The “nobody could have predicted” excuse blows up

Just yesterday, I wrote that the Trump administration is using the “nobody knew” excuse to explain away their incompetence, claiming that nobody could have predicted the scale of the pandemic. That was false but today comes news that really undercuts it. Newly revealed memos from way back on January 29 and on February 23 reveal that people in the Trump administration were warned by chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow that the pandemic could have devastating consequences. This blows up the “nobody could have predicted” excuse of the Trump administration for their lack of prompt action.
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“It is better not to have the country run by sociopaths”

That is the lesson derived by Seth Meyers as he looks at the non-stop flow of nonsense and dangerous false information peddled by Trump and the people in his administration, including his odious son-in-law Jared Kushner. He points to the fact that Trump actually brags at his press conferences about how successfully Mike Pence, the vice-president and the head of the coronavirus task force, avoids answering questions posed to him by journalists.
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Challenging the pandemic skeptics

If you are a credentialed academic in any field at all, then if you espouse policies that are favored by the libertarian, free-market, right wing, you can be assured of a platform for your views in think tanks and the media, even if the subject you are pontificating on are not the ones in which you are credentialed.

Richard Epstein is a good example of that. He is a professor of law. In a recent interview, Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker questioned him about some contrarian claims that he had made about the coronavirus epidemic. Epstein is one of those who believes that we are over-reacting to the pandemic and that the danger to the economy is greater than the danger to people and we should not be having these tough social distancing rule, views that the Trump administration is anxious to believe, and so his views have been influential and received considerable publicity.
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Coronavirus and ventilators

After self-isolating for seven days because he had the coronavirus, UK prime minister Boris Johnson has now been placed in an ICU of a London hospital, presumably because his symptoms have taken a turn for the worse. It is not clear if he has been placed on a ventilator. His spokespersons have been less than forthcoming about his condition in the past week, issuing upbeat statements when it now seems that he was not doing so well, and that has naturally made people suspect that things are worse than what they are being told.
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The ‘nobody knew’ and ‘everybody believed’ phase of evading responsibility

We have been warned by the US Surgeon General that this might be the worst week of the pandemic in the US and that we should brace for it. The time-lapse graph of world wide infections shows today that the US is still on the rising part of the curve while there are hopeful signs that Italy and Spain, two hard hit countries, are starting to show signs of stabilization by veering away off the exponential growth line.

The Trump administration bears responsibility for its late, inadequate, and confused response to the pandemic but as with all things Trump, it seeks to avoid any responsibility or blame. Governments tend to duck responsibility by making sweeping claims, such as “every believed” or “nobody knew” to imply that they alone should not be held responsible. The “everybody believed” excuse was trotted out after they lied about Iraq having WMDs prior to invading that country. In fact, people knew and said at that time that the evidence produced by the US was false or faulty and should not be believed.
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Europe was central to the spread of Covid-19

One of the features of the current pandemic is that the more developed countries especially in Europe seem to have been hit the hardest in terms of the current number of cases. Joe Penney writes that Europe was also the hub from which cases spread to the rest of the world.

As Covid-19 cripples the U.S. and ravages many countries in the world, politicians are battling to craft a narrative of who is to blame for its damage. The virus started in China, of course, but narratives of how it went from epidemic to global pandemic often leave out a crucial element: the role of Europe.
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There is no vaccine or cure for willful ignorance and stupidity

The New York Times has published a map based on cell phone tracking data that shows how different regions compare in terms of the daily distance traveled during this period of people being asked to stay at home as much as possible. The overall average has dropped from five miles per day to less than a mile a day, which is a huge drop. But the drop has not been uniform. At a casual glance it looks like the southern regions have people traveling more.
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Life in China during the quarantine

Peter Hessler is an American with a wife and two young children who has been living in China for a few decades as a college teacher of English. In a very long article in The New Yorker, he describes his experience with how the Chinese authorities reacted after realizing the danger of what was going on, and what measures were put in place during 45 days of the lockdown that is still in place, though it is being relaxed. It was a massive operation that depended on many people implementing and monitoring the measures as well as a high level of compliance by the general public.
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