Actually, if you check my background you will see I had a career in public health, health care, and health insurance and I do track Covid statistics quite closely…
Trying to dismiss the difference between Republican and Democratic states based on factors other than leadership are wrong. While those factors play a small part in the Covid 19 death rate, the greatest share of the difference was based on the perception by several Democratic governors to treat the reluctance of senior facilities to accept recovering Covid patients as a discrimination issue (political) and not a health issue…
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/
If you look at the above chart, it shows 5 of 5 of the highest death rates in the country are Democratic states… 9 out of 10 of the highest death rate states/DC are Democratic states… 11 out of the top 15 states with the highest Covid death rates are Democratic states.
That has since been rectified and present death rates among states track much closer to one another proving that the “other factors” were not the primary ones. But the impact on our death rates as a nation continue to be dragged down by those poor decisions by Democratic governors early on…
I listen to many of Trump’s daily briefings precisely because of my career in health care… can you be more specific as to where you think he was wrong? I have generally found him to be fairly accurate and where he is inaccurate, the understanding of the virus changed…
He was wrong when he thought the virus would disappear by summer, since traditionally viruses like the flu do disappear… since then scientists have determined the “lipid” layer surrounding the RNA strand provides the virus the means to survive for longer periods outside a host thus making it far more contagious than other viruses as it can hang around in the air for longer periods before infecting a new host.
The big divergence I see between Trump and Fauci is that Fauci focuses on the pandemic as a “disease” only and Trump has the added challenge of addressing the economic and social impacts of the Covid virus which can have even longer term health issues than the pandemic itself… more and more emerging data is starting to quantify the impact of things like the lockdown including its impact on mortality due to delays in medical treatment… the estimate cost in lives may exceed that of Covid itself… similarly pediatricians and educational development experts have indicated failure to open schools will have a lifelong disproportionate impact on minority children, while opening schools will have little impact on them (though it does pose incremental risk for children with “at risk” family members at home).
Having been through quite a few viral outbreaks in my career beginning with HIV in the early 80s, I have been quite impressed with how Trump has been able to mobilize the private sector better than any other President in our history… Obama’s response was limited to the government and educational sectors of our society as a contrast, he just did not understand how big a role the private sector could play coming from his background as a politician and an educator…
As a result, we might have a vaccine by this Fall less than 7 months after our first recorded viral case in the US… that alone will save hundreds of thousands of lives. Never in my lifetime in health care have I seen such a rapid response to a virus in the form of a vaccine… nor have I seen therapeutics impact survival rates as fast as has happened under Trump…
So I would encourage you to read the various published studies and steer away from the media for your information… I do monitor the CDC website at least twice a week and read the actual studies that come out on Covid when they are available rather than the often misleading news articles from the right and the left…
So while you may be a biological warfare trained officer… I would match my nearly 40 years (more than 30 of them as a senior executive level) of public health, health care, and health insurance experience dealing with diseases in America against that… how did your biological warfare prepare you to determine who to protect the public and insure the economic underpinnings of our economy remain in place or how did it prepare you to analyze the impact of delaying education and health care procedures long term on society against any short term benefits of more aggressive acts intended to contain a virus for which there are no “anti viral” medications? How much experience do you have managing actuaries who have the difficult challenge of building “trade off” models? I try not to play the game of background… but I assure you my background is quite extensive and I have read more of the emerging studies than most people…. I am now retired but remain very engaged in studying the public health impacts of various responses to medical matters… and I have far more time to do so… no longer being distracted with the daily diversions of a “real job”…
