“On 6 March, a group of epidemiologists at Imperial College London gave the White House coronavirus taskforce a heads-up about the terrifying projections for the disease they were about to publish relating to the US.
“The
Imperial scientists’ findings would have induced paralytic
fear in all but the most nonchalant American. They likened Covid-19, which by that
point had already extended its tentacles into at least 28 states in the US, to
the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 50
million people around the globe.
“On the basis of their modelling, they calculated
that if nothing was done to halt the spread of the disease, within weeks it
would infect 81% of the US population. The virus would ravage the nation,
eviscerate its health system and – here came the sting – put 2.2 million
Americans into body bags.
“We
don’t know at what point that bone-chilling figure was presented to Donald
Trump. What we do know is that on the same day, 6 March, the president of the
United States was taking a tour of the Atlanta offices of
the federal disease control agency, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC).
“He was in ebullient mood. He had just heard on
Fox News that the latest tally of coronavirus cases in the country was 240,
with 11 deaths. Trump and his favorite TV channel were as one in their
interpretation of those figures – things were going great, there was really
nothing to worry about.
“‘It will end,’ he told the reporters trailing after
him. ‘People have to remain calm … All I say is: ‘Be calm.’
“Then
a resourceful reporter asked him to set out the Trump administration’s latest
forecast for how coronavirus would progress in the country. He replied: ‘We don’t have a forecast, because
we don’t know.’ Trump’s answer was one of the few candid moments
over the past three months of his handling of the coronavirus crisis. It was
true that they didn’t know. That in a real sense they were walking blind. Already
by 6 March the absence of effective diagnostic testing – caused in part by the
CDC’s botched rollout of its own Covid-19 test – was
severely hampering efforts to track the spread of the disease in the hope of
containing it before it overwhelmed the country.
“‘Anybody that needs a test gets a test,’ Trump told the gaggle of reporters in Atlanta. ‘They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.’ The tests were not beautiful, they were critically flawed. Anybody who needed them was not getting them.
“With virtually no testing available to inform
public conversation, Trump was free to unleash his ‘natural ability’ on the
problem, which he did with abandon throughout the early weeks of the crisis.
“Trump
took to describing himself as a ‘wartime president,’ with Covid-19 as the
enemy. But his dogged pursuit of his own instincts, his preference for letting
his ‘hunches’ lead the nation into battle rather
than deploying the weaponry of evidence and science, has been the hallmark of
his response to the contagion so far.
“From
the first confirmed US case in Washington state on 20 January to Trump’s citing of Imperial’s
2.2 million projected deaths which he did for the first time just this week, he
has kept up a relentlessly upbeat facade, downplaying the severity of the
threat largely for the benefit of the New York stock exchange.
“‘We
have it totally under control,’ he said two days after that first confirmed
case and a day before China cut off Wuhan, a city of 11 million. ‘We
only have five people, we pretty much shut it down coming from China,’ he said
on 30 January, the day the World Health Organization declared a global
emergency. ‘It’s going to disappear. One day –
it’s like a miracle – it will disappear,’ he said on 27 February, the day America mourned its first coronavirus death.
“On Tuesday he finally switched tone. The country
was in for a ‘very, very painful two weeks,’ he said, and every American had to be prepared
‘for the hard days that lie ahead.’
“By
then the bitter truth could no longer be avoided. With stringent social
distancing, the Imperial’s 2.2m body bags could be reduced, but by the
reckoning even of Trump’s own advisers between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans
are still likely to die.
“Trump
now has on his watch a public health disaster of devastating proportions. Some 245,573
cases have been confirmed across the states, twice the number
in Italy, the second-highest nation in the Johns
Hopkins league table.
“More
than 6,000 people have died and the curve is still rising exponentially.
Covid-19 is overwhelming hospitals in New York, New Orleans, Detroit and is
hurtling towards the Trump-supporting heartlands. The federal stockpile of
essential medical equipment is nearly empty. Ventilators and protective gear for
frontline medical staff are running fatally low. Doctors are improvising masks
to save their own lives out of plastic bags and rubber bands. Even
diagnostic testing, the most critical hope for getting on top of the disease,
remains hard to get because of shortages in swabs and vials leaving emergency
coordinators still – three months into the crisis – in the dark.
“It is a catastrophe that many scientists and public
health emergency experts believe could substantially have been averted, if only
Trump had listened. ‘This will be regarded as the worst public health disaster
in America in a century,’ said Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at
Scripps Research in San Diego. ‘The root cause of the disaster was the lack of
readiness to understand where, how and when the disease was spreading.’
“Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the
Center for Global Development who led the US government’s response to
international disasters between 2013 and 2017, said that stark contrasts in
outcomes between different countries in terms of illness and death have been
determined not by Covid-19 itself, but by how seriously each government took
the risk and how early they acted.
“‘On
that score we failed badly,’ he said. ‘You can have the best system in the
world, but if you give the virus an eight-week head start it will eat you
alive.’
“For
Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard, the unfolding
calamity is the fulfilment of her worst fears. ‘When we first heard about
coronavirus, I and several of my colleagues worried that Trump would not attend
to scientific advice. This is a man who has exhibited a reckless disregard for
scientific evidence over climate change; if he could do that, there was always
the question of whether he would take seriously any science.’
“Oreskes sees Covid-19 as Trump’s ultimate
challenge. Would he put the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans first,
or would he dig into the tried-and-tested Republican playbook of showing
hostility to science and expertise, reining in government intervention and
prioritizing the money markets?
“‘This
was a test of whether Trump’s government would act. What we’ve seen is that for
the people in power in this country, ideology beats even an imminent threat.’
“Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, took the
extraordinary step on Sunday of accusing Trump directly of ‘costing American lives.’ His lessening of the
severity of the virus early on ‘was deadly,’ she told CNN, as will be the
delays in delivering medical equipment to where it is needed.
“‘As the president fiddles, people are dying,’ she said. That
was a tough accusation, even by the standards of these hyper-partisan times.
But a growing number of scientists and health emergency experts are tentatively
drawing the same conclusion.
“‘We now know there will be well over 100,000 deaths,’ Topol
said. ‘A vast majority of those will have been unnecessarily lost because of
the lack of preparedness of the United States. As a leader, Trump has to accept
responsibility, which of course he won’t.’
“It is not as though Trump wasn’t warned. In the
wake of the Ebola epidemic in 2014, the Obama administration was so fearful of
the dangers of another epidemic that they put in place several innovations
designed to prepare the nation for a pandemic.
“Konyndyk,
who was central to the Ebola response, has watched aghast as every element of
that effort has been unpicked or overlooked by the Trump administration. ‘We set up a special
team for pandemic preparedness at the national security council – they
dismantled that. We left them a very detailed playbook of the initial steps for
managing an event like this – they ignored that.’
“When coronavirus reared its ugly head, there was
plenty of early warning. Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary,
became aware of the outbreak of a virus in China as early as 3 January.
“By
5 January scientists in Shanghai had obtained a complete viral genome from an infected
patient and reported it immediately to GenBank, the genetic sequencing database
of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). By early February, scientists
were aware that Covid-19 was both easily transmitted between individuals and
had a relatively high fatality rate, especially for older and vulnerable
people.
“‘That was enough for scientists to know the virus
had the potential to spread far and wide and that urgent action was needed,’
Konyndyk said.
“At
the same time, US intelligence agencies were passing on their own warnings to
the White House. According to the Washington Post, Azar tried several times to
sound the alarm but couldn’t get an audience with Trump until 18 January, at
which point all the president wanted to talk about was vaping.
“The
Post quoted an anonymous US official who said the system was ‘blinking red.’ The
official said: ‘Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of
other people in the government were – they just couldn’t get him to do anything
about it.’
“With
the full might of the US scientific community at his disposal, Trump appointed
individuals not known for their prowess with pandemics in charge of the federal
response. The coronavirus taskforce was to be led by the vice-president, Mike
Pence, who has been widely criticized for his handling of a
2015 HIV outbreak when governor of Indiana.
“Trump
is also increasingly relying on his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who made his first appearance at the taskforce
briefing on Thursday. Politico has reported that Kushner, whose skill set is
in real estate, has in turn reached out to his brother’s father-in-law, who is
at least a physician, for advice on fighting the pandemic.
“Trump’s failure to heed the warnings and act
quickly has set in train a domino effect that now imperils large swathes of the
US. What began as an inability to get diagnostic testing going on a mass scale
has developed into a sluggish mobilization of the federal government, a
stuttering deployment of the Defense Production Act to enlist the firepower of
corporations, and a stand-back, almost detached approach that has allowed state
governors to take the lead in what Konyndyk called the birth of ‘50-state
anarchy.’
“One
of the few proactive measures taken by Trump was to impose a partial travel ban
on China and Europe. Scientists told him the move would only delay the advance
of Covid-19 in the US, it could never stop it. Again, he didn’t listen. ‘Trump
thought in terms of a wall. Put a wall around China and the virus won’t come to
the US. He was out of step with all the experts around him,’ Topol said.
“As a result, the US lost the early potential to contain the
virus, either by locking down hot spots as China did with Hubei province or
through aggressive testing to isolate those infected as South Korea has done.
“Tomas Pueyo, a Stanford-trained consultant based in California,
has laid out in sobering detail how quickly the disaster is laying waste to the
US. His first exploration of the subject, a
data-driven plea to take the disease seriously posted on Medium in early March,
received 40m views.
“On Wednesday he published his updated research. It shows America’s curve of
confirmed cases rising more steeply than that of any other country in the
world. Three weeks ago, Pueyo reminds us, the US had fewer than 1,000 confirmed cases at a
time when Trump was telling the world: ‘No, I’m not concerned at
all. No, I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.’ Now it stands at almost a quarter of a million. “This is what
exponential growth looks like,” he said.
“Having hit the Democratic-controlled high-density urban centers
first – San Francisco and Seattle, then New York and New Jersey, now Detroit –
the virus is marching inexorably in the direction of the more rural southern
and heartland states that happen to form the crucible of Trump’s base.
“Many of those states followed the lead set by Trump and Fox News, remaining relaxed about the threat
and moving astonishingly slowly to put physical distancing controls in place.
Florida, under its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has echoed Trump’s
approach and only imposed a statewide stay-at-home order on Friday despite
having the sixth-largest tally of confirmed cases in
the country.
“Georgia and Mississippi followed suit. Some Republican states
including Oklahoma and South Carolina still have no statewide
mandatory stay-at-home orders.
“Pueyo points out that Republican voters are additionally
vulnerable as they have a higher age profile than Democratic voters.
Coronavirus makes no distinctions as to party, but it does prey on the elderly.
“So it is one of the great paradoxes of Trump’s pandemic that he
may have put many of his own loyal supporters in mortal peril. As Konyndyk put
it: ‘Trump has endangered his own supporters by sending out a message in
contradiction to the science, and they believed him.’”
Global confirmed cases: 1,213,927; total deaths: 65,652; total recovered: 252,391
ReplyDeleteU.S. confirmed cases: 312,245; total deaths: 8,503; total recovered: 15,021
The bitter truth cannot be avoided.
ReplyDeleteThe bitter truth can be and is being denied.
I am surrounded by right-wing Republican deniers who either fluff it off or believe it will only happen to "others." An adjoining subdivision is a "deed restricted" community. Many of its residents were very upset that most people didn't even try to be part of a scheduled community garage sale yesterday.
(This is not an exaggeration or a joke. They voiced their anger on the Nextdoor social network for all to see.)
Many of the same people have been going to donate blood for the first time ever because they believe their blood will be tested for coronavirus free thus avoiding all the costs, rules and regulations followed by local hospitals and urgent care medical facilities.
USA Cases: 435,160 (Highest in World)
ReplyDeleteDeaths: 14,802 (3rd Highest in World)
Global Cases: 1,529,961
Deaths: 89,418