[BostonCard]

Indeed the President did not figure it out. Neither did Merkel . . .  nor Macron . .  nor Boris Johnson . . . nor any of their health ministers, most of whom have resigned. Which leads me to believe that the actual tipping point occurs sometime in the first week in March. That's when enough data accumulates that ALL of these leaders decide almost simultaneously to require drastic action. That's the almost unavoidable inference from the timeline. 

You keep insinuating that Germany did a bad job responding to the coronavirus.  Whatever it is that Germany did wrong with regards to the coronavirus, I wish we would make those mistakes too, because I would rather live in a country with 103 deaths per million people and where the daily death toll has been under 100 for the last two weeks than one in which there have been 316 deaths per million people and where the death toll is hovering at around 1000.  Not only is Jens Spahn still health minister, but 78% of Germans think the German government has handled the coronavirus pandemic well.







Also, you keep repeating that every health minister has resigned. The only health minister to have resigned is the French one, and she did so to run for mayor of Paris, not because of her COVID-19 response.



UK: Matt Hancock has been the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care since 2018.

Italy: Roberto Speranza has been the Minister of Health since last year.

Germany: Jens Spahn is the Federal Minister of Health and has been so since 2018.

France: Agnès Buzyn served as the Minister of Solidarity and Health from 17 May 2017 to 16 February 2020 when she resigned to run for the mayorality of Paris.  At the time she resigned France had reported 12 cases and 1 death from COVID-19.


For what it is worth, Alex Azar is still our Secretary for Health and Human services.



And for the nth time, nobody is asking for Trump to declare a nationwide shelter in place order in late February.  We were just asking for the president to prepare the response.  It'd be one thing if Trump did everything he could: asked Congress for a supplemental appropriation, bashed the heads of FDA and CDC together and told them to figure out the testing or find another job, given governors a roadmap for how and when to shut down their states, replenished the stockpile of PPE, and told the American people that this is a serious deal and the government is doing x, y, and z to prepare.  And it's possible that if he'd done all those things, the House would have played politics and not passed anything to make him look bad, the FDA and CDC still might not have gotten their act together, governors would have ignored him, and Americans would have taken him neither seriously nor literally.  Then you say, you know what, the President did all he could have done, but our politics are broken; this is the fault of Congress and the entrenched bureaucracy, and the governors, and all of us.  But he did none of that.  He consistently minimized the threat; on multiple occasions said it would go away on its own, he never asked congress for money for testing, he couldn't be bothered to even listen to his health secretary (and when they did meet, changed the topic to e-cigarettes), let alone understood that there were problems in his administration getting the test right, constantly lied about the state of testing, picked fights with governors, and downplayed Americans fears.  Basically, he did the opposite of what he should have done.  And as the contrast between Cuomo and Newsome has made clear, policy choices and when they are implemented makes a brobdingnagian difference.  Even a delay of a couple days makes a brobdingnagian difference, and the fact that the pandemic hit Europe before it hit us makes our failure to act all the more glaring.

BC

[BostonCard]

Indeed the President did not figure it out. Neither did Merkel . . .  nor Macron . .  nor Boris Johnson . . . nor any of their health ministers, most of whom have resigned. Which leads me to believe that the actual tipping point occurs sometime in the first week in March. That's when enough data accumulates that ALL of these leaders decide almost simultaneously to require drastic action. That's the almost unavoidable inference from the timeline. 

You keep insinuating that Germany did a bad job responding to the coronavirus.  Whatever it is that Germany did wrong with regards to the coronavirus, I wish we would make those mistakes too, because I would rather live in a country with 103 deaths per million people and where the daily death toll has been under 100 for the last two weeks than one in which there have been 316 deaths per million people and where the death toll is hovering at around 1000.  Not only is Jens Spahn still health minister, but 78% of Germans think the German government has handled the coronavirus pandemic well.







Also, you keep repeating that every health minister has resigned. The only health minister to have resigned is the French one, and she did so to run for mayor of Paris, not because of her COVID-19 response.



UK: Matt Hancock has been the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care since 2018.

Italy: Roberto Speranza has been the Minister of Health since last year.

Germany: Jens Spahn is the Federal Minister of Health and has been so since 2018.

France: Agnès Buzyn served as the Minister of Solidarity and Health from 17 May 2017 to 16 February 2020 when she resigned to run for the mayorality of Paris.  At the time she resigned France had reported 12 cases and 1 death from COVID-19.


For what it is worth, Alex Azar is still our Secretary for Health and Human services.



And for the nth time, nobody is asking for Trump to declare a nationwide shelter in place order in late February.  We were just asking for the president to prepare the response.  It'd be one thing if Trump did everything he could: asked Congress for a supplemental appropriation, bashed the heads of FDA and CDC together and told them to figure out the testing or find another job, given governors a roadmap for how and when to shut down their states, replenished the stockpile of PPE, and told the American people that this is a serious deal and the government is doing x, y, and z to prepare.  And it's possible that if he'd done all those things, the House would have played politics and not passed anything to make him look bad, the FDA and CDC still might not have gotten their act together, governors would have ignored him, and Americans would have taken him neither seriously nor literally.  Then you say, you know what, the President did all he could have done, but our politics are broken; this is the fault of Congress and the entrenched bureaucracy, and the governors, and all of us.  But he did none of that.  He consistently minimized the threat; on multiple occasions said it would go away on its own, he never asked congress for money for testing, he couldn't be bothered to even listen to his health secretary (and when they did meet, changed the topic to e-cigarettes), let alone understood that there were problems in his administration getting the test right, constantly lied about the state of testing, picked fights with governors, and downplayed Americans fears.  Basically, he did the opposite of what he should have done.  And as the contrast between Cuomo and Newsome has made clear, policy choices and when they are implemented makes a brobdingnagian difference.  Even a delay of a couple days makes a brobdingnagian difference, and the fact that the pandemic hit Europe before it hit us makes our failure to act all the more glaring.

BC