One Year, 400,000 Coronavirus Deaths: How the U.S. Guaranteed Its Own Failure

📆 1/18/2021 5:15 PM
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The path to beating the coronavirus was clear, but Kelley Vollmar had never felt so helpless. As the top health official in Missouri’s Jefferson County, Vollmar knew a mandate requiring people to wear masks could help save lives. She pressed the governor’s office to issue a statewide order, and hospital leaders were making a similar push. Even the White House, at a time when President Donald Trump was sometimes mocking people who wore masks, was privately urging the Republican governor to impose a mandate. Still, Gov. Mike Parson resisted, and in the suburbs of St. Louis, Vollmar found herself under attack. A member of the county health board called her a liar. The sheriff announced that he would not enforce a local mandate. After anti-mask activists posted her address online, Vollmar installed a security system at her home. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times “This past year, everything that we’ve done has been questioned,” said Vollmar, whose own mother, 77, died from complications of the coronavirus in December. “It feels like the Lorax from the old Dr. Seuss story: I’m here to save the trees, and nobody is listening.” For nearly the entire pandemic, political polarization and a rejection of science have stymied the United States’ ability to control the coronavirus. That has been clearest and most damaging at the federal level, where Trump claimed that the virus would “disappear,” clashed with his top scientists and, in a pivotal failure, abdicated responsibility for a pandemic that required a national effort to defeat it, handing key decisions over to states under the assumption that they would take on the fight and get the country back to business. But governors and local officials who were left in charge of the crisis squandered the little momentum the country had as they sidelined health experts, ignored warnings from their own advisers and, in some cases, stocked their advisory committees with more business representatives than doctors

January 18, 2021, 2:09 PMThe path to beating the coronavirus was clear, but Kelley Vollmar had never felt so helpless.

But governors and local officials who were left in charge of the crisis squandered the little momentum the country had as they sidelined health experts, ignored warnings from their own advisers and, in some cases, stocked their advisory committees with more business representatives than doctors.Nearly one year since the first known coronavirus case in the United States was announced north of Seattle on Jan.

— The severity of the current outbreak can be traced to the rush to reopen last spring. Many governors moved quickly, sometimes acting over the objections of their advisers. The reopenings nationally led to a surge of new infections that grew over time: Never again would the country’s average drop below 20,000 new cases a day.

The pandemic indeed came with significant challenges, including record unemployment and a dynamic disease that continued to circle the globe. Without a national strategy from the White House, it is unlikely that any state could have fully stopped the pandemic’s spread. Thousands of lives might have been saved in the New York metropolitan area alone if measures had been in place even a week earlier, researchers found. Driven by the spring surge, New York and New Jersey to this day have the worst death rates in the nation.By mid-April, most states had resorted to historic stay-at-home orders to avoid the horror seen in the Northeast. At the time, about 30,000 people had died, and the worst of the outbreak was still concentrated in the Northeast.

“That was the critical time,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious-disease expert at Columbia University. “That was the opportune moment that was lost.” In Iowa, the health director in Black Hawk County, Dr. Nafissa Cisse Egbuonye, was stunned in April when she found employees working elbow to elbow at a Tyson meatpacking plant — only some of them in masks.

In a series of phone calls and meetings over the course of several weeks, the strike force hashed out ideas. The Texas Restaurant Association submitted a plan to reopen restaurants. Each step of the way, the ideas were funneled through a panel of four medical experts, who were empowered to veto ideas.By late April, Abbott was considering opening up the economy in phases.

Write Comment

Thanks to their arrogance and ignorance.

they everyone but themselves, all day all night, every time they broke the lockdown, was someone elses fault. good old americans

Trump did it.

I blame Obama Thanks for the Deadly Global Pandemic, Obama

While I 100% agree we should have had mask policies early on and it would have helped, it seems to me like every western democracy that allowed this to get into the country in a meaningful way got nailed. Once it got around a little, it was just going to keep spreading.

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