Submitted by mike kraft on
How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.
In the first half of 2020, SARS‑CoV‑2—the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID‑19—infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths. These numbers are estimates. The actual toll, though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens.
Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. “The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.
Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. 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....
Despite its epochal effects, COVID‑19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar....
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Commentary on the Atlantic article--Washington Post
Ed Yong’s lengthy exegesis of the coronavirus pandemic in The Atlantic lays much of the blame for its spread in the United States at the feet of President Trump. While the pandemic leveraged a number of systemic flaws, Trump’s pre-pandemic attacks on federal infrastructure, his failure to prepare for the virus’s arrival and his dishonest assessments of its expansion indisputably resulted in a hobbled and partisan response.
At times, Trump has treated the situation with the seriousness it obviously demands. In March, he advocated a broad closure of the economy to limit its spread. More recently, he warned of the expansion of the virus in a number of Sun Belt states, weeks after that expansion was underway. These, though, are the exceptions. Even as health advisers like Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah L. Birx are raising louder alarms about the virus’s current course, Trump has returned to his default position: all is well — or, at least, all is as well as it could be.
It isn't.
Consider the president’s recent public pronouncements about how things are going. There was his tweet over the weekend undercutting congressional testimony from Fauci in which the country’s leading infectious-disease expert attributed the surge in new cases to a failure to robustly shut down the economy — or, really, to keep things shuttered....