Worth a read. A fairly thorough timeline of the Trump admin’s missteps.
An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html
We all know that the NY Times would have praised the government response under Obama had the same circumstances emerged and it had taken the same actions as the Trump Administration. It would have lauded the courageous early steps taken to close the border with China while a president was distracted by a baseless impeachment trial forced by a feckless Congress. It would have stated that more could have been done, but that it was merely speculation given how little was known about the disease.
As a numerical modeler, I had my suspicions about the accuracy of the IMHE model from the very beginning. The numbers that were published never fit the potential for greater than >2 million dead in this country, which is the prediction that led to the shutdown of the economy. Now the prediction is for ~60,000 dead. This seems like a large number, but for reference, the preliminary CDC estimate for number of deaths due to the flu for the season ending on 4 Apr 2020 is between 24,000 and 62,000.
So less biased reporting of the Administration’s response should focus on this drastic change in predictions. The actions taken by the government were either hugely successful (reduced deaths from 2,000,000 to 60,000) or a massive overreaction. I tend to believe it was the latter — the destruction of the economy and infringement of civil liberties were probably not worth it.
It looks like the disease was rampant in certain urban clusters, but less so elsewhere. Maybe it was necessary to confine those in New York City and New Orleans to their homes, but perhaps not necessary in more rural, less densely populated areas. There are individual sectors that require nationwide action such as closing nursing homes to visitors due to the huge risk to their elderly residents. A more targeted approach could have substantially reduced the damage to the economy.
Can anyone really say that requiring everyone to wear masks in public and stay >6 feet away from other people would not have been just as effective in reducing the spread as confining people to their homes? We will see multiple experts offer up opinions that shutting down the economy was the only effective way to prevent the spread of COVID19, but in reality they do not know.