The federal government’s response to COVID-19 has been criminally negligent on multiple levels – Trump denied that COVID-19 was anything to worry about even as it ravaged China, Iran, and Italy. There’s very little evidence that the US government did much to ramp up preventative measures during mid-January to early March, even as it was obvious in late January to someone without domain expertise (me) that it could hit the US hard, and that by mid-February that it would hit the US hard .
The US government’s inaction and attempts to minimise the severity of the problem is going to result in somewhere between tens of thousands and a couple of million deaths and end up costing several trillion dollars. All of this could have been avoided if we had followed the paths of countries like Taiwan and South Korea, both of which managed to slow the outbreak almost immediately without going into lockdown despite having much denser cities than the US.
After an obvious mistake of this colossal magnitude that is both causing significant loss of life and tanking the markets, surely people would realise how incompetent our nation’s leadership is in the face of its first real challenge.
Apparently not. Apparently Donald Trump’s approval rating has shot up, and it’s the highest it’s been since inauguration. This is likely because at this point a significant fraction of our nation gets their news from completely compromised sources, combined with a tendency to rally around whatever leader is present during a time of crisis.
Please do me a favour – if you know any Trump supporters, explain to them just how much the country is about to suffer for their entirely avoidable mistakes.
And not to let Democrats off the hook – Bill De Blasio (NY mayor) delayed far too long on putting social distancing measures in place in NY, and they now have the highest caseload in the country. In contrast, London Breed (SF mayor) was admirably proactive in putting shelter-in-place in place in SF almost two weeks ago.
Furthermore, many other countries that lack the partisan rancor that exists in the US have also been slow to take action.