I watched most of the Coronavirus Task Force briefings. Several times Trump suggested Dr. Birx was telling him that these things would not be needed. And she confirmed that she felt they weren't going to be necessary. So it appears the scientists/experts knew it wasn't necessary from a medical standpoint. One could argue whether or not it was politically/emotionally necessary.
Edit: you can see from several posts here that building these things really did bring a lot of emotional comfort to people, which is an important part of dealing with a crisis. People really underestimate psychology in an emergency.
The primary theme of this pandemic is that we don't know almost anything about what is happening or what is going to happen. The list of wrong predictions can and has filled thousands of column inches and hours of briefings.
We expanded our healthcare capacity because of Italy and the humanitarian crisis that was occurring there. It had nothing to do with emotion. If it made people feel nice then I suppose that was a minor unintended benefit.
I agree with your sentiment and I would go one level deeper down the rabbit hole. A lot of what we've been led to believe were blatant lies. Just look at the way people are talking about reopening. There's all this talk of vaccines and testing. Those aren't going to be real solutions. A vaccine is a year away. Closing everything for a year+ would be the end of civilization. As far as testing... think about the scale of testing we would need. You'd have to basically isolate everyone, test them, and then keep the infected isolated. And you'd have to do that over a very short period of time, like a few days. We're not delivering 300+ million tests in a few days. It's not happening. Testing is useful. It's not going to be some panacea of perfection, or even particularly "good." The hard truth is we're going to eat a lot of deaths from this. And none of the experts can possibly know what is the exact right recipe to minimize deaths, either from covid or economic disaster. Any state/country/whatever that gets better results will have done so totally by luck and their solution might not have worked elsewhere for a myriad of reasons. It's all false confidence.
Just look at Remdesivir, or however it's spelled. The news corps are pushing that as a possible treatment. Except guess what? It doesn't seem to reduce your chances of dying. Worth noting, pharma companies are major advertisers for news networks. It's all been bullshit.
South Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and other countries all used Test, Trace, and Isolate to contain the virus with few cases and deaths.
You don’t actually need 300 million tests if you can stay on top of the virus, so I don’t think this is blatant lies like you’re talking about - in theory we’ve just spent 6 weeks locked down to reduce the number of active virus cases and now could transition to the test/trace/isolate approach we should have taken in February like the successful countries did.
That said I agree the opening seems to be coming too fast and no one I have seen is presenting a model where test/trace/isolate succeeds in the USA - due to political polarization there is no national plan for it. China took 87 days to lift the lockdown on Wuhan and we are going much faster than they did, while having had a much less strict lockdown in the first place.
It’s true that Redemisivir has not been scientifically proven to save lives yet, just to reduce the length of hospital stays (which means hospitals will have more capacity since each individual case stays in the hospital for a shorter time), but scientists think it may be able to reduce death rates if given earlier in the course of infection - clinical trials are still ongoing to see if this is true.
You mentioned feeling like the country is reopening too fast. Can you talk about how many deaths you expect from the virus vs deaths caused by economic distress related issues if we stay closed? I feel like talking about one without the other is missing half the story. The media has framed everything to only talk about virus related death but it's not the only cause of death.
Economic distress could be solved by improvements to the rescue package (The USA is currently able to borrow money at about 1% interest rate over 20-year terms, which is a negative interest rate when accounting for future inflation). Individual workers are already eligible for $600/week of unemployment bonus through July 25 as long as their business doesn’t re-open, for many of them their economic situation is actually better if we waited two months to reopen as they get paid more than they would working their job.
Unfortunately some businesses like restaurants are being poorly served by the PPP and treasury department regulations that don’t allow them to pay enough out of PPP to pay rent in higher-rent locations.
That could be changed, but the Federal government is counting and planning on economic pain to force states to reopen too fast instead, without tests or other measures in place that could reasonably be expected to cap or reduce new virus cases. It’s a very short-sighted plan.
Trump suggests all sorts of things, often directly contradictory, or contradicted shortly thereafter by his own experts. I'm not sure why you'd put any stock in those suggestions at this point.
Trump acknowledges he defied the experts and potentially wasted a bunch of money.
What, exactly, are you imagining is the scandal here? That Trump is lying, he didn't defy the experts, and the potential wasting of money was the fault of experts and not Trump? Is that the scandal you're imagining?
Edit: you can see from several posts here that building these things really did bring a lot of emotional comfort to people, which is an important part of dealing with a crisis. People really underestimate psychology in an emergency.