I agree, Trump was the worst possible person for us to have as President when something like this came up, and it certainly hurt the US with his various antics, including the mask one you brought up. I’m just skeptical that had he said that it would have really made a major difference in the actual numbers, or we’d have been hit substantially less hard. The REAL issue, IMHO, was in not locking down earlier, and not locking down harder…and in some cases, not locking down at all, or in very limited ways. But I’m not sure if any president could have just waved his magic President wand and made that happen in the US, because the other side of lock down is how you handle the hit to the economy, people being out of work, and the like.
I think had we had any President but Trump, it would be better…but we’d still have gotten hammered, and still be looking at some pretty grim numbers. Maybe instead of 2.2 million infected, it would have ‘only’ been 1.5 million, and maybe instead of 117k deaths it would ‘only’ have been 80k, but I think the trajectory would still be similar…and you’d still have folks getting sick of lock down and clamoring for and protesting about getting back to work. The systemic way the US is structured almost would force that, no matter who was president. IMHO and all.
True, but what we’re seeing today is directly a result of his and the GOP’s rhetoric. A LOT of people are viewing mask-wearing as some sort of fascistic assault on their personal liberties and ability to make their own choices, and they’re being egged on by dipshit Republican leaders like Trump and his ilk.
I mean, I agree that we should have locked down faster and harder than we did, but at the same time, it’s not like there’s a lot of recent precedent for doing that kind of thing, so I’m somewhat willing to give lawmakers a bit of grace on that.
But now that we know more, we KNOW that mask-wearing helps stop the spread and we know that social distancing does too. Despite that, we have idiotic nonsense like business owners prohibiting mask wearing, people pitching a fit about mask wearing, masks being optional at the RNC this year, and so on. It should be a concerted message from the top down to wear masks and stay six feet apart, even now. But instead, that gang of drooling simpletons are making it into a political issue and their mental midget minions are falling into line, pitching toddler-style fits about wearing masks, not letting people wear masks in their businesses, and so on.
It’s infuriating and dismaying. Both from the perspective of “some idiots elected these people”, and from the perspective of seeing people you know not wearing masks and realizing that they’re both Trumpers and stupid.
Gotta agree on this. We’d have still taken a tough hit, though probably significantly lesser. Some things would have run more smoothly at the federal level and at least there would have been steps taken to keep the feds and states from stumbling over one another. However even with a coherent national leadership we would still have individual states and cities insisting on their own approach (for example Ron DeSantis keeping Florida open until after Spring Break and insisting on reopening no matter caseload), there would still be people saying reopening parameters were not strict enough, and hell yeah we’d still have folks making masking or distancing an ideological signal.
This is human nature, not American nature. This is where competent leadership comes in. It would be very different if the president, the Republican party and its propaganda arm (Fox) were on the same page as the experts. There would still be the fringe out there, but that’s what it would be, the fringe. Instead, the GOP is now run by fringe beliefs to the detriment of the country (and the world).
The real root problem was a failure by this administration to take public health and pandemic preparedness and response seriously. To be more specific, we locked down late, and we tested way late. The testing debacle is an extraordinary lapse.
Probably because information of these information bubbles that we tolerate. Don’t underestimate the toxicity of these ideas.
The states that drove the numbers way up were NY and NJ. they represent 36% of all US deaths. Both states directed covid19 patients to nursing homes that were not prepared for them. The Mayor New York actively promoted public events related to the Lunar New year in solidarity of Chinese-Americans due to flights shut down from China. Note the headline that followed the event: Chinatown celebrates, and leaves coronavirus fears behind, at Lunar New Year parade.
Despite the fact that we are the most traveled nation in the world and should have the highest per capita death rate we do not.
here are the current rankings minus smaller city/states:
834 Belgium
618 UK
580 Spain
569 Italy
489 Sweden
453 France
360 USA
354 Netherlands
346 Ireland
As for stockpiling things like masks they would have to be rotated because they deteriorate over time. Doable but it might be a better idea to maintain larger stocks at medical facilities where they are easily rotated. It would also make sense to maintain production facilities within the US to support additional stocks.
I think a bigger factor than one stupid parade is that New York is the densest, most travelled city in the US.
Don’t kid yourself. Americans are dumb as shit. Yes, collectively all people are dumb as shit, but Americans have a particular stupidity based on our culture and long history of thinking we know everything, not giving a shit about other people, and no one having the right to tell us what to do.
Now rioters and looters deserve to get sick among other things, but since most of the protests were peaceful:
And yes, most of them used masks, there were actually reports that authorities took away boxes of masks that BLM had ordered for a protest. So once again, rioters were the minority and if they did not wear masks one should wonder if they were other extremists:
This, a thousand times, this. The way I see it, there have been two extraordinary lapses of leadership that any president or half-way serious presidential candidate in the last generation would have been able to handle:
Started emergency preparations in early January–building up supplies of PPC, putting together a response team, developing and producing tests, etc. Funding research on therapies.
Personally promoting and launching a large-scale public service campaign much, much earlier. Masks, for sure, but also hand-washing, social distancing. Getting up and telling people to “Love mom from home this mother’s day”.
The third thing would be locking down earlier and harder. This one is politically much more difficult, and it’s hard to say how much earlier it could have been done. But better organization of the lockdown we had would have helped a lot.
But yeah. If Trump would’ve just started wearing a mask, we’d be a lot better off today. I can’t think of another example in history when personal vanity carried so high a price for so many.
For those that grew up during the Cold War, was there this kind of extremist backlash to duck and cover a-bomb drills? Or fallout shelters? Should there have been? Who knows.
Let’s say that Hillary were president instead. #1 would almost surely have occurred- Hillary may be a lot of things (a few of them even true!), but she is not an anti-intellectual or a science denier. Her advisors would surely have been heard and the crisis addressed more promptly. Hillary on TV: “There is a deplorable virus spreading across the world. We need to be prepared. All of the data out of China can be found at whitehouse.gov”. Masks, gowns, testing- look, if the CDC failed to come up with a viable test under Hillary, would she have been too proud to use foreign tests until we developed our own? I doubt it. Testing –> virus tracking –> smart virus suppression and localized lockdowns. It would have been worth a fortune.
#2 is a problem though. Assume Hillary does everything by the book, masks, public hand-sanitizing and everything. She does an Oval Office address on the grave severity of the looming crisis and urges Americans to work together for their own good against a common enemy. Half the country says, “BOO! We hate Hillary! She’s not my president! I will never follow any of this cuck libtard bs, never never never!!!1!!11!”
My take is that for one thing, it’s a zero sum game. Many pride themselves on not letting personal freedoms be eroded by governmental regulations etc. I look at the Asians dutifully wearing their masks and wish we did more of that here, but look at what they sacrifice in other areas. Gain here, lose there, and Americans don’t like to give up anything so…?
The real challenge for the future would be to somehow agree on how to sift the information, get the wheat from chaff, and agree it’s wheat. Even then, there will be those who don’t understand geometric progressions or lessons history might teach us.
I don’t think we will exit this pandemic with one side saying to the other, “Damn! You were right! What was I thinking?” If problem solving weren’t difficult enough, when you spread it across several months it must be impossible to do, let alone achieve a consensus about what just happened.
I started a thread asking what percentage of posts people delete. I guess I’ll let this less-than-brilliant-one through.
I don’t think so. It wouldn’t be Trump’s party. No one but Trump would have doubled down on “No masks!”. It’s literally a matter of his not wanting to look silly on camera.
Margaret Thatcher might not have worn a mask. I have seen photos of president Xi of China as the only maskless guy in a room that looked like some kind of parliament…
But you’re still right. I just think people would reject masks as a way of sticking it to Hillary.
I don’t remember any objection to drills, though we did realize they were pretty useless. And Dylan has a song Let me Die in my Footsteps which was anti fallout shelter, for him at least. Fallout shelters were not universally loved.
Even if the US did things as badly as Italy or Spain, I doubt the situation can ever get as bad in per capita terms due to demographics. The US population is way more spread out over a MUCH larger area compared to any European country. State level comparisons will be more useful I would think.