Conrad Black: Coronavirus' political toll

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks about America's response to the COVID-19 pandemic during an address to the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 11. Doug Mills/Pool via REUTERS

There is no need to emphasize now that there is no other option in any advanced country than to apply drastic measures to reduce the probability that members of its population will become infected with the coronavirus. As the average age of those who died from the disease in the United States is 80 years, and the death rate in the United States for those under 70 years affected by the coronavirus is approximately between a quarter and a fifth of one percent of those affected, the greatest and most urgent effort should be to protect frail elderly people from any exposure to it.

Certainly, the level of danger this disease presents to a sophisticated country in terms of public health, such as Canada and the United States, does not justify the level of media and public hysteria that has assaulted financial markets and has affected most of the media of the United States. Since the imagination is often more devious than reality, it is easy to jump into a state of acute spontaneous nervousness about a virus that can kill people.

What is said

It is necessary to take into account what is being said and that is that, in fact, it has been indicated that the real coronavirus crisis is the successor of the preparation of the monstrous fraud that President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government to manipulate the elections 2016 and the spurious prosecution effort against him, in which a kangaroo court in the House of Representatives charged him with crimes that are not imputable and without any supporting evidence that he had committed the alleged acts anyway.

What is true is that there is a real public health crisis here; It is not a complete fiction like the previous episodes, and in this round, Trump ruined the first public relations, he seemed complacent and quite ignorant.

Still, despite his awkward start, no one can blame Trump for the start of the epidemic in the United States and he was in fact badly mistreated with the usual bunk on racism and xenophobia for suspending direct travel from China to the USA other governments in January. But, in part because of the relatively distant separation of the United States from China, Western Europe, Iran, and South Korea, the main focus of the coronavirus, and in part, because Trump acted quickly by closing the door on direct travel from China and then In continental Europe this week, the United States has closed the spout of the outsourced infection to a slight trickle, while preventive measures against the communication of the disease of domestic origin are tightening dramatically.

Source: Conrad Black | National Post