Just going to point out that about 45 days ago you (and really a **** ton of people) had a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that the NCAA Basketball tournament could be cancelled...
There's a whole lot to wrap our minds around right now. Lots of previously "unthinkable" things have already happened.
I think the sooner we start wrapping our minds around the realistic "return to normal" scenarios, the better off we'll all be.
I'm not really picking on you specifically, but I think we are all struggling to accept what the likely reality is, and that is that things will not be anywhere near "normal" for at least another year, if not longer.
I won't lie, this is where we really need true national (and international) leadership. There are workable, viable paths to get us "close to normal" in the time period before widespread vaccination. Most of them involve some combination of widespread testing and contact tracing.
We really should be building out the infrastructure to accomplish those things right now. Even before we have a rapid, cheap test. I think we all know that at some point in the next several months that someone, somewhere will invent an accurate, rapid test. We don't know if that test will be a blood test, a nose swab, a spit test, or what. But we do know that we'll need a broad distribution infrastructure to actually get it out there. So let's start building that right the **** now.
The "infrastructure" includes more than just manufacturing, transportation and buildings. It includes the organization of people to coordinate it. It includes legal and social structures - it takes a while for things to "sink in" for lots of people. The campaigns for "I/we all need to participate in widespread testing once it becomes available" need to start now if we want it to actually happen. There's no reason at all why all that **** can't be started on right the **** now.
We're going to need to do "contact tracing." That's going to involve hiring and training a bunch of people to do it. There is absolutely no reason we can't start that **** right now. Hell, we have almost 20 million people who were employed 4 weeks ago who are no longer employed. Hiring them right ****ing now in order to start training them to do what will be a critical job in the hopefully very near future is the right thing to do.
That's what the president should be out there doing: advocating for **** like that. Imagine if the president made a statement like this:
"What we know is that in order to safely open up the economy, we're going to need to be able to administer a whole lot of tests, and we'll probably need to administer in an ongoing manner for over year. We don't know yet what the best test well be, but I'm proposing to build out an organization and structure so that when we have a test, we'll be able to roll it out almost immediately.
We also know that in addition to testing, we're going to need to do a lot of contact tracing in order to trace and stop new transmission chains when, not if, when they pop up. I'm proposing to immediately expand the federal Medical Reserve Corps by hiring and starting to train one million contact tracers right now. This will not only help re-employ some people who recently lost their jobs, but it will also help everyone get back to work sooner."
Everyone would quickly know what the general outlines of the plan were, and how we're going to get there. His approval rating would probably take an immediate 10-15% bump. The stock market would react similarly.
Leadership matters, and our ****-stain in chief has none.