At the time Trump was implementing travel bans, people said he was xenophobic. Sounds pretty stupid to suggest that Obama a globalist would have acted against Europe the way Trump did.
Turns out Trump was right to be concerned as the virus hit America on the west coast from China and on the east coast from Europe.
As it turns out, emerging evidence shows the virus had "landed" in America as far back as December 2019 and was being misdiagnosed because no one understood what they were seeing.
The corona virus is more contagious than the flu and we don't have a vaccine for it yet. So any suggestion that it could be contained in a country as large as the US seems political nonsense.
Imagine the US trying to prevent next years flu outbreak which will likely cost 40,000-80,000 lives and which we have been trying to contain for decades and you get a small sense of the challenge containing the corona virus.
Every country initially lauded as having done a better job than America has already begun to experience a 2nd wave of infections. Unless a company seals itself off from the world, the corona virus like the flu will keep coming back wave after wave.
As someone who spent a career in health care there are things had we known we could have done differently, but most of those things are related to governors requiring senior facilities to accept infected Covid patients to make room in the hospital for more patients. That should never have been done. All mass transit systems should have been disinfected daily sooner.
Social distancing and the wearing of masks should have been promoted sooner, but keep in mind initially the CDC discouraged people wearing masks... that was not Trump. The CDC recommendation to lock down was a mistake... they treated the virus like a seasonal event and not the marathon it is turning out to be.
We should have gone with the current strategy where local government leaders move up and down a phase in approach that responds to their local situations. The goal is to manage the volume of infections at one time and not prevent them all together.... prevention is a pipe dream without a vaccine...
But the managing the volume of infections combined with extreme efforts to protect the at risk population is something the country can sustain until a vaccine comes along.
The reality is the current situation is pretty close to where we should have been at the beginning had we known then what we know now. That strategy will change once a vaccine comes along or when a level of herd immunity and continued improvement in therapeutic treatments change the strategy.
