Graphic by Sesame Gaetsaloe/The Choate News
As the U.S. leads the world in the number of novel coronavirus (Covid-19) cases, with the number in New York state alone higher than any other country, many are left to wonder where our nation went wrong.
Despite America’s world-class medical technology and a head start on managing the crisis from observing China, the U.S. is presently taking the largest hit from the virus, with hundreds of thousands of deaths and an unemployment rate in the double digits and rising.
President Donald Trump P’00 put America in a difficult position to combat the pandemic before the disease even reached American soil. Although being an ocean away from the Wuhan epicenter gave the nation extra time to prepare, this time was wasted — the Trump administration downplayed the virus’s effects, ignored health officials’ warnings, and took no preventative measures.
Compare America’s approach to South Korea’s. Both countries confirmed their first cases within a day of each other, but South Korea was far more aggressive in its isolation procedures, administering coronavirus testing and enforcing strict quarantine measures for international travelers and people showing symptoms of the disease. As a result, South Korea has seen an overall decrease in cases, while the U.S. is suffering the consequences of its negligence.
The first American case was reported in early January; however, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not place a large order for N95 masks until March 21, when New York City already had 5,600 cases and the nation’s death toll had surpassed 100.
“We lost six weeks to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders,” Yale University Physician and Sociologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis recently told The Atlantic. Poor storage and maintenance of medical supplies due to contracts Trump let lapse made the U.S. even more vulnerable.
The U.S. also failed to develop accessible and effective testing. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention struggled with test development, sending out non-functional kits. This testing crisis escalated when the Food and Drug Administration refused to let qualified public health labs develop their own tests. This policy eventually was reversed, but it caused a devastating bump in the road nevertheless. Every six days that the country went without testing, the number of cases doubled. Even as access to tests increased, policies allowed only people who had recently traveled internationally, or come in contact with a test-confirmed carrier, to be tested, even though the disease was spreading within U.S. borders.
As Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, Medical Director of the Special Pathogen Unit at Boston University School of Medicine, also told The Atlantic, “If you don’t know where the disease is early in the epidemic, you have no hope of containing it. Even now, [testing is] that Achilles’ heel; it’s the crack that is making its way throughout our entire response.”
Even today, doctors and nurses are unable to get tests themselves, unaware if their work on the frontline is helping or further spreading the disease. Essential workers like grocery store clerks and postal service workers, who are required to expose themselves, and potentially others, to survive economically, are often unable to get a sick leave without a test, which they often cannot afford.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to undermine science; it has questioned the facts again and again regarding vaccines and climate change, and this pandemic is no exception. In order to have been effective in stifling the virus, the government needed to act quickly and take extreme actions. It needed to value the lives that might be lost over personal liberty and economic downfall.
“We have it totally under control,” Trump, with typical bravado, declared on January 22, “It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
Despite all public health guidelines, Trump made arbitrary projections, hoping to reopen the country by Easter. With Easter now passed, this prediction proved empty. Yet, he continues to modify his definition of success to unrealistic numbers in order to make him look like a hero. His current metric says that he will be successful if fewer than 200,000 people die in the U.S.
Ultimately, the federal government must stop promising the best-case scenario and preparing for the worst. Leaders must swallow their pride and admit that they cannot handle this pandemic alone.
