Opinion | Trump’s America risks repeating China’s early mistakes in coronavirus management

Beijing failed to listen to the experts and communicate clearly with the public in the early days of the coronavirus and paid the price. As Trump contradicts expert advice and downplays infection risks, has he doomed the US to making the same mistakes?

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Published: 9:22am, 13 Mar 2020Updated: 9:22am, 13 Mar 2020

If the crisis over the coronavirus is moving decisively into the arena that hosts all big issues these days – that of great power politics – then at first blush, it ought not to be much of a contest. China has been gaining rapidly on the United States on all fronts in recent years, economically, militarily and diplomatically, but on issues of public health, the party-state’s system fell at the first hurdle.

The first impulse of Chinese officials was to suppress information about the virus when it was discovered in Wuhan in central China in December, and then put pressure on frontline professionals, such as doctors, who wanted to warn the public, to remain silent.

As a result, the virus spread more rapidly from Wuhan to the rest of the country, and overseas, than it would have had it been checked earlier, and more people got sick and died.

The US, in contrast, has constitutional protections for free speech, which means the press cannot be silenced. In its Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, America has a first-rate and independently managed source of expert advice.

In theory, the crisis should offer an easy narrative of Washington’s superior ability to manage a public health crisis, with checks and balances inoculating it against the kinds of missteps made by the Chinese. But with President Donald Trump in charge in Washington, it is looking like a close-run contest of the two warring systems.