President-Elect Biden's Chief of Staff wrote THIS re: Covid. In JANUARY [View all]

[Roland99]

Coronavirus Is Coming—And Trump Isn’t Ready
In order to combat the disease, the president will have to trust the kind of government experts he has disdained and dismissed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/now-trump-needs-deep-state-fight-coronavirus/605752/

The U.S. government has the tools, talent, and team to help fight the coronavirus abroad and minimize its impact at home. But the combination of Trump’s paranoia toward experienced government officials (who lack “loyalty” to him), inattention to detail, opinionated rejection of science and evidence, and isolationist instincts may prove toxic when it comes to managing a global-health security challenge. To succeed, Trump will have to trust the kind of government experts he has disdained to date, set aside his own terrible instincts, lead from the White House, and work closely with foreign leaders and global institutions—all things he has failed to do in his first 1,200 days in office.

We do not know yet how grave a threat the new coronavirus will turn out to be. On the one hand, scientists have quickly sequenced the virus and are working on a vaccine. China has imposed draconian quarantines to slow the virus’s spread, and is rapidly building massive new hospitals to treat its victims. To date, the U.S. has seen only a handful of cases, all of them the product of travel to China, not transmission here. These are causes for concern, but not overwrought fear.

But on the other hand, there are some worrisome developments. Models suggest that the cases in China may number in the hundreds of thousands—many times what the government has reported. Perhaps a million or more people left Wuhan before the quarantines, and could be spreading the virus widely. Other countries are reporting cases of the virus among people who were not in China; there are even reports that individuals may be infectious before the onset of symptoms (a substantial complication to traditional public-health screening). And the economic impact of a massive epidemic in China on the global economy is difficult to predict.

What will Trump do about it? His track record offers us two data points, one horrible and one merely disappointing.


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Competence matters