Olympus Has Fallen

When this whole crisis started snowballing, I knew right away that the backwards systems in place in the United States would be completely incompatible with what would be needed to fight this. Over the last forty years, the government had declawed the unions, stripped workers rights so much, that it has created a culture of working through sickness out of fear of not just losing pay, but losing their jobs because of the consequences of being sick. Basically, this is just a microcosm of the United States as a whole, with a president that is the equivalent of that boss that will give you grief for doing the right thing, main because it's “bad for the company”.

Now mix into this a disease that in most exhibits only minor repository symptoms (let's ignore the biggest issue: that people can be asymptomatic and still spread it for up to two weeks). So, at the company level, we have millions of people working through illness, spreading it to others. On a national level, you have a president who is telling the country to just work through it because it's not that bad. He was operating much like the companies ignoring the experts who say that working while sick is more financially harmful in the long run, then slight losses from having the first few people who get sick stay home. Trump ignored his advisers who told him to put in extreme measure to control the spread, the national equivalent of having sick people stay home.

He ignored the science, was influenced by his xenophobia and merely closed the borders (A good call, but he still allowed preferred countries, who already had the disease spread in their borders to come. We'll ignore how he didn't communicate with other countries before making this decision.). What he didn't take into account was the virus was spreading undetected for weeks already at that point, in a country where people are afraid to stay home when they are sick.

Trump was briefed months ago that this could potentially become a problem, and he ignored it. In the defense of many other countries, so did others. The dubious nature of this disease is that it's a problem before it's obvious. Still, by early-March, most of Europe and Asia, seeing how it ravaged Italy, South Korea, and China, were implementing extreme measures to keep this under control.
Here is where another systematic problem in the United States comes in. Many of these countries have well-established welfare systems (I'm going to ignore universal health care in this essay, because that's a whole other can of worms.) These are countries that understand that when extreme circumstances happen, the government may have to support the people. They knew that these measures would damage the economy, gut their treasury, but understood that NOT doing this would cause a widespread health crisis, resulting in thousands of deaths and hospitals that are ill-equipped. In America, you have millions of people out of work with little more than a one-time $1,200 payout. Helpful yes, but hardly the type of support that could have been offered if the general attitude of the country was that everyone should do their part to help society as a whole, instead of everybody for themselves. A country where taxes are being drastically cut for the upper crust, while the working class is being called lazy. And with as much absolute wealth the upper-class is going to lose in this crisis, it will amount to nothing compared to the relative losses that the working class is going to suffer. I'm clearly not an economist, but my armchair prediction is that countries with more distributed wealth are going to bounce back from this much quicker. And a lot of this is because they could send a significant portion of their workforce home early, yet maintain their buying power through a strong welfare system. In America, we're going to see mass-destitution. (I've since been corrected by some people on the internet and have had my attention raised to other new programs to assist those in need during this trying time. That's great news.)

So here we are in the beginning of April. Many of the countries who took action immediately before there was a problem have flattened the curve. People are still getting sick. People are still dying, but thankfully, the production of respirators and masks in many countries are (just barely) keeping up.
Back in the United States, they have finally put in the measures that most other countries did weeks ago, but only AFTER they have became the epicenter of the crisis. Thousands are dying daily and the numbers are growing exponentially. The president is still ignoring his advisers, giving false information to the country, bragging about how many people are watching his press conferences (mainly to find out what to do during worldwide emergency). In charge of this problem is not a panel of experts, but his son-in-law, a corrupt slumlord whose only business being in the White House is that he's banging a chick Trump thinks is hot. Yet, neither Trump nor Jared Kushner seem to understand how to read an exponential graph or know that it might be best to plan ahead. As states beg for ventilators, all Trump can do is accuse hospitals of stealing supplies, or states of lying about their needs. He's mobilized a handful of factories to make ventilators, but he's done it well after the need for them had been established.

Thus enters another major incompatibility. The fighting of a disease like this need to be a controlled centrally in a focused effort, but we have a country where half the population is petrified of a strong central government, and it is run by an administration that been systematically dismantling the programs and offices that would be best able to handle this crisis.

Now we have states scrambling to get things under control. Some states are taking things seriously. Others ignoring the problem. This lack of focus is doing little to contain the disease or create any concerted, unified effort to get things under control. When the government should be handling the orders and the distribution of ventilators and other necessary medical equipment, keeping prices under control and making sure that the ones with most need are being taken care of, instead, states are being forced to bid against each other in a free market that is inflating the prices, letting a few companies get insanely rich at the height of this crisis. Another example of how the American system is just not set up for the reality of this pandemic, and why it's so tragic we have a business man running the country.

Trump is refusing to take responsibility for his actions and is already creating the narrative that anybody who wants criticize him is wasting valuable time that should be used to solve the problem. And I agree, now is not the time for finger-pointing—at least not on the government level. Those of us stuck at home unemployed can handle that work). But when this is all over, America needs to take a good look and decide if this is the system they want, if this is the leader they want. He didn't make the virus. The pandemic is not his fault. This would have hit no matter what he did. This would have been an uphill battle for anyone in his shoes, because of the systematic issues I've mentioned. But there should be nobody in this world who doesn't see how much he bungled this whole ordeal. And it's tragic that so many people have to die because of it.