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○ As the new coronavirus spread around the

sickening tens of thousands of people,Pre

Donald Trump suggested that warm weatherw

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. nowi

figures, public-health experts have harshcrit

for how the White House has responded.“T

an unmitigated disaster that the administratio

brought upon the population, and I don’tsa

lightly,” says Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard

Health Institute. “We have had a much worseres

than Iran, than Italy, than China and SouthK

Financial executives are just as concerned:“W

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

features of the crisis in 2008?” BlackRockInc

Chairman Philipp Hildebrand said on Bloombe

on March 10.

○ Why didn’t the

U.S. move faster?

The federal government’s role in the crisisbe

earnest on Jan. 31, when Trump forbade mostfo

nationals from entering the U.S. if they hadre

traveled to China. “I give Trump credit forthe

restrictions—and he has taken that credit,”sa

Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, apo

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 whatth

didn’t do, is immediate and widespread testi

the virus, which Jha says is the single mostimp

step in containing the spread of disease. Thea

istration decided against a test already inuseb

XiJinping,

China

Afterhisgovernment

initiallysuppressed

warnings aboutthe

outbreak’s severity,Xi

claimedcreditforlock-

ingdownHubeiprov-

inceandreplacedlocal

leaders.Hissuccess

willdependlargely on

whetherthere’sasec-

ond wave of infections.

Hassan

Rouhani,Iran

Attheoutbreak’sstart,

Iranianauthorities

made ashowofsolidar-

itywithChinaandwere

slowto restrictinter-

nationalanddomestic

travel.Religiousauthor-

itiesinQom,a pilgrim-

agesitethatwasthe

epicenteroftheIranian

outbreak,declined

to restrictaccessto

shrines.Iran’smissteps

arereflectedinthe

high numberofgovern-

mentofficialswhohave

beeninfected,including

aboutone-tenthofthe

nation’s 290 -member

parliament.

MoonJae-in,

SouthKorea

The government’s

refusaltocompletely

barChinese visitors

sparkedanger.Moon

recoveredbydeclaring

“war”onthevirusand

institutinganaggres-

siveandeffectivetest-

ingcampaign.Some

210 , 000 tests(asof

March11)haveleft

the countrywith

oneofthelargest

case totals—but

also oneofthelow-

est fatality rates. 

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