For months, US President Donald Trump has underestimated the seriousness of the current epidemic, overestimated the impact of his policies and possible disease treatments, and blamed others. Hours after the United States topped the list of coronavirus cases, Trump appeared on Fox News, questioned the shortage of medical supplies, boasted of the country's ability to conduct tests on people, and criticized his predecessor's response to another pandemic earlier.

"I don't think 30 or 40,000 respirators are needed," the US president said, referring to a request from New York State Governor Andrew Como. Trump made this statement, despite government reports that he expected a severe shortage and reversed course, on Friday morning, calling for urgent steps to be taken to produce more breathing aids.

Trump claimed, misleading, again, on Friday, that medical authorities had tested more people, more than any other country. In terms of prime numbers, the United States tested more people with coronavirus than in Italy and South Korea, but still lags behind in relation to the proportion of the total population.

He continued to claim, falsely, that the Obama administration “moved too late” during the H1N1 avian influenza pandemic, in 2009 and 2010. Since January, these lies show some basic principles of how Trump is trying to shift his response to the epidemic to his advantage.

Reducing the severity of the epidemic

When the first HIV infection was reported in America, in January, Trump said he was "someone coming from China" and said the situation was "under control" and "would be fine", even though a senior official in the control centers of Diseases and their prevention, he told the public, "We expect more cases."

Regardless of how many cases are increasing, Trump has described them as low.

"We have a very small problem in this country," he said in late January, with five cases. And he maintained the same tone of denial, on the fifth of March, as the number of cases doubled 25 times, and he wrote on Twitter, "129 cases only."

By March 12, when the number again increased 10-fold, to more than 1,200, Trump argued that these were also "very few cases" compared to other countries. He also misleadingly claimed, several times, that a coronavirus, like any flu, “can be called a germ, or a flu, and you can name it a virus, and you can name it with many different names. "I'm not sure anyone knows what that is."

However, the death rate from the virus is 10 times that of the flu, and there is no vaccine or treatment yet for the Corona virus. In confusion between influenza and the emerging virus, the US President has repeatedly emphasized the annual number of deaths due to influenza, and at times he has amplified his estimates. When he compared the comparison, for the first time, in February, he spoke of the number of influenza deaths from "25 to 69 thousand." In March, he was martyred with a number of 100,000, who died in 1990.

The actual figure for the flu season, for the year 1990, was 33,000, and in the past decade, the flu has killed between 12 and 61,000 people in the disease season in the United States. This is much higher than the number of deaths caused by the current virus, in the country so far, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that deaths from "Covid 19" can range from 200 to 1.7 million cases.

Trump, on the other hand, has raised death rates and the incidence of other killer diseases, as if to confirm that the death of the coronavirus was lower, by comparison. According to Trump, "the level of death (by Ebola) was 100%," while the average death rate was about 50%. During the 1918 flu pandemic, “you had a 50% chance of dying,” he said on Tuesday; although the death rate estimates for that pandemic are much lower.

With the start of the closure of US cities and states, the collapse of stock markets, and unemployment reaching record levels this week, Trump once again reduced the impact of the epidemic, saying: "With no evidence, the recession will be more deadly than the coronavirus."

Treatments are overrated

As of early March, the US president had promised to provide a "soon" vaccine, despite public health officials and pharmaceutical industry executives assuring that the process would take 12 to 18 months. Later, he promoted treatments that were not proven effective against the emerging virus, and said they were "approved" and available, although they were not. In addition to medical interventions, Trump overestimated his own policies and private sector contributions in combating the outbreak.

Trump's travel restrictions from China, Iran, and 26 countries in Europe do not amount to a ban or closure of borders. These restrictions do not apply to US citizens, permanent residents, their immediate families, or flight crews. These restrictions were not only comprehensive and absolute, but were also imposed on China "contrary to the advice of many experts." However, the Minister of Health and Human Services, previously said that the restrictions were made, based on recommendations from national health officials. The New York Times also reported that Trump was skeptical, before deciding to support the restrictions at the urging of some of his top aides.

Blame others

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent state test kits in February, some of which were defective and gave inaccurate readings. The problems continued to worsen, as scientists and officials cautioned against restrictions on who can be tested and the lack of testing tools in general. Faced with criticism over medical tests and supplies, Trump instead shifted responsibility to others.

And it was the Obama administration that "took a decision on the test that turned out to be very harmful to what we do," according to Trump's statement on March 4. This was a misleading reference to the draft guidance, issued in 2014, regarding the regulation of tests, and was not finalized or imposed. A law passed in 2004 regulated the process and requirements for obtaining permission to use non-approved test products in health emergencies.

The test distributed by the World Health Organization was never offered to the United States, and was a "bad test", according to Mr. Trump. It is true that America usually designs and makes its own diagnosis, but there is no evidence that the WHO test is not reliable.

As for the shortage of respirators, mentioned by the governor of New York State, Trump said - misleadingly - that the governor refused to address the issue, in 2015, when "he had the opportunity to buy 16,000 devices, at a very low price."

A 2015 report that set out the New York guidelines for allocating respirators, estimated that if a pandemic occurs, the state “is likely to have a shortage of 15,783 respirators, during peak demand.” But the report did not actually recommend an increase in stockpiles, and indicated that purchasing more was not a comprehensive solution, because there would not be enough healthcare professionals trained to operate it.

Rewrite history

The US President compared his government's response to the current Corona epidemic, with the Obama administration's response to the H1N1 epidemic, from 2009 to 2010, and described its performance as among the best, while describing his predecessor’s response as a “large-scale disaster.” In doing so, Trump falsely claimed that the former president had not declared the epidemic an emergency, until the death of thousands, although the government announced a public health emergency, days before the first reported death in the United States.

And there were a number of warnings about both a general global epidemic and coronavirus specifically, a government report for 2019 stated, "The United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next influenza pandemic or a widespread outbreak of an infectious disease." Senior government officials began sounding the alarm about the coronavirus, in early January.

Despite his history of false and misleading statements, Trump also stressed, "I felt it was a pandemic, for a long time, before it was called an epidemic."

Trump's travel restrictions from China, Iran and 26 countries in Europe do not amount to a ban or closure of borders.