A President Biden will do a better job handling COVID-19

November 9, 2020
Arielle Kane

Criticized in their first debate by Vice President Joe Biden for fumbling the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump asserted he had orchestrated the “biggest national mobilization since WWII.” Don’t worry if you missed it, because it never happened. Early on, his administration decided to punt the responsibility to respond to the pandemic to the states — which meant they were left competing for limited resources, begging for federal guidance, and navigating a nationwide problem which they couldn’t solve on their own.

With deaths now totaling more than 230,000, it’s obvious that the U.S. response to COVID-19 has not been effective. President Trump wanted to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19 because he saw it as a political problem and hoped it would go away swiftly. But when it was clear it wasn’t going away, instead of adapting his strategy, he remained unwilling to listen to experts or follow leaders’ footsteps in countries like South Korea, Japan and China. Oliva Troye, Vice President Pence’s lead staffer on COVID-19, said even when it was clear that COVID-19 would spread to the U.S., the president didn’t want to hear it because his biggest concern was getting reelected.

There were multiple failures: Early on, the federal government neglected to do contact tracing of travelers returning from hard-hit regions, then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) botched its early test kits, and the entire medical supply chain fell apart with limited personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers and not enough ventilators to meet demand.

Today, 10 months later, as America experiences a “third wave” of coronavirus infections, the Trump administration still has not mobilized the federal government to meet the moment. Specifically, they failed on three fronts:

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