WASHINGTONShortly after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump lavished praise on the Covid-19 care he'd received at hospital, without acknowledging the vital role that masks and distancing play in preventing infection.
"Don't let it dominate you. Don't be afraid of it. You're gonna beat itwe've the best medical equipment, we've the best medicines, all developed recently," he said in a video released on Monday evening.
Rather than acting as a chastening experience, Mr Trump's own bout of the coronavirus seems to have reinforced his belief that vaccines, treatments and hospital care are together the panacea that will bring an end to the pandemic.
Experts say that while all of these are crucial tools, so too are the public health measures advocated by Mr Trump's own senior health officials, and the President missed a vital opportunity to correct course.
At the start of the crisis, when his predictions that the virus would soon disappear failed to materialise, Mr Trump pulled out the check bookordering 100,000 ventilators then spending billions on vaccine research under Operation Warp Speed.
It turned out that survival rates on ventilators are in the region of 30-50 per cent, and doctors use them now only as a last resort when less invasive methods of oxygenation won't work.
Vaccines, if they're safe and effective, won't be available at a mass scale before 2021, and even then scientists are trying to moderate expectations about just how good they might be, given the nature of respiratory viruses.
The minimum threshold for approval is an injection that prevents disease in half of all patients.
Among treatments that authorities are recommending, the antiviral remdesivir has shown modest results in improving recovery time, while the steroid dexamethasone reduces death rates by a third in ventilated patients.
It's reported that the Media is upset because I got into a secure vehicle to say thank you to the several fans and supporters who were standing outside of the hospital for several hours, and even days, to pay their respect to their President. If I didn’t do it, Media would say RUDE!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020
"His whole shtick for a long time has been that this is overblown," Mr Jeremy Konyndyk a researcher at the Centre for Global Development, who oversaw the Obama administration's reaction to Ebola in West Africa, told.
"He's not out of the woods yet, but if he survives this without any long term health impact, then that's what he'll conclude based on the sample size of one, ignoring the fact that it's killed 210,000 people."
The virus continues to kill more than 700 people in America per day while more than 30,000 remain hospitalised.
'BEYOND CALLOUS'
For Dr Ali Nouri, president of the Federation of American Scientists, the White House Covid-19 outbreakwith over a dozen known infections and counting in Mr Trump's close circlewas evidence that the administration had relied too heavily on testing alone.
"By simply relying on these diagnostics to determine who gets to come in and out... and by not requiring other protections, like social distancing and masks, they created a false sense of comfort," he told.
For months, experts have called for more rapid tests to stem the spreadwith Mr Trump initially resisting the idea before announcing the previous week his administration would distribute 150 million rapid tests.
But rapid tests are less reliable than their lab-based counterparts, and neither can replace other public health measures.
Mr Trump's macho posturing is "a really dangerous narrative to promulgate" to his followers, Dr Gabe Kelen, a professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University told.
"The best way to deal with coronavirus infection is to try not to get it all," he added.
Ultimately, it's Mr Trump's highly selective respect for science that most angers the scientific community.
The President was administered a high dose of experimental synthetic antibodies which are seen as a promising if still unproven treatment.
"The same reasoning and processes that were used to generate those antibodies were used to produce the guidance that says that everybody should be really careful," Dr Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the Science journals told.
Instead, Mr Trump's administration has looked to be at war with its own scientists, repeatedly watering down guidelines issued by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, for example.
While Mr Trump had warm words for the doctors and nurses who treated him, his actions speak to disregard for healthcare workers' lives, said Dr Kellen.
"When a large number of health care workers have died saving other people's lives who did get infected, it's beyond callous," he said.