Trump’s coronavirus death toll estimate exposes his failure

Trump had a chance to avert the unfolding coronavirus disaster. He blew it.

President Donald Trump revealed a grim projection in the coronavirus pandemic on Tuesday: Even with the social distancing the US is doing now, 100,000 to 200,000 Americans will likely die as a result of the ongoing outbreak. “When you see 100,000 people, that’s a minimum number,” Trump said.

It’s a horrifying figure. That’s more people than ever died in a single year from HIV/AIDS, drug overdoses, gun violence, or car crashes in the US. It’s more than American casualties during the entire Vietnam War.

But it’s also a horrifying number, in part, because much of it was likely preventable. If the US — including the Trump administration — had better prepared for pandemics, the country likely could have avoided ever talking about 100,000 to 200,000 deaths.

The estimated death toll “was not inevitable,” Céline Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York University, told me. “If we’d jumped into contract tracing and testing, social distancing, and health system preparedness as soon as we heard reports from China, we’d be in a very different situation now.”

Under Trump, the US had years to prepare. With warnings from President Barack Obama’s administration and activists like Bill Gates, it was always clear that America was vulnerable to a pandemic. (Vox did a whole episode about it for Netflix.) For many, the 2014-’16 Ebola outbreak exposed the threat; Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked in the Obama administration during the Ebola outbreak, told me he “came away from that experience just completely horrified at how unready we would be for something more dangerous than Ebola,” which, thankfully, was relatively hard to transmit.