It is always fascinating to watch politicians try to manipulate and prepare people for what is coming.  In this case Donald Trump of course only a few weeks ago was saying there were 15 cases in America and it would soon be down to zero.  He congratulated himself on the speedy action he had taken, even though he has been slow to react on everything.  He is not the only leader who was slow to react – South Africa and many other countries should have closed off their flights a lot sooner and warned citizens to come back within a day or two or stay overseas. They reacted slowly and that helped to spread the disease internationally. 

After that, frequent references were made by Trump and the television channel that promotes his standpoint, namely Fox News, that this disease is almost exactly the equivalent of influenza and they don’t understand the fuss that the rest of the media is making. That ignores the fact that firstly you have a vaccine for flu and actual medication that generally assists with treating it.  Then we heard wildly inflated death numbers alleging that 120,000 Americans die a year from flu, when in fact the real number is approximately 34 000 to 65 000 per year on CDC figures for the last 2 years.

It took until Sunday for the Trump administration to prepare America for the fact that there would probably be 100,000 deaths and possibly even 200,000 from Covid-19. He stuck to 100 000 and his medical adviser floated the 200 000 figure.  Of course, now that the entire story of saying that the cases would disappear to zero, or that it was the same as influenza, is proving to be another lie, the propaganda machine sprung into action rather quickly and the new version says if Trump had done nothing, as if any leader of a country would do nothing, 2,2 million Americans would have died.   In other words, the new theme is if 100,000 people die, it is not so bad, because Donald Trump took such decisive action and was such a great leader that he stopped 2,2 million people from dying which is obviously based on assuming that a leader of a country seeing this unfold in front of them decided to do absolutely nothing and not ask people to keep a safe social distance.  It also obviously ignores the fact that they are simply implementing and copying, to a large extent, the steps that China took, even if not as drastic – which is probably why it spread more easily through America and European countries – because they did not take the drastic action that China did in Wuhan.  In other words, he hasn’t done anything new, come up with any amazing idea or anything else – he has just implemented some of the steps China took – but more slowly and less strictly on a bit by bit slow basis.

It is nevertheless, however tragic this whole story ends up being, fascinating to watch people deny that it is serious, then to try and compare it to the flu and when they finally, weeks later, start to realise their mistakes and the extra people that will die due to the slow way they have acted, suddenly change their entire story!   That is literally how he tried to present it repeatedly during a press conference on Sunday, while of course as usual berating the media, accusing them of reporting false stories and, as he always does, claiming that they are failing and losing money.  In fact, the New York Times, one of his favourite newspapers to attack, is doing better financially and has more subscribers to its website now than it did before he became President, so even those allegations are simply not true. 

The saddest thing for America though is that people generally choose to watch the propaganda that they want, and those that watch Fox News, presumably with an uncritical mind, will believe what they are told.  I say with an uncritical mind, because it obviously requires them to erase from their memory the fact that only a few weeks ago they were told, “When you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that is a pretty good job we’ve done.”  The tragedy about all of this is for those who naively watch one channel and who might have been able to take more steps sooner to prepare themselves against this – they did not, because the President of America and the TV channel that supports every story he makes - minimised the seriousness of this disease.