Americans are going to demand to know why US wasn't prepared for this pandemic

[babylonsister]

Americans are going to demand to know why US wasn't prepared for this pandemic
Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 2:39 PM EDT, Thu March 19, 2020

Editor's Note: (Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is "Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.)

snip//

Sure, there will likely be push back from the Trump administration about the need for a coronavirus commission, but such an investigation is vital to understand how we might better prepare for the next pandemic or a possible bioterrorism attack, since they have some commonalities.

Here are some questions such a commission might try to answer:

-- Why was it that the United States had tested such a small number of people for the coronavirus so many weeks into the crisis? In the weeks since Covid-19 first appeared in the United States, the CDC has, as of Tuesday, together with other public health laboratories, carried out some 32,000 tests. Meanwhile, South Korea has tested more than a quarter million people -- more than 7.5 times more than the United States. What did South Korea, a nation whose total population is only about 15% that of the United States, get right about its tests that America did not? A smart early decision by the Trump administration came at the end of January, which was to bar non-US citizens who had recently visited China from entering the United States and also to quarantine Americans who had visited China's Hubei province, the epicenter of the virus. But why didn't the administration use the weeks of additional time that this bought the American public to do anything substantially to prepare for the crisis by, for instance, speeding up the availability of tests?

-- Why didn't the government step in to make sure we had enough medical-grade masks for what promised to be vastly increased hospital occupancy? According to The New York Times on March 9, "The federal government's Strategic National Stockpile of medical supplies includes 12 million medical-grade N95 masks and 30 million surgical masks -- only about one percent of the 3.5 billion that the Department of Health and Human Services estimates would be needed over the course of a year if the outbreak reaches pandemic levels" -- which, of course, it already has. Knowing that hospitals run on limited inventory, the federal government should have anticipated that supplies would run short.

-- Why might we face inadequate numbers of ventilators for the patients who might become critically ill? Following a tabletop exercise, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security warned in 2018 that in the event of a severe pandemic there would be a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of ventilators in the United States. This warning seems to have been largely ignored.

-- Why did the Trump administration eliminate the National Security Council's pandemic unit in May 2018 and what effect might that have had on the lethargic response to the crisis?

-- Why did President Trump repeatedly mislead the public about the scale of the threat? Trump said February 26 there were only 15 coronavirus cases in the United States and that the number would soon be close to zero. And as recently as Sunday, Trump made the nonsensical claim that "we have tremendous control" of the virus. Trump's other absurd claim earlier this month that "anybody who wants a test can get a test" was about as accurate as his assessment that his handling of the crisis is rated "a 10."

more...

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/19/opinions/coronavirus-commission-investigation-opinion-bergen/index.html

[Ferrets are Cool]

1. If they don't know why already, they have not been paying attention or are in denial. nt

[blueinredohio]

2. I don't believe Americans will say anything.

They will accept everything, no one will question or call Trump out on anything and life will go on.

[Mariana]

3. Trump will continue to blame Obama.

His voters will enthusiastically agree with him.

[tulipsandroses]

5. Nothing the orange fool says makes sense, but especially blaming Obama makes no sense

Not only did he dismantle the pandemic preparedness team.
For the last 3 years he has worked hard to dismantle everything Obama has done.
He has touted himself as fixing whatever he thought Obama broke. Why then is this different? He could have " fixed it" like he has fixed everything else terrible that the Obama administration did.

[gratuitous]

4. That could happen, I suppose

But first the media have to quit airing several hours of Needy Amin's free-styling bragfests every day, and explain to their audience that Trump is very much at odds with history and reality. Trump totally dropped the ball for weeks in getting on this pandemic, but after the fact, he claims that he was out in front the whole time. The media just let that statement go out, uncorrected, and there are millions of Americans who will believe whatever the hell fell out of Trump's mouth.

It's our job, too, but the media have the really big megaphone and platform to reach millions. They MUST use it; too many lives are at stake to just keep nodding and scribbling during Trump's shoutycracker appearances.