Quote Originally Posted by Dawgology View Post
I think this is what is confusing everyone. Initial predictions for death related to Covid WITH social distancing was in the millions...then it moved to "we may keep it below 1 million", then it was 500,000, then it was 250,000, now it is 100,000-200,000 now it's "we hope to keep it below 100,000". So we started with millions of death in the USA alone to possibly under 100,000. It is impossible that "social distancing" has created such a flattening of the curve unless the initial R0 and mortality rates are completely wrong. That is a massive miscalculation. In fact, in most instancing a miscalculation of this sort would end your career in the scientific community. And now there is a lot of chatter about the initial model out of the UK being flawed. Your argument is that if the President had done something two weeks earlier (which he did when he suspended inbound flights from Asian countries and was CRUCIFIED by his opponents for being racist when the "Chinese Virus" wasn't a real threat) then we would have been under...what...50k deaths? 30k? 10k? 100?

I'm neither Republican nor Democrat but I've been watching the spin from both sides of this argument and it is ****ing hilarious.
1. The initial projections were in the millions WITHOUT social distancing. The numbers Fauci and Birx were quoting a few weeks ago were from the Imperial College model. That model provides a few scenarios. The scenario without any action was 1-2 million deaths. The scenario with strong social distancing / lockdowns was 100-200k.

You can read the paper here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imp...16-03-2020.pdf

2. Trump did not "suspend inbound flights from China." It was not a full travel ban. Thousands of people came into the country from China after his "ban."

Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/u...trictions.html
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/th...-restrictions/
https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-tr...deb1ce0b3.html

3. Two weeks would've made a big difference. We might have even been able to go into containment mode instead of mitigation.

https://thehill.com/changing-america...-may-have-been

4. This is only my opinion but the biggest thing Trump could've done from the beginning is take the threat seriously. He had a chance to get all Americans on the same page. People from Mississippi and the South in general wouldn't have trusted Obama or somebody like that in this scenario, but they do trust Trump. He could've had the entire country pulling in the same direction.

Instead he called it a "democratic hoax" and compared it to the flu among a litany of other nonsense.