If Joe Biden had been president this year rather than Donald Trump, the national response to the coronavirus would likely have been more effective.
One can say this even if one is decidedly unenamored of Biden and willing to give Trump the benefit of certain doubts. The record is clear that, regarding this pandemic, Biden had his eye on the ball long before Trump finally told Americans we should take it seriously.
On Jan. 27, USA Today published a column by Biden saying that Trump should be doing far more to respond to the threat of a coronavirus pandemic. At a time when only 80 people had been confirmed dead of the virus even in China, and fewer than five people had been diagnosed with it in the United States, Biden identified it as a “global health challenge” that “will get worse before it gets better” and warned that “diseases do not stop at borders.”
Granted, Biden’s column was heavier on criticisms of Trump than it was on concrete proposals for battling the coronavirus, but the very fact that he recognized the severity of the danger so much earlier than Trump indicates he would have begun important countermeasures sooner.
It was four days after Biden’s column that Trump issued his order, one Trump now overhypes, that banned certain forms of travel from China. The evidence that this travel semiban made a big dent in the virus’s spread is quite slim and uncertain, while the president’s full month more of blithe unconcern arguably was tremendously harmful.
Five days before Biden’s column, Trump said, “We have it totally under control,” and three days before the column he was, ludicrously, praising Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s handling of the virus. A month later, on Feb. 23, Trump repeated that “we have it very much under control in this country.” On Feb. 26, he said the number of U.S. cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” As late as March 8, he said he would continue to hold public rallies while he was “not concerned at all” that the virus was coming closer to Washington, D.C.
And even as late as his disastrous March 11 Oval Office address to the nation, Trump was incorrectly saying that for “the vast majority of Americans, the risk is very, very low. Young and healthy people can expect to recover fully and quickly if they should get the virus.”
Aside from his semitravel ban, Trump’s response remained remarkably haphazard until Feb. 27, when he finally appointed Vice President Mike Pence to coordinate the governmentwide efforts to battle the contagion.
Imagine how much more might have been done to stop the pandemic’s spread in the U.S. if Trump had started, on the day of Biden’s column, to insist that the government focus more on testing, on beefing up supplies, and especially on moderate forms of social distancing. Throughout February and well into March, the president acted as if the only real danger was of foreigners coming into the country while giving short shrift to stopping the coronavirus’s spread within our borders. That “lost month” was almost certainly crucial.
Biden now has offered to set politics aside and join Trump in coordinated, bipartisan consultations on coronavirus-related policies. Trump should accept the offer.
