How Did the ‘Best-Prepared Country’ Become a
Horror Story?
President Trump resisted masks and sidelined experts,
with disastrous results.
By Nicholas
Kristof
Opinion
Columnist
Sept. 12,
2020
What would
America be like today if President Trump had acted decisively in January to
tackle the coronavirus, as soon as he was briefed on the danger?
One
opportunity for decisive action came Jan. 28, when his national security
adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, told Trump that the coronavirus “will be the
biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” Trump absorbed
the warning, telling Bob Woodward days later how deadly and contagious the
virus could be, according to Woodward’s new book, “Rage.”
Yet the
president then misled the public by downplaying the virus, comparing it to the
flu and saying that it would “go away.” He resisted masks, sidelined experts,
held large rallies, denounced lockdowns and failed to get tests and protective
equipment ready — and here we are, with Americans constituting 4 percent of the
world’s population and 22 percent of Covid-19 deaths.
There’s
plenty of blame to be directed as well at local officials, nursing home
managers and ordinary citizens — but Trump set the national agenda.
Suppose
Trump in January — or even in February — had warned the public of the dangers,
had ensured that accurate tests were widely distributed (Sierra Leone had tests
available before the United States) and had built up a robust system of contact
tracing (Congo has better contact tracing than the United States).
Suppose he
had ramped up production of masks and empowered the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention to lead the pandemic response, instead of marginalizing its
experts.
Suppose he
had tried as relentlessly to battle the virus as he has to build his wall?
If testing
and contact tracing had been done right, then we would have known where hot
spots were and large-scale lockdowns and layoffs might have been unnecessary.
The United
States would still have made mistakes. We focused too much on ventilators and
not enough on other things that might have been more useful, like face masks,
blood thinners and high-flow nasal cannulas. Because of mask shortages, health
messaging about their importance was bungled. Governors and mayors dithered,
and nursing homes weren’t adequately protected.
But many of
our peer countries did better than we did not because they got everything right
but because they got some things right — and then learned from mistakes.
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.
Linsey
Marr, an expert on disease transmission at Virginia Tech, isn’t sure that we
could have achieved South Korean or (somewhat higher) Japanese levels of
mortality, because both of those countries have more of a tradition of
mask-wearing. But she does believe that we could have perhaps achieved German
levels (meaning an 80 percent reduction in deaths).
“We would
have saved a lot of lives,” she said. “Kids would be going back to school.”
Natalie
Dean, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of Florida, said she
is troubled by a public fatigue, a desensitization to a death toll that has
continued to pile up recently at the rate of about 1,000 a day.
Trump still
hasn’t embraced the basic step public health officials sought more than a
century ago during the 1918 pandemic of encouraging mask-wearing. Instead, he
seems to have surrendered to the virus at least until a vaccine is available —
while encouraging delusions among his supporters.
“There’s no
Covid,” an unmasked man attending a Trump rally the other day told CNN. “It’s a
fake pandemic.”
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.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário