Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
President Donald Trump at a meeting with Irish leader Leo Varadkar at the White House on March 12, 2020, not long after imposing a travel ban on Europe.
- Announcing a European travel ban in an Oval Office speech on March 11, President Trump was scathing about the European response to the coronavirus crisis.
- "The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots," said Trump.
- On Thursday, the US overtook China and Italy as the country with most cases of the illness, with 85,500 positive tests.
- Trump has been criticised for not doing enough to slow the disease's spread in the early days of the outbreak.
- Experts say that his plan to lift lockdown measures by Easter could make the crisis worse.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
As the novel coronavirus swept through Europe in early March, President Donald Trump seized the opportunity to criticize the response of the European Union and boast of the success of the policies he had put in place.
"The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots," Trump said as he announced a ban on Europeans traveling to the US in a televised address from the Oval Office.
"As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe."
And in remarks at a meeting the next day with Irish leader Leo Varadkar, he boasted of the success of having shut down travel to the US from China, and pointed at the troubles European countries were having.
"Leo, we closed very early with China and I took a lot of heat, including from your people, a lot of heat. They called me everything from a racist to everything else. It was terrible.
"The same people, then they say, 'Oh, he closed too fast. Why did he close?' Most of them said, 'Why did he close with China?' That turned out to be a great move," he said.
This is what happened next in the US:
At the the time of Trump's meeting with Varadkar, Europe was suffering, with worse to come.
Italy fast became the nation with the worst outbreak, having recorded more than 80,000 infections and 8,200 deaths as of March 27.
In Spain, images of hospital receptions filling with patients as intensive care facilities reach capacity have shocked the world. The severity of its outbreak is fast approaching that of Italy.
But in some parts of Europe there are glimmers of hope, signs that the comprehensive lockdown in place for several weeks are beginning to work.
In Italy this week, the number of new cases has been in decline for several days now. In Germany, which has also taken serious distancing measures, the number of deaths is low despite a large number of cases.
In the US, the situation is very different.
In early March there were only a few hundred recorded US cases. As the end of March approaches, the US is the world epicenter of the outbreak with 80,500 cases, surpassing Italy and China.
Experts consider the US to be relatively early in its outbreak, and expect the situation to worsen.
It is now clear that while Trump was boasting of the success of his travel bans, he had underestimated the scale of the crisis ahead.
Across the US, hospitals are struggling to obtain vital life-saving equipment, especially ventilators.
It was reported this week by the Guardian that, only weeks after the president criticised European nations, his administration was behind the scenes asking those same allies for help procuring medical equipment.
The US is rapidly scaling up its diagnostic testing - but critics say the Trump's slow reactions effectively threw away any extra time his travel bans may have bought (their usefulness is disputed by experts).
When the US could have been establishing a national testing network, its leader was instead focused on talking down the likely impact of the pandemic.
Echoing lockdown measures put in place in China and Europe, the federal government released a 15-day advisory on March 16, requesting citizens to avoid all but essential excursions from the home, such as for food or to pharmacies,
Some states and cities imposed compulsory lock-downs, enforceable by law. However - with a few exceptions like San Francisco - the lockdowns are much milder than their European or Asian counterparts.
They are also planned to be briefer, and have been accompanied by muddled messaging from the White House.
Despite the number of new cases in the US doubling every two and a half days, Trump is already discussing lifting restrictions in as little as two weeks.
With hindsight, many argue that Italy and Spain worsened their outbreak by imposing lockdown measures gradually.
The US seems to be doing the same, with the federal government leaving state governors, mayors and county-level officials to impose a patchwork of measures.
Trump, critics say, has to heed the lessons of the foreign and European nations he was not so long ago deriding, and ensure that lockdown measures are properly enforced and given time to work.
'The clear message [would be] that we have no choice [except] to maintain this isolation and that's going to keep going for a period of time," Bill Gates said in a streamed TED talk Thursday.
"In the Chinese case, it was like six weeks, so we have to prepare ourselves for that and do it very well."
Get the latest coronavirus analysis and research from Business Insider Intelligence on how COVID-19 is impacting businesses.