The costs of Covid-19
As Covid-19, which claimed its first British victim yesterday, continues to spread around the globe the World Health Organization estimates that it will soon reach most “if not all countries.” Reacting to the news, global stock markets continued their plunge into correction territory with the S&P 500 index tumbling more than 3 percent and the FTSE and Nikkei recording equally grim losses in early Friday trading.
This sudden drop in economic confidence is most evident in the United States. Donald Trump has now been at the helm of the American economy for more of the stock market’s worst single-day falls than any other president, yet he seems genuinely puzzled that his lacklustre response to the threat has rattled markets. As stocks decline sharply elsewhere, many leaders have conceded that hard choices lie ahead. But Trump is constitutionally incapable of accepting inconvenient truths. So he blustered through his key press conference, avoiding the candour with which America’s public health officials would normally address such a threat of this magnitude. Instead Trump downplayed the likely impact of the virus and oversimplified and overstated America’s level of preparedness.
The decision to place Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the crisis shows how little Trump appreciates the gravity of the situation. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has noted: “Early in his political career, Pence staked out a distinctive position on public health, declaring that smoking doesn’t kill people. He has also repeatedly insisted that evolution is just a theory. As governor of Indiana, he blocked a needle exchange program that could have prevented a significant H.I.V. outbreak, calling for prayer instead.”
Trump’s willingness to place America’s response in such incompetent hands indicates a level of ignorance, or contempt, that should give pause to even his most ardent supporters. But many of them seem to believe that the virus is fake news that is being used to tarnish their leader. Rightwing blowhard Rush Limbaugh, upon whom Trump recently bestowed a Congressional Medal of Freedom (for “decades of tireless devotion to our country”) said: “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. … [it’s] the common cold, folks.”
Fortunately more informed responses are also available to the American public. On PBS Christiane Amanpour asked Tom Frieden, former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whether the outbreak could
rival the 1918 Spanish Flu – which killed 50 million people initially and perhaps a million more, each time, it resurfaced in ’57 and ’68. Frieden replied that “we don’t know all that we need to know about this virus. We still don’t know how readily it spreads. We still don’t know how deadly it is. We know that it spreads more readily than SARS but is less deadly than SARS. [But] If you compare with the 1918 pandemic, I don’t see a scenario in which this particular coronavirus causes that kind of devastation.”
Unfortunately, expertise like Frieden’s is not yet leading America’s response to the crisis. Shortly after he took office, Trump slashed CDC funding for responding to pandemics by 80 percent. His former director of the National Security Council, John Bolton, also shut down the Council’s globalhealth-security unit in 2018, summarily dismissing its head, Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer, even while there was an Ebola outbreak in the Congo. Having dispensed with most of the resources needed for a coherent response, Trump has been forced to rely on his customary evasions and obfuscations. But a pandemic is not the sort of self-induced crisis that Trump is used to dodging.
As Krugman notes, from the start of Trump’s tenure there have been doubts about “how his administration would deal with a crisis not of its own making. Remarkably [up to now} every serious problem facing the Trump administration, from trade wars to confrontation with Iran, has been self-created. But the coronavirus is looking as if it might be the test we’ve been fearing.” With stock markets in freefall and the US government poorly prepared for the sort of disruption that China, Italy and now Iran are experiencing, Trump faces a true reckoning with Covid-19, one that may well seal his political fate. If he can rise to the challenge, reelection is all but assured; but if he maintains his customary blame-shifting and bluster, Trump will just as certainly guarantee a shaming comeuppance in November.