Julie Song, Reporter
@juliescourant
In the Courant’s election opinion survey, 93.1% of students said that COVID-19 will play the biggest factor in the 2020 election. As COVID-19 is a particularly unique aspect to this year’s election, a variety of students have expressed their opinions about the virus.
Junior Isabella watched family and friends fight for their lives against COVID-19 and ultimately saw some close neighbors pass away from it. Now, after witnessing President Trump’s own experience with it, she’s feeling angry. “Very few people have the access and the priority that Trump had when getting primary care,” Isabella said.
Towards the beginning of quarantine, Isabella’s elderly neighbors caught COVID-19 and passed away. “In addition to that, I have a couple of friends that happened to get sick, lastly, my grandparents got sick. Thankfully they are so strong and were able to fight it off,” she said. “Watching my grandparents fight so hard to stay healthy, and then also seeing how easily my neighbors lost their lives, it infuriated me to watch Trump recover so quickly.”
Isabella does not believe that President Trump will ever understand what people across the globe have experienced while fighting COVID-19. “Over a million people have died, and Trump continues to act so ignorantly,” she said.
Other students also explained how they felt the Trump administration has handled COVID-19. “The administration fought COVID-19 effectively because it shut down flights to China within two weeks of the pandemic,” one student said.
Multiple students also said that President Trump could not have done much else to handle the virus. “Regardless of what the President did, the American people were going to spread COVID-19 at a higher rate, and I think that the damages of this were minimized by the Trump administration’s quick actions,” another student said.
