This week a respected polling organization published a survey that said that 60% of the respondents approved of the way that Trump was handling the pandemic. My only thought about that was that I must know more about communicable diseases and their epidemiology than 60% of the population.

And there’s a reason for that.

In this galaxy, many years ago, I was about to be graduated from Western Caroline College and was in danger of setting the school’s record for the briefest job interviews. (What’s your name? What’s your major? Thanks for coming.) I was an English major with no education courses and no obvious marketable skills. However, by persevering, I received two job offers. 

One offer was from GECC, and as best I could tell, it involved repossessing refrigerators. The other was from the United States Public Health Service. The interviewer kept using a word that I wasn’t familiar with: epidemiology. Whatever it was, it sounded better than repossessing refrigerators, so I signed up with the VD Branch of the Communicable Disease Center, Bureau of State Services, US Public Health Service, and learned what epidemiology meant. It meant combatting communicable diseases by limiting the number of people exposed. Syphilis was what we were most interested in at VD Branch.

In my time with USPHS, I worked on syphilis, TB, and polio. And I learned two important things about infectious diseases. The first is that when you find one, you jump on with everything you have. The second is that when politicians get involved, the disease has a decided advantage.

There are, of course, differences between COVID-19 and syphilis. Syphilis is one of those good news/bad news things. The good news was that we had both a blood test and an effective treatment. Syphilis also had a very narrow vector; the only way you could get it was through sexual contact.

The bad news came in two parts. The early symptoms caused no discomfort, so most people didn’t seek treatment. The second part was that it took a long time, maybe 30 years, to kill you.  That led to our unofficial theme song: “The Thrill Is Gone, But the Malady Lingers On." (There’s no accounting for lack of taste.)

The way we did epidemiology on syphilis was to test widely. Determine who might be infected. Find them. Test them. And treat them, either for the disease or prophylactically.

My job was to follow up on positive blood tests, interview the infected patient, and then chase down everybody that patient had had sexual contact with over a specific period. It was a fairly interesting job, talking to people about their sex lives. It was also a little dangerous since some people weren’t interested in talking about their sex lives to strangers.

With a small army of investigators, we drove down the incidence of syphilis; our goal was to eradicate it.

To see how that method works with COVID-19, look at how South Korea dealt with it and at their results.

·      Within a week of the first case, they began turning out testing kits. They tested widely and repeatedly.

·     They did epidemiology, finding people who might have been exposed, testing them, and if they were infected, isolating them.

·     The provided emergency child care for parents who had to work from home.

·     They made the fight against COVID-19 a national cause.

There were no half measures in the South Korean response. It was coherent, robust, and transparent.

Now contrast that with Trump’s response.

In the beginning, when we were first hearing about the epidemic in China, Trump didn’t take half-measures; he took essentially no measures. He did (after we already had the infection in the US) close down travel from China. Beyond that, he did nothing but engage in several weeks of happy talk. “We have it under control,” he said.  

From January until mid-March, we watched the Coronavirus attack people in more and more states. The WHO declared it a pandemic. Then Trump told the nation that he had always known it was a pandemic.

At that point, we had no usable tests, although we had been offered tests by the WHO. We were not stockpiling personal protective equipment and ventilators. We were not taking personal precautions. A lot of people were minimizing the threat.

Then, once he decided he was going to be a wartime president, he went on TV droning about all of the equipment and other resources he was sending to the states. He mentioned tests about two weeks ago. So far, Georgia has received a total of 5,000 testing kits.

Whatever Trump does from now until the threat is over, he wasted valuable time in the beginning, seeming to worry more about how this might affect his campaign than the fact he was dealing with a highly contagious disease that had a mortality rate at least ten times higher than the flu. Instead of putting the Federal government at the front of the procurement effort as it was in our campaign to eradicate polio, he has set state against state, increasing the cost of essential equipment and causing uneven allocation.

And when he speaks to the nation, he can’t hold to the truth or even the subject. I’ve heard so many false statements from him in the last few weeks that my most fervent prayer is that he would just shut up and let the professionals deal with it.

Which brings me to the second thing I learned as a VD investigator. Politicians are awful in a battle against a disease or even an economic problem. As I mentioned, we had made significant headway against syphilis during the sixties. The incidence of the disease was falling year over year. We were getting education about it into schools at a level where it would do some good. Important people were saying good things about the eradication effort. My boss was on the Today Show. Then the politicians decided that we had done enough and reduced the funding. It’s been going up ever since.

The same thing happened during the Great Depression. Things were getting markedly better, and the politicians decided that the problem was solved. They no longer wanted to spend the money. We began to slide into a second depression but were saved from that by a greater problem: World War II.

In contrast to South Korea’s response, Trump’s response has been neither coherent, robust, nor transparent. It has, so far, been a shambling wreck, and people have died and will die because of it.

I can’t imagine how 60% of our population can’t see that.