IN letter arrived at the office of the mayor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, this week that the public health catastrophe around him could creep him break. His state is one of 21 in the U.S. that have been placed by the White House task force in the “red zone,” indicating that the disease is now occurring in such a way that immediate restrictions need to be placed to prevent serious consequences.
Kemp, a Republican governor and ally of Donald Trump, has taken a controversial approach to Covid-19. Since the beginning of July, the virus has been raging across its state, with new infections rising sharply to a devastating number of 182,000.
Deaths have also skyrocketed dramatically, with new daily peaks pushing the toll close to 4,000. Yet Kemp continues to spend much of his political energy fighting local officials instead of the microbe.
For weeks, he has been pleading with the Democratic mayor of the largest city, Atlanta, to stop wearing masks. Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is African-American, like more than half of her city, has rejected the move by Kemp, who is white, as an act of “personal revenge.”
Videos circulate of unmasked nightclubs closing in on packed dance floor. However, Kemp is letting clubs, bars and indoor restaurants continue to be abandoned.
Social media images show high school corridors filled with students not wearing masks on the first day of the new school year. However, Kemp continues to surrender or have to open classrooms to individual school districts. In Atlanta alone, 260 employees tested positive for the virus, as exposure to it, even before classes began.
It is against this background that the letter fell on Kemp’s desk. Drawn by nearly 2,400 doctors, nurses, physical therapists and other public health workers on the coal of the response to the pandemic, it paints a devastating picture of dying sick people stretching hospitals to the breaking point right across the state under Kemp’s watch.
The letter pleads with Kemp to change jobs, and calls on him to maintain a temporary mask order, close bars and nightclubs and severely restrict indoor and outdoor venues. The signatories plead with him to expand testing rapidly to counter enormous rules and speed up test results that could take two weeks.
“Our situation is rapidly getting out of control,” Melanie Thompson, a Atlanta doctor and co-organizer of the letter, told the Guardian. “Frontline health workers are at the end of their ropes – we are left on our own to make it up as we go along, while the mayor is not doing what is necessary to contain this epidemic.”
But Georgia is far from unique.
Seven months into the pandemic, the utter horror of a deadly disease was allowed to run amok by state officials and a U.S. president who has consistently downplayed the severity of the crisis, the science denied and deflected attention to the failures of self-administration is now glaringly evident. The virus has taken over the south and is slowly making its way to the Mississippi River in the heart of America.
As the virus spreads, the many discrete issues it has exposed in earlier stages of the pandemic are now congealing into one epic challenge.
The Covid crisis in Georgia under Kemp is no longer a matter of inadequate testing or unworkable contact tracing; shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE); overflowing ICU beds; confusing public messages; virulent misinformation and collusion theorizing; not to mention the culture war over masks as the grotesque racial differences that cause 80% of patients in the hospital in the state to be African-American.
Georgia’s disruption is not a matter of any of those factors. It’s a product of them all.
The virus has spread its invisible tentacles from urban centers such as Atlanta and the second-largest city of Augusta, through the suburbs and to rural areas, where health services that were not adequate before the pandemic are now on their knees.
“This was predicted,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Back in the spring, colleagues and I predicted that this virus would be so deceptive that it would move to rural areas, where it would be particularly humiliating and difficult to manage.”
Like many of its fellow experts in response to pandemics, Rivers has seen increasing anger when the Trump administration and its overlords of governor have missed multiple opportunities to contain the virus. “Mankind has in the past been very much involved in defeating infectious diseases – the removal of smallpox for one,” she said. “I have not seen the same energy around this pandemic.”
As time goes on, and the national death toll counts, Rivers observes that the landmarks are spreading ever wider. The country commemorated the first death, followed by the first 100 deaths, then 1,000, then 100,000, almost without noticing that the currency of death was devalued along the way.
The same goes for the total number of confirmed infections in the US, now approaching 5m – more than a quarter of all recorded cases in the world. When Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top expert on American infectious disease, said in March that there would be “millions of cases” before the pandemic was done, the American collective jaw dropped; but when the news broke recently that there were only nearly 2m of new U.S. cases in July, the nation barely snapped.
“I hear rumors and people accept that this is how things will be,” Rivers said. ‘But it’s never too late to take a different approach and steer the ship to something better. We can do that now, we should do it now. ”
Complacency sums up Trump’s helmsmanship when he’s right in the eye of the storm. From the day the first Covid case was heard in the US on January 20, the president has been slow to respond to the threat, has reiterated his hopes in the election and reopened the economy for public safety. , and has repeatedly ignored scientific warnings in favor of his own fatally flawed instincts.
With the death toll at nearly 160,000, Trump sought refuge in the acceptance that Rivers identified. That tendency was shown live this week in Axios’ wide-ranging interview, in which it was stated to Trump that 1,000 Americans die every day.
‘They die. That’s true, “Trump replied.” It’s what it is. But that does not mean we are not doing everything we can. It is under control as much as you can control it. “
Abraar Karan, a global doctor of health at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, despises the idea that the US has done everything it could. “The US, relative to the resources we have, has received the worst response to the pandemic in the world,” he said.
What Karan insists on most is that political leaders have had the benefit of seeing others go through the crisis, yet stubbornly have refused to learn the lessons. ‘China, South Korea, Japan and Italy – they were all hit before we were and we did not listen. Then the north-east hit our own land and we paid no attention. “Now numbers are big in Texas, Arizona, Florida, and people are not listening yet,” he said.
With the US registering about 55,000 new cases a day, the country looks set to punish by further rehearsals for the foreseeable future. Epidemiologists at the University of Washington in Seattle suggest that under current projections, up to 230,000 Americans will have lost their lives on Presidential election day on November 3rd.
By the end of this year, the US could be well on its way to 300,000 deaths.
“This is more than a danger to the health of Americans gone, it is now a full-blown crisis for homeland security,” said Peter Hotez, a global health scientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “Average Americans are so insecure that they no longer feel safe leaving their homes.”
Hopes that political leaders will adapt to Hotez to such an extent that in the absence of federal guidance he has produced his own guidelines for containing the virus. He calls it his ‘October Plan’, noting that other academic centers of excellence have also begun producing similar plans in a desperate attempt to fill the gap. They include Caitlin Rivers and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins who have published a document entitled Resetting Our Response: Changes Needed in the US.
Hotez also worries that people will be lured into false trust by hoping for a fax, which he predicts will only arrive in mid-2021. He is equally skeptical about the idea that Joe Biden would win the presidential election in November would change things soon, given that Biden would not enter the White House until January 20.
It all points to a period of lingering pain for America. Asked how the country will cope in the midst of this seemingly never-ending tragedy, Hotez channels Winston Churchill.
“If you go through hell, stay put,” he said. Then he added, “We have no other choice.”
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