HUMAN CORONAVIRUS NUMBER 7
The first 4 coronaviruses that were transported to humans were related to the common cold and were not very dangerous. Numbers 5 and 6 were SARS and MERS. They were more dangerous because they had a relatively high fatality rate of 9.5 and 34.4%, respectively. But it was easier to get SARS and MERS under control because they were not contagious until after The patient was displaying symptoms. So SARS and MERS patients could be isolated to prevent the spread. Covid-19 had a lower fatality rate but was contagious before displaying any symptoms. Once China informed the world of a disease outbreak on December 31, 2019, the Trump Administration's response was marked by downplaying the threat, inaction or partial measures, confusion, and inaccurate public statements. As a result, opportunities to slow the spread by facilitating a vigorous public health response of containment and suppression based on Testing, contact tracing, and isolation were missed following the confirmation of the first US case on January 21, 2020.
THE UNFORSEEN PROBLEM
Another name for a manager is a supervisor. The term suggests that a supervisor has the vision to anticipate problems and handle them effectively. But as the manager of America trump said that the virus problem was unforeseen. Bill gates had warned about this problem years ago (7b). Obama had formed a team to deal with pandemics. He had experience with Ebola, Swine flu and Zika. Obama was criticized because 2 people died in America from Ebola. Obamas pandemic response team went thru a simulation exercise with trump administration people to show them how to respond to a pandemic (1 ). The Trump administration fired the leaders of the pandemic response team and disbanded the unit (2). John Bolton later defended this by saying that some people on the team were moved to other departments. There were warnings that this was a potential problem (3,4). The CDC warned the trump administration about the coming crisis (4b). Trumps team warned him that the virus was going to be a serious problem (5.6) . The covid virus pandemic was not a black swan event (7).
TESTING
The most efficient way to deal with the virus was to quickly identify who was infected and isolate them before they spread the virus. Some countries were very aggressive with testing for the virus (8). Britain was lagging the EU but not as bad as the US (9). Early testing for the coronavirus testing was a disaster in America so of course trump blamed Obama (10). Trump was never very supportive of testing. He said it was the testing that caused the high amount of coronavirus cases (11 ). Trump suggested to slow down the testing to avoid bad statistics ( 12 ). He did not realize that this could result in more people dying but he was more concerned about the image of his administration. He reiterated that he was not joking. He wanted the testing to be slowed down (13). It was silly to claim that less testing would show less coronavirus cases. That is a head in the sand approach. At one point he said that if we did half the testing we would have half the cases (14) . Based on that logic if we did no testing we would have no coronavirus cases. He was completely incompetent to be a leader of America in a crisis. Eventually the new cases were growing faster than the number of cases discovered by testing (15). We just recently found out that trump was sending scarce coronavirus test equipment to Russia (16,17). This was confirmed by the Russians (18) . Now people remember that trump and Kushner did not want to help the blue states during the early days of the coronavirus (19). This has been the very opposite if the Biden administrations help for all states in emergencies. Now some of the governors are unhappy to find out that trump was helping Russia but did not want to help their states (20) .
DENIAL OF REALITY AND MISMANAGEMENT
Trump's approach to dealing with the coronavirus was denial of reality (21, 21b).. Many times Trump said that the virus was just a flu (22). By the summer of 2020, President Trump’s initial predictions about the coronavirus pandemic proved hopelessly wide of the mark. America was reeling. The virus had infected over five million citizens, and COVID-19 was responsible for more than 160 thousand deaths. With a case-fatality ratio of 4.48 percent and 42.8 deaths per 100,000 population, the United States suffered terribly compared to most other countries. Its per capita death rate was five times the global average and 10 times that in the European Union. For 6 months he went through a series of denials claiming that the coronavirus was not serious (23, 24, 25). It later came out from Bob Woodwards interviews with Trump that he knew all along that the virus was very dangerous (26, 27,28). John Kerry pointed out the more aggressive approach that Obama took to be a world leader in the battle against EBOLA. (29). Trump hid behind denials rather than assuming world leadership against COVID-19. In addition to lying about the coronavirus not being dangerous, the Washington Post documented 977 things that Trump said about the coronavirus that were false or misleading (30). There have been a number of news reports about the management of the coronavirus (31, 32). This was even reported multiple times by the American business press: Forbes (33), Bloomberg (34) and Fortune (35) A book was published about the nightmare scenario showing how the members of the administration launched an all-out war against the health agencies, doctors, and scientific communities, all in their futile attempts to wish away the worst global pandemic in a century (36 )
POLARIZATION
It was known that face masks were effective in preventing the spread of the coronavirus. This was due to the fact that airborne transmission was the primary method of transmitting the coronavirus (37). This fact was lost on many Americans that got out of high school, not knowing that there are differences between germs and viruses. It was not unusual to see Americans posting online memes about cashiers handling customers money behind face shields. Many Americans thought that the coronavirus could be transmitted by handling money. In other countries, the virus was mostly controlled by wearing masks, aggressive testing, and social distancing even before getting vaccines. But in America we had the great mask wars. Due to all the denial and lies about the coronavirus, many Americans were brainwashed by political narratives. This sometimes resulted in MAGAHAT people getting into fist fights in Walmart because they did not want to wear the mask to prevent spreading the virus. The politicization and polarization of the virus in America limited the effectiveness of controlling the virus (38, 39). Americans views on the virus widely diverged depending on which major political party they supported. One survey reported that half of the Republicans believed that Bill Gates wanted to use COVID vaccinations to implant microchips to track people!!! (40). Cambridge University in England did some research on how right-leaning news media spread disinformation about the coronavirus (41). Many Americans refused social distancing, refused to wear the mask, and refused to get vaccinated. Trump almost died from the coronavirus. After he recovered, he recommended that people get vaccinated. It was too late. Many people were too completely brainwashed by political propaganda. They were already committed to getting medical advice from politicians and talk show hosts instead of doctors. Many people became convinced that the vaccines were more dangerous than the coronavirus. They became convinced that the vaccines were killing people. 81% of Americans became vaccinated against coronavirus—over 270 million people in America (42) . By March 2023, more than 72% of the world's population had been vaccinated for the COVID virus—more than 5.5 billion people (43). There are still a significant number of people who believe that the COVID vaccines are deadly. If that were true, there would be significant population reductions from vaccinated people dying in America and around the world.
The DEATH TOLL
The vaccines don’t prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But the vaccines do significantly reduce the risk of dying from the coronavirus. In the early days of the virus with no vaccines, the most densely populated areas with cold weather were hit the hardest by the coronavirus. There are more people that ride the NY City subway every day than the population of many states. And NYC was hit the hardest by the virus. America was a widely polarized country that Biden inherited when he was elected. Some people have pointed out that more people died from the coronavirus during the Biden administration than during the Trump administration. But the virus was already far out of control before Biden was elected. And Trump only had to deal with the virus for less than 1 year, but Biden had to deal with it for multiple years. And the worst part was that when Biden was elected, America was already extremely polarized, with millions of Americans already so brainwashed by political narratives that they refused to cooperate with trying to control the virus. Even the government's attempts to stop deadly health misinformation online resulted in screams about censorship. By August 2020, America was already leading the world in COVID deaths (44) Multiple studies have concluded that many of the deaths in the US were avoidable. By October 2020, a Columbia University report conservatively estimated that between 130,000 and 210,000 deaths were attributable to the failures of the US government (45). This problem was still just beginning. In November 2021, researchers from UCLA concluded the Trump administration could have avoided 400,000 COVID deaths if they had implemented a more effective health strategy that included mask mandates, social distancing, and robust testing guidelines (46).. An assessment published in the Lancet in February 2021 concluded that 40 percent of the COVID-19 fatalities up to that point could have been averted (47). However, this analysis is skewed for multiple reasons. It is comparing the US coronavirus responses to the responses of the G7 nations. But the fatality numbers for the G7 were already badly skewed by the fatality rates from England, which were very bad, although less than America. Also, the Lancet report was published in February 2021. This did not reflect the full impact of the Trump virus policies. The Trump legacy includes several more years of Trump supporters (a) refusing social distancing, (b) refusing to wear the mask, and (c) refusing to get vaccinated. Numerous studies have shown the difference in coronavirus death rates in red states and red counties have been higher that in blue states and blue counties (48,49,50 ,51). There are not available exact numbers of how deadly has been the political polarization. It's hard to get precise numbers because obviously there are some Democrats living in red states and some Republicans living in blue states. Most likely the numbers are more extreme by party than by comparing mixed states. But the point is that the significant polarization and politicization about health care issues continued to negatively impact the fight against the coronavirus well past the end of the Trump administration. One way to measure the effectiveness of how well each country managed the coronavirus crises is to compare the per capita death rates. America had more than one million coronavirus fatalities. Of course, the US has a large population. (India is far larger). It's informative to compare the current total COVID death rates per capita now that the vaccination rates are stable (52). Using the updated table of per capita (per million) coronavirus death rates by country, we see that the US is number 17 from the bottom out of 238 countries (sorted low to high). Over 90% of all other countries had a lower death rate from the coronavirus, including very many third-world countries. America has had 1202,657 COVID deaths. That is a rate of 3421 per million. India has a rate of COVID deaths of 374 per million. If America had the same COVID death rate as India, then America would have avoided 1,074,911 deaths. The Philippines has a COVID death rate of 586 per million. If America had handled the COVID pandemic as well as the Philippines, then America would have avoided 1002,499 deaths. El Salvador has had a COVID death rate of 673 per million. If America had handled the COVID pandemic as well as El Salvador, then America would have avoided 972,782 deaths. New Zealand is a country in the middle of the table of COVID death rates. The per million COVID death rate for New Zealand is 862. If America had handled the COVID pandemic as well as New Zealand, then America would have avoided 908,226 deaths. It's hard to know for sure how many American deaths could have been avoided with better management. But certainly more than half a million people could have been saved by better early testing and isolation of infected people. There are several key factors why America lost an excess number of Americans to the mismanagement of the COVID virus: (A) The president of the United States was a narcissist and a sociopath who cared more about his image than saving American lives. (B) The president of the US thought that he knows everything and does not need to listen to anyone else. (c) The president of the US was cognitively challenged, and he is often disconnected from reality. Republicans in Congress had an unending series of investigations of Hillary for losing 4 Americans at Benghazi, even though Republicans voted in Congress to reduce the funding for embassies and consulates before and after Benghazi. Now, after losing more Americans than we lost in WW2 by mismanaging the COVID pandemic, Republicans are ready to give Trump the same job again.
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