2 months were wasted by him and you know it. People in his own administration know it. Even Peter "freakin' mainline the hydroxychloroquine straight in my brain" Navarro knew it.
But that's essentially irrelevant as there are receipts of Tangerine Jesus from January on downplaying it and doing nothing beyond a half-assed travel ban from China that was hardly that and only appealed to him because boarrrrders make him moist.
To answer in specifics what should've/could've been done would take about 15 more pages. But we can keep it simple:
-We should've had testing capabilities that weren't an absolute disgrace.
-We should've been doing better screening at the airports. Something he STILL is lying about
-We shouldn't have only been ordering more ventilators in mid effing March
-We shouldn't have disbanded the Pandemic Response Team
-When Alex Azar made REPEATED attempts to discuss this with him in January the subject shouldn't have been immediately changed to vaping
And it goes on and on and on...
But no worries. It's only 15 cases and that will be down to 0 like magic shortly as soon as April approaches and the weather warms up.
Ok. Do you have any idea how daily intel and threat briefings go? Do you grasp the volime of "we are all going to die" issues POTUS and other members of NCA face by 1200 each day? National leadership decisions for the US can have global consequences--politico, socio, and economic. This isn't a jet ski that turns on a dime when faced with these types of things
The systems just don't work that way and for good reason. When a Pearl Harbor or Katrina happens, the systems initially work very badly--it's a distasteful FEATURE of how our nation is organized from a governmental perspective.
Do you have any idea what it takes to take the lock tabs off of all the generic levers you describe above, let alone start throwing them?
Do you have an understanding of what it takes to get a testing regimen into place in normal environs, let alone emergencies?
A significant problem in any crisis is those howling loudest have no clue what mechanisms need to engage or even how to engage those mechanisms. Everyone wants an easy button, but guess what?
That easy button doesn't exist for pandemics--yet. DoD ALONE has 10 plans that I know of--and they were written in 2007. What we will see in the future is a streamlining and restructuring, like FEMA was after the disastrous Katrina response. Guess what then as well---there were COUNTLESS plans at all levels to deal with it, but they had never been stressed to that point.
Has POTUS said and done head scratchers? My goodness he is a walking and typing gaff machine. Has the government response overall been on par given the reality factors that had to be contended with? It has actually--they struggled early, but have rallied significantly since.
The only way I know to reform it, but be to go full Sparta on every issue imaginable. We don't have the resources, the attention span, or the culture to do so.
No one on the planet does, but every populace demands instant, infinite, and perfect response to every issue small and large.
The key to disasters besides prevention is mitigation and recovery. We have a history as a nation of poor prevention, but very strong mitigation and recovery. This pandemic will be no different.
Nor will the next. It is very easy to howl when never having been in those seats.
