Trump's Ignorance Puts Entire World at Risk

It may seem enough, for people who are burdened with the twin stresses of lives disrupted by quarantine and fear of the deadly coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), to focus our attention on issues immediately at hand and ask the only two questions that really matter right now: How do we stop the spread of Covid-19 in our own communities, and how do we overcome our own and the country’s economic hardships caused by the pandemic?

Because our own concerns are all-consuming, we tend to forget that the Covid-19 crisis is a “pandemic” in the most literal sense; as of March 26, the coronavirus had infected more than half a million people in 198 countries and territories around the world. As has often been said, the coronavirus does not respect borders or class; decisions made and actions taken on the other side of the globe can and do have an impact on the success or failure of efforts to stop the epidemic everywhere else.

That is why we cannot observe the rhetoric and actions of United States President Donald Trump with anything but alarm and disgust.

Amid the Covid-19 taking on truly frightening proportions in the US — as of March 26, it has 82,523 cases and 1,182 deaths — Trump has stubbornly refused to act with any sense of urgency. Instead, he has loudly and repeatedly complained about the economic disruption of anti-epidemic measures and vowed to have the country “up and running” by Easter this year because “that is when the churches will be packed” with people celebrating the holiday.

In spite of having nearly three months to prepare for the onslaught of Covid-19, the Trump administration did virtually nothing to ensure that widespread testing could be carried out or that health care facilities and workers would have adequate supplies of basic protective gear and equipment needed to treat patients. As late as the beginning of this month, Trump was dismissing alarming media reports of the spread of the coronavirus as “the latest Democratic hoax” intended to discredit him and was blaming the Obama administration for America’s lack of preparedness — even as it emerged that Trump himself had ordered a key government pandemic policy and planning office disbanded in 2018.

Trump’s performance in handling the Covid-19 outbreak in the US has been so willfully inappropriate that even influential supporters have turned on him. Jonathan Last, executive editor of the deeply conservative political journal The Bulwark (a publication founded by conservative journalists Charlie Sykes and William Kristol, who sit as the president and chairman, respectively, of the right-wing Defend Democracy Together Institute), in a commentary on Thursday wrote: “People have been saying that you can’t plan for a once-in-a-century pandemic — there is no playbook for that kind of disaster. This is not true. There is literally a playbook for pandemics. What you can’t plan for is the possibility of a government seeing the pandemic coming and refusing to follow basic protocols for managing the crisis. The black swan here isn’t Covid-19. It’s Trump.”

Trump’s threat to force an end to restrictive quarantines and order businesses to reopen in spite of the still-spreading coronavirus in the US poses a grave health risk to the American people and, not insignificantly, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and citizens of other countries — all of whose homelands are trying to implement proper steps to fight the pandemic — who live and work in the US.

Beyond that, Trump’s self-interested obstinacy undermines the efforts of every other country, like our own, which has had to make tremendous personal and economic sacrifices to combat the spread of Covid-19. For every country’s quarantine, testing, treatment and recovery strategies to be effective, given the extensive interconnectivity of our world, all have to be carried out as faithfully as possible. To have the world’s largest and most connected economy purposely refusing to do that means that overcoming the pandemic and returning to something like a normal condition is delayed for the entire world.

One global-scale disease is enough. We can only hope our friends the American people will cure the world of the other one it appears to be suffering by voting for a more thoughtful and compassionate leader in November.

This article was published in The Manila Times dated 28 March 2020. Republished with permission.