Wednesday, April 15, 2020

The Commonality Between Trump and Xi: Failure to Act

China:
In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.
...
“This is tremendous,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.”
Trump:
On March 16, the White House issued initial social distancing guidelines, including closing schools and avoiding groups of more than 10. But an estimated 90 percent of the cumulative deaths in the United States from Covid-19, at least from the first wave of the epidemic, might have been prevented by putting social distancing policies into effect two weeks earlier, on March 2, when there were only 11 deaths in the entire country. The effect would have been substantial had the policies been imposed even one week earlier, on March 9, resulting in approximately a 60 percent reduction in deaths.
Trump dithered and people died.

Governors have acted and the death tolls in their states have been instructive:
The recent divergence of epidemics in Kentucky and Tennessee shows that even a few days’ difference in action can have a big effect. Kentucky’s social distancing measure was issued March 26; Tennessee waited until the last minute of March 31. As Kentucky moved to full statewide measures in reducing infection growth, Tennessee was usually less than a week behind. But as of Friday, the result was stark: Kentucky had 1,693 confirmed cases (379 per million population); Tennessee had 4,862 (712 per million).
Before you start carping that Trump has no authority to impose social distancing, remember that Trump is the one who had both health professionals and intelligence analysts telling him what was going on and what was going to happen. Governors and mayors don't. Trump could have moved faster, but his one and only concern was that he didn't want to tank the stock market. That's all Trump has cared about from the start.

Both Trump and Xi have been operating from the same place: A need to protect their own skins.

13 comments:

  1. You're going to deserve everything you get in the next election, Comrade.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_FHrSoxPtY&t=544s

    Sorry Chickie… but it's a matter of public record.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Whoa, somebody kicked over the rock!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yea, the current debate is if it slithered or crawled out. Wandered over for a look see and figured out why he hates you so much, it’s just like Lee J. Cobb’s character in 12 Angry Men. He’s also, for a professed aircraft fan, surprisingly ignorant of the basic principles of aerodynamics and controls.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I’d hate to harsh Glen’s mellow, but Cheetolini isn’t doing well with his response to the crisis:

    Most Americans (57%) now believe that President Donald Trump waited too long to act on the COVID-19 pandemic that is devastating the nation, according to the latest Economist/YouGov Poll.

    That is especially true of Democrats (85% of them say this), and a majority of Independents (56%). Most Republicans (71%) are happy with the speed of the president’s response, but one in five Republicans (20%) think he should have moved faster.


    https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/04/13/trump-waited-too-long-poll


    ReplyDelete
  5. The need to act with infectious virus is paramount. It was proven
    back in 1918 and repeated over the years. Faster, sooner, and with tracking
    are all means to get a handle and slowing it down.

    DrumpF didn't act, he called it a hoax weeks before it was too late.
    That is a matter of record. Its on him and all his toadies.

    If we get to the next election, likely what we will have gotten along the way is not not we deserve.


    Eck!

    ReplyDelete
  6. That is what you get when you elect someone who disdains expertise to a pathological extent.
    You listen to experts because they are the ones who know what to do.
    Even were Fergus' claims to be a smart guy true, it still wouldn't mean that he had specialized knowledge about viruses and pandemics.
    The job of president isn't to know everything yourself, it's to get the best information available from the smartest and most qualified people around to base your decisions on. The top levels of government are structured and designed especially for that.
    Fergus, being incapable of admitting that anyone knows more about anything than he does, is a failure right out of the gate.

    Xi, as far as I can tell, is just a vicious fucker.

    -Doug in Sugar Pine

    ReplyDelete
  7. The CDC, just now: The number of coronavirus tests analyzed each day by commercial labs in the U.S. plummeted by more than 30 percent over the past week, even though new infections are still surging in many states and officials are desperately trying to ramp up testing so the country can reopen.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Dear leader doesn't dither
    He screams, he fires
    in between munching
    double cheeseburgers

    His smartphone is smarter
    then he is,
    has speed dial for
    Mc Donald's
    tweets
    Fox News.

    The gods of Olympus
    had the Furies.
    Deejay Thoris (not!)
    has a smartphone
    that lives in purgatory.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Xi's hesitation puts paid to the notion that the virus is an escaped bioweapon. He would have known that his asset was running free and in danger of discovery. He would have clamped down instantly. Hell, he might have destroyed one of his own cities to hide the evidence.

    ReplyDelete
  10. On that thought, Nan, and as it does appear to have gone from bat to human (there may have been a dog in there) I would venture we dodged the big one, and if any good were to come of this it would as dry-run for when one of the viri thawing out of the glaciers and tundra that haven't seen a human since before we were human... meets a human.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hey! I seem to remember some nasty wahmen doing the happy dance when that bible thumper got taken out by the virus after claiming God would protect him from it. You guys are real nice too!

    Might be a good time to remind y’all that the flu is also kicking the fat old wine soaked cat ladies, the gay hipsters, and the greasy elderly hippies to the curb too! HAR HAR HAR! At least the bible thumper has a place to go afterward; the failed liberal social experiments are compost!!! πŸ˜†πŸ‘

    Trump 2020! BFYA!!!

    ReplyDelete
  12. Mr. Filthie,

    Don't let the screen door hit you on your way out.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Xi and Trump are simply not comparable.

    When Xi had to make the call on ordering mass isolation, all he knew was that the virus was capable of human-to-human transmission, not that it was so readily transmitted that failure to take this drastic step would result in Wuhan's medical system being overwhelmed. We know in hindsight that this was so, we know only now, in hindsight, that ordering isolation early, before the effects of the disease are locally apparent, is the only effective mitigation that can prevent disaster.

    The example of Wuhan is what taught us this. China went first, had to respond before anyone knew that drastic measures were the only way to prevent disaster. China learned from not making the call before the need for drastic measures had been proven by what happened to Wuhan, to make that call and take drastic steps in the whole country, and spared itself the nationwide extension of the disaster.

    Every other country on the globe had the benefit of knowing what had happened to Wuhan as a result of failure to start general isolation early, because China and Wuhan went first. Trump ignored the proven reality of the need to isolate, while for Xi the need was not yet proven. Xi admitted that his initial reaction was wrong, and put his whole country in isolation, when reality told us all that isolation was necessary. Trump still hasn't admitted that he was wrong in his initial response. He instead continues to deny the reality of the need for isolation of proven disaster in scores of countries and states and cities that ignored the example of disaster resulting from Wuhan not initially isolating.

    How many times does the mule have to kick you before you learn to avoid its backside?

    ReplyDelete

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