This is what happens when you elect a sociopath

By John Torgrimson

Lanesboro, MN

I first heard of the coronavirus in early January when my friends in Hong Kong started posting about a strange deadly SARS-like virus that was emerging in Wuhan, a city in Hubei province in China.  This was right around the time of the Chinese New Year and my first thought was:  the entire country will be returning to their ancestral villages to celebrate Lunar New Year, spreading the disease as they travel. 

A few weeks later I saw a headline from Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post with the alarming title: 5 million leave Wuhan before lockdown.  

If you have ever seen a wet market in China, or Asia in general, you will know that there is a Noah’s Ark of creatures in cages  and tanks ready to be butchered – bats, fish, chickens, frogs, and so on – one cage stacked on top of the other.  

Epidemiologists believe COVID-19 may have originated from a butcher cutting up a Horseshoe bat, and the virus somehow jumping from creature to human.  They think SARS started this way in the early 2000s as well.

So, we all knew about COVID-19 in early January and its potential spread in a global world.  So, where was the U.S. government? 

While COVID-19 was spreading globally, the president was calling it a flu-like disease, a hoax, saying more people are killed in car accidents, and downplaying its potential impact on the U.S.  And now we have over 10,000 deaths. 

Taiwan started reporting on COVID-19 before China did, setting up a central command, testing travelers into the country, and beginning a public health protocol of monitoring victims and their contacts.  Taiwan has come out of this pandemic as the one country that did things right: as of late March the country of 24 million people had 376 confirmed cases and five deaths.

Journalist David Brooks recently said on PBS that he was angered by the government’s chaotic response to the pandemic, commenting: “Frankly, this is what happens when you elect a sociopath as president, who doesn’t care, who’s treated this whole thing for the past month as if it’s about him.”

And chaos is what the Trump administration has delivered: a lack of emergency preparedness with a shortage of testing kits and specialized medical equipment, no centralized command, leaving states competing with states for medical supplies, left to figure this out as best they can on their own.  Now we are trying to contain an invisible enemy when there should have been a plan in place in the first place. The incompetence at the federal level is staggering.  

And, so, now we have both a medical crisis and an economic one.  Unfortunately our leaders tried to protect the economy by downplaying the epidemic.  The price to be paid will be in lives lost.