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Yes, he ignored the virus because he was told the stock market would be spooked. He blamed the previous administration for not having tests. Even though Obama was supposed to know Covid 19 was happening 3 years after he left office, why didn't the Trump administration prepare for a pandemic? They were left a playbook, which they ignored. I already said it was going to be bad under anyone, just not this bad. He was wrong, wrong, wrong, wouldn't come up with a National response, made the states compete for supplies, like it was The Apprentice, Governors edition, which cost time and money, and took zero responsibility. His own words. Golf too much? I didn't say that, he said Obama did. He golfs more than Obama and makes money when he does. But who cares about conflicts of interest. If Trump can dish it out, and all you have to do is see a really or look at his twitter, he should be able to take it. World's biggest victim. You really don't have to be a democrat to see he messed up, bigly. Almost every single Republican politician who isn't afraid of him has pointed it out.

The virus itself is not political, but everything else about it is. Trump called it a Democratic hoax, he said it would disappear, he DID ignore it until it was too late. Now it's Trumpers vs. Democrats (and some intelligent Republicans) regarding how to respond to the virus and how to go about opening the country again. It is absolutely political.

Frankly yes, several of those countries have done terrible jobs. England was awful, they had the wonderful "let's get to Herd immunity by letting it infect everyone" idea until their universities told them that's going to kill a million citizens. Sweden has had no official lockdowns, so saying they're idiots is describing exactly what we're doing right now. Spain and France got hit hard early, but they've also dropped their case loads down hugely since their peaks, which we have not done. There's no reason why the US had to have 100,000 dead people. We could have kept it to a few thousand with appropriate preparation and leadership, maybe even less.

You are living in a fantasy if you think Trump's behavior is defensible. His behavior has been grossly incompetent. He is entitled to his politics but he is just not qualified. Let's move on.

I'm doing a mock draft for FutureSox and I'm gonna do all 5 rounds for Sox included in there. I won't give player names right now but I went like this: 1st Round: HS pitcher $4 million 2nd Round: College Pitcher $2 million 3rd Round: HS OF $1.2 million 4th Round College Infielder: $600K 5th Round College Pitcher: $350K

2005. They won it all, going 16-1 to finish the season and playoffs. Two 8-game winning streaks broken up by a 3-2 loss. Their starters threw 4 complete game wins in a row against the Angels in the ALCS. That will never be done again, or ever be approached. The bullpen pitched only 2/3 of an inning (Neal Cotts) in a five-game ALCS. Preposterous! Those 4 starters all pitched over 200 innings on the season. Twice they rallied from 4-0 deficits in the playoffs by scoring 5 runs in the 5th inning. Scott Podsednik, who had zero HRs in the regular season, hit two in the postseason, including a walk-off against Brad Lidge in game 2. Who can forget the dropped third strike controversy that helped the Sox win game 2 of the ALCS? Or El Duque getting out of a bases loaded no-out jamb in game 3 in Boston? Or Freddie Garcia, Mr. Road Warrior, winning the division clinching game in Detroit, the ALDS clinching game in Boston, and the World Series clinching game in Houston? Or Frank Thomas, who played in only 34 games and couldn't run, hitting 12 HRs and a .905 OPS despite a .219 batting average. Or guys like Juan Uribe and Joe Crede, who were great defenders but not great offensively, were money in the postseason. Uribe made the diving catch in the stands for the penultimate out in the WS clinching game, then charged a dribbler for the final out. Crede stopped hot smash after hot smash in that 1-0 victory. They went wire to wire. Won the first game of the year 1-0. First game after the All-Star break 1-0. Last game of the World Series 1-0. They are tied for 5th best winning percentage in Sox history, at .611. Tied with the 1983 club. But their pythgorean projection based on run differential was .563, (91-71, out of the playoffs) proving how money they were in close games. Swept the Astros in the World Series but outscored them by only 6 runs. They were relentless. They had Ozzie Guillen as manager. He got the team to believe it could win. He also managed his pitching staff very well. He built up his starters and saved his bullpen by using them for 100 pitches win or lose. It probably hurt them in 2006, but to win the WS was worth it. I could go on. The most magical season in Sox history, by far.

Yesterday was the first day in our county where there were no Covid deaths reported in the last two weeks. I'll take any good news I can get. I am now waiting for Jared to announce what a great success he is.

The CDC does lots of things. He specifically fired the pandemic preparation team. Lots of people wrote, at the time, that this was going to leave us seriously unprepared in the event of a pandemic. Not hindsight, foresight. Really obvious foresight. A reasonable President: wouldn't have been insisting in late February that this would never break out in the US. wouldn't be peddling snake oil cures or lying about testing availability or necessity. may have invoked the DPA much earlier in order to ramp up production of PPE and other medical equipment. would have implemented a national strategy for PPE purchasing and distribution rather than states having to do James Bond-level shit including guarding their purchases with state national guard forces so they don't get confiscated by the federal government and then disappear would have implemented a national strategy for locking down for a duration and then safely reopening rather than constantly going back and forth over whether he has total authority over states would not try to wash his hands and eventually say "well it's up to the states" while at the same time attacking any states that don't do exactly what he wants would not have stopped the CDC from issuing reasonable, science-based guidelines for states to reopen That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's plenty more. The failures here are not solely within the White House or at the federal level, though. You can find numerous posts from me and others in this thread criticizing Cuomo, De Blasio, and others. I think the House Democrats are still failing to put forward the policies we need and the leadership we're lacking. You just keep saying any specific criticisms of the way the federal government has addressed or failed to address this pandemic are lazy without ever really addressing anything. The federal government has failed here, and it's cost Americans lives, and their failures will continue to cost lives.

But you realize that Congress plays a role in funding also, right? Each year, the President's OMB makes each agency create a budget, and the agency has to abide by that budget until Congress passes something. if the President's budget shows a cut, then things have to be shut down or slowed, sometimes for months, and only then might Congress step in. Several of the programs that dealt with epidemic preparation were eliminated based on these OMB orders over the past few years. The President's budget request this year for the CDC was $6.5 billion, showing a more than 10% cut. That was submitted to Congress on February 10. So, propose budget cuts every year, Congress doesn't step in for months, so the CDC is shedding preparedness ability the whole time.

You keep saying "hindsight," but a lot of other countries took different paths, paths that the experts were recommending at the time. The current administration decided to fire their pandemic teams and ignore the prep work done by previous administrations. They decided to downplay it as much as possible early on rather than ramping up production of PPE or testing or medical equipment. They are aggressively pushing the "reopen now" message when actual experts are absolutely not recommending that. It's not hindsight. The criticism is happening in real time, with predictions of what the current actions will result in. Our first case was in late January, and we did basically nothing to prepare. We're still wasting a lot of time that the lockdown measures, which can't go on forever, have bought us.

Of course the president made missteps. I guess on a sports talk site where "I can't believe he threw the curve ball with runners on second and third and a pitch to waste" is de rigueur. I also think when the loudest and most energetic voices that come here are Democrats, non-stop criticism about the president crowds out other voices. Still this section was supposed to be about the virus and as I said...it started off interesting but the streams of hurled accusations followed by "I can't believe HE made this political" is "not compelling". As for the government scaling things up...again perfect hindsight. The government should have just taken the government factories and started producing testing immediately. In fact it's amazing that we didn't have an enormous stock pile of tests for this never-before-seen virus in government warehouses someplace. And imagine our incompetence that 60 days after this never-before-seen virus started invading our country that we were not 100% prepared. If you start with the end point..."The President is an idiot" then you fill in the evidence to make it work and throw out evidence that doesn't fit the narrative and then shout it from the rooftops and have it echoed by people that think exactly as you do it may seem as if you have the truth. It just doesn't seem convincing to me. I think the president is an egomaniac and I hate his NYC aggressive style...it offends my Midwest sensibilities. I thought President Obama was one of the most decent men to ever be president...but to say he would have done better is farcical. President Trump is not trying to kill off his voters. He and his advisors are trying to make heroes of themselves...which is exactly what I want my leader to do in a crisis.

While this isn't my preferred route, especially if the Sox are gonna go all in on Cespedes, you want the BPA. If the Sox think Kjerstad has the absolute best chance of being the best major leaguer, go for it. Before last season we had seemingly amazing OF prospect depth behind Eloy and Robert. Now it's barren.

Even if you accepted that no other country is comparable to America, and that no other outbreak was comparable to this, the idea that you can't criticize the president of the united states for not doing a good enough job at something novel and new is not compelling. The federal gov't is good at scaling up and mobilizing production that makes coordinating nationally a lot easier than by state. The US approach has been incredibly water-fall like. It first had to build out medical capacity and protective gear then it built out testing then it is now building out tracing and just now has the tsa starting to do prevention with temperature checks an forcing mask wearing. This stuff was happening all at once in other countries that have been more successful. Alaska has had a comprehensive tracing system due to TB to its advantage and has done exceedingly well. NOLA had good amounts of testing early on and bent its curve earlier. But state by state they were competing with other countries purchases and slowing everything down. For the last century the US public health infrastructure has been so good at not just preventing things in the US, but assisting at preventing outbreaks from occurring. Now the US response was at best average compared to other countries instead of world-leading. You could ask why that is, or you could say that you are being mean. Or worse - that some unelected people with much less information at their disposal than the president of the united states didn't know exactly what to do in february so therefore nobody is allowed to say that the president misstepped.

This is so incredibly stupid. How is it that the Democrats are quite literally able to shutdown the entire world with some kind of a deep fake? I mean how are Russia, China, England, India, Italy, Germany, etc all shutting down their entire economies and faking thousands of hospitalizations and deaths (hundreds of thousands world-wide) creating huge economic problems in every single country in the world right now, all to apparently play along with some hoax to win an election in the United States for a party that many countries don't want to see in power. Vlad Putin has endorsed Trump twice now, but apparently he is faking it well enough to shutdown the Russian economy and declare the 4th most cases in the world right now. That is some impressive acting. So let's assume this is all valid, and just a Democraticly run hoax. Let me just ask this, if the Democrats hold this kind of world wide level of power, why the fuck do they need to pull of a Wile E Coyote complex of a stunt to win an elected office? How dumb do you have to be to believe all of these things at once?

Hydroxycholoquine has been used for a hundred years on patients. It's side effects are well known, it's cheap and easily produced. It would have been great if it was helpful and maybe it is...but it needs to be tested together with Zinc and Arythromyacine and there are still promising results. And really...you don't believe the President says..."ok...stop all fronts...we are going to only devote our time and energy to Hyrdo..."? This thing is coming at us from a hundred directions and we are pushing back in a hundred ways...and to say...Look...he recommended that and it didn't work...he's an idiot....just makes you a partisan with perfect hindsight. There is no country like the US...we have the #1 economy in the world so we have more business travelers coming here from overseas than anywhere else, we are top tourist destination, we are #1 destination for international students our citizens are rich and mobile and travel frequently all over the world. We have unfettered domestic travel...with hundreds of possible destinations for overseas people to come visit...we have massive urban and rural places. We are the oddest country in the world. To think that US wouldn't be the hardest hit is a misunderstanding of what America is. Doing worse than Iran and China? There are no way those are true numbers. Doing worse than India...that is SO weird. Why is California been so lightly hit versus NYC? So many weird things about what is going on with the Virus...making this a political screed is not one of them.

Yes, endlessly promoting a drug that you have no idea about, just a hunch because your buddy Rudy Giuliani and Fox News reporters and economist Peter Navarro are behind It...actually harmed and potentially killed those with serious heart problems. Instead of devoting resources to PPE procurement and a real vaccine, we for weeks obsessed with therapeutics and aspirational hope drugs that were never properly tested. That’s just bad science. Those new ventilators were needed anyway because 25% of the 10,000 on-hand were outdated or broken, and will be there in the stockpile for the US and the rest of the world (sell/loan/donate) when the next pandemic hits. It doesn’t belong to the Federal government, it belongs to the people. What country should we be compared to? China and India? On Fox News for weeks, it was Sweden, right? Germany? Italy? Spain? Russia? Brazil? The only two countries that come close to us on population are Indonesia and Brazil. But Japan, South Korea, Singapore, HK, Taiwan, Australia/NZ, Germany....all industrialized, first world countries with at least fairly or relatively comparable GDP numbers. If we’re supposed to be the greatest country in the world, how can we be doing worse than nearly every country but the UK, Italy, Spain, possibly France and likely Russia (by the end). How can we be doing worse than India, for example, or Iran?

Sigh...so a single British newspaper reports, using a single unnamed source, that the presidents son-in-law said that it could spook the stock market...and you conflate that into conclusive evidence that Trump downplayed this to protect the stock market???? Listen...believe what you want to believe. But please aim for a little self awareness. Your hatred of the president is making YOU turn this into a political thing.

Kind of like that immigrant invasion right before the mid terms?

He ignored it, because it was going to bring the stock market down, the thing he used to say he was a great president, even though the guy he just called inompotent again had the dow rise 148% under his watch, praised China for their hard work and transparency and cost lives. And he goes on a daily 2 hour rally telling everyone how great he is. Sorry, Trump deserves every slam he gets. He tweets and watches television when he is supposed to be working. Golfs more than any other President, when he himself said he would have no time to golf, and ripped the previous president for golfing. The Secret Service just spent $179,000 for golf carts at his golf course this summer. And people want to praise him for not taking a salary. It was probably going to be bad under any president, but most likely not this bad, and every single one of the others would have shown at least a little bit of leadership. Probably most importantly, the fact that he made a pandemic a political issue, is disgusting. This isn't red vs. blue, but that's what he made it.

I'm bothered by all the blaming. This is NOT Trump's fault...or the governors. This is nature that has come up with a new pitch that the batters haven't been able to figure out yet. Fernando Valenzuela's screwball in 1981. To listen to the president'S advice to "try to swing late" and shout WHAT AN ASSHOLE...then he says "go the other way with the pitch" and you shout "IDIOT...don't you know batting coaches agree that is the dumbest thing ever". Though really the batting coaches have no real answer either. I hate Trump's style but I'm also so sick of everything he does being criticized. 90% of all news stories since his inauguration?? A virus comes along and you guys with perfect hindsight says "we should have done this" or "we should have done that". But who knew that this wasn't SARS or MERS or Swine Flu? It was outrageous to put major travel restrictions on China in early February but that proved correct. His being positive in press conferences in a very scary situation for the simple folks is not a bad decision even if in retrospect some of the words sound stupid. Pushing things to the states...so we have 50 little labs trying to come up with a solution that balances outcomes makes some sense to me...I agree with Jerksticks that the economic ramifications for millions has to be considered. As for his defying the experts...you know for every expert telling the President...this is the worst thing to ever happen...there's another expert saying..."this is like the SARS scare. It will be gone in a month." And we still don't know. Ferguson's College of London model that showed 2.2 million US dead has now been discredited as bad math...but could we ignore that at the time? This clearly is a bad disease but we don't have an answer...we could wait for the vaccine just like we are waiting for the Cold vaccine. Everyone has an opinion no one has an answer. Just lots and lots of guesses. Honestly if there was a lottery system...everyone lines up and gets a ticket. You have a 1/1000 chance of instantly dying (330,000 dead in the US) but the other 999 get to go on with their normal lives and see Kopeck starting on Saturday...I would be first in line...especially given the other option...living under my bed with a 1/10,000 chance of dying...no baseball, no bars, no friends, no happiness?

This is just wrong and ignorant. The world doesn't need it to "end". The world needs scientifically developed immunity and that comes in the form of a vaccine not this "herd" concept where millions and millions of human beings are infected.

Now those are positive sentences. It's still OK to praise America. Thanks Caulfield. USA is the best!

China, pure and simple is our enemy. Wish we'd hear more anger toward China from our people, at least as much venom as Americans speak toward Trump. Our PC culture be damned; China is a huge enemy of the USA and a disgrace to the world considering their control of people who should be free and aren't. . Letting them have so much control over our pharmaceuticals is just sickening.

You're absolutely right. I think it's why both parties need to start thinking more like entrepreneurs. And it's a huge weakness for the Biden campaign, breaking through. What is our country going to look like 5, 10 and 25 years down the line? What can we start doing now in terms of infrastructure investment, 5G, internet broadband/wireless access build-out, investments in the next generation of start-ups, chemists, biologists, AI, data scientists, etc. We have the best public universities in the world....the best environment (still) for innovation and experimentation, the best and brightest scientists and engineers....many aspects of a capitalistic system that work extremely well and incentivize hard work as well as risk-taking, but we've got to get this figured out fast before we get behind over the next generation, and looking inwardly for all the answers, closing off borders to where 40% of next billion or trillion dollar enterprises are originating, that's just cutting off the nose to spite and face. If we had formed a multinational group of EU countries, working along with Canada/Mexico, Australia, Japan, South Korea and the ASEAN countries that were not directly aligned with China, we would have been able to use that leverage to settle a lot of these ongoing issues with China 2-3 years ago. As it stands now, we're just stuck in a status-quo situation...and there are too many countries around the world that need China as a trading partner as much or even more than they need the US (German auto exporters, for example.)

I can't believe this is still a thing. This thread, which was once a refuge from the craziness and conspiracies on basically any other public forum, has gotten hard to read ever since more people started taking Greg's bait and the False Equivalence Army came out of the woodwork... but even then, I can't believe that the latter is still arguing for that drug even after it was revealed weeks ago that the whole thing was just another profit scheme masquerading as health care (obviously, in addition to the drug not even working)

But science in a crisis?? Throw spaghetti at the wall. Like when someone has inoperable cancer and you can't get laetrile because it's not been double blind tested by the FDA so you have to go sit in your hospital room and wait for your death because...well why try stuff that isn't 100% safe.

Which clearly disqualifies hydroxychloroquine.

F) models...repeatable double blind tested trial

2 days man...look I can't begin to fathom what you are going through but there's obviously a change in approach or something needed here. I've seen some weird shit, I've had people disappear without a word, I've had people come in that were clearly different than from video interviews, etc, but I've never fired someone who didn't lie about credentials blatantly 2 days into a job. It would take something pretty big for that to occur, can you shed more light on your interactions with team members and the manager in that time period on what could have set that into motion?

He either has Covid, or is lying about taking the drug. Either is plausible.

Nope, he had it right with "ignorant." What you declare as "science" (good trick, by the way! Ron Burgundy would be proud) is rejected by the actual scientists who make up the world's epidemiological community. "Hasten the spread of Coronavirus" is an approach favored by literally no one with credibility. That is because it is stupid.

That's interesting. It's amazing what a truly totalitarian state can do. As you rightly say it doesn't offer much guidance to the swirling democracy we live in. I'm not sure it's fair to say "well if it would have been Obama it would have been worse." I'm ideologically opposite of most of where President Obama stood...but I always thought he was elected and had a right to try and truly was good-hearted in his attempts at doing things I disagreed with. Sure Fox news had negative stuff on him but only 30% of it was shrill. But 90% of all news articles about Trump have been negative. It's exhausting. Honestly everything he's done has not been horrible. His responses to this virus have not been horrible. But it seems there is no sense reason on the other side. I used to love the Sunday political talk shows...not for the canned politicians reciting their talking points...but the moderators and talking heads dissecting the events. Smart guys thinking and saying smart things in opposition but well thought out. Now it is just who can howl the loudest Trump hate.

He does want negative interest rates (Trump, not Powell) for the first time in US history. Not working well in Japan or Germany. Politically, saying they’ve bankrupted the government so why vote for someone we hamstrung financially is smart politics...the problem is that people are going to begin to demand a better health care alternative to ObamaCare, and the GOP has nothing. Except the likelihood of future cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food/nutrition security for the poor (WIC/TANF) and children. That’s why Trump has lost his huge margins in senior voters. Covid threat, cost of living threat with 0% Fed rates, health care insurance threat, SS cuts threat....the combination of those four threats, simply killing Trump right now with older Americans and then there’s that trust factor.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-trump-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-20200518-iht67oldlfhrnlju7dy4tkiad4-story.html So, is he full of hot air or is he actually taking the drug? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/podcasts/the-daily/economy-coronavirus-jobs-layoffs.html Also, should congress pass a bill for more money to save the economy? Jerome Powell seems to think so even if republicans in Congress don’t all think so. It makes me wonder if Trump will go after Biden saying there isn’t going to be money for his proposals even though Trump has added to the national deficit, going against what traditional conservatives believe.

And you’re just noticing this now? Where have you been? Bipartisanship, moderates and reasonable people are no more. It can’t happen with Trump in office, his base believing in whatever facts they want to believe in and money in politicians coffers pulling the strings.

If only we had first hand accounts of this, on this very thread. Oh well.

That's not what he said. Admittedly, he did word it in a confusing fashion.

Testing, masks, contact tracing, and social distancing, all while working feverishly on potential treatments and a vaccine. We should know from the mortality rate in the US - currently around 6% (90,000 deaths and 1,500,000 confirmed cases) - that there are still a lot of people with Covid who have not been diagnosed. The real mortality rate should be much lower. If it were 3%, that would be 3,000,000 infected. If 2%, 4,500,000 infected, and so on. Now many of those infected have gotten through the infection and are no longer contagious. But you can see from those numbers that there could be a lot of contagious people still out and about. Through the measures above, the goal is to get the contagion rate well below 1. So that contagious people spread it, on average, to less than 1 other person. If you can keep the rate there, the number of contagious people will continue going down. The risk is that even if you get the contagious numbers down into the thousands, recall that this whole thing started from ZERO in the US. So if you ever completely relax the things that keep the contagion rate under 1, you can very quickly see an rapid expansion of contagion. This is why we aren't likely to see stadiums full of fans any time this year. If you can get a handle through testing on the number of contagious people in a defined group - e.g., a baseball team - then you can manage that group to try to keep them Covid-free. If someone slips through the cracks, the hope is they are caught quickly and are unable to infect many others. Seems possible with baseball because of the distance between players. Lastly, no one should be thinking - "I can get Covid and survive, so I don't need to worry." It's not about YOU. It's about who you might infect. Because for them it might be a death sentence.

Yes, math. Go see my original posts. You forgot the whole time thing. For the record, he didn't "shut down" anything. His China "ban" stopped less than half the travel between them. His Europe "ban" included only parts of Europe, leaving out the UK and other countries that were heavily infected. They were visual moves, not ones that actually accomplished anything. And he did essentially nothing stateside until March, and even then never took anything resembling real actions. People are going after you because you are defending the indefensible. No one is saying the virus is Trump's fault, no one is saying China is without blame, and no one is saying that the entire situation is on Trump's lap. None are true. They are saying that his lack of leadership and any kind of meaningful action, during a period when most other countries in a similar position were taking far more decisive action. Trump's response was, and has been, an abject failure. Worth noting too: I've voted in seven Presidential elections so far, and voted for only three democrats (three GOP, 1 3rd party). I also tend more Republican for state offices here in Illinois. So this is not coming from some dyed in the wool Democrat.

3. We did do that on a small scale. San Antonio hosted cruise ship passengers. 4. I believe one key role of the national government is coordinating national problems. This clearly was bigger than any one state and needed a strong coordinated response. A "the buck stops here" moment or Bush on the pile of rubble with a bullhorn moment could have solidified the nation. Instead we receive denials and suggestions it was all a hoax. Oops.

That's called being diplomatic. Should he have told them to fuck off from the start? That was from January 24th. That is very early on in the grand scheme of things. He has changed his tune and called them out since. Still haven't seen anything saying Trump trusts their death toll numbers.

More lazy responses to arguments nobody actually made.

It was completely ridiculous of me to try to come to DNC headquarters and try to argue that the virus is a virus and people are going to die almost no matter what we did and that non-stop blaming of the president is boring. But you win.

He wasn't telling people to stay calm. He was saying we had 15 cases and it was going to go to zero soon. Either he was profoundly unprepared to handle what was coming very shortly, something that he had been warned about internally for weeks by that point, or he was lying to the American people in a deeply damaging way. He continues to push unproven and dangerous fixes to this day. It's dangerous. Ventilator production was eventually ramped up after long delays. Thankfully, thanks to effective social distancing measures, our hospitals haven't been overwhelmed and the initial shortages didn't cost lives. Instead, states have had to bid against each other while the federal government confiscates supplies to do who knows what with them. A competent government would have ramped up PPE production in January or February. Other countries haven't seen the level of dysfunction we have. He has no direct power to force states closed or open. What he has done is claim that he has this power, told states to do what they think is best, had his administration release guidelines for opening and then strongly attacked those states and encouraged protests and defiance if they don't open up right away in contradiction with his own guidelines. The CDC is not advocating for locking down forever. This is more lazyiness. They in fact have put out guidelines for states reopening, though they were initially blocked by Trump officials. I'm not willing to simply write off the lives of the elderly or have some other disease. A competent federal government would be able to stem the economic damage, but the failures there include both parties in Congress. I too have friends who have suffered huge downturns in their business, but they both fully support taking sane, rational measures to address a pandemic. This is one lazy half-truth excuse after another.

Do you know how big organizations work? There is $3 billion funding within the CDC specifically for preparing "Protecting Americans from Infectious Diseases at Home & Abroad". I'm sure within that $3 billion they had a special pandemic preparation team that was set up during the Swine flu epidemic and has just lingered around. When they reallocated resources within that budget that doesn't mean they fired all those people and burned all the plans...it just means they didn't meet every Tuesday for three hours. * In late February there were 68 cases in the US. Would you have closed down the country at that point? Was it unreasonable to tell people to be calm at that point? * I'm not sure what you mean by peddling snake oil sales..hydrochloroquine in conjunction with zinc and asythromyacine still could be useful...but your omniscience seems to know a cheap, readily available solution is not even worth looking at. * Back in February the demand was to ramp up production of ventilators and he did that but now that's not the narrative because it doesn't fit into your idea. Shift the goal posts. * Really? President Trump today announces Illinois won't be getting masks because NYC needs them more...Illinois residents respond...well we're cool with that. * He got crap because he wasn't going to force the states to close...so he said he was going to and then he got crap for that. In a time when no president has ever done anything like this. But sure...you're criticism is fair and balanced. * The CDC is a hammer and they see every problem as a nail. They have one goal and that is to make every citizen 100% safe from every disease. I have friends that started businesses in the last year that are just wiped out because of the shut down...lost everything...to protect the old and inform (90% of the deaths are people that are over 65 and/or have comorbidity). We cannot afford to shut down forever even if the CDC wants to...want to see their funding levels when we have no federal taxes? So yes, as I have said, the president made mistakes, as would President Obama or Lincoln or Jefferson. It's hard dealing with the unknown and it aggravating to have the peanut gallery shouting insults at every misstep. Can't wait for President Biden to save the world.

You know "I am right and you are wrong, I'm gonna sing the 'I was right song'" is not really an argument. It is arrogant smugness. But still have a nice day.

And then for that entire next month we refused to take test kits from overseas, the CDC insisted on developing their own and they were faulty, and as a consequence we imported cases from Italy in Mid-Feb, they got to New York totally undetected because we went 3 weeks with almost no tests, the FDA was ordering private labs not to do any testing, there were several super-spreading events, and by March 1 there were probably several thousand active cases floating around New York City with 1 positive test. Washington and California responded to realizing they had major outbreaks with full shutdowns that week, but New York City and many other states dithered, allowing it to spread around the country even more over the next several weeks. The US didn't take advantage of that month to begin acquiring supplies, we were even shipping them overseas in February. We didn't come up with response plans, we didn't begin preparing people for any sort of actions they might have to take. We weren't working on 14 day quarantines for people coming from infected areas, we weren't even assuming community spread was possible. The people at the CDC, incuding Trump's appointee at the top, were a complete disaster.

The problem is the only way for it to end is to spread it. A vaccine will probably never come but if it does it's a long long way from being released. A "cure" will never happen. Yes New York got hit hard but literally 86% of the 22k deaths are age 60 and over. 30% are over age 90. A better strategy is to protect those most at risk of death/ hospitalization and let others spread it. Crowds are the most efficient way.