What if Trump Fought the Virus as Hard
as He Fought for His Wall?
Many
thousands of American lives would have been saved.
Opinion Columnist
·
Sept. 12, 2020, 2:36 p.m. ET
What would America be
like today if President Trump had acted decisively in January to tackle the
coronavirus, as soon as he was briefed on the danger?
One opportunity for
decisive action came Jan. 28, when his national security adviser, Robert C.
O’Brien, told Trump that the coronavirus “will be the biggest national security
threat you face in your presidency.” Trump absorbed the warning, telling Bob
Woodward days later how deadly and contagious the virus could be, according to Woodward’s
new book, “Rage.”
Yet the president
then misled the public by downplaying the virus, comparing it to the flu and
saying that it would “go away.” He resisted masks, sidelined experts, held
large rallies, denounced lockdowns and failed to get tests and protective
equipment ready — and here we are, with Americans constituting 4 percent of the
world’s population and 22 percent of Covid-19 deaths.
There’s
plenty of blame to be directed as well at local officials, nursing home
managers and ordinary citizens — but Trump set the national agenda.
Suppose Trump in
January — or even in February — had warned the public of the dangers, had
ensured that accurate tests were widely distributed (Sierra Leone had tests
available before the United States)
and had built up a robust system of contact tracing (Congo has better contact
tracing than the United States).
Suppose he had ramped
up production of masks and empowered the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention to lead the pandemic response, instead of marginalizing its experts.
Suppose he had tried
as relentlessly to battle the virus as he has to build his wall?
If testing and
contact tracing had been done right, then we would have known where hot spots
were and large-scale lockdowns and layoffs might have been unnecessary.
The United States
would still have made mistakes. We focused too much on ventilators and not
enough on other things that might have been more useful, like face masks, blood
thinners and high-flow nasal cannulas. Because of mask shortages, health
messaging about their importance was bungled. Governors and mayors dithered,
and nursing homes weren’t adequately protected.
But
many of our peer countries did better than we did not because they got
everything right but because they got some things right — and then learned from
mistakes.
Because of Covid-19,
Trump called himself a wartime president, but he didn’t heed his generals and
never ordered ammunition. In World War II, a Ford plant was configured to turn
out one new B-24 bomber every hour, yet today we display none of that urgency even
though Americans are dying from the virus at a faster pace than they fell in
World War II.
It wasn’t as if the
United States was unready. A 324-page study in
October 2019 found that America was the best-prepared country in the world for
a pandemic — but it didn’t imagine that the United States would fumble testing,
data collection, contact tracing, communications and just about every other
facet of managing a novel virus.
“The administration
made every single mistake you could possibly make,” Larry Brilliant, an
epidemiologist who early in his career helped eradicate smallpox, told me.
“We could have beaten
it back,” Brilliant said. “We could have prevented the horror story we have
now.”
Jeffrey Shaman, a
public health expert at Columbia University, calculated that
if each county in the United States had acted just two weeks earlier to order
lockdowns or other control measures, then more than 90 percent of Covid-19
deaths could have been avoided through early May.
Shaman
told me that his team didn’t model even earlier interventions, in January or
February, but that he believes it would have been plausible for the United
States to enjoy the Covid-19 mortality rate of South Korea. That would mean
almost a 99 percent reduction in mortality.
Linsey Marr, an
expert on disease transmission at Virginia Tech, isn’t sure that we could have
achieved South Korean or (somewhat higher) Japanese levels of mortality,
because both of those countries have more of a tradition of mask-wearing. But
she does believe that we could have perhaps achieved German levels (meaning an
80 percent reduction in deaths).
“We would have saved
a lot of lives,” she said. “Kids would be going back to school.”
Natalie Dean, an
expert in infectious diseases at the University of Florida, said she is
troubled by a public fatigue, a desensitization to a death toll that has
continued to pile up recently at the rate of about 1,000 a day.
Trump still hasn’t
embraced the basic step public health officials sought more than a century ago
during the 1918 pandemic of encouraging mask-wearing. Instead, he seems to have
surrendered to the virus at least until a vaccine is available — while
encouraging delusions among his supporters.
“There’s no Covid,”
an unmasked man attending a Trump rally the other day told CNN. “It’s a fake pandemic.”
When a pandemic
response has become so politicized, when leadership is so absent, when health
messaging is so muddled, when science is so marginalized, it’s easier to
understand how the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic could have
lost 190,000 citizens to the virus.
