Colin,
If the United States had competent leadership, this virus wouldn't have gotten out of control and thousands of lives would have been saved. Not to mention, our lives would have been more normal than what we have been facing the last 8 months.
Donald Trump knew from the beginning that COVID-19 was a deadly airborne virus. He admitted to Bob Woodward on tape telling him "he wanted to always downplay the virus". That lead to tens of thousands of deaths because of him.
Right from the get go, Donald Trump lied about COVID-19 calling it a "hoax" and sought to politicize a non political virus. Instead of fighting to save Americans, he wanted to attack Democrats and downplay the virus because he thought it would help him win an election but he failed miserably.
The right wing media from day one downplayed the virus and started putting out disinformation that posters here parrot. They also caused massive death in this country. People listened to their lies and blew the virus off as a joke and spread the virus around their communities.
We had no national plan that would have helped to combat the virus. Some states had restrictions and red states had none so sick people crossing state lines continued to spread COVID. Most states saw significant improvement and then Donald Trump started demanding states to open and told his deranged cult to force states to open. That's when we lost the war on COVID.
Donald Trump wants herd immunity and doesn't care how many people get sick or die. He held many hate rallies that exploded the spreading of the virus. Over 1 million new cases were recorded this week. Hospitals are at full capacity so new sick patients that require hospitalization won't be able to be admitted. Over 1200 deaths are being recorded each day. Right wingers refuse to lock down or do anything to stop the spread. They are engaging in mass murder.
Immediate lockdowns tomorrow would help stop the spread of the virus and so would wearing masks where eventually we would see progress being made.
There are only two options. Do nothing want watch the economy go under and witness massive death and infection or lockdown and get this virus under control.
Rick, as I see it the problems the US had were the following.
The virus essentially became politicised because you were facing a Presidential election. Trump, for all his failings, had a good chance of re-election and no obvious challenger had emerged by the new year. Trump saw the "economy" as a winner, using the DJI as the simplistic indicator for Joe Public, to prove his point. Everything in his thinking was to keep the Stock market buoyant.
The virus hit early in the new year, I believe in Washington State at first. Information at that time was sketchy, but it was obvious that Wuhan was having a serious health crisis. Unfortunately the US decided to develop their own testing kit. It was not effective early and so that caused serious issues. New York also had outbreaks, and we know the problems that caused.
Now we know that a significant number of people are asymptomatic spreaders. Also people can spread the virus for days presymtomatically. So you can see, community spread was out of control, with no real way of testing. The only way of diagnosis was via severe symptoms. The only experience with severe corona virus disease previously was with SARS, years before. That’s what many used to judge what to do but the characteristics of this virus are different.
Trump's focus was the "economy" ie. his re election. Every action taken was with that filter in place. He was the "cheerleader", not for the country, but for the DJI, his winning in November. Eventually he imposed the limited travel bans but it was too late, the virus was already spreading inside the country.
In my city we have not had a community spread case since April 14. Two days ago we had 4, today 17. We are fortunate enough to have the numbers of contact tracers to track those possibly in contact with them down. Our hospital system can cope at present. I fear for the toll on health workers and the health system in the US given the rapid growth in numbers recently.
