Trump Could Have Easily Saved Thousands of Lives During the Pandemic

If Trump has done one simple thing he would have changed the course of history.  

What if Trump has very simply worn a mask?  

If he hadn’t let what I can only assume is vanity guide him we could be in a very different place today. Possibly with little to no community transmission of COVID-19.  

It is easy to point to Trump’s continual denial of the facts as they emerged & were presented to him out of Wujan. To an earlier admonishment to socially distance. To having testing ready. To REALLY stopping travel from Wujan. 

Any, any one of those things would have saved lives. All were part of a playbook of items Ronald Klain had left the Trump Administration. And that were no secret to public health officials.
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Trump also could have not scrapped nursing home regulations in 2017 called them too burdensome. Or forced meatpacking plants to work. Or made sure our stockpiles were modernized & complete. 

But by mid-March and April most of those ships had sailed. Most of those options were no longer available to Trump. Still he had one thing he could have done to stop the pandemic in its tracks & open the economy by mid-April. Wear a mask. 

Imagine if Trump has strolled out in the middle of March with a mask on his face. What would have happened? It’s easy to imagine the 35-40% of the country that are avid Trump supporters getting on board wearing masks. Much of the rest of the country already is. 

A number of scientists project that if 80% of the public wore a mask in public, the virus would have been very difficult to pass from one person to another. And when that happens every day for a period of weeks, the virus begins to rapidly die.