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More than one critic of U.S. President Donald Trump has observed that Trump seemingly has a tweet for everything. That is, whatever the situation today might be, one can find an old Trump tweet about it (or something similar) -- and more often than not that tweet will be a criticism of how someone else dealt with that situation. One such example was highlighted in the spring of 2020, while the U.S. was dealing with the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic: The background to the Trump tweet from October 2014 featured above was the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa that began in 2014. As the outbreak worsened and Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) spread to countries outside West Africa in August 2014, the Obama administration had to formulate policy for protecting the U.S. against it. Trump (then a private citizen) began tweeting that August, and more frequently and insistently throughout September and October, that the U.S. should ban flights from the affected West African countries. Well into October, however, Democrats in Congress and in the Obama administration still differed over the merits and practicality of implementing a West African travel ban: At that time, the Obama administration did not implement a full travel ban but rather implemented travel restrictions that forced passengers originating from affected West African countries to enter the U.S. through one of five airports with screening procedures in place. Dr. Craig Spencer, who had been working with Doctors Without Borders in Guinea treating Ebola patients, completed his work there on Oct. 12, 2014, before the U.S. travel restrictions were put in place. Spencer then returned to the U.S. from Guinea, traveling through Europe and arriving in New York on Oct. 17, but several days later he fell ill, was hospitalized, and became the first person in New York City to test positive for the Ebola virus. When it was learned that the night before his hospitalization Spencer had traveled on a subway, visited a bowling alley, and then taken a taxi home, health officials began searching for anyone who might have come into contact with him. Spencer was the doctor who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa referenced in Trump's tweet: Several months after those events, Spencer published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which (in the words of Vox) he blamed the media (and self-serving politicians) for stirring fear and hate [and] unnecessarily vilifying returning humanitarians like himself despite the fact that we know from science it would have been almost impossible for him to transmit the virus. That letter read (in part): The Occupy Democrats meme reproduced above is correct in noting that the overall impact of the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak on the U.S. was a total of 11 confirmed cases and two deaths: As of this writing (mid-may 2020), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was reporting a total of 1,384,930 COVID-19 cases in the U.S., with 83,947 deaths: Although the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions on persons entering the U.S. from China in early February 2020 as the COVID-19 virus was spreading internationally, an estimated 430,000 people flew to the U.S. from China between Dec. 31, 2019 (when China first informed the World Health Organization about cases of the coronavirus in Wuhan) and the implementation of those travel restrictions a month later. Those restrictions also included exemptions for U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and their relatives, which allowed nearly 40,000 more people to enter the U.S. from China in the two months after Trump imposed those restrictions.
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