Coronavirus: Americans demand answers as angry blame game begins

By today, Donald Trump wanted America ‘opened up and raring to go’. Instead he’s front and centre of a furious backlash as the bodies pile up.

Bodies are moved to a refrigeration truck serving as a temporary morgue at Wyckoff Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn. Picture: AP

Easter Sunday was the day Donald Trump wanted America “opened up and just raring to go”.

“You’ll have packed churches all over the country … I think it will be a beautiful time,” the US President said barely three weeks ago.

Instead, Americans are spending this Easter locked in their homes in a state of fear and dis­belief about the magnitude of the coronavirus tragedy that has ­enveloped their country.

The toll from the virus would be jaw-dropping even if the US were not the richest and most powerful country in the world, boasting some of the best scientists, medical experts and facilities.

With almost 470,000 people confirmed infected with the virus, almost three times that of any other nation, Americans are dying at a rate of about 2000 a day. The death toll has passed 16,676 and within days will exceed that of Italy and Spain. By the end of the pandemic, it is clear the US will be by some distance the hardest hit industrialised nation in the world.

For now, the dominant mood in the country is one of fear and uncertainty. Americans have been genuinely shaken by the harrowing scenes of endless bodies being loaded into refrigerated trucks in New York, as well as overcrowded hospitals and rising death tolls in cities such as New Orleans, ­Detroit and Chicago.

But there is also growing anger as people ask how a country such as the US could have been hit so hard by this pandemic, which is on course to result in more Americans dying than in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

Was it China’s fault, they ask, for hiding from the US the extent of the initial breakout in Wuhan in early January and for playing down the contagious qualities of the virus? Did US health experts and agencies such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) get it wrong, underestimating the gravity of the threat until it was too late? Was it a failure of planning and preparation for a pandemic in a country that has cut funding for such research over many years? Or was it a failure of leadership from the White House down to local mayors?

What damage did New York mayor Bill De Blasio do when he said as recently as March 11 that New Yorkers should be ­frequenting bars and restaurants? “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life,” he said, noting the virus “does not transmit through food and drink”.

And what damage did Trump do when, on many occasions between late January and early last month he dismissed the threat of the virus, saying it was under control, that it would “miraculously” go away and that it was less serious than the flu? “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,” Trump told one of his ­rallies in February.

Donald Trump briefs the media in Washington. Picture: AP

In truth, all these factors — China’s cover-up, bungles and misjudgments by health agencies, poor preparation, and poor leadership in the early stages of the pandemic — have played their part in ensuring that the US has been hit much harder than it should have been by the coronavirus. Each of these factors almost certainly will be examined exhaustively once the pandemic is over, with House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff preparing to put together a bi­partisan commission to examine what went wrong.

“After Pearl Harbor, September 11 and many momentous events in American history, independent, bipartisan commissions have been established to provide a complete accounting of what happened, what we did right and wrong, and what we can do to ­better protect the country in the future,” Schiff said. “Though we are still in the early days of the coronavirus crisis, there is no doubt such a comprehensive and authoritative review will be required.”

The politics of the pandemic have focused heavily on Trump’s role. Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi has effectively accused Trump of having blood on his hands for his early denials about the severity of the virus, saying this led to delays in procuring and sending vital medical equipment and supplies to potential hotspots. “The President’s denial at the beginning was deadly,” she said. “As the President fiddles, people are dying.”

Republicans counter that China’s deception is to blame for any early misreading of the danger posed by the coronavirus. They say that since the middle of last month, Trump has responded to the pandemic as well as any president could reasonably be expected to handle such a unique event. But the heavy focus on Trump’s role has led many to ignore the broader systemic failings and ­bureaucratic inertia that also contributed to the slow US response to the pandemic.

The Trump administration first heard about the coronavirus outbreak in China on January 3 but Beijing rebuffed US efforts to send a CDC team into China. As late as January 14, China claimed publicly there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of the virus. Trump was first briefed about the virus at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on January 18, and three days later a Seattle man who had returned from Wuhan became the first American to test positive. A day later, on January 22, when Trump was asked his first question about the virus at a press conference, he said it was “totally under control … it’s one person coming in from China”.

The White House began meeting CDC and other health ­officials but the early focus was on stopping infected people from travelling to the US from China.

Little attention was given to the need for a way of testing for this new disease. No one involved in those early meetings predicted anything like the spread of the virus that has occurred. Although Trump was still publicly dismissive of the virus, he acted early and decisively on January 31 to bar non-US citizens from travelling from China to the US.

But more than 300,000 people had already come into the US from China in the previous month. The coronavirus, unseen and largely misunderstood, was already spreading throughout the US.

Health authorities then made a major error by entrusting the CDC — which had overseen the US response to Ebola, H1N1 and other outbreaks — to develop a coronavirus test rather than use tests ­developed by the World Health Organisation or allow private US companies to develop tests. In early February the CDC shipped out its first tests, only to discover a serious flaw meant they didn’t produce reliable results. It was not until four weeks later, on February 29, that the FDA ordered that private laboratories were allowed to try to develop their own tests. On the same day, the US had its first coronavirus fatality.

So the US lost all of February when it came to producing a reliable test and then distributing test kits widely enough to get a picture of who was infected and how it was speeding across the country.

“We just twiddled our thumbs as the coronavirus waltzed in,” Harvard epidemiologist William Hanage wrote.

This failing has meant US authorities were largely flying blind in combating the pandemic, not knowing where to allocate scarce resources or the looming scale of the coming catastrophe. “It’s a failing, let’s admit it,” the country’s top infectious diseases expert, Anthony Fauci, declared last month.

Health authorities also realised the national stockpile of protective masks, gowns, gloves and ventilators was simply not enough to cover the likely need of the fast-spreading pandemic. The stockpile had been whittled down through years of budget cuts but, in fairness, no country had ever planned for a pandemic of such proportions. When Trump initially played down the virus in February, he was largely reflecting a low level of concern inside the White House and the administration. No American had yet died and the virus ­appeared to be centred in the one state,Washington.

But by early last month, Trump’s continued dismissal of the virus flew in the face of mounting evidence that it was spreading fast and was dangerous. At this point, Trump’s opinion diverged from that of his health advisers. He adopted the mode of a salesman, playing down the virus as he became increasingly concerned that it might shut down the economy.

The common flu killed tens of thousands each year and “nothing is shutdown, life & the economy go on”, he tweeted on March 9. Trump’s playing down of the virus at this crucial stage fostered false complacency among many Americans. State governors and city mayors around the country, Republican and Democrat, also were slow to react to the sudden rise in infections early last month, fearing the economic consequences of any lockdown or social distancing.

It wasn’t until the middle of last month that Trump accepted the true gravity of the pandemic.

“There was some coming to grips with the problem and the true nature of it — the 13th of March is when I saw him really turn the corner. It took a while to realise you are at war,” Republican senator and Trump ally Lindsey Graham said. “That’s when he took decisive action that set in ­motion some real payoffs.”

At this point, fewer than 100 Americans had died but it was increasingly clear that the virus was spreading across the country in an uncontrolled manner. On March 16, Trump finally urged Americans to practise social distancing. Since then, the US has been fighting the coronavirus from behind. In New York, the epicentre of the virus in the US where 6268 have died, Governor Andrew Cuomo admits his state gravely misjudged the threat and has been playing catch-up ever since. “We underestimated this virus,” he says. “It’s more powerful, it’s more dangerous than we expected.”

The pandemic has revealed the blurred lines in the US between the states and the federal government about which is primarily responsible for fighting a pandemic such as this.

Many state governors have criticised Trump for not taking greater overarching control of the crisis. They say they have been left to buy ventilators and other emergency equipment on the open market — a system that Cuomo describes as being like an eBay ­bidding war against other states for life-and-death equipment.

Trump said the federal government had responded strongly and that “massive amounts of medical supplies, even hospitals and medical centres, are being delivered directly to states and hospitals”.

Trump has invoked the Defence Production Act to order companies including General ­Motors to make ventilators, although these will not be ready in time to help treat patients in the current surge in infections in New York and elsewhere.

Trump said some governors “have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied (politics?). Remember, we are a backup for them. The complainers should have been stocked up and ready long before this crisis hit. Other states are thrilled with the job we have done.”

Then, late last month, Trump surprised his health advisers by saying he would like to see the economy reopen at Easter, warning that “the cure cannot be worse than the problem itself”.

But the growing death toll in the following days made that impossible, and since then Trump has back-pedalled and is largely ­following the advice of his principal health advisers, Fauci and Deborah Birx. Their advice has been that the virus needs to be brought under control before social distancing can be relaxed.

Polls show that Americans are overwhelmingly more concerned about public health than damage to the economy. In a meeting with a Republican ally in the Oval ­Office recently, Trump said his re-election campaign no longer mattered because his election would now depend on his response to the coronavirus pandemic.

His presumptive Democratic rival, Joe Biden, says Trump’s handling of the crisis has been “behind the curve” and Trump has failed to be truthful about it.

The President has positioned himself to argue that he has saved lives by releasing estimates that between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans will die in the pandemic. He compares this with models that show up to 2.2 million deaths if the government had not taken measures such as social distancing to stop the spread of the disease

“Think of the number — potentially 2.2 million people if we did nothing, if we didn’t do the distancing, if we didn’t do all of the things that we’re doing,” Trump said. “If we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000 … we all, together, have done a very good job.”

Will Americans accept this argument? Despite Trump’s early missteps, voters have a history of rallying around presidents in times of crisis. Polls last month showed about half of voters approved of his handling of the crisis so far, but a CNN poll this week shows his support slipping, with 55 per cent saying the federal government did a “poor job” of preventing the spread of the virus compared with only 41 per cent who say it has done a “good job”.

The pandemic has a long way to run and Trump has the opportunity to reshape his own narrative before the November election.

But the death toll will be steep and harrowing. American voters ultimately will be the judge of why their country was hit so hard and whether anyone, including Trump, should have done more to soften the blow.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.