South Korea masters Covid testing and is playing its baseball season
Updated Friday, May 8, 2020
March 6, 2020, seems like a year ago. A cruise ship, Grand Princess, entered San Francisco Bay, with at least 21 of its passengers infected with the new coronavirus. Medical attention was needed – more than what the ship could provide.
Vice President Mike Pence, heading America’s coronavirus task force, urged his boss to approve disembarkation of the Princess. But President Trump was proud that there were only 15 confirmed cases of the pandemic in the United States. He felt his November re-election depended on spinning his Covid-19 defense as a success.
“I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that’s not our fault.”
So the beleaguered boat drifted for a couple of days, before Trump relented and let it dock in Oakland and release the passengers.
What does this have to do with sports in America? A lot, actually. There won’t be sports in July – or later — unless the numbers indicate safety.
The NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball all want to play their seasons, even if fans cannot be present. The leagues have thoroughly detailed plans. But their players’ unions won’t allow games until hundreds of thousands of diagnostic test kits are in stock to make sure all who enter a locker room are healthy. Not to worry, says Trump: “Very soon we’ll be able to test 5 million a day.”
Toss a challenge flag here. Does anyone, including Trump, believe the USA suddenly will ramp up testing from 200,000 per day to 5 million? Will this happen before there are monsoons on Mars? When did Donald J. Trump change into FDR?
Trump, who famously said, “Article 2 of the Constitution lets me do anything I want to do,” doesn’t want to do much on Covid testing. He says it’s “the responsibility of the states.” Harry Truman he is not. No buck stops for long at Trump’s desk. He passed it back to Barack Obama, who “left us with tests that were no good.” Never mind that Obama departed the White House three years before Covid-19 was born.
As more Americans are tested, the numbers rise. Of course Trump doesn’t want that. Voters might hold him responsible, though he’s quick to say, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” So he dithers, endlessly repeating soothing falsehoods: “Plenty of tests available. . . . Anyone who wants to get tested can get tested.” No need to invoke the Defense Production Act and order corporations to mass produce these rather simple devices. Can this be the same country that churned out a World War II fighter plane every 40 seconds?
Larry Hogan, Republican governor of Maryland, doesn’t see the millions of test kits that Trump sees. With diplomatic assistance from his Korean-born wife, Hogan acquired 500,000 test kits from South Korea, which ranks No. 1 in the world in Covid defense and is now playing its baseball season (6 games per week are shown live on ESPN2 in early morning). The kits were loaded onto an idle Korean Air passenger plane and flown to Baltimore.
Hogan did not want the plane to land in nearby Washington, D.C. He feared Trump would commandeer the kits to disperse as he sees fit, just as he seized 3 million facemasks procured by Massachusetts.
Hogan said he dispatched the Maryland National Guard to secure his shipment “at an undisclosed location.”
There are suspicions that Trump will do everything he can, constitutional or not, to take care of the sports teams. He’s an avid football fan, once owning a franchise in the short-lived USFL. It does seem likely the testing issue will be resolved in time for the NFL season to begin as usual in September.
College football is less likely, no matter how resolute the Southeastern Conference. Will players be quarantined from the rest of the campus? Will 18-21-year-olds adhere to social distancing? How many millions of test kits will the colleges have?
The prognosis is not promising for professional sports leagues hoping to resume in the summer. All fear backlash if they receive preferential treatment when test kits are disbursed. I keep coming back to the point that these athletes, most of them 20-35 and impeccably conditioned, are the least vulnerable people on the planet. Do they deserve health-care priority over everyone else? How will that go over?
In two months, 76,000 Americans have died from a disease that Trump in February shrugged off as “very much under control . . . nothing worse than flu.” His nonchalance was matched by his ideological and hairstyle twin, Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson, who then spent three days in intensive care, gasping for life. Not surprising that Britain’s Covid infection rate is among the world’s highest.
To be fair, some medical experts sided with Trump in late January. Dr. Anthony Fauci said coronavirus “isn’t something the American public needs to worry about.”
But Trump in January received numerous written warnings from intelligence operatives (Deep State) that the pandemic was about to break out of China and reach America. Trump’s aides said he doesn’t read briefings but looks only at pictures and charts.
Trump has assured us that the plague “will disappear like magic” in the withering blast of summer, and “The Greatest Economy in the History of the World” will boom again along with all our sports. The tweety-bird is the master of deception and misdirection. The national pastime is football. Political football.
