Obama's response to H1N1 vs. Trump's response to COVID-19

In three press briefings and five tweets since March 1st, Donald Trump praised his handling of the coronavirus in comparison to how President Barack Obama handled the H1N1 outbreak. Trump tweeted,“And if you look at swine flu...what they did and the mistakes they’ve made, they were terrible.  They were horrific mistakes. Seventeen thousand people died.” As the coronavirus ravages the United States, many people—Trump included—look to the past to understand the present and how to proceed. The responses of the Obama and Trump administrations to H1N1 and COVID-19, reveal the effect of partisanship on emergency actions.

Surprise! Partisanship didn't stop when pandemics decided to ravage the country. A party supporting smaller federal government responses has a harder time limiting the spread of a virus than a party more accustomed to federal governmental intervention.

H1N1: From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases, 274,304 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths in the United States due to H1N1. Contrary to the initial warnings, the global impact of H1N1 was less severe than that of previous pandemics. Republicans were weary of any strong federal response.
COVID-19: If the coronavirus continues along the present trajectory in America, it will cause more sickness, more death, and more economic harm from this virus than residents of any other developed country. Democrats pushed Trump to use his power to take more actions faster.

My conclusion:
Trump has failed to respond  to the great challenges of COVID-19. In line with conservative values, Trump and his administration promoted the idea of limiting the role of the federal government. This hands-off approach failed. In contrast, Obama responded well to the smaller challenges H1N1 produced through embracing liberal ideology, like using global institutions—the WHO—and supporting a strong federal government, to respond. The final death tolls should not be compared. Rather, the responses at similar steps in the pandemic scale-up should be analyzed, to show that Trump failed to respond with the same effective measures as Obama.