1. Are DUpipo so utterly ignorant that it is news to them that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was in circulation outside of China weeks before news the Wuhan outbreak was leaked to the outside world (December 31, 2019)?
2. What "intel reports"? Trump learned of what are now called the SARS-CoV-2 virus and Covid-19 when the rest of the world did, no earlier than December 31, 2019.
3. How many threads are there on DU blasting Trump for xenophobia and racism when he shut down travel to and from China?
Apparently China tried to keep this secret for 2 months. The origin is unclear.
A 2-Month head start would have saved millions. Don't forget, the virus was sequenced quickly... months later.
There is evidence from cell phone location and usage data showing that the relevant area of the WVI had a ~2 week gap of zero usage in mid October. So China at least kept a lab contamination and clean-up event secret for 2 1/2 months.
What is now called the SARS-CoV-2 virus was sequenced by at least one lab in Wuhan by December 30th or 31st. A university professor, probably without government approval, gave the virus sequence to the outside world on January 10th (the same day a Chinese lab produced a test for the virus, BTW). China kept the sequence secret for nearly two weeks. Moderna had its prototype vaccine designed and lab production started within a few days of the sequence becoming known. Had China informed the world of the sequence promptly, Moderna would have been at that stage some 10 days earlier. BioNTech is less talkative, but they use the same technology as Moderna, and probably were at the same stage of development around the same time.
Alternative history is fraught with uncertainties, but had China been transparent, truthful (China lied about having evidence of human-human transmission until January 20), and timely, treatments, (obviously imperfect) preventive measures, and vaccine authorizations could all have happened 2-6 weeks earlier. Vaccine authorizations happened in early-mid December. UK and US daily new cases data on Worldometers probably begin reflecting the effects of vaccinations in January or February. Imagine how vaccinations would have impacted the November-January surge had vaccinations begun 2 or 4 weeks earlier!
DUpipo want some way to pretzellate reality to blame Trump for Covid deaths, but a wealth of facts contradict their desires. In the real world, the Trump Administration, executive branch agencies, and pharmaceuticals companies all responded in an aggressively timely way. Had Hillary been President the US would still be waiting for testing and approval of AstraZeneca's and BioNTech's (plus or minus Pfizer) vaccines, with Moderna, J&J, and Novavax far behind. At best, because even AZ and BioNTech/Pfizer benefitted from some Trump actions.
