[AnthonyMouse]

> More aggressive lockdowns initially could have limited the initial spread, and from there reasonable precautions could have been effective.

This is what Australia did. Except that some of the measures they used may have been unconstitutional in the US, and Australia is an island. The US has 4500 miles of porous borders with other countries.

And covid spreads asymptomatically, so the only way to get to where Australia is now is to get the number of cases down to basically zero. Which you can't do if you get 40 more from Mexico every week.

Notice that Australia is basically the only country that has managed to succeed with this; western Europe is doing little better than the US.

> Cutting funding to certain CDC programs may also have been detrimental.

This is fake news. The budget cuts were proposed (as a starting point for budget negotiations with Congress) but never actually enacted:

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/democrats-misleading-coron...

> Disparaging mask use is also generally considered to be harmful.

For that you can thank CNN. They were writing a national story every time Trump would appear on camera without a mask, even if he was giving a speech to a camera with no audience or was in a room with entirely people being covid tested every day. This predictably led to Trump supporters defending him and it becoming a partisan issue.

It also didn't help that the CDC was disparaging mask use early on, ostensibly in order to preserve PPE for medical professionals, which gave everybody plenty of ammunition to fight about it once CNN had made it partisan for no good reason.

[pugz]

Australia being an island has little bearing on this. It's not like the Covid situation in the USA is because of infected people crossing the border illegally: it happened because of legal travel.

Trump's so-called China ban was a farce. It didn't stop USA residents from flying into the USA, it didn't even stop the immediate family of residents from flying to the USA.

Australia closed all travel from China initially and later from everywhere else in the world. There's plenty of room for criticism as they also stopped Australians from returning home, but the results are tough to argue with.

[cylinder]

I keep saying this about the silly island argument. It's not like the virus is coming into the US via Mexico and Canada. And domestic travel was halted with state border closures. The key is slowing movement. It's been perplexing watching Americans proudly travel and holiday, even internationally, during all this.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

40 people coming from Mexico is highly unlikely to lead to 230,000 US cases/day.

It may be inaccurate news, but calling it fake is needlessly hyperbolic. The contention isn't that overall funding was cut, it's that certain groups within the CDC saw significant cuts, and those cuts reduced readiness.

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN21C3N5

Regardless of whether Trump's missteps were politicized, they were still missteps. Doubling down on something after someone calls you out doesn't make them responsible for your actions.

[AnthonyMouse]

> 40 people coming from Mexico is highly unlikely to lead to 230,000 US cases/day.

Contagions have exponential growth. 40 people coming from Mexico after you've lifted the lockdowns means you need to continue them to keep the 40 from turning into a thousand and then hundreds of thousands. Which means lockdowns of the severity Australia used are useless here because you can never get below the floor necessary to lift them again.

> The contention isn't that overall funding was cut, it's that certain groups within the CDC saw significant cuts, and those cuts reduced readiness.

The problem with this kind of claim is that it's always the case. Priorities shift, staff gets reassigned etc. Which means that of the 1000 different units, 700 of which grew and 300 of which shrank, you'll be able to find in the list that shrank something that sounds like it might have helped against a given problem. It's just cherry picking.

> Regardless of whether Trump's missteps were politicized, they were still missteps. Doubling down on something after someone calls you out doesn't make them responsible for your actions.

The point is that they weren't missteps. Calling out someone for not actually doing something wrong in order to stir up controversy and ratings and politicize a public health issue is contemptible. Defending yourself against a baseless personal attack is not.

The problem, which CNN should have been able to predict, is that if you politicize an issue, people take sides, even if there was never any reasoned disagreement to be had. But maybe they did predict it and did it anyway, so that when less savvy political opponents predictably started making less supportable claims, it would give the instigators something to shoot down and mount on their wall. Even if people died.

[BoiledCabbage]

> The point is that they weren't missteps. Calling out someone for not actually doing something wrong in order to stir up controversy and ratings and politicize a public health issue is contemptible. Defending yourself against a baseless personal attack is not.

What a straw man. You realize there were photos of daily meetings with large groups, bill signings, news reports on how masks were barely worn in the white house. Yes he didn't wear masks as press conferences because they entire administration was lax about mask usage. And then for you to argue and only mention the press conferences is extremely disingenuous.

And that's separate from the Mexico argument. To me, it's incredible how little responsibility certain groups of people take for their own actions. A political party that has continuously downplayed the cheapest, low effort, low cost method of stopping the virus, instead again tries to blame Mexico instead of taking responsibility for their own actions.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Yes he didn't wear masks as press conferences because they entire administration was lax about mask usage. And then for you to argue and only mention the press conferences is extremely disingenuous.

You're missing my point. They would follow him around with a camera and any time they could show him without a mask there would be another story, regardless of the facts or the context. They would write the same story whether or not he was doing anything wrong in that instance.

That's a recipe for creating partisan conflict. They write the story when he's not doing anything wrong and then people correctly defend him. The existence of true instances are not a defense to reporting false ones. Because this is basic psychology; once people start defending something they keep doing it. So they created a large population of people willing to defend not wearing a mask. It was totally irresponsible.

It's the old saw about how the best way to discredit an idea is to defend it loudly with transparently erroneous arguments. That's what CNN were doing throughout.

> And that's separate from the Mexico argument. To me, it's incredible how little responsibility certain groups of people take for their own actions.

Please pay attention to context.

The argument I'm making is that the severe lockdowns as used in Australia could not have been as effective here because they only work if you can close your borders in practice, which Australia can do and the US can't. We're not even talking about "low effort, low cost" methods -- the argument is that higher cost efforts, of the sort that could actually get the number of cases to zero, couldn't have worked here. Even if the US put everyone in solitary confinement for a month, attempting to reopen the day after that would have still seen dozens of new cases.

That is a different argument to the one that more severe extended lockdowns would have saved lives. Which might very well be true (though against some grisly trade offs), but it's no support for claiming that it would have been better for US manufacturing in 2020, which is ridiculous.