You have to make a distinction between what they say in public and what is going on behind the scenes. For me, at least, when the travel restrictions went up o

You have to make a distinction between what they say in public and what is going on behind the scenes. For me, at least, when the travel restrictions went up on January 31st, this represented a very serious indicator that something was seriously wrong. This was a move three standard deviations away from the mean, if not more. As I said in a prior comment, the very next day I checked our supplies and placed online order for a six month lockdown, including N95 masks. I also told friends and family. Everyone who paid attention to my warning did very well and navigated 2020 with very little to worry about other than staying safe. My point is that politicians have a back channel for communications that they should use during these kinds of events. If I had been in politics at the time this started to develop I would ask myself a very serious question: Why did the US president just shut down travel from China? I would not have pulled the answer out of CNN. I would have reached out to the administration and had a serious conversation, regardless of being a member of the opposing political party. I certainly wouldn't have gone on TV to tell people to get on the subway, buses, trains and go to festivals without first understanding something three standard deviations away from the historical mean. Trump was an idiot in public. Not so behind closed doors. The travel restrictions imposed on China on January 31st. carried gravity lots of people, news outlets and politicians chose to ignore, and this cost lives. To beat this one to death: No, the US president --no politician really-- could not go out there and say "we are all going to die". The masses can't handle stuff like that. What the masses want to hear is "we are going to be OK". However, the masses also need to be told how not to kill themselves. We likely would have saved tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives had we come out with a unified message asking people to not participate in high density activities (subway, etc.) because this new virus spread quickly. It would have been just fine to come out and say "we need a few weeks to asses the situation, until then, we ask that you do these five things...". Instead they came out and effectively said "Trump is racist. Ignore him.". And the rest is history. Ironic, when you consider that their "racist" likely saved their lives and that of hundreds of millions by mounting and effectively executing the fastest and most effective vaccine development program in human history. Go figure. It's OK to be politically partisan, but sometimes one has to also be willing to be honest. The man inspired projectile vomiting every time he spoke, and yet the things he did were pretty much always on point. Today we are seeing almost exactly the opposite: Someone who speaks well and is a complete disaster at almost every level. I can't even imagine what reality would look like today if Trump hadn't gotten vaccines done by November of his last year. It's probably fair so say millions would have died in the US. Biden/Harris would have been running around like chickens with their heads cut off.