Just WOW
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opin...marks-another-fail-on-coronavirus/ar-BB11e9Z6
President Donald Trump has been rightly blasted for his combination of lies and incompetence when it comes to the handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
Two weeks ago he claimed that the threat posed by Covid-19 was the Democrats'
new "hoax." His administration also alarmingly
delayed conducting widespread testing of Americans for the virus.
Now, the
jaw-dropping images from numerous US airports on Saturday night mark yet another sorry milestone in Trump's failure to address this pandemic.
Words alone can't adequately describe the jarring scenes at airports in Chicago, Dallas, and New York, where people returning to the United States from European countries affected by coronavirus were forced to stand for
hours at a time virtually on top of each other. These crowds come amid non-stop calls for social distancing from healthcare experts and
even Trump himself.
It resembled something from a horror movie or some dystopian universe. But it was not — it took place right here, in the United States.
What caused this pile-up of people? Simple: A lack of planning by Trump and his administration.
On Saturday night, the Trump administration's new
"enhanced entry screenings" program went into effect to screen US citizens and permanent residents returning from Europe for the coronavirus. (Other travelers have mostly been barred from entering the country.)
Passengers must provide medical history and be checked for symptoms, such as a fever. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, former President Barack Obama implemented a
similar testing program for people arriving to the US from areas infected with the virus. (Trump in 2014 called Obama's Ebola airport testing program
a "joke" despite no reports of people stuck on line for hours).
If there had been proper planning by the Trump administration, protocols could have been put in place to ensure a smooth functioning and health conscious way to effect this new policy. Instead, it was a sea of confusion that potentially resulted in more Americans contracting the virus.
Ann Lewis Schmidt, a passenger returning from Iceland, told CNN that after arriving at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, passengers first waited in a line to have passports checked and then went on a second line to undergo medical screening.
It "seems backwards, as if someone had a fever, they should have been never allowed in these lines for four hours," Schmidt said, adding that passengers were in "very close quarters."
"So if we didn't have the virus before, we have a great chance of getting it now!"
At Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, travelers were also forced to stand in long, cramped lines with some
waiting up to seven hours to be screened as people around them were "coughing and sneezing."
Over at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, passengers said there was a shortage of government forms, no hand sanitizer and shared pens.
Alarmingly, at least three passengers screened at JFK on Saturday were sent to hospitals because of their symptoms, [URL='https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/coronavirus-airport-screening-sunday/index.html']raising concerns about the virus being possibly spread to others who were trapped waiting on the long lines in tight quarters.[/URL]
Potentially worse, another passenger, Kimberley Harris, told CNN that she [URL='https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/coronavirus-airport-screening-sunday/index.html']saw passengers at the Dallas airport skipping the long medical testing line and just getting in lines where passengers didn't have to be screened, undermining the protection protocols.[/URL]
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