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Celerity

(43,349 posts) Thu Apr 23, 2020, 05:13 PM Apr 2020

Trump's Criminal Inaction Increased U.S. Coronavirus Deaths By 90 Percent

The president's idiocy and inaction has killed thousands of Americans, and he must be forced to pay for it.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trumps-criminal-inaction-increased

WASHINGTON, DC -- As some of you might have observed, I watch all of Donald Trump’s evening press conferences, or what I’ve been calling the “Trump Show.” I’m watching his Wednesday show as I write this and, so far, it’s about as successful as “Toonces the Cat” trying to drive a car. In fact, I’ve developed a ratings system on a scale of one-to-ten for each episode, ten being full crazy-eyed “Mad King cocaine ragegasm” and one being “somber, so somber, monotone Biff.” For what it’s worth, his April 4 Trump Show was the most recent ten score, while most have hovered in the six or seven range. Nevertheless, by now we’re all aware of Trump’s gambit with these things. Not only are his press conferences an opportunity for him to flood the zone with his gigantic pumpkin head, appearing across most news networks, and, for a while there, the broadcast networks, too, but it also allows him to fully control the news cycle.

Indeed, most of the political press stops what they’re doing to watch the Trump car fly off the ledge. With only a few exceptions Trump’s given both viewers and reporters fresh chaos to choke down during the dinner hour. One of the topics that Trump’s constantly circling back to -- you know, those mental glitches in which he gets caught up in repetitive verbal loops -- is the American death toll from COVID-19. When he does, he tends to do this thing where he talks about cutting the numbers in half until he arrives at the number of soldiers killed in the American Civil War, around 650,000. I have no blessed clue what he’s getting at here, but lately, once he pulls out of his verbal nosedives, he’s been landing on a death toll in the range of 50 to 60,000 Americans. At one point earlier this week, he twice mentioned, straight up, 50,000 deaths -- total. Considering we’re at around 45,000 deaths as of this writing, we’ll probably surpass 50,000 by Friday and 60,000 by the end of next week, with more deaths occurring thereafter.

or a while there, Trump was engaged in the “Scotty from Star Trek” strategy, deliberately overestimating the death toll so that when it ends up being lower than, say, one to two million, he looks like a hero. But now, he’s gravely underestimating the number, making himself look immensely foolish -- for the gazillionth time because Trump always makes things worse for Trump. But the impact of his underestimated number is that it reinforces his casual attitude toward the spread of the virus. Fewer deaths means lower risk. Whatever the death toll ends up being, Trump’s head-games with the numbers end up distracting from the reality that his own criminal inaction for upwards of a month managed to worsen the crisis by augmenting the death toll. A study by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation determined that Trump’s slow-on-the-uptake response worsened the death toll by as much as 90 percent.

In other words, the death toll would’ve been 90 percent lower had Trump called for social distancing and other measures just two weeks earlier. Two weeks. One week earlier would’ve likewise meant a 60 percent reduction in deaths due to the coronavirus. Put another way, if Trump had acted one week sooner than he did, if he had acted on March 9, the projected death toll would’ve topped out at around 23,000. Two weeks sooner, on March 2, the date of the last public Trump rally, and the death toll would’ve been 6,000. Sadly, there’s no way to undo Thanos’s snap in real life -- there’s no way to bring back the tens of thousands of Americans who died due to Trump’s criminal negligence -- his hideous and unforgivable compulsion to protect the economy and therefore his re-election chances instead of taking responsible measures when it really mattered. Of course he’ll tell you he closed the “border” to China, but this one teeny-tiny decision was the least he could do without doing nothing. 40,000 Americans traveled from China to the United States after the ban, while most of the coronavirus cases originated with infected people traveling from Europe, not China.

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