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As I've previously stated, South Korea and the U.S. learned about the virus on the same day in January. They immediately convened all the experts to devise a solution, implement widespread testing; it has used the data from that testing to guide social distancing and other containment measures; and the disease waned there. By contrast, testing barely began by March and still the promise that anyone who wants to be tested can get one, is a false one. In America, Trump minimized the threat and discouraged action until late March, months after the Koreans. The results are that the U.S. has the highest outbreak and death rate in the world, even though our population is only a fraction.
The details of our failure are complex, but they all flow ultimately from Trump’s minimization of the threat: He was asserting that COVID-19 was no worse than the flu (although true to form, he’s claiming to have known all along that a pandemic was coming). He even didn't want a ship with Covid victims to port because it would hurt his numbers.
On Feb. 25 Larry Kudlow, the administration’s chief economist, declared that the U.S. had “contained” the coronavirus, and that the economy was “holding up nicely.”
Trump rejected the advice of health experts and pushed for a rapid economic reopening, hoping for a boom leading into the election. He ridiculed and belittled measures that would have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, turning what should have been common sense into a front in the culture war.
The result has been disaster both epidemiological and economic.
On April 17, the day that Donald Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” followed by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.” In so doing, he effectively declared White House support for protesters demanding an end to the lockdowns governors had instituted to bring COVID-19 under control, underscoring the Republican Party's hostility to science in general. But many of those anti-lockdown demonstrations weren’t spontaneous, grassroots affairs. They were organized and coordinated by conservative political activists, some with close ties to the Trump campaign, and financed in part by right-wing billionaires.
The main driving force behind reopening, as far as I can tell, was the administration’s desire to have big job gains leading into the November election, so that it could do what it knew how to do, boast about economic success. Actually dealing with the pandemic just wasn’t Trump’s kind of thing and America is paying the price of mistakes made by voters in November 2016.
