In this plague year, led by a president who seems to be trying to kill his own citizens, particularly those in states that support the opposing political party, I find my thoughts turning to consider how a competent and well-meaning president would have handled this disaster that's fallen upon our world, instead of the preening, ignorant ego-monster we currently have.
And you don't have to think back very far. In 2014, Barack Obama had his own deadly epidemic disease outbreak to deal with:
The initial case, or index patient, was reported in December 2013. An 18-month-old boy from a small village in Guinea is believed to have been infected by bats. After five additional cases of fatal diarrhea occurred in that area, an official medical alert was issued on January 24, 2014, to the district health officials. The Ebola virus soon spread to Guinea’s capital city of Conakry, and on March 13, 2014, the Ministry of Health in Guinea issued an alert for an unidentified illness. Shortly after, the Pasteur Institute in France confirmed the illness as EVD caused by Zaire ebolavirus. On March 23, 2014, with 49 confirmed cases and 29 deaths, the WHO officially declared an outbreak of EVD.
[I]t quickly spread to Guinea’s bordering countries, Liberia and Sierra Leone. By July 2014, the outbreak spread to the capitals of all three countries. This was the first time EVD extended out from more isolated, rural areas and into densely populated urban centers, providing an unprecedented opportunity for transmission.
On August 8, 2014, WHO declared the deteriorating situation in West Africa a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), which is designated only for events with a risk of potential international spread or that require a coordinated international response. Over the duration of the epidemic, EVD spread to seven more countries: Italy, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States....
Overall, eleven people were treated for Ebola in the United States during the 2014-2016 epidemic. On September 30, 2014, CDC confirmed the first travel-associated case of EVD diagnosed in the United States in a man who traveled from West Africa to Dallas, Texas. The patient (the index case) died on October 8, 2014. Two healthcare workers who cared for him in Dallas tested positive for EVD. Both recovered.
On October 23, 2014, a medical aid worker who had volunteered in Guinea was hospitalized in New York City with suspected EVD. The diagnosis was confirmed by the CDC the next day. The patient recovered.
Seven other people were cared for in the United States after they were exposed to the virus and became ill while in West Africa, the majority of whom were medical workers. They were transported by chartered aircraft from West Africa to hospitals in the United States. Six of these patients recovered, one died....
CDC activated its Emergency Operations Center in July 2014 to help coordinate technical assistance and disease control activities with partners. CDC personnel deployed to West Africa to assist with response efforts, including surveillance, contact tracing, data management, laboratory testing, and health education. CDC staff also provided support with logistics, staffing, communication, analytics, and management.
...The United States also implemented enhanced entry screening for travelers coming from Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Mali by routing them to designated airports better able to assess travelers for risk.
During the height of the response, CDC trained 24,655 healthcare workers in West Africa on infection prevention and control practices. In the United States, more than 6,500 people were trained during live training events throughout the response. In addition, laboratory capacity was expanded in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone with 24 laboratories able to test for Ebola virus by the end of 2015.
For this the Obama administration was excoriated for incompetence, negligence, and dilly-dallying. It was "Obama's Katrina." He hadn't anticipated the problem. He wanted Americans to die, claimed Limbaugh, as some kind of twisted payback for slavery. The frenzy and hysteria around it from Republicans and the media more broadly, was incredible.
And this was a matter of a total of 11 cases of Ebola in the country, of which 2 patients died.
Now here there are (as of this hour) 215,175 cases of Covid-19 in the country, including 5,110 deaths.
Trump flacks have admitted there could be 200,000 deaths "if we do things almost perfectly," and that surely is an understatement.
And what do we hear from the media? That the president is incompetent? That he should step down and let someone able to deal with the crisis take charge? That he's been monstrously, criminally negligent in his response?
Where is the frenzied condemnation?
Incredibly, what we have instead is pundits praising him for his changed “tone” and his welcome about-face toward finally appearing to take the pandemic seriously.
It's just mind blowing.
The disproportion between the hysterical condemnation the media amplified from the right wing / Republicans for Obama's entirely appropriate actions and their hesitancy now to criticize Trump for his monstrous dereliction of duty, his lies, his attempts to sweep the pandemic under the rug, his heartlessness toward Americans trapped on diseased cruise ships, and so on and so on, is beyond all belief.
This sycophancy of members of the corporate media toward Republican power — and only Republican power — is a huge problem.
Individual members of the media, and the organizations that employ them, are going to have to be publicly excoriated for continually failing on this if there’s to be any hope for the country at all.
