By Chris Satullo

“I’d love to have it open by Easter. I would love to have that. … Wouldn’t it be great to have all the churches full? You’ll have packed churches all over our country. I think it’ll be a beautiful time.” – President Donald J. Trump

Let’s talk about bandwidth – in the figurative sense of the word, which the dictionary defines as “the energy or mental capacity required to deal with a situation.”

Any presidential administration, even the best of them, only has so much bandwidth.  It can only juggle this many heavy balls at one time.

A White House normally boasts a considerable supply of smart, capable, accountable people. Collectively, they provide decent bandwidth to deal with what comes up. Ideally, they’re led by a president who has the good sense to delegate, so that his team has the authority and guidance to deal with much of what comes flying at the building each day.  

That way, only the big, thorny issues end up on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Remember, the president’s attention is the most precious component of an administration’s overall bandwidth. It needs to be conserved, so that it’s ready when the huge issues land.

But here, sadly, is where we are. No President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at least, has had an issue as massive and lethal as COVID-19 hit – and with such velocity.

Yet in modern times, no White House has featured less bandwidth; has had fewer people with the skill, gravitas and authority to act effectively on the president’s behalf. From day one, President Trump’s disdain for expertise and obsession with loyalty limited his administration’s bandwidth.  After three-plus years of tantrums and firings by Twitter, even that modest bandwidth has narrowed scarily. That’s how fiascos like the disastrous March 11 Oval Office TV address happen.

What’s more, no president in history has done more to waste his staff’s already limited bandwidth by forcing them daily to chase phantoms and clean up messes of his own reckless, narcissistic making.

Donald Trump just wants this crisis to be over. He wants us back to work; wants the stock market rising; wants to get back to his favorite mode: basking in his sycophants on Fox and tweeting insults at Democrats and anyone else who crosses him.

We get that, sir.

But the virus is not a voter in Omaha.  You can’t persuade it to do what you’d like by spinning some pleasant lies to be breathlessly amplified by your captive media.

The bandwidth gap – between the urgent-yet-sober leadership we need and the childlike magical thinking of the President and the sandbox squabbling of his staff – is maddening.

Here’s one of the most painful results: Among the items perhaps getting lost in that gap – along with far too many lives – are scientific initiatives with some promise to tame the pandemic. 

It could be that some experts inside the “deep state” actually are working behind the scenes to boost efforts – e.g. development of serology tests and antiviral drugs – that might help America get a handle on when to come out of quarantine.    

It’s hard to tell amid the ill-informed blather we get daily from the presidential podium.

What’s clear is that, if supported aggressively by government clout and discussed carefully from the bully pulpit, these initiatives could offer our homebound brains a bolstering dose of hope.

If our President really wants to see some Americans return to workplaces by the summer solstice, he should rally government behind these efforts. Instead, he spins Easter fantasies.

Serology tests survey the blood, looking not for the virus, but for the antibodies that might signal immunity from the disease. For all the horror it is bringing to far too many, COVID-19 often produces only mild symptoms, so mild that people don’t even know they were infected.  

Thus, it’s possible – treading lightly here, because so little is known yet about how this specific virus behaves – that people with the antibodies won’t, for a period of time, get re-infected or infect others.  If so, they could work, including helping others still vulnerable. (How long that immunity might last is a key unknown, which broader serology testing could help bring into focus.)

Just as America’s failure to do widespread diagnostic testing has made the pandemic worse, a failure to test broadly for these “titres” –  concentrations of antibodies in the blood that signal immunity – could delay tragically our ability to discern when some semblance of normal life can resume.

This testing would provide hints on how many mild cases went undetected, giving us a better fix on COVID-19’s lethality. And it would help gauge how immunity is building up in a given community, perhaps enabling some relaxing of distancing rules.

You’d think a president who desperately wants people back to work would mobilize every relevant channel of government to push serology testing forward. But you’d also would have thought he’d do the same in January about virus testing kits, face masks and ventilators.

Another hopeful path – often cited on cable networks by Dr. William Haseltine, who helped lead America’s response to HIV/AIDS and anthrax – is accelerating the development of antiviral drugs useful for both prevention and treatment. He and others point out that excellent groundwork was laid during the SARS (2003) and MERS (2013) outbreaks for developing antivirals that might be effective across a spectrum of coronaviruses, perhaps including COVID-19. 

So why aren’t these drugs already in the field? Haseltine spelled it out in a piece that appeared on (let me underline this) Foxnews.com: “The drugs were never advanced to clinical trials. That’s because there was no market for them and no government was willing to step in to guarantee the market with a commitment to stockpile the drugs.”

Hmm, what nation might have both the urgent need and the resources (stock market spirals notwithstanding) to step up and guarantee a market for those drugs now?

Instead, we get a POTUS who rambles incoherently and dangerously to the nation about possible off-label use of chloroquine.

Another glimmer of hope: “Convalescent serum” is a medical technique being tried in desperate bids to save some critical patients. (Fans of the 1995 Dustin Hoffman-Cuba Gooding Jr.-Rene Russo thriller Outbreak might recognize the concept.) Hospitals can take plasma from a patient who recovered and put it into one with dire symptoms, hoping the antibodies from the recovered person will slow the disease’s progress in the other. Doctors across America and the globe have been scrambling to try what USA Today called this “seat-of-the-pants medicine,” sharing results online with one another.

Dunno, is it possible this long-shot bid would benefit from some coordinating help or dough from government? Might hospitals have more …bandwidth…to execute and evaluate these trials if their staffs were not so worn down by the lack of masks and ventilators and the national failure to do what it took to “flatten the curve” and spare them the current, scary patient surge?

Sure they might. But that would’ve taken hard work, guided by expert advice.

It’s so much more pleasing to dream of Easter pews filled with people singing hosannas to your magnificence.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.