No one was tested for coronavirus, no one questioned about any possible symptoms, no temperatures were taken, notwithstanding that a fellow passenger on the cruise ship had earlier tested positive for Covid-19 (details here). Many passengers then traveled to the airport where they boarded flights.
This incident provides a perfect snapshot of Donald Trump and his administration's supreme incompetence. At least eight cruise ships in the last two months have had either coronavirus outbreaks or suspected cases that later proved positive.
Yet the Trump administration has utterly no plan for how to deal with cruise ships, even though the President has direct chain of command control over the Coast Guard, which in turn can order any ship to be held in a port and the passengers kept aboard.
The coronavirus pandemic, as of this writing, has had more than 170,000 confirmed cases worldwide with more than six thousand deaths. All of those cases can be traced back to one man who traveled out of Wuhan, China, in mid-November of last year.
Who knows how many people may eventually be infected by allowing the ship to disembark yesterday and for the untested passengers to scatter to the wind, many on confined flights where transmission of the virus would be easy. But one thing is known — every single person who becomes ill because of this debacle will have been sickened and possibly killed by Trump's ineptitude.
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