| When the history of the Great Crash of 2020 is written, the Trump administration’s epic fail on COVID-19 testing will be remembered as one of those ignominious decisions that paved the way for catastrophe.
President Donald Trump’s foolhardy dismissal of the looming threat posed by the coronavirus and his administration’s bungling, half-hearted approach early on will take its place in the annals alongside the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which turned a sharp downturn into the worldwide Great Depression.
His failure to get an adequate testing system up and running, before the virus was able to silently spread across the country, has not just been a public health catastrophe, but an economic one as well.
For it will not only cost some their lives, it may very well wipe out the livelihoods of millions across the country.
Test-Making Bungled
It would be comical if it weren’t so sad.
The problem began in January, at the very start of the coronavirus crisis in the U.S., when the Centers for Disease Control decided to stick with its usual protocols and design its own test.
But the test the CDC came up with proved to be defective, with all but 200 of the first 160,000 tests kits spoiled by a manufacturing problem.
To make matters worse, the CDC was then slow to reach out to private testing companies for help, while also inexplicably failing to take advantage of tests already developed and on offer from the World Health Organization.
Amid all the fumbling, precious weeks were lost in which the virus was steadily and stealthily spreading across the country.
By March 13, the U.S. had tested just 20,000 people, compared to the 250,000 tested in South Korea, a country with less than one-sixth of our population.
President Donald Trump walks to a March 13 press conference where he claimed a nation-wide coronavirus testing would soon be starting with help from a Google-designed website. Subsequent reporting revealed that the website was not being designed by Google and the drive-up testing system was instead a small pilot in the San Francisco area. Photo by D. Myles Cullen | White House Photo
Fighting a Virus with a Sledgehammer
Trump, in an obvious ploy to reassure the markets, proclaimed on Jan. 22 “we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
The president finally changed his tune mid-March, announcing a host of aggressive measures, including promises of a major ramp–up in testing aided by a Google–designed website, that were clearly nowhere near ready for prime-time.
The Dow shot up 2,000 points after that press conference on March 13, only to plunge the following week after it became clear all of Trump’s grand pronouncements and promises of immediate results was just another snow job from one of the greatest flimflam artists of all time.
The multiple screwups have left the U.S. at the back of the pack among developed nations when it comes to testing, with public health officials effectively forced to fight a war against a deadly foe with blinders, unable to locate areas where the virus is most active and zero in on them with preventative measures.
As a result, our nation has been left to battle the virus with the equivalent of a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel, forced to shut everything down, from schools to restaurants to museums and ballparks, sending the economy hurtling towards a 1930s-style cataclysm.
“We have to shut schools, events and everything down, because that’s the only tool available to us until we get testing back up. It’s been stunning to me how bad the federal response has been,” Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, who rated the U.S. response as “much worse than almost any other country.”
Uncertainty, the Economic Killer
But the testing failure has also hit the economy hard in second, very damaging way, creating a huge cloud of uncertainty that hangs over us and leaves businesses and families alike in limbo.
No one knows if we are talking about a two-month crisis, or one that will last for six months or – heavens forbid – 18 months.
The lack of hard data on recent infections in our own backyard forces us to extrapolate from the experiences of China or South Korea, which were the first to be hit, or Italy which, like the United States, failed to take aggressive action early enough and is now in full crisis mode.
Sure, even with much more extensive testing than we are seeing right now in the U.S., there still would be a plethora of unknowns.
But simply being able to understand what the true infection rate currently is, how fast the virus is spread, and where, would help narrow the knowledge gap considerably.
For businesses struggling to survive amid the coronavirus, a year-long shutdown is a very different animal than a two–month disruption, as bad as that is.
Scott Van Voorhis
The same is true for all levels of industry, whether it’s the stock market or the local supermarket.
Given how Trump touts himself as a brilliant businessman, you’d think he’d understand this, but he clearly doesn’t.
Now that reality has caught up with him after thousands of infections and more than 150 American deaths, he has seemingly jumped on the testing bandwagon.
Yet for all those destined to lose lives and livelihoods in this disaster, it’s too little, too late.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
