Early on Trump believed based on the advice he got from Fauci, that the world was dealing with a s "serious" flu like virus. When Trump tried to limit travel from foreign countries to slow the virus's rate of spread, he was called xenophobic by his political opponents. Trump's understanding of the virus as well as his opponents was wrong. Helped a little by China's cover-up with the WHO's help.
I don't recall anyone suggesting that we just let the old people die. Maybe that happened overseas. With the ICUs being overwhelmed, a shortage of PPE, and no known treatments, Trump accepted the advice of the CDC to lockdown our country for a few weeks to slow the rate spread of Covid (at the time the term used was to flatten the curve). Eventually, the Covid wave began to subside, and people thought it would end by summer.
Some people talked about Covid "waves", but others began to believe we could eradicate Covid through lockdowns, masks, and social distancing. Trump rejected that, believing the impact of those mandates would be devastating to the economy with no certainty that they would work.
This divergence became the key point of tension between the group that wanted to close schools, mandate testing, mandate masks, mandate social distancing, close restaurants, mandate the vaccine when it came out.
versus
The group that felt we knew enough that if we protected the "at risk" institutional population with a moat strategy and then provided the best information to the ambulatory "at risk" population, that the total death rate from Covid would be no worse or better than the radical strategy being pushed by Fauci and other countries.
The science ended up confirming the strategy adopted by Trump, but it did "front-end" some deaths whereas other countries had far longer extended Covid waves. America also because of its obesity suffered for more Covid deaths that only later did we have the algorithms to attribute those higher deaths to our higher co morbidity rate rather than our national Covid response strategy.
What I am saying it every virus is different, but in the case of Covid 19, healthy humans with strong innate immune systems are at very very low risk of developing moderate or serious Covid. If you overlay those robust innate immune systems with acquired immunity from previous Covid infections or vaccinations, the chances become extremely low.
But people with weak innate immunity systems have poor immunity systems. And you can only "boost" a weak immunity system so much. For those people taking extreme measures to avoid infection is warranted. Most of the links I used in this thread were publish medical sites. But things like Covid statistics are easily obtained, so adding additional links does not seem necessary.
If you are over age 65 and you are 60 times more likely to die of Covid. Another point of reference is 16% of the population is over 65, and that group accounted for 80% of the Covid deaths. If you want more info, go to the CDC site or the Hopkins site. But I am over 65 and that is enough information for me to be careful.
America will continue to be hurt more by Covid than other countries due to our high rate of obesity. Partially helping our country is we tend to get first dibs on new vaccines and therapeutics. So, our survival rate has improved considerably among those that develop moderate or serious Covid. That said, no one truly knows what the longer-term impact will be of long Covid or multiple Covid infections. But for now, between Covid and substance abuse the life expectancy in most developed nations actually declined in the last two years.
India has a reputation in our medical community as a place people go to study diseases. It is sad that so many people in India are dying, but you might find this interesting...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57888460
The article supports your assertion. India claimed as of July 2021 only 414,000 people died of Covid. That seems strange given excess deaths were over 4 million, almost 10 times higher. In developed countries that number is usually 10-33% higher.
Bottom line, Trump is not a physician and he likely received bad information early on, but eventually, he saw the pandemic for what it was... a medical problem, a social problem, and an economic problem and began to adopt a strategy that balanced those three things.
I agree that Trump voiced his thoughts which may work in business, but not in politics where your opponents and the media are just waiting to take things out of context.
A good healthy business encourages everyone to voice their ideas. Then let the group sift through them discarding the bad ones and embracing the good ones. If you don't voice all your ideas then some bad ones will never be said, but some good ones won't either. As mentioned, I was involved in health care for my career and a lot of "dumb" ideas turned out to be brilliant and a lot of great ideas ultimately ended in a dead end.
The first time someone injected someone with a dead or weakened virus as a vaccine, the medical community thought the person was nuts or a monster. Talk about crazy... you want to inject someone with a deadly virus?
