[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-us-slashed-c...
This seems a-historic to me. The start of the lockdown in the US was as firm as Canada and most other western countries. Trump also funded Operation Warp Speed. Not saying he handled it perfectly, but as I recall the US had tests and vaccines available before we Canucks did.
The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020. I don't think any administration would be able to make it happen again without heavy use of force and considerable risk of social upheaval.
And he did it because he didn't like "his numbers."
Lots of mistakes were made, some less excusable or more harmful than others, but this wasn't "a mistake." This was inarguably and knowably a selfish decision to put self above millions of Americans.
> The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020
Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.
Though this case is concerning.
I suppose the “severity” is low only because the rate of transmission to humans is low. The article mentions how we come into contact with wild animals especially birds more often than we might think. I wish they expanded on that — from touching things in public? from unwashed food? These aren’t wild populations of birds right?
Also gotta love the “we’re hoping no more transmissions occur and the mutation dies out” statement. I mean I don’t have a better plan.
I think I recall a little bit on Reddit in Dec 2019 and Jan 2020, is that plausible?
Anyway, “early COVID” had a feeling to it—stuff was going on in China but news was taking a long time to trickle out, probably just because of the language barrier, and also because nobody (general public-wise) was paying attention to that sort of thing. The bird flu stuff seems quite different, it’s been reported on quite a bit, people are hyper-vigilant about this kind of stuff now, and it has been bouncing around quite visibly in non-human animals for ages. Plus it is in the US, so we hear about it immediately.
Not saying it isn’t anything to be worried about, but we’re getting updates in realtime.
> Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.
I don't agree with your implication, because I don't interpret the original statement the same way. The attitude was present, Trump turned into a cultural catastrophe. What political capital that remained was spent. We have less agreement now among the population as to what is acceptable and what is useful than before the last pandemic. The trenches have been dug, the no-man's land will be filled with mud and bodies.
In that universe, we're not even toying with the idea that the American public would violently revolt at the idea of some basic mitigations of a respiratory epidemic.
Arguably the political capital was just incompetently set on fire.
I imagine a Reagan, or a Kennedy, or a Roosevelt in that situation, and for anyone with a good instinct for leadership it just becomes a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel setup for becoming an absolute legend. The populace was dying of thirst for leadership and unity, and they were given huge blocks of salt and turned on each other. The last time a leader was set up for such an easy approval ratings layup it was Bush post 9/11.
It's wild that the 2020 election wasn't a complete 1984-scale rout for the republicans. It should've been if they'd had an ounce of gravitas or the ability to lead.
This kind of depends on the "great man" view of history where these figures have the kind of influence needed to move entire cultures. I don't put much stock in this. No matter how much togetherness rhetoric one threw at the problem the mistakes made in handling the pandemic, while understandable, emboldened and enabled forces that would result in an eventual backlash.
Witness Canada, where we had a government that constantly emphasized togetherness against a common threat, and yet we also got the trucker convoy. Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.
We were definitely reading about the lockdowns in Wuhan in January 2020.
January 19, 2020, the first case in Washington state was detected in a man who had recently traveled from Wuhan.
Surveillance blood samples from Dec 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020 from several nine US states were tested for COVID-19 antibodies: "Of the 7389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan-Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti–SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all 9 states"
"Gee all of the minks died. Maybe we should protect the humans?"
No it doesn't it just depends on the "words the most important person in the world says matters in times of crisis" view of history.
> Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.
I don't think "all of it" is the alternative. There has clearly been a groundswell of similar sentiments across the western world, but to suppose that the question of who is the US President is literally immaterial is frankly insane.
Notably, this was not Trump's fuckup.
And just to be clear about where I stand - I get the COVID booster together with a flu shot every fall now.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-stopped-talking-operat...
[2] https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023/06/20/trump-i-dont-want...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
He waffled, and his followers waffled too.
Coming out of covid, suddenly it appears we can work with slack, zoom, etc and I have not been on a business trip since.
Did you get out much, being immune and all?
I guess it’s somehow just occurring to me that, despite this giant shared experience that we all had as a society, a lot of us had it in totally different ways.
We weren't allowed to go out very far, it was a weird time, but luckily we live in the countryside and not in a city so not too much change besides police blockades to stop you from venturing too far.
They probably wouldn't have dismantled the global health security branch of the National Security Council either[2][3][4], 2 years prior to the pandemic.
There's a timeline outlining the disastrous bullshit[5].
[0] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/trump-ad...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-cor...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...
[3] https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/1...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-homeland...
[5] https://doggett.house.gov/media/blog-post/timeline-trumps-co...
I remember commenting about it during Christmas dinner that year, spending whole January reading the news dripping from China, and then it hit us hard in Sweden in February, my friends and I were a little more prepared than others (had a month's worth of food stocked, didn't need to leave the house until late March for groceries).