What Hoax?

In this week’s letters (3/26), Brian Palmer demonstrated just how fast the lame excuses of Trump supporters become obsolete. He called COVID-19 fake, saying that “only” 170 people have died. As I write this, the death toll is 10 times that: more than 100,000 confirmed infections, and that number is probably low because testing is so inadequate thanks to the sheer incompetence of Palmer’s hero, Donald Trump. At the rate we’re going, that number will probably be over a million by Trump’s Easter “no problem” fantasy, and yes, deaths will be over 100,000.

Trump’s cuts to CDC, the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Security Council’s pandemic response team have led to this disaster. The Obama administration left him a detailed pandemic playbook which apparently got lost on a shelf somewhere after 20 January 2017, and gathered dust.

This disaster could have been mitigated, if not for Trump’s obsession with destroying all things Obama out of pure spite.

Gary Frazier

Eugene