Donald Trump is apparently
enjoying doing press briefings these days, since it gives him an opportunity to
boast about how “great” he is doing since he started taking the advice of Fox
News’ Tucker Carlson over his colleagues who were claiming that the coronavirus
problem was a liberal “scam” to destroy his presidency. The Washington Post noted that the outlets that Trump has been
decrying as “fake news” has been reporting on the issue since the middle of
January at least, but as always, anything that suggests that all is not
completely “great” in Trump’s America is treated as “bad news” for him
personally, and tossed in the remainder bid or denounced in a tweetstorm.
Meanwhile, according to a story
in Business Insider, a web conference
hosted by the American Hospital Association featured a professor from the
University of Nebraska Medical Center named James Lawless who claimed that his “best
guess” was that 96 million people in this country would eventually be infected
by the coronavirus, 4.8 million requiring hospitalization, and 480,000 would
die of it. These numbers do seem to be way out there; as of March 22 according
to Worldometer, there are 32,356 cases in the U.S., of which 414 have resulted
in fatalities, although as of March 20 the CDC provided numbers only half as
much. But even those numbers may only be a tiny fraction of the actual total,
since these numbers only represent those who have actually been tested after
complaining of symptoms; the vast majority of Americans have obviously not been
tested.
Some sources are predicting even
more dramatic outcomes; according to a report by the Imperial College in London, barring a 100 percent lockdown of both
the U.S. and Great Britain,
We
predict 81% of the GB and US populations would be infected over the course of
the epidemic. Epidemic timings are approximate given the limitations of
surveillance data in both countries: The epidemic is predicted to be broader in
the US than in GB and to peak slightly later. This is due to the larger
geographic scale of the US, resulting in more distinct localised epidemics
across states than seen across GB. The higher peak in mortality is due to the
smaller size of the country and its older population compared with the US. In
total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000
deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential
negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality.
Trump has only in the past week taken the virus
seriously—wasting two whole months when both “fake news” media outlets and
intelligence agencies were warning of imminent danger. Instead of “congratulating”
Trump for his belated actions, if the pandemic gets any worse we should be discussing
his culpability in allowing it to fester. New
York Times columnist David Leonhardt provided the following rundown of
Trump’s views on how serious he thought the coronavirus issue was:
On January 22: “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under
control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control.
It’s going to be just fine.”
January 24: “It will all work out
well.”
January 30: “We have it very well
under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment —
five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”
February 2: “Well, we pretty much
shut it down coming in from China. We have a tremendous relationship with
China, which is a very positive thing. Getting along with China, getting along
with Russia, getting along with these countries.”
February 10: “Looks like by
April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes
away.”
February 19: “I think the numbers
are going to get progressively better as we go along.”
February 23: The situation was “very
much under control. We had 12, at one point. And now they’ve gotten very much
better. Many of them are fully recovered.”
Trump then engaged in a blame
game against Barack Obama and “do-nothing” Democrats who were spending all of
their time attacking Trump’s do-nothing reaction to virus problem. Meanwhile,
February 26: “We’re going down,
not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up.”
February 27: Trump continued to
make false claims about the severity of the situation, asserting that a vaccine
was practically days away and irrationally boasting about how he had personally overseen action that was “the most aggressive taken by any country.” In reality, it was state
governors—mainly Democratic—who had taken the lead in taking aggressive action.
March 6: “I like this stuff. I
really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these
doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural
ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
Followed by
March 7: “I’m not concerned at
all.”
March 10: “It will go away. Just
stay calm. It will go away.”
And this guy “understands”
anything?
It wasn’t until March 11 that
Trump actually pretended to take the virus issue seriously, albeit in a fact-challenged,
self-serving presser that had to be corrected by aides afterwards. But as we
can see from Trump’s prior statements, his reaction to the virus issue was
first and foremost one of personal political considerations. For almost two
months he used the country as a human shield—as Greg Stillson did with that
baby in The Dead Zone—to protect his
political life. That he is now boasting of his “actions” made two months after the fact should not be cause for “praise.”
Incredibly, a majority of the country actually approves of Trump’s belated re-action to the pandemic. Whether history
will judge that Trump’s initial inaction was in fact in large part responsible
for the spread of the virus in this country remains to be seen, but it is
certainly part of the story.
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