Concern Over Coronavirus Grows In Spite Of Trump Lies

This chart is from the Morning Consult Poll -- done most recently between February 24th and 26th of a national sample of 2,000 adults, with a 2 point margin of error. The sample size and margin of error for the three previous polls are the same.

Donald Trump has told Americans that there's nothing to worry about, because his administration has taken steps to keep the Coronavirus out of the United States. But he has also said that the virus will magically disappear as soon and hot weather arrives. And last Friday night, he told a South Carolina crowd of supporters that the Coronavirus is a hoax (perpetrated by Democrats to damage his chance of re-election). In other words, he's just telling whatever lie he thinks will make him look good.

But the public doesn't need lies -- not for something as serious as a possible pandemic. It needs the truth. Sadly, truth is not something Trump does. Most people know Trump is dishonest, and they don't trust him to tell them the truth about this virus. That's probably a big reason why the concern is growing over the Coronavirus. Note on the chart above that concern over the virus is growing -- from 52% near the end of January to 69% a month later.

Fortunately, there are people willing to tell Americans the truth. One of them is Bill Gates. He and his wife have donated $100 million to fight this virus. Here's part of what he had to say in The New England Journal of Medicine:

In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again. The Covid-19 pandemic is a case in point. We need to save lives now while also improving the way we respond to outbreaks in general. The first point is more pressing, but the second has crucial long-term consequences.

The long-term challenge — improving our ability to respond to outbreaks — isn’t new. Global health experts have been saying for years that another pandemic whose speed and severity rivaled those of the 1918 influenza epidemic was a matter not of if but of when. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed substantial resources in recent years to helping the world prepare for such a scenario.

Now we also face an immediate crisis. In the past week, Covid-19 has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about. I hope it’s not that bad, but we should assume it will be until we know otherwise.

There are two reasons that Covid-19 is such a threat. First, it can kill healthy adults in addition to elderly people with existing health problems. The data so far suggest that the virus has a case fatality risk around 1%; this rate would make it many times more severe than typical seasonal influenza, putting it somewhere between the 1957 influenza pandemic (0.6%) and the 1918 influenza pandemic (2%).

Second, Covid-19 is transmitted quite efficiently. The average infected person spreads the disease to two or three others — an exponential rate of increase. There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or even presymptomatic. That means Covid-19 will be much harder to contain than the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which were spread much less efficiently and only by symptomatic people. In fact, Covid-19 has already caused 10 times as many cases as SARS in a quarter of the time.

National, state, and local governments and public health agencies can take steps over the next few weeks to slow the virus’s spread. For example, in addition to helping their own citizens respond, donor governments can help low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) prepare for this pandemic. Many LMIC health systems are already stretched thin, and a pathogen like the coronavirus can quickly overwhelm them. And poorer countries have little political or economic leverage, given wealthier countries’ natural desire to put their own people first.

By helping African and South Asian countries get ready now, we can save lives and slow the global circulation of the virus. (A substantial portion of the commitment Melinda and I recently made to help kickstart the global response to Covid-19 — which could total up to $100 million — is focused on LMICs.)

The world also needs to accelerate work on treatments and vaccines for Covid-19. Scientists sequenced the genome of the virus and developed several promising vaccine candidates in a matter of days, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is already preparing up to eight promising vaccine candidates for clinical trials. If some of these vaccines prove safe and effective in animal models, they could be ready for larger-scale trials as early as June. Drug discovery can also be accelerated by drawing on libraries of compounds that have already been tested for safety and by applying new screening techniques, including machine learning, to identify antivirals that could be ready for large-scale clinical trials within weeks.

All these steps would help address the current crisis. But we also need to make larger systemic changes so we can respond more efficiently and effectively when the next epidemic arrives.

You can go here to read what long-term changes he believes is necessary to prevent future outbreaks.