Clear Thinking Simplified on a COVID-19 Pandemic in America

There will be many postmortems by statisticians wiser than me in the near future, but the international team of researchers at worldometers.info has demonstrated extraordinary accuracy in their calculations.

They have estimated that if our leadership had taken COVID-19 seriously, as did the informed leaders of counties like New Zealand, South Korea, etc., U.S. deaths would likely have been limited to around 1,500. A British study confirmed similar numbers, indicating that if social distancing had started just two weeks earlier, 90% of American lives lost could have been saved. At the time, only 28,000 Americans had died. https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1269742/coronavirus-update-donald-trump-us-death-toll-covid-19-pandemic

Let's give our president the benefit of the doubt, and say worldometers and the Brit researchers were way off. Let's double or triple the worldometers estimate to make sure there is no bias against Mr. Trump. In fact, let's multiply that estimate by 10 ! In that case, an astonishing 15,000 Americans would have been lost to the virus no matter what any of our leaders did.

However, there were some complications. Setting us up to be unprepared by eliminating carefully constructed prevention measures installed by the previous administration, and by firing our best and brightest pandemic medical professionals more than 3 years ago, and then delaying action by 4 months after the first warning, as well as the fact that Mr. Trump has STILL not engaged in successful practices of other victorious countries, has given us a death toll that now exceeds 120,000.

If we assume that 15,000 may have died anyway, that leaves only about 105,000 deaths for which Trump could be held personally responsible for acting in his own self-interest instead of the country's. That amount exceeds all American lives lost in the Korean War, the Iraq Wars, and the War in Afghanistan put together. (The current death rate is likely to double before this is over. If that becomes true, Trump could singlehandedly have accomplished the largest massacre of Americans since the Civil War, nearly outpacing all the battle deaths of WWII. (291,557) )

If you were an author making up a fictional tale, no one would believe this was possible, and yet here we are - all an astonishing consequence of ill-motivated and mis-directed decision-making.

But that's not all. The economic consequences of Trump's non-action and mis-action have been unprecedented in the history of our country, projected to expand to a cost of $16 Trillion by the CBO as reported by Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaharziv/2020/06/02/coronavirus-pandemic-will-cost-us-economy-8-trillion/#1da8daa115e4 ) About $3 Trillion that has already been allocated by Congress to bandaid the mess, with much more to come. (The $3 Trillion amounts to an extra $23,809 per family already, without interest. Guess who will be asked to pay for that?)

In earlier years, Trump depended on his dad to bail out his business failures. We already know of 100's of millions of dollars either given to or laundered by Trump through his businesses to siphon money from his dad, and this is before any disclosure of his tax returns. We also know that Trump has lost as much as $1 Billion in a single year as a businessman (1995). https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/07/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html It's ironic, isn't it, that some people thought he would make a good president because of of his business 'success'?

His dad would not have enough money to bail him out this time, but he has something better - the taxpayers of the United States. Only the United States of America has enough money to bail him out this time. Yes, this time, you and I are rescuing him financially. Not sure any of us knew what were were signing up for there.

Astonishingly, still about 40% of Americans are still thinking about re-electing him this fall. Now that's a story no publishing company would think was sellable.