March 1, 2020
Today saw America’s second COVID-19 death, as well as initial cases in Rhode Island, Florida, and New York. Like the first US COVID-19 death, the second was near Seattle, and testing revealed that the two victims did not know each other and could not have contracted the virus in the same place. This makes experts worry that this coronavirus has been spreading undetected in the Seattle area for six weeks while the government resisted the idea that we needed more widespread testing. Until a few days ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested only people who had been to China or were in contact with someone who had been there, even if a patient presented with symptoms that suggested COVID-19.
As of Sunday night, there were 87 known cases in America and almost 90,000 worldwide. About 3,000 infected people have died. Do not make the mistake of reading those statistics onto what will happen in America, though: there are still too many unknowns to know what our situation will look like. There is, however, no doubt that this is a disease to take seriously.
And yet, we seem to have been caught flat-footed.
On Twitter, Jeremy Konyndyk, who managed the US response to the Ebola outbreak and now researches humanitarian aid and pandemic preparation, had a fascinating thread explaining just how this might have happened. Konyndyk compared the Trump administration’s fumbling of the coronavirus preparedness to the George W. Bush administration’s insistence on going to war with Iraq. In both cases, the president’s priorities were so clear that analysts and advisors skewed the information the presidents received.
Trump has made it crystal clear that his top priority is to be reelected, and to do that, he needs a strong economy. To that end, his only plan for COVID-19 was to keep it out of the country, and keep the markets calm. He and his advisors operated from the assumption that the virus could be contained. So they did not test for the virus here. Their own new kits were faulty, but they could have used kits from the World Health Organization (which has provided kits for more than 50 countries). Other countries have done so quite successfully. South Korea’s infection numbers are high because they have made it so easy to get tested: they can test at drive-through clinics, and have tested about 80,000 people.
Lots of people called for more testing—including Trump’s own former FDA commissioner-- but the CDC limited testing to those who had been in China, outside the country. They simply assumed the virus was not spreading here and focused instead on keeping it out of America. But it apparently was spreading here.
Konyndyk is more forgiving than I am on this. He sees it as “an honest but avoidable mistake, driven by groupthink, unexamined assumptions, and process failure.” I think it was a massive failure, brought about by aligning government with an extremist ideology rather than reality.
Trump and his remaining supporters are convinced that he must stay in office to advance their ideological vision of a government that focuses solely on the liberty of individuals to run their businesses as they see fit, unhampered by regulations or taxation. Anyone who disagrees with them is, in their eyes, an enemy, working to bring socialism to America. So their top priority must be to protect Trump and get him another four years in office. Even now, rather than focusing on the spread of the virus after inaction has made it worse than it should have been, they are spinning the problem to attack Democrats, who, they say, are “weaponizing” COVID-19 unfairly to hurt Trump. Bots and trolls have so uniformly and forcefully taken up the call that the true villains of this play are neither the disease nor the officials who bungled the response, but rather the Democrats, that it looks to me like Russian disinformation.
Before Trump put Pence in charge of messaging about the virus, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was booked on the Sunday political shows, but cancelled after the change in messaging. Instead, Trump’s people are reciting talking points. When CBS reporter Margaret Brennan today asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Alexander Azar to project how many Americans he expects will come down with COVID-19, he refused to answer, saying only “the risk to average Americans remains low.” And on CNN today, Vice President Pence refused to disagree with Donald Trump Jr.’s statement that Democrats want the coronavirus to kill millions of people to hurt Trump.
This. Is. Bonkers. No one wants millions of dead. We want intelligent strategies, designed by experts, to slow the spread of the disease and help us survive it.
But we are not getting them, because what is important to the Trump White House is getting Trump reelected, and Republican leaders are on board because he is advancing their ideology. This is quite literally the opposite of the “conservatism” they claim to embrace. In 1790, the father of modern conservatism, Irish statesman Edmund Burke, looked at the excesses of the French Revolution and warned about government run by ideology. Ideologues made the terrible mistake of thinking that their abstract theories were more powerful than reality. In their drive to make their theories real, they ran the risk of becoming tyrants. Governments must, he said, support longstanding human traditions like religion and family, because they provided stability. Governments must also, he insisted, be based in reality rather than ideology, using intelligence and experience to govern wisely.
It is high time we stopped calling members of the Trump Party “conservatives.” They are the dangerous ideologues Burke warned against, determined to force us to accept their imagined version of the world even as this coronavirus demands-- in no uncertain terms-- that we focus on reality.
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Notes:
New cases: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/us/washington-coronavirus-nursing-home.html
drive through clinics: https://www.voanews.com/episode/south-korea-tests-coronavirus-drive-through-clinics-4207401
Pence:
Fauci: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/us-coronavirus-pence.html