And early on he had no idea how bad it might be...2 days after WHO said CORVID-19 was a pandemic Trump declared a national emergency....how long did it take Obama to do the same even though the virus originated here?
Within a week of the first detected case, the CDC launched its emergency operations center (April 22)
Obama declared it a public health emergency within a week and a half of the first case being detected (20 cases at that time)
Within two weeks of the first detected case, the FDA has approved a test for the virus.
The WHO declared H1N1 a pandemic about 8 weeks after the first case was detected.
Clinical trials for a vaccine began by July. The vaccine was available by October.
Cases died down in late July but a second wave cane in August.
By October between season flu and H1N1 hospitals needed additional resources and Obama raised the public health emergency to a national emergency to give them the flexibility they needed. He also launched efforts to encourage vaccination.
I’m not a medical professional so I’ll leave it to those that were practicing in 2009 to tell me if Obama waiting until October to raise the public health emergency to a national emergency was a problem. But I don’t perceive, looking back on the timeline, that it was.
So I think we can dispense with the notion Obama did nothing or that the current dire warnings are simply the result of bad actors wanting to create panic to make Trump look bad.
We failed when it comes to scaling up our testing. We had our first confirmed case in January, within a day of South Korea. We had our first test for SARS-CoV-2 by early February, within a day of South Korea’s approved test. What happened between that approval and deployed testing by the end of the month is a sad story of multiple missteps that led us to having tested only 1100 specimens by early March when South Korea had tested almost 200,000.
This, aside from Trump’s I ability to communicate complex concepts, is the only big error/misstep I’ve seen so far from our nation’s response under Trump to this pandemic. Criticism of that is completely fair and even necessary.
Other than the big problems with testing - and aside from some small disagreements around the Defense Production Act - you don’t hear states having big problems with the federal government. I’m not here to complain about Trump’s every action. But the H1N1 story is not a helpful analogue with its 0.02% fatality rate. The concern over this pandemic is not created to destroy Trump. It’s valid concern.
