Are Americans better off today (and this entire year) than we were 4 years ago?
https://doggett.house.gov/media/blog-post/timeline-trumps-coronavirus-responses
March 2020 was the month when things went to hell here in the United States. On March 5th there were 129 known cases and only 11 deaths in the US: just 33 days later, hospitals were using refrigerated trucks as morgues and over 10,000 Americans were dead of Covid.
Fear ran through communities and stalked our homes. We were washing our groceries with bleach after picking them up at the store’s parking lot from people wearing masks, goggles, and gloves. We bought up all the air filters in the country. We worked from home when we could. We isolated ourselves from other people as much as was humanly possible.
Within those few weeks in March and early April, serious Covid outbreaks were showing up across the Northeast and Trump — who had two years earlier shut down both of the two federal pandemic task forces Obama had put into place after the Ebola scare — charged his son-in-law, nepo-baby slumlord Jared Kushner, with responding to the crisis.
Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.
By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to only 22, but that was enough to spur federal action. Trump’s official emergency declaration came on March 13th, and most of the country shut down during the following week.
The skies and highways fell silent, the Dow collapsed, and millions of Americans were laid off — but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.
