On Feb. 26, two days before President Trump called the coronavirus outbreak the Democratic Party’s “new hoax,” the Cleveland Clinic alerted the public that it was prepared to quickly open 1,000 additional hospital beds should the need arise.

On March 4, the day Trump boasted that “we have a very small number” of infected people in the United States, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, shut down a weekend fitness expo expected to draw 60,000 people a day to a Columbus convention center. There were no identified coronavirus cases in the state at the time.

Now, Ohio may be realizing the benefits of early intervention in the pandemic by its government and medical community. With about 5,100 covid-19 cases, it has fewer than a third the number of people with the novel coronavirus than in three comparably sized states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois. And Ohio has just a small fraction of the deaths reported in those states.