Confused about the Trump administration's response to coronavirus? You should be

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Raise your hand if you’re confused about the coronavirus outbreak – but don’t touch your face on the way up, or do and make a flippant joke about the whole matter.

This correspondent raised his hand, and did touch his face, but recently bathed them in one of the few remaining bottles of hand sanitizer, so hopefully he’s all set. For now. Maybe.

We’re all confused. And for good reason.

Once again, this White House’s inability to deliver one message is sowing confusion as Donald Trump downplays the threat to Americans and his vice president and top health officials talk about “common sense practices” like methodical hand-washing.

It can happen in the same meeting, with reporters and television news cameras stuffed into a corner of the Cabinet Room or a conference room at a federal health facility.

The president will lead off, uttering a string of technically correct-but-harsh statements about the virus intended to let people know it’s not that big of a deal. Then Mike Pence and others will warn the number of cases inevitably will rise while advising elderly Americans to maybe, possibly avoid getting on an airplane.

Which is it? Who could say definitively? So far, not the Trump administration.

“Well, I think the 3.4 per cent is really a false number,” Trump told Fox News host and conservative commentator Sean Hannity on Wednesday night (the president was taking umbrage with he World Health Organization’s current coronavirus mortality rate, his latest thumb of the nose to scientists). “Now, and this is just my hunch ... but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it's very mild. They'll get better very rapidly. They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor.”

"You never hear about those people. So you can't put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu ... or virus. So you just can't do that," he added. "So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

Compare that to what US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said hours later in the White House briefing room.

“I think the most important thing, for many of those individuals that might be a little type A: If you get sick, stay home. You’re not helping your colleagues by going to work sick,” he said.

The president on Thursday morning tweeted that he “NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work,” going on to, as usual, blame the media for putting out “Fake News” and his Democratic rivals for spewing “disinformation.”

Sorry, Mr President, but as your first press secretary, Sean Spicer, said about your tweets: Your Fox statement speaks for itself.

If Americans who are experiencing coronavirus-like symptoms should roll the dice and go to work, perhaps Mike Pence – who dealt with public health matters as governor of Indiana – offered the same advice as the president during the evening briefing, yes? No.

“It’s a good idea to stay home when you’re sick. Avoid close contact with people who are sick,” Pence said. “Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth. Cover your cough or sneeze with tissue; throw the tissue in the trash. Clean and disinfect frequently.”

Another juxtaposition to consider: Earlier on Wednesday, Trump seemed to verbally roll his eyes about public health officials’ advice to avoid bringing germs near your face, especially your eyes. “I haven’t touched my face in weeks! I miss it,” he quipped flippantly.

Forget touching one’s face. The differing messages are enough to make one bury one’s face firmly in their hands, freshly bathed in hand sanitizer or not.

While the president suggests the outbreak will “disappear” as the spring arrives and temperatures rise, his VP is on live television giving a basic hygiene tutorial: “Wash your hands with either disinfectant or with soap and water for at least 20 seconds,” Pence told Americans on Wednesday.

There was good news from Pence’s Wednesday briefing: the administration has cleared industry to accelerate its testing of possible vaccines. That came after an administration not known for its due diligence on everything from potential Cabinet nominees to controversial policy decisions did just that to ensure faster testing plans were safe.

But this positive development gets lost in the shuffle – largely because the president cannot seem to stop making public remarks that contradict his team and make the coronavirus seem more like the sniffles than a virus that has already killed over 3,000 people around the globe. Trump is speaking in the Cabinet room, then the Oval Office, then on the South Lawn, then at a campaign rally, then at the National Institutes of Health, then back on the lawn, then he’s calling into Fox News in primetime.

Does the president really think he’s helping? US and global stock markets certainly don’t think so. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500, both already having lost substantial value since the coronavirus scare ramped up, were both down again Thursday morning as the markets digested – or tried to – the latest eyebrow-raising Trump statement.

It is difficult to imagine a team less suited to calm a country trying to make sense of a mysterious disease for which a vaccine is a year away from being approved and deployed. And that timeline, by the way, is according to Trump’s public health team – which has tried in public all week to convince him, with questionable results, that a potential drug moving from one testing phase to another in a few months doesn’t mean it’s ready for injection into his countrymen and women.

After all, the White House confusion machine managed to do something almost unthinkable this week by somehow making Congress look functional.

As Trump and Pence twisted the country’s collective nerves into knots, members of both parties struck a deal on an $8.3bn emergency funding package and rushed it to Trump’s desk.

As the Senate teed up that measure for approval, the president was in the White House residence watching cable news. He fired off a tweet quoting GOP Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who had just appeared on Fox News praising him.

As Trump completes his first term, we can safely diagnose him with an unquenchable thirst for praise and an endless case of playing the victim.

There’s no vaccine coming for either.

The confusion machine is running on all cylinders, folks. It keeps Trump’s name on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News chyrons, after all. The chaos president would have it no other way.

Still confused? Me, too. You can put your hand down now. Probably wise to wash it for exactly 20 seconds. Unless it’s not. Who knows?