Handling the coronavirus crisis

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One opportunity for decisive action came Jan. 28, when his national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, told Trump that the coronavirus “will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” Trump absorbed the warning, telling Bob Woodward days later how deadly and contagious the virus could be, according to Woodward’s new book, “Rage.”

Yet the president then misled the public by downplaying the virus, comparing it to the flu and saying that it would “go away.” He resisted masks, sidelined experts, held large rallies, denounced lockdowns and failed to get tests and protective equipment ready — and here we are, with Americans constituting 4 percent of the world’s population and 22 percent of Covid-19 deaths. There’s plenty of blame to be directed as well at local officials, nursing home managers and ordinary citizens — but Trump set the national agenda.

Suppose Trump in January — or even in February — had warned the public of the dangers, had ensured that accurate tests were widely distributed (Sierra Leone had tests available before the United States) and had built up a robust system of contact tracing (Congo has better contact tracing than the United States). Suppose he had ramped up production of masks and empowered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to lead the pandemic response, instead of marginalizing its experts. Suppose he had tried as relentlessly to battle the virus as he has to build his wall?

It wasn’t as if the United States was unready. A 324-page study in October 2019 found that America was the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic — but it didn’t imagine that the United States would fumble testing, data collection, contact tracing, communications and just about every other facet of managing a novel virus.

Jeffrey Shaman, a public health expert at Columbia University, calculated that if each county in the United States had acted just two weeks earlier to order lockdowns or other control measures, then more than 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths could have been avoided through early May.

Shaman told me that his team didn’t model even earlier interventions, in January or February, but that he believes it would have been plausible for the United States to enjoy the Covid-19 mortality rate of South Korea. That would mean almost a 99 percent reduction in mortality.

“There’s no Covid,” an unmasked man attending a Trump rally the other day told CNN. “It’s a fake pandemic.”

Opinion | How Did the ‘Best-Prepared Country’ Become a Horror Story? - The New York Times