Where-oh-where would we be without Trump’s firm leadership in this crisis?
Kevin Drum reminds us that our fearless leader restricted air travel from China after the airlines had already done so.
And today’s New York Times:
New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that travelers brought in the virus mainly from Europe, not Asia.
“The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review.
A separate team at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases. Both teams analyzed genomes from coronaviruses taken from New Yorkers starting in mid-March.
The research revealed a previously hidden spread of the virus that might have been detected if aggressive testing programs had been put in place.
When Trump spouts that COVID is the governors’ problem — not supposed to be his problem — his fans should be asked if they can imagine Ronald Regan or the two Bushes talking such preposterous nonsense.
OWLBP, Our Whiny Little BItch President
Monday morning quarterbacking?
How quickly we forget. The Orange Golem was vehemently accused of racist xenophobia the instant he finally got around to the China travel thing.
Aggressive testing? Good luck! The Consecrated Experts just had to have A Test Of Their Very Own. The WHO test was verboten even for temporary emergency use, because reasons. No president in history, except maybe, just maybe, Ike, would have been prepared to dig quickly and deeply enough into the weeds to try to deal with that overnight. With experts at the time already proffering a zillion different “models” and semi-fantastic notions about what was really going on, who knew enough, anyhow?
For that matter, neither are many business CEOs equipped to sort such things out. They tend to be MBAs and the like lacking even enough subject knowledge to ask the experts useful questions. Such questions are absolutely necessary to sort out disagreements and to sift quasi-facts out of a mass of faculty-lounge speculation.
And the test thing was also the fault of a modern social system that has, for example, padded playgrounds beyond absurdity, far past the point of mind-numbing boringness and pointlessness. That is, it mandates absurd hyper-overcaution in every conceivable situation. No surprise, then, when that backfired in an emergency – when years and years and years simply weren’t available to dot all the i’s, cross all the t’s, and tick every last box that had ever been dreamed up in all the country’s faculty lounges and law firms.
Also, in the modern system, everything is hyper-efficient, and therefore also hyper-brittle. Thus, quick rational emergency response on any significant scale is virtually impossible. Nothing is in inventory. Nothing is in reserve. So the urgent need to “raise the line” as well as “flatten the curve” simply went unmet.
Also, in the modern system, even the Consecrated Experts are oblivious to the rest of the world. That radically shrinks their fact base. Consider their vehement pronouncement: “oh, masks except N95 are useless, they may even spread infection.” Then all of a sudden in less than a day, they’re recommended in certain circumstances – or even suddenly required on pain of a large fine.
Howzatt? Nothing whatsoever had changed overnight. But alas, the Experts mostly live in Laputa, not the real world. Even if they’d been to Japan or China, it was in luxury island-in-the-sky accommodation. So they never even saw the masks worn during flu-and-cold season in, say, the Tokyo subways. So how could they even have been curious about them, or about how and when they are used?
So how could they possibly have given timely advice *before* the sewing-supply stores all closed? (Come on, now, how many folks really have such tools and materials just lying around in usable condition nowadays, or have any idea how to use them?) So to the sake of Looking Good, for the sake of appearing to Do Something, the Experts resorted to hasty, viral (forgive me) virtue-signaling by issuing directives nearly impossible for many to follow usefully.
Nor is there any obvious fix for all this nonsense. It’s too interconnected and too deeply embedded to sort out in less than decades.
Paul:
Trump is a racist and has a history of being such as well as his father for many years.
His response is just short of criminal. Every President in my lifetime would have done a better job, some much, much better.
It is just his history. He cannot do anything well. He knows nothing about anything. And he is an absolute horror of a human being.
That’s quite a trifecta.
And racist voters put him into the White House.
Eventually the GOP will die a horrible death. Lets just hope there is some sort of country left to see to their funeral.
@EMichael
Let me fix this for you.
“Eventually the GOP will die a horrible death.”
Eventually the GOP: Party of Hate® will die…
That’s better.
Trump kept calling it the Chinese virus so I bet he thought white Europeans were immune for COVID-19.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/katie-porter-trade-data-medical-supplies-covid-19
Maybe China’s recovery from this COVID-19 was more successful than ours was due to all those U.S. exports of ventilators and protective masks to the Chinese.
“In February 2020, the value of U.S. mask exports to China was 1094.0% higher than the 2019 monthly average,” Porter’s report said. “In February 2020, the value of U.S ventilator exports to China was 292.2% higher than the 2019 monthly average.” The report, which was released Monday, pointed to specific Trump administration policies — rather than just a general increase in foreign demand due to the spread of COVID-19 abroad — as being a potential reason for the spike in export value.
Kevin Drum repeated a fraud, took it hook line and sinker from the NY Times without a fact check.
I* fact checked it enough to learn the the airlines were dropping flights to Asia on Jan 29 because of lack of demand. The executive then made it mandatory two days later.
The last thing we need are the Kevin Drums exercising their priors. We are taking this crisis out of the hands of the priors crowd, they do us no good.;
Brother Matthew,
Any chance at all you can link to the proof of your fact check?
I mean seriously, it has been over a decade since you made much sense that I have seen and just as long since you posted proofs of any of your comments.
Stick to Kling’s blog, they’re all ahs over there and you fit right in,
These tweets are happening on the 28th when United started waiving fees to change flights as they would not go to Beijing due to Corona virus. Trump did his thing on the 31st. I was looking for dates, https://twitter.com/united/status/1222233850845302785
And Trump has not stopped yet, he is going to go on.
” Nothing Will Stop This Administration* From Its Spin, Deception, and Ass-Covering
The first example appears, to the surprise of approximately nobody, on the Fox News Channel.
There never has been an administration that better exemplifies the philosophical concept of, “You Be You” better than this administration* at the current moment. Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor worldwide pandemic will keep Camp Runamuck from its appointed spin, deception, and ass-covering. Two examples will suffice. The first came, to the surprise of approximately nobody, on the Fox News Channel, where Attorney General Bill (Sede Vacantis) Barr shared some thoughts about what he believes about the current situation. Predictably, they were very unhelpful.
‘ “I am concerned that we not get into the business of declaring everything an emergency & then using these kinds of sweeping, extraordinary steps. But given where we were back in March, I think the president made the right decision.”’
This is Bill Barr, wondering if the federal executive might exercise too much power. So we must presume that he is being ludicrously disingenuous for some other purpose, and with the permission of the president*.
(Barr also thinks the media is in cahoots to undermine the president*’s shilling for his Magic Potion. “As soon as he said something positive about it, the media’s been on a jihad to discredit the drug.” Now, that’s the kind of sycophancy we’ve come to expect from our consigliere.)
Meanwhile, over in the office of the vice president, a man whose sucking up knows neither conscience nor doubt, news management never sleeps. From CNN:
‘ Pence’s office, which is responsible for booking the officials on networks during the pandemic, said it will only allow experts such as Dr. Deborah Birx or Dr. Anthony Fauci to appear on CNN if the network televises the portion of the White House briefings that includes the vice president and other coronavirus task force members. CNN often only broadcasts President Donald Trump’s question and answer session, which sometimes includes the health care officials, live on-air.’
As has become obvious, the networks have floundered in their attempts to be responsible during the pandemic, especially as regards the daily Five O’Clock Follies. And the administration* has leveraged this dithering to its own advantage. If CNN, for example, were to reverse the process that allegedly so bothers Pence—if it were, say, to refuse to cover the president*’s daily spelunking to the depths of his own ego and, instead, cover only Pence’s briefings with the experts—the screaming from the Oval Office would be audible in Rangoon. Now, there are only two possibilities here: either Pence has gone rogue, which would be the equivalent of Lassie turning into Cujo, or this is part of a general effort aimed at acclimating us all to an administration* plan to “re-open the country” sooner than would be considered wise by people who know what they’re talking about.
Limiting access to Doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx would serve that purpose. And Barr’s transparent attempt to render social distancing into the past tense would as well. I think they’re going to do it, and the devil take the hindmost, which he undoubtably will, in various terrible ways.
And NPR adds another exhibit to the case.
‘Some local officials are disappointed the federal government will end funding for coronavirus testing sites this Friday. In a few places those sites will close as a result. This as criticism continues that not enough testing is available. In the Philadelphia suburbs, Montgomery County has a drive-through site that has tested 250 people a day since March 21…A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tells NPR, “Many of the Community-Based Testing Sites (CBTS) are not closing, but rather transitioning to state-managed sites on or about April 10.” The agency and a spokesperson for FEMA say the CBTS program originally included 41 sites. It was intended as a stop-gap to bring testing to critical locations, especially for health care facility workers and first responders.’
It is increasingly clear that the president* is on the verge of taking the approach once recommended by Senator George Aiken in relation to the Vietnam War—declare victory and get out. He has set up all the elements of doing so. His enablers already have begun declaring victory now that it is becoming clear that social distancing is working. The president* is ready to get back to full operational misrule and, if things go badly wrong, and they will, he can blame the states, especially the ones with Democratic governors. He will then campaign on a field of bones as the man who stopped the epidemic.
I can hardly wait.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a32096862/coronavirus-bill-barr-mike-pence-media-cnn/