Donald Trump’s coronavirus legacy: 400,000 dead on his watch
- Experts blame Trump administration for a preventable loss of life
- Biden official warns ‘virus is going to get worse before it gets better’
The US was expected to cross that sombre threshold as early as Monday. It was yet another reminder of how poorly the nation with the world’s largest economy has fared during the coronavirus pandemic that has infected 95 million globally and killed more than 2 million.
Not since Woodrow Wilson was in office during the 1918 flu pandemic – which killed about 675,000 in this country and 50 million worldwide – had a president overseen the loss of so many American lives.
That total was fast approaching the 405,000 US fatalities from World War II – thousands of them recorded when Harry Truman was president after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in April 1945 – to rank as the third-deadliest event in the history of the republic. About 618,000-750,000 were killed in the Civil War of 1861-1865.
“What’s so troubling about this loss of life is it was preventable,” said Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Centre on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “This is an infectious disease we knew how to prevent, and as difficult as it is, far easier to solve than defeating Nazi Germany. And yet, we did not mount a response to wage war against this virus as we have in these other situations.”
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Thomas Whalen, an associate professor at Boston University and an expert on the American presidency, was even harsher in his assessment. Whalen cited reporting by journalist Bob Woodward, who taped Trump on February 7 acknowledging how dangerous the virus was even though he repeatedly played down its severity publicly.