We are in one of those classic scenarios where it's not clear if you should congratulate them on taking the right action or put their head on a pike for doing it too slowly.
Personally while it was a bit painful watching Trump (try to) speak in his typical style yesterday, I thought it was extremely compelling to see the lineup of CEOs from Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Quest, Labcorp, Roche, etc. each of them announcing their support and dedication to serving their communities and fighting COVID.
“While any other day we are competitors, today we all have a common competitor, and that is COVID” was a beautiful line.
It’s emblematic of the US approach (I won’t say a Republican approach) to instead of showing a lineup of government officials to show a lineup of corporate officers saying that they are making this their mission.
My own political leanings gives me more faith seeing these CEOs commit yesterday to fighting this than anything the CDC or the FDA could announce.
So I personally give the Trump Admin a lot of credit for orchestrating that, and I’m excited to see them deliver on their promises in the next couple weeks. I think they moved quickly to close the border with China, and then we lost precious weeks when the CDC failed.
Certainly I would not expect any Administration to revamp FDA guidelines on testing before it became clear they were an obstacle. Overall we’ve moved incredibly fast in getting to a National Emergency declaration (e.g. compared to H1N1).
Honestly it may have been his “9/11 moment” and I thought he nailed it. Not with eloquent speech to be sure. But in the actions being taken.
I don't understand all the negativity and downvotes around Trump's actions.
They are holding press conferences daily. Adjusting to the situation. Daily. He has changed course multiple times regarding his position on things.
Fail fast and course correct. That's the whole "agile" thing, and it seems to me the country is doing a pretty damn decent job of it.
Testing has been the main shortfall so far in our response. It's getting fixed as we speak. That should make people happy.
I saw a clip today of the Surgeon General basically saying "Stop nitpicking and start helping." This is a national emergency. Time to start acting like it.
We also at the time had a severe shortage of tests. If you have enough tests, sure test everyone. If you only have a couple, then your hands are basically tied. What do you do when you use all your available test kits on people that come back negative and then a real case shows up?
Probably due to statements like "we'll have a vaccine in two weeks", "some people go to work and they get better", "foreign virus", "our numbers will go to zero", "I don't want that cruise ship docking and making our numbers go up", "Google have 1,700 developers on a Coronavirus website", etc.
>I don't understand all the negativity and downvotes around Trump's actions.
Because Trump is a moron enabled by a political class that displays outright contempt for the public, who completely mismanaged his government's response to this crisis, mislead the public as to its severity, and deflected responsibility for his actions.
January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
February 25: “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
February 26: “We're going very substantially down, not up.”
February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
February 28: “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
March 5: “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6: Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6: “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
March 7: “We’ll hold tremendous rallies...I’m not concerned at all.”
March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on coronavirus.”
March 9: “This blindsided the world.”
March 10: "Our CoronaVirus Team has been doing a great job. Even Democrat governors have been VERY complimentary!"
March 11: "I am fully prepared to use the full power of the Federal Government to deal with our current challenge of the CoronaVirus!"
March 12: "108 countries are dealing with the CoronaVirus problem, some of which we are helping!"
March 13: "To this point, and because we have had a very strong border policy, we have had 40 deaths related to CoronaVirus. If we had weak or open borders, that number would be many times higher!"
March 13: "Today I am declaring a national emergency. Two very big words."
March 13: "No, I don't take responsibility at all."
