| HN Mirror

The fact that you leap from "Trump should have done more" to "what Trump did was not impactful" shows your bias. Cancelling flights was impactful, but clearly insufficient. You're the one who is off-balance here, not me. There were systematic failures to recognize the threat from leaders and citizens alike. Regulatory structures that have been in place for decades have shown their cracks in an emergency. The CDC/FDA dumped tons of red tape on the testing process, and 'fixed' the problem by taking themselves out of the loop. The testing debacle was well underway during the timeline you mention - what does that tell you? If it only tells you "Trump fucked it up", you're not paying attention. It may be a contributing factor, but we have some real, serious problems beyond who is at the top of the executive branch. Similar weaknesses are about to be exposed in the clinical trial testing process, due to the degree to which we have culturally landed on p-values and statistical power needed to lead to action - there's a chance to correct that now, but if we're focused on Trump, and only Trump, we will fail to do so pre-emptively and it will cost more lives.

I have been preparing for this since early January, have you? If not, why not? If not, you fell into the trap almost everyone else did to fail to recognize the threat and the exponential nature of the threat. So stop throwing stones from within your glass house, and look forward. Critique the actions of leaders who are behind the curve today, not those who were behind it yesterday. The finger pointing backwards can happen later: for now, we should focus on course correction and survival.

Also, I did some more research, and it sounds like the tweet I was referencing above was in fact misinformation. So I stand corrected on that one! However, it was certainly the case that at the time flights were being called to be cancelled from China, there were accusations of xenophobia being through around.