Over at Vox, Sean Illing interviews Lawrence Wright, author of a long and detailed piece in the New Yorker about our response to the coronavirus pandemic. Wright says we did a terrible job and points in particular to three big mistakes. Here they are:
- The CDC fails to get cooperation from the Chinese, thus delaying our knowledge that the virus could be transmitted asymptomatically.
- CDC bungles the testing.
- CDC spends a couple of months telling people not to wear masks.
The first of these is basically the fault of China. The other two are the fault of the CDC. None of them are the fault of Donald Trump.
Now, Trump clearly deserves a share of blame on the mask debacle, since he failed to support mask wearing after the CDC finally came around. In fact, it's worse than that. He didn't just fail to do anything, he actively turned masks into a stupid partisan issue:
You can look at the various states and how they reacted to the virus and how the outcomes were different. And you can compare similar states; Kentucky and Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, Vermont and South Dakota. In many respects, these were similar states with similar demographics. In one case, the governor imposes strict lockdowns, mask wearing, and so on. In another case, the tap is open. One public health official said, “If the country had behaved like the state of Vermont, we would have 200,000 fewer deaths.” Well, that’s almost half of what we’re talking about. More responsible leadership could have made an immense difference in the suffering and the death that America has endured.
Keep in mind, however, that the decision to lock down a state isn't a federal one. It's inherently a state issue. And the idea that the entire country might have equaled the performance of its single best state is silly. Trump may have bollixed the mask issue and then spent months doing and saying stupid things, but California spent that entire time basically doing everything right and it didn't matter. We did well at first, but our death rate from the coronavirus is currently one of the highest in the nation.
So how many deaths is Donald Trump responsible for? It's certainly not 200,000. Even 100,000 is probably a huge overestimate. If I had to guess based on what Wright says, I'd say that (a) Trump acted like a buffoon the whole time, (b) he made things worse by spewing stupid theories constantly, (c) he failed to support mask wearing, and (d) in concrete terms, maybe this increased the death rate 5-10%.
Obviously this is speculative. No one can put a firm number to any of it. But for as much as Trump's public performance was insane, the evidence really doesn't suggest that it was responsible for a massive increase in the COVID-19 mortality rate. That blame mostly goes elsewhere.
Only 5-10%, uh? That 10% is about 45000 deaths. There were the same number of combat casualties in Vietnam... over 20 years of conflict.
So Donald Trump, by himself, had a death rate about 20 times higher than Vietnam combat. Nope, no great impact. No siree...
Reading the accounts of health care workers, I am struck by the number cases they describe where avowed Trump supporters dying of COVID angrily deny they are dying from some hoax virus. Seems many Trumpers really are ready to die for Trump, just not from COVID.
Big Liberace energy.
A highly contagious disease simply cannot be contained in a large country who's immune system is not used to this type of Sars. Indians learned the hard way in the 1600's.
Your "large" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Are you claiming the handful of European countries with a much better track record on covid share population immunity profiles similar to Taiwan or South Korea? Also, what about Australia and New Zealand? Also, even if it's true the immune system profile of the US population disadvantaged it vis-a-vis East Asian states*, a degree of vulnerability hardly makes America's death toll an inevitability. Look at Germany.
*Needless to say, you're making an assertion here that hasn't been proven. I wouldn't be shocked if science eventually confirms population-wide immune system profile differences played a role in the pandemic, but I also wouldn't be shocked if science eventually confirms this theory is bogus.
Uh uh uhhhhh. If the impeachment part deux teaches us anything, it’s that Trump is the curse that keeps on giving. People will be dying because of his evil for some time to come. Headline should be: How many people will Trump end up killing?
The anti-mask movement is more visible, but I think Trump's anti-testing initiative has killed way more people. If you just test enough people and (pay to!) quarantine them when they test positive, you can wipe out the virus in weeks.
Say Kevin is right (he's so very, very, not) that Trump is responsible for only 5% of the death toll, so, TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS. We are having an impeachment trial over a riot in which _five_ people died. And that, apparently, is a greater crime!
The president of the United States spent the summer and early autumn literally travelling around the country organizing super-spreader events.
& only once did his effort get stymied by KPOP.
& even in that case, Herman Cain died as a result.
There are a few other issues that likely resulted in more deaths that can be attributed to Trump:
1. Withdrawing from the World Health Organization. This probably didn't affect American deaths, but it may have contributed to deaths in poorer countries.
2. Undermining and politicizing his own CDC, including muzzling officials like Fauci. Obviously very hard to quantify this, but it's not nothing.
3. Holding numerous super-spreader events.
4. Undermining the ACA, which lead to more people being without insurance (some percentage of which likely fall into the category of undercounting, people who died without ever getting any healthcare).
I think you have to put many of the CDCs mistakes on Trump's shoulders. He was the boss of that organization for more than 3 years, selected the person who headed it up, did everything he could to trash the science and hurt morale. It wasn't that long ago that CDC was the premier health organization in the world.
The politicization of mask-wearing and social distancing had a bigger effect than you are considering, I think. We did some (careful) traveling in our RV last fall, and it was amazing how different the behaviors were from state to state. And case rates sure seemed to correlate.