Trump's turn to the economy leaves a vacuum when it comes to controlling the pandemic

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/17/politics/president-donald-trump-leadership-covid/index.html

 Publicly and privately, Sen. Angus King spent weeks seeking a national coronavirus testing plan. Sen. Lamar Alexander held a hearing where President Donald Trump's testing czar Brett Giroir acknowledged his efforts remain "a work in progress."

Trump has brushed off all three -- a Democratic-aligned independent from Maine, a Republican from Tennessee, an admiral he appointed. He calls testing "overrated" while asserting, nonsensically, that more tests merely inflate the number of coronavirus cases.

"An astonishing failure of competent leadership," King concluded in an interview with CNN. And it's one that demonstrates a jarring reality of America's fight against the global pandemic.

After briefly embracing the role of "wartime President," Trump has all but quit the battlefield in favor of cheerleading for economic revival. In the absence of reliable White House leadership, a haphazard combination of federal, state and private sector efforts has gradually boosted testing levels even without a national plan.

 

The decline in the proportion of positive tests points toward an ebb-tide for the pandemic nationally. Yet public health officials warn that the commander-in-chief's retreat on halting the virus now threatens to slow or reverse progress that the painful stay-at-home measures and economic shutdown have bought. The British medical journal The Lancet denounced the Trump administration as "obsessed with magic bullets" such as vaccines, while remaining "nowhere near" the level of testing the fight requires.