The US Coronavirus Epidemic: The Simple Facts of Our Response

With so much in the news, you may want a simple guide to the facts. What has our government’s response to the coronavirus been? How has the US approach worked? Maybe these notes can be helpful in conversations with friends, or maybe it can help by making sense of the events of this year. My only hope is that what is presented be the facts, and that it brings us an inch closer to a solution.

The Coronavirus Pandemic (January 2020 — ongoing)

• The US president considered the virus to be unimportant and under control from January 22nd, 2020 until March 13th, 2020.

The president at a rally stated, “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus…and this is their new hoax…and we are totally prepared.” (February 28th, 2020).

The president also dismissed internal memos and National Security Council recommendations warning about a possible US epidemic in January, considering them alarmist.

For reference, on January 16th, German scientists came up with the first coronavirus diagnostic tool, and the German government immediately began the effort to scale up testing across public and private labs. Germany was able to thoroughly track the transmission of the coronavirus from its initial source by the end of January, and broke the known chain of transmission, giving the country an additional week to reorganize and pursue its testing strategy.

Overall trend in coronavirus cases in Germany and the United States (The New York Times)

• The US releases its own diagnostic test on February 8th, 2020, refusing to use the German-WHO diagnostic test, but the US test does not work. In this early stage, US government bureaucracy also prevents private and public labs across the country from deploying their own tests, which were already effective and working.
• It took 21 days for the CDC to deliver a new test.
• Even with a functional test, getting it out to the public, and working to prevent new infections, largely failed at the early phase of the US epidemic. Without an early test, and with minimal technical help or resources from the federal government, states across the country fail to identify and contain early outbreaks. Lockdowns are pursued as a last-resort measure to stop the spread of the virus.
• Whereas Germany sees their new cases peak in April, the overall US strategy has led to a peak in July, with no indication of decrease.
• On April 17th, the US President encouraged anti-lockdown protests. On this day, an estimated 30,000 Americans were newly infected by coronavirus. By July 18th, the number of Americans newly infected would rise to more than 70,000 per day.

Protesters outside the State Capitol Building in Michigan, April 15, 2020 (NBC News)

• The science journal Nature shows that US medical health professionals point to a lack of federal leadership in why widespread testing, after the US test was approved, was so far behind in the early stages of this country’s epidemic. Large, private healthcare systems did not engage with academic labs, even though large-scale testing capabilities actually existed across universities and companies in March, as the Nature article shows. Healthcare systems cite technological difficulties and bureaucracy, and limited themselves to smaller in-house testing, with little federal guidance.
• As a physician-turned-journalist in the US observed, “No institutional players — not hospitals, not manufacturers of ventilators, masks, tests or drugs — saw it as their place to address the Covid-19 train coming down the tracks.” The early US testing situation is so poor that a war correspondent is shocked.
• The federal and state governments’ strategy of finding new outbreak hot-zones, and coordinating between levels of government to contain the virus, continues to fail. In July, the federal government remains unable to address coronavirus testing equipment shortages across the states.
• The decline in number of cases in May has been strongly attributed to social distancing and lockdowns across the country. The BBC finds that anti-lockdown protesters “have largely been conservative, pro-Trump and pro-gun activists.”

• Another key fact to the US response: the federal government disregarded and retaliated against an important public health official during the early stages of the epidemic. On April 20th, Dr. Richard Bright, the head of the government’s biomedical research and development department, was reassigned by the US Department of Health and Human Services, despite being an early proponent of acquiring more masks and investing in critical supplies. An American mask manufacturer warned Dr. Bright in January of the rising tide in global demand, and Dr. Bright in his testimony before Congress stated,

“I pushed that forward to the highest levels I could in H.H.S., and got no response. From that moment, I knew that we were going to have a crisis — our health-care workers — because we were not taking action. We were already behind the ball. That was our last window of opportunity to turn on that production, to save the lives of those health-care workers. And we didn’t act” (May 14th, 2020).

• The government’s Office of Special Counsel found “reasonable grounds to believe” that the administration used the reassignment to retaliate against Dr. Bright for his unwillingness to follow Department consensus on the coronavirus pandemic.

A front-line worker at a Quest diagnostic laboratory in Chantilly, Virginia (New York Times)

• Across this time period, the president and vice president, as chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, also chose not to wear masks in public settings. The first time the president wears a mask in public is July 11th. This approach goes against the scientific consensus that mask-wearing works to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
• And Sweden, long cited as the case that proves that lockdowns are not necessary, has faced 3,000 more deaths than its neighboring countries due to the coronavirus, with little to no economic gains. As this research shows, per million people, Sweden due to its unique “stay open” policy has suffered 12 times more deaths than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark.

Vice Pres. Mike Pence visiting the Mayo Clinic, April 28th, 2020 (AP News)

Some Concluding Points

• A months-long investigation by the New York Times released this week shows that weak federal leadership in April— focused on shifting responsibility to the states, and focused on the data that could reopen society the fastest — allowed this situation to progress as it has.
• And on July 19th, the US president continued to maintain that the nation’s top advocate for epidemic control was being “alarmist” about the coronavirus epidemic. This comes as some states are continuing to set new daily records of cases.
• Important to note too is that the president’s early term was marked by efforts to try to end the Affordable Care Act, the central law of national healthcare in the US. This June, the federal government again asked the Supreme Court to strike down key provisions of the healthcare law. The coronavirus, in light of this government’s response and health system failures, has also disproportionately harmed people of color in the country.
• Beyond their limited efforts to contain the epidemic, the president and members of his team have failed to positively reinforce public health guidelines like mask-wearing and social-distancing, which remain crucial in slowing the virus’s spread.

Finally, to understand the current crisis in the perspective of world history, this important graphic can be helpful. Also useful are some facts from a recent and influential article by John Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History”,

“To understand just how bad things are in the United States and, more important, what can be done about it requires comparison. At this writing, Italy, once the poster child of coronavirus devastation and with a population twice that of Texas, has recently averaged about 200 new cases a day when Texas has had over 9,000. Germany, with a population four times that of Florida, has had fewer than 400 new cases a day. On Sunday, Florida reported over 15,300, the highest single-day total of any state.”

One of the Government’s inherent duties is to protect its citizens, and to give them a shot at pursuing peace. On the simple facts of our response, the US approach to the coronavirus has left more people exposed and vulnerable.

Our policies and the nature of our leadership have seen too many people perish, with every numeral being another person with a family, with some love of a home’s comfort, with a dream. Many of these people have passed away alone, far from the warmth of their families and rites. Millions of people remain out of work and without the means to continue a decent life when unemployment benefits expire this month. Early data shows that moving learning online has seen students in high-income areas performing well, while those in low-income areas bearing witness to decreased participation, back-tracking progress and months lost of education. The current US approach to the epidemic suggests that these trends will simply widen.

Although we will need a scientific solution through a vaccine to end this, we will need government solutions.

The stress test of America’s leadership, and the state of our social infrastructure — our health system, economy, and education — shows us that we simply cannot handle issues in the ways that our peer countries can, despite having talent, resources and wealth. The epidemic era has also emphasized the deep-rooted injustices tied to race in this country that must be further exposed and addressed. Our approach, as a whole, has been wrong. Understanding, and fixing, these interrelated issues is incumbent if we really care about our membership in this democracy.