So much irony. So much getting it wrong. So much rewriting history.
We’ve been told that President Trump was slow to understand and react to the pandemic, but most of the evidence suggests it’s just the opposite. He closed travel to China before anyone thought it was a good idea, and then they chastised him for it.
He’s moved companies to produce the equipment we need. He’s been given credit (rightly or wrongly) for suggesting we can sterilize masks, rather than have to produce more in mass quantities. He’s given us sometimes useful daily updates to keep everyone informed.
Yes there’s the constant, predictable media and Democrat drumbeat of how unprepared he was and how incompetent he’s been as a leader during this pandemic.
They’re missing the story. Entirely.
It’s quickly turning out that President Trump’s real sin is that he’s been slow to understand and react to the repercussions of shutting down our economy.
The more evidence we get about coronavirus, the more we learn that it got here sooner than we gave it credit for, many more people have had it and built up antibodies than we thought, keeping people in isolation is just preventing herd immunity and kicking the inevitable infections and subsequent recoveries down the road – prolonging the pandemic, and that it’s far less lethal than we thought.
You can’t blame anyone for not knowing this right away. But you can start blaming people for not acknowledging this and adjusting the plan. You can blame the media for never once asking questions about any of the evidence or studies regarding how many people have already had this and recovered, about how our plan to protect hospitals are actually killing them, about the real mortality rate, and about the negative effects of people losing their jobs.
The thing about the coronavirus is that it’s new, and we’re learning more every day.
But we have at least a century of good and relevant data about how our economy works, and we should have taken the negative effects of the shutdown far more seriously and predicted more accurately what’s currently happening.
Our administration also never factored in all of the negative effects of the shutdown and weighed them against the thousands of pandemic-related deaths. These should have been easy to see. That there would be depression, suicide, more obesity, stress, drug use, and alcoholism should have been very predictable and factored in.
No doubt, having to make those decisions that literally involve life and death is a tough and unenviable position. And it’s going to take a lot of strength to go against media-induced conventional wisdom.
50,000 deaths against 26 million unemployed is no match. The thing is, people die every day, and nothing any task force does can prevent that. But the number of people who die from events caused or exacerbated by the lockdown is most likely going to be greater than from coronavirus. (And that’s not even considering how we’re inflating coronavirus deaths by counting those who died with it, along with those who died because of it.)
President Trump has to step up and move faster on this or, ironically, his defeat in November will not be because of how he handled the pandemic, but because of the way he handled an economic shutdown that was ultimately his decision.
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