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I think that Trump should have take super harsh lockdown measures in like the first two weeks while it still hadn't reached the U.S., or very shortly afterwards, and was possible to contain. Once it reached more than 1 states it was too late. There was 0 chance it wasn't going to go full epidemic eventually, and all any lockdown measures did was "flatten the curve". Which they did do, but with great cost and little benefit. As soon as we lost containment it would have been better to focus on ramping up healthcare readiness and otherwise let people and the economy get on with their lives.
And if Trump was actually a giga genius he would have gone authoritarian just to get the left going anti-lockdown and then let their control of the media make that spread and dominate the manufactured consensus. Sure the right-wing would be mad at the left for spreading disease and killing their grandparents, but that happened anyway and the economy would be in much better shape.
This would've been possibly January? Maybe December? Very few people in the US were paying attention at that point. Well. Publicly paying attention.
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Plenty of countries where it didn't (Korea, Japan, Taiwan being the clear-cut cases). That no western country managed the pandemic as well as those three was a policy choice.
what about Vietnam, Cambodia, the Phillipines, and other countries in the area with pretty much the same curves?
there was a wide disparity of approaches across all these countries and yet they have very similar curves, so similar in fact I doubt you could correctly pick out Japan, Taiwan, and Korea from the group of them
and there are other countries outside this region which had very similar approaches which failed spectacularly
one theory which explains the above is this region had pre-existing immunity from another similar virus which they had already been exposed to while other parts of the world had not, but what doesn't explain it is some Asian miracle where their efficient administration saved them
you'll notice it didn't save them as time went on and they were exposed to new variants despite them having the same attempt to control it
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Also even the absolute worst case of a COVID epidemic isn't even that bad.
Western societies are currently getting absolutely beset with immigration and other such policies to try and offset the population pyramid getting stacked with the elderly and their associated costs. COVID would have ameliorated a lot of that if there were minimal responses.
No, despite the memes, COVID wasn't the Boomer Doomer; it was the Silent Killer. And the Silent Generation is both too old and too small to have much effect on the inverted population pyramid. COVID did essentially spread unchecked; it didn't "help".
It would still largely hit those who were already the unhealthiest which is going to reduce the short and medium-term burden on the system.
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