The Staggering Cost Of Donald Trump's Incompetence

The United States and South Korea both discovered their first case of Coronavirus on the same day -- January 20th.

South Korea immediately sprang into action. They began testing, contact tracing, and social distancing. Those actions allowed them to get control of the pandemic in their country. To date, they have only had about 267 deaths (or about 5.21 deaths per million people).

The United States did none of that. In fact, the Trump administration delayed a full two months before it recognized the need for testing, and it still hasn't distributed enough tests to allow us to get a full picture of the viral spread in the country. To date, nearly 100,000 deaths have occurred from the virus (or about 295.22 deaths per million people).

It did not have to be that way. If the Trump administration had acted quickly (like South Korea did), they could have contained the virus and prevented many thousands of deaths. In other words, Donald Trump's has cost the lives of many thousands of Americans -- and his demand for the economy to reopen insures that many more thousands will die. This nation is paying a heavy price for Trump's incompetence!

Here is part of what Peter Baker (The New York Times) has to say about the number of Coronavirus deaths in this country:

This was a death toll that Mr. Trump once predicted would never be reached. In late February, he said there were only 15 coronavirus cases in the United States, understating even then the actual number, and declared that “the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” In the annals of the American presidency, it would be hard to recall a more catastrophically wrong prediction. Even after he later acknowledged that it would not be zero, he insisted the death toll would fall “substantially below the 100,000” mark.

As it stands now, the coronavirus has infected 1.6 million and taken so many lives it is as if an entire midsize American city — say Boca Raton, Fla., just to pick an example — simply disappeared. The toll is about to match the 100,000 killed in the United States by the pandemic of 1968 and is closing in on the outbreak of 1957-58, which killed 116,000. At this pace, it will stand as the country’s deadliest public health disaster since the great influenza of 1918-20 — all at the same time the nation confronts the most severe economic collapse since the Great Depression.

The historical comparisons are breathtaking. More Americans have died of the coronavirus in the last 12 weeks than died in the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined and nearly twice as many as died of battle wounds during World War I. The death toll has nearly matched the number of people killed by the initial blasts of the world’s first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In terms of American deaths, it is the equivalent of 22 Iraq wars, 33 Sept. 11 attacks, 41 Afghanistan wars, 42 Pearl Harbors or 25,000 Benghazis.