Many countries, like SK and Germany, are doing much, much better, because of superior leadership and decision making. Furthermore, they’ve been much more successful without decimating their economies – because they’ve provided much more assistance in the meantime (as well as reducing the deaths – and deaths are bad for the economy).
I’m angry because the government has done such a shitty job, and this has lead to more deaths and more economic decimation. You should be too.
You’re wrong. No country has had a worse outcome than the United States. No leader has done a worse job than Donald Trump. I cited the numbers.
I’m not even gonna waste any more of my time on someone who posts something this deliberately obtuse. Nice no longer knowing you.
The reason Belgium has a much larger Covid 19 case load is that they are using a different metric than the rest of the world in how they count cases. Rather than counting confirmed cases, they are counting suspected cases along with confirmed cases.
The government has done a bad job, but the focus on one man obscures what the actual problems are.
The amount of regulations imposed is to slow decisions down and make sure something like thalidomide can’t happen. Every action by the government has to go through an obstacle course before anything can be done. Multiple layers have to sign off and there are lots of veto points and bottlenecks. In normal times it makes government frustrating to deal with. It is the reason new drugs cost 2 billion dollars each, why it takes more time and money to build infrastructure than it did 100 years ago, and why high speed rail is impossible.
In an actual crisis it goes from frustrating to deadly. That is why tests were delayed, the reason information could not be shared between hospitals, why masks could not be imported, etc. It is a failure of the regulatory state that has been building for 60 years. Blaming Trump for all this is like saying it is the captain’s fault a cruise ship is not as fast as a cigarette boat.
That is one of the reasons why it is impossible to state with confidence which country is doing the best or the worst.
Regardless of whether Trump is “among the worst” or “THE worst,” it’s pretty much indisputable that his response has been utterly dishonest (“I knew it was a pandemic before anyone else did”) and bungled.
I cannot think of a president that has been gifted more and done less with it than Trump. He was gifted a strong economy but insisted on devoting airtime to other unpopular topics instead, thus dragging down his popularity. Then he was gifted an opportunity to make everyone forget about impeachment, scandal, etc. by turning in a strong performance on Covid - had he done well, he could have made this the Covid election, and won on the strength of his good handling of a crisis - and he bungles that as well.
It’s like giving a golfer countless mulligans, and he screws each and every single one up. Like a football team that can’t get a first down despite being given a 5th, 6th, 7th down to get those ten yards.
So your argument now is that the number of confirmed cases we now have might be smaller if we added the number of suspected cases to the number of confirmed cases?
You’re disputing how addition works?
The biggest name on Trump’s Economy Memorial will be the American middle class, which will be reduced to a heap of jobs that used to exist and probably won’t come back for at least a year. Some jobs will never come back.
I’ll say it again: we’re already moving away from v-shape recession/recovery - that ship has sailed.
It’s just a question of whether this becomes the Great Recession II or the Great Depression II. I’d say we’re rapidly approaching the latter. A year from now, our collective (and I dare say individual) image of self will be vastly different than what it is now.