“The propaganda machine that Wilson set up that was trying to highlight the war effort and give short shrift to other problems in the country,” Tevi Troy, the author of a book about presidential disaster management told “The Chicago Way” podcast in 2016, “and that really undercut the ability to get out the message as to how bad the disease was and promote strategies for combating it.”

COVID-19 is not the Spanish flu, but the Trump administration’s strategy of downplaying, putting politicians in charge of information flow rather than deferring to and empowering public health experts, and worrying most of all about the financial markets and Donald Trump’s ego isn’t confidence-inspiring in light of this history.

Robbing health programs for the poor to pay for coronavirus response, slowing down congressional action on fuller funding, telling people to turn off the television, yammering about Ebola, and—most of all—putting a politician with no medical training and a disastrous public health record in charge of the administration’s response is not the way to prevent the virus from spreading or from being deadly if it does spread. Sending untrained workers without protective gear to greet people returning from the epicenter of the outbreak is not a good first move from the administration. Our for-profit healthcare system is a danger to us.

The United States—like all countries right now—needs a major public health mobilization with ample funding and a rejection of partisan concerns. Given that, the U.S. has the resources and medical expertise to minimize the dangers of coronavirus. Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re getting, and that’s where things potentially get scary. In the face of an incompetent administration most interested in short-term political positioning, we need public health officials to press to do their jobs free of political interference, and we need the media to be responsible both in the sense of refusing to fearmonger and in the sense of pushing through the administration’s efforts to control information.