Absolutely every governor should take responsibility for the deaths caused by their poor actions or lack of action. Even if you do this, this does not magically erase all responsibility from Trump. Just like many deaths became unavoidable because of the actions and inaction of China, additional deaths became unavoidable because of the actions and inaction of Trump, then governors, etc. The responsibility is not mutually exclusive. China, Trump, governors all have a share of the blame. I don't get to hold China accountable, though. Trump's share of responsibility in America is by far the largest out of anyone.

We don't yet know the full extent of the cost of the Ever given blocking the Suez canal yet either. It's still very safe to say that it's a lot.

That's how science works. The stuff at the fringes doesn't count, unless some groundbreaking evidence pushes the fringe to the mainstream. Someone can publish some paper that shows plants have feelings. That "evidence" runs so counter to the mainstream that doesn't count until someone builds a machine to allow people to talk to plants to prove beyond a doubt that they are sentient, and we all have to stop eating vegetables.

First of all "both sides" get plenty of airtime. I would argue that the conspiracy side gets way more airtime than it deserves because of how this whole thing has become politicized. Normally publicity is proportional to merit. But once something a scientific topic is politicized, publicity is tied to utility in pushing a political agenda. You can consume all kinds of crackpot theories that have no merit, by watching even mainstream media like Fox News, and a lot of it is because of the former president using his office to push these meritless conspiracy theories to the point where even good journalists are forced to give airtime debunking them.

Sure. Some people think Trump is responsible for every single death. And those people are overestimating trump's responsibility. I'm not sure what the point is, of pointing out that those people are wrong, other than to create a strawman.

As I said before, there are lots of responsible parties. Furthermore, the reason a lot of these governors decided to downplay the virus and not take proper precautions, was to please Trump and his base, who have decided that owning the libs by allowing a pandemic to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans is a priority.

It's definitely real. There are a bunch of people that think the election was stolen by Venezuelan voting machines.

Here is the first study that showed up on a Google search of "effectiveness of mask mandates"

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818

The conclusion of the study

1) What data in relation to the effectiveness of mask mandates are you referring to?

2) What's the downside to mask mandates? Whatever extra percentage of people wear masks helps reduce the spread of the virus, and whatever percentage of people decide not to follow it will not have any effect compared to if there was no mandate.

We didn't always have more testing. We needed more testing because we had more cases. We have so many cases we can no longer do contact tracing. Other countries don't need to test as much because their case rates are low enough to do contact tracing. We NEED all those tests.

There can be more than one responsible party. Trump's mistakes and Cuomo's mistakes can combine to cause deaths. Cuomo's repsonsibility is limited to New York nursing homes. Trump's responsibility is nationwide.

I know republicans keep saying that that's what democrats called Trump racist for this. I'm not actually aware of any that did. If you can find some, please cite sources. Even if there are a few, so what? There are lots of people in this country and someone is going to called you racist no matter what. That's not really an excuse.

Repeat strawman

Trump's contribution to vaccines was giving them the money to develop the vaccines and getting out of the way. He also turned down the offer from pfizer for 100-500 million more doses, and lied about pfizer being part of operation warp speed and taking credit for their vaccine.

I'm sticking with 1.5. Tuly terrible, other than not getting in the way of vaccine production.

Trump has powers that he simply chose not to use like the defense production act.

That was a typo. I meant to say that the current response IS Joe Biden's responsibility.

Presumably people who died on Jan 21 should still be counted for Trump, but just for the sake of simplcity I am willing to count all deaths after January 20 for Biden.

https://www.businessinsider.com/analysis-trump-covid-19-response-40-percent-us-deaths-avoidable-2021-2

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/fulltext

I am not trying to give Biden credit for the cases lowering in general. That is most likely a combination of vaccine rollout, seasons, natural dips coming after holiday peaks, etc. We would have to compare how much cases lowered vs. how much they should have lowered. I don't think we have enough data for that yet. but we probably will eventually. That said Biden seems to be doing a pretty good job with vaccine rollout so far (He's not screwing it up).

I agree that's what it is implying. But almost everyone uses it in the face of lots of real evidence as a way to pretend that evidence doesn't exist.

Please provide a source. Everything you just mentioned is counter to what the current science suggests. It doesn't surprise me that someone can find one virologist to claim just about anything. There are a lot of people in this world. Just like you can find a doctor to claim hydroxycholroquine works against covid and something about alien DNA and demon sperm. Not everyone with some kind of credential is legitimate.

I'm not a democrat, and I'm not going to defend Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo's bad score doesn't inscrease Trump's score. They can both have bad scores.

Is 1000 an incomprehensibly large number for you? Breaching the 1000 barrier (in anything) is all it takes for you to be so impressed to have a new God? The man sent almost 46,919 tweets not even including retweets as president. If that's a number too large for you to imagine, try to think of it as 47 times the biggest number in the universe.

The united states has 4% of the worlds population and a quarter of the world's cases. WTF are you talking about? How are you going to turn that into a good response? WTF is a country similar to the United States in Europe? I'll make this easy. Any country in Europe that is doing as badly as us is also a doing a terrible job. We don't have the single worst response. Some other countries are worse. We are just one of the worst, which is sad considering we are the richest country on earh.

In regards to what Trump did correctly. Closing the border was not a bad idea. It was a bit too little too late (i.e. initially only banning some travel form one country, China), and then blaming democrats for criticizing him for closing the borders (which maybe some people did, but most didn't). It's just his normal victim roleplaying and blame diversion.

As far as most of the responsibility being at the state level, that was largely because of Trump's actions. Because of the way he wanted to both take credit for anything good that happened, and hhave a way to divert blame for things that didn't go well, he decided to leave a lot of things to the states that shouldn't have been. We had states outbidding eachother for PPE, ventilators, and test kits, rather than having a national strategy to distribute those items where they were most needed. This was all because Trump had to appeal to his conspiracy theory base that didn;t even believe the virus was real but hedging his bets and creating an avenue to blame states if things got real bad. What this is called is bad leadership. We need a president to be a good leader not a person who can take credit and avoid blame the best.

Basically my position is this. Imagine there were like 10 things that any president could have done right or wrong (like a test). A mediocre president might score 5/10. A really president would maybe score 9/10. Nobody's perfect. Trump would score like a 1.5 and is constantly bragging about it. His defender's are constantly defending him by asking "Are you saying he got those 2 answers wrong?!" No I'm saying that he got all the other answers wrong and and only even gets partial credit for some he didn't get wrong. I'm saying 1.5 is a bad score.

And yes shifting all responsibility to the states so he could wipe his hands clean of the mess is one of those things he did wrong. Had he shown good leadership and taken responsibility (as crazy as that sounds given how work averse he is), some of the responsibility would have still been on the states, just not all of it as in the "every state for themselves" environment he seemed to be fostering intentionally or unintentionally.

How long does what take before it's no longer Trump's fault? The current pandemic response is not Joe Biden's responsibility right now. All the unnecessary deaths that already happened under Trump will always be his fault. They will never magically switch to being Joe Biden's fault. They deaths that are caused by Joe Biden's mistakes will be his fault. It's not that complicated.

I'm not saying that Trump could have prevented every death, that that's what right wing media keeps claiming the bar is. So far more data based evidence suggests that Trump could have prevented about 40% of the current deaths had he acted more responsibly.

Are today's cases Trump's fault too? Honestly, yeah some of them are. Not all of them. The rate of infection wouldn't be zero, but it would be lower today had Trump acted responsibly. In that sense those deaths were preventable. Now that Biden is in charge he will face decisions that will either prevent deaths or not and he will be responsible for those. The infection rate can't be lowered instantly, but it is lowering. You deal with the hand you are dealt. Trump turned a bad hand into a clusterfuck. We'll see what Biden turns that clusterfuck into. I don't think Biden is particularly competent, but I think literally almost anyone honestly trying to solve this problem republican or democrat, couldn't even come close to doing a worse job than trump.

I don't think it's fair to expect a president to know all the right answers. They don;t have a crystal ball. But Trump wasn't even trying. In fact, it seemed like he was actively making the pandemic worse. He was mocking people for wearing masks. He was criticizing people for trying to do their jobs. He was encouraging armed protests public health measures. We are fighting a war, and Trump's not just a soldier with bad aim. He is a soldier that keeps shooting people on his side.

This orange man bad meme is dumb. It's just a way of diverting criticism without a good argument. In fact it is very Trumpian. You don't need an argument if you just come up with a short catchphrase.

No it doesn't "elude me". I already stated statistics in terms of deaths per million people (i.e. per capita). If you want to nitpick the difference between density and population, fine. But the states with the most population density and the states with the most population are the same states. So I'm not sure what the point of this distinction (that I am fine with) is.

There is plenty of literature showing the efficacy of masks in preventing the spread of disease. In fact you have to cherrypick pretty hard to find studies that suggest it isn't effective.
But you are asking for medical literature that demonstrates that a regulation is effective. That's at best on the fringes of the field of medicine. It's more in the realm of social science (i.e. a soft science). "Will mask mandates (if followed) lead to positive effects?" (a medical and scientific question), and "Will people follow mask mandates?" (a social science question) are 2 different questions that need to be untangled.
The answer to the 2nd question appears to be "Most people will follow mask mandates but a large percentage of maga cultists will refuse to."
The answer to the first question is: This seems obviously true and probably not worth the time and resources to investigate prior to implementation. We will get plenty of data on the effectiveness of mask mandates after implementing mask mandates and seeing how different communities with varying levels of compliance fare. Combatting the very real negative effects of covid-19 by controlling the spread of the disease is a higher priority than figuring out if any of the silly negative effects imagined by people are real.

He doesn't have to control the ENTIRE nation's response. The part he did control was ridiculously terrible.
Here are some things a competent president would have done.
1. Not lied about the severity of the virus. Not tell people it would disappear like a miracle. Not tell people that it was no worse than the flu.
2. Not politicized public health measures like mask wearing.
3. Not disregarded his own government's public health orders.
4. Not turned the whitehouse into a superspreader by having multple events with lots of people where mask wearing was ridiculed
Just to name a few off the top of my head.
You don't need to be an infectious disease expert to have a better response than that. All you have to be is not incpompetent.
Also your facts are totally wrong. Democrat states do not have higher death rates. They are basically the same everywhere (despite blue states being more populous). We don't have a lower death rate than sweden. The US has 1,622 vs sweden's 1,278 per million people.

Here are the two options:
1. It's not a bioweapon: The disasterously incompetent response is Trump's fault. 2. It is a bioweapon: Let's bomb the shit out of China and the horrible response is Trump's fault, and now he's guilty of treason for is disasterously incompetent response to what he knew was a bioweapon, and in the process allowed a foreign nation to kill hundreds of thousands more people in our country than would have been killed had he actually acted like it was a bioweapon rather than just saying it in an attempt to divert blame.

Are you retarded? Can you read? Trump controls OUR NATIONS RESPONSE to the pandemic. Like I said even if this was a bioweapon (which it wasn't), it just means Trump downplaying it and personally infecting everyone in the whitehouse, etc is even more incompetent. It being a bioweapon makes it EVEN MORE important to have good leadership. Saying it's a bioweapon doesn't shift the blame to China. It adds blame to China AND to Trump. If FDR said, "Pearl Harbor wasn't my fault, it was a Japanese attack" and then said "The Japanese will go away like a miracle", and did nothing about it, that would be a bad WW2 response, regardless of whatever blame Japan has. China and Japan aren't responsible for protecting us, and I don't expect them to. Our president is, and I expect him to.

Just like your comment is to divert attention from the disasterous response to the pandemic by the Trump administration. Like you said, It is undisputed that the virus came from China. It doesn't matter if it was from a farm or a lab, our former president's wishful thinking, downplaying, denials, and conspiracy theories wasted valuable time that could have been spent ramping up PPE production and testing infrastructure. Even if it was made in a Chinese lab by evil Chinese people, it is still the president's job to deal with the problem. Having 4% of the world's population and 25% percent of the cases is what utter incompetence looks like. You don't get to abdicate responsibility just because the virus came form another country even if it was a bioweapon. If anything, a bioweapon is even more serious requiring even more serious attention, not the buffoonish clownery we and the whole world saw.

I'm pretty sure it's because we they are able to believe crazy shit online and be normal in real life that this is even a thing. Before the internet you talked to your neighbors. If you brought up some crazy shit like this, your neighbor would just call you a fucking idiot and that tiny reality check would keep you from going further down the rabbit hole. Now you can find 10,000 people online willing to validate your dumb as shit beliefs and give your even more.