People who watched the Republican and Democratic national conventions a mere week apart could be forgiven for thinking they lived in two different countries, each with its own reality.
Vice President Mike Pence described a lightning-fast response to the mysterious pathogen that surfaced in China in January, one week after Democrats said the effort to beat back the coronavirus was a failure across the board.
“Before the first case of coronavirus spread within the United States, President Trump took the unprecedented step of suspending all travel from China. That action saved an untold number of American lives and bought us time to launch the greatest national mobilization since World War II,” Mr. Pence said on the third day of the Republican National Convention.
A day later, President Trump said his team is “focusing on the science, the facts and the data.”
Just a week ago, Democrats described the response as a nightmare, from “muzzled” scientists and stutter steps in testing to laggard supply chains that forced blue states to beg for supplies.
“At first, he said the virus was under control and would soon disappear. When it didn’t, he was on TV every day bragging on what a great job he was doing while scientists waited to give us vital information,” former President Bill Clinton said of Mr. Trump. “When he didn’t like the expert advice he was given, he ignored it.”
Which side the American people see as credible could decide the election, as voters take stock of the virus that has killed 180,000 Americans and the man who is best equipped to lead the nation out of the pandemic’s shadow. In some cases, surrogates at the Republican convention spoke as if COVID-19 were receding from view and pivoted their focus to civil unrest over racial issues and law enforcement.
“The disparity between the two events was driven home to me watching [White House economic adviser] Larry Kudlow speak of COVID in the past tense,” said Rutgers University politics professor Ross Baker. “Two wholly different narratives where the Democrats hammered away on the 170,000 deaths and the GOP stressed law and order.”
A CNBC/Change Research poll this week showed a slight uptick in Mr. Trump’s approval rating and a drop in coronavirus fears in six swing states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. By a 51% to 49% margin, they said Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats would do a better job than Mr. Trump and other Republicans in handling the pandemic. The survey gave Mr. Biden a 3-percentage-point lead overall.
It’s not clear whether the pandemic will continue to drag down Mr. Trump’s ratings.
Robert Cahaly, chief pollster at the Trafalgar Group, said the share of people in swing states hunkering down to wait for a vaccine continues to shrink while the share of those looking to stay safe, yet not live in fear, is “rising like a rocket.”
He said people seem to be “done” with the pandemic.
“The media doesn’t reflect that, but that is where people are and that is why we think Trump is going to continue to grow,” he told The Washington Times.
The pollster is surveying swing states Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and red states Georgia and Texas. He said parents overwhelmingly want children to go back to in-person learning. In swing states, 65% say it is fine for children to go back to school.
Mr. Trump is pushing for in-person learning and hopes breakthroughs in treatments or the chase for a vaccine will give him a boost.
His administration gave emergency approval to “convalescent plasma” treatment on the eve of Republican festivities in North Carolina. The night before Mr. Trump’s big address, a $5 antigen test from Abbott Laboratories that was called a “game changer” in rapid diagnostics was approved.
The White House said Thursday that the administration bought 150 million of the “inexpensive and easy-to-use Abbott BinaxNOW tests.”
“This is a major development that will help save more lives by further protecting America’s most vulnerable and allow our country to remain open, get Americans back to work and get kids back to school,” press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said.
Mr. Biden said the president is six months late. Last week, he faulted Mr. Trump for waiting on a “miracle” that never came, giving the U.S. a black eye on the global stage.
“The tragedy of where we are today is it didn’t have to be this bad. Just look around. It’s not this bad in Canada. Or Europe. Or Japan. Or almost anywhere else in the world,” Mr. Biden said in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Mr. Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris, said Mr. Trump was too busy watching the stock market and flattering Chinese President Xi Jinping after the first U.S. cases were detected in January, despite his tough talk afterward.
“Donald Trump stood idly by. And folks, it was a deadly decision,” Ms. Harris said Thursday. “Instead of rising to meet the most difficult moment of his presidency, Donald Trump froze. He was scared, and he was petty and vindictive.”
The U.S. accounts for more than one-fifth of global deaths from COVID-19 even though it has a little more than 4% of the world’s population.
The seven-day rolling average of U.S. cases is down to 42,000 per day from 65,000 per day about a month ago. The caseload is heavy compared with early June, and ongoing transmission is making it difficult for college campuses to reopen.
Mr. Trump says the U.S. tallies more cases because it has set up a robust testing apparatus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week abruptly changed its advice to asymptomatic people who think they have been exposed to the coronavirus. The CDC now says they might not need to be tested unless local officials or doctors advise it.
Democratic Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Ned Lamont of Connecticut said Thursday that they will not change their policies. They said the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services did not share “their scientific rationale for this policy, which substitutes sound science-based public health guidance with the president’s misinformation.”
“This abrupt and ill-informed shift threatens the robust testing regimes our states have worked tirelessly to stand up with our federal partners,” the governors said. They said detecting asymptomatic carriers of the disease has been key to their success in suppressing transmission.
During the week of the Republican National Convention, the president and his allies toggled between pledging additional help and speaking about the pandemic as if it were a vanquished enemy. Mr. Kudlow said the president built the world’s greatest economy and will do it again.
“Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere,” he said on Day Two of the convention. “But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the COVID virus.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence are highlighting early travel restrictions, in particular. The administration said Jan. 31 that it would prevent foreign nationals who had recently been in China from entering the U.S. It announced the change shortly after American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines suspended service between the nations.
“When I took bold action to issue a travel ban on China, Joe Biden called it hysterical and xenophobic. If we had listened to Joe, hundreds of thousands more Americans would have died,” Mr. Trump said in his acceptance speech.
Yet Mr. Cuomo and other critics say the Northeast was seeded by the virus from across the Atlantic, not China, as outbreaks appeared in Europe in mid-February.
Passengers from hard-hit Italy started to have their temperatures checked before flying to the U.S. at the start of March, though Mr. Trump didn’t ban travel from much of the European Union until March 11.
“The [New York City] outbreak was sparked by European imports of the virus, not Chinese,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “The focus on China with travel bans and Air Force base quarantines was a distracting waste of resources that instilled a false sense of security that the problem was containable. In January, February and March, precious time was lost because of this mindset and the evasion it represented, resulting in the predictable chain of events that led to hospitals in [New York City] becoming inundated.”
• David Sherfinski and Alex Swoyer contributed to this report.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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