Botched

The Trump Administration reaction to the corona virus outbreak is a classic case of government failure. The President has downplayed the risks from the first, hoping to limit damage to stock markets and the economy in the run-up to his re-election campaign. He is claiming anyone can get tested, which isn’t even close to being true. The number of test kits available at the end of the week was just 75,000, after the Vice President had promised one million.

Part of the problem lies at the Centers for Disease Control, which at the start of this debacle shipped test kits that did not work properly while barring others from providing them. No wonder its leadership tries to look on benevolently as the President lies blatantly:

The chronicle of the inconsistencies in US government messaging is getting biblical. No one should be surprised. It is hard to keep a straight story when you are not telling the truth. That is the trick to many police interrogations: get the suspect to contradict himself, then hammer away at the contradiction. Real infectious disease experts will stand up to that sort of interrogation. President Trump and Vice President Pence will not, because they have a tale to tell that aims at political results, not scientific ones. That’s why they’ve channeled all questioning to the White House.

There is still a great deal of uncertainty about Covid-19: when during the course of the disease is it contagious? can you be reinfected? how lethal is it? what is the best protection for the older people who are succumbing in higher percentages? will the virus attenuate as spring rolls around? But some things are already clear: stay off cruise boats and out of nursing homes. Our friend Toby Edelman had this to say yesterday on NPR about the latter:

The other advice we are getting also makes sense: wash your hands, don’t touch your face, self-quarantine if in doubt, avoid contact with people who are ill. But really we haven’t got much idea how much of this will work. It’s just common sense for any infectious disease.

What we do know is that Trump and his administration have botched their first real crisis. Unable to tell the truth, unable to fix things that go wrong, unable to listen to sound advice, they have instead politicized an epidemic and made it much worse than it might have been.