The incompetent poser in office, Don Trumpillini, was briefed in 2017 by the National Security Counsel of the existence of a "pandemic playbook" providing a step by step checklist of actions to take in the event of a "high consequence infectious disease threat". Because he is a science denying fool enslaved to the plutocrats of Wall Street, he choose to deal with the pandemic by parading a rotating circus of clowns before the corporate mass media to deny the seriousness, or extent of the emerging threat. Politico reports that the sixty-nine page white paper lays out hundreds of strategies and tactics to use in combating a pandemic like the one the world is experiencing right now. The paper includes consideration of using executive powers under the Defense Production Act to insure adequate supplies of medical equipment and PPE, a move the magical thinkers of capitalism have resisted on the grounds: "socialism". Perhaps "positive thinking" will suffice to end the pandemic. NOT! So far, the regime, at the behest of its capitalist owners, has lagged behind the timelines for action contained in the NSC playbook.
Solely out of concern for declining profits, the Antichrist in Office wants to pack the churches by Easter. In other words public health is to take a risky back seat to propping up the bottom lines of corporations. The pandemic did not take the regime by surprise, just one of the many lies Don Trumpillini has used to misinform the public. The regime was warned by the outgoing administration to be prepared for a potential pandemic, as well as a precautionary exercise that health officials undertook to model a global infectious disease threat, called "Crimson Contagion". The NSC playbook is even color coded so an idiot like Don Trumpillini can follow it--green for normal operations, yellow for elevated threat, orange for
credible threat, and red once a public health emergency is declared.
The playbook details steps to take if
there’s evidence that the virus is spreading among humans, which the
World Health Organization concluded by Jan. 22, or the U.S. government declares a public health emergency, which HHS Secretary Alex Azar did on Jan. 31. Officials now privately concede that the administration’s well-documented testing problems have contributed to the outbreak’s silent spread across the United States. Instead of taking decisive actions that would have saved lives, the modern-day Nero twitted away, exhibiting his sociopath tendencies for the world to see*. US Cases: 125,161. US Deaths: 2,194 (1.8%)
*Compare the regime's fumbling efforts to contain SARS CoV-2 the previous government's response to the H1N1 swine flue epidemic of 2009. This from Pro Publica: Almost from the day the H1N1 strain of flu was identified, researchers
set out to develop a vaccine for it. Six days after the first case was
identified in April 2009, the CDC began working to develop a candidate
vaccine virus. Clinical trials began in July. And on Sept. 15, the Food
and Drug Administration approved four 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccines. The
first doses of the vaccine were available in October, and by December,
100 million doses were available to be ordered...about 81 million U.S. residents were vaccinated Granted, this virus is novel, so a vaccine will not be as quickly available, but the testing failure and attempts to mislead the public is the regime's responsibility. They know that the current broken health care system in the US cannot handle a high infection rate of a disease that has ten time the lethality of the flu; so there is no motivation to provide wide-spread, free testing. Do the math: at 40% infection rate there would be 120 million cases and approximately 2.4 million deaths, an unprecedented number. What you are witnessing is simply an intentional policy of social Darwinism