Aseahawkfan wrote:Looks like it (testing) was a CDC decision, not Trump. That confirms what I thought that he was following the advice of his advisers. Trump likes to talk about a lot of things and listen to other people talk, but at the end of the day he listens to the true experts.
The delay in testing was a 100% CDC failure. Except for the fact that the POTUS is the head of the government and ultimately his responsibility, we can't hang that one on Trump. Part of it was just plain American arrogance and stupidity, that we just had to have our own test and not the ones the rest of the world was using.
Trump didn't start listening to his advisors until just recently, within the last week. His team of experts, led by Dr. Fauci, had some serious discussions with him that finally persuaded him to take this crisis recently. Until then, he was calling it a hoax, insisting that we could be back to normal by Easter, rate counties as high, medium, and low risk and allow businesses to re-start, and so on.
Aseahawkfan wrote:Once again I must point out this same lapse in judgment seems to have occurred worldwide at roughly the same pace. There is no indication we missed a month as most nations missed on this, which is why the outbreak is so widespread worldwide. The only nations doing testing in advance was South Korea and China, South Korea is closer to China and likely had a good idea what was going on since they got hit hard by the last few outbreaks.
South Korea ran way more tests than we did. As a matter of fact, we are just now surpassing them in the number of test conducted even though our population is 6 times theirs. They also have an advantage in that they have something like 3 times the hospital bed space that we do, and as you pointed out, the Asian culture is more accepting of authority than ours here in America and western Europe.
Aseahawkfan wrote:Suffice it to say I still don't think our slowness is what caused this. I think it has been circulating since December. I think most of the deaths and problems with it have been attributed to the flu. I think it's been here with us quite and a while and testing has just revealed the full extent. I think that will be borne out in the after action report when this thing is done and once antibody testing starts.
It didn't cause it, but it damn sure has contributed to the severity of it. Had the Mayor of New Orleans canceled Mardi Gras, it's likely they could have prevented a lot of the suffering they're going through now, but the CDC had yet to issue an advisory, and without the CDC to back her up, she hesitated, caved into the business interests. The Florida governor refused to close down the beaches even though the CDC advisory existed and honored by the NCAA, NBA, MLB, NHL, and many more organizations that canceled their events. We were late to the game in a lot of areas, and there's a lot of elected officials, including but definitely not limited to, the POTUS, that don't showed up late.