what makes you assume i was talking about you. I was responding to a generalized comment.
I’m happy to have a conversation about this. However I think you have politicized something that shouldn’t be political. You have also given trump positive credit for what have proven false promises or bad policies.
he promised free tests. That didn’t happen. It took the house and senate to make that happen. You have him credit for waving copays, but that didn’t materialize. It was a promise from a small number of large insurers and turned out to apply to only a few. At this point it’s not clear it applies to anyone as it’s not certain it was even implemented. I have United, and they have indicated they aren’t waving anything.
trump is promising to put money in people’s pockets. Democrats were begging for that for years. That has been a suggested solution to similar problems for a long time. Republicans only got behind it when in an emergency, and the original proposal was $1000 checks for everyone. Why? I don’t need that check. A lot of people don’t need that check. We do have to pay for this.
he is offering low interest loans for small businesses? That isn’t very helpful. These small businesses aren’t making any money right now, how are they going to pay off the loans?
communication about the virus and how serious it is has been a joke. One that isn’t remotely funny. There has been misinformation and miscommunication.
@JerryLove has already quoted Trump on the many nonsensical things he said. That was not helpful, Trump was being dangerous.
conservative media blames the liberal media for overreacting to this and making it political. The conservative media downplayed how serious this was, suggesting it was just a cold. It wasn’t. It was serious. Their advice was wrong and dangerous. The liberal media might have been hysterical, but there was far less harm in that. This IS serious and we needed to take it seriously. There was little harm in a few extra people quarantining themselves. There was great danger in a few less.
The Single biggest screw up in the initial response to this was a failure to develop tests fast enough. Trump tried to blame Obama which was completely nonsensical. He didn’t screw up the test, but it was his administration with the responsibility to fix it. We are only now seeing the tests on a large scale and we still lack the necessary infrastructure. They could have asked the WHO and South Korea for help. We would have had tests weeks earlier. But we didn’t. Was it pride? Why? It was part of the pandemic response plan that the US should have coordinated with the WHO. Why didn’t we?
completely unqualified people were put in charge of the response and we ended up with silly distractions like a non-existent website from a Google subsidiary. That website will be great in a few years. We don’t need it right now. We need more tests and a system put in place to test safely.
the majority of the actual response is coming from state and local health departments. That is how our public health works and this pandemic is showing the flaws in a decentralized public health system that relies on a fully privatized healthcare system. We can’t easily coordinate a cogent response to the virus. Some are doing drive through screenings. That is great. Others are telling people to go home and hope for the best.
As
@TLS Guy has said, we don’t have the medical infrastructure to manage this. We don’t have enough doctors or nurses, enough hospital beds, or enough ventilators (critical for the treatment of patients). Trump told the Governor's to fend for themselves. Why? What are we going to do? Why aren’t we doing what Europe is doing and asking some of our manufacturing facilities to begin making ventilators. Ford is building ventilators for England.
Trump closed the boarders, but made exceptions. Why? Those exceptions can bring the virus here. It doesn’t matter that they are American. We should simply close the boarders and allow repatriotization through quarantine. But really, we shouldn’t close the boarders. WHO has noted that doing that doesn’t help. It simply makes it harder to track the virus. When we closed off travel from China, I stayed in a meeting that I didn’t think that was our biggest problem. That we were going to find community spread through unmonitored individuals who entered the country through other means. That’s what happened. Yes we needed to ask people to stop traveling, but we also needed to maintain a means to track and monitor travel. The best way to do that is not to close the boarders, which is the recommendation of pandemic response experts at the WHO.
Trump decimated funding to HHS while massively increasing spending to the military. This is the result. He disbanded a pandemic response team, one that could have managed this early on and hopefully prevented many of the missteps.
a true leader should accept that the buck stops with them. When asked if any of the problems where his fault, he said no. He deflected and blamed others. When a mistake happens in my company, on a project I manage, I fall on my sword. It’s my fault. It’s my bosses fault. That’s leadership. When I go into incident response meetings, I always say that the mistake happened because we created an environment that allowed that mistake to happen. That we need to change the culture and system that caused that.
that is my opinion.
