The Terrible U.S. Response To the Coronavirus -- "Among the Worst In the World"

 

The US has had the fifth worst response to the Covid pandemic in the world,a think tank has claimed

"I believe that if you look back historically, we've done worse than most any other country in the battle against the coronavirus, and we're a highly developed, rich country.”

– Dr. Anthony Fauci in an interview with ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos on February 22, 2021

As the United States nears 500,000 COVID-19 deaths, Dr. Anthony Fauci told "Good Morning America" that the U.S. has done worse than nearly every other country in the battle against the coronavirus.

"It's so tough to just go back and try and, you know, do a metaphorical autopsy on how things went. It was just bad. It is bad now," Fauci said.

The U.S. has by far the highest death toll, with at least 498,901 lives lost, followed by Brazil with 246,504 fatalities, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

One in every 656 Americans has now succumbed to the virus. With 525,600 minutes in one year, 500,000 deaths is equivalent to approximately one American dying from COVID-19 per minute for almost an entire year.

Fauci rejected the thinking in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal by Johns Hopkins medical school professor Dr. Marty Makary, who wrote that he thinks the U.S. will reach herd immunity by April.

"We got to be really careful and not just say, 'We're finished now, we're through it,'" Fauci said. "We have variants out there that could actually set us back."

(Emily Shapiro and Cheyenne Haslett. “Fauci on COVID-19 fight: US has 'done worse than most any other country.'” Yahoo News. February 22, 2021.)

How Did the U.S. Become Among the Worst?

Ed Yong of The Atlantic offers an interesting perspective on the subject. After he had spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields, Wong believed that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. The following is some of the information from the award-winning journalist. Please read the entire article --  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/

Here are seven reasons among many cited by Yong for the terrible failure of U.S. leadership.

1. The U.S. has little excuse for its inattention. In recent decades, epidemics of SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 flu, Zika, and monkeypox showed the havoc that new and reemergent pathogens could wreak.

Yong said:

“A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness.

“Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID 19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood.

“The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.”

(Ed Yong. “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” The Atlantic. August 4, 2020.)

2. SARS-CoV-2 is something of an anti-Goldilocks virus: just bad enough in every way.

Yong explained …

“Its symptoms can be severe enough to kill millions but are often mild enough to allow infections to move undetected through a population. It spreads quickly enough to overload hospitals, but slowly enough that statistics don’t spike until too late. These traits made the virus harder to control, but they also softened the pandemic’s punch.”

(Ed Yong. “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” The Atlantic. August 4, 2020.)

3. A pandemic can be prevented in two ways: Stop an infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming thousands more. The first way is likely impossible. Curtailing those viruses after they spill over is more feasible, but requires knowledge, transparency, and decisiveness that were lacking in 2020.

Yong said …

“The United States has correctly castigated China for its duplicity and the WHO for its laxity—but the U.S. has also failed the international community. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has withdrawn from several international partnerships and antagonized its allies.

"Since 2017, Trump had pulled more than 30 staffers out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s office in China, who could have warned about the spreading coronavirus. Last July, he defunded an American epidemiologist embedded within China’s CDC. America First was America oblivious."

(Ed Yong. “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” The Atlantic. August 4, 2020.)

4. Trump never rallied the country. Despite declaring himself a “wartime president,” he merely presided over a culture war, turning public health into yet another politicized cage match.

Yong concluded …

“Abetted by supporters in the conservative media, Trump framed measures that protect against the virus, from masks to social distancing, as liberal and anti-American. Armed anti-lockdown protesters demonstrated at government buildings while Trump egged them on, urging them to “LIBERATE” Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia. Several public-health officials left their jobs over harassment and threats.

“The virus was never beaten in the spring, but many people, including Trump, pretended that it was. Every state reopened to varying degrees, and many subsequently saw record numbers of cases. After Arizona’s cases started climbing sharply at the end of May, Cara Christ, the director of the state’s health-services department, said, 'We are not going to be able to stop the spread. And so we can’t stop living as well.'

“At times, Americans have seemed to collectively surrender to COVID 19. The White House’s coronavirus task force wound down. Trump resumed holding rallies, and called for less testing, so that official numbers would be rosier. The country behaved like a horror-movie character who believes the danger is over, even though the monster is still at large.”

(Ed Yong. “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” The Atlantic. August 4, 2020.)

5. Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, “so that when something like this happens, you’re moving quickly,” Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told Yong, “By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken.”

Yong reported …

“Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, and urged Americans to avoid going there.”

(Ed Yong. “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” The Atlantic. August 4, 2020.)

6. Rather than countering misinformation during the pandemic’s early stages, trusted sources often made things worse. Many health experts and government officials downplayed the threat of the virus in January and February, assuring the public that it posed a low risk to the U.S. and drawing comparisons to the ostensibly greater threat of the flu.

Yong said …

“The WHO, the CDC, and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. These messages were offered without nuance or acknowledgement of uncertainty, so when they were reversed—the virus is worse than the flu; wear masks—the changes seemed like befuddling flip-flops.

“Beginning on April 16, DiResta’s team noticed growing online chatter about Judy Mikovits, a discredited researcher turned anti-vaccination champion. Posts and videos cast Mikovits as a whistleblower who claimed that the new coronavirus was made in a lab and described Anthony Fauci of the White House’s coronavirus task force as her nemesis. Ironically, this conspiracy theory was nested inside a larger conspiracy – part of an orchestrated PR campaign by an anti-vaxxer and QAnon fan with the explicit goal to 'take down Anthony Fauci.'”

(Ed Yong. “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” The Atlantic. August 4, 2020.)

7. In March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

Yong wrote ...

“The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by a study published in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The paper relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere, and was retracted in June.”

(Ed Yong. “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” The Atlantic. August 4, 2020.)

The Blame

Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID 19 pandemic. In the early days of Trump’s presidency, many believed that America’s institutions would check his excesses. Yong said, “They have, in part, but Trump has also corrupted them … Everyday Americans did more than the White House. By voluntarily agreeing to months of social distancing, they bought the country time, at substantial cost to their financial and mental well-being.”

Ed Yong writes in conclusion:

“No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control;

that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people;

that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open;

that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal;

that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law;

that an armchair polymath would claim to have a 'natural ability' at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant;

that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs;

or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, 'I don’t take any responsibility at all.'”

(Ed Yong. “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” The Atlantic. August 4, 2020.)

Donald Trump is the only American leader in a century with more than 400,000 deaths from one event on his watch. Thomas Whalen, an associate professor at Boston University and an expert on the American presidency, is even harsher in his assessment.

Whalen cited reporting by journalist Bob Woodward, who taped Trump on Feb. 7, 2020, acknowledging how dangerous the virus was even though he repeatedly downplayed its severity publicly.

“He has, you could say, blood on his hands,” Whalen said of Trump. “He knew this was a threat and really did not do what was necessary to respond to it in a thoughtful and resourceful way.”

(Jorge L. Ortiz. “'Blood on his hands': As US surpasses 400,000 COVID-19 deaths, experts blame Trump administration for a 'preventable' loss of life.” USA TODAY. January 17, 2021.)