If leadership had been proper, perhaps tens of thousands of people would still be alive now.
To point out just a few of the several problems with this psuedo-logic:
a) Under the US Constitution, the power to order quarantines, shutdowns, and other health-related matters lies with state governors, not the President. The state with by far the highest death toll is New York, led by Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo -- a man for some reason roundly praised by the media for his "handling" of the virus. In supreme irony, had Trump attempted to order such shutdowns, he would have been guilty of an impeachable unconstitutional act -- which is what Congress was busily accusing him of when this epidemic began, rather than themselves taking any positive action to address it.
b) Some nations which quickly ordered shutdowns have done as bad or worse than the US, whereas other nations which did nearly nothing have fared much better. The primary factor correlating Covid deaths is not national policy, but a simple measure of how much community spread the disease had incurred before China finally stopped lying and admitted Covid was a highly infectious disease capable of rapid human-to-human spread.
c) Media sources originally predicted that the virus would kill "3 to 11 million people", and that hundreds of thousands would die due to no more than a lack of hospital beds and ventilators. Instead, thanks to a rapid federal response providing assistance to states,
not one single person has gone without a hospital bed or ventilator. Additionally, the federal government's unprecedented support of medical research programs has not only given us by far the fastest vaccine creation in history (less than half the time the media said it could be done), but by changing FDA regulations, a number of new treatments which have dramatically improved survivability rates.
