[BostonCard]

I'm curious, would HRC have done better in the pandemic?  It's holy writ here that Trump is responsible for the entire American pandemic.  It is clear that Obama's team would have handled it perfectly, just as they handled the H1N1 pandemic perfectly:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4861530/ron-klein

From Ron Klein:

"I was in the White House in 2009 and 2010, I was working for VP Biden, I lived through the H1N1 response as a WH staffer.  Bunch of really great, really talented people working on it and we did every possible thing wrong.  60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time and it's just purely a fortuity that this wasn't one of the great mass casualty events in American history.  It had nothing to do with us doing anything right.  It just had to do with luck...imagine a virus with different lethality and you can just do the math on that."

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/52/...S75/499147

Twice as many people died in the month of July as in the entirety of the H1N1 influenza pandemic.  It is a very interesting counterfactual.  Had the case fatality rate been 1% as with COVID-19, would the response have been the same?  Would we still have had 60 million cases, and as a result 600,000 deaths, or would the pandemic have resulted in shutdowns comparable to or even more stringent than what we have seen with COVID-19.

The counterfactual with Hillary is also interesting.  I suspect we would have had a more consistent and aggressive message coming from Washington, but I wonder if it would have nonetheless been as ineffectual.  I feel like the types of protests that we saw against shutdowns and masks in places like Michigan would have been many-fold higher if the message were coming from a President Clinton.

Ironically, I think in the same way that only Nixon could go to China, I wonder if only Trump could have been an effective medium for a forceful response to the pandemic.  Alas, we won't get to find out what would have happened had Trump tried.

BC

[BostonCard]

I'm curious, would HRC have done better in the pandemic?  It's holy writ here that Trump is responsible for the entire American pandemic.  It is clear that Obama's team would have handled it perfectly, just as they handled the H1N1 pandemic perfectly:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4861530/ron-klein

From Ron Klein:

"I was in the White House in 2009 and 2010, I was working for VP Biden, I lived through the H1N1 response as a WH staffer.  Bunch of really great, really talented people working on it and we did every possible thing wrong.  60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time and it's just purely a fortuity that this wasn't one of the great mass casualty events in American history.  It had nothing to do with us doing anything right.  It just had to do with luck...imagine a virus with different lethality and you can just do the math on that."

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/52/...S75/499147

Twice as many people died in the month of July as in the entirety of the H1N1 influenza pandemic.  It is a very interesting counterfactual.  Had the case fatality rate been 1% as with COVID-19, would the response have been the same?  Would we still have had 60 million cases, and as a result 600,000 deaths, or would the pandemic have resulted in shutdowns comparable to or even more stringent than what we have seen with COVID-19.

The counterfactual with Hillary is also interesting.  I suspect we would have had a more consistent and aggressive message coming from Washington, but I wonder if it would have nonetheless been as ineffectual.  I feel like the types of protests that we saw against shutdowns and masks in places like Michigan would have been many-fold higher if the message were coming from a President Clinton.

Ironically, I think in the same way that only Nixon could go to China, I wonder if only Trump could have been an effective medium for a forceful response to the pandemic.  Alas, we won't get to find out what would have happened had Trump tried.

BC