To the Editor:
Re “Could Trump Have Saved More Lives?,” by Ross Douthat (column, Sept. 6):
Mr. Douthat spends most of the article comparing the U.S. Covid deaths with those of “peer countries.” This premise is faulty, as there are no comparable countries. The United States is far wealthier than any other country; we had a pandemic playbook all ready to go; we have some of the best medical facilities and most well-trained medical personnel in the world.
In both theory and practice we were primed to meet this challenge. Only President Trump’s incompetence has made us comparable. Had Mr. Trump not thrown away the pandemic playbook handed to him by President Barack Obama and disbanded the team responsible for pandemic preparedness, the death toll would have been far smaller. The financial toll would have been far smaller as well.
So to answer Mr. Douthat’s question, Mr. Trump’s response has not been “mediocre”; it has been “catastrophic.” A “normal” president would have used the playbook to direct a comprehensive national response, including invoking the Defense Production Act right away to provide personal protective equipment, testing equipment, ventilators at reasonable cost and innumerable other essential items we lacked.
If ever there was a national disaster requiring a competent president, this was it. About 145,000 deaths too many (the number suggested by David Leonhardt) are on Mr. Trump’s watch, if not on his conscience.
Steven Kahn
Caroline Kahn
Princeton, N.J.
The writers are, respectively, a retired surgeon and a psychologist.
To the Editor:
“Could Trump Have Saved More Lives?” I do not feel the need to engage in speculation regarding the unknowable. What I do know is that our president did not want to off-board Americans stranded on a cruise ship in March because he didn’t want the number of Covid cases to rise: “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”
I do not know what the body count would be under a more “normal” president, but I do know that the persistent feeling of dread I experience would be ameliorated by the knowledge that my government’s priorities were in service of my and my fellow citizens’ well-being, as opposed to the president’s poll numbers. The fact that this president can be counted on for only one thing consistently — and that is to put his interests first — should be disqualifying. Period.
Delene Wolf
San Francisco
To the Editor:
Wait a second, Ross Douthat. Isn’t Canada a “similarly positioned and sized” country to the United States in your comparison of Covid deaths per capita? Why was it left out and only Latin American countries of the Americas included?
Canada’s death rate from the virus is half of what we’ve suffered here in the United States. This seems like a much more comparable figure against which to judge the president’s success in protecting American lives.
Sharon Mullally
Philadelphia
To the Editor:
Ross Douthat attempts to answer whether more U.S. lives could have been saved by comparing the Covid-19 experience in the United States with that of countries in Western Europe and Latin America. That is neither relevant nor informative.
Rather, the question of whether more lives could have been saved in the United States is answered by looking at how President Trump responded to warnings about Covid when he was first informed of it, and whether U.S. outcomes would be different had his administration acted more quickly, forcefully and effectively with a clear and consistent message.
Researchers at Columbia University in a study released in May determined that approximately 36,000 lives may have been saved early in the pandemic had Mr. Trump taken seriously the mid-January warnings he received and then acted promptly with strong mandates involving masks, distancing, testing and tracing.
Instead, Mr. Trump ignored these warnings. Wanting to take credit for a strong economy he inherited from the Obama administration, he has made false and misleading statements suggesting that everything was “under control” and that the virus would magically “just disappear.”
It seems to me that the response of the Trump administration is a far more relevant and better answer to Mr. Douthat’s question than the experience of other countries.
Peter R. Gluck
Chevy Chase, Md.
The writer is professor emeritus of political science and public administration at the University of Michigan-Flint.