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Coronavirus has officially hit the United States. Throughout the country, there have been anywhere between 1600 and 3600 confirmed cases and 41 deaths. This number is likely a gross underestimate of the actual number of cases, as the U.S. has only tested a small proportion of the population. Meanwhile, top health officials in Ohio estimate 100,000 people could have potentially already been infected with the virus. Researchers at Johns Hopkins estimate there could be between 50,000 and half a million cases in the U.S. at this time, and that number only looks like it will grow. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and top member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, recently stated it’s possible millions could die in the United States. I hope that we do not see things get worse in the U.S., but based on what I personally have seen and what my colleagues report, I cannot help but believe things will get worse than they are now.
Take it from a U.S. physician working on the ground in communities hit by COVID-19: the U.S. is woefully unprepared for this pandemic. During a recent press conference, after being pressed around the limited availability of coronavirus test kits, Dr. Fauci said, “The system does not — is not really geared to what we need right now, what you are asking for. That is a failure.” The U.S. has only been able to test five individuals per million, while South Korea has tested more than 3,500 per million people. This is largely due to the fact that the U.S. declined to use WHO tests used around the rest of the world.
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After continually downplaying the Covid-19 pandemic for nearly two months, President Donald Trump dramatically changed course this week and has shifted his tone to reflect the dire circumstances. But as he pivots his public relations strategy, he’s also clearly and deliberately trying to rewrite his own history to claim — falsely — that he knew it the outbreak was bad and has been working hard to stop it.
“I’ve always known this is a real — this is a pandemic,” Trump told the media on Tuesday in the White House press briefing room. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
And on Monday, I reported that Trump’s rhetoric on the outbreak had clearly turned the corner — and had begun more closely reflecting reality. He acknowledged that the infection is particularly contagious and dangerous, that the pandemic could stretch into late summer or longer, and that it may trigger an economic recession.
Some have cheered this change of pace.
“This is an important thing to note and to applaud from an American standpoint, from a human standpoint,” said CNN’s Dana Bash. “He is being the kind of leader that people need, at least in tone, today and yesterday. In tone, that people need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty.”
But while it’s important to acknowledge that Trump really has changed the way he talks about the coronavirus, Bash gave the president far too much credit. Because even though it’s good that Trump is now conveying the level of threat the virus poses to American society — and thus may be reversing some of the damage he wrought by spreading doubt about the need to fight it — he’s still not being the leader the country needs. He’s incapable of that.
He proved as much when he was asked on Friday about his administration’s decision to shut down the White House pandemic office, which may have managed the situation much more effectively. Trump told the reporter who asked about the closure that it was a “nasty question.” And he flatly denied that he holds any responsibility for his administration’s galling failure to adequately test for cases of the infection in the early days of the pandemic, which likely contributed to the proliferation of the virus. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump said.
And even now as he acknowledges how bad the outbreak could be, he’s still lying. He says he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” but this contrasts starkly with the record of his own public comment
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Politico takes a fascinating look at those whom Trump follows on Twitter — I had never noticed; they are a gang of only 47, "a collection of family members, conservative pundits, administration officials and Trump-brand properties," observes the magazine. This airtight, self-echoing cyberchamber of ghoulish sons and daughters and criminally insane loudmouths has assisted, in part, in fueling Trump's wildly distorted view of the coronavirus pandemic.
For what he sees in his Twitter feed — "in a nutshell" — writes Politico, is "that the coronavirus crisis is someone else’s fault (China, Joe Biden, etc.), that he’s doing a great job responding to it, and that a Trump-hating media is just fanning the flames." To a clinical narcissist who already sees himself as either a political messiah or hellish sorcerer, such groupie flattery and enemy-bashing would be irresistible.
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If there's one thing we've learned from previous emergencies and crises it's that the bigger you are, the lighter your fall. We see that time and again in our cyclical financial crisis. In the 2008 crash, the Federal Reserve rushed to the aide of struggling banks and Wall St firms lavishing truckloads of free money onto their balance sheets. Of course, all dough went right on the national credit card account, to worry about later.
Well, here we go again. Living by the theory that it's corporate malfeasance not to take full advantage of the crisis de jour, corporate giants have already dusted off their emergency-tin cups and are rattling them at Washington. They want government money, buckets of the stuff, socialism in industrial quantities so they can get back on their feet and continue warning average Americans about the ills of socialism.
Maybe most galling are the airlines. They're looking for something in the order of a $50 billion shot in the arm from Uncle Sam. And Dopey Don is fully onboard:
“We’re going to back the airlines 100 percent,” President Trump said at a news conference yesterday.
Yes, these are the folks who lose your luggage and make you pay dearly to sit for hours in chairs the Marque de Sade would have considered too cruel. Maybe Uncle Sam can get us travelers another five or six inches of legroom for 50-bil, huh?
In a normal world, the president of the United States would be responding competently and effectively to a global pandemic, helping along with the rest of the leaders of the industrialized nations to combat it around the world. The last president of the United States, Barack Obama, and his administration tried to make that happen. They really tried. But no one could predict just how bad Donald Trump would be.
In January 2017, the Obama administration’s transition team conducted tabletop disaster response activities with Trump's top aides. One of those tests was eerily prescient—a strain of novel and deadly influenza they called H9N2, origination in Asia and quickly spreading to Europe and then to the U.S. "Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918," the Obama team told Trump's aides in the exercise, according to the documents and interviews from that transition effort obtained by Politico.
But Trump doesn’t seem to understand that. Before agreeing to an actual coronavirus relief bill, his administration was considering more corporate tax cuts, tax cuts targeted to the airlines and hospitality industries, and a temporary payroll tax cut.
But tax cuts will be useless. They’ll be too slow to stimulate the economy, and won’t reach households and consumers who should be the real targets. And they’ll reward the rich, who don’t spend much of their additional dollars, without getting money into the hands of the poor and middle-class, who do.
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