TheViews: Why Trump failed to handle Covid crisis
Coronavirus was supposed to be China’s Chernobyl. It’s ended up as the West’s Waterloo
AsI watched the first TrumpBiden debate, a vision popped into my head. I imagined that the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party had also gathered to watch the debate — but its members decided to make it more entertaining by playing a drinking game. Every time Donald Trump said something ridiculous or embarrassing for America, each Politburo member had to down a shot of whiskey. Within a half- hour, all 25 members were stone- cold drunk.
How could they not have been? They were watching something they had never seen before — the out- of- control antics of an incoherent American president, a man clearly desperate to stay in office because losing could mean his prosecution, humiliation and liquidation all at the same time.
And who can blame the Chinese for gloating? A pandemic that began in Wuhan, and, for now, has been contained in China, is still rampaging through America’s economy and citizenry — even though we saw the whole thing coming.
Alas, we aren’t who we think we are. Covid- 19 was supposed to be China’s Chernobyl. It’s ended up looking more like the West’s Waterloo. That is the argument that John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge make in their new book, The Wake Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and Howto Fix It.
According to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, America has suffered 65.74 Covid deaths per 100,000 people, or about 216,000 total. China has lost 0.34 per 100,000, or about 4,750 people. China has been vastly better at protecting its people than the United States.
Indeed, early this month, days after Trump’ s White House became a super sp reader site and millions of Americans were afraid to send their kids to school, China, with close to zero local transmissions, saw millions of its citizens flocking to bus stations, train stations and airports to travel all across their country for a national holiday.
Invisible enemy
On March 28, Trump declared, “Our country is at war with an invisible enemy.” He vowed to summon “the full power of the American nation” to defeat it. But it never happened. Outside of the first responders and health workers, acts of public solidarity and war time willingness to sacrifice have been minimal or evanescent.
Why? It’s not because democracies are incapable of governing in a pandemic — South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and New Zealand have done much better than us.
In part, it’s because we have a uniquely individualistic culture, a highly fragmented local- state- federal power- sharing system, a frail public health system, a divided body politic, a Republican Party whose business model has long been to cripple Washington, and somany people getting their news from social networks that amplify conspiracy theories and destroy truth and trust.
But what is most different is thatwe now have a president whose political strategy for re- election is to divide us, to destroy trust — and to destroy truth — and to declare any news hostile to his goals as “fake.” And without truth and trust in a pandemic, you’re lost.
In our last great pandemic, in 1918, lots of Americans did not mind wearing masks — look at the pictures — because their leaders asked them to do so and led by example. But this time, the president never trusted Americans with the truth and led by dismissing the virus and mocking mask- wearing. So, many Americans never trusted him back.
As a result, we could never rationally discuss the sorts of trade- offs that a democracy like ours, with a culture likes ours, needed to make.
Public health expert Dr. David Katz argued in an op- ed and in an interview with me back in March that we needed a national plan that balanced saving the most lives and the most livelihoods. If we just focused on saving every life, we would create millions of deaths of despair from lost jobs, savings and businesses. If we just focused on saving every job, we would cruelly condemn to death fellow Americans who deserved no such fate.
Katz argued for a strategy of “total harm minimisation” thatwould have protected the elderly and most vulnerable, while gradually feeding back into the workforce the young and healthy most likely to experience the coronavirus either asymptomatically or mildly — and let them keep the economy humming and build up some natural herd immunity aswe awaited a vaccine.
Unfortunately, we could never have a sane, sober discussion about such a strategy. Fromthe right, Katz said, we got “contemptuous disdain” for doing even the simplest things, like wearing a mask and social distancing. The left was much more responsible, he added, but not immune from treating any discussion of economic trade- offs in a pandemic as immoral and “treating any policy allowing for any death as an act of sociopathy.”
In sum, what ails us today is something that cannot be cured by a Covid- 19 vaccine. We have lost the trust in each other and in our institutions