This article places a fair amount of blame on Dr. Birx and helps explain why she stuck around. My impression was she was mostly useless, but reportedly she was frequently overly optimistic and the Trump decision makers partly relied on that.
https://www.startribune.com/inside-the-trump-administration-s-rush-to-abandon-leadership-role-on-the-virus/571821141/Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Her model-based assessment failed to account for a vital variable: how Trump’s rush to urge a return to normalcy would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.
they focused on two more questions: Had the virus peaked? And had the government given the states the tools they needed to manage the remaining problems?
On the first question, Birx was optimistic: Mitigation was working, even as many outside experts were warning that the nation would remain at great risk if it let up on social distancing and moved prematurely to reopen.
The group believed they had succeeded on the second question, too, although shortages of protective gear continued in some places (and would flare again months later).
The whole Trump health team: Fauci, Birx, Redfield, Azar, Adams, Hahn, Giroir have all made serious mistakes and done a poor job. The only one who seemed to know what they were talking about was Messonnier, who was quickly sidelined for providing honest, accurate information (when Trump was so clueless he was away in India).
After 15 days of shutdown, Trump wanted to reopen. But was persuaded by Fauci and others that another 30 days would be necessary. If the lockdowns were extended another 2 weeks, mask use encouraged/mandated and the lockdowns were stricter -- most of the disruption and illness and death the US is experiencing could/would have been avoided.
And it's not hindsight, it's what China and South Korea and Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore and to a lesser extent Japan all did effectively (Japan got caught up in trying to hold the Olympics and so lied to their citizens and misrepresented case numbers and tried to pretend things were normal instead of viral).
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