When you read articles about why the pandemic is an epic disaster in the US, it’s usually mentioned that we had almost no federal guidance which left states to deal with it individually.
With states’ rights being what they are in this country, could it have been otherwise? Is there a mechanism that would have allowed for a nation-wide lockdown? Or even something as minor as a federally mandated mask requirement? Or have we always been doomed to suffer through a different approach in all 50 states, DC, and US territories?
It’s more than what laws/rules the federal government can have. It’s about having thorough guidelines that all states can refer to. It’s about creating a sense of unity in the country so that public health measures aren’t seen as political. It’s about coordinating the supplies needed, rather than making states compete. It’s about modeling what everyone should be doing. It’s about not contradicting scientists on when to reopen.
Yes, the US very well could have had a unified national plan. It’s also rather obvious as to why we did not. Come January of 2021, no doubt, you will see an actual plan implemented.
The Constitution provides that the federal government can deal with issues with affect interstate commerce–and the Covid-19 crisis has affected interstate commerce enormously.
There is absolutely no reason why we could not have implemented a national strategy in response to a national threat. We did this after 9/11 with the immediate shutdown of all air travel nationwide, implementation of TSA standards nationwide, etc. etc. The main reason this did not occur for the pandemic is lack of leadership. Simple as that.
You could argue that we did not appreciate the details of this particular threat right away, but over time the situation became clear and a national strategy should be been rolled-out. Again, lack of leadership prevented that. We had our chances to stem this disaster, and it COULD have been much, much less bad.
Other countries have political subdivisions that also have rights. In Germany, states are dictating the level of closures, for instance. The federal government, just like America, can still use its power, mostly money and bully pulpit, to encourage some national framework to the response even if it isn’t directly deciding lockdown policy.
A lot of people seem to envision a “national response” as being “the top layer of government makes orders, and literally everyone below them obey without question,” since that’s the way it works in some (but not all) other countries. Is this what the OP envisions? Because if so, the answer is probably no, but as others have mentioned, there are other possibilities that don’t go so far.
It is also a matter of how serious the federal government is. Multiple times the feds have basically coerced states into going along with a national standard that the feds have no intrinsic constitutional or statutory authority to dictate by threatening to withhold federal highway funds; e.g., drinking age of 21, maximum speed limit of 55, and the 0.08 blood alcohol limit.
Not only was the pandemic team disbanded, but they had already produced a checklist type ‘to do’, program so states could be up to speed fast. It was created with input from disease specialists at tax payer expense. This, paired with a team, at the ready, would have made a HUGE difference.
Unfortunately Trump not only disbanded and defunded the team, he destroyed the playbook because it was created under Obama.
They had a literal playbook that even what so far as to mention one of the signs of a possible pandemic is an uptick in the number of coronavirus (ie SARS) cases in China and mentioned that if that’s noticed, hospitals should be stocking up on PPE and making sure they have extra respirators.
Remember the response when there was an Ebola outbreak? Granted, Ebola doesn’t spread nearly as easily as covid-19, but I remember hospitals gearing up from day one and people already concerned for our safety. No one was downplaying it even a little. Perhaps that’s why TWO people in the US died (of 12 cases). If we treated it like we treated the current pandemic, I have to assume it would have been considerably worse. Maybe not as bad, but a lot more than 2 dead and 12 sick.
Oddly enough, I wonder how much of the fear, which ultimately drove us to protect ourselves, was political. People were calling for Obama to be impeached over it. Maybe the fear mongering actually helped…maybe if Fox and Friends had fear mongered instead of brushed it off, we’d be in a better place now.
Even with actual zero federal power to implement anything, a federal response that
Didn’t lie to people about whether masks were useful for months in hopes of securing them for health workers
Didn’t undercut the message of health professionals to turn basic preventative measures like universal mask wearing into the newest front in the culture war
Didn’t try to treat a public health issue like a PR problem
Would have put us vastly better off.
When you get into actual things the federal government could have done, they could have prioritized pooled testing, they could have organized testing for places that needed it (instead of just doing mostly nothing and/or using tests as political favors), oh my god the list goes on and on.
Were they actually lying about that or did they/we really just not know enough? I guess I really don’t know the answer to that one.
In either case, I’m not sure what the best course of action would have been. On the one hand, I want to say they should have gotten word to the medical world that they need to start stocking up on supplies. On the other hand, I think the public would feel they got lied to when they find that out.
OTOH, if we had followed the playbook, and started stocking up on supplies in January or February (and generally taking this a lot more seriously), there may have been a considerably smaller need for the entire population to have ready access to masks.
I want to say ‘but hindsight is always 20/20’, but that playbook I linked to was born out of hindsight after the ebola outbreak.
They were actually lying. Any public health official that doesn’t know that universal mask wearing is key to coping with a respiratory pandemic is dangerously incompetent. The populations of many asian countries have already figured this out and embraced it, while many other countries have not, but the experts know it. It did not take us actual months to figure out that putting fabric between peoples mouths/noses and other people would help.
Imagine the difference if public officials had come out on day one and said “Everyone needs to wear a mask, but there aren’t enough manufactured masks and we need to preserve them for health care professionals and first responders, here’s how to make your own out of an old t-shirt…” instead of, well, here’s the US Surgeon General saying Stop Buying Masks!
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus
Honestly? I think the mask thing would have played out exactly like it did, just a few months earlier. Of course, had it played out a few months earlier, we’d have less sick people and more time to restock the mask supply before the first big wave hit.
I don’t know why, but I thought Fauci said that. I see that he (Adams) was also the one originally downplaying the virus. As much as I don’t want to bring politics into it, I’m curious as to if he was politically motivated in those decisions. His political party is simply listed as ‘independant’, though I do see he followed Pence to the White House.
Funny, how’s this for a quote from a 2017 article about him. “Jerome Adams, Indiana’s state health commissioner, pledged Tuesday to put science ahead of politics if he becomes the next surgeon general.”.
With Trump and much of the rest of the Republican party continuing to pretend that it’s “just a flu” and that masks are somehow a major imposition, sure, but as part of my 3-point no-federal-power-required plan where there’s just the semblance of taking things seriously from the federal government as a whole, then I think it makes a dramatic difference.
The fundamental difference between the US and a lot of other countries is that when the US was formed, the States delegated power TO the new Federal government, and explicitly stated that anything not so explicitly delegated was the province of the States and the People (10th Amendment).
In practical terms, it means that US states have a unique ability to tell the Federal government to go pound sand if what the Feds want is outside the scope of their power. Case in point- foreign nationals sentenced to capital punishment in a state. The Feds literally have NO de jure standing or ability to tell the state what to do, unless there’s some sort of ratified treaty governing it.
So in the case of a unified national plan, it would have had to have been some sort of Federally funded thing- much like the way the Feds fund the National Guard in large part, or the way that the Feds fund highways. That’s typically how the Feds get the states to toe the line- they fund stuff, as they have the deepest pockets. And the funding usually comes with conditions as to what the states need to do in order to receive the funding. Of course the states are free to refuse the money, but that’s comparatively rare.
There isn’t really any good way to enforce any sort of joint “The Feds will do X, Y and Z and the states will be responsible for P, D, and Q” without that sort of funding. Political nonsense and funding differences will render that moot in short order, as some states will look at it as unwarranted Federal overreach, and others will say that they have bigger fish to fry than whatever the Feds want.
So in our current situation, I think that merely having a President and Federal government that would have approached the pandemic with the appropriate gravity, echoed and reinforced the views of the experts, and one that strove for transparency, would have gone a LONG way toward having a less shambolic response to the virus. Instead we got an administration that didn’t treat it seriously (“Kung flu?”), contradicts public health officials and advocates weird, fringey nonsense, and who seems to be as opaque as possible, has led to fifty states going fifty different directions, as there’s no coherent, sensible advice coming from DC.
