2020 the battle of the septuagenarians - Trump vs Biden, Part 2

namloc1980 wrote: »

She went to Chinatown in SF on the 24th February at a time when there were 53 confirmed cases in the US in total. Chinatown is in her election district and she represents the people living there in Congress. She lives very nearby to it. She went on a walkabout there when there was an uncertainly and fear about Covid etc to show support to local businesses. I'm not seeing the issue here.

Not an issue with it per se, the argument is over the actions of the Federal government. When she visited on 24th February, Trump had implemented border restrictions three weeks earlier, so it's not as if they weren't at least somewhat ahead of the game.

A bigger problem wasn't Pelosi or Trump, it was New York City, and the advice dispensed by the now-ex-Commissioner for Public Heath, Orixis Barbot.

In solidarity with the Chinese community, NYC politicians actively encouraged going out to the Lunar New Year celebrations, even as a lot of the Chinese participants pulled out of them. A stand against racism and xenophobia. That's fair, but it still resulted in massed crowds.

A month later, early March, the official position of NYC's medical advisor was still "everyone go about your daily lives", and "This is not transmitted like measles, this is totally different. If someone is ill with COVID-19, exposing others requires prolonged exposure to their secretions, or droplets, from the infected patient". This was the week before Ireland started to shut down. Take the NYC Subway and commuter trains? Sure, it's safe, you're not around the infected long enough.

We can give NYC leadership the benefit of the doubt. Even if the information being put out about COVID was the best known at the time, the problem is we now know it to be wrong. And this is in the biggest city in the US, a hub for domestic travel, and highly condensed, ripe for transmission. Actively encouraging folks to go about their daily, commuting lives, with the now-known-follow-on of a critical concentration of cases in the NYC area which almost overloaded the local health system. (But did not overload total health capacity, the military facilities went all but unused).

By that point, the stable door was open and the horse long bolted. Despite the highly acrimonious relationship between Trump and Cuomo or Newsom, both the latter admitted that they were getting basically everything that they asked for from the Feds. The matters of lockdowns, mandatory face wearing, and so on, are the responsibility of State and local governments.

The main reason the US is failing on the COVID response is the lack of correct action at the state/local level, and also the idiots who think that they can go out and have parties, spring break beach trips, motorcycle rallies, protests, shopping trips, visits to friends and families, and all those other things that we know we're not supposed to do but they're doing it anyway, with or without masks even if state and local policies are correct.