Zonkerbl wrote:Despite his refusal to take responsibility for doing his job, Trump is in fact responsible for many thousands of people dying from COVID. But how many? Now he might have shut down the entire country immediately and stopped the whole thing in its tracks, but I think that's unreasonable - I don't think HRC would have done that.
You could argue that every single death is his responsibility because he dismantled Obama's pandemic working group basically for no reason other than spite. How much that would have changed things is impossible to say, unfortunately. I suppose if you just want to blame every single death on him you could go with that, but I'm not comfortable with it.
Arguably any mistake Gov Cuomo made, Trump is off the hook for. So all the deaths in the Northeast we have to chalk up to something that would have happened anyway, minus a few deaths that resulted from the Trumps seizing control of PPEs and auctioning them off to the highest bidder, which wasn't where they were actually needed.
I think the new hump that's emerged is arguably Trump's fault, although I don't know what's going on in California. I guess every death that's occurred outside of New England is a good approximate number to use for deaths that are indisputably Trump's fault.
Oh hell no, its all on Trump. For precisely the reason bolded above. Contrast this outbreak with our response to Ebola. We identified every possible infected person, tracked them personally and everyone they had contact with. The German response to COVID used our model for that. The world thought we would handle it since they use the response protocols we helped write for the WHO and all, and we have the resources and intelligence for contact tracing etc.
This outbreak was precisely predicted as a possibility in the briefing book left by the Obama team. Specifically warning about another mutant Coronavirus from China (SARS being the precedent). If any of those protocols were in place when we first heard about trouble from CHina and watched as they locked down entire cities, we would have been able to intercept and isolate cases and track them. NY and NJ would not have happened with a unified response. It shouldn't have been up to Cuomo or whomever people wish to blame. Here we have a White House condemning testing for crying out loud. When constant testing and contact isolation is the only thing that will help up open our country up before the science produces a vaccine or treatment protocol.
HRC would damn sure have recognized this incoming virus as a clear and present danger. Health policy is where she cut her teeth in Bill's administration. She reads and listens to science. I thought she was a terrible candidate, even if she was more qualified than anyone who ever ran for the office (and all the Lefty reasons for disliking her, coziness to Wall Street, and hawkishness in general) but if you think she wouldn't have swiftly and decisively put the right people in charge to snuff the threat, well, you're wrong.
