Corona In Trumpland
FRONTLINE|April 10, 2020
Donald Trump’s buffoonery in the face of the pandemic is not an individual failing but a symptom of a country where the state has been emptied out and lacks the capacity to act decisively in a time of crisis.
Vijay Prashad
Corona In Trumpland

United States President Donald Trump was convinced that the coronavirus was just common flu. On March 4, he told the television host Sean Hannity that the coronavirus was not even as lethal as the flu, which could kill between 27,000 and 77,000 people a year. A week later, Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health told the U.S. Congress that “the mortality of COVID-19 is multiple times what the seasonal flu is”. The death rate for the flu is 0.1 per cent, while the World Health Organisation (WHO) says that the estimated death rate for coronavirus is at 3.4 per cent. This small incident reveals how callous Trump was from the very first about the coronavirus and the threat it posed to the people of the world, and to the people of the U.S.

Not only was Trump publicly callous about the threat from this coronavirus, but his administration had cut funding for the Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund and for the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC lost 15 per cent of its budget, which amounts to $1.2 billion, while the Reserve Fund lost $35 million. The federal Public Health Emergency Preparedness programme lost a third of its budget between 2002 and 2019, now down to $617 million; this has meant a loss of trained workers who can manage a pandemic at the community level. These cuts come after a decade of austerity for public health services in the U.S. and the haemorrhaging of workers in the social services and public health sectors. The infrastructure that would deal with a pandemic had been sliced down to the bone, or indeed, even into the bone.

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