1. I can’t stop thinking about how so much of our suffering could have been prevented if we didn’t have @realDonaldTrump as #POTUS. #coronavirus #Covid_19
2. In 2006, I was part of a team at @SyracuseU @MaxwellSU hired by @HomelandDems to evaluate and make recommendations on how to improve upon the plans the #Bush Administration (quite prudently) developed in 2005 in preparation for an inevitable pandemic. securitypolicylaw.syr.edu/wp-content/upl…
3. #Congress passed our recommendations into law in 2007. The @BarackObama admin improved upon them throughout their time in office. The #Trump team spent the last three years dismantling all of that hard and necessary work - immeasurably compounding the disaster we now face.
4. We had so much of this figured out on what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, and the consequences of acting how the Trump admin has thus far conducted itself (essentially the worst case scenario).
5. Our opening sentence: “The question of an American public heath crisis is not “if” but “when.”
6. Our second paragraph, first sentence: “Included in ‘Are We Ready?’ is a full-scale scenario portraying how the many levels of preparedness mechanisms interact both positively and negatively.”
7. We handed them the how to guide back in 2006. Trump & his ilk purposefully ignored & destroyed it simply because so much of it came out of the Obama admin - he’s spent his presidency attempting to all but eradicate every legacy of the Obama Presidency, consequences be damned.
8. As a result of Trump’s purposeful negligence, countless Americans will needlessly die because we weren’t ready for the inevitable.
9. We could have stopped this pandemic in its tracks if we had competent leadership in the White House.
10. We could have had tests stockpiled. We could have had a plan to do rapid & aggressive contact tracing & subsequent isolation of both the infected and those who came in contact with the infected. We could have had PPE and ventilators stockpiled.
11. We could have done so much ahead of this if we didn’t have a President and his death cult dismissing this illness as a Democrat hoax, claiming it was only 15 cases in the US, and that it would soon go away (as if by magic). washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…
12. Instead what we got was the nearly worst case scenario because of the criminally negligent incompetence and lack of actual leadership at the federal level.
13. Now, the only options left available to us are the draconian social distancing and mass closing of all but essential businesses.
14. So much of this suffering could have been prevented if we simply had someone, anyone else as President.
15. More Ameircans have died due to #coronavirus than did on 9/11. By the time this is over, more will have died than in any American war - more than WWII, more than the Civil War. #COVID19 will result in the largest loss of life in American history.
16. When this is over, after we’ve mourned & buried our dead, #Congress must create a 9/11 style commission to account for all of @realDonaldTrump’s failures - to ensure we never screw up like this again & to hold him & his team responsible for all the needless damage they caused
