If--God forbid--we had a sociopathic narcissist as President of the United States in a time of grave crisis, we might see a tweet like this from him:
@realDonaldTrump
As usual with Trump's tweets, there's a lot of nastiness, divisiveness, us-vs-them-ism, and a whopper or two to unpack. However, let's just focus on "... in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success".
In other words, what we do about the coronavirus pandemic should be determined by how it might impact him. That is pure narcissism.
Epidemiologists--experts who devote their lives to studying, understanding and modeling epidemics and pandemics--tell us that stringent steps now can beat this virus down to a manageable level in a month or two--as the Chinese and a few other countries have managed to do. That would allow our health system to continue to function, and researchers to develop treatments or a vaccine. This painful-but-necessary choice might mean thousands of deaths in the US.
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