Updated
March 27, 2020 11: 22: 13
If a week is a long time in politics, it’s an eternity during a pandemic.
Last week, this column described Donald Trump as a changed man: factual, decisive, upfront.
It seems the transformation was temporary.
This week, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson turned the health policy equivalent of the Titanic around.
He ordered his nation to hide in their homes after his advisors initially suggested “herd immunity” would see them through.
Over the same short period of time, Mr Trump was doing his second U-turn in as many weeks.
He suggested Americans could be set free and attending “packed churches all over the country” on Easter Sunday.
Indeed, on the very day the World Health Organisation warned America it could soon become the global epicentre of the pandemic, Mr Trump pushed for the US economy to be “opened up and raring to go” in just over two weeks.
“Our people are full of vim and vigour and energy,” he told Fox News viewers.
“They don’t want to be locked into a house or an apartment or some space. It’s not for our country. We’re not built that way.”
Larry Brilliant, a veteran of the eradication of smallpox, told the New York Times ending the lockdown so early would be “an error of epic proportions”.
Modelling suggests a nationwide lifting of restrictions by Easter would see 118 million Americans infected by October, resulting in more than 1.2 million dead.
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