patrick.net

...Trump’s instincts have left him better armed than any president in living memory to confront an epidemic. Protecting borders is the thing Trump cares about most. It is also the most time-tested and effective way of fighting epidemics. Trump’s decision to limit the inflow of foreigners from China in January, as soon as news emerged from Wuhan, turns out to have been the earliest constructive step any leader took in stemming the virus. It bought time. In January, one would have expected the virus to hit the US before it hit Europe.

There are moments when it is wiser and safer to keep people apart — that is just common sense. But as Trump’s foes have sought to politicize the epidemic, common sense is what they have declared war on. Joe Biden accused Trump of xenophobia for mentioning China.

A Georgetown University public health expert confidently tweeted that ‘germs don’t respect borders’. If this is true, it is true only in the sense that respecting borders is a human trait. ...

This viruses-don’t-respect-borders business is a perfect globalist slogan. It conveys absolutely nothing but aggressively enough so as to cow others into swallowing any inclination to stand up and disagree with you. It is what is called in zoology ‘display’.

But in fact, the scientist is wrong. This virus happens to travel on people. If people can be made to respect borders, viruses will ‘respect’ them too, in the sense that they will not cross them. If this is true of households, then it is true of nations. ...

The press has long treated Trump as worse than the plague, and that view has not changed now that there is an actual plague to compare him to. ...

The evidence from Hong Kong seems to be that the single most effective measure against contagion is mask-wearing. Yet masks were insufficiently available in all western countries, and wholly unavailable in most, because those countries had surrendered their production to China (along with the jobs of those who used to make them) in order to save two or three cents. Now China refused to export them; doctors in Bergamo and Brescia and Codogno were having to share masks meant to be discarded after treating every patient. What is that if not a crisis of globalization? ...

It is common to describe ‘learned helplessness’ as a problem for the welfare-dependent: people on the dole lose the ability to conceive that they might improve their situation by getting a job. In the same way, at the start of the coronavirus epidemic countries had lost the habit of thinking it was ever a legitimate thing to enforce a border. In retrospect, the European refugee crisis of 2015 revealed that the continent would be unable to fight a contagion, should one ever arise.