There were zero preventable COVID deaths in America with the possible exception of New York State (killer Cuomo). Not even Pennsylvania (ugly man in a dress) counts.She's just one of 514K+ died as the result of GOP tried to keep Trump in WH.
— Senate Banana Republicans (@ForbiddenReali1) March 2, 2021
Remember "flatten the curve"? The point of that public policy was not to prevent Wuhan Flu deaths, because that has been impossible since Chairman Xi let his bioweapon leave the city of Wuhan. The point was to spread out the deaths over a longer timespan, so that the mythical "overwhelmed hospitals" didn't happen. Remember this graph?
That's the only possible measure of preventable deaths: our public policies were designed to merely keep the number of seriously ill patients low, on the theory that there could be people who would survive COVID if they were in an ICU bed but would die if none were available. Everybody else: the people who would die with or without an ICU bed or never even got near one? They were (sensibly) written off. And it wasn't the "GOP trying to keep Trump in the White House" who was doing that, it was basically every country in the world (which was the whole issue I had last March in the post linked to above):
Instead what we've seen is that almost every political jurisdiction in the world taking the exact same actions at nearly the exact same times. With a couple exceptions (eg. Canada still letting planeloads of people in from Red China weeks after Trump and Putin "colluded" to both block direct travel) things are progressing everywhere at the same rate. Elections, pace President Monkey, didn't seem to matter after all. It doesn't matter if you elect a conservative (Kenney, Ford, Pallister, Trump, Johnson, Kemp) or a liberal (Rat Bastard 2.0, Newsom, Moon, Legault, Sánchez, Irish Poofter). It doesn't matter if your government is formed by a left-right coalition (Italy, Sweden, Germany, Japan) or if you don't get to choose your government at all (Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia). In late February your government wanted you to self-isolate if you traveled abroad or had flu symptoms. In early March citizens were being repatriated from cruise ships. By March 12 your sports league was cancelled. By March 13th your schools were cancelled. By March 17th your bars and restaurants were closed down. By March 20th your borders were closed to nonessential travel. Sure some areas are more intense (Spain was on lockdown as of March 14th even though Queerbec bars were still serving people almost a week later), but the pattern is pretty consistent.
Appropriately enough considering who posted the tweet above, I even crack a Russian collusion joke in there. While there are a few GOP names in the list above, most of the leaders mentioned or alluded to have nothing to do with the American Republican Party (and in many cases even conservatism as a whole).
In most if not all of those countries, the number of preventable deaths is close to zero as well. Italy and Spain might be the only two countries on that list: most other countries didn't come close to having their healthcare systems overwhelmed...even locally it was just Montreal and New York City bringing down their larger jurisdictions. Mexico and Ecuador (both GOP hotspots, natch!) were the other locales with a possibility of excess deaths caused by overwhelmed hospitals. Despite much consternation, it didn't even happen in the UK.
Did New York have any deaths that could have been prevented if stronger measures were taken earlier? Possibly, but then the followup question has to be whether any federal government policies could have realistically been taken. The major ones that come to mind are border closures (Trump was ahead of the world curve) and the U.S. Navy hospital ships. The hospital ship sent to NYC covered less than 200 patients, far less than expected, indicating that even if hospitals had been overwhelmed before it arrived the effect would be minimal.
Which means the thesis holds: the United States had zero deaths that President Trump could have prevented.
Ashlii Babbitt's death, of course, was the responsibility of the cop who shot her. Hey, your rules and not mine!
