And Slow Joe would have deluged us with a ton more seed cases from China.
"Seed cases from China"? You know that the travel ban only affected flights of non-US Citizens direct from China right? It did nothing to contain US citizens or people on flights from Europe that may have been exposed in Spain or Italy and then traveled to the US. Just pointing out that Trump's biggest talking point is just cosmetic...
No wellness checks at airports, no 14-day quarantine, no contact tracing. Countries like ROK and Singapore who were exposed to the virus much earlier had initially more cases than the US and are far closer (distance-wise) to China were able to arrest their development of cases while the US went ballistic.
In ROK, they were able to pinpoint the outbreak to a certain charismatic church group in the city of Daegu, restrict their practices, implement social distancing, and basically slow and eventually eliminate new cases...
"On February 16, a Sunday, a 61-year-old woman with a fever entered the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu, South Korea. She
touched her finger to a digital scanner. She passed through a pair of glass doors and proceeded downstairs, to the prayer hall, where she sat with approximately 1,000 other worshippers in a large windowless room. Hours later, she exited the building and left behind a trail of pathogens that would lead to thousands of infections, triggering one of the largest coronavirus outbreaks in the world.
By the end of February, South Korea had the most COVID-19 patients of any country outside China. New confirmed cases were doubling every few days, and pharmacies were
running out of face masks. More than a dozen countries imposed travel restrictions to protect their citizens from the Korean outbreak,
including the U.S., which had, at the time, recorded an official COVID-19 death toll low enough to count on one hand.
But just as South Korea appeared to be descending into catastrophe, the country stopped the virus in its tracks. The government demanded that the Shincheonji Church turn over its full membership list, through which the Ministry of Health identified thousands of worshippers. All were ordered to self-isolate.
Within days, thousands of people in Daegu were tested for the virus. Individuals with the most serious cases were sent to hospitals, while those with milder cases checked into isolation units at converted corporate training facilities. The government used a combination of interviews and cellphone surveillance to track down the recent contacts of new patients and ordered those contacts to self-isolate as well.
Within a month, the Korean outbreak was effectively contained. In the first two weeks of March, new daily cases fell from 800 to fewer than 100. (This morning, the nation of 51 million reported
zero new domestic infections for the third straight day.) On April 15, the country successfully held a national parliamentary election with the highest turnout in three decades, without triggering another wave. South Korea is not unique in its ability to bend the curve of daily cases; New Zealand, Australia, and Norway have done so, as well. But it is perhaps the largest democracy to reduce new daily cases by more than 90 percent from peak, and its density and proximity to China make the achievement particularly noteworthy.
In the time that South Korea righted its course, the United States veered into disaster. In mid-March, the U.S. and South Korea had the same number of coronavirus-caused fatalities—approximately 90. In April, South Korea lost a total of 85 souls to COVID-19, while the U.S. lost 62,000—an average of 85 deaths every hour. That the U.S. population is approximately six times larger than South Korea’s does little to soften the horror of the comparison."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/whats-south-koreas-secret/611215/
How many people died from Ebola in the US during the Obama/Biden Administration?
The point is that the Pandemic Response preparedness playbook that Trump inherited was built from experience and study. It wasn't some sort of gotcha developed by first Bush and then Obama to "trap Trump". The officials from the Obama Administration fully felt they were leaving behind a GUIDE for successive Admins to follow in the event of a calamity of the type they feared and worked to prepare to prevent/deal with.
Trump came into office as a BASE POTUS, needing to placate the whims of his vocal minority base of support who were all about his wall. That meant he had to cut other areas within the HHS budget, in his constant scrounging for funds to fulfill the lie that "Mexic would pay for it". That involved him cutting areas that the country as a whole depended on in order to try and satisfy his base, and keep his dreams for re-election alive.He made his choices- now he has to deal with them...
Cutting CDC staff within Mexico that had been in place for 40 yrs, as well as eliminating the specific monitoring position held by Dr Linda Quick meant cutting Pandemic Preparedness- any way you slice it. He put it on the back burner, and as Biden pointed out on Jan 27, Trump was still not up to speed on even the basics. There were only 5 US cases on Jan 27 when Biden called Trump out. Later when the number had grown to 15 Trump was still making inane comments about how the numbers were going to go down, or the virus would never be a threat because warm weather would kill it...
We now know that Biden was calling out Trump on these budget cuts and his disastrous ignoring of Pandemic Preparedness as early as Oct- before the virus had even evolved into cases. So we know that Biden as a VETERAN of an Administration that had worked to eliminate issues in that area, was already aware that Trump was one outbreak away from 110,000 US deaths. It isn't even debatable that a Dem Administration would have handled this better. They would have followed the advice left from the Previous 2 Admins- go back and read the Rolling Stone timeline...
