I am not defending Trump, merely listing facts. I believe Trump's rhetoric (as always) could have been much, much better, but you had much rather criticize Trump instead of the Chinese government because, I assume, you dislike the person and his politics. He has just signed the largest stimulus bill in U.S. history. He also implied in yesterday's briefing that he would consider signing another bill to assist Americans.
In order to safeguard citizens, Trump suggested quarantining New York as some presidents of European countries have done, but people on the left fought this agenda for political reasons.
Because infections and deaths vary by state, responsibilities lie within the governor of each state. Governor DeWine has protected Ohioans. He was one of the first ones in the country to close all public places, including schools. In fact, he has announced to continue the closure until the first of May.
Trump, just like any other president, cannot do everything and not everything is his fault.
Yeah, this type of piecemeal approach does not work in an epidemic like this, and it’s why every other country that’s serious about this (including ones as big as India) has issued a national order for a coordinated response.
The issue is threefold: one, the spread of this virus is exponential, not linear. This means that by the time an individual state or region of the country goes from “Oh, we don’t have so many cases” to “Hmm, this might be a problem” it’s far too late. You absolutely cannot wait — the models that we have which are successful worldwide at preventing a flood of cases nationwide are ones where the federal government responded aggressively and immediately to all cases. This is not in dispute.
The second major issue is testing. We actually don’t know how many cases are in each area, because we haven’t been testing nearly as many people per capita as we should be. In NY, for example, we’re on the record as having 60k cases. But I haven’t been able to get a test. Neither has anyone I know. Thus the official count, which is mostly from hospitalized people, does not accurately reflect the situation. This is likewise true in states which believe they only have several hundred cases, but mathematically are likely to have several thousand already.
The third issue is that we have no controls on travel between states or borders, which means that it’s hard for us to track the movement of people who might be sick. So even if your state shuts down, if the state next door doesn’t shut down, there are people flowing back and forth, which makes it a lost cause. If say, NYC is closed but Connecticut is open and people are flowing back and forth, the response is a mess and that’s exactly the kind of situation that’s playing out across the nation right now.
I cannot state this clearly enough — we need a
coordinated and uniform response here, and that needs to be led by the federal government, just like it has everywhere else. For every day that goes by with a piecemeal shutdowns, and “Oh maybe we’ll close this part of the country down eventually, when it gets bad”, we exacerbate the problem, waste time, and ultimately waste lives.
