How the COVID-19 Pandemic Ravaged America
Trump and the Republicans just made things worse while blaming the Democrats
Photo Credit: cdc.gov
Issue #168 Government November 3, 2022
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President Biden recently declared that the COVID-19 pandemic was “over,” and technically, he was right. A pandemic is defined as a “…widespread occurrence of an infectious disease over a whole country or the world at a particular time.” COVID-19 is certainly not spreading as far and as fast as it did in 2020, but COVID is definitely still with us.
As with most viruses, there are always new variants appearing. Additionally, not nearly enough people in the United States and across the world have received all of the vaccines and boosters that would mitigate COVID-19 more effectively.
There are many types of coronaviruses, and only some of them cause disease. COVID-19, officially called SARS-CoV-2, caused the respiratory illness pandemic.
Where it started
It seems like such a long time ago…
COVID-19 emerged in December 2019 (hence the “19” part of the name) in a lab in Wuhan, China. It is thought to have originated in an animal and mutated to cause illness in humans. These kinds of animal-to-human disease mutations are not new. Remember when some Texas cattlemen sued Oprah because she advised not eating beef because of an outbreak of “Mad Cow Disease?” Remember the “Bird Flu?”
Because of the availability and ease of global travel, the newest coronavirus spread easily and quickly to other countries. Coronaviruses in general were first identified in the 19th century. They are so named because “corona” is a Spanish word that means “crown,” and the outer layers of the virus are covered with spike proteins that surround them like a crown. Even the common cold is a type of coronavirus.
Many people have heard of SARS, an acronym that stands for “severe acute respiratory syndrome.” There was an outbreak of SARS in 2003-2004, which is now named SARS-CoV-1. The current COVID-19 virus is a related type of SARS, which is why it is named SARS-CoV-2. It spreads even faster and farther than its predecessor.
The way COVID-19 was handled in 2020 in the United States resulted in a wider spread and more deaths than necessary
Because COVID-19 spreads so quickly and easily, it was inevitable that many people would eventually die from the disease. COVID can be spread from one person to the next person just by breathing, coughing, or sneezing, which releases the infected droplets. As a matter of fact, here in Detroit, in March 2020, a bus driver got sick when a rider sneezed on him as the rider was boarding the bus. The driver was dead the next week.
Again, because of the ease of global travel, the virus spread all over the world very quickly. Also, because this particular strain of SARS was “new” (one of the names was even the “novel coronavirus”), it was difficult at the very beginning to know what exactly would happen as the virus spread.
What we did know, as early as January 2020, was that the virus was spread by close contact with another person who may not even show outward symptoms. The former president was interviewed that February and revealed that he did know that COVID could spread via invisible droplets in coughs and sneezes and even the breaths of infected people. At first, Trump decided not to alert Americans to the dangers (he said he didn’t want to start a panic), but by the first week in March, COVID-19 had been declared a global pandemic.
Because everything Trump does is all about him, he decided that because the spread of COVID might damage his chances in the next presidential election, he would do whatever it took to minimize the medical and economic damage COVID could do and of course, put the blame elsewhere. By June 2020, over 100,000 Americans had died from the virus. At the time, that number was more than 25% of the worldwide deaths even though the United States is only about 4% of the global population, and it was unthinkable that more than one million Americans would eventually die from COVID.
Also in February 2020, Trump told the American people that “only one person” in the United States had been diagnosed with COVID and he wasn’t worried that it would spread. The Trump administration had previously just thrown away the pandemic preparation protocols developed by the Obama administration after the successful management of the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks, so there were no programs or policies in place to fight the spread nationwide.
While other countries immediately started stockpiling PPE (personal protective equipment) for frontline and medical workers and making testing widely available, Trump said that the federal government was not a “shipping clerk.”
Trump also announced that he would keep COVID testing at a minimum, because “…if there was less testing, there would be fewer bad numbers.”
The Trump administration dragged its feet for over two months even as millions of Americans were exposed to the virus.
In March 2020, after COVID was declared a global pandemic, Trump ordered Americans overseas to come home within three days. It never occurred to him that having tens of thousands of people return from other countries in such a short time would just exacerbate the problem. At JFK Airport in New York, thousands of unmasked people waited for up to six hours just to get through customs.
In April, Trump told people that 1) the virus would just “disappear like magic” when the weather warmed up, and 2) people could just drink medicines like hydroxychloroquine to “cure” COVID. Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus but has no effect on COVID.
The Trump Administration ignored the science, derailed the scientists and medical experts, and encouraged people to ignore proven mitigation efforts
As usual, Trump declared that he and he alone had the answers for the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to downplaying the severity of the outbreak, Trump also insisted that any scientists (like Dr. Fauci) and doctors only say what he wanted them to say, even if the declarations were false or otherwise not helpful.
For the general public, mask-wearing, hand washing, and school and business closures (as difficult as those closings were) were the best ways to curb the spread of the virus. Trump was against them all and convinced his supporters not to follow the recommendations. Trump and his supporters railed against mask mandates and demanded that schools and businesses re-open in the spring, just a couple of months after the pandemic was declared and months before the vaccines were even fully approved, much less distributed.
Because the virus initially spread much more quickly in large, mostly Democratic cities, the Trump administration didn’t care if most of the illnesses and deaths were in “blue states.” He and his son-in-law Jared Kushner kept back most of the already scarce federal government PPE supplies so that they could be distributed only to their friends and/or to governors who showed him “loyalty and appreciation.” Governors were forced to fight each other in a bidding war for PPE supplies for their medical workers. The non-MAGA Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, even had to resort to hiring private planes to go straight to Asia to procure PPE for his state so that the Trump administration could not highjack the supply he bought for his constituents.
Because the Trump administration had already started to disable as much of the social safety net as possible even before the pandemic, it was even harder to get help to the people who needed it the most, including the elderly. While many people were able to work from home and even home-school their kids, most low-income people did not have those options. Many of them worked public-facing jobs that offered no protection from the virus, had limited access to preventative healthcare, and many of their children did not have access to computers at home or high-speed wifi. Many children lost one or both of their parents, grandparents, and caregivers, even as they fell further behind in school.
Throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 2020, Trump continued to hold large political rallies, discouraging the attendees from wearing their masks. Even when he himself caught COVID but was able to immediately access the highest quality care that was not available to regular people to lessen the effects, Trump continued to rail against COVID, mask-wearing, school and business closings, and anything else he thought made him look bad.
Not only did Trump and members of his administration not care about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had gotten ill and/or died by that point, but he also continued to blame and demonize political leaders from blue states, the CDC, and other medical professionals who did not adhere to his talking points.
He did, however, as the vaccines that he and his supporters railed against were being approved, demand that the vaccines be named after him.
Even today, as many people have at least received one of the vaccinations, the spread of the virus and the deaths are now mostly among the unvaccinated, and mask-wearing is still being demonized.
Republican governors are blaming Democrats for the fact that many students are still behind after two years of no in-person schooling. They aren’t doing anything to help students catch up, and they failed to realize that although most children had little to no bad effects from COVID, they could still spread it to school staff and to their family members at home.
Now, almost three years later, the negative physical and economic effects of not properly handling COVID are still with us. COVID is still with us. And Trump-loving MAGA people are still protesting and blaming Democrats for everything wrong with the country.
What are your thoughts on COVID now? Let us know in the comments.
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