Coronavirus is spreading across the United States, but there’s nothing united about the response. With the Trump administration seemingly most focused on downplaying the outbreak, states and cities and businesses are making their own decisions about what preventive measures to impose, rather than working in a coordinated way with uniform standards. It's a mess.
“There’s no systematic plan of when a city should close school, when they should tell businesses that they have to telework, when they should close movie theaters and cancel large gatherings,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on Face the Nation Sunday. “We leave these decisions to local officials, but we really should have a comprehensive plan in terms of recommendations to cities and in some support from the federal government for cities that make that step, make that leap, if you will.”
At the same time, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is talking less about steps the government might take and more about how individuals should respond. “You don’t want to alarm people, but given the spread we see, you know, anything is possible,” he told Fox News. “And that’s the reason why we’ve got to be prepared to take whatever action is appropriate to contain and mitigate the outbreak.”
But what does Fauci want to see? “Social distancing like in Seattle is the way to go. I’m not talking about locking down anything. There’s a big difference between voluntary social distancing and locking anything down.” That right there sounds like a message coming from someone who wants to stop the spread of the disease but knows that proposing any measures more significant than “Don’t go to crowded places, think twice before a long plane trip, and for goodness’ sake don’t go on any cruises” is going to badly upset Donald Trump.
The countries that have successfully slowed the spread of COVID-19 have done so through exactly the kind of response the Trump administration is frantically rejecting. Voluntary social distancing will help in the U.S., but we need more than the good will of individual people at work here.