[jjeaff]

Case fatality rate is the one metric that has almost nothing to do with leadership. America is fairing well in that metric because we have good doctors and good technology and good facilities.

All the other metrics, infection rates, testing, contact tracing, reflect partially on the administration. And we are not fairing well, comparatively on any of those metrics.

[fastball]

The US is a federation of states, and generally internal matters (like stopping the spread of a virus in your state) are not the purview of the executive branch. It's hard to blame the president when it is not equally bad across the board, for example if you have some cities like NYC which manage to contribute 10% of all COVID deaths in the US so far.

When it comes to things that typically are the purview of the executive branch, I think I remember the US being the first country in the G20 to restrict travel from China, among other things, and then the POTUS was called xenophobic by various people for pointing the finger where it deserved to be pointed (China, who was the very first to downplay the virus and pretend everything was hunky dory while it really wasn't).

I'm not a fan of Trump, but if you are placing the blame for coronavirus on him you are more than a little misguided. In all honesty, watching Democrats use people who died of COVID as political props by trying to pin their deaths on Trump is one of the shittiest things I've seen this year, and it's been a crap year.

[triceratops]

> The US is a federation of states, and generally internal matters (like stopping the spread of a virus in your state) are not the purview of the executive branch.

These states aren't islands though - they mostly share land borders, freeways connect them, and people freely travel between them every day. The virus doesn't know state borders. If the federal government can insert itself into random state affairs by citing the interstate commerce clause, I don't see how it can wash its hands of responsibility for this debacle.

[jjeaff]

Nearly every public health expert and virologist and other related expert I have seen has said the administration has done a terrible job.

Shutting down travel to China was only a partial shutdown and was about the same time that 40 other countries shut down travel.

Much of the early infections were thought to have come in through europe anyway.

Inconsistent messaging, disagreement with their own scientific leadership, disagreement with scientific reality, willingness to promote unproven theories and treatments, and most of all, inability to course correct when new information becomes available are all reasons the Trump admin has done a terrible job and is quite responsible.