When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.
Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea's disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the
first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald went on air on CNBC and bragged: "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming from China. It's going to be just fine." It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the
Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
Those missing four to six weeks are likely to go down in the definitive history as a cautionary tale of the potentially devastating consequences of failed political leadership
We have more cases then China and rising!
"The US response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort," Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014, told a Georgetown university panel recently. "What's happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions."
Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government's response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: "We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times."
In Konyndyk's analysis, the White House had all the information it needed by the end of January to act decisively. Instead, Trump repeatedly played down the severity of the threat, blaming China for what he called the
"Chinese virus" and insisting falsely that his
partial travel bans on China and Europe were all it would take to contain the crisis.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the diagnostic tests and will control any new treatments for coronavirus, has also shown vulnerabilities. The agency recently indicated that it was looking into the possibility of prescribing the malaria drug
chloroquine for coronavirus sufferers, even though there is no evidence it would work and some indication it could have serious side-effects.
The decision dismayed experts, given that
Trump has personally pushed the unproven remedy on a whim. It smacked of the wave of anti-science sentiment
sweeping federal agencies under this presidency.
As the former senior official put it: "We have the FDA bowing to political pressure and making decisions completely counter to modern science."
On 30 January, as the World Health Organization was declaring a global emergency, Donald said: "We only have five people. Hopefully, everything's going to be great."
On 24 February, Donald claimed "the coronavirus is very much under control in the USA". The next day, Nancy Messonnier, the CDC's top official on respiratory diseases, took the radically different approach of
telling the truth, warning the American people that "disruption to everyday life might be severe".
To date, the Trump administration has supplied 400 ventilators to New York. By Cuomo's estimation, 30,000 are needed.
"You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators?" Cuomo scathingly
asked on Tuesday. "You pick the 26,000 who are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators."
"We are seeing the emergence of 50-state anarchy, because of a total vacuum of federal leadership. It's absurd that thinktanks and Twitter are providing more actionable guidance in the US than the federal government, but that's where we are."
https://www.theguardian.com...h-disaster
