In Texas, Kyle Coleman—an emergency management coordinator in Bexar County, which is home to San Antonio—began to inventory the county's personal protective gear in early January despite what he was hearing from Trump: that "we have it totally under control." Coleman told the Post: "You would read one story one day, and then you get another story the next day, and it wasn't the same message coming out. […] But it kind of looked like it was bad, so we started ordering supplies." He thought they had enough. They didn't.



And then on Feb. 29, while Trump was telling the nation there was "no reason to panic at all," the CDC mistakenly released an infected woman who had been evacuated from Wuhan out of quarantine from the Texas Center for Infectious Disease. She "had been dropped off at a Holiday Inn near the San Antonio airport and headed to a mall where she shopped at Dillard’s, Talbots and Swarovski and ate in the food court."

As soon as Coleman found out, he called his boss, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who immediately contacted the CDC for a statement, for guidance, for anything. "They were like quiet little mouses [sic]," Wolff said. "They were all scared to talk because I think they felt they were going to get in trouble with the president of the United States because he was saying there was not a problem." That's the story of this entire pandemic, all over the country.

In Oklahoma City, Republican Mayor David Holt didn't really get it until early March, when the NBA cancelled a game between the Thunder and the Utah Jazz because of the positive test of one of the Jazz players. Until then, Hold told the Post, the whole thing was "distant on many levels."



On a March 13 conference call of mayors, he said Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan "sounded like the main character in a Stephen King novel. […] She had hundreds of cases, she had dozens of deaths." Then he got it. "Any struggles that we're having, whether it be testing or other issues, or even just convincing our public of the seriousness of the matter, there are some roots back to the time period in January and February when not all national leadership was expressing how serious this was," Holt said.

That's still the problem—with the public if not with the state and local leaders who are now having the pandemic hit home. Like for Miami Mayor Francis X. Suarez, a Republican, who literally has been in quarantine with a positive test for coronavirus. "You have the president saying he would like everybody to be at work by Easter. While aspirationally that's great," Suarez said, "we want our decisions to be driven by what's in the best interest of the health and welfare of our residents."

What's in the best interests of everyone is shutting Trump the fuck up.