Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. And despite its considerable advantages-immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise-it floundered. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. The actual toll, though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens.ĭespite ample warning, the U.S. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths. In the first half of 2020, SARS‑CoV‑2-the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID‑19-infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.
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