I thought here in the west that it was well-established that temperature checks and mask do not work against the corona?!
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Failures across the board. Federal government, state government, local government, hospitals, insurance companies - no one in positions of authority saw this coming in January? No one with clout or power had the foresight to stockpile masks or other PPE, just in case?
Why isn't a national emergency stockpile being maintained when we've seen a dozen potential global pandemics in the last decade alone?
Apparently even officials aren't immune to senseless groupthink.
People did see it coming. The administration ignored early warnings about the virus and publicly downplayed the severity of the issue in order to preserve the stock market and Trump's poll numbers in an election year. This after dismantling much of the infrastructure and firing the personnel needed to respond to this issue in order to cut costs.
This is nonsense, if you presume the administration knew what was coming then they would have known that this would last up until election season, as it likely will. Unless you're implying that they waited deliberately for it to get worse so they could "fix" it. But you'd never prove something like that. In any case that still doesn't excuse the other tens of thousands of people for individually and collectively failing to act.
I started stockpiling mid January.
Here is an article pointing out that Trump ignored warnings about the virus from his own intelligence services as far back as January[0].
Here is an article about his efforts to downplay the effects of the virus, and calling it a Democratic hoax[1], also going back to January.
Here is an article about Trump's efforts to quickly scale back social distancing guidelines and ending the quarantine in order to get the economy going, again, for the sake of his reelection campaign.
Here is an article about the lies, minisformation and misdirection Trump has offered about the coronavirus[3].
> Unless you're implying that they waited deliberately for it to get worse so they could "fix" it.
I'm not implying that. I will imply that Trump assumed the problem would just go away, and when it didn't, his primary concern became political damage control. FFS he's said he only willing to help blue states with funding if they stop criticizing him[4] and during a press briefing on the coronavirus he boasted about being "number one on facebook."[5] Clearly he cares more about his image and his ego than he does the health of the country.
Notwithstanding whatever other failures have occurred, when the Executive branch is being run like this during a crisis, the result affects the entire system. It affects funding. It affects procurement and distribution of goods. It affects the way people behave, whether they even believe a crisis exists, and what actions should be taken. There's an entire "coronavirus truther" thing happening now resulting in people ignoring quarantine orders and that's directly a result of Trump convincing people the scale and danger of the problem has been overblown by the "liberal media" in order to attack him. That's directly his fault.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intellig...
[1]https://www.vox.com/2020/3/18/21184945/trump-coronavirus-com...
[2]https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-wants-to-r...
[3]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/trumps-...
[4]https://www.vox.com/2020/3/25/21193803/trump-to-governors-co...
I'm not remarking in the incompetence and/or maliciousness of Trump and his administration. I'm pointing out that it's a failure across the board.
But you clearly are unable to look at things objectively. Again, I'm not here to flame about the president. Everyone screwed up. Tens of thousands of people with power failed to act. Including Democrats. That was my while point. Stop with the partisan politics, they have no place here.
But fine, I admit I get a bit heated about Trump, especially lately, but it isn't partisan politics. I don't feel the way I do about him or his leadership merely because because he's a Republican.