America’s told-you-so moment: How we botched the reopening

Source: Politico | July 1, 2020 | Joanne Kenen

The resurgence of Covid-19 was preventable, but the country’s rush to end shutdowns triggered disaster.

States emerging from the coronavirus “stay at home” orders this spring had a road map to safety at their fingertips.

Much of it was never put in place. Or it was largely ignored. And the alarming surge in coronavirus cases now spreading across the country is less a surprise than a tragically predictable national “I told you so” moment.

“Every state was allowed to go off and do their own activities,” said Howard Koh, a senior public health official in the Obama administration who is now at Harvard. “And a lot of states opened up when the trends were going the wrong way.”

To open safely, states needed vastly expanded testing. They needed contact tracing to identify and isolate people who had been exposed. They needed clear, consistent public health messaging and a coordinated national response, so that Americans could understand that even as economic activity resumes, life does not return to normal.

And states needed to pay attention to the epidemiological data — diagnoses, positivity rates, hospital admissions, ICU capacity — that would tell them if their caseload was going down and staying down before taking the next step in gradually reopening. The framework included “gates,” or checkpoints that let a state know it was doing well in controlling the virus and could go on to the next phase.

But the hierarchy of risk was put aside.

Some states that initially avoided the worst effects of Covid-19 stampeded right through the gates, as President Donald Trump pushed them to revitalize the economy and offered inaccurate reassurances that the virus would “disappear” or “fade away.” Some Republican governors allied with Trump like Florida’s Ron DeSantis took victory laps, and the president himself tore into Democratic governors taking a more cautious approach.

The current resurgence of Covid-19 cases — and most experts see this as a wave within a first wave, not the second wave that many fear will arrive in the fall — wasn’t inevitable. On an almost daily basis, health experts issued public warnings about the risk. By the time governors listened, cases were exploding. Florida, Texas, Arizona and southern California are particularly affected right now — but viruses readily cross state lines.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told a Senate committee this week. The count of deaths and illnesses in the weeks and months to come, he added, “is going to be very disturbing.”

………

Tagged: , ,

Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic.