jrober38

How?

Because he tells Trump what Trump wants to hear. People who do that typically rise to the top.

What are his qualifications exactly? Some of his comments made no sense whatsoever.

The US mortality rate is now 2.37%. It was about 1% a week ago.

If you want to look at deaths per capita wouldn't it make sense to look at tests per capita? Why would you focus on deaths per capita but then only focus on the raw number of tests needed? The US has 4-8 times the resources and man power as any of those countries. You're not offering an apples to apples comparison.

Show me another developed country affected by this that has 330 million people. No one else has done that many tests because they have a fraction of the population. If South Korea can do 300k tests, there's no reason the US can't do 2 million.

Why would conducting 2 million tests be more difficult than them doing 300k?

My view is as follows. In January a foreign adversary essentially declared war on the US. A pandemic was spreading in Asia, and every scientist said it would spread to the US eventually. Dr. Fauci was on TV multiple times in late January and early February sounding the alarm bells. As early as 8 weeks ago he was saying hospitals needed to prepare, that people with elective surgeries scheduled should be cancelling them, and that it would affect every corner of the US. The US should have been preparing for war. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. They did the opposite. They closed the border with China and called it a day, hoping that would be enough. They were totally wrong. In early February Trump actually sent 18 tons of PPE to China which was a terrible decision. At that time, the Federal Government should have been ordering companies to begin supplying extensive quantities of PPE and they should have begun the manufacturing of ventilators as soon as there was enough data to suggest that your only hope at survival if you make it into an ICU is being hooked up to one. That's hindsight, but the response was laughable. Even when hospitals in Italy were being completely overrun with sick patients, the Federal government was still sitting around twiddling its thumbs in early March. They thought shutting that border would be enough. Trump said although they had 15 cases, it would soon be zero. A lot of people deserve blame. I think the only people who have done a good job all things considered are the Governors of California and Washington. They were hit first, and they acted decisively to shut things down and limit the spread. Their epidemics are mostly under control at this point, although there is obviously a chance that can change. To think that Florida is still operating without a major lock down is beyond mind boggling. It's going to get absolutely hammered by this virus in 4 weeks and its elderly population is going to be devastated.

Trump can't do any harm. It's not his fault they didn't have enough tests or do anything to build more ventilators and PPE. He locked down the border with China as if that would be enough to stop the spread. That's enough for his supporters to think he did all he could to help.

It also didn't help when Trump decided to ship 18 tons of PPE to China in early February. I think it's safe to say that was a mistake.

Sure. So he didn't do anything. Thanks for clarifying that.

Fauci was sounding the alarm in various TV interviews at the end of January.

No. I'd be more interested in deaths per 100,000 people. Unless everyone gets tested I've accepted the mortality rate is flawed.

I was watching MSNBC last night to listen to a Q&A with Dr Fauci. He answered questions off twitter. One was, I thought this was supposed to go away in warm weather. Why is it being spread so much in Florida? I GUARANTEE that guy got that idea from Trump or Fox News when they were pushing the idea it would go away like the flu when the weather warmed up. It's like a wave, one day like a miracle it will just be gone. - Trump sometime in late Feb/early March Whoops!

I think the problem is that the US is going to have by far the most fatalities in the world outside of China when this is all said and done. In six months I'm fairly confident people will be able to look back and say, the Western World totally screwed up, but the US screwed up the most.

What else did he do? Did he order the production of ventilators or PPE? Did he order the mass production of testing equipment?

We don't know if this is true. All we know is that those government policies failed across the Western World. We have no idea what the experts like Dr. Fauci were saying in January and February behind closed doors.

Please don't tell me you're pro life.

Agreed. Biden is completely useless. Regardless of what the polls say I can't see him winning unless this completely spirals out of control and 250,000 people are dead by November and the economy is in a depression. Trudeau benefits from the Trump circus. No one is paying attention to what he's doing, which hasn't been much.

Peoples lives are more important. The economy will eventually recover. Once you're dead, you're dead.

You're right. Most politicians will have their head on the chopping block in 7 months based off the mistakes they made over the past 6 weeks. This is going to be a colossal disaster.

Doctors had to get permission from the CDC to test people.

We're talking about testing as a way to contain the spread of the virus. The US has failed miserably at testing.

People did that all over the world. People are still doing it in Florida today.

This is incorrect. South Korea did minimal social distancing. They did extensive trace testing (they did 200k tests in the time the US did 1k) and they identified who had the virus and then they quarantined them. There are two ways to contain this. 1. Lock everything down, extreme social distancing. 2. Massive testing South Korea took door #2. Cuomo wasn't getting a daily briefings from the CDC on the COVID-19 outbreak in December and January. There's supposed to be a reason these things are centrally directed by the Federal Government. Imagine if another country attacked the USA, would it fall on the Governors to organize the military defense? Of course not!!!