The Beginning
Fifteen years before COVID struck, President Bush was right; pandemics can spread like a forest fire if not managed.
In late December 2019, the first hints of an impending pandemic began to trickle out of China. They were spotted not by the World Health Organization (WHO) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but by Avi Schiffmann, a bright seventeen-year-old working from his bedroom in Mercer Island, Washington. Surfing the internet over the Christmas holidays, Avi had noticed a spike in influenza-like deaths in Wuhan, China.
Frustrated by the lack of information and already a proficient coder, Avi built a website to track the spread of the new disease. The website went live on December 31 while Avi and his family were on a weekend ski vacation. (Today, Avi’s COVID tracking website remains one of the best.)
That same day, Chinese health authorities informed WHO that a new virus, similar to SARS, had been observed in Wuhan. The new virus strain was officially named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, or simply COVID) on February 11 after it was confirmed to be related to the 2002 SARS virus. At the same time, the resulting disease was named CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).
International travelers quickly spread COVID around the world. On February 1, the Philippines reported the first death outside China. Three days later, Hong Kong reported two deaths. Japan reported its first death on February 8, followed by France on February 15, Taiwan on February 16, Iran on February 19, South Korea on February 20, and Italy a day later.
On March 11, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be a world pandemic. By then, 4,300 had already died from the virus, more than double the number of deaths from the SARS and MERS viruses over the last fifteen years.
But many believed WHO was overreacting. For weeks, President Trump had tended to minimize the risks of the disease.
On February 10: “You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.”
On February 25: “[China has] had a rough patch, and I think right now they have it—it looks like they’re getting it under control more and more. They’re getting it more and more under control. So I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.”
And on February 27: “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear. And from our shores, we—you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.”
Then the stock market collapsed, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling from 29,440 on February 14 to 19,028 on March 23. Radio and cable news pundits, feeding on the nation’s political division, amplified the confusion, claiming COVID was a political hoax engineered by Democrats to harm the president during an election year.
On February 27, talk radio’s most popular host, Rush Limbaugh, told his loyal listeners, “The forces arrayed against Donald Trump are doing everything they can to weaponize this to harm the economy, to harm the stock market in hopes of harming President Trump,” Limbaugh declared. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus . . . I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”
Fox News soon picked up the political hoax drumbeat. On March 6, for example, Dr. Mark Siegel, the senior medical analyst for Fox News, told Fox viewers, “And let me tell you something, this virus should be compared to the flu, because at worst, at worst, worst case scenario it could be the flu.” That same day, Sean Hannity amplified Siegel’s comments telling his viewers “They’re scaring the living hell out of people and I see it again as like, ‘Oh, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.’ ”
Not every pundit was declaring COVID-19 a hoax; some were cashing in. Within weeks of the outbreak, a mini industry had popped up selling fraudulent COVID cures. On March 6, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent warning letters to seven companies, which, the FTC claimed, were “preying on consumers by promoting products with fraudulent prevention and treatment claims.” The companies were selling teas, essential oils, and colloidal silver, which they claimed would treat or prevent COVID-19. The FTC letter instructed the recipients to cease making claims that their products could treat or cure COVID-19.
Similarly, on March 12, the New York Attorney General sent a cease-and-desist letter to Alex Jones, the popular Infowars talk show host. The attorney general claimed Jones’ Infowars and related websites promoted fraudulent COVID cures, including Superblue toothpaste, which the Infowars websites claimed “kills the whole SARS-corona family at point-blank range.” The attorney general sent similar letters to other COVID cure promoters, including The Silver Edge company. In one of the more imaginative promotions at the time, Silver Edge used the former televangelist James Bakker to promote its Micro-Particle Colloidal Silver Generator along with Silver Wire for hundreds of dollars. The company claimed their silver products would not only cure but prevent COVID-19.
To his credit, Tucker Carlson, at the time Fox’s second most popular host after Sean Hannity, was the voice of reason in the cacophony of false claims. Carlson believed his Fox associates and President Trump were dismissing the seriousness of COVID. On March 7, in an extraordinary two-hour meeting at Mar-a-Lago with President Trump, Carlson warned the president of the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Two days later, Carlson told his audience, “People you know will get sick. Some may die. This is real. That’s the point of this script—to tell you that.” In a remarkable admission regarding President Trump’s earlier COVID comments, Carlson continued, “People you trust—people you probably voted for—have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem. It’s just partisan politics, they say, calm down. In the end this is just like the flu, and people die of that every year.”
Carlson’s comments were admirable and politically courageous, but the damage had already been done. By mid-March, polling data showed that only 38 percent of Fox News viewers considered COVID a serious threat compared to 72 percent of national newspaper readers and 71 percent of CNN viewers. Overall, Pew Research found that 79 percent of people who turned to Fox News as their primary news source believed the media had exaggerated the risks of COVID.
On March 13, 2020—shortly after meeting with Carlson and two days after WHO declared COVID an international pandemic—President Trump declared a national emergency, giving his Secretary of Health and Human Services broad powers to manage the emerging pandemic. Although COVID had emerged less than three months earlier in Wuhan, China, nearly two thousand Americans had already been infected by the virus.
Three days later, President Trump issued stringent COVID mitigation guidelines, declaring, “My administration is recommending that all Americans, including the young and healthy, work to engage in schooling from home when possible. Avoid gathering in groups of more than ten people. Avoid discretionary travel. And avoid eating and drinking at bars, restaurants, and public food courts.”
The president had been briefed on the spiraling death rates of earlier pandemics. Pandemics, if left unchecked, can quickly strain the nation’s health facilities, flooding hospitals with the sick and dying.
In 1918, just six months after three flu-like deaths were reported in Haskell, Kansas, the Spanish Flu killed 195,000 Americans. Another 450,000 died over the next eighteen months. During the summer of 1957, the Asian Flu killed 116,000 Americans, and eleven years later, in 1968, nearly 100,000 Americans died from the Hong Kong Flu. Now with COVID infections growing exponentially, it was hoped that declaring a national lockdown would “flatten the curve,” delaying the spread of the virus and giving hospitals and other facilities more time to prepare.
Within days of President Trump’s lockdown directive, communities began closing down, issuing restrictions on public gatherings, work, and travel. On March 15, New York City closed its public school system, the largest in the nation with 1.1 million students, followed the next day by closing bars, restaurants, gyms, and movie theaters. As the virus swept through the country, entire states began closing down, starting with California on March 19.
By April 7, forty-three states had largely locked down. Only seven states—Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming—opted not to issue lockdown orders.
The lockdowns may have slowed the virus, but they hardly stopped it. By early April, COVID was tearing through the country. On April 6, the death toll passed 10,000, an unimaginable number just a few weeks earlier. Five days later, deaths doubled to 20,000 on April 11, then doubled again on April 20.
As April ended, over 60,000 Americans had died of the virus, more than all the American deaths during the Vietnam War.
I remember that Limbaugh comment. What an absolute moron. Scary isn’t it, looking back???