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COVID-19 and the American Response

It Was Never Meant To Be

Benin Bryant
8 min readMar 18, 2020
A nurse wearing protective gear is seen at a hospital. Eric Gaillard/Reuters

Woeful incompetence and flagrant disregard are the most apt descriptions for the federal government’s response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, which has circled the globe in less than three months and is now officially classified as a pandemic. The response, or lack thereof, to this burgeoning public health crisis is what President Trump’s electoral victory was to our democracy; not a cause but instead a symptom of our nation’s most glaring inequities.

President Trump, whose initial public statements were that the COVID-19 outbreak “would go away”, and that it would be “over” by April, has reacted with a tortoise-like response. Meanwhile, a highly contagious virus has raced across the entire country infecting citizens in nearly every state.

In one rally, the President described the growing outbreak as a “Democratic Hoax”.

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Benin Bryant
Benin Bryant

Written by Benin Bryant

Engineer by trade, writer by passion. Reachable at twitter @beninbf, or beninbf@gmail.com

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