For a Germaphobe, Trump Is Pretty Bad at Fighting Viruses

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The coronavirus epidemic is not President Donald Trump's fault. Neither is the stock market's decline, or the economic downturn that seems increasingly likely to follow in its wake.

What's more, with many of the big decisions on how to slow the disease's spread in the hands of state and local officials, a U.S. president's role in such a crisis is limited. The regime in Tehran may have enabled the onset of a full-on national pandemic in Iran with its denial and inaction. That would be harder for any White House, however incompetent or misguided, to accomplish.

Still, not being as bad as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei isn't exactly something to brag about. And Trump really has been doing a lot of things wrong lately. Not everything: Long known for his heavy use of hand-sanitizer, he's been OK about promoting proper hygiene. Also, his early decision to cut off most travel between the U.S. and China, controversial at the time, appears to have been the right call. It didn't stop the virus from getting here, but surely slowed its spread.

With the disease now making its way around the U.S., though, border controls are of diminishing effectiveness. The recent White House focus on discouraging and restricting travel to and from Italy and South Korea might even be entirely mistargeted, given that both countries' high numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases seem to stem as much from aggressive testing as anything else.

Speaking of testing, the rollout of coronavirus tests here in the U.S. was initially bungled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is coming online only in fits and starts. The full story of why testing took so long has yet to be told, and may well turn out to be a case of simple bureaucratic failure rather than anything that can be pinned directly on Trump or his appointees. But the president's general disdain for scientific expertise and his repeated attempts to cut the CDC's budget (even though they have been mostly thwarted by Congress) don't exactly earn him the benefit of the doubt.

The biggest problem, though, is simply the way that the president talks about the disease. His instinct at every turn is to downplay its danger and significance. His controversial coronavirus remarks Wednesday night on Sean Hannity's Fox News show are a prime example. The two talked for a long time, and Trump said some sensible things, such as warning that the disease poses higher risks for the elderly. He also really has been studying up on his flu-season fatality numbers, reeling off the death tolls from recent years with impressive accuracy.

But the gist of the president's remarks was that his travel ban with China has been such a success that Covid-19 poses little threat here. When Hannity mentioned the World Health Organization's latest estimate that 3.4% of those diagnosed with the disease worldwide have died from it, Trump went into a riff about how this estimate was surely on the high side because it didn't count people who had Covid-19 but weren't diagnosed with it.

A lot of people will have this and it's very mild. They'll get better very rapidly, they don't even see a doctor, they don't even call a doctor. You don't even hear about those people. So you can't put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu or virus. If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by sitting around or even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better ...

I'll stop it there, because this last bit was misreported in some places as Trump saying that people with mild cases of Covid-19 should go to work. He didn't say that (he didn't say they shouldn't, either). He's also right that large numbers of mild, unreported cases mean the WHO's 3.4% case-fatality rate is probably too high; I went with an estimate of 1% in a column published earlier today. But there's no reason to think it's “way under 1%,” as Trump also said, and if lots of cases are going unreported that's actually more alarming than it is reassuring. It is the undetected spread of a virus that allows a true pandemic to develop, and while Covid-19 appears to be a bit easier to detect than influenza, it also appears to be 10 times deadlier.

The contrast with the messaging coming from the U.K. — where a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson said today that it is “now highly likely that the virus is going to spread in a significant way,” and the government is making projections of potential economic disruption so huge that one respected economist dismissed them as “fear-mongering” — is instructive. Johnson is often likened to Trump because of his hair and his penchant for making things up, but in this instance he seems far more interested in heading off the worst than in telling people not to worry about it.

That is, of course, how you're supposed to approach a potential public-health crisis. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. There are lots of people in all levels of government in the U.S. who are doing just that right now, which is reassuring. There is also, interestingly, a former high-level Trump administration official who has been doing a spectacular job — on Twitter, in op-ed articles, on television and, one presumes, in countless emails and phone calls — of spelling out the risks posed by Covid-19 and nudging government officials in Washington and elsewhere to take appropriate action. If Trump would just call up former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, ask him very nicely to take the reins of the coronavirus-fighting effort and then abstain from talking or tweeting about anything coronavirus-related other than to endorse whatever Gottlieb says, he would garner widespread and deserved praise — and possibly save hundreds of thousands of lives.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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