US faces grim times before it can build a better future

US Surgeon-General Jerome Adams, his country’s top public health official, has left no doubt about the enormity of the challenges now confronting the world’s most powerful nation over the coronavirus. “This is going to be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives,” he said on Sunday. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localised. It’s going to be happening all over the country.”

After Donald Trump’s grim warning last week that the country faces between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths from the pandemic, neither the gravity nor the imminence of the crisis in the US can be overstated. “It’s going to be ugly,” Mr Trump conceded, as his top infectious diseases adviser, Anthony Fauci, said experts were struggling to get the virus under control.

As Henry Kissinger, with all his wisdom and insight, noted in our pages on Monday, there are surreal aspects to the COVID-19 pandemic. None is more surreal than seeing the US, the world’s biggest and most successful economy, at the epicentre of the crisis, battling uphill odds.

Life in New York, at the heart of American greatness, as Washington correspondent Cameron Stewart noted on Monday, has been rapidly transformed. He summed up what has happened to the US as a whole: “Just a few weeks ago, crowds flocked to see Broadway shows while bars and restaurants were pumping and tourists crowded into Times Square. Now the city is an eerie ghost town — a lone taxi driving down Fifth Avenue, shuttered-up shops, silent museums and grim-faced, frightened people.”

Who would have thought that a virus spawned in a fetid “wet market” in faraway Wuhan, China, only weeks ago could have done this to one of the world’s greatest and most vibrant cities? And yet it has. Nothing is more indicative of what has befallen the US as it deals with a total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases surging towards 350,000, 123,000 of them in New York, which has already recorded 4160 deaths and is projected to suffer a death toll of at least 16,000. No one can be sure about where the pandemic is headed in the US, or anywhere else. Countries and cities everywhere are similarly afflicted. With more than 1.3 million cases globally so far, and 70,000 deaths, the outlook everywhere is grim.

But all eyes are on Mr Trump as the leader of the free world, and he must be unrelenting in providing the guidance that is needed to overcome the immediate challenge in America and ensure that, once the crisis has passed, the US continues to provide the strong global political and economic direction the world needs. Mr Trump has not been without critics over his responses to the pandemic. His early dismissal of warnings about a potential crisis, when he compared it to the flu, didn’t help.

“We have it totally under control, it’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine,” he said in January. As recently as February 28, he said: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Mr Trump has come a long way since then, and it is to his credit that as the imminence and full extent of the threat to the US has evolved, he has been showing the strong leadership that is needed, with Dr Kissinger talking of “a solid job” being done by the administration.

Any administration, Republican or Democrat, would have been tested mightily by the COVID-19 pandemic. Having been convinced of the threat the US faced, Mr Trump has done well to lead from the front, working closely with New York’s Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo and leaders across the country to provide the back-up, including the thousands of ventilators, needed to meet the challenge. For the US and the world as it battles the deadly pandemic, the stakes could not be higher. Dr Adams clearly believes profoundly difficult days lie ahead. Mr Trump’s prospects for re-election in November depend in no small measure on how he navigates the US through this grave crisis. So do hopes for Mr Trump being able to realise his frequently expressed determination to get through the crisis and get the US economy back to work. As Dr Kissinger argued, when the crisis passes our leaders will have to “build the future”.