Covirus 19 coronavirus: all the mistakes the United States has made in its response

The United States has suffered the largest coronavirus outbreak in the world, with five times as many reported cases as any other country and more than double the deaths.

The numbers are astonishing. The United States has 1.3 million confirmed cases. The next highest figure is the 257,000 in Spain. New York State alone has more cases of the virus than any other country.

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And as the United States approaches 80,000 deaths, its closest rival in that regard, the United Kingdom, has just surpassed 30,000.

How did the most powerful nation in the world find itself in such a dire position?

The answer is a long and awkward series of mistakes, made by everyone from the President to federal agencies, state governments, and the American people themselves.

A president in denial

In January, when the US intelligence agencies. USA They began to warn Donald Trump about the threat posed by the virus, their instinct was to ignore it.

Trump did not want to scare the financial markets. Even after China finally recognized that there was significant person-to-person transmission of the virus, it consistently downplayed the danger.

On January 22, CNBC asked the president if he was concerned that the virus would become a pandemic.

“No, not at all,” he said.

“We have him totally under control. He is a person who comes from China, and we have him under control. He will be fine.”

In early February, having been persuaded by his staff to announce restrictions on travel from China, Trump said the problem had been solved. On February 2, he told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the partial travel ban had “practically closed.”

On February 14, he suggested that the virus simply disappear as the United States heads into the summer months.

“There is a theory that, in April, when it’s hot, historically, that has been able to kill the virus,” Trump said.

As of February 26, there were 60 confirmed cases in the United States, and that number was steadily increasing.

“We are going down, not going up. We are going down substantially, not going up,” Trump said, contradicting health officials in his own administration.

“As they improve, we will remove them from the list, so very soon we will only be with five people. And we could be with just one or two people in the next short period of time.”

He also compared the coronavirus to the flu, arguing that the latter kills tens of thousands of people a year without causing any economic shutdown.

We could continue for some time, but you understand. Trump repeatedly downplayed the virus and dismissed fears about its potential spread in the United States as media “hysteria.”

He did this until mid-March, when he finally started taking the pandemic seriously, and suddenly changed to claiming that he had known how bad it was all along.

“I always knew this is, this is real, it’s a pandemic,” he said March 16.

“I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

“I’ve always seen it as serious.”

That simply wasn’t true. While other world leaders did their best to prepare for the crisis, Trump pretended there was nothing to worry about.

Scarcity of evidence

When the virus reached the US In the USA, it was allowed to spread virtually undetected for weeks. That was the result of a catastrophic shortage of coronavirus test kits.

Our own government has repeatedly spoken about the importance of widespread testing. Without it, health officials cannot trace the virus. With it, they can identify outbreaks and turn them off much more efficiently by isolating people exposed to possible infection.

“No one else in the world took care of all those original Wuhan cases in January and contained them. That’s why we are now dealing with what we know, rather than a major community broadcast that occurred throughout February in countries like Italy and the United States, “Australian Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said last month.

As Professor Murphy alluded there, the USA USA Essentially they were flying blind throughout February. I had no idea where the virus was or how widely it had spread.

So why was there a shortage of test kits?

Remember, Covid-19 is a new strain of coronavirus, which means that when the outbreak started, health authorities had to develop a new test to detect it. There was simply no existing reservation out there.

The United States decided not to accept the test kits offered by the World Health Organization, and instead the relevant government agency, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), set out to create its own.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took a remarkably conservative approach to testing.

First, it prevented private laboratories from developing and manufacturing their own kits, forcing them to use only the CDC. And second, it issued narrow guidelines to determine who should be tested, only people who had recently been to Wuhan or had come in contact with a confirmed case.

By February 7, CDC had distributed test kits to state labs. But there was a problem: the tests were faulty. Too many of them were returning inconclusive results, and they had to be repaired.

The FDA loosened its restrictions on private laboratories at the time, but it took another fortnight, until the end of the month, for the testing rate to start increasing.

Then, due to the sudden avalanche of tests, the labs responsible for analyzing the results were overwhelmed. That created delays, and some patients had to wait up to a week to find out if they had the virus.

While his government agencies were so thoroughly ruining the testing problem, the President was bombarding the public with little information.

“Anyone who wants a test can get one,” Trump said March 6. That was not even remotely close to being true.

A month later, in early April, Trump said the United States was testing “more than any other country in the world, both in terms of gross and per capita numbers.”

“Most of them,” he insisted.

It was half true. At that point, things had improved considerably, and the United States was conducting a greater number of rough tests than any other country. However, it was still far behind other countries in terms of the number of tests per capita.

How many tests, exactly, does the United States need to do? According to a Harvard University study, its goal should be to carry out five million tests a day in June, if the economy wants to start reopening.

Trump’s undersecretary of health has called that goal “irrational.” But in late April, the president said he was within reach.

“We are going to be there very soon. If you look at the numbers, it could be that we are getting very close,” he said.

“We will be there very soon.”

Again, he was talking nonsense. The United States has been doing an average of 150,000 to 200,000 coronavirus tests per day. Even now, it is still far below what is required.

• Covid19.govt.nz – The official government Covid-19 advisory website

Lack of medical supplies.

In the first weeks of the pandemic, hospitals and doctors warned of the impending shortage of crucial supplies they needed to treat patients with coronavirus: ventilators, masks, gloves, and other forms of personal protective equipment (PPE).

The shortage was caused by a few different factors.

For example, China generally manufactures and exports a massive percentage of the world’s face masks. For obvious reasons, that was no longer happening.

And the United States’ national mask stock N95 had been depleted by previous administrations, including that of Barack Obama. The Trump administration had not considered replacing it in its first three years.

Health workers had to cope. Some tried to reuse the PPE they had. Others created makeshift supplies. Neither solution was ideal.

Meanwhile, the federal and state governments discussed who was ultimately responsible for obtaining more equipment.

“The Federal Government is not supposed to buy large quantities of items and then ship them. You know, we are not a shipping clerk,” Trump said in mid-March.

He put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of the problem, without success. This week, the New York Times described, in excruciating detail, the fruitless and absurd search for supplies that Kushner and his “confused and overwhelmed” team undertook.

Kushner finally faced the cameras at a White House briefing and lectured states on their own failures.

“The notion of the federal reserve is that it is supposed to be our reserve. It is not supposed to be the reserves of the states that they then use,” he told reporters.

“When there are governors who say the Federal Government has not given them what they need, I encourage you to ask them, have you looked within your state to make sure that you have been unable to find the resources?”

States argued that the absence of the federal government had forced them to compete with each other for supplies on the open market, which increased prices.

“It’s like being on eBay with 50 other states, bidding for a fan,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said at one point.

NY

We mentioned earlier that New York has more confirmed cases of the virus than any other country in the world outside of the United States. Even that extraordinary statistic underestimates its role in the crisis.

This week, geneticists at the Yale School of Public Health determined that most infections in the United States (“60 to 65 percent”) go back to New York. It served as the “front door” for the disease to enter and then spread throughout the country.

Speaking to The Times, immunology professor Kristian Andersen said the Yale investigation was proof that the size of the US outbreak was “his own fault.”

“It means we lost the ship from the start, and the vast majority in this country comes from internal spread,” said Professor Andersen.

In other words, officials were too slow to implement measures to contain the virus. New York was an open door; An easy entry point.

Trump restricted some travel from China in early February, but waited until March 11 to ban travel from Europe. It turns out that most of the infections in New York occurred through Europe, rather than directly from China.

Incidentally, it was also in mid-March that the White House finally issued a set of social distancing guidelines as part of its plan to “curb the spread.”

By then it was too late. In the fortnight after Trump announced a ban on travel to Europe, the official case count skyrocketed from less than 2,000 infections, largely limited to Washington and New York state, to more than 68,000, spread across the country. .

But the federal government was not the only culprit. New York authorities also could not act quickly.

The state’s first confirmed case occurred on March 1. Research has suggested that at that time there were actually 10,000 undetected infections there.

Cuomo declared a state of emergency on March 7. It didn’t implement a full shutdown until almost two weeks after that, on March 20.

Again, we now know that it was too late. For weeks, thousands upon thousands of people continued to travel in and out of New York City, silently spreading the virus to all corners of the United States.

Confusing messages

Trump has fluctuated back and forth between very different messages, predictions, and priorities.

He said he wanted the US economy to “open up and get going” before Easter, April 12. Days later, he extended the Federal Government’s social distancing guidelines for another month, until the end of April.

He told Americans to follow those social distancing rules, then expressed his support for people protesting against state governors for implementing them.

He told people that they should wear face masks, and seconds later he said that he had no intention of wearing one.

He claimed that the coronavirus was no worse than the common flu, then decided that any number of deaths below 100,000 would be a “good” result.

At one point, Trump says the virus “shocked” the world and that no one could have seen it coming; The next, he says he knew it was a pandemic weeks before the declaration of the World Health Organization.

In February, he praised China for its “transparency”, and now blames others for swallowing the country’s lies.

He said a vaccine will be ready before the end of the year, contradicting estimates by his own officials that it will take 12-18 months.

The president privately expressed support for a Republican governor’s plan to reopen his state’s economy, then criticized the plan in public.

He posted a vague tweet late at night saying he was closing immigration to the US. USA, just to clarify the next day that it was a two-month hiatus to issue green cards.

He said he was considering quarantining New York and closing it from the rest of the country, then dropped the idea hours later.

Trump declared that he had “full authority” to do anything as president, then said that states “make their own decisions.”

Its predicted death toll has changed repeatedly, depending on which model is eye-catching at any given time.

We could go on, but you understand the idea. A clear message is essential in a crisis, and in the United States, much has been lacking.

Searching for a miracle cure

Twice Trump has been distracted from the daily work of managing the pandemic out of his seeming desire to find a quick and easy cure.

The first instance of this was its fixation with the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine in late March and early April.

Holding on to a very limited early study from France that suggested the drug could be an effective treatment for coronavirus, Trump came in and said he had “a real chance of being one of the greatest game-changers in the history of medicine” . He said it should be used to treat the virus “immediately”.

“What the hell do you have to lose?” he reflected.

Doctors quickly answered that question, noting that hydroxychloroquine can have serious side effects in some situations, including death.

Trump hasn’t mentioned much about the drug lately. Subsequent studies have shown that it is not effective in treating the virus and could even increase people’s risk of death.

Her second experience with experimental medicine came at the end of last month, when she suggested carrying ultraviolet light “inside the body” or perhaps even injecting disinfectant.

“Assuming we hit the body with a tremendous, either very powerful ultraviolet light.” He said during a White House briefing after hearing a presentation from one of his government officials.

“I think you said, that hasn’t been verified, but you’re going to prove it. And then I said, assuming you brought light into the body, what you can do through the skin or otherwise.

“And I think you said you’re going to try that too. Sounds interesting.

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it removes it in a minute, a minute, and is there any way we can do something like that? By injection inside or almost a cleaning.

“As you can see, it reaches the lungs and has a tremendous number in the lungs. So it would be interesting to verify that.”

“So we’ll see. But the whole concept of light, the way it kills it in a minute, that’s pretty powerful.”

He urged Dr. Deborah Birx, a senior member of her coronavirus task force, to “talk to doctors” about the possibility of applying light and heat “to cure.”

“Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m not a doctor. But I’m a person who has good, you know what,” he added, pointing to his head.

Needless to say, none of this was particularly helpful.

A divided audience

All countries have seen several people oppose and, at times, break the rules of social distancing. Australia is no different in that regard.

But Americans have struggled with their discipline more than most.

Polls show that most people agree to the restrictions and don’t want them to be lifted prematurely. That has not stopped some Americans from challenging the authorities.

“If I get a crown, I get a crown,” a famous Spring Break student told Reuters.

“At the end of the day, I’m not going to let it stop me from partying.”

Images of anti-blockade protesters have consistently drawn attention worldwide.

This month, thousands of people flocked to Huntington Beach in California to go against Governor Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order, along with his decision to temporarily close the beaches.

And in a particularly controversial protest, heavily armed men stormed the state capital of Michigan, posing for photos with their rifles outside Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s office.

Trump has sporadically incited protesters, despite the fact that they are technically circumventing his own government’s guidelines.

He tweeted that Democratic governors should “liberate” their states.

“The Michigan governor should give in a little and put out the fire,” he said of the protesters in Michigan.

“These are very good people, but they are angry. They want to get their lives back, for sure! See them, talk to them, make a deal.”