I've been telling people about the numbers problem the US has. Namely, that we're
fucking huge. We're the third most populous nation in the world, behind China and India. And we're a free society that's actually somewhat efficient.
China is an authoritarian shithole where they could
literally have you shot for leaving your apartment block during quarantine, and they definitely haven't reported their numbers truthfully. India tried to lock down early on but they're losing their grip on it and now their numbers are
spiking. No matter how you cut it, there's no way to have so many people in a nation and not have
ugly numbers to show for it.
Now let's look at it objectively. Currently, we're at almost 6.5 million reported cases of COVID-19. That is almost exactly 2% of our population reported as being infected. With those numbers, the lethality rate is ~3%. The number of infected is likely a lot higher because we just can't test everybody like many (much smaller) European nations and South Korea did, but the number of dead by COVID is likely close to the truth because anything we miss gets compensated by how much the numbers get bloated by the odd motorcycle crash. So lethality is closer to 2%, if not lower.
The Spanish Flu infected about one third of the entire world population. One third. We haven't reached one
tenth yet. We're around two tenths of one tenth. There's not much Trump (or Hillary, if she were in power)
could have done. This is a viral infection with respiratory symptoms and a long latency and incubation period.
It's going to spread no matter how hard you lock shit down. It's important to take measures against it, absolutely. But this shit got politicized because... again, Orange Man Bad.
I'm not going to say we should be cheering and holding great rallies to celebrate our pre-emptive defeat of COVID-19. This thing is going to be running through America for a
long time and we'll be feeling its effects (both in terms of public health and the economy) even longer, and trying to be more sanitary (wash your fucking hands!) and social-distance-y is a good idea regardless. But all told Trump didn't do nearly as bad as he could, and definitely not nearly as bad as people say he did.
Edit: derp. Got the percentage of infected wrong (seriously, don't trust me with a calculator). The point should still stand, though.