April 1st 2020

By Mark Sumner

Daily Kos

The United States is in a very bad place in the novel coronavirus pandemic. With more cases than any other nation on the planet, health care systems under strain in cities across the nation, and a rising case fatality rate to accompany that growth, the outlook is nothing less than dire. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned, the U.S. could be looking at between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths related to COVID-19 before the primary pandemic is past. And there are reasons to believe those numbers may be optimistic.

No matter that Donald Trump says, that does not mean he did a “good job.” It means that, with months of warning and near-infinite resources, he did a worse job than every other government on the entire planet—a job so awful that when a decade from now someone is unlucky enough to think of Trump, this is what they will remember. This is all they will remember. There was a crisis, Trump failed the nation, and the cost was many, many times worse than 9/11.

Donald Trump may not have actually received a memo entitled “Coronavirus determined to strike in the United States,” but he certainly received its equivalent a hundred times over. From the first revelations by the World Health Organization, it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 represented a genuine threat to the entire world. It was so clear by mid-January that, following a briefing on Jan. 16, Republican senators ditched millions of dollars in stocks in anticipation of the crash ahead.

Sen. Richard Burr didn’t just move around a small part of his portfolio—he bailed from the market with almost everything he had. Sen. Kelly Loeffler switched her investments around to benefit from a nation stranded at home. That’s how clear the coming disaster was based on the information available just over two weeks after the outbreak in China drew the attention of the world.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, made public appearances all through January warning that there were dozens of “suspect cases” within the United States, some of them coming from people who presented themselves to health care providers with symptoms, indicating that community spread might already be underway. 

In numerous briefings over the following weeks, Messonnier made it clear that the virus was likely to “gain a foothold” in the United States, the idea that the virus could be stopped by suspending flights to China was wishful thinking, and that the nation needed to prepare measures to slow the spread of the virus. At the same time, the World Health Organization rapidly increased warnings about the novel coronavirus, reaching their maximum level of threat announcement by Jan. 30.

It was also on that day that Donald Trump actually placed travel restrictions on China—11 days after the first known case from someone returning from the affected region, and a full week after the airlines had already moved to suspend service. That’s the action he’s still bragging about, even as Rome burns.

One day later, Messonnier warned that the consequences of underreacting would be infinitely worse than the cost of overreacting. Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch warned, “I think it is likely we’ll see a global pandemic. If a pandemic happens, 40% to 70% of people world-wide are likely to be infected in the coming year.” Throughout February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted weekly scenarios that indicated that “between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected” and an estimate of 480,000 deaths was viewed as “conservative” unless swift action was taken.

But Trump failed to act, much less overreact. Instead, he continued to downplay the threat of the virus, to declare that closing the “borders” with China solved the issue, and to tell his rally crowds that the virus was a Democratic “hoax.” After Messonnier’s warning on Feb. 25 that Americans should expect that “disruption to everyday life may be severe” and that hundreds of thousands could die, she was sidelined from further appearances.

Trump was reported to be furious … because Messonnier’s claims “spooked the stock market.” In fact, Messonnier’s dire warnings came just a day after Trump had tweeted that “the coronavirus is very much under control in the USA” and said “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

So perhaps it’s not that shocking that the White House Coronavirus Task Force includes economic policy adviser Larry “Air Tight” Kudlow, and Treasury Secretary Steven “No Lasting Effect” Mnuchin, but not the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases who warned about the impact of the virus weeks in advance.

Every single thing that has happened—from the need to enact suppression measures early to prevent an explosion of cases, to the shortage of protective gear for health care workers, to the need for additional ventilators and ICU facilities, to the lack of coordinated federal testing—all of it was laid out by Trump’s own people, for weeks, at a time when action would have genuinely helped.

It wasn’t just that Trump ignored the results of a simulation conducted with his transition team, or that he dismissed the pandemic response team within the National Security Council, or that he scrapped the DHS early warning system for pandemics, or that he brushed off results of tests that happened as recently as last fall. He openly ignored the warnings of his own staff, being made repeatedly, at a level that was terrifyingly clear.

Already the United States is seeing the outcome of Trump’s beyond criminal incompetence, overt defiance of facts, and continued denial of responsibility. Those results are in the form of refrigerated trucks filling up with bodies. They’re in the form of hospital ships—usually sent by the U.S. to relieve developing nations in the throes of crisis—being welcomed into America’s greatest ports. They’re in the form of field hospitals spreading across green parks and conference centers becoming makeshift emergency rooms.

A pandemic may have been inevitable, as experts were predicting—and Trump was denying—months ago. But the level of damage being done to the United States at every level, including lives, was not. Trump hasn’t done a “very good” job. He has done the worst job in the world. And he has absolutely no excuse.

Posted with permission