Trump will stand or fall on his coronavirus test

"There’s no doubt that the president’s response so far has been uneven. One of the nation’s leading infectious disease specialists tells me the president deserves more credit than he gets for his decision early on to suspend flights to and from China, and to limit travel to other seriously affected countries. It was a decision that was attacked at the time as a spasm of nativism by the same people now attacking him for his recent inaction. But it’s possible it bought the country precious time in the battle to “flatten the curve” of the incidence of coronavirus cases to spread out the pressure on healthcare facilities. He notes also that the administration was slower than it might have been in ramping up production of test kits, which it is finally starting to do."  

That was Gerald Baker in an article headed

Trump will stand or fall on his coronavirus test

in the Times today, published just  before Trump announced stopping travel from Europe. 

He is having a good crisis, clever politician as he is, but he is trying to prevent the virus spreading while the UK sees it as inevitable and wants to delay it to the summer. Angela Merkel said yesterday that 75% of European population might catch it. She is right - anything 'might' happen. Time to read Camus' The Plague, which I was supposed to read at school.

Boris Johnson said yesterday that banning mass gatherings (as Romania has done) would be counterproductive. He said,

“Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science.” 

However, Richard Horton, chief editor of The Lancet, the world's leading medical journal, commented: 

“The UK government — Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson — claim they are following the science. But that is not true. The evidence is clear. We need urgent implementation of social-distancing and closure policies. The government is playing roulette with the public. This is a major error

I think the British government is right that the spread of the virus can only be delayed, not stopped (in Europe anyway), if only because of the long incubation period, but delay is good so that the big hit is in summer when hospitals are less crowded. 

News of declining number of cases in Wuhan is good but do we believe the Communist regime in China? 

(Why is the Syrian government a regime and the Chinese Bolsheviks a government?)

Anyway Trump looks good taking drastic measures- and stopping travel would be effective if it were not a cure worse than the malady. 

Trump's travel ban may be an overreaction and has sent the stock markets reeling, but in November, when I hope this thing is over, it may play very well. The Democrats may feel forced to oppose it, which will play badly for them. Nobody loses votes for doing too much in order to save voters' lives.

I think we are seeing an understandable overreaction to a virus that for most sufferers will feel like flu or a cold, but a quick spreading, lethal virus that has huge consequences for supply chains and the world economy was an inevitable consequence of cheap, easy transport and globalisation. This will not be the only such virus to wreak havoc.

The symbolism is so obvious that, were it fiction, readers would complain. The virus is very globalist and the reaction is protectionist, nativist and, in a word, Trumpian.