In 2030 there will be a wave of nostalgia for the "good days" of the Trump presidency before the "natural disaster" of the Coronavirus trashed everything. The weeks of denialism, foot dragging, and incompetence (esp. re. testing) will be almost entirely forgotten.
There's no better time than the present to start pushing back against that revisionism. The US could have handled this much, much, much better...and it didn't largely because of the incompetence of this anti-science and anti-government administration.
Like this episode, for example. In a story published 2/27...back when many people looked at me funny for washing my hands for too long and opening doors with my sleeve. washingtonpost.com/health/2020/02…
There is no such thing as a purely "natural disaster." As revealed by the different courses the virus has taken through the world's different societies--political structures, cultural practices, socio-economic structures all shape the course an epidemic takes.
The Coronavirus is not Trump's fault. But the severely botched federal response to the crisis is. And it is not an outlier in his time in office...it's entirely indicative of his leadership style and the GOP's longstanding disinterest in governance. politico.com/news/2020/03/0…
This story was published today. It's been five days since my university shifted to entirely online learning. And yet only today is Trump starting to get the Army Corps of Engineers moving. They've been waiting for instruction for a while now. No word. nytimes.com/2020/03/17/us/…
If we had sufficient testing 2 weeks ago, & had science-based leadership from the top, we would have gotten a huge head start on containing the virus. But instead, Trump & his media surrogates were busy calling it a Democratic hoax while it was being spread at CPAC & Mar-a-Lago.
This has been an enormous unforced error. The death toll will be significantly higher than it needed to be, and the economic toll (ironically enough) will be much greater than it would have been if we would have acted sooner and more effectively. But we didn't.
People in the future will call this Monday morning quarterbacking. It is not that. The people whose job it is to understand this stuff knew in late February, and the people in charge ignored them because they didn't want "the numbers" to look bad.
Whatever "numbers" emerge from this crisis in terms of the death toll and the economic toll should be chalked up largely to Trump's account. He responded to this crisis about as badly as a leader could have. With great power comes great responsibility.
On February 28, while folks were backslapping at CPAC and spreading the virus around, I took a group of students to a talk in Corvallis. We all carefully washed our hands and practiced social distancing. Because we're not idiots.
I don't have the director of the CDC at my beck and call. And yet, some f-cking how, I knew that when I greeted the speaker on Feb 28 that we should just politely nod and not shake hands. Again, because we're not idiots.
In sum, we have finally been slammed by that "Fifth Risk" that Michael Lewis warned us about. It wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when. And then when, is now.
