“Specifically: why have there been so many NEEDLESS deaths?”
Data is skewed. Our county in Florida has about 40% of deaths in long-term facilities. Many more elderly died at home or at the hospital.
Neighboring counties are at 60%.
Nearly all have comorbidity conditions.
I’m talking more about things like the policies from some governors (e.g. Governor Cuomo) forcing nursing homes to accept known infected patients. And the failure from governors to provide the resources and expertise necessary to protect elderly care facilities staff and residents from infection. And moves like Governor Newsom’s brilliant plan to burn tens of millions of taxpayer dollars putting homeless people up in hotels (indoors, which CDC is high risk) rather than leaving them where they normally are (outdoors, which CDC says is low risk). And why didn’t the states have stockpiles of PPE for their hospital personnel in case of emergency so they could effectively treat patients safely?
Dozens of examples of policies and failures like this point mainly to Democrats who utterly botched their response to this. President Trump did everything he possibly could to give those governors everything they asked for, and despite all the help from the Federal government, these fools still managed to botch this whole thing in the worst possible ways. I think these governors need to be under investigation and indictment for their roles in tens of thousands of criminally negligent homicides.