Greets and saluts from the NYC metro area. It’s a glorious day out there, even if it’s a little chilly this morning. But I expect there to be crowds out in the parks as people begin to emerge from the forced hibernation to stop covid19 spreading. Not as much social distancing, or masks out in the parks, and that’s going to enable this to spread once more.

We’re playing with fire, and we are going to get burned. No one wants to stay at home indefinitely, but without aggressive testing and far more screening and contact tracing, we’re going to be shut back down before we know it.

So of course the NYT runs a mess of a story claiming that we could have had 36,000 fewer deaths had Cuomo shut things down a week or two sooner than he did.

Um… yeah, except everyone from Trump on down was claiming that it was an overreaction and questioned Cuomo’s New Rochelle order as being fascist/overreaction.

Cuomo did respond slower than Newsom in CA. That’s true. By all of a couple of days.

Trump abdicated his role to protect the nation from all threats, foreign and domestic. He let this spread uncontrolled nationwide. He ignored the briefings and PDBs. GOPers downplayed this to the public, all while they were going to their stock brokers to cash in on the pandemic (Loeffler, Burr, etc.) Cuomo didn’t have the health experts that Trump has at his disposal and made the decision with incomplete information.

Trump had the ability to ramp up testing, use the WHO test and deliver them by the thousands to NY. He didn’t. NY had to scratch build a testing scheme to deal with the crisis that quickly spiraled out of control. Trump continued to believe that cases would soon be zero back in March. We’re now about to cross 100,000 dead Americans and he’s too busy calling for things to reopen to care.

Do those days make a difference? Absolutely. But Trump wasn’t demanding closures. He still doesn’t. He’s chafing at all the closures and wants things opened up even before cases have started declining in states.

Trying to blame states for a disastrous federal response. That’s what the GOP is going to turn to in effort to deflect from Trump’s disastrous response to covid19.

You’re carrying Trump’s agenda all while trying to preserve access.

Pathetic.

— lawhawk (@lawhawk) May 21, 2020

Maggie’s doing Trump’s heavy lifting.

And pointing that out means that the Trumpists calling you a China lover come out of the woodwork (and make it easy for you to block).