Fox/Trump Immoral Handling of covid19

If we're speaking on how things are being handled right now, I think they're generally good, though I'd say most of the responsibility for those effective efforts have been on the state and county levels. It took quite a while for the federal government to provide much in the way of guidance, and even then, I haven't seen them working very closely with states to deal with more specific problems each state is managing. That being said, while the current federal response is laudable in many ways, I don't think there is any reasonable defense for how Trump handled the early stages of this outbreak. His attitude was largely dismissive and minimizing. He claimed several times that it would simply disappear like a miracle and seemed most concerned with how well he appeared rather than actual issues of spread. Frankly, the continued lack of access in many locations to basic tests for COVID-19 still stands as a massive failure to me - detection is key to prevention, and yet we're still falling flat on our faces in this regard. Is anyone going to seriously argue that Trump's disbanding of the NSC directorate for global health and security and biodefense was a good choice at this point? 

@bmdrocks21

I'm honestly not sure how a wall has or would have any meaningful effects on the spread of COVID-19 for multiple reasons. First, what we have of a wall didn't stop them and, I would argue, wouldn't have stopped them from coming in. Illegal immigrants can and have circumvented physical barriers to entry. Second, these people were caught crossing the border, which means that their entry into the US was stopped. If anything, this kind of entry makes it simpler to ensure that we take appropriate precautions for everyone crossing over who could be infected. Third, COVID-19 is already here, in every state. Having a few immigrants cross the border doesn't suddenly increase our disease burden by any appreciable amount, and the notion that because they're Chinese they somehow present more of a threat is problematic in and of itself. 

@SupaDudz

A couple of inaccuracies in your post. The virus is deadly to more than just senior citizens - it's because they're largely immunocompromised that it causes a lot more problems in the elderly, but the same is true of anyone who has a weakened immune system. The notion that there are false positives may be accurate, but it's extremely unlikely that flu cases are testing positive in the same fashion. They're extremely different viruses. Other coronaviruses may yield false positives, but I don't think the flu would. 

I get that not everyone's taking the precautions they should, and honestly, limited social interaction seems fine to me as long as you're taking precautions while doing so. That being said, I think there are a lot of people who just aren't taking this seriously at all, and whether that's the elderly or the young, they're both increasing the harms that will be caused by the disease and lengthening the duration of the pandemic by doing so.

For me, I've largely cut off interpersonal contact that isn't through a phone or computer screen. Any visits with friends are going to be with maybe 1 or 2 people at most. My wife is one of those immunocompromised, vulnerable people, so I feel very acutely how much this matters within my own life. My birthday is coming up, as is Passover, and I unfortunately plan to spend those in social isolation. It's frustrating, but I feel it's necessary. 

"Better physical barriers make it easier to block illegal immigrants from entering the country."

I still haven't been convinced that this is true. The number of illegal immigrants coming into the country was declining when no walls were going up, and it has largely continued to decline. If you have evidence that physical barriers have worked/will work, I'd like to see it.

"If you cannot control who comes into your country, it is very difficult to have a successful quarantine."

Again, I disagree. I don't think a trickle of other people into the country actually does much to disrupt a quarantine because reduced social interactions are still reduced with, say, a couple hundred other people in the mix (though, to be clear, we don't have a quarantine in most parts of the country - shelter in place rules basically allow people to go out anyway, so I don't see how having a few others in the mix who may also have the virus suddenly escalates the problem). Whether they know our quarantine procedures or not seems largely irrelevant to me - they aren't likely to pass it to other people because other people are staying out of public spaces where they could do that. If they're not engaging in social distancing right now, then they're already putting themselves at risk. How does this pose a substantially increased threat to those, or for that matter, any other people?

"These immigrants know that our hospitals won’t refuse them care, so that creates a huge incentive for individuals, especially sick ones, to attempt to enter the country to receive treatment."

This seems largely non-unique to me. Plenty of people are already flooding emergency rooms with all manner of respiratory diseases. I fail to see how a small trickle of people from other countries coming in does any substantial harm above what already exists.

"I think we certainly should have set up travel restrictions much sooner, as well. If you can prevent sick people from entering the country, you can pretty effectively combat a pandemic."

Maybe. I'm not so sure that travel restrictions do much to actually manage disease spread, largely because it is already here and spreading. There are simply far more cases here now than are coming in from other countries. Hence, I disagree with the latter statement. The pandemic is here, and it's likely already spread far wider than we know.

"We probably should have begun disease testing much sooner as well."

Completely agree.

"That all being said, this virus doesn’t appear to be very serious to me. The death rate, except for the very old with preexisting health conditions, is incredibly low. Really, only those individuals and those working in close proximity with them should be quarantined. Unless something is being hidden from us, this is just media-induced, irrational panic."

I pretty thoroughly disagree with this. It's pretty serious, and for those with weakened immune systems, getting it is very nearly a death sentence. That's a big problem for a lot of people, and while working in close proximity is one way to get the virus, literally any interaction can pass the virus from one person to the next. And much as you're correct that complications from the disease are minimal in those under 65, that is precisely the problem. Younger people still get and spread the virus, even without showing any symptoms whatsoever. It's much more deadly than any pandemic we've seen since SARS, and SARS didn't spread nearly so rapidly as this. You might argue that that shouldn't have yielded this strong of a response, but the numbers of infected will soar in the coming weeks. We will see that the disease burden is far larger than we know right now. In a manner of speaking, this is hidden from us, but only insofar as the testing has been too minimal to detect it. Speaking as someone who knows something about disease spread (note: I am neither an epidemiologist nor an expert in human viruses, though I am a microbiologist and am more than a little familiar with the scientific literature in these areas), this is serious, and I think any effort to minimize the impact of the disease does more harm than good because it encourages more people to interact more often, which will spread the disease. It may not be a huge impact to you, personally, but to others this disease is devastating. And it's not going away anytime soon.

- The terrain on which these walls have been/are being built is very different. From your source:

"'Most of the Israeli fence goes through open, arid terrain. Easy to access, easy to build, easy to monitor with agents,' Jones said.

- The legal response has been different, and it has been much better correlated with Israel's success. From your source:

"The number of illegal border crossings decreased drastically "in an extremely short time" after the implementation of an "Anti-Infiltration Law" in mid 2012, Jakubowicz said. Under the law, individuals caught illegally entering Israel could be detained for up to three years, Jakubowicz said. The number of people illegally crossing Israel’s southern border decreased after the law came into effect, even though the fence was not fully completed, he said."