[Hoot Gibson]

Trump is letting the medical "experts" call the shots so he can't be blamed for not being cautious enough. 540 active cases in DC and 15 deaths so far out of millions of people. Be very cautious and stay calm Hoot.

https://www.bing.com/covid/local/distric...itedstates

I am calm, JP, but I have a degree of situational awareness to which some seem oblivious. I am not blaming Trump for his handling of the situation in any way. The number of identified active cases and number of deaths from COVID-19 is irrelevant because we have no idea how many people have actually been infected nor do we know where we, as a nation, are on the graphs of the spread of the virus.

As for Trump's handling of the situation, I would expect that a competent, responsible president would not necessarily be 100 percent truthful to the public because panic could add to the death toll. In every crisis, there will be people who panic and/or hoard supplies.

My problem with some of your posts has been your characterization of folks taking what have proven to be prudent precautions as cowering under tables.

If I believed as you seem to believe that the federal and state governments have created panic by over reacting to the pandemic, then I would not have hesitated to have blamed Trump and every other politician who has taken steps to almost bring our economy to a halt.

Even if in the final analysis it becomes clear that the federal government did err on the side of caution, you will not see me blaming them for their reaction. I have been critical of many things that FDR did during his four terms in office, but I have always cut him some slack for the mistakes that he made in handling the economy during the Great Depression. When faced with an unprecedented crisis, people will make mistakes and we can only hope that they learn from those mistakes and better handle similar crises in the future. I believe that this is such an unprecedented crisis. We may never be certain that this was not the first instance of the deployment of a bioweapon.