Trump's Decisive Actions Helped Save Lives During Coronavirus Pandemic, Experts Admit

Democrats and the media may be trying to pile the bogus attacks on Trump over the United States’ response to the coronavirus epidemic, but Trump should be getting credit for acting decisively and taking action that likely saved lives, even though it was a politically unpopular move to make. New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. noted that the Trump administration took “aggressive measures like barring entry to non-Americans who were recently in China and advising Americans not to go to China or South Korea,” and that this strategy worked, despite the fact that the World Health Organization officially opposes travel and trade restrictions, and “reiterated that even as it declared the epidemic a global emergency on Jan. 30.”

Republican Senator Tom Cotton said on Friday that “The single most consequential and valuable thing done to stop this virus from already spreading throughout the United States was when President Trump decided to shut down travel to China last month.” He also acknowledged that “the so-called experts who opposed the decision at the time” eventually admitted that it “bought valuable time to prevent the spread of this virus in the United States.”

He’s absolutely right. The World Health Organization admits the strategy helped saved lives.

The head of the W.H.O. team that visited China said this week that China “took one of the most ancient strategies and rolled out one of the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease-containment efforts in history.”

The W.H.O.’s epidemic-modeling teams concluded that travel restrictions had slowed the spread of the virus outside China by two to three weeks.

For the United States, the delay was probably far greater. Air-traffic data shows that flights from China to the United States dropped much more than they did to Europe.

As of this writing, a single case not connected to any known transmission has turned up in California, but there are no indications of large outbreaks like those in Italy and Iran.

But we’re not seeing Trump get any credit for this in the media, or from Democrats, are we? Nope. They’ve politicized the coronavirus epidemic, using lies to attack Trump in the hopes it will help defeat him in November.

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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis