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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump's Poll #'s on pandemic should be 0:Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded
( We must change this narrative on him, he is a con man liar and his poll numbers should be in the toilet. )
Government exercises, including one last year, made clear that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic like the coronavirus. But little was done.
By David E. Sanger, Eric Lipton, Eileen Sullivan and Michael Crowley
March 19, 2020
WASHINGTON The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.
That scenario, code-named Crimson Contagion and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administrations Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
The simulations sobering results contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.
The draft report, marked not to be disclosed, laid out in stark detail repeated cases of confusion in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.
Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nations leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.
In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html
MyOwnPeace
(16,888 posts)were put in the same filing cabinet along with the one telling "W" about probable attacks in America by Bin Laden.
BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)working well for Americans. I do not mean to suggest this narrative is dangerous for the GE but for right now. If the numbers were lower he might actually try and do something. For now he must be pleased and may not do much of anything but keep lying.