There's a difference between not creating mass hysteria and providing false information. Kellyanne and Kudlow have both said the virus is "contained" - how can you say it's contained when you have no way of knowing yet how many people have been infected? The experts say one thing, Trump contradicts them. Four times Trump publicly said that a vaccine was in development and would be available "soon", and Dr. Fauci had to publicly correct him each time. Pence promised that there would be a million test kits available by the end of this week - where are they? The labs that have to create them are saying they don't have that kind of capacity.
I know he has zero control, but he's trying to make it sound like he's got this. Just today he said that "we've shut this down." No, you haven't - it's just starting to ramp up. The CDC stopped publishing the number of individuals tested; all it will tell us now is the number of confirmed cases. Why? Trying to hide how inadequate their response has been so far perhaps? South Korea is testing 10,000 people a day - they even have drive-through test locations. We're testing 100, maybe 200 a day - don't know for sure because the CDC won't tell us that number. If we know the number tested vs the number confirmed, we can tell whether it's spreading faster or slowing down - but they won't tell us that.
The sad part is that we knew about this in January - and did nothing for at least a month. He could have had some control with a timely response to the threat, but his first reaction was to call it a hoax. Thousands of people around the world were getting sick, and he said it was a hoax intended to affect his reelection. That's just incompetent leadership.
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