Reading everyone’s comments makes me think I must have successfully landed in a parallel world. You guys travel by blimp in your world? Does everything operate on steam? Do you have cyborgs? Can i come join you?
The president of the United States continuted to down play this virus as “not as bad as the flu” and was still refusing to take action even as Italy began to drop down dead.
Impeachment was no longer on anyone’s minds by a few days after it was over. That’s how the 24 hours news cycle works. Long before impeachment ended, people at the US CDC were ringing all the alarm bells. The president refused to listen, downplaying it and believing the people who said the flu was worse. Meanwhile, Taiwan had already delayed schools by two weeks, required 14 day quarantine with strict fines for breaking it for people arriving from China and affected areas, implemented strict landing rules to monitor anyone entering from elsewhere, and carefully controlled how schools and hospitals handled people who should be there and visitors alike. Disinfectants and soap appeared everywhere, and people started to use them.
For the entire month of February and half of March, the US media played videos of empty shelves across Asia, strongly implying that the Aisans had a cray-cray disease and it’ll never happen here. On March 5th, I was still receiving “how are things there?” And “you’re welcome to come here to wait it all out” messages from family and friends in the US, cuz the American mainstream media *still * didn’t report this as something that could already be in the US.
By late February, every science, history, and pop-culture podcast i had from NPR was talking about “how to prepare for the coronavirus”. In that time, Trump was still emphasizing “it’s not as bad as the flu”, and refusing to pass measures or even fund research for test kits. A GOP politician didn’t want to pass a funding bill for covid19 cuz it might require new taxes down the line to pay for it.
When time came to address the reality that there was clearly community transmission in the US, the response was to worry about the crashing stock market and consider cutting payroll taxes. When the stock market started to take a tumble due to coronavirus fears in early February, Trump blamed the democratic debate. Reality was screaming in his face and he still brushed it aside.
As of Thursday, there was zero monitoring of border crossings, aka “mass gatherings of people” between the US and Mexico for COVID19. The only thing the border control was checking was someone’s legal right to be working in the US. This virus does not discriminate between legal and illegal aliens. Border control has (as of Thursday), not let that reality affect how they monitor the border. No wall’s gunna keep this virus out of the US. Too bad they didn’t close the border, cuz Mexico would be safer, just like Taiwan is.
Vaccines need a sh*tload of tests because they can often cause complications that are worse than the disease they’re trying to prevent, or make an individual more susceptible to the disease in the first place. HIV is one that comes to mind. @bojack, if you want you an unregulated vaccine because checking to make sure it won’t kill you first is an infringement of your rights, by all means. Let us know how it works out for you.
Into the end of this work week, podcasts I listen to from the more conservative-leaning side were saying things like “if this covid19 is even real and not another Democrat hoax” and “I’m not Chinese, I don’t have their disease”. In other words, people still refusing to accept reality for what it is.
There’s a nasty part of me that hopes this never gets under control in the US, so people who think this doesn’t have anything to do with them can see the reality of what happens when politics gets in the way of taking care of a global public health crisis. Even then, people will lap up the president’s comments the way the CCP wishes the Chinese citizens would. This is a global health crisis. The United States of America, once the world leader in handling infectious diseases in other countries from becoming global pandemics, has been caught with its hands tied behind their backs.
Those same experts who handled bird flu, SARS, swine flu, MERS, and Ebola, have been silenced or required to go through political channels to let people in the US know what’s up. The CDC’s budget for overseas outbreak prevention was slashed in 2018 in order to get a balanced budget. Somehow the Trump administration thought that by not stopping epidemics in their tracks, they still wouldn’t ever arrive on American shores. Congrats, a “foreign virus” has arrived on your shores, USA. And you don’t even have the PPEs necessary to keep your staff in one hospital safe for a few days. Yes, you’re feeding the CCP propaganda machine.
It amazes me that anyone would believe that the mishandling of this crisis is anyone’s fault but the leader of the free world. The US government is no better than China with regards to this crisis. Actually, it’s worse, because China took the steps they thought were necessary to contain this virus from the moment they saw widespread transmission, but American universities are still finishing up their terms before spring break, and everyone is still bitching about the economic effects of shutting everything down.
I’m never one to agree with CCP propaganda, but right now, Trump’s propaganda is scarier. This disease is not under control for no reason other than the US government chose not to take action for nearly 2 months to prevent its spread.
If people don’t wake up by election time, maybe Taiwan will become my permanent home. Not that the dems are fielding better candidates.
Not sure where you’re from, but in the US the impeachment of the US President is kind of an all hands on deck situation. It tends to suck every resource out of the system as the US President and his team fight for survival.
Although the US Senate acquitted Trump on Feb 6, if you recall there was a long discussion, days long (10?) about whether Trump had been exonerated somewhat or totally. In short, impeachment is a Very Big Deal in the USA.
If you think that either the Leg or the Exec just flipped a switch on Feb 6 and moved on, then you’re naive. Or partisan.
No picket fence will keep it out, I agree. That’s not what Trump or the GOP mean by “a wall” though. What they mean - but lack the funding for currently - is a set of secure structures which could be used to stop illegal immigration and administer asylum claims at first level.
Also, “the wall” is symbolic of control over walk-in immigration. The way this is going to go down, imo, is that a month or two from now if you were against “the wall” then you were for borders open enough to allow Covid19 unchecked entry into the US.
I try to get a balance of news from all sources/varieties of partisan, and by the time I was chilling in my apartment waiting for school to start again in Taiwan, very little of the news was covering impeachment anymore.
Let’s pretend impeachment really did have an effect on how COVID19 was handled in the US. Did the president get up and say “let’s put this behind us, there’s a global health crisis and we need to handle this ASAP so we don’t look like China?” Or did he wait over a month to consider taking action?
Also, I don’t think you’re alone in rooting for the virus. I think that’s a natural human reaction in situations over which we have limited/no control. I also think many infected with TDS also root heartily for Covid19, just as they rooted for impeachment and for any negativity at all about Trump.
I think you missed my point. Border control, where people pass through legally, isn’t checking for anything but one’s legal right to enter the US. If you’re not checking for covid19 at the legal points of entry, it’s easier to bring it in legally than through a hole in a fence.
If they weren’t checking for drugs at border control, would you bring your drugs through a legal point of entry or risk your life by trying to smuggle them across a river? If you have a fever and a cough but border control isn’t looking for that, only your papers, why not walk right through?
The wall isn’t built yet. If you think a secure barrier to entry would not flatten the infection curve, then again that’s just partisan noise on your part.
Because they’ve chose to impeach Trump, because they chose to denigrate Trump’s approach to everything daily, and because they work hand in glove with their press on all of the above.
If you think this is going well for Dems, then I think you’re very badly mistaken.
We have secure ways to enter the US. They’re called border crossings. US Customs and Border Control check the passport and work permits of every person coming through those check points. Just like at airports. What they’re not checking for at those check points is signs of COVID19. It doesn’t matter if there’s a wall or not, no one passing over the US-Mexico border is being screened for coronavirus.
I never said it was going well for Dems. I just said it’s not going well for the president, who worried about 401ks instead of impending plague. A leader will always be blamed when crisis hits; it doesn’t help when they failed to lead in the first place
Yes, these things do not happen now because Democrats refuse to support a border wall. Yes, these things will happen in the future, once the wall infrastructure is impacted by the realization that it would help manage the infection curve and that it would help prevent a bad actor from flooding the US with immigrants ala Ergodan in Turkey last week.
If you lack the imagination to see how a border wall would help here, then fine. I think you will be surprised how the election turns in November.
Trump will stand in judgment for it all, never fear.
I don’t think you yet realize that the net effect of Covid19 will shake out in Trump’s favor, ceteris paribus.
Although he didn’t have a pandemic top of mind, nearly everything he ran on in 2016 could have been used to manage the entry of Covid19 if the Democrat party could have gotten over itself and pitched in to help.
Literally the only thing the US would need to do in this situation is check people’s temperatures and travel history at the border, the way Taiwan has been doing since January.
If you build a wall surrounding all of Mexico right now, the only thing you will do is funnel all the sick Americans and Mexicans to the same spot, so they can spread the diesease to each other while waiting to get their passports stamped. This is because there is no checkpoint for COVID19 at the border, only documents. A wall isn’t going to do anything if there’s no screening for the disease at the legal points of entry.