This, in today’s NYT Sunday edition, is a fairly long read, but hey lots of those among us have some time on our hands, and it is very informative.
The combination of fails at various levels are hard to comprehend, and what the circumstance would have looked like with our having used the time China gave us to get ready with testing available to use both diagnostically and in the surveillance networks is sickening (in the metaphorical and literal senses of the word both).
Please read before commenting and please don’t unless you have.
Meanwhile a very minor stylistic comment about the article. I was struck by how often in the article they mentioned the ages of the various players. I am not aware of the NYT doing that as normal stylistic. Have I just not noticed it before or were they doing it for some specific reason you think?
I read it in the print edition. It should be read in conjunction with an article a few days ago about the large number of openings in government, and how the heads of various agencies were not experienced.
My impression was lack of leadership throughout, and lack of urgency. That still seems to be happening at the federal level, but not at the state level for at least some states.
This is a “Great Man” theory of History and Politics. I’m more of “Geopolitics” guy myself, seeing the failure of the American Public Health System as characteristic of the American Public Health System, not down to the failures of the individuals who were in charge at the time.
This is not to dispute that Hirohito and Winston Churchill did have an effect — but the pacific war was predicted by
(American) Homer Lea and later by (British) Hector Charles Bywater: their predictions didn’t require particular people to be in charge.
Seen in this light, the defense made by individuals in that article isn’t just wrong: it completely misses the point. American medicine, and FDA and the CDC offer care for American individuals, and try to ensure that individuals get the best possible individual care. The FDA and CDC were doing their job, and smart dedicated people were doing it to the best of their ability. Yes, the CDC and FDA acted properly and it was all the fault of someone else. Like the Maginot Line failed to defend France in WWII: they were facing the wrong way.
I read it and its not surprising. They basically lay the blame on incompetence at the federal level combined with regulations limiting the ability to use new tests.
The incompetence isn’t unexpected by any means. But they never go into details about what these regulations are that held back testing. Regulations can be good and bad, I’m not sure which regulations they were worried about, what they focused on or any real details.
I found this to be a good article on testing as well, it goes more in depth about the different methods and science of testing.
I have to agree with Melbourne. I think the premise of the article is slightly flawed.
I wholeheartedly agree that the major players here did not perform well. But few governments have performed well. Some are getting hit much harder than others, but the USA is no worse off than countries like Italy or Spain. and what other governments have rolled out testing competently? South Korea, I guess. Who else? I live in Canada and can’t get tested. I’ll put our performance above the USA’s for sure, but we still lack testing in sufficient quantity to deal with the pandemic on a truly effective level.
I would actually go even further than Melbourne; the failure to properly deal with this is beyond the scope of the public health system of a country. This is a product of the fact the world is divided into nation-states; the very fact every country is dealing with this in its own way is itself a huge problem and an inherently stupid way of dealing with a global problem. The system of having the world divided into discrete sovereign nation-states is not an inevitable thing or the only way to do it; it is largely something that was formally established in the Peace of Westphalia, and while that worked to end the Thirty Years’ War, it’s not working all that well now. Dealing with COVID-19 (or global warming, or any number of problems) as individual countries is about as logical as everyone in my family separately trying to install a new roof on the same house.