Joel Achenbach, William Wan, Karin Brulliard and Chelsea Janes, Washington Post, July 19, 2020:
The Crisis That Shocked The World: America's Response To The CoronavirusAlexander Burns, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, New York Times, July 19, 2020:
Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation has failed spectacularly to contain it. The country's ineffective response has shocked observers around the planet.
Many countries have rigorously driven infection rates nearly to zero. In the United States, coronavirus transmission is out of control. ... Testing shortcomings that revealed themselves in March have become acute in July, with week-long waits for results leaving the country blind to real-time virus spread and rendering contact tracing nearly irrelevant.
The United States may be heading toward a new spasm of wrenching economic shutdowns or to another massive spike in preventable deaths from covid-19 — or both.
How the world's richest country got into this dismal situation is a complicated tale that exposes the flaws and fissures in a nation long proud of its ability to meet cataclysmic challenges.
The fumbling of the virus was not a fluke: The American coronavirus fiasco has exposed the country's incoherent leadership, self-defeating political polarization, a lack of investment in public health, and persistent socioeconomic and racial inequities that have left millions of people vulnerable to disease and death.
In this big, sprawling, demographically and culturally diverse nation, the decentralized political structures gave birth to patchwork policies that don't make sense when applied to a virus that ignores state boundaries and city limits.
While other countries endured some of the same setbacks, few have suffered from all of them simultaneously and catastrophically. If there was a mistake to be made in this pandemic, America has made it.
The single biggest miscalculation was rushing to reopen the economy while the virus was still spreading at high rates through much of the country, experts say. ...
The United States did not follow the expert advice. ...
Other countries have managed to avoid the kind of dramatic viral resurgence that is happening in America. Spain, Italy, Germany and France — all devastated by the virus months ago — drove coronavirus cases and deaths to relatively low levels. ... In Taiwan, baseball fans sit in the stands and watch their teams play. Japan has had fewer than 1,000 deaths from covid-19 ... South Korea has had fewer than 300. [South Korea reported its first case on the same day as the US.] Vietnam has recorded no deaths from the virus.
The death rate from covid-19 in the United States looks like that of countries with vastly lower wealth, health-care resources and technological infrastructure.
America's mishandling of the pandemic has defied most experts' predictions. ...
America, experts say, is approaching a tipping point at which its public health systems could become so overwhelmed they begin to collapse. Already, coronavirus test results take so long to come back they are almost useless for anything except as a historical record.
The delays have a cascading effect. Contact tracing is rendered ineffectual. Containing the virus by isolation becomes impossible. And as hospitals fill, the virus's fatality rate could inch upward because of overtaxed ICU nurses and doctors struggling to care for so many. ...
Trump repeatedly downplayed the viral threat. "You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero," he said in late February. On Twitter, he cheered on citizen protests of shutdowns that had been ordered by Democratic governors. He did not wear a mask in public until July 11. ...
Future historians will not treat kindly Trump's efforts to divide and confuse, said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.
"You look at the Great Depression and how Roosevelt made a concerted effort to unite the country — the fireside chats, the New Deal. That is the instinctive reaction of almost every president in crisis. Even if you don't succeed, you try to convince people that they're all in this together," Grossman said. "This presidency is the exception and anomaly."
Many Americans now believe the pandemic has been exaggerated, or even fabricated, by scientists and the mainstream news media. The rejection of scientific expertise has flowered into a conspiracy theory holding that the experts are lying as part of a political agenda.
"The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid 19. Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust," former "Wheel of Fortune" game show host Chuck Woolery tweeted July 12.
Trump retweeted that. Days later, Woolery revealed his son was sick with the virus, and he has since taken down his Twitter account.
As Trump Ignores Virus Crisis, Republicans Start to Break RanksErica Werner and Jeff Stein, Washington Post, July 18, 2020:
President Trump's failure to contain the coronavirus outbreak and his refusal to promote clear public-health guidelines have left many senior Republicans despairing that he will ever play a constructive role in addressing the crisis, with some concluding they must work around Mr. Trump and ignore or even contradict his pronouncements.
In recent days, some of the most prominent figures in the G.O.P. outside the White House have broken with Mr. Trump over issues like the value of wearing a mask in public and heeding the advice of health experts like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, whom the president and other hard-right figures within the administration have subjected to caustic personal criticism.
They appear to be spurred by several overlapping forces, including deteriorating conditions in their own states, Mr. Trump's seeming indifference to the problem and the approach of a presidential election in which Mr. Trump is badly lagging his Democratic challenger, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in the polls.
Once-reticent Republican governors are now issuing orders on mask-wearing and business restrictions that run counter to Mr. Trump's demands. Some of those governors have been holding late-night phone calls among themselves to trade ideas and grievances; they have sought out partners in the administration other than the president, including Vice President Mike Pence, who, despite echoing Mr. Trump in public, is seen by governors as far more attentive to the continuing disaster.
"The president got bored with it," David Carney, an adviser to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, said of the pandemic. He noted that Mr. Abbott, a Republican, directs his requests to Mr. Pence, with whom he speaks two to three times a week. ...
Amid mounting alarm in a huge portion of the country, Mr. Trump has at times appeared to inhabit a different universe, incorrectly predicting the outbreak would quickly dissipate and falsely claiming the spread of the virus was simply a function of increased testing. With his impatient demands and decrees, Mr. Trump has disrupted efforts to mitigate the crisis while effectively sidelining himself from participating in those efforts. ...
Mr. Trump has offered only hedged recommendations on wearing masks and has rarely worn one himself in public; in a Fox interview that was broadcast on Sunday the president said he would not issue a national mask order, because Americans deserve "a certain freedom" on the matter. ...
Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, in an interview on "Meet the Press" on NBC, did not answer directly when asked if he had confidence in Mr. Trump's leadership in the crisis. ...
Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska ... condemned the open animosity toward Dr. Fauci by some administration officials ...
"I want the whole White House to start acting like a team on a mission to tackle a real problem," Mr. Sasse said. "Navarro's Larry, Moe and Curly junior-high slap fight this week is yet another way to undermine public confidence that these guys grasp that tens of thousands of Americans have died and tens of millions are out of work."
Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, was more succinct: "The more they turn the briefings over to the professionals, the better."
Mr. Trump himself seems less interested in the specific challenges the virus presents and is mostly just frustrated by the reality that it has not disappeared as he has predicted. The disconnect is only growing between him and other party leaders — not to mention voters. A poll published Friday by ABC News and The Washington Post found that ... about two-thirds of Americans said they had little or no trust in Mr. Trump's comments about the disease.
Mr. Trump’s political standing is now so dire that even Republicans who have spent years avoiding direct comment on his behavior are acknowledging his unpopularity in plain terms. ...
Some of Mr. Trump's closest advisers are adamant that the best way forward is to downplay the dangers of the disease. Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, has been particularly forceful in his view that the White House should avoid drawing attention to the virus ...
Trump Administration Pushing To Block New Money For Testing, Tracing And CDC In Upcoming Coronavirus Relief Bill
The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.
The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad ...
The negotiations center around a bill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is preparing to unveil this coming week as part of negotiations with Democrats on what will likely be the last major coronavirus relief bill before the November election. ...
Negotiations are expected to kick off with increased urgency because of the rapid growth of cases — and steady uptick in deaths — in the United States. The number of cases began falling in April but accelerated sharply after Memorial Day, shattering records in the past two weeks.
In late May, there were fewer than 20,000 new cases of coronavirus reported each day. On Friday, there were more than 76,000 new cases reported. ...
One person involved in the talks said Senate Republicans were seeking to allocate $25 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing, but that certain administration officials want to zero out the testing and tracing money entirely. ...
"Cases and deaths are now both rising again, including in many red states," said Sam Hammond, a policy expert at the right-leaning think tank the Niskanen Center, which has been working with Senate Republicans on testing legislation. "Senate Republicans have asked for funding to help states purchase test kits in bulk. As it currently stands, the main bottleneck to a big ramp-up in testing is less technical than the White House's own intransigence."
President Trump has repeatedly questioned the value of conducting widespread coronavirus testing, arguing that if there were fewer tests conducted, the number of infections would be lower. ...
The administration is also seeking to zero out $10 billion in new funding for the CDC in the upcoming bill, while slashing spending for the Pentagon and State Department related to foreign aid ...
At the same time they push cuts in testing and CDC funds, administration officials are trying to use the spending package to fund priorities that appear not directly related to the coronavirus — including a new FBI building, which has been a longtime priority for Trump ...
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