So, then why would you expect Trump to have acted sooner? Fauci said that on January 21. So that means you expect Trump...on January 21....to have said, "We're shutting down everything right now!!!!!!"
I remember on January 23, seeing China suddenly shut down Wuhan. That was pretty earth-shaking, right there. It made a lot of people sit up and watch. WHY would the Chinese government do something so incredibly drastic? That's huge. It hurts practically no one but themselves. So WHY would they do that? Curious people wonder. (Trump is a remarkably, pathologically, incurious person). Wondered. It was the talk of the office. Already people were making data visualizations of the number of people who travel through Wuhan and we were assuming Trump would quarantine all incoming travelers. Those of our people still traveling were being warned to take enough clothing to stay put if needed. If the US had done the same thing as China, it would have made sense because of the unprecedented closure of Wuhan. We already assumed something HUGE was going on there. And that it was coming here.
It was at that point that we started talking about repatriating our employees who were working in China. In JANUARY. We worried that the disease would spread and they would be affected, even though they were in a neighboring province, not Hubei. We got back all of our most vulnerable. Then we started working on our other employees, thinking that the US airports would soon close, and they people would be quarantined upon return. By the first week in February, almost everyone was home and we were already asking employees returning to quarantine. Only 3 days at the time,. but that's what we knew.
So would we have been appalled at an airport shut down? No. We
expected Trump to shut it down AND QUARANTINE any homecoming Americans.
But he didn't.
Late in January, he stopped non-us citizens from coming back if they'd been to China, but he didn't test or quarantine anyone. Like only the Chinese would get this? Instead He didn't stop anything or anyone except Chinese carriers. And didn't test anyone. And that was the only thing he did for two more months.
By early March we were talking to our employees about taking work home on weekends in case they were told to not come back in on Monday. By mid-March, schools were closed and we worked from home voluntarily if we could, and workplaces closed the week after that.
So why would I have expected trump to act sooner and what would I have expected him to do?
I would have expected him to act with the far superior information he had, by early February, to put all incoming travelers in quarantine and test as many people as possible, tens of thousands a day. And to trace every person who had come home since mid January.
[url]https://t.co/mUUHcmQXO2
