0.035%. It's not SARS; it won't wipe us out.
3. It's highly contagious, and because it can be picked up from objects and people will simply cross contaminate, so masks alone are not enough -- it will spread.
4. Immunity whether from vaccine or recovering from a case of COVID-19 will only be good for 3-6 months, so herd immunity is a fantasy and not worth attempting to pursue.
5. Quarantines and shutdowns will not eliminate the virus, as too many people's ideologies won't let them obey quarantines and shutdowns (think right wing conspiracy theorists, BLM rioters, etc.).
6. We do not have in the federal warehouses sufficient masks, hand sanitizer, and other equipment to do a mass shutdown for 28 days with essential workers conscripted and housed in sanitized barracks delivering us our food.
7. Even if we did do a mass shutdown for 28 days, we'd have to seal off the borders, and that means no flights in and out of America without mandatory 14-day quarantines until the rest of the world snuffs out the virus too. Our economy requires international travel. A mass shutdown will not work.
8. Our borders are too porous to prevent the virus from sneaking back in illegally.
9. Rush development has immediately begun to fund immuno-therapy treatments/cures, and that's the best we can do there.
10. Rush development has immediately began to fund vaccine creation, and that's the best we can do there.
11. The goal now is to accept acceptable losses that will be upon us .. but keep the economy up and running as best as possible.
12. Many states, especially those with large dense populations that thereby will have Democrat governors are going to want to shut their state down, and they have every states right to do so and cannot be stopped, so that's life. Simply encourage those states to carefully consider the damage that can be done to the economy and not cause the whole country to go down.
13. There will be losses until treatment and vaccine are developed. Encourage individual self-protection for the elderly and the infirm, do the best you can to prevent panic (such as the President himself eschewing masks as long as possible), and keep the whip up on treatment and vaccine development. That's the best we can do. Don't look panicked, as that will panic the people!
All of this is what President Trump did.
Considering all we know now about the virus that was also completely knowable back in January and February, the only thing Trump did was to hide the truth of it all from everyone as long as possible to keep spirits up.
All facts considered, I don't have a big problem at all with what the President did.
