re: What Would Biden/Dems Do Different Than Trump In Handling Chinavirus

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Other countries certainly acted with urgency in February that we lacked

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We stopped travel from China in late January before dems were remotely willing to. Behind the scenes actions with the private sector and provision of treatment materials were underway. There is a list of these activities you can find on the internet.

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In the last 30 years we have had HIV in the 80s, anthrax attacks in 2001, SARS in 2002, swine flu in 2009, Ebola in 2014, and now COVID-19. In all of those cases, the CDC was point on managing the outbreak. Again, this situation is the CDC's raison d'etre

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None of those were remotely similar in scope to this worldwide pandemic. The CDC and WHO were wrong on many facets of this novel virus, because it was novel. There is a learning curve.

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But this is sort of my point. Cuomo has no specific expertise in this kind of thing and there is no expectation that he should. Same for DeSantis or Abbott. Same for Trump to be frank

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But they do have state epidemiologists who have the same knowledge as those in the CDC. There is no special knowledge possessed by the CDC docs that others don't have. There are more than enough teleconferences between the states and the CDC regardless.

Simply put, what we are seeing today is what we would have seen with any president in office. It's a novel virus.

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We stopped travel from China in late January before dems were remotely willing to. Behind the scenes actions with the private sector and provision of treatment materials were underway. There is a list of these activities you can find on the internet.

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The closing China thing was good. My point is that there were a lot of things that we did months after the fact all of which could have been done in February. Everything that happened in NY in March & early April was due to collective inaction in February. I personally was using the Subway until around March 1st. A more competent CDC would have been screaming about "ARE YOU GUYS EFFING CRAZY; SHUT THE SUBWAY DOWN. I'm on this subway a couple of weeks after going to Mardi Gras. A more competent CDC would have been screaming "ARE YOU GUYS EFFING CRAZY; YOU CAN'T HAVE A MILLION PEOPLE IN ONE SPOT" and on and on.
Ramping up testing capacity
Ramping up PPE production
Ramping up production of testing reagents (still desperately needed)
ramping up capabilities to contact trace (still desperately needed)
Getting every man, woman and child access to shiny new n95 (still desperately needed)
Write a giant check to restaurant & bar owners so they could remain closed

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None of those were remotely similar in scope to this worldwide pandemic. The CDC and WHO were wrong on many facets of this novel virus, because it was novel. There is a learning curve.

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I agree with. Mistakes were and were necessarily going to be made. But we seemed to be making more than every other rich country. On this, we are not the shining star. Why is that?

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Simply put, what we are seeing today is what we would have seen with any president in office. It's a novel virus.

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Again, why then has the rest of the first world managed this so much better?

Here's a question to you. What's our national plan to make it safe enough to get kids back to school and keep them there?

Easy answer..... This would be a non issue to a democratic administration. The media wouldn’t hype the non response they would have. Case numbers wouldn’t be counted in error.

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Everything that happened in NY in March & early April was due to collective inaction in February

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Nobody was up for drastic action in February. No democrat either, and that's what we're talking about...what the dems would have done better. You are judging this in hindsight.

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A more competent CDC would have been screaming about "ARE YOU GUYS EFFING CRAZY; SHUT THE SUBWAY DOWN

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First, the CDC is not a Trump CDC or an Obama CDC. They are often the same people from admin to admin, so if they are incompetent with an unprecedented event, that would be the case regardless of the party in power. Both the CDC and the WHO had missteps and understandably, to reasonable people, a lack of knowledge about a new virus type. They didn't know how contagious it was or even how much it spread from person to person. There are still holes in the knowledge of how much kids or asymptomatic people transmit it. No way anyone was going to shut down subways or Mardi Gras that early. Again, hindsight.

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Ramping up testing capacity 
Ramping up PPE production 
Ramping up production of testing reagents (still desperately needed) 

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None of this can be made as easily as you seem to think. When the entire world needs it there aren't enough facilities to instantly produce it and the items have a shelf-life that is short.

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But we seemed to be making more than every other rich country. On this, we are not the shining star. Why is that?...Again, why then has the rest of the first world managed this so much better?

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They have? We have a lower death per million rate than the UK, Spain, Sweden, France, Italy and Belgium. What do you think other first world countries are doing better?

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What's our national plan to make it safe enough to get kids back to school and keep them there

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Why does there need to be a national plan? Do you really think DC knows what the Rapides parish public schools need to do vs the Garfield County Utah school district needs to return to school? The counties know far better and can be assisted with those plans by the state epidemiologists.

You are judging this with far too much hindsight and the idea that government is powerful enough to protect us from almost everything.

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Biden would've been much more proacitve in identifying and isolating cases

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Biden cannot identify where his zipper is to take a piss.

He's not fit for office.

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You are incredibly one of the biggest dumbasses that posts on this board. You are neck and neck with little david for that coveted title.

I won't even begin to address any of the crap you spewed because I would be here all day debunking your nonsense.

I should have put a caveat in the original post that only people with at least a fourth grade education AND an IQ above 30 be allowed to respond. That would have saved the majority of us here from reading the meaningless, yet predictable, drivel from some of you.

My apologies to the sane adults on this board.

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Why are you even on this thread? I mean, the question was addressed to Dems. He asked a question, I gave an answer. You are free to disagree. You don't have to get sand in your vagina about it. I disagree with people on here all the time. It's not that big a deal.

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Nobody was up for drastic action in February. No democrat either, and that's what we're talking about...what the dems would have done better. You are judging this in hindsight.

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It doesn't require hindsight to suggest that the Democrats would act in accordance with the Playbook for Early Response to High Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents created in 2016. A playbook that they developed specifically for this type of incident. A Playbook that predicted many of the challenges we ended up facing (PPE shortages, testing, hospital capacity planning, supplies, etc. Is it your position that they would just ignore this playbook? Why? The rest of the world didn't.

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First, the CDC is not a Trump CDC or an Obama CDC. They are often the same people from admin to admin, so if they are incompetent with an unprecedented event, that would be the case regardless of the party in power. Both the CDC and the WHO had missteps and understandably, to reasonable people, a lack of knowledge about a new virus type. They didn't know how contagious it was or even how much it spread from person to person. There are still holes in the knowledge of how much kids or asymptomatic people transmit it. No way anyone was going to shut down subways or Mardi Gras that early. Again, hindsight.

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Either leadership is accountable or it isn't. It appears that it is your position that Trump, three years into his role as President, was not capable of developing and staffing a competent CDC. I agree. I happen to believe that there are better folks for that job than Redfield. And Trump hired him. Again, either leadership is accountable or it isn't.

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None of this can be made as easily as you seem to think. When the entire world needs it there aren't enough facilities to instantly produce it and the items have a shelf-life that is short.

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Yes. The President's job is really hard. This would have required a lot of time, effort, and focus to make this happen.

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They have? We have a lower death per million rate than the UK, Spain, Sweden, France, Italy and Belgium. What do you think other first world countries are doing better?

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This is actually a fair question. The key word there is doing. With the exception of Sweden, those countries stumbled out of the gate, in the case of Spain and italy, quite terribly. Most of their deaths occurred in March/April. This is true of us as well as NY got hit early. The difference is that each of those places other Sweden then went on to execute national strategy to diminish COVID within their borders. As such combined Belgium, France, UK, Spain, and Italy experienced ~ 300 deaths last week, the US experienced more than 5,000. I think they're doing better, because they are doing better.

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Why does there need to be a national plan? Do you really think DC knows what the Rapides parish public schools need to do vs the Garfield County Utah school district needs to return to school? The counties know far better and can be assisted with those plans by the state epidemiologists.

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A national plan would offer guidance on best practice; what to do to keep schools safe; what to do if they become unsafe. More importantly, it would offer significant support in reaching the initial set of conditions required for safe re-opening of schools in the first place. Right now, most school systems have no path back to safely re-opening. That's just a fact. All across the country, school district are trying to figure it
out by the seat of their pants. My argument is that CDC should have been working about this for months. it doesn't take hindsight to being contingency plan for getting kids back to school given the knowledge that school normally start in late August. Honest question do you think most schools will be open across the country this time next month? Do you think they'll stay that way? I'm not confident. I mean baseball opening day was like 4 days ago and look at them.

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You are judging this with far too much hindsight and the idea that government is powerful enough to protect us from almost everything.

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Not really. We still haven't solved our testing turnaround issues. Why? We still haven't put out an unenforceable, but necessarily helpful national masking mandate. Why? We still have bars open. Why? We still don't have sufficient contact tracing capabilities anywhere in this country. Why? I suppose expect our government to not so significantly lag the other rich countries. If they can figure it out in Germany and France, we can do it here. We have not.

I don’t think you grasp that we are a federalist nation.

There is absolutely no reason and no legal basis for national ordinances when there is such wide disparity between states re:covid cases and deaths


Also, as many disease experts have stated, America is a giant nation geographically. We were never going to be hit at the same time all over like France and Italy were.

Btw: are you not paying attention to covid spikes in Italy and other European nations right now? Belgium just went on lockdown again.

At the end of the day, our data is going to end up very similar if not slightly better than most other major nations

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I don’t think you grasp that we are a federalist nation.

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Sometimes the federal government is best positioned to step in. We do it all the time if we think it's important enough. If we're cool with sic ICE on a bunch of hippies in Portland, we should be cool with sending the CDC to New York to tell them what's what.

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Also, as many disease experts have stated, America is a giant nation geographically. We were never going to be hit at the same time all over like France and Italy were.

Btw: are you not paying attention to covid spikes in Italy and other European nations right now? Belgium just went on lockdown again.

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We are significantly outlying in how bad we're doing. Florida had it's first case not too long after Germany did, yet last week there were probably more deaths in Florida as all of Western Europe combined. That's nuts. We can go back to March and check the threads, but no one thought we'd going through this in this manner in August. Not even me, who has been more pessimistic about covid the whole time. Are you really saying we couldn't have done any better?

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Btw: are you not paying attention to covid spikes in Italy and other European nations right now? Belgium just went on lockdown again.

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I have been. I respect the disease. but their spike is like 250 cases in the whole country and our average day is 60,000 cases. It's a different planet.

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At the end of the day, our data is going to end up very similar if not slightly better than most other major nations

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I think it is meaningfully that they're getting back to normal earlier and we don't quite have a pathway out.

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I don't know. Ny is significantly different than Topeka.

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I am deeply aware. Question still stands.

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The fact that testing and PPE are still issues demonstrate that it is not the fault of the Trump administration and, rather, an issue with the creation processes themselves.

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The federal government has tremendous powers in an emergency to impact those processes. They can literally make companies make the stuff. further, other countries have solved testing turnaround challenges. Though to be fair, given the scope of disease in those places, they have less testing to do.

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I know of no major dem who has said that. In fact, Biden's plan in that interview months ago consisted of several things Trump had already proposed or done.

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Your argument is now that the Democrats wouldn't follow the NSC playbook that they created 3 years prior. Um. Why wouldn't they?

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Again, let's look at how well the democratic governor and potential presidential candidate Andrew Cuomo did. Not well per your definitions. IMO there wasn't a ton for him to do besides utilize the hospital ships provided him in a better manner

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I've already explained my view of the ideal role of governor in pandemics. You can disagree and then you get Cuomo you get DeSantis. Said another way, when we after action this thing and make recommendation for how to manage an outbreak in the future, I guarantee we will re-emphasize the role of the CDC and de-emphasize choices, if not the authority of state and local officials.

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Lastly, to suggest that the political party that didnt want to shut down travel from China and supports the idea that protests and riots don't spread the disease would have performed better is laughable.

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I want to be clear. I'm not claiming that democrats are better at this. I'm saying this particular administration has been uniquely disjointed, dysfunctional, backward looking, and ineffectual and that has earned us uniquely bad outcomes. You can scratch out Dems or Biden and put in Rubio or Cotton administration and my argument wouldn't change.