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○ As the new coronavirus spread around the

sickening tens of thousands of people, Pre

Donald Trump suggested that warm weather w

kill the virus and said the number of U.S. ca

Covid-19 was “going very substantially down

up.” He predicted the imminent availabilit

vaccine and blamed the Obama administrati

the slow rollout of test kits. 

With the number of cases in the U.S. now i

figures, public-health experts have harsh crit

for how the White House has responded. “T

an unmitigated disaster that the administratio

brought upon the population, and I don’t sa

lightly,” says Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard

Health Institute. “We have had a much worse res

than Iran, than Italy, than China and South K

Financial executives are just as concerned: “W

is the U.S. leadership, which was one of the de

features of the crisis in 2008?” BlackRock Inc

Chairman Philipp Hildebrand said on Bloombe

on March 10.

○ Why didn’t the

U.S. move faster?

The federal government’s role in the crisis be

earnest on Jan. 31, when Trump forbade most fo

nationals from entering the U.S. if they had re

traveled to China. “I give Trump credit for the

restrictions—and he has taken that credit,” sa

Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, a po

risk consulting firm.

But the few weeks of time the U.S. bough

the travel restriction were frittered away, exper

What other countries have done, and what th

didn’t do, is immediate and widespread testi

the virus, which Jha says is the single most imp

step in containing the spread of disease. The a

istration decided against a test already in use b

Xi Jinping,

China

After his government

initiallysuppressed

warnings about the

outbreak’s severity, Xi

claimed credit for lock-

ing downHubeiprov-

ince andreplaced local

leaders.Hissuccess

will depend largely on

whether there’s a sec-

ond wave of infections.

Hassan

Rouhani,Iran

At the outbreak’s start,

Iranian authorities

made ashow ofsolidar-

itywith China and were

slowto restrictinter-

nationaland domestic

travel. Religious author-

ities in Qom, a pilgrim-

age site that was the

epicenterof the Iranian

outbreak,declined

to restrict access to

shrines. Iran’s missteps

are reflectedin the

high number of govern-

ment officialswho have

been infected, including

about one-tenth of the

nation’s 290-member

parliament.

Moon Jae-in,

South Korea

The government’s

refusal to completely

bar Chinese visitors

sparked anger. Moon

recovered by declaring

“war” on the virus and

instituting an aggres-

sive and effective test-

ing campaign. Some

210 ,000 tests (as of

March11)have left

the country with

one of the largest

case totals—but

also one of the low-

est fatality rates. 

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