In almost every conflict between opposing sides, the greatest weapon you can have is information. Whoever is better at controlling information often comes out the victor. This is the case on the battlefield, in a boardroom, and even in the operating room. If you have the right information, and you have a good understanding on how to best use that information to your advantage, you can win even against overwhelming odds.
If you apply this concept to today’s threat of COVID-19, having the right information is essential. With widespread testing, we would have a better understanding of where the hotspots likely are, and where to focus our efforts at quarantine. With enough disease research directed at the virus, we would have a better understanding of how infectious it is, how lethal it is, and how to get better at detecting it. With a full understanding of our frontline medical response, we would better know which areas will likely need reinforcements in the form of more healthcare providers, respiratory equipment and other vital resources.
But we are not seeing any of this. We cannot get COVID-19 testing to the extent that other countries have so far been able to manage. We are not providing our hospitals with the resources they need to tackle this problem effectively. We are unable to get anything close to a full understanding of the current COVID-19 situation in this country.
And a great deal of this Fog of War over our knowledge of COVID-19 in this country can be directly attributed to Donald Trump.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Because of Trump, we know neither our enemy’s weaknesses, nor our own. Because of Trump’s efforts at dismantling and defunding the Affordable Care Act, and defunding our institutions like the CDC and the NIH, we lost valuable time and resources in responding to the virus more aggressively at an earlier stage. And we can plainly see the results of this, with the drastic measures that have been taken pretty much across the board. As I mentioned in a previous post, like a used car salesman telling you to skip the affordable oil changes, Trump’s approach to handling the COVID-19 threat has been to cut and weaken relatively affordable preventative measures, and in doing so, force us to have to deal with it as a much bigger, much more expensive problem.
The extreme measures that officials all around the country are taking to stem the spread of COVID-19 may prove to be decisive in preventing widespread illness and death. But it needs to be pointed out that if Trump had mounted a better response to COVID-19 in the first place, and not botched the response at nearly every step, a lot of the most extreme disruptions to normal life and to our economy could have been a avoided entirely. Yes, the USA would still likely have been affected by this disease that is now globally a pandemic, but if we had properly prepared ourselves, gathered the right information and used it effectively, we would likely be far better off than we are now.
If we were about to go to war with another country, no 21st-Century US general would advise it without first having a large-scale, fully-capable information-gathering network in place, giving us the most accurate assessment of our adversary and its capabilities. Not without expecting massive casualties and loss of human life.
But with our current Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump, he is expecting us to do exactly that.