COVID-19 is a common enemy, but states aren’t fighting as a team
LOS ANGELES – As the pandemic has washed over the U.S., the coronavirus has faced an inconsistent set of defenses in recent weeks, with state borders often marking the difference between whether millions of Americans – and therefore the virus – are free to move about or not.
The lack of strong direction from the Trump administration has left many life-and-death decisions in the hands of state and local officials, whose varied response is projected to produce a notable disparity in rate of infection and how many lives are spared or lost.
Under the nation’s decentralized system of public health management, governors hold sweeping quarantine powers, making them marquee political figures. An early group, primarily Democrats, bucked the Trump administration in mid-march to shut down businesses and impose social distancing orders in the most disruptive government intervention into Americans’ lives since World War II.
“Federalism is America’s great strength and its greatest weakness,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “When there’s a leadership vacuum, other leaders fill that void, and in this case, it’s been governors.”
Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings on his oversight of the nation’s worst outbreak zone have turned into must-watch TV for many Americans. At home, New Yorkers have rewarded his brusque, Gen. Patton-like style of public speaking with a practically dictator-like 87% approval rating.
“In this time of crisis, with little concrete information available, I need Cuomo’s measured bullying, his love of circumventing the federal government, his sparring with increasingly incompetent [New York City] leadership,” Jezebel writer Rebecca Fishbein wrote in a tongue-in-cheek appreciation titled, “Help, I Think I’m In Love With Andrew Cuomo???”
But apart from some early responders like Republican Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine, other GOP governors matched President Trump’s hesitation. They failed to acknowledge the coronavirus as an imminent threat requiring intrusive measures such as stayat-home orders, even as scientists warned that time is running out to blunt the virus’ spread.
Trump said Friday that he would not recommend stay-athome orders nationwide. “I leave it up to the governors,” he said. “The governors know what they’re doing.”
“In a pandemic, when the nation has to act with one voice and one hand, [federalism is] an impediment,” Gostin said. “There’s just no sense in one state being rigorous and another state not, with people moving back and forth.”
Florida’s Republican governor, Ron Desantis, who set up checkpoints on his state’s border to stop travelers from New York and Louisiana, had resisted issuing a statewide stay-at-home order on the grounds that Trump’s coronavirus team hadn’t recommended it.
“If they do, that’s something that would carry a lot of weight with me,” Desantis said Tuesday.
Desantis reversed course the next day after Trump had warned at a news conference that between 100,000 to 240,000 Americans could die in the coming weeks.
“When you see the president up there and his demeanor the last couple of days, that’s not necessarily how he always is,” Desantis said Wednesday.
His fellow Republican to the north, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, waited until Wednesday to issue his own stay-at-home proclamation, saying that “we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours” that asymptomatic carriers of the virus could infect other people – which scientists have warned about for weeks.
“If you look at what’s going on in this country, I just don’t understand why we’re not” mandating nationwide stay-at-home orders, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CNN on Thursday. “We really should be.”
After a surge of new directives in recent days, more than 40 states as of Friday had statewide stay-athome orders, in some instances effectively expanding the orders already in place from many cities and counties that had shut down earlier.
One of the dwindling number of holdouts, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, defended herself against Fauci’s comment, saying Friday “that maybe he doesn’t have all the information.”
“You can’t just look at a map and assume that no action has been taken. That is completely false,” Reynolds said, noting that she had done other distancing measures such as shutting down dine-in restaurants and banning large gatherings.
Much like today’s battle against the coronavirus, when the United States faced the great influenza pandemic of 1918, there wasn’t much united about the country’s response.
President Woodrow Wilson’s administration had little appetite for battling a pandemic during World War I, leaving local officials to come up with their own directives.