Spirits were high in the White House on September 26, as they were about to hold a ceremony officially nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. This nomination would refocus the topic of the 2020 election away from COVID-19 and onto a topic more favorable for President Trump: filling the judiciary with conservatives. Before the ceremony, the 150 high-profile attendees were told they did not have to wear masks or socially distance themselves if they had tested negative that day (Jenkins, 2020). Five days later, these high spirits quickly deflated when President Trump announced via his Twitter that he had tested positive for COVID-19. Over the following week, 35 people who attended the ceremony or were in close contact with Trump announced that they too had tested positive for the coronavirus (Blasey, 2020). For comparison, over the same time period the entire country of Vietnam, home to over 95 million people, reported only 27 total cases of coronavirus (Roser, 2020). President Trump couldn’t protect himself from the coronavirus, and that could severely impact his reelection campaign.
SARS-CoV-2 is a dangerous virus in part because of its ability to be transmitted via airborne particles even if the one exhaling the virus is asymptomatic. The virus is also characterized by superspreader events, where one person disproportionately infects a large number of people (Adam, 2020). There is not a scientific explanation for why some people are superspreaders, but it is clear that these events do occur. Because of these and other factors, the Trump administration should have known a ceremony packed with people was a bad idea. Instead they pushed ahead with their misguided belief that instant testing would protect them, even though the instant tests are less accurate than laboratory tests and are not designed to replace masking and social distancing (Patel, 2020).
After President Trump tested positive, he was taken to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. He spent the weekend there receiving dexamethasone, remdesevir, and several other drugs that are being tested as COVID-19 treatments. He was taken back to the White House on October 5 after stabilizing. One might expect a president to thank the medical staff after leaving, or empathize with and console the families of the 200,000 Americans who weren’t as fortunate as him, or even allow the CDC to investigate the outbreak so more wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Instead, after leaving Trump tweeted “Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!” Instead of showing his humanity, Trump went back to what he does best: talk about himself while minimizing a virus that has hamstrung America.
America never should have been hamstrung in the first place, as the country entered this pandemic with vast advantages. America has the manufacturing capacity, biomedical research capabilities, expertise, and government institutions like the CDC and NIH that are the envy of the world. Even so, many of our leaders have chosen to disregard and diminish the experts. While tearing down the experts, there has been no building of a national plan to stop the virus that has killed more Americans than any military conflict since World War 2 (America’s, 2019).
The results of our leadership’s failure are clear. An outbreak disproportionately harming communities of color (COVID, 2020) has fanned the flames of inequality. Children are unable to go to school, the sacrifices made by health care workers have been squandered, businesses are unable to reopen while much of the world has reopened, and worst of all over 200,000 Americans died. America’s death rate is 2 times worse than Canada’s, 5 times worse than Germany’s, and 50 times worse than Japan’s—a country with a huge elderly population (Roser, 2020). Anyone who has so recklessly squandered lives and money is not fit to hold office, so this November we must send Trump a message he knows too well: you’re fired.
Works Cited
Adam, D., Wu, P., Wong, J., et al. (2020, May 21). Clustering and superspreading potential of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections in Hong Kong. PREPRINT (Version 1). Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-29548/v1+]
America’s Wars. (2019, November). Department of Veterans Affairs. Retrieved from: https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf
Blasey, L. (2020, October 7). Essential Politics: This is how a coronavirus outbreak unfolds. LA Times. Retrieved from: https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2020-10-07/essential-politics-white-house-coronavirus-outbreak-essential-politics
The COVID Racial Data Tracker (n.d.). Retrieved from: https://covidtracking.com/race
GHS Index: Building collective action and accountability. (2019). Retrieved from: https://www.ghsindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019-Global-Health-Security-Index.pdf
Jenkins, J. (n.d.). A Message from Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.: I regret my error of judgment in not wearing a mask. Retrieved from: https://president.nd.edu/homilies-writings-addresses/a-message-from-rev-john-i-jenkins-c-s-c-i-regret-my-error-of-judgment-in-not-wearing-a-mask/
Roser, M., Ritchie, H., & Ortiz-Ospina, E. (2020). Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)". OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Patel, N. (2020, October 7). Rapid covid tests can work—if you avoid making the White House’s mistakes. MIT Technology Review. Retrieved from: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/07/1009636/rapid-covid-tests-can-work-white-houses-mistakes-trump-abbott/
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of 老司机传媒. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, 老司机传媒 or the Seventh-day Adventist church.