One fact breaks through the misinformation: When the virus came for the president, he treated it seriously. So should you.
Something momentous happened late last week, a brief pinprick of clarity piercing through the haze: Donald Trump finally showed Americans the truth about the coronavirus. Not with his words, of course. According to researchers at Cornell, Trump has been the single largest driver of misinformation about the pandemic. Public health experts had hoped that the president’s own infection might prompt him to become more truthful. Instead, since his release from the hospital on Monday, Trump has become even bolder in his distortions, declaring that the virus is nothing to be afraid of. On Tuesday both Facebook and Twitter blocked posts in which Trump falsely claimed that the seasonal flu is deadlier than the coronavirus. But the president’s actions tell a more honest tale, and suggest a way for the media to convey even to Trump’s loyalists the threat the virus poses: When he became the patient, Trump took it seriously. He did not react like a man who’d only gotten the flu. To convey the true danger, the media should focus on how Trump acts with regard to his own battle against the virus, rather than amplifying the things he says about how the rest of us should think of it. The timeline unspooled like a medical thriller. The president announced he’d tested positive just before 1 a.m. on Friday. Only 16 hours later, with his fever spiking and his blood oxygen levels dropping, Trump was taken by helicopter to Walter Reed Military Medical Center. The president’s doctors did not mess around with any of the miracle cures that Trump had long touted. Instead of hydroxychloroquine, ultraviolet light therapy or bleach, they turned to treatments whose efficacy had a basis in science. They put him on an experimental antibody treatment that has been shown in a clinical trial to alleviate symptoms in some patients; it is unavailable to most Americans. Over the weekend, Trump was prescribed two more drugs, including a steroid that is usually administered to patients with severe cases of Covid-19. “We’re in a bit of uncharted territory when it comes to a patient that received the therapies he has so early in the course,” Dr.
