POLITICS AGGRAVATED PANDEMIC

On March 17 Donald Trump again attempted to rewrite history when he announced that "this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic." No wonder our bumbling leader is losing whatever credibility he still had leading up to our all encompassing health crisis. Witness his pronouncements during the weeks before he made this hollow sounding statement.

January:
* "Totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. It's going to be just fine."
* " It will all work out well.
* " We have it very well under control." "We have very little problem in this country at this moment - five, and those people are all recuperating successfully."

February:
* "Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets  little bit warmer, it miraculously goes away."
* "I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along."
* "Situation is very much under control."
* "CNN and MSNBC are panicking the markets."
* "The Democrat policy of open borders has brought the virus into the country."
* "We're going down, not up. We're very substantially down, not up."
* "It's going to disappear."
* He accused Democrats and the media of engaging in a political hoax, and praised his administration's actions as the most aggressive taken by any country.
* We're talking about a much smaller 'range' of deaths than from the flu. It's very mild."
* When asked if he was concerned that the virus was spreading closer to Washington D.C., sitting next to President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil: "No, I'm not concerned at all. No, I'm not. No, we've done a great job." At least four people attending later tested positive.
And, as recently as March 16 he claimed the outbreak would "wash" away this Summer.

Throughout, President Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Resources Alex Azar maintained, falsely, that we had no test kit shortage, that anybody who wanted a test could get a test. In February, the World Health Organization distributed 1.5 million working tests to nearly 120 countries. We declined to acquire and use these tests, instead opting to develop our own. Our tests failed. Nobody in the chain of command has been willing to identify the individual responsible for this, ultimately calamitous, decision. By mid-March the U.S. had tested 25,000 people, 100 per one million of population; Italy tested 134,000, 2,200 per million; and South Korea tested 274,000, 5,300 per million of its population. We were flying blind. Lack of testing obscured the scope of the problem confronting us.

In the mean time, lacking a coordinated sense of urgency, Mr. Trump's propaganda machine produced daily photo-ops on national T.V. on a dais featuring a rambling performance by our president surrounded by a gaggle of parroting support staff mandated to say something nice about their boss. Mr. Trump continues to display the traits that, especially given the circumstances, are rapidly eroding whatever credibility he still has: the propensity to blame others, the lack of empathy, penchant for rewriting history, disregard for expertise, distortion of facts and rage when confronted with scrutiny or criticism, constantly trying to spin a situation that is not spinnable. The only sane and rational person in his entourage is Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist, who has the difficult task of converting scientific facts into political parlance acceptable to Trump. No easy task when fact is routinely replaced by hunches. In the mean time, people are dying.

On March 8, White House social media director Dan Scavino tweeted: "My next piece is called 'nothing can stop what's coming'" over an image of Trump, eyes closed and a satisfied look on his face, playing the violin. This image caused critics to compare his handling of the coronavirus  crisis to the story of emperor Nero fiddling while Rome was burning - insinuating that Donald Trump was playing golf while the crisis raged on and people were dying. Mr. Trump retweeted the post saying: "Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me." Neither the president nor Dan Scavino apparently knew about Nero.

Late January, the Wall Street Journal urgently suggested that there was still a possibility "to prevent a grim outcome. Act now to prevent an American epidemic." Experts project that as many as 214 million Americans could become infected, and up to 1.7 million could die. At every point in this developing tragedy specialists have emphasized that the country could reduce these numbers by taking action, and until very recently our president has ignored their advise, insisting: "It's going to be just fine."