The guess here is nobody (outside of China) saw this pandemic coming. Which explains the horrible crisis management – even in the Trump White House. There is plenty of blame to go around for the sudden lay-offs, shut-downs, shut-ins, deaths and drunken spending. If COVID-19 was a bad storm blowing through town, COVIDIOCY was the storm that blew the town away.
COVIDIOT-1 has to be Chinese President Xi, who infected America into the Twilight Zone. The Australian and British press report better than 50-50 odds COVID-19 was a bioweapon that leaked from a lab. Even absent an unthinkable conspiracy, Communist China is still the undisputed incubus of global pandemics: e.g. 1956 Asian Flu, 1968 Hong Kong Flu, 2003 SARS, 2009 Swine Flu, and 2019 COVID-19. Xi isolated Wuhan residents from greater China, but allowed them to fly to Italy and the US. What a pal!
COVIDIOT-2 is every government outside Taiwan (which kept its SARS crisis response up to date). How is it even possible that G7 countries lack surgical gloves, gowns, masks and ventilators? It took six weeks before these enlightened leaders imposed travel bans to stop the spread, which is why COVID-19 hit LA, metro New York, San Francisco and Seattle first. Further, name one G7 leader who’s owned his or her nation’s unpreparedness (hint: you can’t).
COVIDIOT-3 is the US media that soft-balled China and hard-balled a US president, and who turned a national emergency into a national panic with half-vetted news and panels of anti-recovery partisans. The daily White House briefings (except for the respect shown Drs. Fauci and Birx) were intellectual food fights to prove it’s all Trump’s fault. COVID-19 was the threat equivalent of WWII, except the press reported open-up American protestors as today’s Nazis. Mis-information and partisan spin failed we the people 100%.
COVIDIOT-4 is every bickering blue-state mayor and governor, whose preparation, reaction, and accountability failed their residents. The Washington Post found blue-state “hospitals and health systems do not stockpile materials for emergency situations.” New York and New Jersey governors made nursing homes accept CV-19 patients from hospitals; thereby exposing the most vulnerable. New York’s mayor expressed no regrets for urging residents into bars the day before the city closed down (source: New York Post). You want hypocrisy? Democrats arguing for states rights!
COVIDIOT-5 is Nancy Pelosi, beginning with her request for US citizens to parade in Chinatown 3 weeks after Trump had formed the coronavirus task force. She then formed committees to investigate the President mid-crisis, explaining to CNN the need to find “what did he know and when did he know it?” Finally, she originated a $3 trillion spending bill Senator John Thune (R-SD) labeled as not “a sincere effort to address a crisis [but] an effort to create talking points for the 2020 election.” She described CV-19 “as really quite interesting times for us.” No kidding!
COVIDIOT-6 is every American that acted with selfish and reckless regard to the societal norms in a national emergency. Honestly, governments weren’t asking US citizens to drink hemlock – as Athens demanded of Socrates. And so – – to the woman who coughed on produce in a grocery store, the man who carried a rocket launcher into a Subway, the five spring-breakers who shared one margarita, and the dude that refused to wear a mask into my local Sheetz: who died and made you Supreme Ayatollah?