It strikes me as highly inappropriate for the leader of our country to be joking about a major catastrophe that's continuing to cost THOUSANDS of American lives - every day! That's especially true when his efforts to manage how we cope against the pandemic have been woefully inadequate.
Remember when he said there was only one person with COVID-19? Then he said there were only 15 and it was going to just go away? And when he talks about numbers of... whatever, he uses pretty much meaningless data. He's bragging about how many tests we conduct, but we're the third largest country (in population) in the world. Per capita data would be much more informative - but data is being collected in different ways in every state and none of it is consistently accurate enough to even be able to calculate that in meaningful ways. Most local health officials seems to be judging status by number of hospitalizations and deaths, although that doesn't tell the entire story, either.
When it became apparent that COVID-19 wasn't going to just "go away", rather than organize a coordinated approach to help impacted areas care for those stricken and to contain spread as much as possible, states were forced to compete with each other for desperately needed supplies, like PPE. (That's the kind of thing that FEMA is supposed to be able to do.) Instead of leveraging the buying power and clout of the federal government to buy sensibly, that significantly drove up costs to taxpayers . In some cases, the feds were directly competing with the states for supplies and even commandeering supplies ordered by states. There was zero coordination to ensure supplies were available where most needed, except for informal alliances created on the fly by various governors.
So what could have been done better? Rather than rehash again that reports existed with highly detailed recommendations on how to handle a pandemic and were ignored, here are four things done in countries that were successful in containing (and potentially eliminating, in some cases) further spread of the virus. It typically involved swift, drastic action early on.
1. Shutdowns & strict stay-at-home orders; 2. Massive testing; 3. Extensive contact tracing; 4. Strict quarantines of anyone who tested positive, even if asymptomatic (or pre-symptomatic).
As a nation, we did none of these things, although some individual states tried with some level of success - at least relative to the rest of the country. Trump brags about how much testing we're doing (now...), but it's still a very small number relative to the size of our population, and still inadequate in many parts of the country, especially in areas where it's spreading the fastest.
Personally, I don't find anything about this the slightest bit funny nor do I believe it's something to be joking about - especially by the person who has the power to do something to improve the situation!
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