How Public Health Failed to Stop Coronavirus Pandemic
/By Roger Chriss, PNN Columnist
The pandemic is not going well in the United States, except possibly for the coronavirus. The U.S. is seeing record levels of new confirmed cases, and deaths are back up to almost 1,000 daily. Projections based on positivity rates and hospitalization levels suggest a long summer of illness and death, followed by even more in the autumn.
Several websites are using COVID-19 data to compile visual “dashboards” of what’s happening in states and counties around the nation.
Covid Act Now classifies most of the South as having an “active or imminent outbreak,” while the Covid Exit Strategy marks the entire South and much of the West as having “uncontrolled spread.”
Axios summarizes the nation’s response to COVID-19 with the headline “We blew it.”
“America spent the spring building a bridge to August, spending trillions and shutting down major parts of society. The expanse was to be a bent coronavirus curve, and the other side some semblance of normal, where kids would go to school and their parents to work,” wrote co-authors Dan Primack and Nicholas Johnson.
“The bottom line: We blew it, building a pier instead.”
COVID EXit STRATEGY
The bleak situation is clearly visible in county-level maps of the country. The Harvard Global Health Institute’s Covid dashboard marks almost all of Florida red. Most counties in the South are also red, and only a handful of counties around the nation are green.
The STAT News preparedness dashboard shows that many counties, particularly in the South and West, are completely unprepared to handle a surge of Covid-19 cases.
Despite all this, there is no nationally coordinated response. As Prevent Pandemics notes in a new report, the U.S. has no standards for collecting and reporting local or national data on COVID-19. As a result, the information is “inconsistent, incomplete and inaccessible in most locations.”
“Particularly in the absence of a clear national vision, strategy, leadership, or organization, it is crucial to establish standardized, timely, accurate, interlinked, comparable, and informative dashboards for every state and county in the US. This is required to improving our control of the virus and maximizing our chance to get our children to school in the fall, ourselves back to work, our economy restarted, and to prevent tens of thousands of deaths,” the report concludes.
The Trump administration has handed over management of Covid-19 to states, as if the virus confines itself within state borders or mutates when crossing them. The White House and some governors have even blamed the current surge on increased testing, though this is mathematically impossible, according to STAT News.
Cities and states are also competing against each other for scarce medical resources like N95 masks and drugs like remdesivir, and disagreeing about public health measures like face coverings and quarantining visitors from hard-hit areas.
Waiting for a Vaccine
The pandemic response in the US seems to be to soldier through until a vaccine becomes available. There is rapid progress with vaccine development, including promising results in Phase I trials from Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca, and CanSino. Phase III trials are getting underway, meaning that data should be available by year’s end. If all goes extremely well, large-scale deployment of one or more vaccines could be underway by summer, 2021.
But the coronavirus is well underway now. The Covid Tracking Project shows testing, cases and hospitalizations surging upward week after week, with deaths expected to follow.
The virus is spreading fast enough that the U.S. could reach herd immunity levels before widespread deployment of a vaccine. This means hundreds of millions of Americans exposed. Even if the rate of serious illness is only 5% and of death is 0.5%, that is still millions of people affected.
Johns Hopkins reports the U.S. has the third highest death rate in the world, behind only the United Kingdom and Chile.
The pandemic will keep going until we stop it. As journalist Debora Mackenzie notes in the book, Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened: “Science didn’t actually fail us. The ability of governments to act on it, together, did.”
The U.S. has indeed failed and will continue to fail until it develops a coherent public health strategy.
Roger Chriss lives with Ehlers Danlos syndrome and is a proud member of the Ehlers-Danlos Society. Roger is a technical consultant in Washington state, where he specializes in mathematics and research.
