Re: Remember this?

Washington DC

Description

Yeah, wasn't it great to have a president that was intelligent and actually worked for the American people that contained the spread of a dangerous pathogen so that there were only a little more than 11,000 deaths instead of 535,000 deaths? You're absolutely right that the media should point out the difference that that taking even minimal steps to protect public health could have taken. It really shows the difference a little competence can make! You're meme has a typo. There were 257,000 hospitalizations according to the number posted along with the meme, not 275,000 like you're meme says. Just more incompetence or were you sticking to the GOP's SOPs and trying to lie? Also don't forget that flu deaths are ESTIMATED based on statistical sampling and higher than the cases actually found through testing. The ESTIMATED FLU CASES are HIGHER than the ACTUAL NUMBER OF CASES observed by testing. Same is true of COVID - the observed number of cases found by testing is lower than the actual number out there because asymptomatic people are unlikely to be tested but they may still spread the disease. The Trump administration was not competent enough to set up a national testing strategy that could estimate where the spread was occurring so that mitigation efforts could be targeted to prevent the spread while having minimal impact on the economy, The actual number if cases in the US are likely between 150,000,000 and 300,000,000 and deaths as high as 635,000 and 735,000. That comes closer to comparing apples to apples. We'll have to wait until after the pandemic to get an idea of the true number of cases and deaths caused by the virus. We know the numbers observed now are too low. You are correct that the contrast is very stark. It is true that Trump had a novel virus that was much more infectious and deadly than the flu, but the number of deaths could have been decrease by 30% to 40% had Trump followed simple masking and distancing guidelines, tested to target spread reduction efforts, purchased and distributed the appropriate PPE to hotshots, and such. Such efforts would have resulted in more targeted shut downs resulting in better control and less economic damage than pretending there was no problem. Trump's biggest control push in the beginning was to ban travel from China. It was a first step, but because people could be asymptomatic and not obviously ill, it was not a sufficient control step. However, dumping money into vaccine development was a good policy that has resulted in a vaccine that will be widely available by the summer - as predicted by public health officials in November of 2020. Trump did a good thing with that. But the uncontrolled exponential spread, massive number of cases, and unnecessary deaths are what happens when you have a narcissistic president trying to cover up a pandemic for his own personal political gains. The US is still reeling from the initial mismanagement of the virus that has made the US the case study on what NOT to do during a pandemic.