Advertising
Supported by
Letters
Readers talk about a column through Ross Douthat that says the death toll in the United States with that of other countries.
For the editor:
Re “Could Trump Have Stored More Lives?” Via Ross Douthat (chronicle, Sept. 6):
Dr. Douthat devotes most of the article to comparing Covid’s deaths in the United States with those of “even countries. “This premise is because there are no comparable countries. The United States is much richer than any other country; we had a ready-to-use pandemic strategy manual; we have some of the most productive medical amenities and the most productive trained medical staff in the world.
In both theory and practice, we were able to meet this challenge. Only President Trump’s incompetence has made us comparable. If Trump hadn’t kicked out President Barack Obama’s pandemic consultant and disbanded the pandemic preparation team, the death toll would have been much lower. The monetary balance would also have been much lower.
So, to answer Douthat’s question, Trump was not “mediocre”; this was “catastrophic. “A “normal” president would have used the manual to lead a comprehensive national response, promptly adding to invoke the Defense Production Act to supply non-public protective equipment, verification equipment, pretty expensive enthusiasts and countless other essentials – I have parts we lacked.
If there has ever been a national crisis requiring a competent president, it is this: some 145,000 more dead (the number reported through David Leonhardt) are under Trump’s supervision, if not on his conscience.
Steven Kahn Caroline Kahn Princeton, N. J. The authors are, respectively, a retired surgeon and a psychologist.
For the editor:
“Could Trump have stored more lives?” I don’t feel the desire to speculate about the unkistakable. What I do know is that our president didn’t want to leave Americans stranded on a cruise ship sent in March because he didn’t want the number of Instances of Covid to increase: “I like numbers where they are. I don’t want to double the numbers for a single shipment.
I don’t know how many bodies there would be under a more “normal” president, but I know that the persistent sense of terror I feel would be reinforced by the wisdom that my government’s priorities were at the service of me and my fellow citizens. opposed to the president’s voting numbers. The fact that this president can only be counted for one thing constantly, that is, putting his interests first, is disqualifying.
Delene Wolf as San Francisco
For the editor:
Wait a second, Ross Douthat. Is Canada a country “of size and similar position” to the United States in its comparison of deaths by Covid consistent with the capita?Why did you leave out and only include latin American countries in the Americas?
The virus mortality rate in Canada is part of what we’ve had here in the United States and turns out to be a much more comparable figure in judging the president’s good fortune in protecting American lives.
Sharon Mullally,
For the editor:
Ross Douthat is investigating whether more American lives may have been stored by comparing Covid-19’s experience in the United States with that of Western European and Latin American countries. This is not applicable or informative.
Instead, the question is whether more lives may have been stored in the United States by examining how President Trump responded to Covid’s warnings when he first heard about Covid, and whether the effects on the US were the only one in the World’s Day. But it’s not the first time They would have been others if their administration had acted more quickly. strongly and powerfully with a transparent and coherent message.
Columbia University researchers, in a study published in May, decided that some 36,000 lives could have been stored at the beginning of the pandemic if Trump had taken seriously the warnings he gained in mid-January and then acted. temporarily with strong commands involving masks, distances, testing and tracing.
Instead, Trump ignored the warnings. Wanting to take credit for a strong economy he inherited from the Obama administration, he made false and misleading statements suggesting that everything was “under control” and that the virus would “simply disappear” through magic.
It seems to me that the Trump administration’s reaction is a much more applicable and better answer to Trump’s question, than the delight of other countries.
Peter R. GluckChevy Chase, Md. Es professor emeritus of political science and public administration at the University of Michigan-Flint.
Advertising