Last week the U.S. stock market suffered its largest weekly loss since 2008. A health crisis could also become an economic crisis.

So far, America's response has left much to be desired.

Epidemiologists in other countries have used "surveillance testing" under World Health Organization guidelines to track the spread of the disease before large numbers of people turn up at hospitals. But according to a new report by ProPublica, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in America because it insisted upon devising its own test, which turned out to be flawed.

President Donald Trump and his administration would rather blame the media and the Democrats, and even question whether the virus is real.

On Friday, Trump accused news outlets such as CNN of "doing everything they can to instill fear in people" and said that some Democrats are "trying to gain political favor by saying a lot of untruths." At a campaign rally Friday evening in South Carolina, he claimed that concern about the virus was the Democrats' "new hoax" after the Russia investigation and then impeachment.

(On Wednesday, in a phone interview with Sean Hannity, Trump dismissed scientific data. "I think the 3.4% [death rate from the coronavirus] is really a false number.")

What is Trump's idea for how to deal with the emerging crisis? He says he's considering another round of tax cuts. As if cutting taxes would somehow motivate people fearful of contagion to venture into shopping malls, movie theaters and airplanes. As if pumping up the stock market is the most important first step. As if Trump's earlier round of massive tax cuts trickled down to average Americans.

Trump is instructing all government health officials and scientists who have information about the virus to first clear their statements with the White House. Yet controlling the flow of information within an administration that's not especially renowned for truth-telling seems unlikely to increase the public's confidence in what they hear.

Trump has already taken several other steps, all of them backward. He has eliminated a National Security Council position that coordinates responses to pandemics. He has ignored an expert panel's warning that the United States is badly unprepared for global health threats and needs to restore funding to address them. He is requesting that the CDC's budget be cut by almost 16%, and the Department of Health and Human Services budget by almost 10%.

Trump is proposing a $3 billion cut to global health programs, including a 53% cut to the World Health Organization and a 75% cut to the Pan American Health Organization.

When he's not accusing his enemies of hyping the coronavirus or doing what he can to undermine the nation's and the world's ability to cope with it, Trump and his administration have been making the nation more vulnerable to all sorts of health risks.

He's demanding that anyone receiving public assistance have a job, which presumably will make many people reluctant to stop working if they feel sick. Beginning next month, for example, nearly 700,000 Americans who aren't working will no longer be eligible for food stamps. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the Trumpsters that the likely result is for people with flu symptoms to ignore them in order to keep their jobs, thereby spreading disease.

Trump's obsessive efforts to wreck Obamacare make the coronavirus and other contagious diseases more dangerous, for the obvious reason that people without health insurance are less likely to see a doctor. The number of Americans without health insurance has risen steadily during Trump's tenure. A 2018 poll found that 44% of Americans didn't see a doctor because they couldn't afford it.

Trump and Republicans have rejected all safety nets — including paid family leave and guaranteed sick leave — that people need to cope with personal health emergencies. This makes America less prepared for contagion. A recent survey found that 90% of Americans go to work while they're sick.

What Trump and his administration fail to understand is that personal health and individual well-being are inextricably linked to public health and social well-being. This is not a socialist hoax.

A new and especially virulent contagious virus is bad enough. That it is spreading at a time when the United States government is headed by someone who denies it, blames his opponents and dismantles what's left of the institutions that could contain it, makes the danger far worse.

Robert Reich is a former U.S. Secretary of Labor and professor of public policy at Berkeley. His columns are distributed by the Tribune Content Agency.