U.S. Virus Response Marred by Overconfidence and Delays
Despite reassurances, testing has been limited and health officials are contradicting White House statements.
The U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court Building (right) in Washington, D.C.
Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
As the new coronavirus spread around the world, sickening tens of thousands of people, President Donald Trump suggested that warm weather would kill the virus and said the number of U.S. cases of Covid-19 was “going very substantially down, not up.” He predicted the imminent availability of a vaccine and blamed the Obama administration for the slow rollout of test kits.
With the number of cases in the U.S. now in four figures, public-health experts have harsh criticism for how the White House has responded. “This is an unmitigated disaster that the administration has brought upon the population, and I don’t say this lightly,” says Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “We have had a much worse response than Iran, than Italy, than China and South Korea.” Financial executives are just as concerned: “Where is the U.S. leadership, which was one of the defining features of the crisis in 2008?” BlackRock Inc. Vice Chairman Philipp Hildebrand said on Bloomberg TV on March 10.