COVID-19 in the US, Poor Timing and Propaganda. Which of Trump’s Errors Has Led to the Crisis?

Since February, the president and U.S. governors have made several mistakes which, in turn, have fueled the virus.

On Feb. 12, Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told journalists that it’s not a question of if, but when the pandemic will explode within the United States. The Centers for Disease Control lab in Atlanta has already developed critical measures to prevent the spread of the virus. However, until that point, there had been only 15 cases across the U.S., and Donald Trump had banned people traveling from China from entering the country.

Messonnier, 54, has been part of the Epidemic Intelligence Service since 1995. She tracks down and monitors viruses around the world, just like CIA agents keep an eye on suspected terrorists. Nevertheless, her warning about the virus was completely ignored and, in fact, since Feb. 12, she has completely disappeared from public debate.

However, other figures have appeared on the scene. The country’s most prominent virologist stands out among them: 79-year-old Anthony Fauci. On Jan. 30, Trump named him to the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Perhaps he did so because the president initially liked the optimism Fauci displayed on Jan. 23 when he stated that there was no chance the U.S. would take the kind of restrictive measures in Chicago, San Francisco or New York that were taken in Wuhan. For the entire month of January and most of February, while Messonnier was calling on people to prepare protective measures against the virus, both Fauci and other scientists reiterated the phrase “minimal risk.”

This was exactly what Trump wanted to hear and it seems the U.S. has paid a great deal for that excessively soft start. In those two months, the pandemic festered freely across New York and along the East Coast. Even the media were confident in following the pandemic: Was the virus even here in the U.S.? It’s not like we’re in Italy, they reported.

When Fauci and the task force changed course, they had to contend with Trump’s reaction. The president has continued to downplay and ignore the opinions of scientists and warnings from the Secret Service. We’ll see whether his erratic and bizarre management of the pandemic will cost him the election, as it appears today. In any case, there has been serious damage. Trump has decided to politicize the virus, switching between unrealistic predictions and provocations, claiming that masks aren’t necessary, that we can reopen the economy by Easter, that we should use hydroxychloroquine, and so on. In doing so, he has stripped away the whole essence of the task force. For several weeks, Fauci and his coordinator, Deborah Birx, have been asking Americans to stay at home and have also encouraged social distancing. However, a large part of the population seems to think that Fauci and Birx are exaggerating. Therefore, New York became the epicenter of the pandemic. And in the states governed by Trump-style Republicans like Texas, Florida and Arizona, there was a huge delay in implementing restrictive measures which have since been hastily revoked.

Here, the decentralized federal system has clearly shown some worrisome limits as the governors have power to make decision about security and health. Each governor developed his or her own strategy, without even raising the issue, at the very least, of discussion with neighboring states. The close agreement among New York, New Jersey and other small states is the only exception.

In general, the governors’ bad timing in terms of implementing lockdowns is clear. The virus has been able to swarm from one area to another unseen. Between March and April, Fauci had warned the president and governors that they should put areas into lockdown even where the number of cases is still low. Instead of lockdowns, the opposite happened. So between March and April, hospitals in the Bronx and Queens suffered a crisis, while people in Miami were going to the beach.

The American health care system has not been well prepared. Even in April, testing swabs were extremely scarce and even the few thousand or so kits sent to various states by the CDC turned out to be defective. For a long time at the start of the crisis, only 12 of the states and local regions were able to perform tests using swabs taken from patients, granting the coronavirus yet another deadly advantage. To address this, the Trump administration has had to ask pharmaceutical companies and supermarket chains for their cooperation. However, the coronavirus is still out of their grasp, so the long and exhausting pursuit of it has only just begun.

*Editor’s note: Although accurately translated, the quoted remark could not be independently sourced.