This crisis highlights the weaknesses in our nation. For the US this means the lack of social security constructs to aid people.
People also in this thread keep saying that trump has the ability to deflect every controversy and scandal, but it doesn't seem like he is capable of doing this with a health crisis. Something this black and white as life or death, money or no money does not seem to be something he is doing great over, he is even digging a hole greater for himself.
Went to twitter and i mean, the cartoons and pictures lined up there of him standing on top of corpses bragging about his ratings is not going down well with many.
What i wonder is, if this crisis is not going to be used to delay the elections and extend the presidency? It is not that he has much respect for any democratic process or laws for that matter.
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Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs
US labs that underwent huge efforts to retool for COVID-19 testing still aren’t operating at full capacity. Experts say the lack of a national strategy is largely to blame.
Article Link
Some snippets from the article in question, some of which were portrayed as the government as positives earlier and further highlighting as to why a government protectionist in nature and lacking actual leadership makes an impossible situation even harder, despite efforts of those willing to work to a solution;
“Our capacity is 2,000 tests a day,” says Stacey Gabriel, a human geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where testing facilities were approved in March. “But we aren’t doing that many. Yesterday was around 1,000. What is holding us back? That is the question,” she says.
Scientists say federal leadership is needed to organize US testing, to reduce bureaucratic and logistical barriers.
"The World Health Organization (WHO) began warning governments to prepare for COVID-19 in January. The agency also vetted and distributed a German-developed PCR-based test for the virus. But rather than use this test, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed its own. For most of February, this was the only test permitted in the United States."
Another step — the one that leading scientists are best prepared to address — was working out the most reliable test to use. Many decided against the CDC’s version. “I don’t want to be disparaging, but the people who made the CDC kit simply failed at molecular biology — they created a nightmare,” says Urnov.
Even so, Urnov says, hospitals rejected an offer of free tests from his centre, funded by philanthropic organizations. “I show up in a magic ship,” Urnov says, “with 20,000 free kits and CLIA and everything, and the major hospitals say: ‘Go away, we cannot interface with you.’”
“We need a national framework for states to make decisions on testing,” he says. In a letter to the White House obtained by Nature, scientists listed the bottlenecks they face, along with a plan to help cities and towns across the United States get the tests they need.
In Summary, labs have done all they can to run at maximum capacity but the federal government is in over its head, unable to properly restructure to create an unified effort.
Not all of this appears to be on trump as they also speak of a fragmented healthcare landscape with everyone just doing their own thing, however this in my opinion can be blamed to the republican ideology of state rights, where you further dismantle the federal oversight and let everyone just do whatever they please.
It also shows why simply raging and dismissing everything from the WHO is going to cause more issues and why the plan to cut funding is standing to make this crisis even worse and that means Americans are going to be paying the price for cutting WHO funding.
It is not a fun read but it offers a better insight in everything that is going wrong and might prevent some from easily jumping on one bandwagon or the other.
ps: Nature is a scientific journal, not political and a highly credible source. It is the same scientific journal that also posted the study that debunked the story of this virus being lab made.