For the record, while Americans do what needs to be done now

[Pete F.]

The government has contingency plans for everything. Everything. For the fall of the Berlin Wall, for a Soviet first strike, for the emergence of MUTOs. These plans might not be good. They might be bare-bones or outdated. But the point of the plans isn't to have a cheat-sheet ready the minute a crisis strikes. The point is to have people already exposed to the idea of the crisis so that, when it hits, they're not starting from zero. New presidents are briefed on many of these plans. And as an incoming president, Donald Trump's team was briefed on the possibility of a world-wide pandemic:POLITICO obtained documents from the meeting

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000...712fe-79680897

and spoke with more than a dozen attendees to help provide the most detailed reconstruction of the closed-door session yet. It was perhaps the most concrete and visible transition exercise that dealt with the possibility of pandemics, and top officials from both sides — whether they wanted to be there or not — were forced to confront a whole-of-government response to a crisis. The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount” . . .
Asked whether information about the pandemic exercise reached the president-elect, a former senior Trump administration official who attended the meeting couldn’t say for sure but noted that it wasn’t “the kind of thing that really interested the president very much.”
“He was never interested in things that might happen. He’s totally focused on the stock market, the economy and always bashing his predecessor and giving him no credit,” the person said. “The possibility things were things he didn’t spend much time on or show much interest in.
“Even though we would put time on the schedule for things like that, if they happened at all, they would be very, very brief,” the former official continued. “To get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard.”

[Got Stripers]

Sounds just like Trump, it's about him, always has been and of course his beloved stock market.

He said it wasn't real.
He said it's contained.
He said it would disappear very soon.
He blamed it on the democrats.
He shared his hunches.
He overruled his scientists.

He did everything he could do to downplay and keep his image up, until the expanding pandemic finally forced the messaging to change. Catch-up only works if you are Tom Brady in his prime, there are no forth quarter miracles coming our way on this one, unless your a team in need of a new QB.

I'm only invested at a risk level of 3 on a 1-10 scale and I've lost a boatload of investment and I'm bracing for more losses. I'm healthy and can absorb those, but I pity the younger working men and women in a higher risk portfolio, or someone who was close to retirement and didn't bail out, it's a hard thing to watch your retirement plan taken down by 20%, 30%, 40%.