I think it is important for all American’s to stop and realize where we are in this country.
Number #1 in the world in cases.
Number #1 in the world in deaths.
Why are more of us not embarrassed? Why are so many people still waving American flags around and screaming about how we are the best? Do we have no shame as a nation? Why are so many refusing to do the very minimum to help save lives (like wearing a mask)?
Throughout this article, I will offer commentary as to why, I believe, we got to where we are today. I cite a variety of information. I use specific quotes as examples. This may be hard for some people to read. Too bad. You’re an adult. It is time to realize that we are all in this together. It is time to look at, truly look at, how on earth we got to this point.
Lack of preparation
We simply were not prepared for a pandemic such as this one. Whether it was the disbanding of the Pandemic Response team in 2018 (1) or the fact that we continued to sell and ship masks overseas as Covid19 raged on our shores (2), we simply did not have the resources or the even the structural system to handle a pandemic like this. If you look at other healthcare systems in the world, many have consistently claimed that ours is “the best” and “socialized medicine is terrible”, but the facts say otherwise. Every other industrialized nation with public healthcare handled this pandemic better than the US. Every. Single. One. America had the slowest and worst response to this pandemic than any other country. (3, 4, 5) In nearly every single timeline review, it can be deduced that America waited until Covid19 was on our shores before even discussing it, and waited until outbreaks started happening before even responding to it. We were not ready and we reacted entirely too slow. (6, 7) And because of this, it cost thousands of Americans their lives.
Lack of education
The United States of America is not #1 in education. Not
even close. Science education in this country is lagging behind the rest of the world,
continues to drop every year and the consequences are dire. As of 2015,
the US ranked #24 in science, behind countries like Singapore and Japan,
Germany, and the United Kingdom (8). By the way, all of those countries had arguably better responses to the Covid19 pandemic. Now, correlation does not equal
causation, there were a variety of factors involved with the US’s horrifically
botched pandemic response. But having a populace heavily lacking in science
education certainly does not help. In fact, on March 17th of this year, only
56% of American’s thought that Covid19 was a “real threat”. That means over
HALF of the country didn’t understand the severe consequences this virus could
have, not only economically but the impact on human lives. Two weeks before
that survey was conducted, the president of the United States called this virus
the democrats “new hoax” and compared it to the flu (10). Both of which, we
found out the hard way, were simply not true. If American’s had a better
understanding of simple virology, would more of us have taken precautions
seriously? Could we have prevented more deaths? A recent study found that even
one week, just ONE week sooner of social distancing could have saved around
36,000 American lives. Imagine if a very scientifically educated populace began
wearing masks and social distancing back in February, how many thousands of
lives could have been saved? Being smarter would have helped us.
Lack of compassion
During this pandemic, you could very easily go online, social media, or even local news, and see how many people simply didn’t care about spreading the virus. People partying on the beach in Florida or at the bars in Missouri at Lake of Ozark, American’s simply got tired of being cooped up. And frankly, they didn’t care. Call it apathy, call it lack of sympathy, I call it lack of compassion. One study at the beginning of May found that over half of American’s were not wearing masks in public (12). Now a variety of excuses have been made for not wearing masks, everything from the CDC told us not to then told us we should, which caused distrust in our government (13 & 17) to masks are “just the start” of authoritarianism (14) to one Florida woman stating she doesn’t wear underwear or a mask because “things gotta breath” (15). Whatever the reason, thousands of Americans jumped on the “no mask” bandwagon and have been riding it through a disease-ridden country ever since. And the simple fact is thousands of deaths could have been prevented if American’s had simply masked up earlier (16). But instead, we came up with every reason why we should NOT wear a mask instead of thinking about the ONE very simple reason why we SHOULD: compassion. The day we all decided that we didn’t care about each other as human beings is the day that Covid19 got the best of us. One minor inconvenience, that is all healthcare professionals and disease experts asked of us, wear a mask, and we couldn’t do it. Not for our community. Not for our country. Not for each other as humans. And that is because we lack compassion in this country.
Lack of access to healthcare
Our fragmented, expensive, and inaccessible healthcare system made it very hard for many in this country to seek out the services they needed during this crisis. In addition to a completely failed testing system (18), America was blinded by how bad Covid19 would be because we had no idea how many people were carrying it. The lack of early and aggressive testing led us down a path that we could not recover from, one that strained our already failed healthcare system even more (19). The basic design of the American healthcare system is this: hospitals surrounded by clinics and surgery centers, ready to handle day to day sick people but NOT ready to handle thousands of severely ill. This is why we build mobile hospitals or temporary wings on hospitals all over the country. Also having minimal true primary care, minimal community health and under 1 million hospital beds nationwide our hospital system was built to fail during a crisis. And it did. Our system failed everyone, but it especially failed those living in poverty, those in rural areas, those with disabilities, and people of color (20). Those 4 groups suffered immensely. Imagine that. We live in a country where people brag about our healthcare system, but in a time of crisis, people with disabilities suffered more. People without financial resources suffered more. And people of color suffered more. How is that right? How can we justify this? I hope that as a country we learned we need to make some very serious changes to our current healthcare system.
Poor Leadership
Since the beginning of this crisis, the leadership in
this country has been scattered. It started with our leadership ignoring every
internal and external warning (21), then acting like it “wasn’t a big
deal” (22), and then it was “we have the best testing” and on and on in circles it goes.
When in reality, the entire pandemic response was just serious of confusing
events directed by a group of people who do not even believe in scientific
facts. See also: climate change. See also: the debate over wearing masks. Trump
himself mocked reporters for wearing masks (23). The leader of the free world
perceived mask-wearing as “weak” and whether people realized it or not, this
had a tremendous effect on the ability to enforce mask-wearing nationwide. He
has only recently allowed the press to see him in a mask (24). A basic
understanding of the virus, how it spreads, and how to track it was completely
missed by leadership in this country as well. Test and trace was a concept that
seemed to be not understood as we struggled to get tests produced while our leaders
made jokes about “testing less to keep low numbers” (25). Which is the exact
opposite of what you want to do during a viral pandemic, you want MORE testing
to help quickly trace cases, isolate individuals who might be carriers and STOP
the spread faster. Combine these issues with the fact that states were bidding
against each other for ventilators (26), or that we had no centralized plan for
re-opening (27), the failure of this administrations ability to guide and lead
through a crisis is truly a testament to their inability to lead in general. A
true leader listens and heeds the advice of experts, a true leader humbles
themselves and admits when they've made mistakes. Leadership in this country
has even gone after a top physician criticizing his “mistakes” and attempting
to place blame for failures (28). I find this interesting because it means that
leadership knows mistakes were made, but they simply refuse to admit they were
the ones who made them. The leadership in this country has faltered in nearly
way imaginable AND has continued to claim success, including claiming we were
“beating the virus” (29) and claiming there is no “second wave” coming (30),
both statements being demonstrably false. Don’t get me wrong, a variety of
governors, mayors, and other elected officials have stepped up and done well,
in fact, many areas of the country that tested more, masked early and remained
closed longer have the lowest cases of Covid19 including the lowest deaths as
well (31). But nationally, it would be difficult to argue that we were lead well through this crisis.
Polarized politics
Every. Single. Time.
Every single time it turns into red versus blue. Whether it’s debating gun control or healthcare or women’s abortion rights, people nudge up with their party and refuse to budge. And over the past several decades, our politics have become increasingly hostile and polarized (32).
Covid19 was no different. For some reason, simple things
like mask-wearing became some sort of weird political statement. Because of
polarizing politics in this country, many people flat out refused to do the
bare minimum, such as mask-wearing, to keep us safe, and thousands of people
have died because of it. Liberals and conservatives despise each other so much
in this country, we are so polarized, that we let people die. We couldn’t
simply put politics to the side, even for a moment, and say “hey, let’s ALL do
this to help protect each other.” Instead, it was a series of conspiracy
theories about why the government is “forcing masks” with many claiming loss of
freedoms and rights. People actually protested these things. That was and still is completely absurd.
We embarrassed ourselves as a country on the world stage. We couldn’t put our differences to the side, even just for a few weeks, to help protect and save our most vulnerable. And that, America, is how you will be remembered during this crisis.
History will remember this generation. This time during a 100-year pandemic when America lacked things like basic healthcare for all, compassion and true leadership which took thousands of lives, and was certainly preventable if we simply had just been better.
Learn a lesson from this America. Be better.
References
1. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/387191-trump-official-overseeing-pandemic-response-suddenly-leaves-admin
3. https://www.businessinsider.com/us-coronavirus-response-among-worst-in-world-2020-5
6. https://www.justsecurity.org/69650/timeline-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-u-s-response/
8. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/
9. https://www.npr.org/2020/03/17/816501871/poll-as-coronavirus-spreads-fewer-americans-see-pandemic-as-a-real-threat
10. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-calls-coronavirus-democrats-new-hoax-n1145721
13. https://www.vox.com/2020/3/31/21198132/coronavirus-covid-face-masks-n95-respirator-ppe-shortage
14. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-authoritarianism-is-getting-out-of-hand/
16. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/masks-covid-19-infections-would-plummet-new-study-says
18. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51860529
19. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html
21. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/12/21218305/trump-ignored-coronavirus-warnings
22. Three minutes of Trump
downplaying the coronavirus on video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuOatLZPwgI
23. https://deadline.com/2020/05/coronavirus-donald-trump-masks-jeff-mason-1202943810/
24. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53378439
25. https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2020/06/21/trump-says-he-told-officials-to-slow-coronavirus-testing-to-keep-case-numbers-low/
26. https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2020/03/28/states-bidding-against-each-other-pushing-up-prices-of-ventilators-needed-to-fight-coronavirus-ny-governor-cuomo-says/#3acce869293e
27. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-coronavirus-trnd/
28. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/12/politics/fauci-trump-coronavirus/index.html
29. https://weather.com/en-IN/india/coronavirus/news/2020-05-12-usa-beaten-coronavirus-declares-president-donald-trump
30. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/vice-president-mike-pence-op-ed-isnt-coronavirus-second-wave/
32. https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/political-polarization/
Other references:
“Why we should all wear facemasks” - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200504-coronavirus-what-is-the-best-kind-of-face-mask
Timeline of the corona virus spread - https://www.justsecurity.org/69650/timeline-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-u-s-response/
How the pandemic in US
compares with the rest of the world - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52771783
Alex Jones leads Anti-mask march - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/alex-jones-leads-anti-masker-texas-rally-as-covid-19-infections-rise/ar-BB167pkN?ocid=sf
How the Corona Virus revealed America’s failures - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/
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