Democrats Have a Real Problem, Part VIII
Chinese government
As the novel coronavirus continues to wash over the Northeastern corner of the United States and threatens to bleed into the rest of the country, the Democratic Party’s COVID-19 response has come into sharper focus.
The first priority is to save lives and minimize the pandemic’s impact on the nation. I have about as low an opinion of our politicians as is reasonable, but it’s silly and counterproductive to argue they are genuinely, trade-lives-for-personal-gain evil (in significant numbers). This is true even of the most shamelessly partisan like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, President Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, etc. and it is true of both the Democratic and Republican Parties, overall.
Of course, this is American politics in the year 2020 so it would also be silly to call any of the above honest, decent people. At least by generally accepted human standards.
Which means the Democratic Party’s coronavirus response has a secondary mission that can be seen with equal clarity: Weaponize the human and economic tolls of the virus to use against Trump in the upcoming election.
One can see this reflected in in the pandemic’s coverage by Democrat-friendly—which also happen to be Chinese-government-friendly—media outlets as well as comments coming from Democrat leaders.
President Trump’s daily briefings on the fight against the Wuhan virus routinely feature members of the press doing their worst Jim Acosta impressions and asking the President questions with zero social utility beyond making him look foolish. Trump takes the bait and the entire display devolves into no-win nonsense with the American public emerging as the biggest loser. One can also see the media’s agenda in subtle pieces like these that place the blame for the US outbreak primarily at Donnie 45’s feet while minimizing the bigger, often intentional mistakes made upstream from him by the Communist Party of China and the World Health Organization in the pandemic’s earliest days.
Democrats in DC have been more explicit. Take it away, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut:
The reason that we’re in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did, is not because of anything the WHO did. It’s because of what this president did. It’s because he didn’t take this virus seriously. We weren’t going to be able to keep every case out of the United States, but we didn’t have to have tens of thousands of people dying.
Excuse me. That’s rising star, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
Not to be outdone, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi effectively said the bad man in the Oval Office had blood on his hands and promised another Congressional investigation into Trump’s conduct. Considering she cribbed language from the Nixon investigators, one can only imagine another impeachment charade could be in the offing should President Trump win re-election. Which would just be really special and an effective use of resources.
There are two glaring problems with this line of attack.
The biggest problem is that there have been over 2.4 million cases of COVID-19 on the planet resulting in more than 165,000 fatalities.
Belgium and Spain have over 400 deaths per million people of population. Italy is close behind them with over 390 and France has over 300. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands have over 200 deaths per million. Iran, Turkey, Russia, Brazil, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Portugal, India, Austria, Ireland, Peru, South Korea, Israel, Chile, and Japan have all been broadsided by the novel coronavirus. All of these countries and more have been severely disrupted if not locked down under pseudo-national quarantine. Unsurprisingly, the global economy is in shambles.
None of this can plausibly be blamed on Donald Trump. Especially when neither the Chinese government’s deceit nor its authoritarian attempts to cover up the initial outbreak is in doubt.
The Trump Administration and the man, himself, should catch hell for initially underestimating the COVID-19 threat, thus exacerbating the severity of America’s outbreak. It makes sense that moments wasted in the early stages of the fight against the virus are the most costly. However, that only makes even more egregious the CPC’s intentional efforts to hide evidence of transmission from human to human and imperil the planet. The Chinese government could’ve saved thousands of its owns people and given the rest of the world a fighting chance to keep COVID-19 at bay. Instead, it arrested whistleblowers, destroyed antiviral research, and encouraged Chinese citizens to go about their normal routines (which included traveling to assemble in large crowds for Lunar New Year celebrations).
The absolutely best-case scenario for the Communist Party of China is that the Wuhan virus emerged via zoonotic transmission at a wet market and then the government aggressively tried to cover it up. Unfortunately, that narrative is no longer the unquestioned consensus.
The possibility that the virus leaked from a governmental lab studying coronaviruses thanks to substandard safety protocols and/or good, old-fashioned incompetence is no longer being discounted. The theory looks even more credible now that reports have surfaced of the Chinese government tightly restricting research into the virus’ origin. Everyone already believes it originated from a Chinese wet market so what purpose would further secrecy serve except to hide a more problematic narrative.
Consequently, Donald Trump’s failure probably—though not certainly—made America’s problem worse. On the other hand, the Chinese government’s failure created a global pandemic. Ignoring that fact because it’s an election year and Democrats really want to beat Trump is unconscionable, plain and simple.
If America doesn’t hold the CPC responsible for the global destruction its wrought, then who will? Who else can?
Granted, the Democrats and their media mouthpieces could try to argue the Chinese government is to blame for the global pandemic, yet Trump is still primarily to blame for the American situation being so much worse than the one confronted by the rest of the world.
That’s a very fine needle to thread, but it becomes impossible in light of the second glaring problem, which is…
By all objective indicators, the United States is managing its outbreak as well as—if not better than—most comparable countries.
The media obscures this fact by toggling between per capita and raw data comparisons while contrasting the US efforts against those of more closed societies. For example, when criticizing the US testing blitz, media outlets chose a per capita comparison. When commenting on the US death toll, however, they focus on raw numbers. Furthermore, America’s fight against COVID-19 is often judged against South Korea’s (or that of other tiny, insular countries) without regard for how the two societies’ fundamentally different approach to civil liberties render many of Seoul’s most effective containment methods DOA in America:
Health officials would retrace patients’ movements using security camera footage, credit card records, even GPS data from their cars and cellphones…South Koreans’ cellphones vibrate with emergency alerts whenever new cases are discovered in their districts. Websites and smartphone apps detail hour-by-hour, sometimes minute-by-minute, timelines of infected people’s travel — which buses they took, when and where they got on and off, even whether they were wearing masks…South Koreans have broadly accepted the loss of privacy as a necessary trade-off. People ordered into self-quarantine must download another app, which alerts officials if a patient ventures out of isolation. Fines for violations can reach $2,500.
Trump’s loudest critics have been calling him a fascist for the last few years. Do we really want him (or any other US president) having control over that kind of surveillance apparatus? The correct and obvious answer is no.
Which means comparing the US fight against the novel coronavirus to South Korea’s is a textbook case of apples versus oranges.
It should go without saying that the fairest basis for comparison with the US is a per capita examination of other relatively open, democratic countries who saw their first cases of COVID-19 at the end of January/beginning of February*. Those countries are the US (first confirmed case, January 20th), France (Jan 24), Australia (Jan 25), Canada (Jan 25), Germany (Jan 27), Finland (Jan 29), Italy (Jan 30), Spain (Jan 31), Sweden (Jan 31), the United Kingdom (Jan 31), and Belgium (February 4th).
Here’s how those countries stack up as far as number of cases per million of population (as of April 19th, according to Worldometers):
And number of tests per million:
And finally, number of deaths per million:
The US is middle of the road in per capita cases, still lagging in per capita testing, and having better success than most limiting per capita fatalities, which is the most important metric. Only Germany, Canada, Finland, and Australia can claim to be doing a significantly better job battling the virus under similar circumstances whereas Spain, Belgium, Italy, France, and the UK appear to be struggling far worse than Uncle Sam.
There is simply no reasonable argument that holds the Chinese government accountable for plunging the world into chaos while simultaneously painting President Donald Trump as the primary architect of the United States’ pandemic. That doesn’t seem likely to stop the Democrats from trying, though.
*[For the record, the other countries who saw their first cases of COVID-19 during the relevant window were China, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, Nepal, Malaysia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, India, Philippines, and Russia.]
