More to blame than just Trump

Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist who occasionally throws cold water onto the Times' generally red-hot liberal editorial opinions.

Douthat's Sept.12 column, to me, was one of his most thoughtful and disturbing to those who, like me, tend to think President Donald Trump's response to the COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented, world-class disaster.

After reading Douthat and probing a little more, I have to conclude that while Trump's response certainly made our COVID-19 response worse than it could have been, we should consider spreading the blame and pay heed to information that mitigates the consequences

Douthat said another “debilitating pre-existing condition” in the population, which he called “folk-libertarian hostility,” was instrumental in COVID-19's spread. That attitude, he said, includes hostility to all federal policies and disregards the common good in favor of “a reflexive individualism.”

It is “not just conservative,” Douthat added, and it's as old as the nation. He even says, “some of its impulses are healthy curbs against public-health overreach and local tyranny.”

Despite my antipathy to Trump, I also agree with Douthat that Trump's Operation Warp Speed is a creative approach to speeding development of a vaccine against COVID-19, even as I disparage Trump's delusion that his obsession with re-election alone can produce a vaccine on or before Nov. 3.

I would also add that Trump has been subjected to an undue rush of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

The U.S. has a history of failing to keep non-apparent disaster scenarios front-of-mind when the threat is not immediate.

A recent Politico article notes, “After each major health crisis of the last two decades, American health and political leaders have launched preparedness programs and issued blunt warnings to their successors — only to watch as those programs were defunded, staff was allowed to depart and Washington forgot the stark lessons it had just learned.”

Things have also gone the other way — overreaction to health disasters that never materialized.

A “bird flu” epidemic never came in 2005, leading to ridicule of the George W. Bush administration's response, Politico said.

The lesson, according to a Bush administration official: “Prepare too early and you're called Chicken Little. Act too late — and millions may die.”

I also believe that many, including me, have focused too much on this statistic: With 4% of the world's population, the U.S. has about 25% of coronavirus cases and 20% of the planet's deaths — in sheer numbers, the world's worst record.

But by other measures, our record, while not good, is not the world's worst. In terms of deaths per 100,000 in population, the U.S., with 60.4, ranks seventh in the world, not first, according to statistics reported by Johns Hopkins University.

With a 3.2% fatality rate among recorded cases, the U.S. ranks 11th in the world.

Overall, I think media commentators, including me, have been a little too eager to denigrate the Trump administration's record on U.S. COVID-19 response, as bad as it was. We should be honest, but make sure we keep things in perspective.

Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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