How our leaders respond to crisis and how we respond to them

The president and the prime minister are facing questions over their response to the outbreak but they are not the same ones, writes Chris Stevenson. We must make these nuances clear

Trump's constant proclamations about the future for the virus have not cut any mustard (Reuters)

This week has shown that both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are both under pressure over their response to coronavirus.

The interesting thing when it comes to commissioning pieces on the Voices desk is that that pressure is building for different reasons.

For Johnson its mostly because his government has acted relatively decisively – although you’d never guess this from his muddled communication strategy – but in a way that is at odds with the rest of Europe. Some might glibly quip that there is nothing new in that, but having acted in accordance with the advice of his scientific advisers he is facing questions about whether the UK has gone far enough. And there are calls for the government to quickly release the scientific rationale behind its decisions.

In Washington, on the other hand, the consensus is that Trump has moved far too slowly. If the UK has moved from the “containment” to the “delay” stage of its action plan, a number of experts in the US have suggested that America has essentially been forced to move past a “containment” phase thanks to a lack of testing.

While treatment of medical conditions can vary from state to state, there appears to have not been enough testing kits produced or distributed to adequately gauge how many cases there are across the US. Meanwhile, Trump’s constant proclamations about the future for the virus have not cut any mustard. Johnson faced criticism over his early comments about the outbreak, but a press conference last week drew a line under that as he made clear that families would lose loved ones.

The White House needs that kind of step change to get back on the front foot in fighting the epidemic, but instead, the negative headlines keep building. Even big moves, like stopping travel from Europe involved a U-turn after the UK was initially allowed to be kept off the list. That is not to say that Johnson has not had his own U-turns, but in general the UK response has looked comparatively swift compared with the US.

Reflecting these differences to our global readership will be one of the challenges as the political response to coronavirus evolves.

Yours,

Chris Stevenson

Co-editor, Voices