A little more than a week ago, U.S. President Donald Trump said Easter — April 12 — would be a good time to get Americans back to work, and predicted, “packed churches all over our country . ... I think it'll be a beautiful time.”
A week ago, Trump accused the “lamestream media” of pushing to keep America “closed” in order to damage the economy and, by extension, his prospects for re-election.
On Monday, more than 500 Americans died of COVID-19 — the deadliest day yet in America — and Trump set a new goal. If the U.S. keeps its total death toll to 100,000, he said, it will have done “a very good job.”
He got that number from Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response co-ordinator, and like everything else Trump utters, it is subject to change at any time according to his whims or sense of the political winds.
Birx, it should be noted, said that if Americans “do things together well, almost perfectly,” the nation's death toll might be held to between 100,000 to 200,000.
But, she added, if Americans don't get serious about slowing the spread of the virus, the worst case becomes more likely, and that means COVID-19 could kill 1.6 million or more in the U.S.
From the outset of the crisis, Trump has, as always, been a reliable fount of unreliable information and of fantastic, fantasy outcomes.
In the last days of February, as U.S. cases began to climb, Trump tweeted that “coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” He followed that, two days later, with another tweet claiming the outbreak would be temporary. “It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle — it will disappear.”
It didn't. And now the U.S. leads the world in confirmed COVID-19 cases and many experts say it's just a matter of time until it leads the world in deaths, as well.
In Canada, no one is claiming that the response to the coronavirus has been perfect. We, like the Americans, would benefit from more testing.
But Canadians, regardless of where they live, have no excuse for not knowing exactly what is expected of them to slow the spread of the virus. From Victoria to St. John's the messages, from political leaders and public health officials, have been remarkably consistent.
Nor are Canadian leaders downplaying the dangers that are still ahead, or the extraordinary efforts Canadians will need to maintain, for weeks if not months, to keep the outbreak within the capacity of provincial health systems to meet.
The situation to our south is very different and, as of now, much worse. Hospitals in New York and southern California are already overwhelmed. Huge naval hospital vessels have been called into service on both coasts.
The tests that Trump's been claiming are available to any American who wants one, never have been.
As CDC director Robert Redfield told Congress recently, there are 350 million Americans and only about four million tests in the pipeline.
“We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the U.S. government's response to international disasters from 2013 to 2017, told The Guardian newspaper.
“The U.S. response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” according to Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014.
The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council's global-health office, whose sole purpose was to prepare for global pandemics, and Americans are now paying the price for that.
Hundreds of medical workers across the U.S. have fallen sick and hospitals face dire shortages of protective gear.
The vacuum of leadership and conflicting messages from the Trump administration has led to a patchwork of responses and restrictions — and in some cases no restrictions at all — at the state and local level.
The president has swung between false assurance — the promise of business as usual by Easter — to phoney claims he's saved the nation. Monday, he told Fox News that he'd saved the country from “deaths like you have never seen before.”
And he now says that June will bring the recovery. “By June 1, a lot of great things will be happening.”
In times of danger, people need leaders they can trust to tell them the truth and they need consistent direction on how to keep themselves, and their fellow citizens safe.
Canadians are getting both. Americans neither.
