LET'S TALK COVID...

State by state, city by city, business by business and person by person, coronavirus precautions in the US vary from outright ­denial and the completely blase, to sensible precautions with strict ­social distancing. There are groups campaigning for compulsory mask-wearing and other movements urging the burning of masks.

YOUR HEALTH IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY...

Pandemic politics seems to have taken over the US and it could be the decisive factor in the election outcome.

Certainly, COVID 19 is almost all the Democrats want to talk about... if only whenever Joe Biden has braved the outside world, donned his black mask, and delivered one of his scripted media performances about a looming “dark” winter.

This could prove a massive miscalculation. For all his routinely bizarre and inconsistent messaging, attempting to pin the blame on Trump for a coronavirus that has delivered shocking health and economic consequences in most countries across the globe is one hell of a stretch.

There is a tendency, particularly among the Left, to underestimate the intelligence of mainstream voters... It also misjudges the pragmatic and even fatalistic approach that many Americans display. Such is the buy-in of the political/media class into this narrative that it has become accepted wisdom to say that Trump’s handling of the pandemic has been a disaster. Yet few examples are provided, beyond his wildly fluctuating and sometimes absurd rhetoric.

The worst you could say of Trump is that his inconsistent messaging has provided poor national leadership which, admittedly, is a pretty major error, except that not a single world leader has been consistent on the pandemic response. As more has become known, advice has changed on suppression methods and medium-term strategies.

The truth is that Trump banned international arrivals early, bumped up supplies of medical equipment early and invested early in research and trials on treatments and vaccines.

Just as has been the case here in Australia, most of the day-to-day management of the ­pandemic in the US, and most of the disastrous responses, have been presided over by the states. You have to ask yourself which states have done worse

The politics are so jaundiced on this that the Democrat Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who misplaced thousands of federally supplied ventilators and forced infected patients into aged care homes, is lauded by the media as a COVID saviour — he has even published a book on his experiences. The coronavirus debate in the US is intensely partisan and extremist — the Left blames Trump for a threat they consistently overstate, and the Right dismisses what is obviously a major public health challenge.

The Democrats and the Left-liberal media accuse Trump of being a superspreader through his campaign rallies and talk about infection with the virus as if it is a death sentence. (By the way, the hard-left partisan posturing of stations such as MSNBC and CNN makes Fox News seem like a paragon of balance and objectivity.)

In the US it seems the national mindset, spirit of individualism and primacy of free enterprise mean people would not tolerate a big- government, freedom-crushing and risky social and economic experiment. What else would Biden be planning, It is not like he has told anyone. The truth is that the campaign pandemic debate rages between the extremes of a President who downplays the virus but at least comprehends that life must go on, and a Democrat candidate who seems cowed by it and determined to push for further lockdowns.

Neither man promotes the middle path of masks, social ­distancing and adaptation that will undoubtedly emerge post-election — and which most voters surely would expect and support. But that is the nature of America’s polarised politics.

For Biden to win, he will need to take a host of middle-America states like Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania where people need to work to feed their families. Yet he is the shut-it-down candidate, promising to shut down the oil and gas industry, permanently, to save the planet, and shut down everything, temporarily, to defeat the virus.

Biden will probably win the national popular vote, like Clinton did, with huge anti-Trump votes in places like California, New York and Massachusetts. But like Clinton before him, he might find the electoral college, and Trump’s pragmatism, and disdain for the Establishment that has worked so hard against him for 4 years, harder to overcome than they think..