RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump’s biggest mistake in the pandemic has been his own shifting rhetorical leadership. He’s moved from public nonchalance to worst-case shutdowns back to overconfidence and in recent weeks more focused concern. He has suggested that triumph over the virus is just around the corner, which defies reality, while minimizing the disease’s severity. Democrats this week hammered his constant self-congratulation and seeming lack of empathy, which have hurt in particular with older voters.

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But Mr. Trump’s virus policy in practice has been better than his critics claim, and Mr. Biden isn’t offering better ideas. Start with testing. Mr. Biden promises to “develop and deploy rapid tests with results available immediately.” Great—the Food and Drug Administration in the past week has approved two new rapid tests that can be scaled up quickly.

The FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched the initial testing rollout. And earlier this summer, shortages of chemical reagents and lab equipment led to delays in processing tests amid a surge of infections. But supply-chain hiccups are gradually being worked out. The U.S. is now conducting 700,000 or so tests a day, up from about 400,000 in early June and 100,000 in late March.

More testing is vital to give Americans confidence to return to work and reopen schools, and the rapid tests that the FDA approved this week will help. The cheap saliva test developed by Yale researchers will avoid chemical reagent shortages and can cost as little as $10.

Mr. Biden is also calling for “a coordinated, country-wide, future-facing national effort to acquire, produce, and distribute PPE, test kits and machines, lab supplies, and other critical supplies, including by fully utilizing the authorities” under the Defense Production Act. The Administration is already doing nearly all of this.

The Pentagon this spring issued $259 million in contracts to 3M, Honeywell and Owens & Minor to produce tens of millions of N95 face masks for medical workers. U.S. companies like GM and New Balance have retrofitted plants to produce ventilators and PPE, and the Administration has used the Defense Production Act to allocate more tests and protective equipment to hot spots.

Mr. Biden wants to hire 100,000 federal workers to track down contacts of people who get sick. States are already doing this, though public-health officials say contract tracing is of little use when the virus is widespread in communities. Government is also susceptible to dysfunction. California this summer trained 10,000 contact tracers, but the Sacramento Bee last month reported most were never assigned work for inexplicable reasons.

Mr. Biden promises to “ramp up the large-scale manufacturing of as many vaccine candidates as necessary.” The Trump Administration and private industry are already on that. Health and Human Services this spring issued a $628 million contract to Emergent BioSolutions, a private firm, to coordinate with vaccine developers ramping up manufacturing capacity.

The Administration has contracted with Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca for hundreds of millions of dosages as soon as their vaccines are proven safe and effective in trials. Pfizer and BioNTech said this week that their vaccine is on track to seek regulatory approval as early as October.

The National Institutes of Health is also funding the most promising treatments. Last month the Trump Administration signed a contract with Regeneron to manufacture 300,000 doses of its antibody cocktail by the end of the summer. Mr. Biden’s proposals for price controls and threats to prosecute health-care executives would blunt the incentive to develop therapies and vaccines.

Mr. Biden says he’ll give schools “the resources they need to be open, safe, and effective.” But Mr. Trump has said he wants more money for schools too—if they reopen. Mr. Biden would write a blank check to unions even if teachers refuse to work in classrooms.

It seems Mr. Biden’s main policy difference is that he’d impose a national mask mandate. We’re all for wearing masks in public settings, but businesses and states that mandate them have struggled to enforce compliance. The Constitution doesn’t give the federal government the police powers to do so in any case.

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A highly contagious and deadly virus is a hard problem for any democracy, as the Obama-Biden Administration learned in its manifest failure dealing with the less deadly H1N1 virus in 2009. Despite his partisan boasts, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made many mistakes in the pandemic, including the catastrophic decision to send Covid-19 patients back to nursing homes. New York state still leads the country by far in the number of Covid deaths.

Mr. Biden is right that America’s economic recovery will depend on getting the virus under control. But he’s also right that “no miracle is coming,” including from his own plan, which is Mr. Trump’s without the bluster.