***Hope in San Francisco

[ChicagoTiger85]

do you think his leadership (lies) have had anything to do with people not taking it seriously?

Yeah, for sure. On the other hand, he’s currently doing the right thing. Which puts the people who want to claim this is some kind of big hoax in a weird position. Just generally, though, I don’t think this is much about Trump.

 

[lcctay]

I’m a republican, but the administration was/is epically ill prepared to handle this. He is in way over his abilities. Picking fights with reporters asking legitimate questions to deflect responsibility is too much. They give him plenty to fairly rail against, but some tough questions need answers.

El Presidente wasted 6 weeks of potential preparation time, how many masks, PPE and ventilators could have been acquired? His messaging confused the 45% of the country that solidly backs him into taking no action and basically lied to the citizens to reduce impact on the stock market. I’m not seeing much difference between China and the US as far as preparation and communication. China eventually shut everything down. We should have shut down in early February and this may have been essentially over.

Then, we likely wouldn’t be at 300k cases and 8k deaths as of too day- but no “it’s just one case”, “ we’ve got this under control”, “ it’s just like the flu”, “it’s 15 cases, soon to be zero”, “anybody can get tested”...... His response to this event has been historically poor based on any president this country has had- “not a 10/10”. His head was/is in the sand, ignoring the biggest problem facing the nation. He will be remembered as a once a century leader- the James Buchanan or Herbert Hoover of his time.

OK - Trump is not always the best communicator and sometimes says things that are often not aligned with what he actually does in policy. I am a big Trump supporter and can acknowledge that. But, overall, I think the Trump admin has done a good job on this.

Now if you want to place blame on Trump for lacking PPE and ventilators, your blame is not supported by actuality. The states are responsible for the health care system - not the Federal government. You can disagree with this statement for how it should be but that is how it is. How should the national stockpile of PPE and ventilators be managed and what should be that inventory? Again, that is a historical national issue - not a Trump issue. You can make the claim that NY was clearly irresponsible and you can make the claim that Obama was absent on this topic during and after H1N1 even given heads up and multiple studies but what does that give us?

The bottom line is that USA and much of the world was not ready to have the plans and infrastructure in place. We were not ready to take hard mitigation actions as was the direct experience and response of some of the Asian countries in SARS like South Korea, Taiwan, etc to COVID.

After we learn from this, we need to take the damn politics out of it and put in place a system to react and have the infrastructure in place to deal with this. There is plenty to learn and it is unfortunate our media is so screwed up that we will probably get a bunch of BS about what Trump did or did not do.

 

[lcctay]

I don't think your timeline is right...please read through following actual timeline of relevant data....there is much more information that this in the following non political link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_from_November_2019_to_January_2020. It is not fair to think any administration could have done much better without being able to have firsthand access to all the information. Look at when the WHO determined it was a Pandemic and when the US CDC raised travel to level 4 ...January 30th and then on the 31st the President restricted all travel. Only 3 people had died in China on January 19th, that is hard to classify as a Pandemic don't you think?

On 14 January, Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO's emerging diseases unit said that there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus, mainly small clusters in families, adding that "it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission

On 19 January, the first confirmed cases were reported in China, outside Wuhan, one in the southern province of Guangdong and two in Beijing.[99] Wuhan reported 136 additional laboratory-confirmed cases, bringing the total number of laboratory-confirmed cases in China to 201. A new death was also reported in Wuhan, bringing the total number of fatalities in China to three

21 January[edit]
The World Health Organization announced that it would hold an emergency meeting on the virus the following day to determine if the virus is a "public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC)".[
22 January[edit]
WHO's emergency committee was unable to reach a consensus—with one member stating that the vote was "50/50. Even."—on whether the outbreak should be classified as a PHEIC due to lack of information.[402] The committee will resume discussion the next day.[403]
25 January[edit]
The United States announced plans to evacuate US citizens out of Wuhan by charter jet.[419] The US government later clarified that it only had limited capacity for private citizen evacuations.
27 January[edit]
On 27 January, the WHO assessed the risk of COVID-19 to be "high at the global level".[422]
The USCDC expands travel advisory from Wuhan to the whole of Hubei Province.[433] Later that day, the US State Department raised the travel advisory for China to Level 3 ("Reconsider Travel: Avoid travel due to serious risks to safety and security.") due to the coronavirus.[434] The same day, the USCDC again updates its travel health notice to Warning - Level 3, Avoid All Nonessential Travel to China.[
29 January
The WHO announces that its director-general has decided to reconvene their international health regulations emergency committee on 30 January to reconsider declaring a global health emergency, technically a "public health emergency of international concern" (PHEIC). The reconvening is due "mainly on the evidence of increasing number of cases, human-to-human transmission outside of China, and the further development of transmission."[452][453
30 January[edit]
The WHO director-general declares the coronavirus outbreak a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern" (PHEIC), reversing two previous decisions after emergency committee meetings in the last week.[462][463][464] WHO also issued a warning that that "all countries should be prepared for containment, including active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread" of the virus.[465]
The US State Department issued an updated travel advisory as "Level 4: Do Not Travel to China."
31 January
The United States government declares a Public Health Emergency due to the coronavirus, and is closing its borders to all foreign nationals "who pose a threat of transmitting the virus from entering the country and would quarantine U.S. citizens returning from Hubei province in China, the epicenter of the outbreak, for up to 14 days," starting Sunday, February 2 at 5 p.m. The 195 Americans on the Air Force base in California whom were recently evacuated from Wuhan recently will also be quarantined.[495][496][497]

Thanks for that - good post - I did not read it before my previous post - but it illustrates many issues in the communication of this topic - many issues outside the USA in the timeline of this pandemic and the massive issue on the Chinese side in how they dealt with the first few months of the pandemic in communication and warning.