IN times of great peril, nations collectively behave in many ways, principally influenced by the resilience of their people, the strength of their institutions, the efficiency of their systems of governance and, above all, the demeanor of their leadership. This time of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), telescoped in five months were the sufferings, deaths, betrayals and incompetence, and exposed were the weaknesses and strengths of these four features that define a nation. This article touches on two countries — the United States of America and the Philippines — and examines the impact of the fourth element, the quality of the political leadership, personified by its two presidents, the US’ Donald Trump and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte (“The Donald and the Deegong — lame ducks?” The Manila Times, March 4, 2020).

Covid-19 timeline

Tomes have been written on the Covid-19, tracing its esoteric pedigree from bats and snakes, to the realm of conspiracy theories. This time, facts are simply narrated on a timeline, juxtaposing the role of these two leaders, starting after the first reported death in Wuhan, China on Jan. 9, 2020, caused by a coronavirus later named Covid-19. From January 13 to 20, similar cases were reported from Thailand, Japan and South Korea. By January 23, Wuhan’s lockdown began. This contagion has spread to 46 countries, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic.

United States

By January 29, the White House Coronavirus Task Force was formed. Subsequently, Trump was informed by trade adviser Peter Navarro “that the coronavirus could cause 500,000 deaths and trillions in economic damage.” This was summarily dismissed by Trump, and Navarro was sidelined.

America, the world’s greatest economy, was the best prepared to meet the pandemic head on. Its industrial might, resources, democratic institutions and people were primed. What America needed was a spark — a leader to rally around, harnessing their strengths, inspiring them. President Trump never did rise to the occasion when imperatives so demanded, perforce analogously surrendering America’s global preeminence.

A month after China’s lockdown, the US reported 15 cases on February 26. I wrote in my April 15, column “Trump trivialized the contagion asserting it…is very well under control in the US…and when you have 15 people [infected], within a couple of days [it] goes down to zero”. Ian Johnson a writer based in Beijing succinctly stated “China bought the West time. The West squandered it.”

Thus began the daily two-hour White House CTF press conference to update the American people on the pandemic. But this turned out to be a garish spectacle of a sideshow, with Trump using it as his pulpit and undermining his scientists and experts arrayed beside him by “telling people what they want to hear, not what they need to know and do.”

A showman with credentials anchored tightly on reality TV, he cowed his own scientists and healthcare experts, reducing them to a supporting cast squirming uncomfortably whenever their president encroached into their fields of expertise. America is at war with a phantom enemy, and he fancied himself the wartime president. Except that he refused to take full command and assume responsibility. He delegated instead to state governors the strategy to wage this war. They had to figure out for themselves where and how to source their matériel — personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing kits, ventilators. Chaos ensued. He refused to enforce a lockdown leaving this matter individually to the state governors. And they did what they had to.

He disdained critical health protocols already done successfully in other countries and hammered on him by his own experts in a mantra: “testing, testing, testing – tracing, tracing, tracing — treatment, isolation, social distancing and quarantine.” Anyone who wants a test can get one, he declared. It was a barefaced lie. Only 1.07 million tests were completed in the US by end of March. His own task force recommended 500,000 and “millions” of tests per day, as necessary.

In a bizarre appearance, he usurped the role of his health experts to be the pharmacist-in-chief recommending a potential treatment, the untested drug, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. He reprised this role later in what was regarded as an insane act by a president. On April 23, with horrified senior members of the task force looking on, Trump suggested on national TV that injecting disinfectants or hitting the body with a powerful ultraviolet light could treat Covid-19. The Lysol company had to issue a disclaimer about ingesting their product.

By March 26, the US had 85,000 confirmed cases surpassing that of China and becoming the world’s epicenter of the contagion. Then this stunning irrational declaration, “I want to reopen the economy by Easter (April 12).”

Whereupon 40 economists with the University of Chicago published their position debunking Trump’s: “Abandoning severe lockdowns at a time when the likelihood of a resurgence in infections remains high will lead to greater total economic damage than sustaining the lockdowns to eliminate the resurgence risk.”

Thereupon, Trump mandated a phased reopening of the US economy by individual states, which he promptly repudiated two days later by supporting the anti-lockdown “Liberate Minnesota, Michigan, Virginia” protests.

By April 29, the US had surpassed the 58,220 Vietnam war’s 20-year death toll. By the second weekend of May, 80,0000 Americans were dead, and there is now a new gruesome projection of 135,000 to 240,000 deaths by Aug. 1, 2020.

Philippines

It was different in the Philippines. President Rodrigo “Deegong” Duterte was hands-on from the first confirmed death outside mainland China on February 2. Within the week, the Department of Health was directed to distribute for the use of the frontline health workers PPE, masks, gloves, respirators, isolation gowns and other equipment. Between February 9 to 22, the Deegong directed the quarantine at New Clark City of repatriates from Wuhan. In a flurry of activities, the President put his Cabinet on war footing taking total control and responsibility.

By March 9, the Philippines had a total of 20 cases. That same evening, President Duterte went on national TV to declare a state of public health emergency, suspending all classes in all levels in public and private schools. As a sign of unity, Vice President Maria Leonor Robredo on March 12 addressed the public on Covid-19, urging government to adopt the work-from-home method, fast-track the processing of test kits and protect the vulnerable from the pandemic.

In another address on national TV on March 13, President Duterte announced the placement of the entire island of Luzon on an enhanced community quarantine — euphemism for lockdown. On March 17, he signed Proclamation 929 placing the entire Philippines under a state of calamity. Quarantine was in effect for a month, later extended to May 15.

The responses of the two presidents under similar extreme conditions say much of the type of leadership a nation desires. One is all about himself. The other, all about his people. In America today, a First World democratic country, Trump will open the economy crucial to the Americans and tangentially the November elections. The Philippines, a Third World country, the Deegong may have to declare martial law, an adjunct to reopening the economy. We need not debate as to the type of leadership needed. Covid-19 is the arbiter. Death is the prize. Who may it favor?

WASHINGTON — There has been a barrage of contradictory claims in recent days about how U.S. officials believe the coronavirus emerged from the Chinese city of Wuhan, what evidence they have and when President Donald Trump was first briefed about it.

Here is what we actually know:

When was Trump first briefed on the intel about the coronavirus?

As NBC News has reported, U.S. intelligence agencies first detected signs of a health crisis in Wuhan in November and began producing intelligence reports on the issue in December. Intelligence reports first appeared in the president's briefing book, known as the President's Daily Brief, in early January, according to NBC News' reporting. The brief is written for the president, but it also goes to certain Cabinet officials and top advisers.

The National Security Council began meeting about the coronavirus in early January, according to NBC News' reporting.

But according to multiple officials, Trump rarely, if ever, reads his written intelligence product. On Sunday, Trump said he was first briefed on Jan. 23.

"On January 23, I was told that there could be a virus coming in but it was of no real import. In other words it wasn't, 'Oh, we've got to do something, we've got to do something.' It was a brief conversation, and it was only on January 23," Trump said during a Fox News town hall Sunday.

Did the virus really emerge accidentally from a Chinese lab?

Despite Trump's comment Thursday that he has seen information that gives him high confidence that the outbreak was the result of an accidental release from a Wuhan laboratory, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News that they have made no such assessment. There is no "smoking gun" evidence pointing them in that direction, they say, and there may never be.

Intelligence officials stand by the public statement put out Thursday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which said that the intelligence community has concluded that the virus was not man-made but that it had reached no conclusion about whether it emerged accidentally from a lab or was transmitted to humans through animals.

NBC News reported last week that the White House has tasked the intelligence community with investigating that and other questions about the origin of the virus, the extent to which China covered it up and whether the World Health Organization was complicit in the cover-up. Some critics have raised the concern that the White House is pushing the intelligence agencies to validate a conclusion that helps it politically, by distracting attention from the question of whether it acted soon enough. China and the WHO deny that they were less than forthcoming, and China says the virus couldn't have come from one of its labs.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday on ABC that "there is enormous evidence ... I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan." But he declined to detail the evidence, as did Trump when he was asked about it.

Two White House officials told NBC News that by saying he'd seen convincing evidence, Trump wasn't saying he'd seen an intelligence assessment.

Scientists and virologists say a far more likely explanation is natural transmission from animals to people. But experts and U.S. officials say a good deal of circumstantial evidence points to an accidental release. No one has credibly suggested that the virus was engineered by humans. Pompeo said he accepted the scientific consensus that the virus was naturally occurring.

Two labs in Wuhan were studying coronaviruses, experts told NBC News: the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, shorthanded as the Wuhan CDC. Researchers from both facilities collected the virus samples from bats in caves. The goal of the research was to learn more about a family of viruses that had already been proven lethal to humans in the 2002 SARS outbreak.

In the accidental release scenario, a worker at one of the labs could have become infected and transmitted the virus to others. Those who suspect such a lab release point to the following:

---A Jan. 24 study published in the medical journal The Lancet found that three of the first four cases — including the first known case — didn't provide a documented link to the Wuhan wet market.

---The bats that carry the family of coronaviruses linked to the new strain aren't found within 100 miles of Wuhan — but they were studied in both labs.

---Photos and videos have emerged of researchers at both labs collecting samples from bats without wearing protective gear, which experts say poses a risk of human infection.

---A U.S. State Department expert who visited the WIV in 2018 wrote in a cable reported by The Washington Post: "During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, [U.S. diplomats] noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory."

---According to Senate Intelligence Committee member Tom Cotton, R-Ark., the Chinese military posted its top epidemiologist to the WIV in January.

---The Shanghai laboratory where researchers published the world's first genome sequence of the coronavirus was shut down Jan. 12, according to The South China Morning Post.

---According to U.S. intelligence assessments, including one published by the Department of Homeland Security and reviewed by NBC News, the Chinese government initially covered up the severity of the outbreak. Government officials threatened doctors who warned their colleagues about the virus, weren't candid about human-to-human transmission and still haven't provided virus samples to researchers.

Despite all that, most scientists and researchers believe natural animal-to-human transmission is the most likely scenario.

Peter Daszak, a virus expert who has visited one of the Wuhan labs as part of a U.S.-funded program, said millions of people in China are infected each year by coronaviruses from animals. Most of the infections aren't life-threatening.

"There's just an incredible volume of traffic between wildlife and people," he said.

He added that the WIV rarely worked with live viruses and generally practiced sound safety procedures.

"I've been in hundreds of labs, and I know a good lab when I see one," he said. "These guys are good."

It must be very hard for President Duterte to find himself having to make a decision on an issue where the slightest miscalculation could lead to catastrophic consequences, and with no one to blame. Like autocrats whose experience at ruling has mostly been carved in premodern settings, Mr. Duterte trusts too much in his own instincts. He has shown little patience for the kind of systematic thinking and rational decision-making that underpins modern statecraft.

In a rare admission of fallibility, he said in his latest public appearance that he has turned to prayer for some guidance on what to do. I suspect that, deep down, Mr. Duterte is terrorized by the thought of being remembered as the president who failed to protect his people from the ravages of a vicious disease.

Newly-reinstated presidential spokesperson Harry Roque earnestly opened the briefing with a summary of the decision, which extended the existing enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in the National Capital Region and much of Luzon to May 15, and modified it into a general community quarantine (GCQ) in areas that have posted significant declines in the number of new coronavirus infections.

That would have made for a concise and straightforward presentation. But the President could not control his need to say something after every report by a member of the Inter-Agency Task Force. He saw every pause as an opportunity to launch another rambling and repetitive monologue on a pet issue, sometimes to the point of losing his breath in the middle of unrestrained cursing and threats to declare his “own” brand of martial law. These interruptions are the main reason for the general incoherence of these briefings.

If he is supposed to be the representative of the expert community during this crisis, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III has been nothing but a pathetic presence. His fawning behavior before the President is without parallel. Nothing in what he says mirrors the independent viewpoint of science or of one with any functional expertise.

On a previous occasion, in what seemed like an after-the-fact nod to science, UP professor Mahar Lagmay was called to the podium to share the findings from the modelling studies that his team from the university had been conducting. This took place after the main briefing led by the President had ended.

I don’t quite understand how these things are arranged. But I’m sure Dr. Lagmay would have gladly yielded the microphone to an epidemiologist or a public health specialist, if there was one in the room. He is, after all, an earth scientist, and, in the mass media, he is better known as an expert on geological hazards.

Be that as it may, the projections of his group, like those of another research team from the UP scientific community, carried a caveat. These projections are premised on the presumed accuracy of the Department of Health’s daily reports of the number of confirmed infections and number of deaths from COVID-19.

Here, precisely, is where the crux of the problem lies. These numbers are highly dependent on many factors, not the least of which are: (1) the readiness of people to report their symptoms to the health authorities, and (2) the availability of the tests to those who require them. Since testing for the virus has been largely confined to symptomatic persons with a history of travel to infection hotspots or of contact with known cases, the likelihood that the actual number of infections is grossly understated cannot be ignored. If testing were made available to people with mild or moderate symptoms, or to those who have had contact but show no symptoms, the scale of the infection could be much worse than the current figures indicate.

The numbers for COVID-19 deaths, at first glance, may seem unproblematic. But that is assuming that a proper diagnosis of death from COVID-19 is made and is duly reported to the DOH in every instance, no matter where it happens. I understand that the DOH subjects these reports to a validation process. Where neither a test nor a clinical diagnosis nor an autopsy is performed, it would not be easy to arrive at a clear determination of the cause of death. This leaves plenty of room for error in the number of case fatalities ascribed to COVID-19.

Some say that, ideally, at least a third of the population should be tested in order to arrive at a confident measure of the extent of the outbreak. That would be about 35 million in our case—a figure that we cannot begin to contemplate given the government’s modest target of 8,000-10,000 tests per day.

Given the inherent complexity of gauging the real magnitude of the outbreak and the course it takes over a period, responsive governments have premised the loosening of quarantine measures on attaining certain targets other than the flattening of the curve that everyone talks about.

One such plan comes from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neoconservative think-tank that has a strong interest in the eventual reopening of the US economy. Interestingly, the AEI regards the current insistence on physical distancing as the chief barrier to a renormalization of economic activity. To lift this barrier, it argues, it would be necessary to put in place a better public health surveillance system for early outbreak identification and containment, and adequate treatment facilities. Without a vaccine, there is simply no way of returning to the world we knew.

This is a very modest roadmap as it is. We expect nothing less from a government that is supposed to base its decisions on more than one person’s instincts.