Reassessing Trump and Covid
REASSESSING TRUMP AND COVID: It's hard to exaggerate the anger, criticism, and vitriol directed toward then-President Trump last year for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. If for some reason you need a reminder, just search for "Trump" and "blood on his hands."
But now something interesting is happening. In the last few days, among some commentators following the COVID crisis, we're seeing the beginning of a sense of perspective about the way the Trump administration battled the virus. The bottom line is: Of course the crisis was awful, but on balance, overall, the United States handled it as well or better than many of the world's most advanced countries.
"With some exceptions (Germany, though even they have a slow vaccine rollout), the EU's pandemic handling has been worse than the US's on balance," tweeted FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver on Saturday. One could quibble with Silver's wording -- it would be more accurate to call Germany's vaccine rollout a complete mess -- but the big point is true.
Indeed, Silver was responding to a tweet from writer Matthew Yglesias, who pointed out huge problems with the entire European Union vaccine effort. "What a disaster," Yglesias said. "European leaders mostly procured AstraZeneca shots, then excessively talked it down, and now European citizens are refusing to get them, waiting instead for unavailable mRNA vaccines while unused [AstraZeneca] doses pile up."
By contrast, in the United States, President Trump pushed and cajoled and threw money at vaccine makers in the form of Operation Warp Speed. Critics scoffed at Trump's vow to have a vaccine in record time, before the end of 2020. But he did just that. "It's just breathtaking that that got done in 11 months from when we first knew about this virus," National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins told Axios last week. "It is at least five years faster than it has ever been done before."
James Hamblin, a doctor who writes on the virus for The Atlantic, tweeted, "It is honestly beyond my wildest expectations that we'd have three extremely effective vaccines a year into the pandemic."
Biden recently held a strange event to celebrate the 50 millionth dose delivered since he was inaugurated. Why not celebrate all the doses delivered -- about 66.5 million on February 25, the day of Biden's event? The subtext of the Biden event was that the effort started when he arrived. It didn't.
Trump clearly deserves credit for leading the effort that resulted in the speedy development of a vaccine. But the vaccine arrived in November. What about the time before that?
There's no doubt the virus has taken a terrible toll in the United States -- roughly 525,000 deaths so far. That is 1,582 deaths per million population, according to the Worldometer website. (Of course, the U.S. is a huge country, and the toll has varied from state to state -- 2,459 deaths per million in New York and 2,618 in New Jersey, versus 327 deaths per million in Vermont and 523 in Maine.) In Europe, Germany did indeed do better than the U.S. -- 842 deaths per million. But in the United Kingdom, the toll was 1,803 deaths per million; in France, 1,323; in Italy, 1,617; in Spain 1,478.
When Silver wrote that Europe's handling of the pandemic has been "worse than the US's on balance," the leftist writer Josh Marshall responded, "That seems a bit overstated. Only Italy has a higher per capita death toll out of major EU states. US death toll is almost twice that of Germany."
But that's not the only way to compare performance, Silver responded. "The per-capita death toll so far is reasonably similar between the major non-Germany EU countries and the US, especially given ambiguities in how deaths are counted," he wrote. "And our vaccine rollout is hugely better than theirs."
When Joe Biden ran for president, his proposal to deal with the pandemic was that he would 1) implement a national plan for the problem, and 2) encourage, if not force, Americans to wear masks and practice social distancing. But Americans were already doing that. Last October, a Centers for Disease Control study found that the "vast majority of Americans of all ages have been wearing face coverings since April," in the words of a New York Times report. That finding was "roughly in line with other polls showing that most Americans report wearing masks," the Times added. The bottom line is that Biden did not have a lot new to add to the COVID fight. It would simply take time to make progress.
And then progress happened. Starting around the ninth of January, the rolling average of daily new COVID cases began a dramatic decline. It fell day after day, through Inauguration Day and continuing until nearly the end of February, when it began to flatten. On January 9, the seven-day average of new cases was 259,571 a day, according to a New York Times compilation. On Saturday, it was 62,694. Like much else in COVID news these days, it is a good development that started under Trump and has continued under Biden. All Americans hope that it gets better and better.
The point is not that Donald Trump and the United States led the world in handling the pandemic crisis. The point is that, all things considered, the U.S. slogged through an extraordinarily difficult period in a way that was roughly similar to many other advanced nations. And realizing that, it's important to remember the frenzied, hysterical, and hostile media coverage of the Trump administration during the virus's worst days. It was just that -- frenzied and hysterical and hostile. It gave Americans an unbalanced picture of what was happening. Now, perhaps, with the perspective of some time and a new president, people will be able to see that.
"The fact that America and Europe were never so very far apart in their COVID response was discernable" during Trump's time in office, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote over the weekend. Indeed it was. Perhaps that is even clearer now.
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