As US corona cases spike, it is worth pointing out that a LOT of people predicted this about a month or two ago. It was clear then that the re-opening was premature and that the lock-down, while it had flattened the curve, was not used as a window of relief by the Trump admin /1
to set-up national, coordinated, and well-funded mitigation - testing, quarantining, contact-tracing, best practices like masking & temperature checks, more ICU beds, PPE, & ventilators, etc - to battle resurgences post-lock-down. That was the whole point of the lock-down - to /2
create some breathing space against the initial surge to get a suppression structure up and running to handle the long run of the virus. Trump wasted that window bought at terrible economic pain. Instead,he continued to push it all onto the states and then undermine even those /3
efforts with his 'liberate' comments. Then, bc of the temporary, lock-down-induced caseload drop, Trump charged recklessly into re-opening, and craven GOP governors followed. So now, when the widely anticipated case resurgence is indeed happening, there is scarcely a structure /4
to beat it down. And while deaths are still dropping, that is probably a lagging indicator; i.e., all these new cases will likely feed into the death toll later in the summer, especially if the curve explosion overwhelms health care facilities and the sick can't get the /5
treatment they need. So naturally, this is a good time for the Trump administration to pull Obamacare insurance assistance from people too: .
This didn't have to happen. If the president wasn't such an incompetent clown, the window of relief bought by /6
This didn't have to happen. If the president wasn't such an incompetent clown, the window of relief bought by /6
the lock-down at great cost could have been used wisely. Other countries did that - New Zealand, S Korea, Taiwan. There is nothing inevitable about this, and we don't just have to sit around and wait for herd immunity at the cost of a half-million deaths. Trump's passivity and /7
disinterest is just appalling negligence.
Here is Krugman predicting this 6 weeks ago: nytimes.com/2020/05/11/opi…. And here is my concern even earlier that red states bullied by Trump into re-open would see a summer case spike: . END
Here is Krugman predicting this 6 weeks ago: nytimes.com/2020/05/11/opi…. And here is my concern even earlier that red states bullied by Trump into re-open would see a summer case spike: . END
