The Trump Administration's COVID-19 Response Analysis

By the Full Disclosure Team - Jesenia Parthasarathy, Mia Korsunsky, and Aditi Ambravan

COVID-19 - A Background

The recent strain of Coronavirus has not only plagued the immune systems of citizens around the world, but it has also completely dominated the minds of our government administration officials. Dealing with an illness that is so widespread has been quite stressful for many officials considering that the last Pandemic the world had seen was the influenza pandemic of 1918. It has been suspected that COVID-19 originated in animal bodies, as many viruses do, however, were capable of mutating to make humans their host due to frequent contact. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) developed this way in the past. COVID-19, declared a Pandemic on March 11th, 2020, and rooted from the SARS-CoV-2 virus by the World Health Organization (WHO), has infected 27.2 million people and killed 890,000 worldwide¹. However, the United States leads this race that no one wishes to win, with 6.3 million total cases and 189,000 deaths¹. To put this in perspective, the second-in-line is India with 4.2 million cases and 71,642 deaths¹. Yet, the U.S. is currently not only struggling with backlash against their numbers, but also with the way they’ve dealt (and are dealing with) distributing aid, preventing racial injustice, implementing safe quarantine, and acting in a timely manner. This piece will break-down the actions the Trump Administration has taken to mitigate the possible disaster COVID-19 has in store for us (as of September 10th, 2020).

Trump’s Administration Takes Action (Timeline)

January 31, 2020: President Trump suspended the entry of those who posed a risk of transmitting the coronavirus to the U.S. This was one of the earliest actions taken to combat the pandemic by the Trump administration. Shortly afterwards, President Trump took action to increase respirator availability and expand resources that the United States would need to combat the pandemic.

March 13, 2020: COVID-19 was declared a national emergency. Following the state of emergency, numerous actions were taken to increase the availability of testing and gain access to military resources. Overall, the President successfully gained resources valuable to suppressing the pandemic and issued aid to suffering countries like Italy. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act assured the support for families and businesses impacted by the virus.

March 27, 2020: President Trump signed off on a bill introduced by the 116th US Congress - the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act, which allowed for a 2.2 trillion dollar investment into the economy. The CARES act was the boost America needed to combat the recession caused by the virus.

These three core actions taken overlook hundreds of more minuscule contributions by the Trump Administration to help America recover from the pandemic. Yet, travel restrictions, monetary aid, and the expansion of resources are all actions that do not actively stop the spread of the virus itself. A federal quarantine or social distancing mandate was never adopted, something that would not have violated the president’s power due to the state of a national emergency.

Impact on Racial Injustice

No plan is one size fits all. For a country built on decades of failed economic policies and wealth gaps that could rival 18th century France, tackling COVID-19 would be no different. The first, and arguably most noticeable economic consequence of the pandemic was the sharp plunge the country took into a recession. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 20.5 million non-farm jobs were lost and the unemployment rate rose to 14.7 percent in April. This recession would have devastating outcomes all around, but the impacts would be largely exacerbated in particular communities like the Black, Latino, Indigenous and immigrant households, a finding that reemphasized the structural racism integrated in our society found in employment, education, healthcare inequality and more, all being worsened as this pandemic continues to wield its ugly head.

In America, we fight daily against the bitterness of discrimination, yet still, we see our system deny many non-white patients and citizens the proper healthcare and testing. Some people from non-white Hispanic groups are more likely to be uninsured². We also see that many people of varying ethnic groups and backgrounds hesitate to seek medical help, due to a distrust in government and healthcare systems. However, these fears are not baseless, as non-white citizens have been mistreated countless times before in historical events such as the multiple eugenic movements which forced sterilization³, and the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male⁴. Additionally, transportation, child care, language, cultural differences, and others, are reasons for inability to receive safe healthcare.

On one hand, inequalities in high-quality education, that we already see present in the college system, have a lasting effect on citizens far after they finish their schooling years. When a person has less access to quality education, they are more likely to have less flexibility when it comes to jobs. Many of these people work as gig-economy workers, workers who do not follow a set career or have a stable job, but survive with an income from a combination of small gig jobs, possibly in different sectors of the economy. This puts them at a higher risk of exposure to COVID-19, as those who are already struggling to get by with a steady income, cannot afford to miss a day of work, let alone 2 weeks, especially if they do not have a paid leave.

On another hand, we might see evictions occurring at a higher rate in neighborhoods with ethnic minorities considering the disproportionate unemployment rates of these minorities. When more people in one complex can’t pay their rent, not only is that alone considered a high rate, but the landlord is now struggling to pay for their building, causing the rates to grow even further⁵.

These injustices are not the end of the long list that has plagued our country alongside the pandemic. Keep in mind the effect of this pandemic, and how it unevenly affects different groups of people.

As for the Trump Administration and its ability to construct a response strategy that takes these disparities into account, the Center for Budget and Policies Priorities explains that “[r]relief measures have mitigated hardship, but there are significant gaps — including, for example, leaving out the poorest households from any increase in SNAP benefits — and implementation challenges that have delayed aid to some households. The measures are also temporary.” It’s at this point that we must raise an important question. “Is it possible to implement a successful response plan when the infrastructure and institutions that we expect to carry it out were barely functioning in the status quo?” The Washington Center for Equitable Growth argues that “a blind adherence to the idea that markets can solve every problem, have made our economy and our society more vulnerable. Disparities by income, race, ethnicity, and gender are inevitably exacerbated by this shift of social and economic risk from collective institutions to individuals—rendering any response to a deep recession and eventual recovery all the more difficult.” Obviously this trend cannot just be attributed to our current presidency, but rather decades of policy making decisions that were easy instead of impactful.

Biden’s Battle. The Democratic Presidential Candidate and his Coronavirus Policies

On his campaign website, Biden outlines a nine step plan to combat COVID-19. The first of these steps is to address testing. He plans to double the number of drive-through testing sites, invest in next-generation testing, stand up a Pandemic Testing Board and establish a U.S. Public Health Jobs Corps. Next, he takes up PPE, in a plan to use the Defense Production Act to Increase production and the national stockpiles. The next step he outlines is providing evidence-based national guidance in cooperation with the CDC. This seems like the first big difference from the Trump Administration, whose decision to allow states to address guidelines on a case-by-case basis is met with confusion and contrasting policies. The fourth step is a plan for vaccines and treatments, with investing $25 billion in vaccine manufacturing, promising to keep politics out of medical trials, followed by protecting Older and High Risk Americans through various task forces and plans.These steps are followed by step 6: rebuild and expand defenses to predict, prevent and mitigate pandemic threats. This would include the restoration of the White House national Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense that the Trump Administration eliminated in 2018, among other restorative measures with organizations like WHO and previously eliminated programs and plans. The last step? A mask mandate nationwide.

The promise of Biden’s democratic stance comes as a surprise to few, and while a campaign must state plans and policies in order to articulate to its supporters why their ballots should be cast in favor of the democratic or republican party, it’s important to reference past precedent and weigh feasibility over flowery rhetoric. If elected, Biden comes into a republican legislative branch, meaning any act or piece of legislation he tries to introduce that requires more than 50 senate votes won’t make it past the republican-dominated senate. This isn’t dissimilar to the Obama administration, when faced with the 2008 recession, where his legislative branch blocked policy from making tangible impacts. While personal political beliefs are subjective, we must examine all possibilities and prospects when standing in the polling booths in November.

The What-Ifs

A Columbia University report stated that if the United States had undergone quarantine just one week earlier, we could have saved 36,000 lives. Simply put, our administration should have taken action sooner when it came to quarantine. Unfortunately, this complacency and inaction persisted through the present day in September. The enforcement of social distancing, left to the discretion of individual states, immediately caused a national divide among partisan lines, something that could have easily been avoided with federal intervention and policy.

Governor Andrew Cuomo best mitigated the COVID-19 pandemic, as he recently announced that New York’s COVID infection rate has been at under one percent for over 33 days⁶. His policy of strict quarantine enforcement and emphasis on the value of masks and social distancing hold the responsibility of New York’s impressive recovery. Southern counterparts have seen a rapid acceleration of COVID-19 cases due to the strict retainment of the Constitutional value of freedom. Many believe that forcing others to quarantine, distance, and wear a mask vastly overstep the authority that the government should have. Both approaches, while shockingly different, are representative of American values.

Overall, this divide would have disappeared with federal action - something that American is clearly unable to agree upon. So while many may criticize the lack of action by the Trump Administration, it is simply impossible to act in a way that appeals to every single American due to the vast polarization between states. There are many what-ifs to address about handling the pandemic but it is most important to analyze the reasons behind the actions of American leaders rather than speculate on what could have been done.

Sources Cited:

1. W. (2020). WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard. Retrieved September 07, 2020, from https://covid19.who.int/

2. Berchick, Edward R., Jessica C. Barnett, and Rachel D. Upton Current Population Reports, P60-267(RV), Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2018, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2019. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-267.pdf

3. The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced Sterilizations. (2016, March 07). Retrieved September 11, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/07/469478098/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations

4. Tuskegee Study - Timeline - CDC - NCHHSTP. (2020, March 02). Retrieved September 11, 2020, from https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm

5. The Annie E. Casey Foundation. Unequal Opportunities in Education [online]. 2006 [cited 2020 Jun 24]. Available from: https://www.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/aecf-racemattersEDUCATION-2006.pdf

6. Governor Cuomo Announces 33rd Straight Day with COVID-19 Infection Rate Below 1 Percent. (2020, September 09). Retrieved September 11, 2020, from https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-33rd-straight-day-covid-19-infection-rate-below-1-percent