\u201cIt began in April 2018 \u2014 more than a year and a half before the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, Covid-19, sickened enough people in China that authorities realized they were dealing with a new disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Trump administration, with John Bolton newly at the helm of the White House National Security Council, began dismantling the team in charge of pandemic response, firing its leadership and disbanding the team in spring 2018.
The cuts, coupled with the administration\u2019s repeated calls to cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health agencies, made it clear that the Trump administration wasn\u2019t prioritizing the federal government\u2019s ability to respond to disease outbreaks.
That lack of attention to preparedness, experts say, helps explain why the Trump administration has botched its response to the coronavirus pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSeveral weeks after the first community transmission within the US, the country has tested more than 16,000 people as of March 13, according to the Covid Tracking Project. By comparison, South Korea had tested more than 66,000 people within a week of its first case of community transmission.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTesting is crucial to slowing epidemics. First, it lets public health officials identify sick people and subsequently isolate them. Second, they can trace that sick person\u2019s recent contacts to make sure those people aren\u2019t sick and to get them into quarantine as well. It\u2019s one of the best tools we have for an outbreak like this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cit\u2019s the kind of thing that the Trump administration has screwed up, while instead trying to downplay the threat of Covid-19. Trump himself has tweeted comparisons of Covid-19 to the common flu \u2014 which Jha describes as \u201creally unhelpful,\u201d because the novel coronavirus appears to be much worse. Trump also called concerns about the virus a \u201choax.\u201d He said on national television that, based on nothing more than a self-admitted \u201chunch,\u201d the death rate of the disease is much lower than public health officials projected.
And Trump has rejected any accountability for the botched testing process: \u201cI don\u2019t take responsibility at all,\u201d he said on Friday.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cIn April 2018, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, then the homeland security adviser, who, the Washington Post reported, \u201chad called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks.\u201d Then, that May, Bolton let go the head of pandemic response, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, and his global health security team. The team, the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, was never replaced.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSince the federal government is sprawling and large, it helps to have centralized leadership in case of a crisis. That leadership could ensure all federal agencies are doing the most they can and working toward a single set of goals.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cit\u2019s important to have this kind of agency set up before an outbreak. Setting up an agency takes time; it requires hiring staff, handing out tasks and expected workloads, creating internal policies, and so on. A preexisting agency is also going to have plans worked out before an outbreak, with likely contingencies in place for what to do. That\u2019s why it was so important to have this agency in place even during years, like 2018, when disease pandemics didn\u2019t seem like a nearby threat to everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cBy repeatedly undercutting outbreak preparedness, Jha said, the Trump administration signaled \u201cto the government and all the agencies this is not a priority. And that means that even other agencies end up not putting as much attention and energy on it. So I think this has been a longstanding problem of the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump, for his part, has defended his record, arguing, \u201cI\u2019m a businessperson. I don\u2019t like having thousands of people around when you don\u2019t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But experts argue that\u2019s not how pandemic preparedness should work. \u201cYou build a fire department ahead of time,\u201d Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the Washington Post. \u201cYou don\u2019t wait for a fire.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cNot all of this is necessarily the Trump administration\u2019s fault. When the CDC rolled out its tests, a component in them turned out to be faulty. That was unfortunate, but it put a big spotlight on the CDC\u2019s decision to use its own test kit instead of test kits other countries have used, reportedly in an effort to create a more accurate test.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBut this is exactly the kind of situation that proper preparedness, well, prepares federal agencies for. If the Trump administration had prioritized outbreak prevention before the coronavirus pandemic, it might have used the time prior to Covid-19\u2019s appearance \u2014 or even January and February, when the global threat was increasingly clear \u2014 to establish contingencies in case something went wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is, after all, something the federal government has done before for outbreaks, from H1N1 to Zika. A big difference from then to now is that Trump is in charge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cTrump has consistently downplayed the coronavirus, comparing it to the common flu and claiming that his administration is doing a \u201cGREAT job\u201d and keeping things under control. Even on Friday, when announcing his administration\u2019s goal to get 5 million test kits out, Trump said, \u201cI doubt we\u2019ll need anywhere near that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of that may be political. Politico reporter Dan Diamond told NPR host Terry Gross that, based on his own reporting, Trump \u201cdid not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that\u2019s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear \u2014 the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential re-election this fall.\u201d
Some of it could also be a result of too much optimism. Trump in February said of the coronavirus, \u201cOne day it\u2019s like a miracle, it will disappear.\u201d (As of March 13, the US has nearly 2,000 confirmed cases, up from fewer than 100 at the beginning of the month, according to Johns Hopkins University.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The administration more broadly seems to have underestimated the threat, requesting $2.5 billion in emergency funding for the crisis \u2014 a fraction of what both Democrats and Republicans said is necessary and ultimately passed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat Trump has done is focus on travel restrictions, first against China and most recently against most of Europe. While this likely bought the US a little time with China, the Trump administration didn\u2019t use that time properly.
And in the case of Europe, the restrictions will likely do little to nothing. There\u2019s one simple reason for that, Kates told me: \u201cThe virus is already here.\u201d Since the coronavirus is already spreading within communities, the concern is no longer the virus coming in from outside the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even conservatives have been critical of Trump\u2019s response. The National Review editorial board wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c[Trump] resisted making the response to the epidemic a priority for as long as he could \u2014 refusing briefings, downplaying the problem, and wasting precious time. He has failed to properly empower his subordinates and refused to trust the information they provided him \u2014 often offering up unsubstantiated claims and figures from cable television instead. He has spoken about the crisis in crude political and personal terms. He has stood in the way of public understanding of the plausible course of the epidemic, trafficking instead in dismissive clich\u00e9s. He has denied his administration\u2019s missteps, making it more difficult to address them.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cOn Wednesday night, Trump appeared to finally confront the reality of the crisis in a televised statement from the Oval Office\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cThe speech was also riddled with errors, leading the administration and others to later issue several corrections\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cTrump on Friday declared a national emergency, which will unlock billions of dollars in disaster aid to help combat the virus. The administration previously declared a public health emergency in January, but that didn\u2019t tap into as much money as the new declaration under the 1988 Stafford Act\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n