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Yes, he ignored the virus because he was told the stock market would be spooked. He blamed the previous administration for not having tests. Even though Obama was supposed to know Covid 19 was happening 3 years after he left office, why didn't the Trump administration prepare for a pandemic? They were left a playbook, which they ignored. I already said it was going to be bad under anyone, just not this bad. He was wrong, wrong, wrong, wouldn't come up with a National response, made the states compete for supplies, like it was The Apprentice, Governors edition, which cost time and money, and took zero responsibility. His own words. Golf too much? I didn't say that, he said Obama did. He golfs more than Obama and makes money when he does. But who cares about conflicts of interest. If Trump can dish it out, and all you have to do is see a really or look at his twitter, he should be able to take it. World's biggest victim. You really don't have to be a democrat to see he messed up, bigly. Almost every single Republican politician who isn't afraid of him has pointed it out.

The virus itself is not political, but everything else about it is. Trump called it a Democratic hoax, he said it would disappear, he DID ignore it until it was too late. Now it's Trumpers vs. Democrats (and some intelligent Republicans) regarding how to respond to the virus and how to go about opening the country again. It is absolutely political.

Frankly yes, several of those countries have done terrible jobs. England was awful, they had the wonderful "let's get to Herd immunity by letting it infect everyone" idea until their universities told them that's going to kill a million citizens. Sweden has had no official lockdowns, so saying they're idiots is describing exactly what we're doing right now. Spain and France got hit hard early, but they've also dropped their case loads down hugely since their peaks, which we have not done. There's no reason why the US had to have 100,000 dead people. We could have kept it to a few thousand with appropriate preparation and leadership, maybe even less.

You are living in a fantasy if you think Trump's behavior is defensible. His behavior has been grossly incompetent. He is entitled to his politics but he is just not qualified. Let's move on.

I'm doing a mock draft for FutureSox and I'm gonna do all 5 rounds for Sox included in there. I won't give player names right now but I went like this: 1st Round: HS pitcher $4 million 2nd Round: College Pitcher $2 million 3rd Round: HS OF $1.2 million 4th Round College Infielder: $600K 5th Round College Pitcher: $350K

2005. They won it all, going 16-1 to finish the season and playoffs. Two 8-game winning streaks broken up by a 3-2 loss. Their starters threw 4 complete game wins in a row against the Angels in the ALCS. That will never be done again, or ever be approached. The bullpen pitched only 2/3 of an inning (Neal Cotts) in a five-game ALCS. Preposterous! Those 4 starters all pitched over 200 innings on the season. Twice they rallied from 4-0 deficits in the playoffs by scoring 5 runs in the 5th inning. Scott Podsednik, who had zero HRs in the regular season, hit two in the postseason, including a walk-off against Brad Lidge in game 2. Who can forget the dropped third strike controversy that helped the Sox win game 2 of the ALCS? Or El Duque getting out of a bases loaded no-out jamb in game 3 in Boston? Or Freddie Garcia, Mr. Road Warrior, winning the division clinching game in Detroit, the ALDS clinching game in Boston, and the World Series clinching game in Houston? Or Frank Thomas, who played in only 34 games and couldn't run, hitting 12 HRs and a .905 OPS despite a .219 batting average. Or guys like Juan Uribe and Joe Crede, who were great defenders but not great offensively, were money in the postseason. Uribe made the diving catch in the stands for the penultimate out in the WS clinching game, then charged a dribbler for the final out. Crede stopped hot smash after hot smash in that 1-0 victory. They went wire to wire. Won the first game of the year 1-0. First game after the All-Star break 1-0. Last game of the World Series 1-0. They are tied for 5th best winning percentage in Sox history, at .611. Tied with the 1983 club. But their pythgorean projection based on run differential was .563, (91-71, out of the playoffs) proving how money they were in close games. Swept the Astros in the World Series but outscored them by only 6 runs. They were relentless. They had Ozzie Guillen as manager. He got the team to believe it could win. He also managed his pitching staff very well. He built up his starters and saved his bullpen by using them for 100 pitches win or lose. It probably hurt them in 2006, but to win the WS was worth it. I could go on. The most magical season in Sox history, by far.

Yesterday was the first day in our county where there were no Covid deaths reported in the last two weeks. I'll take any good news I can get. I am now waiting for Jared to announce what a great success he is.

The CDC does lots of things. He specifically fired the pandemic preparation team. Lots of people wrote, at the time, that this was going to leave us seriously unprepared in the event of a pandemic. Not hindsight, foresight. Really obvious foresight. A reasonable President: wouldn't have been insisting in late February that this would never break out in the US. wouldn't be peddling snake oil cures or lying about testing availability or necessity. may have invoked the DPA much earlier in order to ramp up production of PPE and other medical equipment. would have implemented a national strategy for PPE purchasing and distribution rather than states having to do James Bond-level shit including guarding their purchases with state national guard forces so they don't get confiscated by the federal government and then disappear would have implemented a national strategy for locking down for a duration and then safely reopening rather than constantly going back and forth over whether he has total authority over states would not try to wash his hands and eventually say "well it's up to the states" while at the same time attacking any states that don't do exactly what he wants would not have stopped the CDC from issuing reasonable, science-based guidelines for states to reopen That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's plenty more. The failures here are not solely within the White House or at the federal level, though. You can find numerous posts from me and others in this thread criticizing Cuomo, De Blasio, and others. I think the House Democrats are still failing to put forward the policies we need and the leadership we're lacking. You just keep saying any specific criticisms of the way the federal government has addressed or failed to address this pandemic are lazy without ever really addressing anything. The federal government has failed here, and it's cost Americans lives, and their failures will continue to cost lives.

But you realize that Congress plays a role in funding also, right? Each year, the President's OMB makes each agency create a budget, and the agency has to abide by that budget until Congress passes something. if the President's budget shows a cut, then things have to be shut down or slowed, sometimes for months, and only then might Congress step in. Several of the programs that dealt with epidemic preparation were eliminated based on these OMB orders over the past few years. The President's budget request this year for the CDC was $6.5 billion, showing a more than 10% cut. That was submitted to Congress on February 10. So, propose budget cuts every year, Congress doesn't step in for months, so the CDC is shedding preparedness ability the whole time.

You keep saying "hindsight," but a lot of other countries took different paths, paths that the experts were recommending at the time. The current administration decided to fire their pandemic teams and ignore the prep work done by previous administrations. They decided to downplay it as much as possible early on rather than ramping up production of PPE or testing or medical equipment. They are aggressively pushing the "reopen now" message when actual experts are absolutely not recommending that. It's not hindsight. The criticism is happening in real time, with predictions of what the current actions will result in. Our first case was in late January, and we did basically nothing to prepare. We're still wasting a lot of time that the lockdown measures, which can't go on forever, have bought us.

Of course the president made missteps. I guess on a sports talk site where "I can't believe he threw the curve ball with runners on second and third and a pitch to waste" is de rigueur. I also think when the loudest and most energetic voices that come here are Democrats, non-stop criticism about the president crowds out other voices. Still this section was supposed to be about the virus and as I said...it started off interesting but the streams of hurled accusations followed by "I can't believe HE made this political" is "not compelling". As for the government scaling things up...again perfect hindsight. The government should have just taken the government factories and started producing testing immediately. In fact it's amazing that we didn't have an enormous stock pile of tests for this never-before-seen virus in government warehouses someplace. And imagine our incompetence that 60 days after this never-before-seen virus started invading our country that we were not 100% prepared. If you start with the end point..."The President is an idiot" then you fill in the evidence to make it work and throw out evidence that doesn't fit the narrative and then shout it from the rooftops and have it echoed by people that think exactly as you do it may seem as if you have the truth. It just doesn't seem convincing to me. I think the president is an egomaniac and I hate his NYC aggressive style...it offends my Midwest sensibilities. I thought President Obama was one of the most decent men to ever be president...but to say he would have done better is farcical. President Trump is not trying to kill off his voters. He and his advisors are trying to make heroes of themselves...which is exactly what I want my leader to do in a crisis.

While this isn't my preferred route, especially if the Sox are gonna go all in on Cespedes, you want the BPA. If the Sox think Kjerstad has the absolute best chance of being the best major leaguer, go for it. Before last season we had seemingly amazing OF prospect depth behind Eloy and Robert. Now it's barren.

Even if you accepted that no other country is comparable to America, and that no other outbreak was comparable to this, the idea that you can't criticize the president of the united states for not doing a good enough job at something novel and new is not compelling. The federal gov't is good at scaling up and mobilizing production that makes coordinating nationally a lot easier than by state. The US approach has been incredibly water-fall like. It first had to build out medical capacity and protective gear then it built out testing then it is now building out tracing and just now has the tsa starting to do prevention with temperature checks an forcing mask wearing. This stuff was happening all at once in other countries that have been more successful. Alaska has had a comprehensive tracing system due to TB to its advantage and has done exceedingly well. NOLA had good amounts of testing early on and bent its curve earlier. But state by state they were competing with other countries purchases and slowing everything down. For the last century the US public health infrastructure has been so good at not just preventing things in the US, but assisting at preventing outbreaks from occurring. Now the US response was at best average compared to other countries instead of world-leading. You could ask why that is, or you could say that you are being mean. Or worse - that some unelected people with much less information at their disposal than the president of the united states didn't know exactly what to do in february so therefore nobody is allowed to say that the president misstepped.

This is so incredibly stupid. How is it that the Democrats are quite literally able to shutdown the entire world with some kind of a deep fake? I mean how are Russia, China, England, India, Italy, Germany, etc all shutting down their entire economies and faking thousands of hospitalizations and deaths (hundreds of thousands world-wide) creating huge economic problems in every single country in the world right now, all to apparently play along with some hoax to win an election in the United States for a party that many countries don't want to see in power. Vlad Putin has endorsed Trump twice now, but apparently he is faking it well enough to shutdown the Russian economy and declare the 4th most cases in the world right now. That is some impressive acting. So let's assume this is all valid, and just a Democraticly run hoax. Let me just ask this, if the Democrats hold this kind of world wide level of power, why the fuck do they need to pull of a Wile E Coyote complex of a stunt to win an elected office? How dumb do you have to be to believe all of these things at once?

Hydroxycholoquine has been used for a hundred years on patients. It's side effects are well known, it's cheap and easily produced. It would have been great if it was helpful and maybe it is...but it needs to be tested together with Zinc and Arythromyacine and there are still promising results. And really...you don't believe the President says..."ok...stop all fronts...we are going to only devote our time and energy to Hyrdo..."? This thing is coming at us from a hundred directions and we are pushing back in a hundred ways...and to say...Look...he recommended that and it didn't work...he's an idiot....just makes you a partisan with perfect hindsight. There is no country like the US...we have the #1 economy in the world so we have more business travelers coming here from overseas than anywhere else, we are top tourist destination, we are #1 destination for international students our citizens are rich and mobile and travel frequently all over the world. We have unfettered domestic travel...with hundreds of possible destinations for overseas people to come visit...we have massive urban and rural places. We are the oddest country in the world. To think that US wouldn't be the hardest hit is a misunderstanding of what America is. Doing worse than Iran and China? There are no way those are true numbers. Doing worse than India...that is SO weird. Why is California been so lightly hit versus NYC? So many weird things about what is going on with the Virus...making this a political screed is not one of them.

Yes, endlessly promoting a drug that you have no idea about, just a hunch because your buddy Rudy Giuliani and Fox News reporters and economist Peter Navarro are behind It...actually harmed and potentially killed those with serious heart problems. Instead of devoting resources to PPE procurement and a real vaccine, we for weeks obsessed with therapeutics and aspirational hope drugs that were never properly tested. That’s just bad science. Those new ventilators were needed anyway because 25% of the 10,000 on-hand were outdated or broken, and will be there in the stockpile for the US and the rest of the world (sell/loan/donate) when the next pandemic hits. It doesn’t belong to the Federal government, it belongs to the people. What country should we be compared to? China and India? On Fox News for weeks, it was Sweden, right? Germany? Italy? Spain? Russia? Brazil? The only two countries that come close to us on population are Indonesia and Brazil. But Japan, South Korea, Singapore, HK, Taiwan, Australia/NZ, Germany....all industrialized, first world countries with at least fairly or relatively comparable GDP numbers. If we’re supposed to be the greatest country in the world, how can we be doing worse than nearly every country but the UK, Italy, Spain, possibly France and likely Russia (by the end). How can we be doing worse than India, for example, or Iran?

Sigh...so a single British newspaper reports, using a single unnamed source, that the presidents son-in-law said that it could spook the stock market...and you conflate that into conclusive evidence that Trump downplayed this to protect the stock market???? Listen...believe what you want to believe. But please aim for a little self awareness. Your hatred of the president is making YOU turn this into a political thing.

Kind of like that immigrant invasion right before the mid terms?

He ignored it, because it was going to bring the stock market down, the thing he used to say he was a great president, even though the guy he just called inompotent again had the dow rise 148% under his watch, praised China for their hard work and transparency and cost lives. And he goes on a daily 2 hour rally telling everyone how great he is. Sorry, Trump deserves every slam he gets. He tweets and watches television when he is supposed to be working. Golfs more than any other President, when he himself said he would have no time to golf, and ripped the previous president for golfing. The Secret Service just spent $179,000 for golf carts at his golf course this summer. And people want to praise him for not taking a salary. It was probably going to be bad under any president, but most likely not this bad, and every single one of the others would have shown at least a little bit of leadership. Probably most importantly, the fact that he made a pandemic a political issue, is disgusting. This isn't red vs. blue, but that's what he made it.

I'm bothered by all the blaming. This is NOT Trump's fault...or the governors. This is nature that has come up with a new pitch that the batters haven't been able to figure out yet. Fernando Valenzuela's screwball in 1981. To listen to the president'S advice to "try to swing late" and shout WHAT AN ASSHOLE...then he says "go the other way with the pitch" and you shout "IDIOT...don't you know batting coaches agree that is the dumbest thing ever". Though really the batting coaches have no real answer either. I hate Trump's style but I'm also so sick of everything he does being criticized. 90% of all news stories since his inauguration?? A virus comes along and you guys with perfect hindsight says "we should have done this" or "we should have done that". But who knew that this wasn't SARS or MERS or Swine Flu? It was outrageous to put major travel restrictions on China in early February but that proved correct. His being positive in press conferences in a very scary situation for the simple folks is not a bad decision even if in retrospect some of the words sound stupid. Pushing things to the states...so we have 50 little labs trying to come up with a solution that balances outcomes makes some sense to me...I agree with Jerksticks that the economic ramifications for millions has to be considered. As for his defying the experts...you know for every expert telling the President...this is the worst thing to ever happen...there's another expert saying..."this is like the SARS scare. It will be gone in a month." And we still don't know. Ferguson's College of London model that showed 2.2 million US dead has now been discredited as bad math...but could we ignore that at the time? This clearly is a bad disease but we don't have an answer...we could wait for the vaccine just like we are waiting for the Cold vaccine. Everyone has an opinion no one has an answer. Just lots and lots of guesses. Honestly if there was a lottery system...everyone lines up and gets a ticket. You have a 1/1000 chance of instantly dying (330,000 dead in the US) but the other 999 get to go on with their normal lives and see Kopeck starting on Saturday...I would be first in line...especially given the other option...living under my bed with a 1/10,000 chance of dying...no baseball, no bars, no friends, no happiness?

This is just wrong and ignorant. The world doesn't need it to "end". The world needs scientifically developed immunity and that comes in the form of a vaccine not this "herd" concept where millions and millions of human beings are infected.

Now those are positive sentences. It's still OK to praise America. Thanks Caulfield. USA is the best!

I can't believe this is still a thing. This thread, which was once a refuge from the craziness and conspiracies on basically any other public forum, has gotten hard to read ever since more people started taking Greg's bait and the False Equivalence Army came out of the woodwork... but even then, I can't believe that the latter is still arguing for that drug even after it was revealed weeks ago that the whole thing was just another profit scheme masquerading as health care (obviously, in addition to the drug not even working)

F) models...repeatable double blind tested trial

He either has Covid, or is lying about taking the drug. Either is plausible.

And they did the same in Beijing and Shanghai, especially to protect the capitol. Months later, airplanes were still diverted to other cities despite the completion of yet another massive airport...there were about 12-13 second tier airports where if you wanted to eventually enter Beijing, you started off with a 14 day quarantine outside in another city...and perhaps even went through another quarantine upon entering the city. At any rate, all these things will eventually come out in public/international investigations...but don’t particularly lead to any bipartisan solutions or trust right now in the US. As far as MSM vs. Conservative Media, Benghazi and the email servers/“lock her up” are child’s play compared to the treatment Obama or Biden would get from Fox if the situations were reversed. Very few read newspapers anymore. Fox always outdraws CNN and MSNBC. And Trump has about 6-8x as much money as Biden now. Ironic, because he won in 2016 spending about 15-20% as much as the Clinton campaign.

If only we had first hand accounts of this, on this very thread. Oh well.

That's not what he said. Admittedly, he did word it in a confusing fashion.

Testing, masks, contact tracing, and social distancing, all while working feverishly on potential treatments and a vaccine. We should know from the mortality rate in the US - currently around 6% (90,000 deaths and 1,500,000 confirmed cases) - that there are still a lot of people with Covid who have not been diagnosed. The real mortality rate should be much lower. If it were 3%, that would be 3,000,000 infected. If 2%, 4,500,000 infected, and so on. Now many of those infected have gotten through the infection and are no longer contagious. But you can see from those numbers that there could be a lot of contagious people still out and about. Through the measures above, the goal is to get the contagion rate well below 1. So that contagious people spread it, on average, to less than 1 other person. If you can keep the rate there, the number of contagious people will continue going down. The risk is that even if you get the contagious numbers down into the thousands, recall that this whole thing started from ZERO in the US. So if you ever completely relax the things that keep the contagion rate under 1, you can very quickly see an rapid expansion of contagion. This is why we aren't likely to see stadiums full of fans any time this year. If you can get a handle through testing on the number of contagious people in a defined group - e.g., a baseball team - then you can manage that group to try to keep them Covid-free. If someone slips through the cracks, the hope is they are caught quickly and are unable to infect many others. Seems possible with baseball because of the distance between players. Lastly, no one should be thinking - "I can get Covid and survive, so I don't need to worry." It's not about YOU. It's about who you might infect. Because for them it might be a death sentence.

3. We did do that on a small scale. San Antonio hosted cruise ship passengers. 4. I believe one key role of the national government is coordinating national problems. This clearly was bigger than any one state and needed a strong coordinated response. A "the buck stops here" moment or Bush on the pile of rubble with a bullhorn moment could have solidified the nation. Instead we receive denials and suggestions it was all a hoax. Oops.

You keep talking about don’t play politics, yet you’re relying on evidence that you simply don’t possess about China. Come here and look at the locked gates that are still up 4 months later blocking off every residential community from main streets. Retesting millions five months later when we have under 20 asymptomatic cases. The cost is down to $32 (all government subsidized) for the nucleic acid and pharyngeal swabs. How much at those private testing labs without health insurance, $300-500, roughly? Does everyone in the entire country have an app tracking/tracing contacts with infected? Green, yellow and red run by algorithm and tracked by GPS. One infected person gets on a bus, the entire bus or subway train is quarantined? Quarantine hotels/convention centers for people before they’re showing symptoms and admitted to hospitals....then 14 day quarantines away from family after clearing? Tracking devices on bracelets or ankles are being used in the US? Thousands of dollars in fines or mandatory jail time for breaking quarantine (only about 15-20 people in Hawaii so far.) Blocking off entire provinces from each other for months on end...with checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint on highways. All food deliveries with printed temp checks of every worker from cook to delivery guy...3-5 involved at each step of the process. People literally locked into their apartments. Heavy fines for spitting or infecting others if you knowingly went outside while sick. Nobody could go out for 4-6 weeks, all food ordered online and delivered. Other than that time period, just one person every two days who was temp checked and had to sign in and out with national ID card. People incentivized by the govnt for reporting “suspicious or potentially” sick people to the police or neighborhood association. People rounded up by the police for trying to buy medicine from pharmacies or turned away from hospitals because they were sick but no space available....so many ended up dying undiagnosed at home (60% undercount). Quarantined 80% of cases inside of one province....brought literally every single infectious disease specialist, mobilized nurses and most experienced doctors from Shanghai, Beijing, Army medical teams, built two mobile hospitals in 10-14 days to quarantine the 2000+ most critical patients away from everyone else, delivery after delivery of PPE through the airport that was shut down and dedicated solely to pandemic logistics. Entire city locked down from Jan 23 until April 8th. KG out for an entire eight months. Most primary/elementary and middle school students still not back, only 9th and 12th because they have national exams which have been pushed back to July for the first time in history. You have a culture where grandparents, aunt/uncles or the neighborhood and apartment complex looks after all the younger kids, allowing parents to work. Not a single day care exists. If anything, people are working an extra 4-6 hours per day at home compared to reporting to the office...on call literally 24 hours per day, because the boss always knew you were at home and would send messages throughout the night expecting an immediate response.

That's called being diplomatic. Should he have told them to fuck off from the start? That was from January 24th. That is very early on in the grand scheme of things. He has changed his tune and called them out since. Still haven't seen anything saying Trump trusts their death toll numbers.

It was completely ridiculous of me to try to come to DNC headquarters and try to argue that the virus is a virus and people are going to die almost no matter what we did and that non-stop blaming of the president is boring. But you win.

Europe? I dunno, but I am in this thread on record on March 3 saying "OMG we completely f***ed up we need to close down the west coast right now and this is going to be a nightmare everyone panic". I coudln't know about the NY outbreak...because the US refused, for whatever reason, to accept testing assistance from the WHO.

Agree to disagree. There is a reason why literally no countries are trying this strategy. Here, we are starting to see kids get a Covid-related syndrome that one 14 year old described as “someone literally injecting fire into you.” There is so much we don’t know about this virus that achieving herd immunity by giving it to large groups at once would, in addition to overwhelming the entire health system, likely result in unexpected outcomes for a bunch of people outside of your expendable group. Hold tight. Good vaccine news today. We may lose the 2020 baseball season, but that is no reason to sacrifice like 2 million people imho.

There is clear DNA evidence that even if there was any early introductions into the US, they did not become an epidemic. The strains circulating in the US today are dominated by the strain that erupted in Italy in February. They were imported into New York in February, undetected, and spread everywhere from there. ONly a handful of people in Washington and California ever got sick from direct strains imported from China. There is no cure. The Chinese did exactly what our government did when faced with the epidemic, they dithered for a few days and that allowed major spread. They had lots of people traveling for a holiday and didn't want to provoke a panic/hurt the economy out of it. They waited about a week from the point where they had clearly identified the new strain on about January 9 to the point where they had everything to the WHO on January 21 and that was plenty to allow a huge amount of spread. They literally did the exact same thing our government did. So, why is one interesting and not the other to you?

The twist becomes two fold for the White Sox. #1, they have a new guy running the draft who seemingly pushed the Sox towards more early and late HS picks then I can ever remember them taking. #2, if they an put together a draft where they some decent savings in their top pick, it could allow them to go very high school heavy in the draft. In fact for my two cents, it isn't hard to envision a scenario where they get together with a top HS kid and offer say 75-90% of slot. Typically it is not worth it to sign at that kind of a number for a HS kid, but you can get paid now, and start your pro career, or you can go to college and run into a log jam of HS players who were forced to do the same down the road both competing for college jobs, and down the road in the draft. You may also be looking for a job after a lot of minor league teams are being cut. If you can get some big savings done with the #1 pick, it allows you some big dollars. Saving just 10% on the top pick is an extra $450 k to spread out over the last four picks. Keep in mind we don't have to save any more for late picks as those are capped at $20k. I have no idea what having the new leadership with the draft means to the team, but one can build an interesting case for being ultra-aggressive, especially if they think they have some big Cuban talent coming in that also allows them to take a few more draft risks.

Especially if you are in a probationary period, which most employees are when they start.

Yep. Politicians in this situation HAVE to be tough or it will burn them if they ever run for higher office. Meanwhile, people with compassion and a brain realize their edicts throwing businessmen into court over defying dictatorial orders is WRONG. I'm voting against every current decision maker in Kansas for their behavior during corona.

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-coronavirus-response-keep-stock-market-up-economy-2020-5's Look at Trump's tweets regarding China from January to March. He bought everything he was supposedly told. There were no US people in the lab. Trump had them removed. I don't think it's a political issue either, but Trump has made it one. Red vs. Blue. But he won't play the same game he is asking others to play. You can't be around him without a test, yet tests are overrated.

Here’s the problem with the China flight ban....it still let in an additional 30-40,000 coming from China past that date. Most importantly, we refused to similarly stop travel from the EU, well....because of Steve Mnunchin, Jared Kushner and the stock market again. And those tourists were more desirable politically, I guess? If the stock market was struggling in late February or early March, we would or could have saved 85-90% of those who died. South Korea has 15x the population of density of the US. 249 deaths. Total. We were pulling down those numbers in 2-3 HOURS. We spent more time on hydroxychloroquine than creating any type of national or Federal plan. We promised a test of everyone when the capacity was 75,000 at best, and nowhere near the 4,000,000 being hyped that was in the pipeline and always just a matter of days away. Trump and Scott Morrison of Australia are essentially the same political animal...Trump pitted governor against governor, and the Federal government vs. states in terms of the PPE supply chain. But here’s what one of the most partisan leaders in Morrison did. But instead of offering the most partisan response in the world (UK would also have to be up there), Australia made every decision a bipartisan one with consensus or total buy-in behind it, every piece of messaging had the blessing of both sides of the political aisle before going forward to the public. And that’s the type of leadership we will never consistently see out of Donald Trump, because he always puts himself first. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/world/australia/new-zealand-coronavirus.html Australia 99 deaths, New Zealand 21. That’s 120 for two countries combined. That 120 per day is now what you’re hoping to limit the state of Iowa to for every day in the month of June. 4.25% of the world, over 1/3rd the cases and soon to be 1/3rd of the deaths. But that 90,000 to 150,000 (since nearly every scientist is asserting the undercount in the US and around the world is around 60%) is not really such a big number, right? And most of the people dying are old and/or “unhealthy” minorities anyway, not our OWN neighbors, right?

Now that I found out that Crochet is a likely reliever, I hope that Detmers falls or they take Kjerstad.

What you think is ignorant is science. Why do you think a SARS vaccine doesn’t exist? But it’s not wrong and ignorant. But if a vaccine does come it will be at least a year from now...products don’t get approved that fast. In vitro...animal and then human testing. I know the process. But hey if something comes because it’s rushed through- you can be first in line to try it.

As long as nobody that gets sick blames their governor for opening up too quickly and providing them a false sense of security...as long as nobody who goes outside without a mask expects to get priority treatment in a hospital or have their medical expenses reimbursed when they are on a ventilator or have a lifelong debilitating lung condition as a result. It has been pointed out hundreds of times in this thread already...but why do we even need a president if he’s deferring to state governors on every single decision? Whatever accidentally goes well, he will attempt to take credit for (since he’s just going on gut instinct and the fact an uncle went to MIT) and whatever goes wrong, it gets blamed on the governors, right? If Trump didn’t care more about reelection (the definition of power hungry), he would have simply declared in February or March that the health of the American people will always be my priority, first and foremost. That this crisis is a health care crisis, and that only by addressing that first will the economy start to rebound for all Americans. We all know the answer. Regardless of the individual actions of politicians, you can’t force now people to spend when every bone in their body says they should save or conserve resources. It won’t make the majority of people feel safe to return to church, to sports events, to concerts, to fly, to stay in hotels, to malls, to go to a movie...to even go out to eat. As we have now learned, businesses run on just 15-25% margins. Many will not survive, no matter how many want to go out and enjoy the summer. You just can’t wish or hope or con or brand your way through a pandemic. Other than food prices, there’s a tremendous amount of deflationary pressure in the economy. Yet our president wants negative interest rates for the first time in American history. He’s just used to borrowing money and not paying it back. But Americans over 60 still value their lives, they care about the future cost of living, their drugs...and especially the world being left behind for their grandchildren. As it turns out, intentionally dividing the country has now made it virtually impossible to get everyone back on the same page...and that is ultimately a failure in leadership. It’s one thing to win an election, it’s quite another to successfully govern it.

While I don't have sympathy for people not wearing masks, I have plenty sympathy for people up against it economics-wise. But I don't see how pressuring workers to return to infested meat packing plants is the answer. Normal economic policy is not the answer. I don't know what the answer is, but we are not coming close to getting answers from Washington. These problems are huge, and the people there are small-minded.

Why do people keep responding to Greg here? He's obviously trolling. People take the bait every time.

Yes but what about the NBA players...a bunch got it back in February and now they are piling their corpses up like cord wood...oh wait. We are, right now at about 1 in 4,000 Americans dead from this...Italy during the plaque had 2,400 dead out of 4,000 and THEY didn't cancel baseball. I'm tired of hiding under my bed and I want to see Robert and Moncada and Jimenez hitting.

Couldn't agree more. I don't understand why the assumption is being made that playing baseball in empty stadiums under constant supervision and strong cleaning precautions is any more dangerous than wherever they would be if not at the ballpark. Its not like they are being held in vacuum chambers with no human interaction when not playing. I understand the fear of front line workers with constant interaction with the public (cashiers, health care workers, etc), but it seems like people are hijacking those reasonable fears into other lines of work like baseball where the public interaction just doesn't exist.