By D.L. White
The twenty-five cents question reverberating in communities across the country, “Could the spread of the deadly coronavirus also known as (COVID-19) have been minimized if the current administration had taken the matter more seriously early on?”
President Donald Trump is on record asking, “Who could have known the pandemic would be as devastating as it has demonstrated?
Well Mr. President, you should have known………. Former Presidents George Bush II (2005) as well as Barack Obama (2014) warned of a potential world-wide pandemic.
In 2014, President Obama speaking to a gathering of Mayors hosted by former New York Governor Michael Bloomberg, stated, “The biggest mistake leaders can make is to misinform and not take the warnings seriously.” Check it out on CNN.Com. Former President Obama went a step father, establishing within the Center for Disease Control (CDC), a Division to specifically study and anticipate pandemic.
Obama also established an office in China to study and anticipate pandemics (2015).
Trump, one year into his presidency, eliminated the Office in China, and began to grossly under fund and dismiss the top scientist working at the CDC in 2017.The result of Trump’s inaction and in direct response to the question of “Who could have known?”…..You Mr. President had you not eliminated and drastically cut the CDC’s funding.
The United States which has 4% of the world’s population has the dubious label of having 30% of the world’s cases of the corona virus, a leading figure no country welcomes. World-wide, the pandemic has taken 2,345,331 lives as of Sunday (April 19), and of those two million plus cases, 161,191 have lost their lives, however, 604, 596 have recovered (worldmeters.info/coronavirus).
A month after other countries began testing; the Trump administration was still referring to COVID-19 as a Democratic hoax and or nothing more than the common cold. The lack of a serious response cost lives (CNN. News). There are 738,923 active cases of the Coronavirus in the United States, 39,015 individuals have lost their lives with the majority in New York City which continues as the epicenter.
African Americans are dying at much greater rates than any other ethnic group in the United States as evidence by the high mortality in New Jersey, Mississippi and Alabama.This begs the obvious question, “Could the loss of life and the spread of the deadly virus have been averted or reduced, if the Trump Administration had acted sooner?
The first case of the coronavirus was reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The difference between China and the United States? China took immediate action and began locking down and testing it’s more than one billion citizens almost immediately. Conversely, Trump, his son (Donald, Jr) as well as the controversial Rush Limbaugh, all stated to large audience via television as well as on as radio broadcast, that the “Virus was not as serious as the annual flu or a bad cold?”
Washington State, confirmed the first case of the virus on January 26, weeks later, the number of active cases had doubled with the first death coming in late February. By the time a dozen lives had been lost in Washington, the tide immediately shifted across the country to New York. Over night the cases multiplied, with NY reporting more active cases than any city of its size world-wide.