A few days ago I wrote that our overall response to the COVID-19 pandemic had been pretty good, all things considered. I also mentioned that my post was basically a reply to Lawrence Wright, who argues that our pandemic response has been "one of the greatest failures in the history of American governance." He bases this on three big mistakes:
- In early January, the CDC failed to get China to cooperate with an investigation.
- In February the CDC botched the development of testing kits.
- In March, the CDC fumbled on mask wearing and eventually made a U-turn.
This struck me as laughably thin. Wright admits that #1 is the fault of the Chinese and there was nothing we could have done about it. #2 is real, but I doubt very much that it had much of a long-term effect. Europe had tests earlier than us and their outbreaks were just as bad.
As for #3, the CDC could have done better. But there really was new research being done in real time, and it was only slowly that mask wearing was tested as a way to prevent the spread of the virus. Previous research had been mostly about protecting the mask wearer, and the CDC was correct in saying that this was of limited use. European countries were in the same boat, and they changed their minds at about the same time we did.
All in all, this just isn't the devastating indictment Wright thinks it is. But the funny thing is that he missed the truly greatest mistake we made. Take a look at this chart of COVID-19 deaths:
This is a chart of all European countries plus the US. In the early days, the US is at the low end of the pack. Despite our missteps, we're not doing too badly. But during the summer of 2020 the pandemic dies down in Europe but keeps shooting up in the US. By November we're doing worse than all but four or five European countries.
Why? Because Donald Trump insisted on reopening the economy too soon. Unlike Europe, we never crushed the virus to near zero. Instead we kept on killing people all through summer, and when winter came we were starting from a higher base. I think it's safe to say that this one mistake probably cost a hundred thousand lives or so.
This is why I rate our overall response to the pandemic as "pretty good." We really didn't make as many deadly mistakes as people think, and overall the CDC and FDA did a fairly reasonable job. The one big mistake we did make came down to a single sociopathic man whose motivations, as always, were beyond human ken. Electing Trump president was our only real mistake, and we did that long before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19.
NUTSHELL VERSION: We mostly responded fairly well to the pandemic, especially given how new it was and how the science behind it was changing rapidly in real time. On the vaccination front, our response has been all but miraculous.
We made only one big mistake: allowing Donald Trump to be our president. My take is that this is not enough to condemn the entire US response. It's only one thing. On the other hand, it was a big thing and we did elect the man. If you think it's sophistry to say "it was only one thing" when the result was so catastrophic, I can't really blame you. I think it's important to understand just where we went wrong, but I'm less concerned with how you then describe it.
Kevin,
The worst mistakes were 1) announcing a travel ban, bringing tens of thousands of travelers back to the US, but not preparing--no quarantine or even track and trace. And worse, there was anti-preparation--as these travelers arrived in a rush, there were no preparations or thought for keeping them apart--returning travelers were packed together for hours. This is what led to the initial rush of cases in the US, and is why NY and the Northwest were hit so hard initially. It probably seeded COVID-19 throughout the country, though those seeds took longer to grow to noticeable outbreaks.
2) Not using the time in February and March to plan and prepare a Federal response. PPE supplies, ventilator supplies, track and trace, public health measures, etc. All the US responses were late and lagging behind the growth of the pandemic. States each went their own way.
3) And of course, Trump's personal actions were pro-pandemic spread. Disrupting a Federal response. Politicizing mask wearing, politicizing business closures, politicizing school closures, minimizing and disrupting public health guidance.
Also, shipping "excess" PPE to China, & ventilators to Russia.
Confiscating PPE from states -- with REPUBLICAN governors! (MA, MD) -- that did as advised by El Jefe & Jared & didn't rely on the feds for supplies.
Not restocking government reserve in 2017-19, & disbanding pandemic taskforce in 2017*.
*Shades of Bush-43 sidelining terrorism experts in Jan 2001 in order to focus intelligence ops on China. (W/o 9/11, W's signature foreign policy was having a US spy plane land on emergency basis in China, the plane interdicted, the soldiers onboard kept for two weeks before negotiated release.
Yes. I've always been troubled by the "travel ban" that allowed thousands of people to return to the United States. People respond with "but they're Americans and we have to ensure their safety and bring them home." Maybe. Or maybe not in a pandemic.
And the other thing ... as you say, the lack of any real Federal level plan with respect to so many things. PPE, testing, and now vaccines.
Meanwhile, I just saw a human interest piece on a local Portland affiliate about an Oregon retiree who started a tour of the South Pacific islands in New Zealand in February 2020 -- just the dam broke -- & has been holed up with Kiwis ever since.
Spring Break did an excellent job of seeding the virus through out the country.
Yeah,
My analogy is we had a leaky pipe so we shut off the water, but then we just waited a couple months didn't do anything and turned the water back on hoping the pipe had fixed itself.
Ah, but the first time you do that you have a genuine hope it will work. It's a real rush.
Donald Trump didn’t block local mask mandates in Texas, Iowa, Arizona, South Dakota, Florida or numerous other states. He didn’t decide to have spring break in Texas and Florida.
Yes, Donald Trump provided crap leadership and it permeated the federal response, choked off federal resource, and encouraged resistance to sound public health measures. Maybe with better, more cohesive and coherent leadership people would’ve been persuaded to forgo the super spreader holiday gatherings and travel. But it was not Trump who held the giant biker rally in South Dakota or opened the casinos in Nevada or opened the bars in California.
The little that has been accomplished has been by local governments and it has been done almost entirely against the will of the state governments and the entire federal bureaucracy, including the CDC and all of the great experts who held their tongues to keep their jobs. Top to nearly the bottom, and Donald Trump notwithstanding, this country’s response to the pandemic could charitably be described as a giant clusterfuck.
Also, just as an aside, we wouldn’t have need the cooperation of the Chinese government if our network of sources which had been intelligently placed in Wuhan hadn’t been withdrawn by the Trump administration.
^^^as an aside, we wouldn’t have need the cooperation of the Chinese government^^^
Many countries responded far more ably than the United States. I doubt a single one of them had better cooperation from China or superior intel.
This is a red herring.
Big Wu v. Hopkins energy.
you are minimizing the importance of trump's lack of leadership in this mess. of course trump lacked the authority to mandate masks or shut down the economy. of course states could have done so on their own.
but trump could have encouraged mask-wearing. he could have worn one himself. had he done so, there would have been less resistance to mask mandates. had he discouraged mass gatherings, almost certainly there wouldn't have been the giant bike rally in s.d. not only did he fail to encourage those measures, he actively campaigned against them because he (wrongly) saw them as conflicting with his own interests.
.
sure, there were screwups. but just think of how many lives might have been saved through those two simple steps.
I’m not minimizing Trump’s role. It was he who set the tone. He polluted and debased every aspect of the country’s COVID-19 response. And the chaos that permeated and paralyzed the federal bureaucracy is entirely due to Trump’s bizarre personality. I
I also accept that there’s always been an expectation of federal leadership and the commitment of massive federal resources against a pandemic I have little doubt that with even with GW Bush as president the response would’ve been much, much better.
Nevertheless, I stand by my point that this wasn’t something that Trump did on his own. Every one of the states lead by crazy Republicans would have fought to keep the pandemic alive and opposed local mask mandated, etc.
The Democrats response has been better but certainly nothing to write home about. Andrew Cuomo’s leadership of New York’s Covid-19 response was deplorable. The moron we’ve got here in California reopened the bars and promptly forfeited his moral leadership by going to a fancy indoor dinner with campaign donors.
Trump set the tone but he couldn’t force these people to make the mistakes and exercise such poor judgment.
trump was uniquely positioned to convince a goodly portion of our populace to wear masks, to socially distance, to take covid seriously. not only did he fail to do it, he politicized the issue, making it worse.
yes the moron in california reopened the bars. the moron in florida pretty much kept them open. the moron in n.d. pretty much did nothing. there's plenty of stupid to go around but a lot of that could have been ameliorated or avoided altogether if we had had a modicum of leadership at the top.
masks and social distancing.
Trump ruined our chances with China by pulling our pandemic investigation team from them earlier in his term. We should have been a part of affairs and knew the ins and outs. But we didn't, we were blind because his response was terrible.
But most of the US lives in Blue states where we did what we could. And that saved lots of lives.
If we compare ourselves to countries in Europe, we don't look too bad but there's a comparable country much closer--Canada. The death rate in the US is about 1500 per million, in Canada it's about 560.
Now it looks really bad.
Well, you can extend that to insane Republican governors everywhere, virtually everyone of whom were in a lather to re-open their economies before they'd even closed them.
NOEMNOEMNOEM.
When it comes to DeSantis and Noem, I get a clear trying to fit in over kill with them as they are not "white" in a 1790's founding fathers declaration sense. So they overkill it.
“She has Norwegian ancestry” - Wikipedia article on Kristi Noem.
Not as hot as Kirstjen Nielsen, though.
But now do economic performance. The U.S. will rank near the top of the pack of Western countries. It's a tradeoff, and we made the choice the US usually makes, money over length of days.
Japan is about to host an Olympic games.
I doubt that any economic gains are being made in the real economy. I think the gains are mostly in the financial sector, mostly illusionary, and mostly to a relative handful of companies and individuals. The overall boost to the economy has come from things like the CARES Act which keep people spending on essentials but without it I believe the real economy will sputter and then decline.
The point, which has been made over and over, is that the prerequisite for truly opening the economy is subduing the virus. Without that, there’s really nothing.
Simple numbers say the US response was bad. In his previous post Kevin mentioned the US death rate from covid, 0.15%, as if it is something to be proud of. According to worldometers (link blocks post? google "worldometers coronavirus") this ranks the US as 213th best out of 221. On the basis of cases the US is no. 215. It is true that a few European countries did even worse, even though they don't have a Trump as President. But there are also many advanced countries all over the world which have done far better - look at the list in the link.
Kevin's presentation of the data is highly misleading - it does not indicate at all what could have been done with a good response. The US did not need to have over half a million deaths. We need to find out exactly how Australia, New Zealand, Canada (societies similar to the US) and others kept cases down, and why Spain, etc. did not.
As Kevin said in the previous post, people's complaint about vaccine distribution are not really justified since we have done as well on this as all but a very few countries. But this does not mean that the overall response was not bad.
Yes, Spain is an interesting case. It had the same really disastrous start as Italy but never recovered in that way that Italy did. My intuitive guess from falling the news is that they also opened up too much, too soon and were never able to reestablish the degree of compliance with the health protocols.
But, I would admit that this is just a guess. The only countries I follow closely apart from my own are France and the UK.
Among other things the Spanish government was busy fighting a separatist government in Barcelona as stupidly as possible. Covid was priority number 2.
Is there some magic WordPress method of inserting a link? Putting one in seems to kill the comment.
I've had that happen to me too. Not sure if it's a "word to link" ratio or some other algorithm. Maybe add some comments both before and after the link.
Off topic but I wash to make an extremely strong plea for editing.
Seconded.
Bring back Disqus!
what--no Coral luv?
Secretly, I think Coral played a role in Drum deciding to leave MoJo after a dozen years.
The *critical* failures of the Trump administration in response to COVID-19:
1) Delayed test kits, which was a result of an egotistical approach of self-reliance rather than openness to accept help from every corner.
2) Mixed/deceptive/subversive messaging, which among many things included the downplaying of the impacts of the virus, which fed directly into the political cultural divide, preventing/delaying effective mitigation.
3) Delays in utilizing the DPA to invest and increase production of N95 masks and other PPE, and ventilators.
4) Failure to throw tens of billions into vaccine development, production, and distribution to ensure that *any* successful vaccine candidate would be available in massive amounts on the first day the FDA gave its approval.
5) A failure to follow the pandemic playbook that was left behind.
6) Virtually no tracking/tracing project worthy of the name, at least from what I can see. Google/Apple supposedly had tracing apps ready to go. What happened to that? Virtually everyone over the age of 14 here in China uses such an app on a daily basis (yours truly included). You can't get into many places of commerce otherwise. The US does software at least as good China. Why didn't/couldn't we take such a basic public health precaution?
7) Poor (borderline nonexistent, really) quarantine procedures, ie, positive-testing people being sent home with families, lack of a uniform quarantine standard with respect to international arrivals, etc.
Basically my added 6/7 dovetail with your #2. The Trump people were never serious about fighting the pandemic, because they thought battling the virus (instead of the spread of the virus) would hurt the economy, and therefore Trump's reelection prospects.
We have an app in California.
I agree with your point 7 (and it is valid for Europe as well). To quarantine or isolate yourself without any help from government is nearly impossible for most of us and completely impossible for a large minority.
I disagree with your second point. Switzerland has an app (homemade in Switzerland). It does not report data to the government; it just tracks movements and detects the phones nearby. If one of those phones is "infected" the app alerts you and nobody else. It is then up to you to test and quarantine (see my first paragraph about that); the government does not know about the alert--unless your trace is also found by the track and trace personnel. In China of course the government hijacked the occasion and made the app part of the totalitarian state apparatus. This is why Western countries were uneasy about an app.
^^I disagree with your second point. Switzerland has an app (homemade in Switzerland).^^
What are you disagreeing about? That the US lacked a comprehensive, app-based (and therefore largely automated) track/trace system? Or that such a system can be an effective tool if universally employed?
I have zero disagreement with the notion that China's government is an often brutal autocracy (I should know), but they nonetheless do get *some* things right. Their app-based track/trace system is one of them. Also, I'd argue that, in a public health emergency, it's perfectly appropriate for the government to oversee and even mandate the use of such tools. If anything, such an approach is all the more legitimate when being carried out by a democratic polity, which is, after all, accountable to the electorate.
(I know nothing of Switzerland's particulars on this score and wasn't claiming otherwise).
I seem to recall that the population of Europe is, on average, older than the US, with higher density (and thus a more rapid rate of disease spread). We had every reason to do significantly better were it not for our feckless management of the pandemic and Rube-Goldbergesque healthcare system.
It's undoubtedly true we should have done better than Europe. Certainly the WHO, pre-pandemic, thought as much. Basically, the United States performed at about the same level as the weaker performers in Europe (UK, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, France, Spain) DESPITE the fact that much of America's public sector was substantially absent from the fight against covid (outside of vaccine development) and, amazingly, even *actively hostile* to the fight against covid. That's not the case with the various European governments. They were guilty of ineptitude, but not, in the main, malfeasance.
If we simply changed that one variable -- moving from a government that interfered and often blocked the nation's fight against the pandemic to one that did everything in its power to lead that fight -- things surely would have been a lot different. I think Kevin is WAY low-balling the death toll attributable to the Trump administration's depravities with his 100k figure, although admittedly we'll never know.
Trump's errors began before COVID-19 even existed. He slashed the CDC budget (with GOP collusion obviously; Trump and the GOP are essentially the same thing and share the blame), he withdrew the embedded US scientists in the Chinese "CDC" (the Chinese did try to cover up at first as anybody would have expected but this facilitated the cover up) he allowed the emergency reserve of PPE, ventilators etc. to deteriorate (this began under Obama; the GOP congress cut those budgets and the admin chose not to fight for them--understandably at the time).
Some people are harping endlessly on the mask flip flop. I think that in this case for once they made the correct decision in the circumstances: Reserve the few masks that were available for medical personnel. When the mask shortage was over it was the time to change direction. Nobody had any data about the effectiveness of masks. If you just look at a mask you'd rate the benefit as small to insignificant. This turned out to be wrong.
A second point: If you rate an achievement you compare to the top performers, in this case Taiwan, S Korea, New Zealand, Vietnam. You don't brag that you are only slightly worse than the second worst. Anyway all EU countries (except Sweden) brought down the first wave to near zero expediently, had a nearly COVID-free summer and then triggered a second wave by getting complacent. We never even got to a place where we might have been tempted to be complacent. It is only the second wave following from that which puts the EU more or less on a par with us.
Vietnam will never stop pwning us.
No surprise one of the nomads in Nomadland* reported being a Vietnam War vet with PTSD.
*Neither here nor there, but at what point did legendary character actors Frances Mac Dormand & Willem Dafoe become the same person? I think we need a face/off remake with them.
Good points. But I think the messaging on masks could have been done better. There’s science to communications, that’s why marketing people and political operatives do A/B testing. We probably did a better job of shaping citizen’s behaviors by government appeals during the World Wars (granted, we had a different public then). We should at least have tried to discourage/stigmatize wearing of N95’s by non-medical people, while simultaneously encouraging the use of DIY face coverings.
" . . . and we did elect the man."
No we didn't We elected HRC, by nearly 3 million votes. The electoral college appointed Trump against the will of the American voters.
Trump's 2nd Impeachment attorneys just asked to enter this comment into evidence, at the end of the "Fight Chorus (Campaign Trail Remix" -- Ministry f/ Bjork video.
KD said:
"We made only one big mistake: allowing Donald Trump to be our president. My take is that this is not enough to condemn the entire US response. It's only one thing"
So the election of 2016 had what affect on the pandemic of 2020? Kevin there are governors involved here. Nursing homes. schools, state government agencies - all NOT under the control of the federal government. "WE" didn't make the mistake during the election because lets face it - nobody - not even YOU could foretell just how bad a president Trump was going to turn out to be.
W/O the pandemic Trump is in his second term
Grow up will you?
Its as much a fault of Noem, DeSantis, Abbott and others who COULD Have instituted restrictions far exceeding Trump's. Trump politicized the pandemic there's no doubt about that and IMHO he could have done much better.
Just be careful tossing around the word WE and elected. Gov Baker - in Democratic bastion of MASS did a far better job than Noem did.
You're trying to make excuses for being wrong about our response. Deaths are only ONE Factor to consider in evaluating our response. California's hospital system was near collapse while Australia and New Zealand's immediate and severe response at the first sign of cases slowed the spread and allowed for reopening. Do we blame Newsom for this? After all "we" elected him
Vaccine development was wonderful. A miracle if you believe in such things.
Otherwise our response sucked and you can't bring yourself to admit that YOU were wrong.
Go ahead, blame the cats or the windmills
California’s hospital system was near collapse, oxygen was being rationed in Los Angeles, and ambulance services were performing triage because Gavin Newsom ordered the bars to reopen. Which, in turn, seemed to signal the emergency was over.
Some of what happened in California was because of the MAGA nutters. But they didn’t reopen the bars.
This drum you are beating sounds flat to me. I was in and out of Thailand, where the CDC developed a working early test for COVID19, in January, February, and March 2020. Each time they were checking temperatures and offering free testing at the Bangkok airport. People were wearing masks, and they were available everywhere. Thailand is a military dictatorship with a titular king, but they were not actually trying to kill off their citizens. Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos were similar, but on a poorer, less organized level. Ditto for the Seoul and Tokyo airports. Flying back to the US on March 6th, 2020 was an eye opener -- no masks, no temperature checks, and no warnings. And I did not make it to Vietnam, which did much better than the rest.
So, the US didn't do that bad? As the 'leader' of the Western world, we sucked.
Another example of American exceptionalism.
When America runs behind the human rights record of the country that gave the world the Khmer Rouge.
It was Donald Trump's ignorance, arrogance and negligence that trickled down and poisoned the federal response to the pandemic. The biker rally (as an example) happened because nobody called the governor in South Dakota and warned her about probable repercussions. In a global pandemic, "states rights" doesn't work. Republicans are getting what they deserve for creating the monster and using their many tricks to put him in power. Unfortunately, so are the rest of us.
I read in a slate article that the one thing we all can take away from COVID-19 experience is humility. So, in that limited sense, I have to agree with KD since he points the finger at the exact opposite (catastrophically unhumble) specimen we had as our leader.
Perhaps the spectacular in describing our response in the earlier post was just a remnant of the last four years' experience?
--r
In the course of human history, our response to this outbreak was amazing. Compared to what it could and should have been--we sucked.
As for our economy--it's just being propped up the the federal gov't.
Are we getting ready for the next pandemic? Not really...We really do have to have a supply base that is available to ramp up.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2021/01/22/two-guys-start-a-dfw-mask-factory-but-cant-catch-a-break-forget-made-in-texas-china-always-wins/
I find the reasoning in this post very odd. It's like one of those claims that a Republican would have won the popular votes if you take out California. Just California, Donald Trump is American and thus he is part of the American failure. It elides the structural relationship the presidency has to different agencies, public opinion, etc. At the very least your argument should be that it's Donald Trump and the Republican Party (both in congress and in state houses). I don't buy Wright's critique either, but Kevin this is just as shallow. The strongest version of your argument, IMHO, is that certain American institutions proved themselves relatively robust (e.g. health care, CDC, NIH,) in the face of sustained and repeated efforts to weaken them by a Republican President, Congressional Republicans, as well as acts of intimidation and threats of violence from grassroot Republican party members (and even from conservative media hosts). The robustness of institutions lets you make the counterfactual argument that it could have been much worse, but that is much different from saying it was a "pretty good" response. Again, just MHO.
Drum has set the bar so low for "pretty good" responses to Covid that we need a drilling team to dig it up. Jiminy Xmas, the combination of cherry picking and strawmen he keeps throwing up to make his case for our "response" being anything but a disaster is just pathetic.
And I thought Coral was the worst commenting system in the history of commenting systems. Buy, then I met WordPress commenting. Wow! Just wow! Congratulations WordPress software engineers, you have created a worse commenting system than Coral. That is a truly impressive achievement.
And since the worst commenting system ever won't let me edit a comment, even for 5 minutes (hey, Coral even let's you do that!), I have to correct my typo with a reply to my own comment.
That "Buy," in the 2nd paragraph should have been "But,".
A year ago there were basically three strategic approaches: a) herd immunity; b) go for zero; c) try for some Goldilocks compromise. The problem with c) is that exponential growth is unstable, so that it is akin to trying to ride a unicycle forever. Talking about particular tactics is kind of pointless because whatever benefit came of this or that good choice was just undone when the country relaxed later. Going for zero worked out much better for those (I reside in Australia) that took that approach, and in this sense the US response was unambiguously disastrous. Comparison with Europe suggests that the US did perhaps slightly better than some others who tried to find a middle way, but also that the details don't matter much.
I get what Kevin is trying to do here I think. He wants to avoid simplistic
critiques of the American response and facile but questionable conclusions.
And to an extent (and this extent only) I'm sympathetic: there are so many variables that go into the spread and mortality of this disease it's very hard to know what comparisons are really valid. Do we compare the US to France or Belgium or the UK , in which case we don't look so bad or do we compare us to New Zealand or Japan or Australia in which we look like a disaster ? Probably the fairest and most meaningful comparison is to our neighbor Canada in which case Kevin's figure of 100,000 more deaths due to US failures is very low. Moreover, in what universe is 100,000 extra deaths "pretty good" ?
It is way too soon to tell exactly how bad our response was. We will learn a lot (I hope) about the extent to which various actions and policies worked and the extent to which inaction and lack of policy caused great harm but right now we don't know for sure. But seriously Kevin, we do know that there were many many failures in our response, some that Wright cites and some you list under the overbroad rubric of "Trump" and others other commenters have pointed out.
That theses mistakes and malfeasance have caused at a bare minimun 100,000 deaths is all we need to know to know we failed miserably.
Four died at Benghazi, & Trey Gowdy had Shrillary in the hot seat for 11 hours.
100,000 died unnecessarily due El Jefe's mishandling of the Coronavirus response, & he gets to photobomb engagement pictures at Maralago.
RZM nails it (IMO, of course). What s/he said..
I think the chart misses the element of population density, which is lower for the US than for Europe.
I think in all likelihood the US OUGHT to have done much better than it did: the way our population is dispersed gave us the opportunity -- were we not "led" by a moron, and had we not millions of morons following him -- to have isolated outbreaks in ways not available to a lot of our peers.
The early outbreak in New York City, for example, probably could not have been prevented from reaching Boston, Philadelphia, Washington -- the Acela train corridor.
But it probably could have been kept from reaching Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Chicago.
Most of Europe, however, is connected like our Acela train corridor.
I'm surprised neither Wright nor Drum consider the failure that stands out to me most: the failure to recognize, educate, and take advantage of the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is so much more transmissible indoors than outdoors, a 20x difference by the estimates I've seen. Just as often, we pushed people in the wrong direction! That difference is harder to take advantage in most of the country now in winter, but we had the spring, summer, and fall.
Any state or county could have exploited this too, but none did that I'm aware of. We just left that very powerful tool on the table.