| | | Because of Covid-19, Trump called himself a wartime president, but he didn’t heed his generals and never ordered ammunition. In World War II, a Ford plant was configured to turn out one new B-24 bomber every hour, yet today we display none of that urgency even though Americans are dying from the virus at a faster pace than they fell in World War II.
It wasn’t as if the United States was unready. A 324-page study in October 2019 found that America was the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic — but it didn’t imagine that the United States would fumble testing, data collection, contact tracing, communications and just about every other facet of managing a novel virus.
“The administration made every single mistake you could possibly make,” Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who early in his career helped eradicate smallpox, told me.
“We could have beaten it back,” Brilliant said. “We could have prevented the horror story we have now.”
Jeffrey Shaman, a public health expert at Columbia University, calculated that if each county in the United States had acted just two weeks earlier to order lockdowns or other control measures, then more than 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths could have been avoided through early May.
Shaman told me that his team didn’t model even earlier interventions, in January or February, but that he believes it would have been plausible for the United States to enjoy the Covid-19 mortality rate of South Korea. That would mean almost a 99 percent reduction in mortality.
When a pandemic response has become so politicized, when leadership is so absent, when health messaging is so muddled, when science is so marginalized, it’s easier to understand how the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic could have lost 190,000 citizens to the virus. |
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