One line deserves your attention in the Washington Post’s grave report about how U.S. intelligence kept briefing President Trump about the spread of the new coronavirus: “We’re looking at it very closely, but we just don’t know.”
That quote is from an unnamed “senior U.S. intelligence official,” and it appears about halfway through the lengthy story, which otherwise portrays the president as dangerously disinterested in any information about the virus way back in January when, presumably, we could have better prepared for the outbreak.
The report is, naturally, meant to feed the narrative that Trump “downplayed” the threat of the virus and has proven himself exceptionally inept at managing the crisis. But if U.S. intelligence didn’t understand exactly what they were looking at, why would Trump be expected to? What immediate action could anyone take regarding a virus born in China that the Chinese government was lying about?
Maybe voters will decide in November that Trump really did botch the response to the pandemic. But in the meantime, does anyone want to highlight some other developed Western nation where the outcome has been significantly better than ours?
I readily concede that the White House sent mixed signals about the severity of the virus at first, and what the public should have been doing to limit its spread. For example, face masks should have been advised all along, and in retrospect, Trump’s reassurances that the plague would not amount to anything were wrong. But all things considered, we’re in the same boat as any other First World country, but with fewer deaths per capita and a better survival rate than anyone else.
It was on Jan. 31 that the White House restricted travel to the United States from China. On March 16, six weeks later, Trump issued the first national guidelines for everyone to lock themselves up at home in order to reduce the spread of the virus. Those were extended by one month just before April 1.
What we’ve seen in that time is a very rapid spread of infection in New York, New Jersey, and a handful of other densely populated jurisdictions that account for most coronavirus deaths in the U.S. Even including those places, the country has been in relatively good shape, with a death rate of about 17 per 100,000 people. If you look at other jurisdictions (Florida, for example, at 5 deaths per 100,000), the death rate per capita is much lower than even the Western countries that have fared best — Germany, for example, at 7.5 deaths per 100,000.
It wasn’t until a week after our initial lockdown that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson instructed his country’s people to stay home. Their death rate is now twice ours.
Bloomberg on Friday reported something similar to that of the Washington Post on Trump. “For days,” the story said, “Prime Minister Boris Johnson had brushed aside a crescendo of calls from politicians and academics to close the country’s more than 30,000 schools. He had repeatedly refused, insisting that the scientific advice he was so publicly heeding showed such disruption wasn’t necessary.”
In France, the story was basically the same. “If Macron’s government felt a sense of urgency, it didn’t show it,” said a story in the left-leaning Vox on April 14. It went on to say that “few concrete actions were taken to impose strict social distancing measures or promote large-scale testing” in France until March 3. At that point, some public schools were closed, but there was otherwise no government advisement to lock down the economy.
France’s death rate: 35 per 100,000, or twice ours.
Sweden’s death rate is also higher than that of the U.S., at 22 per 100,000, but lower than most of Europe. That country neither imposed nor advised a nationwide lockdown. Rather, they said that the most vulnerable, the elderly and those with underlying health conditions, should shelter and avoid contact until given notice otherwise, and they encouraged people to avoid close contact with strangers or gatherings in close quarters.
So, where again is the evidence that Trump was somehow more negligent than anyone else? And where is the evidence that had he acted sooner the outcome would have been different?
There isn’t any. All indications are that everyone screwed up some, and everyone was screwed over a lot — by China, which hid what it knew about the virus.
That’s worth keeping in mind when reading the Washington Post report about all the warnings Trump was supposedly given by U.S. intelligence officials — the officials themselves didn’t know what was going on. To this day, doctors and scientists are still figuring it out. There’s no reason we should have expected Trump to know more than any of them or anyone else.
