Belief. It stands as a central pillar to our very existence. Belief can transcend. Belief can allow you to imagine that which is impossible, and through that belief make it reality. Belief can take you across the world, and across the stars.
But there is an opposite power to belief, one which can trample reality, trample facts, foster injustice and suffering.
Disbelief.
Trump never believed in pandemics or the CoronaVirus.
Starting in January the Intelligence community kept telling him through the Presidential Daily Briefing that CoronaVirus was coming and that it was deadly.
“U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen,” the newspaper reported, citing “U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.”
“The intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public health officials should take, issues outside the purview of the intelligence agencies. But they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak,” The Post reported.
Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans,” the newspaper reported.
[...]
“Intelligence agencies ‘have been warning on this since January,’ said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration, and who, along with others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information,” the newspaper explained.
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” the official said. “The system was blinking red.”
Ultimately this information was delivered in over a dozen different briefing packages. Just imagine if G.W. Bush had received multiple warning about an imminent attack by Osama Bin Laden [Like say: Bin Laden deterined to attack within the U.S.] and he had just blown it off?
Not just once, but a dozen times.
So of course when news that there were American cases of CoronaVirus aboard a cruise ship he had to act and act swiftly. Decisively. He could have deployed his international pandemic teams and had them study the problem lscally and provide and advanced head-up, except that he’d dismantled most of those teams, and he could have consulted his pandemic team within the National Security group within the White House, except that all of them had already been fired.
So he did the next best, smartiest thing. He banned travel from China.
There, problem solved.
But it’s not like he banned all the travel from China to the U.S. US citizen were allowed to return home, and so were green card holder and people who had a direct family link to the U.S. In all, over 40,000 people travelled between the U.. and China after Trump’s ban.
There were 1,300 direct flights to 17 cities before President Trump’s travel restrictions. Since then, nearly 40,000 Americans and other authorized travelers have made the trip, some this past week and many with spotty screening.
Since Chinese officials disclosed the outbreak of a mysterious pneumonialike illness to international health officials on New Year’s Eve, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, including nearly 40,000 in the two months after President Trump imposed restrictions on such travel, according to an analysis of data collected in both countries.
The bulk of the passengers, who were of multiple nationalities, arrived in January, at airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Newark and Detroit. Thousands of them flew directly from Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, as American public health officials were only beginning to assess the risks to the United States.
Indications are now that there were at least 10,000 people inside the U.S. who already had CoronaVirus before Trump implemented his ban at the end of January.
Everything that’s happened since then, rejecting the testing kit from the World Health Organization. The failed kit that the CDC initially developed, the slow distribution of the second CDC kit with it’s complicated reagent and long swab requirements, everything that’s happened has been a result of Trump’s disbelief in CoronaVIrus.
We didn’t implement a testing plan that would have identified which people had the virus and isolated them from everyone else. We didn’t do contact tracking to trace where those people may have come into contact with the virus and where they may have spread it. We didn’t implement a strategy designed to lockdown the virus and protect of from it’s impact, instead we locked down EVERYONE with the hope that that would also lockdown the virus under the hope that that would do the trick.
8 weeks, 5 million tests and 65,000 dead Americans later — here we are.
31 states have begun to end their lockdown protocols when not a single one of them has met the CDC Guidelines of having 14 days of decreasing numbers first. They’re all just taking the bet that having their restaurants and retail operate at 25% will generate some type of significant revenue while not causing a vicious second wave of infection.
The worst example of this have been the multiple outbreaks at various meat processing plants around the nation including Smithfield and Tyson foods.
Trump has ordered that these meat plants be re-opened, but he hasn't done so by requiring that they first meet CDC guidelines for safety. So they’re supposed to be open and operating and still spreading the virus in the same way that they have been? That’s nuts.
They’re just gambling. They don’t believe that their risking their citizens lives on a whim. There’s lot of disbelief to go around.
And it’s spreading.
April 24th
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