This isn't, and has never been about "banning travel" - that's the whole freaking point.
The first case in the USA was before that even started. 325,000 people enter the USA every single day via air travel.
It was, and remains, about testing, hospital preparedness, and messaging.
When H1N1 began (in the US, out of the blue), by the end of the first month, we had tested 1,000,000 people, and that flu still killed 11,000 or so Americans.
With COVID, the testing was far more desperately needed, and would have been way more important (see Singapore), because we know the highest-risk people here and so knowing that you're infected - knowing, not second-guessing every cough - allows for better decision-making.
Have we done well or poorly with testing? There are objective measurements here and you know the answer. They had a Boston doctor on this morning clearly frustrated because how can they begin the second "i" of isolation if they can't do the first, identification? California's Governor yesterday said that many of the kits they got, which was only a few thousand for a state of 40 million, were missing key pieces - like getting a printer without ink.
On the second part, getting money to the states early to ramp up preparedness - proper equipment for quarantining, for medical personal to protect themselves, for the tents we're only now seeing constructed and tested, for ventilators - all of that should have been done in January. All of it. CDC should have had preparedness teams across the country prepping for worst-case scenarios. They didn't.
The simple truth is that the states have done far more than the Feds on this, and the Feds have known about for months, and known it was here since January.
So tell me, objectively, how have we done on preparedness?
And thirdly, messaging...do I even have to go into it? Apparently human skin turns orange as it thins. Trump has downplayed, poo-poo'd, spread misinformation, spread division, and behaved inappropriately since the beginning. please don't make me find and post for you all the clips of him minimizing the threat and laughing it off, so say nothing of the horribleness of when he spoke the quiet part out loud of not wanting the passengers on the sick cruise ship to come ashore because the number would go up and it wasn't his fault. What kind of a ghoul worries about his PR "number" when he has 3000 people stuck on a boat off the coast?
So tell, objectively, if our leader has met the proper tone for this unfolding crisis.
If you ran a business and the guy in charge had gutted the protocols for disaster, refused needed help (test kits) when they were offered, lied to employees - putting them at risk by minimizing the dangers! - and all the rest, would he remain in charge of your company?
Trump was tested. He failed miserably - and anyone who's followed his life story would react to that with "well, duh." It's what he does.
This has nothing to do with conservative or liberal. Trump is not conservative at all. Trump is not liberal. Trump is a self-absorbed malignant Narcissist whose entire sense of worth is based on money. Always has been. Always will be.
Of all the people running this cycle, if I could wave a wand an put one in charge of this whole thing from the beginning, it would probably have been Bill Weld. Steady hand, tells the truth, manages properly.
Of all the people running this cycle, if I could eliminate one, it would clearly have been Trump, even more than Marianne Woowoo Williamson. At least she has a heart and a capacity for empathy.
