FailureThe Crisis that Shocked the World: America’s Response to the Coronavirus
“Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation has failed spectacularly to contain it,” Joel Achenbach, William Wan, Karin Brulliard, and Chelsea Janes write in the Washington Post. “The country’s ineffective response has shocked observers around the planet.” They write that the death rate from covid-19 in the United States looks like that of countries with vastly lower wealth, health-care resources and technological infrastructure, adding: “If there was a mistake to be made in this pandemic, America has made it.”
“Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation has failed spectacularly to contain it,” Joel Achenbach, William Wan, Karin Brulliard, and Chelsea Janes write in the Washington Post. “The country’s ineffective response has shocked observers around the planet.” They write that many countries have rigorously driven infection rates nearly to zero. In the United States, coronavirus transmission is out of control. “The national response is fragmented, shot through with political rancor and culture-war divisiveness. Testing shortcomings that revealed themselves in March have become acute in July, with week-long waits for results leaving the country blind to real-time virus spread and rendering contact tracing nearly irrelevant,” they write.
They add:
The United States may be heading toward a new spasm of wrenching economic shutdowns, or to another massive spike in preventable deaths from covid-19 — or possibly both.
How the world’s richest country got into this dismal situation is a complicated tale that exposes the flaws and fissures in a nation long proud of its ability to meet cataclysmic challenges.
The fumbling of the virus was not a fluke: The American coronavirus fiasco has exposed the country’s incoherent leadership, self-defeating political polarization, a lack of investment in public health, and persistent socioeconomic and racial inequities that have left millions of people vulnerable to disease and death.
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While other countries endured some of the same setbacks, few have suffered from all of them simultaneously and catastrophically. If there was a mistake to be made in this pandemic, America has made it.
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The death rate from covid-19 in the United States looks like that of countries with vastly lower wealth, health-care resources and technological infrastructure.
The article’s authors write that the crisis has been sucked inexorably into the vortex of political polarization. Future historians will not treat kindly Trump’s efforts to divide and confuse, said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. The instinctive reaction of other presidents in times of national crisis was to make a concerted effort to unite the country. “Even if you don’t succeed, you try to convince people that they’re all in this together,” Grossman said. “[The Trump] presidency is the exception and anomaly.”
