There are three moments this year that determined the scale of the COVID-19 catastrophe in the United States, argues New Yorker Lawrence Wright, editor of the team, in a sweeping and searing look at the year that the country spent fighting (and failing) against COVID-19. The magazine is dedicating an entire double issue to catalog these missteps and the many other mistakes made by employees who have put us on the path to hundreds of thousands of deaths from the disease.
The first came on January 3, when Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spoke to his Chinese counterpart about a new respiratory virus. Redfield wanted to send a CDC team to China, but was refused. Instead, the CDC was kept outside China and the agency was slow to understand the risk the virus posed.
“Redfield is convinced that if CDC experts had visited China in early January, they would have learned exactly what the world was up against,” Wright writes. “The new pathogen was a coronavirus and, as such, was considered only modestly contagious, like its cousin, the SARS virus. This assumption was wrong. ”
Then came the problems with the coronavirus test kits developed by the CDC. They did not pass quality control checks, but were sent to the labs anyway. The failure meant that the United States spent the month of February practically flying blind, with few tests to see how much coronavirus was already in the country. This had a domino effect on other elements of the initial response:
Without test kits, contact tracking was blocked; without contact tracking, there was no obstacle in the way of contagion. America has never had enough reliable tests distributed across the country, with results available in two days. In contrast, South Korea, thanks to universal public insurance and lessons learned from an outbreak of MERS, provided free rapid tests and invested heavily in tracking contacts, which was instrumental in breaking the chains of infection. The country recorded about fifty thousand cases of COVID. The United States now records more than four times that number a day.
The third turning point was masks. The research showed that they could help slow the spread of COVID-19, but the CDC was slow to recommend them. At the time the agency said everyone should wear masks, they were politicized by President Donald Trump and others.
The sudden reversal of the CDC, Redfield admitted to me, was strange: “When you have to change the message, the second message doesn’t always catch on.” Worse, when the president announced the new mask board, he emphasized, “This is voluntary,” adding, “I don’t think I’m going to do that.”
Wright describes other flaws: Trump’s refusal to target federal aid to governors, for example, and the hydroxychloroquine disaster. He also touches on a bright spot – the scientific triumph of developing vaccines at record speed – but avoids any impulse to make the scale of this success equal to that of the tragedy. Two authorized vaccines that are extremely effective in preventing COVID-19 in one year are almost unbelievable, but more than 300,000 people have died from the pandemic and the number continues to rise.
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