COVID-19 blame game
When it comes to the COVID-19 crisis, one could blame President Donald Trump for many things: for waiting until crashing stock markets forced him to acknowledge that this wasn’t just the flu; for assembling a crack task force of public health officials to serve as a televised backdrop for hourslong information-light presidential free-association sessions; for helping to make mask-wearing a partisan flashpoint rather than a commonsense precaution; for slyly encouraging his political partisans to defy his own health experts.
But for the first three months, there was one thing he couldn’t be blamed for, not provably: the deaths.
In fact, the U.S. death rate was in the middle of the pack for a big rich country. The United States did better than Italy, France, Spain and Britain, worse than Germany or Canada. Outside of Asia, however, no country fared particularly well, and this is understandable.
Humans assess risks in two key ways: by reference to their own experience and by looking at what others like them are doing. This works extremely well most of the time, which is how humankind has managed to stay alive for so long. But when dealing with a truly new kind of danger — such as, say, a once-in-a-century pandemic — the system breaks down, utterly.
Your own experience tells you that modern medicine has brought plagues under control, so there’s no need to worry. Everyone else’s experience says the same thing, so when you look at your neighbors to see whether they sense danger, you’ll get the impression that everything is fine. This is why the history of crisis and catastrophe suggests that most people, institutions and nations perform badly under the initial onslaught of a novel threat.
Countries in China’s vicinity, however, had a firsthand brush with a nasty, new infectious disease: the SARS epidemic of 2003. That experience helped them develop playbooks for future outbreaks. So when the novel coronavirus emerged, Asian populations masked up and stayed home.
In Western countries, meanwhile, the virus spread silently for months. Our government and others acted only after thousands of deaths were inevitable and the only way to avoid even more was to send the citizenry into lockdown. At that late date, how badly a country did seems to have mostly been a matter of dumb luck: How early was the population seeded with disease, and did those index cases propagate quickly through crowded super-spreading events, or mosey along through the moderately infectious and the modestly social?
The United States was middling lucky. Note the past tense.
The quality of our leadership might not matter much in the initial “headless chicken” phase of a crisis when no one knows what they are doing, and many of the efforts will turn out to be useless or counterproductive. But, over time, luck matters less and management matters more. We expect leadership to get better, to learn what works and what does not, to understand the risks and progressively fine-tune their response. That is what European nations have done, and it is precisely what Mr. Trump has not. Months in, the president is still playing down the threat, still encouraging people to go out and gather in large groups, still hostile toward the wearing of masks. As of this writing, about 35,000 new cases a day are emerging.
Not all of that can be laid at Mr. Trump’s feet. American federalism means local officials have considerable discretion over public health efforts. And the worst U.S. outbreak occurred under two Democrats — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — who initially rivaled Mr. Trump in their “see no evil” approach to COVID-19.
But the outbreak has shifted its locus to many states with Republican governors. When a president from your party convenes mass gatherings in viral hot spots, tells people they needn’t bother wearing masks and disparages expanded testing, that makes it very hard to say, “No, don’t do those things” to voters for whom ignoring the health nannies has become a point of partisan pride.
So perhaps forgive Mr. Trump the first three months as the natural course of calamity. The outcomes in the months after that, however, will be his responsibility. And, unfortunately, the heaviest cost for his failures will be paid not by Mr. Trump, but in American lives.