US wasn’t prepared with response to coronavirus

Editor:

When Obama was President we faced a pandemic – H1N1, also called the “Swine Flu.” (We had H1N1, H3N2 and H5N1  a triple assortment of bird, swine and human flu viruses further combined with a Eurasian pig flu virus, leading to the term “swine flu”.)

With COVID, now the danger is like slowly drowning from the fluid, scars, and lesions in your own lungs. A person is carrier before symptoms hit. We have few tests available months despite being months into it. It’s a pandemic closing countries.

You have heard otherwise (you know from whom) but look it up. The fact is we are 2 to 3 months behind 2009 when President Obama declared a National Emergency with swine flu. If we had made an emergency declaration at that early stage now we would have been able to purchase WHO test kits from Germany immediately.  (The Congo of all places had theirs in early January.)

The fact is that back in ’09 pigs and poultry around the world were destroyed the moment the virus appeared. Hospital waivers like those announced Friday were issued immediately. Despite all that, there were 12,000 dead from it just here in the US! It was so sad.

Unlike ’09 this time we find store empty shelves as we need to fend for ourselves! It took a stock market free fall and the financial community to force the Government to listen to science. We lag the world in testing and only now are ramping up our response(s).

Hate and despise President Obama all you want, but face fact. He was elected to lead and he made the hard calls. It was a lesson in leadership that was under appreciated at the time.  Perhaps it was simply what we knew to expect from a President.

In light of all the turmoil I think it’s appropriate to take the time to think back and publicly thank him.

Conrad F. Cropsey

Albion