The U.S. has hamstrung itself': How America
became the new Italy on coronavirus
While Trump touted America’s reopening and watched
infections climb, European leaders maintained strict rules and drove cases
down.
By DAN
DIAMOND and SARAH WHEATON
06/22/2020
04:30 AM EDT
Three
months ago, public health officials feared that America would be swamped by
Covid-19 like Italy. Today, the U.S. would be lucky to swap its coronavirus
crisis for theirs.
Italy’s
sudden surge of coronavirus in March swamped hospitals, pushed the nation into
a strict lockdown and forced its doctors to ration life-saving ventilators.
About 200,000 Italians were sickened and 29,000 died from the virus by May 1
alone. Global health officials seized on Italy — as the first country outside
of China to be battered by the virus — as a disturbing case study for the rest
of the world. In private meetings, White House officials worried that Italy was
a preview of the storm about to hit the U.S. health system.
But Italy
announced just 264 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday — the same day that the
United States reported nearly 32,000. The European nation opened its
restaurants and stores a month ago, albeit under new, national safety measures,
even as U.S. states wrestled with inconsistent, hasty reopening efforts that
have been blamed for new virus spikes. And Italy’s outbreak has dramatically
ebbed from its mid-March peak, while America’s new per capita cases remain on
par with Italy's worst day — and show signs of rising further, with record
hospitalizations in states like Arizona, Florida and Texas last week.
“I think
there are going to be states in our country that can replicate Italy,” said
Ashish Jha, head of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, noting that New York has
made its own dramatic strides in containing the virus.
“But I
would rather spend this summer in Rome with my family than in Phoenix.”
Italy is
not alone in driving coronavirus down to manageable levels. Its Western
European neighbors Spain and France grappled with damaging outbreaks that
killed tens of thousands and prompted lockdowns, only to drive daily new cases
below 500. Meanwhile, Germany was able to fend off the virus with relatively
low mortality, which some credit to the nation’s robust test-and-trace
strategy. The collective recovery of the European nations — punctuated by
Italy’s apparent turnaround — stands in stark contrast to the muddle facing
many parts of America, where the death toll has now topped 120,000.
“I would rather spend this summer in Rome with my
family than in Phoenix.”
Ashish Jha,
head of Harvard’s Global Health Institute
Jha and
other public health experts say that America’s piecemeal, politicized approach
to fighting coronavirus has left the United States ever-further behind the
Western European nations that were similarly threatened by the virus but moved
more judiciously to fend it off. They also say that Western Europe is a better
comparison point for the United States than nations like South Korea and
Singapore, which had been scarred by previous viral outbreaks and were more
prepared to handle the arrival of Covid-19. After the damaging initial spike in
cases, European Union members' total daily case count is now about one-eighth
of the U.S. daily cases — despite having roughly the same population.
“Both we
and Western Europe were really slow to act,” said Jeremy Konyndyk of the Center
for Global Development, who helped oversee international aid efforts during the
Obama administration. “But the worst performers in Europe with the bad luck to
get hit first, like Italy and Spain … they are now down 85, 95 percent in terms
of case counts from the peak.”
“In the US,
we’ve struggled to get it down one-third — and in the last few days, it looks
like it could rebound again,” Konyndyk added.
Partisan
fights bog down U.S. response
Public
health experts cited multiple factors for why the fortunes of the United States
have differed from Western Europe — starting with the intense politicization
that worked against a disciplined response, and the federal government’s
decision to let individual states take the lead in reopening. The decisions of
some states to end their lockdowns as early as possible — at levels of
infection considerably higher than those that triggered reopening in Western
Europe — appear to have consigned the United States to a far longer battle with
the virus.
President
Donald Trump and some Republican governors have bristled at public health
experts’ advice, questioning predictions on viral spread and pushing back on
recommended lockdowns. GOP-led states like Georgia and Texas reopened their
economies despite requests from public health experts to wait for more testing
and fewer cases.
Meanwhile,
Trump’s allies and pundits on Fox News pushed malaria drugs as possible
Covid-19 cures, despite scant evidence, leading to largely fruitless efforts
that consumed the time of senior federal officials — including scientists whose
time would have been better spent pursuing other therapies.
Dan Diamond
✔
@ddiamond
· 8h
NEW: Italy
was a worst-case scenario for the U.S. — but now we’d be lucky to swap our
current coronavirus crisis for theirs. https://politi.co/2Cn4i1c with @swheaton
How the
U.S. and Italy traded places on coronavirus
While Trump
touted America’s reopening and watched infections climb, European leaders
maintained strict rules and drove cases down.
politico.com
Dan Diamond
✔
@ddiamond
In March,
White House officials looked at the Italy numbers and grew alarmed. But within
weeks, Italy had gotten its outbreak under control - even as US numbers
(population-adjusted) caught up.
Our current
daily cases remain on par with Italy’s worst days.
“There are
plenty of people, on cable TV and elsewhere, who exploited that the virus was
primarily in New York and other places to say that it's a blue state problem,”
said Harvard’s Jha. “They’d ask, ‘Why are we shutting down Montana when the
problem is Manhattan?’”
Democrats,
meanwhile, didn’t condemn hundreds of thousands of people for violating restrictions
on mass gatherings to protest police brutality this month. Instead, governors
like New Jersey’s Phil Murphy and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer broke the
lockdown orders that they had extended just days before to join the protests
themselves — moves that confused many Americans about the need for social
distancing and fueled charges of hypocrisy from conservatives.
Even basic
protections have been politicized in the United States. Trump has eschewed a
mask in public and has sometimes mocked others for wearing face coverings —
despite requirements that people wear masks in certain states and ample science
that they work to prevent the virus’ spread.
The
president also swiped at mask-wearers in a Wall Street Journal interview last
Wednesday, suggesting that some Americans are wearing coverings to signal their
disapproval with him. He has repeatedly voiced his hesitation about the
widespread coronavirus testing urged by public health experts, including
controversial remarks at his rally on Saturday.
"When
you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people," Trump
said during his rally in Tulsa, Okla. "You're going to find more cases. So
I said to my people, slow the testing down please." White House officials
claimed Trump was joking.
But in
Italy, there’s been much less disagreement over scientists’ recommendations —
including lockdowns that were more restrictive than those applied in the United
States — particularly after the virus swiftly tore through the nation in early
March, peaking at 6,557 new cases announced on March 21. (Adjusted for
population, that would be equivalent to about 35,400 new cases in the United
States.) While some protested, residents largely went along with restrictions
that effectively banned jogging, instituted one-at-a-time entry policies for
grocery stores and saw the Pope livestream his Easter Mass from an empty St.
Peter’s Basilica.
That still
wasn’t enough to spare Italy from horrific consequences in the early spring:
Doctors had to make decisions on the fly about who would get life-saving care
when there weren’t enough beds to go around. Dead bodies had to be stored in
sealed-off rooms until funeral services were available in the worst-hit
regions.
 |
CORONAVIRUS
Younger People Now Driving Spikes in New
Coronavirus Cases
Jordan DavidsonJun. 22, 2020 08:24AM
The rush to
reopen states across the South and the Sun Belt has led to a surge in
coronavirus cases. Public health officials are now noticing that people in
their 20s and 30s seem to be driving the spikes in the infection rate across
Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, Arizona and other states as CNN
reported.
Data from
Johns Hopkins University finds that at least 23 states are seeing a rise new
cases compared to the previous week. Ten of those 23 reported more than a 50
percent spike, including the first states to start reopening.
Public
health officials have lamented the resistance to social distancing orders in
those states. In Mississippi, for example, officials pinpointed a surge in
cases due to fraternity rush parties at the University of Mississippi,
according to CNN.
Officials
in South Carolina warned that a rising number of people under 30 were testing
positive for coronavirus, with an official at the local department of health
saying that the rise shows "younger South Carolinians are not taking
social distancing seriously," according to Forbes.
The rise in
cases in clusters of young people has also been observed in California,
Washington, Colorado, Wisconsin and North Carolina, according to NPR.
As Forbes
reported, the chief medical officer at Georgia's largest hospital, Dr. Robert
Jansen, told the local press that he was seeing more patients in their 20s and
30s: "What frightens me is not only that they are younger, the potential
of them infecting other people, particularly parents and grandparents."
Texas
Governor Gregg Abbot attributed the rise in cases in his state to bar-type
settings where young people have congregated since Memorial Day weekend,
according to The Hill.
"What
we're seeing there is that people of that age group, they're not following
these appropriate best health and safety practices," Abbott said in an
interview this week with KLBK, a McAllen television station, as The Hill
reported. "They're not wearing face masks. They're not sanitizing their
hands. They're not maintaining the safe distancing practices. And as a result,
they are contracting COVID-19 at a record pace in the state of Texas."
In
Washington state, where the virus's arrival in the U.S. was first detected, the
number of hospitalizations among older people has continued to fall even as the
number of new cases has started to rise, according to NPR.
"This
creates a reservoir of disease moving around in the population, simmering, if
you will," said Judith Malmgren, an epidemiologist at the University of
Washington to NPR. "This can spike to uncontrollable levels in more
vulnerable adults very quickly."
The growing
trend suggests that young people feel complacent with social distancing
guidelines and recommendations to wear masks. They feel that the statistics
suggest the coronavirus will not negatively affect them, which is worrisome
since many hold front-line service jobs that put them in contact with many
people, as The Hill reported.
"We
need to change our whole thinking about COVID-19 during this stage of the
pandemic," said Dr. Thomas Tsai, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health, to NPR. "It's difficult to contain the virus
physically because you have younger individuals, who may be pre-symptomatic or
mildly symptomatic, who are going about their normal lives and reengaging with
society."
Tsai
suggested that making tests more available, effectively employing contact
tracing, and pushing people to wear face masks is the key to stopping the
spread, instead of a new round of lockdowns.
"Arguably,
this is even more important now because we're no longer motivated to follow
public health guidance by images of people lining up outside the hospitals in
New York," he told NPR. "It needs to be a more personal
approach."
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