Life in the Time of Coronavirus: Why Conservatives' Trump-versus-Obama Comparisons of the Swine Flu Pandemic and the COVID-19 Are Hollow

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To my conservative friends who are posting false comparisons between the Obama Administration's handling of the swine flu outbreak in 2009 and the current Administration's handling of COVID-19 on social media:

Stop it. When the world experienced the swine flu pandemic, Barack Obama was just settling in as President. The first cases were reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in late March, around the same time that the Obama Administration was dealing with the disastrous state of the economy, which had been battered by the Great Recession of 2008. It took the federal government less than a month to declare a public health emergency, but because the novel Influenza A/H1N1 was a new strain, it took the medical community several more months to get a handle on the outbreak and its spread. President Obama declared a National Health Emergency on October 24, 2009. In all, the CDC estimates that at least 60 million Americans were infected, 274,000 were hospitalized, and 12,469 died between April 12, 2009 and April 10, 2010.

The differences between then and now are not comparable. Obama was a "new" President who was coping not just with swine flu but with an economy in recession. His government was proactive in its handling of the health crisis, and just like now, schools were closed, people were told to be cautious about how they interacted with others, and in one year, the pandemic was dealt with, without dishonesty from the White House. In addition, Obama's National Security Council had a functional pandemic unit, which was shut down by the Trump Administration in 2018



In contrast, Trump has been President since 2017, and the outbreak of COVID-19 should have come as no surprise. The first cases of novel coronavirus were reported in late fall of 2019 (hence its designation as COVID-19) in Wuhan, China. Prior to that, the Trump Administration had not only shut down the NSC's pandemic unit, but it also had failed in a government exercise (or simulation) based on a pandemic scenario.

Obama did not lie to the American people about the seriousness of swine flu in order to keep bad news from sending the Dow Jones into a tailspin. Trump, in his Twitter account and on TV, lied on numerous occasions. Obama did not use xenophobia and racism to shift blame for the outbreak; Trump did and continues to do so. And Trump was slow to react in some areas, decisively fast in others, which makes his overall performance uneven at best, abysmally inept at worst.

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