The United States, and indeed the rest of the world, is going through the worst public health pandemic in living memory. Entire countries are closing their doors to new travellers; shutting themselves down until further notice. The NBA (National Basketball Association) has postponed the rest of the season due to the coronavirus outbreak. America’s health care system is in significant danger of being overrun, overextended, and unprepared for the stream of infected patients. Americans at risk of contracting the virus are not getting tested fast enough because testing kits aren’t widely available. Panic is beginning to settle in; walk to the corner grocery store and you will find empty hygiene shelves and desolate freezers where frozen food should be. And what is president Donald Trump’s solution to this public health crisis? Banning flights from mainland Europe.
The first responsibility of the commander in chief during an emergency is to reassure the nation that their government has everything well in hand. Yet after listening to Trump in the Oval Office last night, you could be pardoned for feeling a chill in your spine. The White House is flubbing the response and making things up as they go along.
The White House is flubbing the response and making things up as they go along.
Trump tried to perform his role as president, sombrely telling Americans in a prime-time television address that ‘the virus will not have a chance against us’ and ‘no nation is more prepared or more resilient than the United States.’ But it’s hard to take those assurances seriously when Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of America’s most respected scientists of pandemic diseases, testifies to Congress the next morning that America’s health system is ‘failing’ and that the crisis is going to get much worse before cases begin stabilizing. Who are you going to believe: Trump or the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases?
Let’s be clear, any administration in Washington would have an enormous amount of trouble dealing with the coronavirus. Public health is not an easy subject; unlike a state actor, diseases can’t be deterred with overwhelming military force or bombed into submission. A government can’t bankrupt the coronavirus through a heavy set of economic sanctions. An infectious disease doesn’t care how much money you make or how powerful you are in society. Very often, the only thing governments can do is find a way to mitigate the impact.
Yet when it comes to coronavirus, we are way past containment. Shutting U.S. airspace to European flights, as Trump ordered last night, may have been a prudent step months ago when cases on U.S. soil were minimal. But today, when there are approximately 1,215 cases in the United States (a figure that will probably skyrocket in the near future), closing the borders seems like a desperate response by an administration that makes coordination look like an endangered species. It’s like slapping a plaster on somebody who just got hit by a bus and declaring that the injuries are no longer life threatening.
In an ideal world, Americans would be comforted by a whole-of-government response, in which politicians in Washington, D.C. were passing emergency relief packages to help the public through this difficult time, rather than engaging in the usual partisan nonsense. In an ideal world, lawmakers would be sticking around to do their jobs rather than preparing to fly out of town for a scheduled vacation. And in an ideal world, the U.S. government at large would be admitting that the response to date has been wholly unsatisfactory.
Regrettably, we live in the real world.
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