Sometimes I like to use alliteration to highlight a point I’m trying to make. donald* trump’s* behavior throughout the COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has caused a lot of words starting with “D” to line up as a means to describe his, and his administration’s behavior in this international crisis.
DENIAL
The first case of this disease was reported to the World Health Organization on November 17, 2019 www.brookings.edu/… Other sources have pushed back the first human case to as early as October 6, 2019.
The origin of the regression between sampling dates and ‘root-to-tip’ distances (Fig. S3) provides a cursory point estimate for the time to the MRCA (tMRCA) around late 2019. Using TreeDater (Volz and Frost, 2017), we observe an estimated tMRCA, which corresponds to the start of the COVID-19 epidemic, of 6 October 2019–11 December 2019 (95% CIs) (Fig. S4). These dates for the start of the epidemic are in broad agreement with previous estimates performed on smaller subsets of the COVID-19 genomic data using various computational methods (Table 1), though they should still be taken with some caution. Indeed, the sheer size of the dataset precludes the use of some of the more sophisticated inference methods available. Source
On December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization published a notice of an outbreak of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. There is no need for me to put the entire timeline into this diary. The US Government, through CDC and other organizations had to have known about at least the origins of COVID-19 since November 17, 2019. It has been widely reported that donald trump denied and delayed any meaningful governmental response until the virus had spread widely in America, leading to tragic loss of life and potentially thousands of needless deaths. Even today, trump publicly denies the truth of COVID-19 and minimizes the disease as “overrated”.
DELAY
Again, it has been widely reported that trump waited months before taking any meaningful action against the pandemic virus, and even today, mr. trump seeks to delay or eliminate testing because of his DELUSION that if you don’t test and find cases, they don’t exist. See the link “even today” in the paragraph above for the quotation.
DECEPTION, DEFLECTION, DEPRAVITY
Deception and deflection are both ends of the same stick. mr. trump DECEIVES himself to believing that he bears no responsibility for his own behavior, deflects blame to anyone and anything but himself, and cowardly will not own up to his own DEPRAVITY and incompetence to do the work necessary to lead a nation out of a crisis, much of it his own doing.
DECEIT
A president who has 18,000 documented lies, and a current average of 18 lies per day, including many about the COVID-19 pandemic is guilty of DESPICABLE behavior. Nothing more needs to be said here.
DELUSION, DERELICTION, DUTY
mr. trump’s DELUSION that he and his incompetent and DEPRAVED administration are doing a good job combating COVID-19 is clear evidence that mr. trump and his administration are clearly in a state of DERELICTION OF DUTY and of their Oaths of Office and the American people need to exercise their right to vote and do what the United States Senate lacked the courage to do, and end the career of donald j. trump. We Americans know what duty is, and we need to exercise our duty to remove a depraved and incompetent president.
*I don’t capitalize the names of politicians who have not earned the respect that causes the need for a proper noun.