COMMENTARY: The Pandemic Curve is Not Bending, Putting Americans at Risk

By Roger Caldwell, NNPA Newswire Contributor

“The real implications of those delays and missteps were not fully apparent during early polling regarding the White House response. But now, as the death toll mounts and more state governors have stepped up their responses to the emergency, it appears the slow response is now eating away at the public’s confidence in the president,” says Pema Levy – reporter at Mother Jones.

With no coordinated National Strategic Plan to battle the coronavirus, and the most cases on the planet, President Trump has failed. Each day the numbers get worse, with 350,000 American cases, and over 9,700 deaths. It took Trump and his administration 70 days from the first time he was notified of the coronavirus, and its grave implications to treat it as a public health crisis.

President Trump likes to brag about how early he shut down travel to China at the end of January. But the truth is that in November, in the city of Wuhan, the virus appeared, and nothing was done for 2 months. Trump and his administration had allowed over 300,000 people from China to enter the country before the ban was imposed. It took another month for Trump and his administration to limit travel from and to Europe to control the virus.

During the month of February, our president was making jokes about the virus, and the Democrats were undermining his election chances talking about the virus, and he predicted the virus would soon disappear.

“Perhaps the most consequential failure was the administration’s bungling of testing which hobbled the country’s response and blinded it to the potential enormity of the outbreak. The Centers for Disease and Prevention failed to produce a good test, causing fatal delays in tracking the spread of the virus. In February federal, medical, and public health officials were emailing increasing dire forecasts among themselves, with one Veterans Affairs medical adviser warning, ‘We are flying blind,’ according to the American Oversight Committee.”

There are 8 states that have not issued a shelter-in-place order, and the blame must be placed solely on the leadership of the country. With no coordinated national plan, the infection curve is not improving, and President Trump’s handling of the crisis is terrible. On March 24^th, Navigator Research, a polling company found that 52% of Americans approved of the president’s handling of the pandemic. But in the recent weeks, things are going in the other direction.

“The latest polling shows that a growing number of Americans feel that Trump downplayed the crisis, was unprepared, and failed to respond quickly. In the latest poll out Saturday, 59% of respondents said they had serious concerns that Trump failed to take decisive action in the early stages of the outbreak,” says Pema Levy.

The president’s pandemic advising team has predicted that the next two weeks will be a tsunami of deaths with the coronavirus. The front lines of workers are tired, and there appears to be no slowing down of the invisible enemy – the virus.

Leadership is what is missing in America, and the other 42 governors must convince the 8 governors to shut down their state to flatten the curve. The American prisons will be the next hot spot where there will be a major outbreak of the virus. Social distancing is impossible in prisons and there is a need for a plan.

Call your governor and force them to shut down your state, if it is still open. Social distancing measures are given to restrict when and where people can gather to stop the spread of the virus. Let’s shut America down, and stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.