Originally Posted By: Matter-eater Man
 Originally Posted By: Wonder Boy

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Obama declared a national emergency when 1,000 people were already dead from Swine Flu/H1N1 in 2009, and millions infected.
Trump declared a national emergency yesterday when less than 50 were reported dead and about 1,700 diagnosed infected.

Which president do you think is acting more in proactively/effectively and in the interest of the American people, M E M?



Obama did, you can lie all you want but I’ve seen plenty of fact checks on how conservatives are trying to use the swine flu comparison.


The "factchecks" are again written by the Washington Post (Factcheck) and Tampa Tribune (Politifact), which 75% of the time overwhelmingly target Republicans/conservatives to deconstruct and paint as liars. Papers that have expressed their clear partisan hatred of the president (and Republicans in general).
I'm not saying they can't post facts, but they do consistently reach for a context to label a Republican as "somewhat true" or "partially true" when they are just plain TRUE.

Specific to the declaration of a national emergency, Obama had declared lesser emergencies prior to declaring a national emergency. The factcheck spin-sites hide that. It was only when 1,000 people were already dead in 2009 from Swine Flu/H1N1, six months AFTER the crisis began, that Obama declared a national emergency. As Trump did Friday, 6 weeks after suspending flights from China, at a point when there were about 40 deaths.
Swine Flu ultimately infected 59 million people. Only a national emegency declaration allows the relaxing of bureaucracy and massive sudden move of resources that we are seeing now.



 Originally Posted By: M E M

Obama declared an emergency when there was something like 20 confirmed cases in the US. He didn’t play it down or contradict his administration’s experts all the way like Trump has. The CDC didn’t have the same problems with testing that it is having here. Obama didn’t classify the deliberations either like Trump has. And when there was a vaccine available some of your conservative heroes like Rush and Hannity pushed conspiracy stories. You continue to cite numbers that are artificially low because this country doesn’t have enough tests. Trump has known this was an issue and that we’ve been flying blind mostly while the virus has spread. We don’t know who decided not to use the WHO test but instead a whole new one that ended up being flawed btw. The CDC isn’t saying nor is the Trump administration. Who could be being protected here?


The numbers I cite are the numbers. CONFIRMED cases. Both Trump and CDC have said the numbers will see a rise when testing begins, to diagnose already infected cases.
And despite the delay in available tests, Trump way more than Obama shut down flights from China, and now Europe, to contain the spread.

I watch Hannity regularly, and never saw the demagoguery that you allege. There's a difference between expressing concerns, and engaging in hysteria and disinformation.

While I'm typing this I'm listening to the opening editorial on The Next Revolution (a populist show that I like because it holds both parties accountable for corruption and disinformation) and he was expressing concerns about how bad this crisis could get in the U.S., urging the building of auxilliary hospitals to prepare, and prevent U.S. hospitals from being overwhelmed. If it were Obama he were criticizing, you would characterize that as fomenting panic and "conspiracy theories". But it is the same warning and concern, the same standard, Fox had regarding Obama, and the 2003 SARS outbreak under W. Bush.

I heard a similar bio-security and infectious disease expert, Michael Osterholm express fears of under-preparation with a lack of hospital staff and respirator machines on Tucker Carlson a few nights ago. He was angered at the complacency of the Medicare/Medicaid head who was interviewed just before him. Far from Fox being just the "everything is great" propaganda you allege, that only targets Obama. Likewise Lou Dobbs on FBN the last few nights. Likewise Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. While not inciting panic, they express there is a possibility hospitals could be overwhelmed.
And as I cited with the BBC News video I linked, both the U.S. and U.K., and probably all nations dealing with this, are trying to "flatten the curve" and avoid that spike that overwhelms the system.
See the Australian Four Corners video I posted above, showing exactly how bad it got in Wuhan province. State officials went building to building and melted the locks with welding torces so people could not leave their apartments! Basically trapping them to die in their homes, if infected.

Perhaps the brutal authoritarian measures the Chinese used prevented the crisis from being even worse there. One commentator I saw speculated that our unwillingness to so brutally contain the infected population could lead to a wider outbreak in the U.S., and cost more lives. But I suspect (as do most nations) that thousands more died than is officially reported in China, and "treatment" was mostly rounding them up and leaving them somewhere out of sight to die.